The unanimity with which these measures were decreed was due to the great forbearance of many members of the Congress, for the secret debates of that body were distracted by the bitterest divisions. As John Adams wrote, ‘Every important step was opposed and carried by bare majorities,’ and a large amount of jealousy and suspicion was displayed. 1 Adams, at the head of the New England party, maintained that America should at once declare her independence, form herself into a confederation, seize all the Crown officers as hostages, and enter into negotiations with France and Spain; and letters which he had written expressing these views fell into the hands of the British Government. Dickinson, however, supported by Pennsylvania and by some of the other Middle States, insisted upon drawing up another petition to the King, and making a last effort towards reconciliation; and after a very angry resistance, Adams was obliged to yield. Zubly, a Swiss clergyman, who was prominent among the delegates of Georgia, appears to have gone still further. ‘There are persons in America,’ he complained, ‘who wish to break off with Great Britain; a proposal has been made to apply to France and Spain; before I agree to it I will inform my constituents. I apprehend the man who should propose it would be torn to pieces, like De Witt.’ 1 He objected strongly to the proposed invasion of Canada as an unjustifiable aggression, and to the non-importation and non-exportation agreements as certain to ruin America. He openly expressed his hope that the present winter would witness a reconciliation with the mother country; and he declared his opinion that ‘a republican government is little better than government of devils.’ 2 The trade agreements were debated vehemently through several days, and a large proportion of the members appear to have held that the non-exportation agreement would render it impossible for the colonies to obtain the money which was necessary for carrying on the war. Negotiations with France and Spain were spoken of, but as yet there was great doubt about the disposition of these Powers. It is curious, amid the storm of invective which at this time was directed against English tyranny, to read the opinion of Gadsden, one of the representatives of South Carolina, who was most active in promoting the Revolution: ‘France and Spain,’ he said, ‘would be glad to see Great Britain despotic in America. Our being in a better state than their colonies, occasions complaints among them, insurrections and rebellions. But these Powers would be glad we were an independent State.’ 1
Perhaps the most difficult question, however, was the appointment of a commander-in-chief; and on no other subject did the Congress exhibit more conspicuous wisdom. When only twenty-three, Washington had been appointed commander of the Virginian forces against the French; and in the late war, though he had met with one serious disaster, and had no opportunity of obtaining any very brilliant military reputation, he had always shown himself an eminently brave and skilful soldier. His great modesty and taciturnity kept him in the background, both in the Provincial Legislature and in the Continental Congress; but though his voice was scarcely ever heard in debate, his superiority was soon felt in the practical work of the committees. ‘If you speak of solid information or sound judgment,’ said Patrick Henry about this time, ‘Colonel Washington is unquestionably the greatest man in the Congress.’ He appeared in the Assembly in uniform, and in military matters his voice had an almost decisive weight. Several circumstances distinguished him from other officers, who in military service might have been his rivals. He was of an old American family. He was a planter of wealth and social position, and being a Virginian, his appointment was a great step towards enlisting that important colony cordially in the cause. The capital question now pending in America was, how far the other colonies would support New England in the struggle. In the preceding March, Patrick Henry had carried a resolution for embodying and reorganising the Virginia militia, and had openly proclaimed that an appeal to arms was inevitable; but as yet New England had borne almost the whole burden. The army at Cambridge was a New England army, and General Ward, who commanded it, had been appointed by Massachusetts. Even if Ward were superseded, there were many New England competitors for the post of commander; the army naturally desired a chief of their own province, and there were divisions and hostilities among the New England deputies. 1 The great personal merit of Washington and the great political importance of securing Virginia, determined the issue; and the New England deputies ultimately took a leading part in the appointment. The second place was given to General Ward, and the third to Charles Lee, an English soldier of fortune who had lately purchased land in Virginia and embraced the American cause with great passion. Lee had probably a wider military experience than any other officer in America, but he was a man of no settled principles, and his great talents were marred by a very irritable and capricious temper.
To the appointment of Washington, far more than to any other single circumstance, is due the ultimate success of the American Revolution, though in purely intellectual powers, Washington was certainly inferior to Franklin, and perhaps to two or three other of his colleagues. There is a theory which once received the countenance of some considerable physiologists, though it is now, I believe, completely discarded, that one of the great lines of division among men may be traced to the comparative development of the cerebrum and the cerebellum. To the first organ it was supposed belong those special gifts or powers which make men poets, orators, thinkers, artists, conquerors, or wits. To the second belong the superintending, restraining, discerning, and directing faculties which enable men to employ their several talents with sanity and wisdom, which maintain the balance and the proportion of intellect and character, and make sound judgments and well-regulated lives. The theory, however untrue in its physiological aspect, corresponds to a real distinction in human minds and characters, and it was especially in the second order of faculties that Washington excelled. His mind was not quick or remarkably original. His conversation had no brilliancy or wit. He was entirely without the gift of eloquence, and he had very few accomplishments. He knew no language but his own, and except for a rather strong turn for mathematics, he had no taste which can be called purely intellectual. There was nothing in him of the meteor or the cataract, nothing that either dazzled or overpowered. A courteous and hospitable country gentleman, a skilful farmer, a very keen sportsman, he probably differed little in tastes and habits from the better members of the class to which he belonged; and it was in a great degree in the administration of a large estate and in assiduous attention to county and provincial business that he acquired his rare skill in reading and managing men.
As a soldier the circumstances of his career brought him into the blaze, not only of domestic, but of foreign criticism, and it was only very gradually that his superiority was fully recognised. Lee, who of all American soldiers had seen most service in the English army, and Conway, who had risen to great repute in the French army, were both accustomed to speak of his military talents with extreme disparagement; but personal jealousy and animosity undoubtedly coloured their judgments. Kalb, who had been trained in the best military schools of the Continent, at first pronounced him to be very deficient in the strength, decision, and promptitude of a general; and, although he soon learnt to form the highest estimate of his military capacity, he continued to lament that an excessive modesty led him too frequently to act upon the opinion of inferior men, rather than upon his own most excellent judgment. 1 In the army and the Congress more than one rival was opposed to him. He had his full share of disaster; the operations which he conducted, if compared with great European wars, were on a very small scale; and he had the immense advantage of encountering in most cases generals of singular incapacity. It may, however, be truly said of him that his military reputation steadily rose through many successive campaigns, and before the end of the struggle he had outlived all rivalry, and almost all envy. He had a thorough knowledge of the technical part of his profession, a good eye for military combinations, an extraordinary gift of military administration. Punctual, methodical, and exact in the highest degree, he excelled in managing those minute details which are so essential to the efficiency of an army, and he possessed to an eminent degree not only the common courage of a soldier, but also that much rarer form of courage which can endure long-continued suspense, bear the weight of great responsibility, and encounter the risks of misrepresentation and unpopularity. For several years, and usually in the neighbourhood of superior forces, he commanded a perpetually fluctuating army, almost wholly destitute of discipline and respect for authority, torn by the most violent personal and provincial jealousies, wretchedly armed, wretchedly clothed, and sometimes in imminent danger of starvation. Unsupported for the most part by the population among whom he was quartered, and incessantly thwarted by the jealousy of Congress, he kept his army together by a combination of skill, firmness, patience, and judgment which has rarely been surpassed, and he led it at last to a signal triumph.
In civil as in military life, he was pre-eminent among his contemporaries for the clearness and soundness of his judgment, for his perfect moderation and self-control, for the quiet dignity and the indomitable firmness with which he pursued every path which he had deliberately chosen. Of all the great men in history he was the most invariably judicious, and there is scarcely a rash word or action or judgment recorded of him. Those who knew him well, noticed that he had keen sensibilities and strong passions; but his power of self-command never failed him, and no act of his public life can be traced to personal caprice, ambition, or resentment. In the despondency of long-continued failure, in the elation of sudden success, at times when his soldiers were deserting by hundreds and when malignant plots were formed against his reputation, amid the constant quarrels, rivalries, and jealousies of his subordinates, in the dark hour of national ingratitude, and in the midst of the most universal and intoxicating flattery, he was always the same calm, wise, just, and single-minded man, pursuing the course which he believed to be right, without fear or favour or fanaticism; equally free from the passions that spring from interest, and from the passions that spring from imagination. He never acted on the impulse of an absorbing or uncalculating enthusiasm, and he valued very highly fortune, position, and reputation; but at the command of duty he was ready to risk and sacrifice them all. He was in the highest sense of the words a gentleman and a man of honour, and he carried into public life the severest standard of private morals. It was at first the constant dread of large sections of the American people, that if the old Government were overthrown, they would fall into the hands of military adventurers, and undergo the yoke of military despotism. It was mainly the transparent integrity of the character of Washington that dispelled the fear. It was always known by his friends, and it was soon acknowledged by the whole nation and by the English themselves, that in Washington America had found a leader who could be induced by no earthly motive to tell a falsehood, or to break an engagement, or to commit any dishonourable act. Men of this moral type are happily not rare, and we have all met them in our experience; but there is scarcely another instance in history of such a man having reached and maintained the highest position in the convulsions of civil war and of a great popular agitation.
It is one of the great advantages of the long practice of free institutions, that it diffuses through the community a knowledge of character and a soundness of judgment which save it from the enormous mistakes that are almost always made by enslaved nations when suddenly called upon to choose their rulers. No fact shows so eminently the high intelligence of the men who managed the American Revolution as their selection of a leader whose qualities were so much more solid than brilliant, and who was so entirely free from all the characteristics of a demagogue. It was only slowly and very deliberately that Washington identified himself with the revolutionary cause. No man had a deeper admiration for the British Constitution, or a more sincere wish to preserve the connection and to put an end to the disputes between the two countries. In Virginia the revolutionary movement was preceded and prepared by a democratic movement of the yeomanry of the province, led by Patrick Henry, against the planter aristocracy, 1 and Washington was a conspicuous member of the latter. In tastes, manners, instincts, and sympathies he might have been taken as an admirable specimen of the better type of English country gentleman, and he had a great deal of the strong conservative feeling which is natural to the class. From the first promulgation of the Stamp Act, however, he adopted the conviction that a recognition of the sole right of the colonies to tax themselves was essential to their freedom, and as soon as it became evident that Parliament was resolved at all hazards to assert and exercise its authority of taxing America, he no longer hesitated. An interesting letter to his wife, however, shows clearly that he accepted the proffered command of the American forces with extreme diffidence and reluctance, and solely because he believed that it was impossible for him honourably to refuse it. He declined to accept from Congress any emoluments for his service beyond the simple payment of his expenses, of which he was accustomed to draw up most exact and methodical accounts.
The other military events of the year must be very briefly related. About three weeks after the skirmish at Lexington a party of colonists under Colonels Allen and Benedict Arnold had succeeded, without the loss of a man, in seizing the two very important forts of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, which commanded Lakes George and Champlain, and were indeed the key of Canada, but which had been left by the English in the charge of only sixty or seventy soldiers. In September, in obedience to the direction of the Congress, a colonial army invaded Canada. Washington was at this time organising the army in Massachusetts, but the Canadian expedition was entrusted to the joint command of Schuyler—who, however, was soon obliged through ill-health to return to Ticonderoga—and of Montgomery, a brave and skilful Irish soldier from Donegal, who had been for many years settled in the colonies, and had served with great distinction in the late French war. For some time the invasion was successful. Several parties of Indians joined the Provincials. 1 General Carleton, who commanded the English in Canada, with 800 soldiers was driven back when attempting to cross the St. Lawrence. The small fort of Chamblée and the much more important fort of St. John were taken. Montreal was occupied in November, and in the beginning of December Montgomery laid siege to Quebec. He had been joined just before by Benedict Arnold, who had been sent by Washington at the head of an expedition to assist him, but their joint efforts were unsuccessful. The Canadians remained loyal to England. Their laws and their religion had been guaranteed. They had enjoyed under English rule much prosperity and happiness. The Catholic priests were strongly on the side of the English Government. 2 The contagion of New England republicanism had not penetrated to Canada, and the Canadians had no sympathy with the New England character or the New England creed. They were especially indignant, too, at the invasion, because on June 1, 1775, about four weeks before Congress secretly decided upon this step, that body had passed a resolution disclaiming any such intention, and had caused it to be widely disseminated through Canada. 3 Unsupported by the inhabitants, in the midst of a Canadian winter, without large cannon or sufficient ammunition, Montgomery soon found his position a hopeless one. His troops deserted in such numbers that only 800 remained. 4 They were turbulent, insubordinate, and half-trained; and they had enlisted for so short a period and were so unwilling to renew their contract that it was necessary to press on operations as quickly as possible. 1 He fell on the last day of 1775 in a desperate but unsuccessful attempt to storm Quebec, and in the course of the following year the Americans evacuated Canada.
In most parts of the colonies the British government simply perished through the absence of British soldiers, but in Virginia Lord Dunmore, the Governor of the province, made desperate efforts to retain it. Having removed a store of gunpowder from Williamsburg, in order to secure it from the Provincials, he was obliged to fly from the palace to a British man-of-war. There were no English soldiers in the province, but with the assistance of some British frigates, of some hundreds of loyalists who followed his fortunes, and of a few runaway negroes, he equipped a marine force which spread terror along the Virginian coast, and kept up a harassing, though almost useless, predatory war. Two incidents in the struggle excited deep resentment throughout America. The first was a proclamation by which freedom was promised to all slaves who took arms against the rebels. The second was the burning of the important town of Norfolk, which had been occupied by the Provincials, had fired on the King's ships, and had refused to supply them with provisions. It was impossible, however, by such means to subdue the province. An attempt to raise a loyalist force in the back settlements of Virginia and the Carolinas was defeated by the arrest of its chief instigators in the summer of 1776, and soon after, Dunmore, being no longer able to obtain provisions for his ships, abandoned the colony. The unhappy negroes who had taken part with the loyalists are said to have almost universally perished. 1
In the Southern provinces, and especially in the two Carolinas and in Georgia, there was a considerable loyalist party, but it was unsupported by any regular troops, and after a few spasmodic struggles it was easily crushed. Most of the governors took refuge in English men-of-war; a few were arrested and imprisoned. Provincial Congresses assumed the direction of affairs; except in the immediate neighbourhood of British soldiers the power of England had ceased, and there was no force in America competent to restore it. In the chief towns the stir of military preparation was incessant. When Franklin attended the Congress at Philadelphia in the September of 1775, he found companies of provincial soldiers drilled twice a day in the square of the Quaker capital, and the fortifications along the Delaware were rapidly advancing. Six powder mills were already designed, and two were just about to open. A manufactory of muskets had been established which was expected to complete twenty-five muskets a day. Suspected persons were constantly arrested, and the letter-bags systematically examined. Tories were either tarred and feathered or compelled to mount a cart and ask pardon of the crowd, and the ladies of the town were busily employed in scraping lint or making bandages for the wounded. 1
Over the inland districts the revolutionary party was as yet supreme, but the whole coast was exposed, almost without defence, to the attacks of English ships of war, and all the chief towns in America were seaport. The Americans possessed a large population of seafaring men who were eminently fitted for maritime warfare, but they had as yet not a single ship of war. The Government made large offers to gunsmiths to induce them to abandon America for England. 2 The manufacture of gunpowder was only slowly organised, and for many months the colonial forces were often in extreme danger in consequence of the scantiness of their supply. It was wisely determined to pay the provincial troops and to pay them well; but as all foreign commerce was arrested, and as most forms of industry were dislocated, there was very little money in the country, and paper was speedily depreciated. Some of the necessaries of life had hitherto been imported from England, and the great want of native woollen goods was especially felt in the rigour of the first winter of the war.
Though the negroes, who were so numerous in the Southern States, were a cause of great anxiety to the colonists, 1 they remained at this time, with few exceptions, perfectly passive; but one of the first consequences of the appeal to arms was to bring Indian tribes into the field. In the great French war they had been constantly employed by the French and frequently by the English, and it was not likely that so formidable a weapon would be long unused. Neither side, it is true, desired a general Indian rising. Neither side can be justly accused of the great crime of inciting the Indians to indiscriminate massacre or plunder, but both sides were ready to employ them as auxiliaries. Before the battle of Lexington the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts formed a company out of Stockbridge Indians residing in the colony. 2 In the beginning of April 1775 they issued an address to the Mohawk Indians exhorting them ‘to whet the hatchet’ for war against the English, 3 and Indians were, as we have seen, employed by the Provincials in their invasion of Canada. In March 1775 Mr. Stuart, who managed Indian affairs for the English Government in the Southern colonies, reported that General Gage had informed him ‘that ill-affected people in those parts had been endeavouring to poison the minds of the Indians of the six nations and other tribes with jealousies, in order to alienate their affection from his Majesty,’ 1 and New England missionaries appear to have been in this respect especially active. 2 Up to the middle of this year the English professed great reluctance to make use of savages. In July, Stuart wrote very emphatically to the Revolutionary Committee of Intelligence at Charleston, which had expressed suspicions on this subject: ‘I never have received any orders from my superiors which by the most tortured construction could be interpreted to spirit up or employ the Indians to fall upon the frontier inhabitants, or to take any part in the disputes between Great Britain and her colonies,’ 3 and both English and colonists exhorted the Indians as a body to remain neutral. 4 It is, however, certain that in the beginning of June 1775 Colonel Guy Johnson, who had succeeded Sir William Johnson in the direction of one great department of Indian affairs, had, in obedience to secret instructions from General Gage, induced a large body of Indians to undertake ‘to assist his Majesty's troops in their operations in Canada,’ 1 and in July this policy was openly avowed by Lord Dartmouth. It was defended on the ground that the Americans had themselves adopted it. 2
Few things were more terrible to the Americans than the scourge of Indian war. As it had generally been the function of the Government to protect the savages against the rapacity and violence of the colonists, England could count largely upon their gratitude, and the horrors which never failed to multiply in their track gave a darker hue of animosity to the struggle.
But the greatest danger to the colonial cause was the half-heartedness of its supporters. It is difficult or impossible to form any safe conjecture of the number of real loyalists in America, but it is certain that it was very considerable. John Adams, who would naturally be inclined to overrate the preponderance in favour of independence, declared at the end of the war his belief that a third part of the whole population, more than a third part of the principal persons in America, were throughout opposed to the Revolution. 1 Massachusetts was of all the provinces the most revolutionary, but when General Gage evacuated Boston in 1776 he was accompanied by more than 1,000 loyalists of that town and of the neighbouring country. Two-thirds of the property of New York was supposed to belong to Tories, and except in the city there appears to have been no serious disaffection. 2 In some of the Southern colonies loyalists probably formed half the population, and there was no colony in which they were not largely represented.
There were also great multitudes who, though they would never take up arms for the King, though they perhaps agreed with the constitutional doctrines of the Revolutionists, dissented on grounds of principle, policy, or interest from the course which they were adopting. There were those who wished to wait till the natural increase of the colonies made coercion manifestly impossible; who feared to stake acknowledged liberties on the doubtful issue of an armed struggle; who shrank from measures that would destroy their private fortunes; who determined to stand aloof till the event showed which side was likely to win; who still dreamed of the possibility of resisting the Parliament without casting off allegiance to the Crown. If America succeeded in throwing off the yoke of England, it could hardly be without the assistance of France, and many feared that France would thus acquire a power on the Continent far more dangerous than that of England to the liberties of the colonies. Was it not likely, too, that an independent America would degenerate, as so many of the best judges had predicted, into a multitude of petty, heterogeneous, feeble, and perhaps hostile States? Was it not certain that the cost of the struggle and the burden of independence would drain its purse of far more money than England was ever likely to ask for the defence of her Empire? Was it not possible that the lawless and anarchical spirit which had of late years been steadily growing, and which the patriotic party had actively encouraged, would gain the upper hand, and that the whole fabric of society would be dissolved? John Adams in his Diary relates the ‘profound melancholy’ which fell upon him in one of the most critical moments of the struggle, when a man whom he knew to be a horse-jockey and a cheat, and whom, as an advocate, he had often defended in the law courts, came to him and expressed the unbounded gratitude which he felt for the great things which Adams and his colleagues had done. ‘We can never,’ he said, ‘be grateful enough to you. There are now no courts of justice in this province, and I hope there will never be another.’ ‘Is this the object,’ Adams continued, ‘for which I have been contending?’ said I to myself. … Are these the sentiments of such people, and how many of them are there in the country? Half the nation, for what I know; for half the nation are debtors, if not more, and these have been in all countries the sentiments of debtors. If the power of the country should get into such hands—and there is great danger that it will—to what purpose have we sacrificed our time, health, and everything else?’ 1
Misgivings of this kind must have passed through many minds, and the older colonists were not of the stuff of which ardent soldiers are made. Among the poor, vagrant, adventurous immigrants who had lately poured in by thousands from Ireland and Scotland, there was indeed a keen military spirit, and it was these men who ultimately bore the chief part in the war of independence; but the older and more settled colonists were men of a very different type. Shrewd, prosperous, and well-educated farmers, industrious, money-loving, and eminently domestic, they were men who, if they were compelled to fight, would do so with courage and intelligence, but who cared little or nothing for military glory, and grudged every hour that separated them from their families and their farms. Such men were dragged very reluctantly into the struggle. The American Revolution, like most others, was the work of an energetic minority, who succeeded in committing an undecided and fluctuating majority to courses for which they had little love, and leading them step by step to a position from which it was impossible to recede. 2 To the last, however, we find vacillation, uncertainty, half-measures, and in large classes a great apparent apathy. In June 1775, the Provincial Congress of New York received two startling pieces of intelligence, that Washington was about to pass through their city on his way to Cambridge, and that Tryon, the royal governor, had just arrived in the harbour. The Congress, though it was an essentially Whig body, and had assumed an attitude which was virtually rebellion, still dreaded the necessity of declaring itself irrevocably on either side, and it ultimately ordered the colonel of militia to dispose of his troops so as to receive ‘either the General or Governor Tryon, whichever should first arrive, and wait on both as well as circumstances would admit.’ 1 The dominant Quaker party of Pennsylvania was at least as hostile to rebellion as to imperial taxation, and Chastellux justified the very democratic institutions which Franklin established in that province when the Revolution had begun, on the ground that ‘it was necessary to employ a sort of seduction in order to conduct a timid and avaricious people to independence, who were besides so divided in their opinions that the Republican party was scarcely stronger than the other.’ 2 In every Southern colony a similar division and a similar hesitation may be detected.
The result of all this was, that there was much less genuine military enthusiasm than might have been expected. When Washington arrived at Cambridge to command the army, he found that it nominally consisted of about 17,000 men, but that not more than 14,500 were actually available for service, and they had to guard a line extending for nearly twelve miles, in face of a force of at least 9,000 regular troops, besides seamen and loyalists. Urgent demands were made to the different colonies to send recruits, but they were very imperfectly responded to. Colonel Lee, in a remarkable letter on the military prospects of the Americans, estimated that in three or four months the colonists could easily have an efficient army of 100,000 infantry. 3 As a matter of fact, a month's recruiting during this most critical period produced only 5,000 men. There was abundant courage and energy among the soldiers, but there was very little subordination, discipline, or self-sacrifice. Each body of troops had been raised by the laws of its own colony, and it was reluctant to obey any other authority. Washington complained bitterly of ‘the egregious want of public spirit’ in his army. The Congress had made rules for its regulation. The troops positively refused to accept them, as they had not enlisted on those terms, and Washington was obliged to yield, except in the case of new recruits. The Congress had appointed a number of officers, but the troops rebelled violently against their choice, and it soon became evident that they would only remain at their post as long as they served under such officers as they pleased. 1 The absence of any social difference between officers and soldiers greatly aggravated the difficulty of enforcing discipline. 2 The local feeling was so strong that General Schuyler gave it as his deliberate opinion that ‘troops from the colony of Connecticut will not bear with a general from another colony.’ 3 The short period for which the troops had consented to enlist made it impossible to give them steadiness or discipline, to count upon the future, or to engage in enterprises of magnitude or continuity. What little subordination had been attained in the beginning of the period was destroyed at the close, for the officers were obliged to connive at every kind of relaxation of discipline in order to persuade their soldiers to re-enlist. 4 Personal recriminations and jealousies, quarrels about rank and pay and service, were incessant. Great numbers held aloof from enlisting, imagining that the distress of their cause would oblige the Congress to offer large bounties; 5 no possible inducement could persuade a large proportion of the soldiers to re-enlist when their short time of service had expired, and there were instances of gross selfishness and misconduct among the disbanding soldiers. 1 The term for which the Connecticut troops had enlisted expired in December, and the whole body, amounting to some 5,000 men, positively refused to re-enlist. It was vainly represented to them that their desertion threatened to bring absolute ruin on the American cause. The utmost that the most strenuous exertions could effect was, that they would delay their departure for ten days. There were bitter complaints that Congress granted no bounties, leaving this to the option of the several colonies, and also that the scale of pay, though very liberal, was lower than what they might have obtained in other employments. Great numbers pretended sickness, in order to escape from the service; 2 great numbers would only continue in the army on the condition of obtaining long furloughs at a time when every man was needed for the security of the lines. 3 There was a constant fear of concentrating too much power in military hands, and of building up a system of despotism, and there was a general belief among the soldiers that unquestioning obedience to their officers was derogatory to their dignity and inconsistent with their freedom.
The truth is, that although the circumstances of the New Englanders had developed to a high degree many of the qualities that are essential to a soldier, they had been very unfavourable to others. To obey, to act together, to sacrifice private judgment to any authority, to acknowledge any superior, was wholly alien to their temperament, 1 and they had nothing of that passionate and all-absorbing enthusiasm which transforms the character, and raises men to an heroic height of patriotic self-devotion. Such a spirit is never evoked by mere money disputes. The question whether the Supreme Legislature of the Empire had or had not the right of obliging the colonies to contribute something to the support of the imperial army, was well fitted to produce constitutional agitation, eloquence, riots, and even organised armed resistance; but it was not one of those questions which touch the deeper springs of human feeling or action. Any nation might be proud of the shrewd, brave, prosperous, and highly intelligent yeomen who flocked to the American camp; but they were very different men from those who defended the walls of Leyden, or immortalised the field of Bannockburn. Few of the great pages of history are less marked by the stamp of heroism than the American Revolution; and perhaps the most formidable of the difficulties which Washington had to encounter were in his own camp.
Had there been a general of any enterprise or genius at the head of the British army, the Americans could scarcely have escaped a great disaster; but at this period, and indeed during all the earlier period of the Revolutionary War, the English exhibited an utter absence of all military capacity. That spirit of enterprise and daring which had characterised every branch of the service during the administration of Chatham, had absolutely disappeared. Every week was of vital importance at a time when undisciplined yeomen were being drilled into regular troops, and the different provincial contingents were being slowly and painfully organised into a compact army. But week after week, month after month, passed away, while the British lay inactively behind their trenches. After the first reinforcements had arrived at the end of May 1775, General Gage had upwards of 11,000 men at his disposal, including seamen and loyalists; yet even then weeks of inactivity followed. At Bunker's Hill more than 1,000 men were lost in capturing a position which during several months might have been occupied any day without resistance. Gage knew that the town which he held was bitterly hostile; that the Americans greatly outnumbered him; that they occupied strong and fortified positions; that he was himself secure through his command of the sea; that his army was the sole support of the British Empire in New England. A very large proportion of his soldiers were incapacitated by illness. 1 He considered those who remained too few to be divided with safety; and he maintained that, in the absence of sufficient means of transport, it would be both rash and useless to attempt to penetrate into the country, and that success would only drive the Americans out of one stronghold into another.
He probably feared, also, by energetic measures, to commit the country irrevocably to a war which might still be possibly avoided, and to produce in an undecided and divided people an outburst of military enthusiasm. There was a widespread expectation that the resistance would fall to pieces through the divisions of the Americans, through the stress of the blockade, or in consequence of the conciliatory propositions of North. Gage would risk nothing. His information was miserably imperfect, and he was probably very indifferently informed of the extreme weakness of the Americans. The Provincials had as yet no cavalry. They had scarcely any bayonets. Their ammunition was so deplorably scanty that in the beginning of August it was discovered that there were only nine rounds of ammunition for each man, and a fortnight passed before they received additional supplies, and in this condition they succeeded in blockading, almost without resistance, a powerful English army. Nor was Gage more successful in conciliating than in fighting. He had made an agreement with the inhabitants of Boston that, on delivering up their arms, they might depart with their effects; but he soon after repented, and though the people had complied, he refused to fulfil his promise. Many, indeed, were allowed to depart, but they were obliged to leave their effects behind as a security for their loyalty.
At length, in October, he was recalled, and General Howe assumed the command; but the spirit of indecision and incapacity still presided over the British forces. In November and December, the time for which the American troops enlisted having ended, most of them insisted on disbanding, and a new army had to be formed in the presence of the enemy. On the last day of December 1775 when the old army had been disbanded, only 9,650 men had been enlisted to supply their place, and more than 1,000 of these were on furlough, which it had been necessary to grant in order to persuade them to enlist. 1 Yet not a single attempt appears to have been made to break the American lines. ‘It is not in the page of history, perhaps,’ wrote Washington, ‘to furnish a case like ours: to maintain a post within musket-shot of the enemy for six months together without powder, and at the same time to disband our army and recruit another within that distance of twenty odd British regiments.’ 2 ‘My situation,’ he wrote in February 1776, ‘has been such that I have been obliged to use art to conceal it from my own officers,’ and he expressed his emphatic astonishment that Howe had not obliged him, under very disadvantageous circumstances, to defend the lines he had occupied. 3
The negligence and delay of the British probably saved the American cause, and great efforts were made to recruit the provincial army. Before many weeks the army around Boston had considerably increased, and before the middle of the year it was pretended, though probably with great exaggeration, that the Americans had altogether 80,000 men in arms. 1 In April the Congress voted about 1,300,000 l . for the support of the army, and in June it offered a bounty of ten dollars for every man who would enlist for three years. Large numbers of cannon were cast in New York, and great exertions were made to fit out a fleet. A hardy seafaring population, scattered over a long seaboard, accustomed from childhood both to smuggling and to distant commercial enterprises, formed an admirable material for the new navy. The old privateersmen of the last war resumed their occupation, and the number of British merchant vessels that were captured brought a rich return to the American sailors. The want of ammunition was the most serious deficiency, but it was gradually supplied. Manufactories of arms and gunpowder were set up in different provinces. The Americans succeeded in purchasing powder in Africa, in the Bahama Islands, and in Ireland. A few daring men sailed from Charleston to East Florida, which had never joined in opposition to the Government, and surprised and captured near St. Augustine a ship containing 15,000 lbs. of powder. A cargo, which was but little less considerable, was seized by the people of Georgia immediately on its arrival from England; and several ships, carrying military stores to Boston, were intercepted before the British appear to have been aware that American privateers were upon the sea. The news from Canada was extremely discouraging, but it was counterbalanced by a great triumph in Massachusetts. The blockade of Boston became more severe; sickness disabled many of the British soldiers; swarms of privateers made it very difficult to obtain provisions; and at last, on the night of March 4, 1776, the Americans obtained possession of Dorchester heights, which commanded the harbour. The town was now no longer tenable. On March 17, Howe, with the remainder of his army, consisting of about 7,600 men, sailed for Halifax, and Washington marched in triumph into the capital of Massachusetts.
At the same time public opinion in the colonies began to run strongly in the direction of independence. Great stress has been placed on the effect of an anonymous pamphlet called ‘Common Sense,’ advocating complete separation from England, which appeared at Philadelphia in January 1776. 1 It was the first considerable work of the notorious Thomas Paine, who had only a few months before come over from England, and had at once thrown himself, with the true instinct of a revolutionist, into hostility to his country. Like all his works, this pamphlet was written in clear, racy, vivid English, and with much power of popular reasoning; and, like most of his works, it was shallow, violent, and scurrilous. Much of it consists of attacks upon monarchy in general, and hereditary monarchy in particular; of very erude schemes for the establishment of democratic forms of government in America, and of violent denunciations of the English king and people. England is described by this newly arrived Englishman as ‘that barbarous and hellish power which hath stirred up the Indians and negroes to destroy us.’ The lingering attachment to her is ridiculed as mere local prejudice. Not one third part of the inhabitants even of Pennsylvania, it is said, are of English descent; and the Americans are recommended to put to death as traitors all their countrymen who were taken in arms for the King. At the same time the arguments showing that America was capable of subsisting as an independent Power, and that, as a part of the British Empire, she could only be a secondary object in the system of British politics, were stated with great force. The present moment, it was urged, was eminently opportune for complete separation. Reunion could only be purchased by concessions that would be fatal to American liberty. Cordial reconciliation was no longer possible, and America had now the inestimable advantage of the military experience of the last war, which had filled the country with veteran soldiers. If the struggle were adjourned for forty or fifty years, the Americans would no doubt be more numerous, but they would probably be less united, and it was quite possible that there would not be a general or skilful military officer among them.
It is said that not less than 100,000 copies of this pamphlet were sold; and Washington himself, not long after its appearance, described it as ‘working a powerful change in the minds of many men.’ 1 As is usually, however, the case with very popular political writings, its success was mainly due to extraneous circumstances. It fell in with the prevailing tendency of the time, and gave an expression to sentiments which were rising in countless minds. The position of men who were professing unbounded devotion to their Sovereign, and were at the same time imprisoning his governors, waging war against his armies, and invading a peaceful province which was subject to his rule, was manifestly untenable. When blood was once shed, amid the deepening excitement of the contest the figments of lawyers disappeared, and the struggle assumed a new character of earnestness and animosity. Several acts of war had already been committed, of which Americans might justly complain, and others were grossly exaggerated or misrepresented. The conduct of the British troops in the beginning of the war in firing upon the Provincials at Lexington, was absurdly described as a wanton massacre. The conduct of Gage to the inhabitants of Boston, and the burning of Charleston during the battle of Bunker's Hill to prevent it from being a shelter for American soldiers, were more justly objected to; while the proceedings of Lord Dunmore in Virginia raised the indignation of the colonists to the highest point. When the news of the burning of Norfolk arrived, Washington expressed his hope that it would ‘unite the whole country in one indissoluble band against a nation which seems to be lost to every sense of virtue, and those feelings which distinguish a civilised people from the most barbarous savages.’ 1
If such language could be employed by such a man, it is easy to conceive how fierce a spirit must have been abroad. In the dissolution of all government, mob intimidation had a great power over politicians, and mobs are always in favour of the strongest measures; and the adoption of the policy of armed resistance had naturally given an increased power to those who had been the first to advocate it. Every step which was taken in England added to the exasperation. Already the Americans had been proclaimed rebels; and all commercial intercourse with them had been forbidden. The petition of Congress to the King, which was the last serious effort of America for pacification, was duly taken over to England; but, after a short delay, Lord Dartmouth informed the delegates that ‘no answer would be given to it.’ An Act of Parliament was passed authorising the confiscation of all American ships and cargoes, and of all vessels of other nations trading with the American ports; and by a clause of especial atrocity, the commanders of the British ships of war were empowered to seize the crews of all American vessels, and compel them, under pain of being treated as mutineers, to serve against their countrymen. 1
All these things contributed to sever the colonies from amicable connection with England, and to make the prospect of reconciliation appear strange and remote. Separation, it was plausibly said, was the act of the British Parliament itself, which had thrown the thirteen colonies out of the protection of the Crown. But another and more practical consideration concurred with the foregoing in producing the Declaration of Independence. One of the gravest of the questions which were agitating the revolutionary party was the expediency of asking for foreign, and especially for French, assistance. France had hitherto been regarded in America, even more than in England, as a natural enemy. She was a despotic Power, and could not therefore have much real sympathy with a struggle for constitutional liberty. Her expulsion from America had been for generations one of the first objects of American patriots; and if she again mixed in American affairs, it was natural that she should seek to regain the province she had so lately lost. If America was destined to be an independent Republic, nothing could be more dangerous than to have a military and aggressive colony belonging to the most powerful despotism in Europe planted on her frontiers. But, on the other hand, it appeared more than probable that the intervention or non-intervention of France would determine the result of the present struggle. If America were cordially united in her resistance to England, it would be impossible to subdue her; but it was quite evident to serious men that America was not united; that outside New England there was scarcely an approach to unanimity; that powerful minorities in almost every province were ardently attached to England; and that, of the remainder of the population, a very large proportion were vacillating, selfish, or indifferent, ready, if the occasion could be found, to be reconciled with England, and altogether unprepared to make any long or strenuous sacrifices in the cause. Under these circumstances the revolutionary leaders had much to fear.
There was a party in the Congress, among whom Patrick Henry was conspicuous, who desired to purchase French assistance by large territorial cessions in America; 1 but this view found little favour. Apart from all considerations of territorial aggrandisement, it was the evident interest of France to promote the independence of America. She could thus obtain for herself a share in that vast field of commerce from which she had hitherto been excluded by the Navigation Act. The humiliation of the loss of Canada would be amply avenged if the thirteen old colonies were separated from England. A formidable if not fatal blow would be given to that maritime supremacy against which France had so long and so vainly struggled; and the French West India islands, which were now in time of war completely at the mercy of England, would become comparatively secure if the harbours of the neighbouring continent were held by a neutral or a friendly Power. Ever since the Peace of Paris, a feeling of deep humiliation and discontent had brooded over French society; and even in Europe the influence of France appeared to have diminished. The recent appearance of Russia as an active and formidable agent in the European system, and the recent growth of Prussia into the dimensions of a first-class Power, had profoundly altered the European equilibrium. Both of these Powers lay in a great degree beyond the influence of France; and although one school of French politicians maintained that the rise of Prussia was beneficial, as establishing a balance of power in Germany, and checking the preponderance of Austria, another school looked upon it as seriously affecting both French ascendency and French security. Great indignation was felt in Paris at the passive attitude of the Government at the time of the first partition of Poland in 1772, and during the war that ended in the treaty of Kainardji in 1774, when Russia succeeded in extending her territory southwards, in separating the Crimea from the Turkish Empire, and in acquiring a right of protectorate over Christians in Constantinople. As long as the old King lived, there seemed little chance of a more active policy; but in May 1774 Lewis XV. died, and a new and more adventurous spirit was ruling at the Tuileries.
Under such circumstances it appeared to John Adams, and to the more sagacious of his supporters, that it would be possible to obtain from France such a measure of assistance as would insure the independence of America without involving her future in European complications. But the first condition of this policy was a declaration by the colonies that they were finally and for ever detached from Great Britain. France had no possible interest in their constitutional liberties. She had a vital interest in their independence. It was idle to suppose that she would risk a war with England for rebels who might at any time be converted by constitutional concessions into loyal subjects, and enemies of the enemies of England.
The questions of a French alliance and of a declaration of independence were thus indissolubly connected. In the autumn of 1775 a motion was made in Congress, and strongly supported by John Adams, to send ambassadors to France. But Congress still shrank from so formidable a step, though it agreed, after long debates and hesitation, to form a secret committee ‘to correspond with friends in Great Britain, Ireland, and other parts of the world.’ 1 But the conduct of England herself soon dispelled the hesitation of America. England found herself at this time confronted with a military problem which she was utterly unable by her own unassisted efforts to solve. The same pressure of financial distress, the same reluctance to increase the army estimates, which had made the English ministers so anxious to throw upon America the burden of supporting her own army, had prevented the maintenance of any considerable army at home. Public opinion had never yet fully accepted the fact that the forces which were very adequate under Walpole were wholly insufficient after the Peace of Paris. The King, indeed, had for many years steadily maintained that military economy in England had been carried to a fatal point, and that the army was much below what the security of the Empire required; but his warnings had been disregarded. 2 The feeling of the country, the feeling of the House of Commons, against large standing armies was so strong that it was impossible to resist it. As late as December 1774, the seamen had been reduced from 20,000 to 16,000, and the land forces had been fixed at 17,547 effective men. 1 In the following year, when the war became inevitable, Parliament voted 28,000 seamen and 55,000 land forces, but even this was utterly inadequate for the conquest of America, and as yet it only existed upon paper. Most of the troops that could be safely spared had been already sent, and the result had been the formation of two armies, one of which was not more than sufficient for the protection of Canada, while the other had been for months confined within the town of Boston.
It was evident that much larger forces were required if America was to be subdued, and Howe strongly urged that he could make no aggressive movement with any prospect of success unless he had at least 20,000 men. To raise the required troops at short notice was very difficult. In January 1776, Lord Barrington warned the King that Scotland had never yet been so bare of troops, and that those in England were too few for the security of the country. 2 The land tax for 1776 was raised to four shillings in the pound. New duties were imposed; new bounties were offered. Recruiting agents traversed the Highlands of Scotland, and the most remote districts of Ireland, and the poor Catholics of Munster and Connaught, who had been so long excluded from the English army, were gladly welcomed. Recruits, however, came in very slowly. There was no enthusiasm for a war with English settlers. The pressgangs met with an unusual resistance. No measure short of a conscription could raise at once the necessary army in England, and to propose a conscription would be fatal to any Government.
The difficulties of subduing America by land operations, even under the most favourable circumstances, were enormous. Except on the sea-coast there were no fixed points, no fortified places of such importance that their possession could give a permanent command of any large tract of territory; the vast distances and the difficulties of transport made it easy for insurgents to avoid decisive combats; and in a hostile and very thinly populated country, the army must derive its supplies almost exclusively from England. 1 The magnitude, the ruinous expense of such an enterprise, and the almost absolute impossibility of carrying the war into distant inland quarters, ought to have been manifest to all, and no less a person than Lord Barrington, the Secretary for War, held from the beginning that it would be impossible for England to subdue America by an army, though he thought it might be subdued by a fleet which blockaded its seaport towns and destroyed its commerce. But Barrington was one of the most devoted of the King's friends, and he was a conspicuous instance of the demoralising influence of the system of politics which had lately prevailed in England. Already, at the close of 1774, he informed his colleagues in the clearest and most decisive manner of his disapproval of the policy they were pursuing, and he repeatedly begged the King to accept his resignation. ‘I am summoned to meetings’ of the ministers, he complained, ‘when I sometimes think it my duty to declare my opinions openly before perhaps twenty or thirty persons, and the next day I am forced either to vote contrary to them or to vote with an Opposition which I abhor.’ He wished to retire both from the ministry and from Parliament, but he had declared that he would remain in both as long as his Majesty thought fit, and he accordingly continued year after year one of the responsible ministers of the Crown though he believed that the policy of the Government was mistaken and disastrous. It was only in December 1778 that his resignation was accepted. 1
The King was the real director of the Administration, and he was determined to relinquish no part of his dominions. He was accordingly reduced to the humiliating necessity of asking for foreign assistance to subdue his own subjects. It was sought from many quarters. He himself, as Elector of Hanover, agreed to lend 2,355 men of his Electoral army to garrison Minorca and Gibraltar, and thus to release some British soldiers for the American war. The Dutch had for a long time maintained a Scotch brigade in their service, and the Government wished to take it into English pay, but the States-General refused to consent. Russia had just concluded her war with the Turks, and it was hoped that she might sell some 20,000 of her spare troops to the English service, but Catherine sternly refused. The little sovereigns of Germany were less chary, and were quite ready to sell their subjects to England to fight in a quarrel with which they had no possible concern. The Duke of Brunswick, the Landgrave of Hesse Cassel, the Hereditary Prince of Hesse Cassel, and the Prince of Waldeck were the chief persons engaged in this white slave trade, and they agreed for a liberal payment to supply 17,742 men to serve under English officers in America. 1
The German princelets acted after their kind, and the contempt and indignation which they inspired were probably unmixed with any feeling of surprise. The conduct, however, of England in hiring German mercenaries to subdue the essentially English population beyond the Atlantic, made reconciliation hopeless and the Declaration of Independence inevitable. It was idle for the Americans to have any further scruples about calling in foreigners to assist them when England had herself set the example. It was necessary that they should do so if they were successfully to resist the powerful reinforcement which was thus brought against them.
It belongs rather to the historian of America than to the historian of England to recount in detail the various steps that led immediately to the Declaration of Independence. It will here be sufficient to indicate very briefly the main forces that were at work. Even after the enlistment of foreign mercenaries by Great Britain, the difficulty of carrying the Declaration was very great. As late as March 1776, John Adams, who was the chief advocate of the measure, described the terror and disgust with which it was regarded by a large section of the Congress, and he clearly shows the nature of the opposition. ‘All our misfortunes,’ he added, ‘arise from the reluctance of the Southern colonies to republican government,’ and he complains bitterly that ‘popular principles and axioms’ are ‘abhorrent to the inclinations of the barons of the South and the proprietary interests in the Middle States, as well as to that avarice of land which has made on this continent so many votaries to Mammon.’ It was necessary, in the first place, to mould the governments of the Southern and Middle States into a purely popular form, destroying altogether the proprietary system and those institutions which gave the more wealthy planters, if not a preponderance, at least a special weight in the management of affairs. The Congress recommended the colonists ‘where no government sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs hath hitherto been established’ to adopt a new form of government, and it pronounced it necessary that the whole proprietary system should be dissolved. 1 The Revolution was speedily accomplished, and the tide of democratic feeling ran strongly towards independence. Virginia, now wholly in the hands of the revolutionary party, concurred fully with Massachusetts, and the influence of these two leading colonies overpowered the rest. In Pennsylvania, in New Jersey, in Maryland, in Delaware, in New York, in South Carolina, there was powerful opposition, but the strongest pressure was applied to overcome it. New Jersey and Maryland first dropped off and accepted the Resolution of Independence, but South Carolina and Pennsylvania opposed it almost to the last, while Delaware was divided and New York abstained. John Adams was now the most powerful advocate, while John Dickinson was the chief opponent of independence. At last, however, it was resolved not to show any appearance of dissension to the world. The arrival of a new delegate from Delaware, and the abstention of two delegates of Pennsylvania, gave the party of independence the control of the votes of these provinces. South Carolina, for the sake of preserving unity, changed sides. New York still abstained, and on July 2, 1776, the twelve colonies resolved that ‘these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.’ Thomas Jefferson, of Virginia, whose literary power had been shown in many able State papers, had already drawn up the Declaration of Independence, which having been revised by Franklin and by John Adams, was now submitted to the examination of Congress, and was voted after some slight changes on the evening of the 4th. It proclaimed that a new nation had arisen in the world, and that the political unity of the English race was for ever at an end.
The importance of the American question during the few years that preceded the Declaration of Independence was so transcendently great that I have thought it advisable to devote the preceding chapter exclusively to its development, and have endeavoured to preserve the unity and clearness of my narrative by omitting several matters of domestic policy which I shall now proceed to relate.
From the time of the accession of Lord North to the foremost place the Government had continued steadily to increase in parliamentary authority, and the long period of anarchy and rapid political fluctuation which marked the beginning of the reign had completely ceased. The Court was now closely united with the ministers. The King disposed personally of nearly all the ecclesiastical, and of most of the other departments of patronage. He prescribed in a great measure the policy of his Government. His friends in Parliament steadily supported it; the most important of the old followers of Grenville had joined it; it was strengthened by the personal popularity of North, by the eclipse of Chatham, and by the dissension between his followers and those of Rockingham, and it commanded overwhelming majorities in both Houses. The democratic movement which followed the Middlesex election had gradually subsided. The City opposition was broken into small and hostile fragments, and a great political apathy prevailed in the nation.
But while the course of events appeared thus eminently favourable to the designs of the Court, a long series of disgraces and calamities had cast a dark shadow around the throne. In 1770 the Duke of Cumberland, one of the brothers of the King, had been compelled to appear as defendant in an action for criminal conversation on account of his adultery with Lady Grosvenor, and to pay 10,000 l. in damages. He then formed a new and notorious connection with another married woman, and soon after the King learnt with bitter indignation that in October 1771 he had secretly married Mrs. Horton, the widow of an undistinguished Derbyshire gentleman. The new Duchess was daughter of Lord Irnham, and, as Junius and the other satirists of the Court noticed with ferocious pleasure, she was sister to that Colonel Luttrell who had been so lately put forward in opposition to Wilkes as the champion of the Court. Immediately after this marriage had been announced, the Duke of Gloucester, the favourite brother of the King, confessed that he had several years before contracted a secret marriage with the Dowager Countess of Waldegrave, an illegitimate daughter of Sir Edward Walpole, and granddaughter of the great statesman of the last reign. Very soon after, news arrived from Copenhagen of the disgrace of the King's sister, the Queen of Denmark, who had been arrested by the command of her husband on a charge of adultery with Count Struensee, the Prime Minister of Denmark, and had been thrown into prison. Struensee was executed with circumstances of peculiar horror, but the Queen after four months of confinement was suffered to retire to Hanover, where a few years later she died. The Princess Dowager, the mother of the King, was in the mean time slowly dying of cancer, and ten days after the news of her daughter's disgrace arrived in England, she ended her stormy and unhappy life. There is no evidence whatever that for several years before her death she had exercised any political power; but the belief in her influence had never ceased, and neither her sex nor her sorrows nor her munificent charities could screen her from the most brutal insults, which pursued her to the very end of her life. Wilkes, Horne, Junius, and a crowd of nameless libellers and caricaturists, and especially the infamous papers called the ‘Whisperer’ and the ‘Parliamentary Spy,’ vied with each other in insulting her; and in March 1771, when the Princess was stricken down with her mortal illness, Alderman Townshend made a furious attack upon her in the House of Commons, declaring that for ten years England had been governed by a woman, that he considered the Princess Dowager of Wales to be the cause of all the calamities of the country, and that an inquiry should be made into her conduct. 1 The Princess died on February 8, 1772, and her body was a few days later carried to the tomb amid the shouts and rejoicings of the mob. 2
In the same month, and in consequence of the scandals connected with the Dukes of Cumberland and Gloucester, a King's message was brought to Parliament urging both Houses to take into consideration measures for making more effectual the right which had always, it was stated, belonged to the kings of this nation of approving of all marriages in the royal family, and it was followed by the Royal Marriage Bill, which more than any other measure in 1772 divided opinion both in Parliament and in the country. The object of this Bill was to prevent the great dangers which might arise from clandestine or improper marriages in the royal family. It was possible that in consequence of such marriages the title of the successor to the throne might become a matter of doubt and of dispute, and it was very probable that connections might be formed, and disgraceful elements introduced into the royal family, which would greatly lower the authority of the monarchy in the country. To guard against these dangers, the Marriage Bill prohibited any descendant of the late King, except those who were the issue of princesses married into foreign houses, from contracting marriage before the age of twenty-five without the assent of the King signified under the Great Seal. After that age they might marry without the royal consent, but only if they had given notice of their intention to the Privy Council twelve months before the ceremony was performed, and if the two Houses of Parliament did not signify their disapprobation. All marriages contracted in defiance of this Act were to be null, and all who celebrated them or assisted at them were to be subject to the penalties of præmunire. 1
This Bill was fiercely and persistently opposed. Its adversaries emphatically denied that the King possessed either by law or by prerogative any control over the marriages of his family other than that which every parent or guardian possesses over his children or his wards when they are minors. They dilated upon the great number of persons far removed from the throne who would ultimately be brought under the provisions of the law, and deprived during their whole lives c. their natural and inherent right of marrying according to their inclination; and they urged that while no immorality was so pernicious to the community as the immorality of those who occupied an eminent position in the eyes of men, the moral effects of a Bill imposing such formidable restraints upon marriage must be in the highest degree injurious. To treat the whole royal family as a separate caste, and to make intermarriage between its members and subjects almost impossible, was no doubt very congenial to the sentiments of a German court, but it was a slur upon the English nobility, it was utterly inconsistent with English traditions, and it claimed for a German family reigning by a parliamentary title a position which had not been claimed either by the Plantagenets, the Tudors, or the Stuarts. The principle that a marriage which was valid in the eyes of God and of the Church could be pronounced by the civil law to be not only criminal and irregular, but null and void, had indeed been introduced into English legislation in the last reign, but it was a principle which was contrary to religion, and would never be fully recognised by opinion. Nor was the Bill likely to fulfil its objects. It was intended to prevent improper persons from sitting on the throne, but it imposed no restraint on the imprudent or profligate marriage of the reigning prince. It was intended to prevent the possibility of disputed successions; but it would almost certainly multiply clandestine marriages, and call into being two classes of heirs; those who were legitimate in the eyes of God, of the Church, and perhaps of public opinion, and those whose legitimacy depended on an Act of Parliament.
Arguments of this kind made the Bill exceedingly unpopular outside Parliament, and in the House of Commons itself the feeling against it was so strong that an amendment limiting it to the reign of George III. and three years longer was only rejected by a majority of 18. 1 The measure was generally understood to emanate especially from the King, and his influence was employed to the utmost to carry it. ‘I do expect,’ he wrote to Lord North, ‘every nerve to be strained to carry the Bill through both Houses with a becoming firmness, for it is not a question that immediately relates to administration, but personally to myself, and therefore I have a right to expect a hearty support from everyone in my service, and shall remember defaulters.’ 1
The Bill was carried by large majorities; it still remains on the statute book, and, although it may be justly regarded as oppressive by the collateral branches of the House of Brunswick, who are too far from the throne to have any reasonable prospect of succeeding to it, it cannot be said to have hitherto produced any of the public dangers that were foretold. The discussions on the measure are especially interesting as marking the first appearance in opposition to the Government of Charles James Fox, a man whose name during the next thirty years occupies a foremost place in English history, and whose character and early life it will now be necessary to sketch.
He was the third son of the first Lord Holland, the old rival of Pitt. He had entered Parliament irregularly and illegally in November 1768, when he had not yet completed his twentieth year, and in February 1770 he had been made a Lord of the Admiralty in the Government of Lord North. The last political connection of Lord Holland had been with Bute, and his son appears to have accepted the heritage of his Tory principles without inquiry or reluctance. His early life was in the highest degree discreditable, and gave very little promise of greatness. His vehement and passionate temperament threw him speedily into the wildest dissipation, and the almost insane indulgence of his father gratified his every whim. When he was only fourteen Lord Holland had brought him to the gambling table at Spa, 1 and, at a time when he had hardly reached manhood, he was one of the most desperate gamblers of his day. Lord Holland died in 1774, but before his death he is said to have paid no less than 140,000 l. in extricating his son from gambling debts. The death of his mother and the death of his elder brother in the same year brought him a considerable fortune, including an estate in the Isle of Thanet and the sinecure office of Clerk of the Pells in Ireland, which was worth 2,300 l. a year; but in a short time he was obliged to sell or mortgage everything he possessed. He himself nicknamed his antechamber the Jerusalem Chamber from the multitude of Jews who haunted it. Lord Carlisle was at one time security for him to the extent of 15,000 l. or 16,000 l. During one of the most critical debates in 1781 his house was in the occupation of the sheriffs. He was even debtor for small sums to chairmen and to waiters at Brooks's; and although in the latter part of his life he was partly relieved by a large subscription raised by his friends, he never appears to have wholly emerged from the money difficulties in which his gambling tastes had involved him.
Nor was this his only vice. With some men the passion for gambling is an irresistible moral monomania, the single morbid taint in a nature otherwise faultless and pure. With Fox it was but one of many forms of an insatiable appetite for vicious excitement, which continued with little abatement during many years of his public career. In 1777, during a long visit to Paris, he lived much in the society of Madame du Deffand, and that very acute judge of character formed an opinion of him which was, on the whole, very unfavourable. He has much talent, she said, much goodness of heart and natural truthfulness, but he is absolutely without principle, he has a contempt for everyone who has principle, he lives in a perpetual intoxication of excitement, he never gives a thought to the morrow, he is a man eminently fitted to corrupt youth. 1 In 1779, when he was already one of the foremost politicians in England, he was one night drinking at Almack's with Lord Derby, Major Stanley, and a few other young men of rank, when they determined at three in the morning to make a tour through the streets, and amused themselves by instigating a mob to break the windows of the chief members of the Government. 2 His profligacy with women during a great part of his life was notorious, though he appears at last to have confined himself to his connection with Mrs. Armitstead, whom he secretly married in September 1795. 3 He was the soul of a group of brilliant and profligate spendthrifts, who did much to dazzle and corrupt the fashionable youth of the time; and in judging the intense animosity with which George III. always regarded him, it must not be forgotten that his example and his friendship had probably a considerable influence in encouraging the Prince of Wales in those vicious habits and in that undutiful course of conduct which produced so much misery in the palace and so much evil in the nation. 4 One of the friends of Charles Fox summed up his whole career in a few significant sentences. ‘He had three passions—women, play, and politics. Yet he never formed a creditable connection with a woman. He squandered all his means at the gaming table, and, except for eleven months, he was invariably in opposition.’
That a man of whom all this can be truly said should have taken a high and honourable place in English history, and should have won for himself the perennial love and loyalty of some of the best Englishmen of his time, is not a little surprising, for a life such as I have described would with most men have destroyed every fibre of intellectual energy and of moral worth. But in truth there are some characters which nature has so happily compounded that even vice is unable wholly to degrade them, and there is a charm of manner and of temper which sometimes accompanies the excesses of a strong animal nature that wins more popularity in the world than the purest and the most self-denying virtue. Of this truth Fox was an eminent example. With a herculean frame, with iron nerves, with that happy vividness and buoyancy of temperament that can ever throw itself passionately into the pursuits and the impressions of the hour, and can then cast them aside without an effort, he combined one of the sweetest of human tempers, one of the warmest of human hearts. Nothing in his career is more remarkable than the spell which he cast over men who in character and principles were as unlike as possible to himself. ‘He is a man,’ said Burke, ‘made to be loved, of the most artless, candid, open, and benevolent disposition; disinterested in the extreme, of a temper mild and placable to a fault, without one drop of gall in his whole constitution.’ ‘The power of a superior man,’ said Gibbon, ‘was blended in his attractive character with the softness and simplicity of a child. Perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity, or falsehood.’ ‘He possessed,’ said Erskine, ‘above all men I ever knew, the most gentle, and yet the most ardent spirit.’ He retained amid all his vices a capacity for warm and steady friendship; a capacity for struggling passionately and persistently in opposition, for an unpopular cause; a purity of taste and a love of literature which made him, with the exception of Burke, the foremost scholar among the leading members of the House of Commons; an earnestness, disinterestedness, and simplicity of character which was admitted and admired even by his political opponents.
He resembled Bolingbroke in his power of passing at once from scenes of dissipation into the House of Commons, and in retaining in public affairs during the most disorderly periods of his private life all his soundness of judgment and all his force of eloquence and of decision. Gibbon described how Fox ‘prepared himself’ for one important debate by spending twenty-two previous hours at the hazard table and losing 11,000 l. Walpole extols the extraordinary brilliancy of the speech which he made on another occasion, when he had but just arrived from Newmarket and had been sitting up drinking the whole of the preceding night, and he states that Fox, in the early period of his brilliant opposition to the American policy of North, was rarely in bed before five in the morning, or out of it before two in the afternoon. 1 Yet, like Bolingbroke, he never lost the taste and passion for study even at the time when he was most immersed in a life of pleasure. At Eton and Oxford he had been a very earnest student, and few of his contemporaries can have had a wider knowledge of the imaginative literatures of Greece, Italy, or France. He was passionately fond of poetry, and a singularly delicate and discriminating critic; but he always looked upon literature chiefly from its ornamental and imaginative side. Incomparably the most important book relating to the art of government which appeared during his lifetime was the ‘Wealth of Nations,’ but Fox once owned that he had never read it, and the history which was his one serious composition added nothing to his reputation. In books, however, he found an unfailing solace in trouble and disappointment. One morning, when one of his friends, having heard that Fox on the previous night had been completely ruined at the gaming table, went to visit and console him, he found him tranquilly reading Herodotus in the original. ‘What,’ he said, ‘would you have a man do who has lost his last shilling?’
His merits as a politician can only be allowed with great deductions and qualifications. But little stress should indeed be laid on the sudden and violent change in his political principles, which was faintly foreshadowed in 1772 and fully accomplished in 1774, though that change did undoubtedly synchronise with his personal quarrel with Lord North. Changes of principle and policy, which at forty or fifty would indicate great instability of character, are very venial at twenty-four or twenty-five, and from the time when Fox joined the Whig party his career through long years of adversity and of trial was singularly consistent. I cannot, however, regard a politician either as a great statesman or a great party leader who left so very little of permanent value behind him, who offended so frequently and so bitterly the national feelings of his countrymen, who on two memorable occasions reduced his party to the lowest stage of depression, and who failed so signally during a long public life in winning the confidence of the nation. His failure is the more remarkable as one of the features most conspicuous both in his speeches and his letters is the general soundness of his judgment, and his opinions during the greater part of his life were singularly free from every kind of violence, exaggeration, and eccentricity. Much of it was due to his private life, much to his divergence from popular opinion on the American question and on the question of the French Revolution, and much also to an extraordinary deficiency in the art of party management, and to the frequent employment of language which, though eminently adapted to the immediate purposes of debate, was certain from its injudicious energy to be afterwards quoted against him. Like more than one great master of words, he was trammelled and injured at every stage of his career by his own speeches. The extreme shock which the disastrous coalition of 1784 gave to the public opinion of England was largely, if not mainly, due to the outrageous violence of the language with which Fox had in the preceding years denounced Lord North, and a similar violence made his breach with the Court irrevocable, and greatly aggravated his difference with the nation on the question of the French Revolution.
But if his rank as a statesman and as a party leader is by no means of the highest order, he stood, by the concurrent testimony of all his contemporaries, in the very first line, if not in the very first place, among English parliamentary debaters. He threw the whole energy of his character into this field, and by continual practice he at last attained a dexterity in debate which to his contemporaries appeared little less than miraculous. ‘During five whole sessions,’ he once said, ‘I spoke every night but one, and I regret only that I did not speak on that night.’ With a delivery that in the beginning of his speeches was somewhat slow and hesitating, with little method, with great repetition, with no grace of gesture, with an utter indifference to the mere oratory of display, thinking of nothing but how to convince and persuade the audience who were immediately before him, never for a moment forgetting the vital issue, never employing an argument which was not completely level with the apprehensions of his audience, he possessed to a supreme degree the debating qualities which an educated political assembly of Englishmen most highly value. The masculine vigour and strong common sense of his arguments, his unfailing lucidity, his power of grasping in a moment the essential issue of a debate, his skill in hitting blots and throwing the arguments on his own side into the most vivid and various lights, his marvellous memory in catching up the scattered threads of a debate, the rare combination in his speeches of the most glowing vehemence of style with the closest and most transparent reasoning, and the air of intense conviction which he threw into every discussion, had never been surpassed. He was one of the fairest of debaters, and it was said that the arguments of his opponents were very rarely stated with such masterly power as by Fox himself before he proceeded to grapple with, and to overthrow them. 1 He possessed to the highest degree what Walpole called the power of ‘declaiming argument,’ and that combination of rapidity and soundness of judgment which is the first quality of a debater. ‘Others,’ said Sir George Savile, ‘may have had more stock, but Fox had more ready money about him than any of his party.’ ‘I believe,'said Lord Carlisle, ‘there never was a person yet created who had the faculty of reasoning like him,’ ‘Nature,’ said Horace Walpole, ‘had made him the most powerful reasoner of the age,’ ‘He possessed beyond all moderns,’ wrote Mackintosh, ‘that union of reason, simplicity, and vehemence which formed the prince of orators,’ ‘Had he been bred to the bar,’ wrote Philip Francis, ‘he would in my judgment have made himself in a shorter time, and with much less application than any other man, the most powerful litigant that ever appeared there.’ ‘He rose by slow degrees,’ said Burke,’ to be the most brilliant and accomplished debater the world ever saw.’ His finest speeches were wholly unpremeditated, and the complete subordination in them of all rhetorical and philosophical ambition to the immediate purpose of the debate has greatly impaired their permanent value; but even in the imperfect fragments that remain, the essential qualities of his eloquence may be plainly seen.
At the period, however, we are now examining, his talent was yet far from its maturity, and the statesman who became one of the steadiest and most consistent of Whigs was still one of the most ardent of Tories. Almost the first speech he ever made was in favour of the expulsion of Wilkes, and he was one of the ablest advocates of the election of Luttrell, one of the fiercest vituperators of the City democrats. Very few politicians were so unpopular in the City, and in the great riot of 1771 his chariot was shattered by the mob, he was dragged through the mud, and his life was in some danger. 1 He supported the shameful attack on the property of the Duke of Portland which gave rise to the Nullum Tempus Act, and resisted the attempt of Sir W. Meredith in 1771 to defeat it. He opposed the law which punished by disfranchisement the gross corruption of the electors of Shoreham. He opposed the law making the Grenville Election Act perpetual. He opposed the motion for relieving clergymen of their subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, though he expressed a strong wish that the obligation should be no longer extended to students at the Universities. 1 It is curious to find Lord Holland congratulating himself on the close connection of his son with Lord North, and anticipating that the young statesman would infuse a new energy into his chief in the struggle with the Whigs that followed the resignation of Grafton, 2 and it is not less curious to read the judgment of the future historian of James II. upon the history of Clarendon. ‘I think the style bad, and that he has a great deal of the old woman in his way of thinking, but hate the opposite party so much that it gives me a kind of partiality for him.’ 3
The resignation of Fox in February 1772 was not due to any general opposition to the policy of North, but to his opposition to the Royal Marriage Bill, and to his unsuccessful effort to amend that Marriage Act of Lord Hardwicke which his father had so ably and so bitterly opposed. It appears, however, from a letter addressed by Lord Holland to Lord Ossory that Fox considered that he ‘had reason to be dissatisfied,’ and to think that ‘Lord North did not treat him with the confidence and attention he used to do,’ and also that his father considered that he ‘had been too hasty in a step of this consequence.’ Fox himself probably soon adopted a similar view, for he spoke of North in a tone of marked moderation and compliment, expressed in strong terms his general concurrence with his political principles, and clearly intimated his desire not to go into general opposition. 4 North met his overtures in the same spirit, and towards the close of 1772 the first quarrel of Fox with the Tory party was ended. A new disposition of places was made expressly to open a place for him, and he became one of the Commissioners of the Treasury.
The most engrossing subject of parliamentary discussion in 1772 and the following year was the affairs of the East India Company, and in order to understand them it will be necessary to resume in a few pages the narrative which was broken off in a former volume. The period of Indian history during the five years that followed the return of Clive to England in February 1760, though it is not the most tragical, is perhaps the most shameful in its whole annals. The victories of Clive had filled the natives with an abject terror of the English name, and had given Englishmen an almost absolute ascendency in Bengal. But this power was not in the hands of the responsible government of England. It was not even in the hands of the great commercial Company which nominally ruled the British possessions in Hindostan. It was practically monopolised by a great multitude of isolated officials, scattered over vast and remote districts, dominating in the native Courts, far removed from all control, and commanding great bodies of disciplined Sepoys. Most of them had left England when little more than schoolboys, and at a time when their characters were wholly unformed. Some of them were desperate adventurers of broken fortunes and tarnished honour, and they had gone to the East at a time when very few even of the best Europeans would have considered themselves bound to apply the whole moral law to men of a pagan creed and of a colour differing from their own. The government of the Company was too weak, too divided, and too distant to exercise any real control upon their conduct; and they found themselves wholly beyond the range and influence of European opinion, and in a country where all the traditions, habits, and examples of government were violent and despotic. Salaries had been regulated according to a European scale, and they were utterly insufficient in the East. By the strictest economy the servants of the Company could barely live upon their pay, while they had unlimited opportunities of acquiring by illicit means enormous wealth. Nowhere in Europe, nowhere else, perhaps, in the world, were large fortunes so easily amassed. Clive himself had gone out a penniless clerk; when he returned to England, at thirty-four, he had acquired a fortune of more than 40,000 l. a year, besides giving 50,000 l. to his relatives; 1 and he atterwards declared that when he remembered what he might have obtained he was astonished at his moderation. It was a common thing for young men who had gone out without a penny, to return, in ten or twelve years, with fortunes that enabled them to rival or eclipse the oldest families in their counties.
It needs but little knowledge of human nature to perceive that such a combination of circumstances must have led to the grossest abuses. The English officials began everywhere to trade on their own account, and to exercise their enormous power in order to drive all competitors from the field. A chief part of the native revenues consisted of duties imposed on the transit of goods; but the servants of the Company insisted on exempting themselves from paying them. Sometimes they sold for large sums a similar exemption to native traders. They defied, displaced, or intimidated all native functionaries who attempted to resist them. They refused to permit any other traders to sell the goods in which they dealt. They even descended upon the villages, and forced the inhabitants, by flogging and confinement, to purchase their goods at exorbitant prices, or to sell what they desired to purchase, at prices far below the market value. They exacted heavy sums, as fines, from those who refused to yield; disorganised the whole system of taxation in the native states by the exemptions they claimed; seized, bound, and beat the agents of the native governments; openly defied the commands of the Nabob, and speedily undermined all authority in Bengal except their own. Monopolising the trade in some of the first necessaries of life, to the utter ruin of thousands of native traders, and selling those necessaries at famine prices to a half-starving population, they reduced those who came under their influence to a wretchedness they had never known before. The native rulers had often swept like some fierce monsoon over great districts, spreading devastation and ruin in their path; but the oppression of the English was of a new and wholly different kind. Never before had the natives experienced a tyranny which was at once so skilful, so searching, and so strong. Every Sepoy in the service of the Company felt himself invested with the power of his masters. Whole districts which had once been populous and flourishing were at last utterly depopulated, and it was noticed that on the appearance of a party of English merchants the villages were at once deserted, and the shops shut, and the roads thronged with panic-stricken fugitives.
There were other means by which the vast fortunes of the upper servants of the Company were accumulated. The Company had not adopted the plan of governing the country directly. It ruled mainly by its influence over the native authorities, and its chief servants exercised an almost unlimited power of promoting or degrading. They became the centre of a vast web of intrigue, countless native officials competing for their support, and purchasing it by gifts wrung from an impoverished people. More than one native ruler struggled against the tyranny, and there was much mutiny and disorder among the British; but in critical moments they always displayed a skill, a courage, and a discipline that enabled them to crush all opposition. The Emperor had been murdered in 1760, and his successor, having made the Nabob of Oude his Viceroy, attempted to restore the Imperial ascendency in Bengal; but, after two severe defeats, he was compelled to retreat. Meer Jaffier, whom the English had made Nabob of Bengal after the battle of Plassy, was deposed by them, and his son-in-law, Meer Cossim, was raised to the vacant seat. He proved, however, to be a man of energy and capacity. He resented bitterly the trade privileges of the English, and he attempted to place the English traders on a level with his own subjects. The English, finding him recalcitrant, soon resolved to depose him. The struggle was long and desperate; 150 English were deliberately massacred by the Nabob at Patna. The Nabob of Oude joined his forces with those of Meer Cossim; but the prowess of the English proved again victorious. Meer Jaffier was once more made Nabob of Bengal, and the total defeat of the Nabob of Oude in the battle of Buxar, on September 15, 1764, destroyed the power of the only great Mogul chief remaining, and placed the Emperor himself under the protection of the English. In Madras the English influence was extended by the subjugation of some independent chiefs. Mohammed Ali, the Nabob of that province, was wholly subservient to the English; and the Company obtained the grant of a great part of the revenues of the Carnatic.
In January 1765, Meer Jaffier died, and the succession to his throne lay between his surviving son, who was a youth of twenty, and an infant, who was the son of his eldest deceased son. The choice legally rested with the Emperor; but he was not even consulted. The Company made Nujum-ad-dowla, the son of Meer Jaffier, Nabob; but he purchased the dignity both by large money gifts and by conditions which marked another step in the subjugation of Bengal to the English. The new Nabob was compelled to leave the whole military defence of the province to the English, keeping only as many troops as were necessary for purposes of parade and for the administration of justice and the collection of the revenue. The civil administration was hardly less effectually transferred by a provision placing it in the hands of a vicegerent, who was to be chosen by the Nabob by the advice of the Governor and Council, and who might not be removed without their consent. The large revenues the Company already received from Bengal were confirmed and increased; the Company's servants obtained a formal concession of the privilege of trading within the country without paying the duties exacted from native traders, provided they paid two and a half per cent, on the single article of salt, and the accountants of the revenue were not to be appointed except with their approbation.
At every turn of the wheel, at every change in the system or the personality of the Government, vast sums were drawn from the native treasury, and most steps of promotion were purchased by gifts to the English. A great part of these gifts, going to minor servants for procuring minor promotions, have never been traced; but the Select Committee of 1773 published a detailed account of such sums as had been proved and acknowledged to have been distributed by the princes and other natives of Bengal from the year 1757 to 1766, both included. Omitting the great grant which had been made to Clive after the battle of Plassy, these sums amounted to no less than 5,940,498 l.
Rumours of these abuses had begun to come to England. The Indian adventurer, or, as he was popularly called, the Nabob, was now a conspicuous and a very unpopular figure in Parliament, and the feeling of discontent was greatly strengthened by the impoverished and embarrassed condition of the Company. While numbers of its servants were returning to England laden with enormous wealth, the great corporation itself seemed on the verge of bankruptcy. The pay of its troops was in arrears, and the treasury at Calcutta was empty; heavy bills had been drawn in Bengal, and it was with the utmost difficulty they could be met. 1 Vansittart, who had succeeded Clive in the government of Bengal, though a man of good intentions and of some ability, was utterly unable to control his servants, and he was often paralysed by resistance in his own Council. Orders were sent out from England, in 1764, forbidding the servants of the Company from engaging on their own account in the inland trade, and enjoining that all presents exceeding 4,000 rupees received by them should be paid to their masters; but these orders were completely disregarded. It was felt by the Directors that if the Company was to be saved, a stronger hand was needed in India. After several stormy debates and much division of opinion, Clive was again made Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Bengal, and was invested with extraordinary powers; and in May 1765 he arrived at Calcutta.
His administration lasted only for eighteen months, but it was one of the most memorable in Indian history. He found, in his own emphatic words, ‘that every spring of the Government was smeared with corruption; that principles of rapacity and oppression universally prevailed, and that every spark of sentiment and public spirit was lost and extinguished in the unbounded lust of unmerited wealth.’ The condition of affairs, he informed the Directors, was ‘nearly desperate,’ and, he added, ‘in a country where money is plenty, where fear is the principle of government, and where your arms are ever victorious, it is no wonder that the lust of riches should readily embrace the proffered means of its gratification, and that the instruments of your power should avail themselves of your authority and proceed even to extortion in those cases where simple corruption could not keep pace with their rapacity. Examples of this sort set by superiors could not fail of being followed in a proportionate degree by inferiors. The evil was contagious, and spread among the civil and military down to the writer, the ensign, and the free merchant.’ 1
The scheme of policy which he adopted shows clear traces of a powerful and organising mind. Though himself the greatest conqueror in the Indian service, he strongly censured the spirit of aggrandisement and adventure that had passed into the Company, and he declared that they never could expect good finances till they recognised their own position as a purely commercial body, put a check to the incessant military expeditions in which they had engaged, and resolved to restrict their influence and their possessions to Bengal, Orissa, and Behar. 2 But the relations of the English with the Emperor and with the Nabob of Bengal were both changed. The Emperor and his Vizier, the Nabob of Oude, were still in a state of hostility to the Company, but they were thoroughly broken and humiliated, and the war had for some time languished. Clive now concluded a definite peace with them. The Nabob of Oude received back all his territory on paying a large sum in compensation, with the exception of Allahabad and Corah, which were reserved for the Emperor. The financial relations between the Emperor and Bengal were much modified, and one change was made which was of capital importance in the future government of India. The ‘Dewannee,’ or right of collecting, receiving, and administering the revenue of Bengal, Orissa, and Behar, was granted to the English. They thus became practically the sovereigns of the country. The Nabob of Bengal received a large pension from the Government, but he was deprived of all real power, though, by the advice of Clive, he was still retained as a nominal ruler, in order that in case of any complication with European Powers the English might be able, under the fiction of a native prince, to preserve a somewhat greater liberty of action in declaring or in declining hostilities.
He at the same time made great efforts to cure the abuses of administration. The difficulties he had here to encounter were enormous, for he had not only to struggle with the opposition of the civil servants in India, but also with very serious obstacles raised by the Directors at home. In spite of the orders of the Directors enormous presents had passed to their chief servants in India on the accession of Nujum-ad-dowla, and on the appointment of his vicegerent the inland trade had been expressly recognised and encouraged by the treaty with the new Nabob. At the same time the Directors positively refused to raise the salaries of their servants, and until such a step was taken, it was impossible that the inland trade could be suppressed. Some compromise was evidently necessary, and that which was adopted by Clive, though it was in direct disobedience to the instructions of his superiors at home, and though he was accused of having in the course of the transaction speculated largely for his own interest, 1 was probably one of the best that could have been devised. A peremptory order was issued forbidding the infamous practice of forcing the natives to buy and sell at such prices as the servants of the Company chose to prescribe, and the inland trade and presents from natives were in general terms prohibited. Clive resolved, however, to maintain for the Company a strict monopoly of the salt trade, which was probably the most lucrative in Bengal, and to assign the profits of that trade in specified proportions to the Governor, the Councillors, and the senior civil and military officers. The shares of the trade were granted to the civil servants as low down as factors, and to the military servants as low down as majors, and the chaplains and surgeons were included in the arrangement; 35 per cent, was allowed as a tax to the Company. According to the estimate of Clive, the profits from this source of a councillor or colonel would be at least 7,000 l. a year; those of a major or factor, 2,000 l. 1
These measures and several others of detailed reform were carried amid storms of unpopularity. When some of the Bengal functionaries refused to act under him, he sent to Madras for substitutes. On one day 200 officers resigned, and but for the fidelity of the Sepoys the whole military organisation of the Company might have fallen to the ground. But the iron will of Clive was never diverted from its object. He encountered the animosities of those whose illicit gains he disturbed with the same calm courage which he had displayed at Fort William, at Plassy, and at Chinsurah; and when at last, in January 1767, his broken health obliged him to return to England, he had undoubtedly left the state of India much better than he had found it. Had the lines of his policy been steadily maintained, the affairs of the Company might never have passed under the hostile notice of Parliament.
The Directors, however, refused to confirm the provisions he had made about the salt trade, and on the removal of Clive the old trade abuses grew up again, though in a somewhat mitigated form. The belief in the enormous wealth of India had greatly increased, and the proprietors of the Company began to clamour loudly for an augmented dividend. In spite of the great debts of the Company, in spite of the strong opposition of the Directors, the proprietors insisted on raising the dividend in 1766 from 6 to 10 per cent., and in 1767 to 12 1/2 per cent.
It was about this time that the great question of the justice and propriety of a parliamentary interference with the government of India first came into practical importance. We have seen in a former chapter that Chatham strongly maintained that it was both the right and the duty of the Crown to take the government of India under its direct control; that no subjects could acquire the sovereignty of any territory for themselves, but only for the nation to which they belonged; that while the trading privileges of the Company should be preserved as long as its charter was in force, its territorial revenue belonged of right to the nation; and that the gross corruption and oppression existing in India loudly called for parliamentary interference. These views were maintained with equal emphasis by Shelburne; but in the Cabinet of Chatham himself Charles Townshend strongly urged that the question should not be brought before the House of Commons, and the whole Rockingham section of the Whigs maintained the sole right of the Company under the terms of its charters to the government and revenues of India. As no reservation of territorial revenue to the Crown had been made when these charters were purchased by the Company, granted by the Crown, and confirmed by Parliament, they contended that the claims now put forward on the part of the Government were utterly inconsistent with good faith or respect for property. In November 1766, however, Parliament appointed a committee to inquire into and to publish the state of the Company's revenue and other affairs, its relations to the Indian princes, the expenses the Government had incurred on its account, and even the correspondence of the Company with its servants in India. It was with difficulty that the Company procured an exemption of the confidential portion of that correspondence from the general publicity. In 1767 a law was passed which introduced several new regulations into the manner of voting and declaring dividends in public companies; 1 it was immediately followed by an Act which, in defiance of the late resolution of the Court of Proprietors raising the dividend of the East India Company to 12 1/2 percent., limited it till the next Session of Parliament to 10 per cent.; 2 and the Company, terrified by the action of the Government, then entered into an agreement, by which it purchased the extension of its territorial revenue, and also a temporary exemption from a duty which had been imposed upon some kinds of tea, by binding itself to pay 400,000 l. a year into the public exchequer for two years from February 1, 1767. 3
The question of right which was thus raised was a very grave one. The enactment of a law restraining a trading company from granting such dividends as were voted and declared by those who were legally entrusted with the power of doing so was opposed by all sections of the Opposition as a gross violation of the rights of property, and as inconsistent with the security of every commercial corporation in the country. Counsel were heard against the Bill. On the third reading in the House of Lords a minority of forty-four divided against a majority of fifty-nine, and nineteen peers signed a protest against the measure. 1 The principle, however, was maintained and extended. In 1768 the restraint on the dividend was continued for another year, and in 1769 a new agreement was made by Parliament with the East India Company for five years, during which time the Company was guaranteed its territorial revenues, but was bound to pay an annuity of 400,000 l. , and to export a specified quantity of British goods. It was at liberty to increase its dividend during that time to 12 1/2 per cent, providing the increase in any one year did not exceed 1 per cent. If, however, the dividend should fall below 10 per cent, the sum to be paid to the Government was to be proportionately reduced. If it sank to 6 per cent, the payment to the Government was to cease. In case the finances of the Company enabled it to pay off some specified debts, it was to lend some money to the public at 2 per cent. 2
It is obvious that this law rested upon the supposition that the Company possessed an enormous surplus revenue, and a large section of politicians regarded the exaction of the annuity as a simple extortion, which was wholly unwarranted by the terms of the charter. It soon became evident that the Company was totally unable to pay it. Its debts were already estimated at more than six millions sterling. 3 It supported an army of about 30,000 men. It paid about one million sterling a year in the form of tributes, pensions, or compensations to the Emperor, the Nabob of Bengal, and other great native personages. 4 Its incessant wars, though they had hitherto been always successful, were always expensive, and a large proportion of the wealth which should have passed into the general exchequer was still diverted to the private accounts of its servants. At this critical period, too, the Company was engaged in a desperate and calamitous struggle with Hyder Ali, the ruler of Mysore, who was by far the ablest and most daring native enemy the English had yet encountered in Hindostan. The war had begun in 1767, when Hyder Ali succeeded in inducing the Nizam of Deccan to join him against the English; but although it had become evident from the beginning that an enemy had arisen who was widely different in skill and courage from those whom the Company had as yet encountered, it seemed as if English discipline was likely to be as usual completely victorious. After several vicissitudes of fortune Hyder Ali was defeated in a great battle near Amboor. The Nizam fell away from him and made peace with the English. Mangalore, one of Hyder Ali's principal seaports, was captured by a squadron from Bombay. Colonel Smith pursued the defeated chieftain into his own country, and although he was unable to force him to give battle, he penetrated far into Mysore and captured several fortresses. But towards the close of 1768 a great turn took place in the fortunes of the war. Hyder Ali reconquered everything that had been taken. With 14,000 horsemen and a large force of Sepoys, he swept almost without resistance over the southern division of the Carnatic, reducing a once fertile land to utter ruin; and soon after, having by a series of artful manoeuvres succeeded in drawing the English army far from Madras, he, at the head of 6,000 cavalry, traversed 120 miles in three days, and appeared unexpectedly in the immediate neighbourhood of the English capital. He at once proposed a peace; and, as the open town and the rich country round Madras were at his mercy, the English agreed to negotiate. In April 1769 a treaty was signed, providing for a mutual restitution of conquests and an alliance.
It was the first instance in which a victorious native Power had almost dictated terms to the English, and its effects on the fortunes of the Company were immediate. The price of East India Stock fell 60 per cent., the credit of the Company sank, and as the revenues from India began to fail, and the shadow of unpopularity fell more darkly upon the corporation, the old complaints of the abuses that were practised grew louder. Three supervisors were sent out to India by the Directors in 1769, with authority to investigate every department of the service; but the ship in which they sailed never reached its destination. In 1770 Bengal was desolated by perhaps the most terrible of the many terrible famines that have darkened its history, and it was estimated that more than a third part of its inhabitants perished. Yet in spite of all these calamities, in spite of the rapidly accumulating evidence of the inadequacy of the Indian revenues, the rapacity of the proprietors at home prevailed, and dividends of 12 and 12 1/2 per cent., as permitted by the last Act, were declared. The result of all this could hardly be doubtful. In July 1772, the Directors were obliged to confess that the sum required for the necessary payments of the next three months was deficient to the extent of no less than 1,293,000 l ., and in August the Chairman and Deputy Chairman waited on the minister to inform him that nothing short of a loan of at least one million from the public could save the Company from ruin.
The whole system of Indian government had thus for a time broken down. The division between the Directors and a large part of the proprietors, and between the authorities of the Company in England and those in India, the private and selfish interests of its servants in India, and of its proprietors at home, the continual oscillation between a policy of conquest and a policy of trade, and the great want in the whole organisation of any adequate power of command and of restraint, had fatally weakened the great corporation. In England the conviction was rapidly growing that the whole system of governing a great country by a commercial company was radically and incurably false. The arguments on the subject cannot be better stated than they were a few years later by Adam Smith. The first interest, he said, of the Sovereign of a people is that its wealth should increase as much as possible; and this is especially the case in a country like Bengal, where the revenue is chiefly derived from land rent. But a company of merchants exercising sovereign power will always treat their character of sovereigns as a mere appendix to their character of merchants, will make all government subservient to the maintenance of trade monopoly, and will employ it to stunt or distort the economical development of the people over whom they rule. In the Spice Islands the Dutch were said to burn all spiceries which a fertile season produces beyond what they expected to be able to dispose of in Europe with such profit as they deemed sufficient. In British India Government officials had been known to compel a peasant to plough up a rich field of poppies, for no other reason than that they might be able to sell their own opium at a higher price. As sovereigns it was the plain interest of the Company that their subjects should buy European goods as cheaply, and should sell their own goods as profitably, as possible. As merchants possessing the sole right of trading between India and Europe, it was their interest to compel the Indians to buy what the Company supplied at the dearest rate, and sell what the Company purchased for the European market at the cheapest rate. The first object of sovereign merchant companies is always to exclude competitors from the markets of the country they rule, and consequently to reduce some part at least of the surplus produce of that country to what they themselves require or can dispose of at the profit they consider reasonable. Insensibly but invariably, on all ordinary occasions, they will prefer the little and transitory profit of the monopolist to the great and permanent revenues of a sovereign.
And the public trade monopoly of the Company is but a small part of the evil. This, at least, extends only to the trade with Europe. But the private trade of the servants of the Company extended to a far greater number of articles, to every article in which they chose to deal, to articles of the first necessity intended for home consumption. It is idle to suppose that the clerks of a great counting-house, 10,000 miles distant from their masters, will abstain from a trade which is at once so lucrative and so easy, and it is no less idle to doubt that this trade will become a ruinous form of oppression. The Company has at least a connection with India, and has, therefore, a strong interest in not ruining it. Its servants have gone out for a few years to make their fortunes, and when they have left the country they are absolutely indifferent to its fate. If their wishes are attended to, they will establish the same legal monopoly for their private trade as the Company possesses for its public trade. If they are not suffered to do so, they will attain the same end by other means, by perverting the authority of Government and the administration of justice, in order to harass and to ruin all rival traders. 1
The subject was discussed in Parliament, in 1772, at great length, and with much acrimony. Several propositions were put forward by the Directors, but rejected by the Parliament; and Parliament, under the influence of Lord North, and in spite of the strenuous and passionate opposition of Burke, asserted in unequivocal terms its right to the territorial revenues of the Company. A Select Committee, consisting of thirty-one members, was appointed to make a full inquiry into the affairs of the Company; but it was not till 1773 that decisive measures were taken. The Company was at this time absolutely helpless. Lord North commanded an overwhelming majority in both Houses, and on Indian questions he was supported by a portion of the Opposition. The Company was on the brink of ruin, unable to pay its tribute to the Government, unable to meet the bills which were becoming due in Bengal. The publication, in 1773, of the report of the Select Committee, revealed a scene of maladministration, oppression, and fraud which aroused a wide-spread indignation through England; and the Government was able without difficulty, in spite of the provisions of the charter, to exercise a complete controlling and regulating power over the affairs of the Company. A new Committee—this time sitting in secret—was appointed by the Government to investigate its affairs, and Parliament took the decisive step of preventing by law the Company from sending out to India a Commission of Supervision which it had appointed, on the ground that it would throw a heavy additional expenditure on its tottering finances. 1
A very earnest opposition was made to this measure by a few members, among whom Burke was pre-eminent. The part which Burke took in the contest is a curious illustration of the strong natural conservatism of his intellect, and a curious contrast to his later speeches on Indian affairs; and few persons who follow his speeches as they appear in the parliamentary reports will fail to be struck with the ungovernable violence of language, and the glaring faults of taste, temper, and tact which they display. 1 His arguments, however, when reduced to their simplest expression, were very forcible. He contended that to violate a royal charter, repeatedly confirmed by Act of Parliament, was to strike at the security of every trading corporation, and, indeed, of all private property, in the kingdom, and that it was a clear violation of the charter of a self-governed Company to prevent it, by Act of Parliament, from managing its own affairs and exercising a supervision and control over its own servants. Every additional proof of the abuses in India was an additional argument for permitting the Company to send out a Committee of Supervision, and the simple postponement of such a step would necessarily aggravate the evils that were complained of. It was true that the financial condition of the Company was deplorable; but its embarrassments were partly due to transient and exceptional causes, and mainly to the conduct of the Government itself. Without a shadow of authority in the terms of the charter or in the letter of the law, the ministers had raised a distinction between the territorial revenue and the trade revenue of the Company. By threatening the former they had extorted, in addition to the legitimate duties which had been paid into the Imperial exchequer, no less than 400,000 l . a year, at a time when the finances of the Company were altogether unable to bear the exaction. This tribute, which was the true origin of the bankruptcy of the Company, 2 was purely extortionate. In one form or another it was computed that little less than two millions sterling had of late passed annually from the Company to the Government. 1 The interference of Parliament with the affairs of the Company had been going on since 1767, and had produced nothing but unmixed disaster. Not a single abuse had been in reality removed. Government had shaken the credit of the Company; had introduced a fatal element of uncertainty into all its calculations; had imposed upon it a tribute which reduced it to bankruptcy; had paralysed its efforts to control the abuses of its own servants. Nor was there the smallest reason to believe that the withdrawal of the chief patronage of India from the Company, and the transfer of an almost boundless fund of corruption to the servants of the Crown, would prove beneficial either to England or to India. In the eyes of the law Parliament may, no doubt, be regarded as omnipotent; but its power does not equitably extend to the violation of compacts and the subversion of privileges which had been duly purchased. Yet this was the course which Parliament was now taking when it virtually cancelled the charter it had granted.
These arguments, however, proved of no avail. A large number of proprietors of the Company supported the Government. Clive himself, who was in violent opposition to the predominating party among the Directors, was usually on their side. 2 The public mind was at last keenly sensible of the enormity of the abuses in India, and it was felt that an empire already exceeding in magnitude every European country except France and Russia, with a gross revenue of four millions, and a trade in proportion, 3 should not any longer be left uncontrolled by Parliament. The Company was obliged to come to Parliament for assistance, and the ministers resolved to avail themselves of the situation to reorganise its whole constitution. By enormous majorities two measures were passed through Parliament in 1773, which mark the commencement of a new epoch in the history of the East India Company. By one Act, the ministers met its financial embarrassments by a loan of 1,400,000 l . at an interest of 4 per cent., and agreed to forego the claim of 400,000 l . till this loan had been discharged. The Company was restricted from declaring any dividend above 6 per cent. till the new loan had been discharged, and above 7 per cent. till its bond-debt was reduced to 1,500,000 l . It was obliged to submit its accounts every half-year to the Lords of the Treasury; it was restricted from accepting bills drawn by its servants in India for above 300,000 l . a year, and it was obliged to export to the British settlements within its limits British goods of a specified value.
By another Act, the whole constitution of the Company was changed, and the great center of authority and power was trnsferred to the Crown. The qualification to vote in the Court of Proprietors was raised from 500 l . to 1,000 l ., and restricted to those who had held their stock for twelve months; and by this measure 1,246 voters were at once disfranchised. The Directors, instead of being, as heretofore, annually elected, were to sit for four years, a quarter of the number being annually renewed. The Mayor's Court at Calcutta was to be restricted to small mercantile cases, and all the more important matters of jurisdiction in India were to be submitted to a new court, consisting of a Chief Justice and three puisne judges appointed by the Crown. A Governor-General of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, was to be appointed at a salary of 25,000 l . a year, with four Councillors, at salaries of 8,000 l . a year, and the other presidencies were made subordinate to Bengal. The first Governor-General and Councillors were to be nominated, not by the East India Company, but by Parliament; they were to be named in the Act, and to hold their offices for five years; after that period the appointments reverted to the Directors, but were subject to the approbation of the Crown. Everything in the Company's correspondence with India relating to civil and military affairs was to be laid before the Government. No person in the service of the King or of the Company might receive presents, and the Governor-General, the Councillors, and the judges were excluded from all commercial profits and pursuits. 1
By this memorable Act the charter of the East India Company was completely subverted, and the government of India passed mainly into the hands of the ministers of the Crown. The chief management of affairs. was vested in persons in whose appointment or removal the Company had no voice or share, who might govern without its approbation or sanction, but who nevertheless drew, by authority of an Act of Parliament, large salaries from its exchequer. Such a measure could be justified only by extreme necessity and by brilliant success, and it was obviously open to the gravest objections from many sides. The direct appointment by the legis lative body of great executive officers was especially denounced as at once unprecedented and unconstitutional; for it freed ministers from the responsibility, while it left them the advantages, of the patronage, and thus, in the words of the protest of the Rockingham peers, ‘defeated the wise design of the Constitution, which placed the nomination of all officers either immediately or derivatively in the Crown, while it committed the check upon improper nominations to Parliament.’ Some of the names then selected were afterwards very prominent in English and Indian history. Warren Hastings had been appointed by the East India Company Governor and President of Bengal in 1772. He now became by Act of Parliament the first Governor-General: Barwell, Clavering, Monson, and Philip Francis were the four Councillors. In the Governor-General's Council all differences were to be decided by a majority, and it was therefore always possible for the Governor-General to be thwarted by three of the Councillors.
In a future chapter of this history it will be my task to describe the results of this great change and experiment in government which makes the year 1773 so memorable in the history of British administration in India. The overwhelming majorities by which the measure was carried, in spite of the opposition of the Company, of the City of London, and of the Rockingham Whigs, show that it obtained something more than a mere party support; and Lord North, having attained his end, was anxious as much as possible to alleviate the stroke. Seventeen millions of pounds of tea were lying in the warehouses of the Company, and by permitting the direct export of this tea to the colonies, North hoped to grant a great boon to India, and did not foresee that he was taking a great step toward the loss of America.
Another subject which now attracted general attention was the charges that were brought against Clive. He complained bitterly that he had been examined before the Select Committee as if he had been a sheep-stealer. The report of the committee unveiled the many acts of violence and rapacity he had committed during his earlier administration; the great reforms which he had undertaken during his later administration had mortally offended many corrupt interests; he had bitter enemies among the Directors; he was the most prominent and most wealthy representative of a class of men who were very unpopular in the country; and as he had attached himself to the Grenville connection in politics, and bad not after the death of Grenville fully identified himself with North, his position in Parliament was somewhat isolated. General Burgoyne, when presenting one of the reports of the Select Committee, declared that it contained an account of crimes shocking to human nature; and a few days later he brought on a vote of censure directed personally against Clive. Having enumerated the disgraceful circumstances attending the deposition of Surajah Dowlah in 1757, the fictitious treaty drawn up by Clive in order to elude the payment that had been promised to Omichund, the forgery by Clive of the name of Admiral Watson, and the enormous gifts which Clive had received as a reward for the elevation of Meer Jaffier, he moved that Clive did at that time, ‘through the influence of powers with which he was entrusted,’ obtain, under various authorities, sums amounting to 234,000 l ., and in so doing abused those powers.
The debates that followed were very remarkable for the confusion of parties and persons they displayed. Clive defended himself with great ability and power, and his chief advocate was Wedderburn, the Solicitor-General, while one of his chief assailants was Thurlow, the Attorney-General. Lord North voted with the enemies of Clive. The Court party were divided; 1 and the bulk of the Opposition supported Clive. Fox and Barré agreed in attackíng him, while Lord G. Germaine powerfully defended him. Burke was also among his defenders. He always drew a broad distinction between the career of Clive and the career of Hastings, and maintained that though the former had committed great crimes, his serious attempts in his last administration to purify the government of India, and especially his prohibition of presents from the natives, had done much to atone for them. 1 The facts that were alleged against him could not, indeed, be disputed; but the danger of the crisis, and the universal habits of Indian life, were strong circumstances of palliation. It was remembered that fifteen years had passed since the incriminated acts were committed; that Clive had performed services of transcendent value to the Empire; that in his last administration, with every opportunity of enormously increasing his fortune, he had refrained from doing so; and that the animosity against him was quite as much due to his merits as to his crimes. The resolution of Burgoyne was divided into two parts. The first part, asserting that Clive had accepted 234,000 l. , was carried without a division; but the latter part, censuring his conduct, was rejected after a long debate, and, on the motion of Wedderburn, the House unanimously resolved ‘that Robert Clive did at the same time render great and meritorious services to this country.’ 2
He did not long survive the triumph. The excitement of the conflict and the storm of invective that was directed against him contributed to unhinge his mind, which had always been subject to a dark, constitutional melancholy; and a painful disease, and a dangerous narcotic taken to alleviate it, aggravated the evil. In November 1774 he died by his own hand, when but just forty-nine; and in this manner, about two years before the outbreak of the American war, England lost the greatest general she had produced since the death of Marlborough. 1
Another group of measures of considerable importance, which occupied at this time the attention of the public and of Parliament related to religious liberty. The spirit of intolerance, as we have seen in the last volume, had been for a long time steadily declining in England, and there was no disposition in the higher ranks of the Government and among the leaders of either of the great parties in the State to make legislation subservient to religious fanaticism. Prosecutions for religious heterodoxy had almost wholly ceased. The only case, I believe, of the punishment of a freethinker for his writings in the early years of George III. was that of Peter Anet, who was sentenced in 1762 to stand twice in the pillory, and to be imprisoned for a year in Bridewell with hard labour, for a very violent and scurrilous attack upon Christianity. 2 The Methodist movement, however, contributed to strengthen a spirit of fanaticism among the classes who were influenced by it, and, on the other hand, as we have already seen, it was encountered by explosions of mob violence which often amounted to a high degree of persecution, and which were sometimes in a very shameful manner connived at, countenanced, or even instigated by local magistrates and by clergymen. Isolated incidents occasionally occurred which seemed to show that the spirit of persecution was rather dormant than dead; 3 and the law, though mildly administered, contained many things that were repugnant to true religious liberty.
The Ecclesiastical Courts still retained a jurisdiction which was in many respects oppressive and anomalous, and there were frequent complaints of their expensive, vexatious, and dilatory proceedings. Their conflict with the temporal courts dates from a period long anterior to the Reformation, and the temporal courts had early assumed, and exercised with much severity, a superintending influence over the spiritual ones, defining their sphere of action, and arresting by ‘writs of prohibition’ their attempts to extend their authority. The Ecclesiastical Courts retained, however, a power of taking cognisance of acts of private immorality, heresy, and neglect of religious observances, and some large departments of wrong lay within their jurisdiction. The withholding of tithes and other ecclesiastical dues and fees from the parson or vicar, injuries done by one clergyman to another, questions of spoliation and dilapidation of churches or parsonages, matrimonial cases, and also, by a peculiarity of English law, testamentary cases and cases of intestacy, passed under their control.
The tendency of English law, however, was gradually to abridge their sphere. The strange power they originally possessed of compelling an accused person to criminate himself, by tendering to him what was termed an ex-officio oath relating to the matter in dispute, would probably have been abolished under Elizabeth but for the direct intervention of the Queen. 1 It was finally taken away under Charles II. 2 and the jurisdiction of the Ecclesiastical Courts in cases of tithes and other pecuniary dues was greatly limited. When a question of disputed right was raised, the trial passed at once from the Ecclesiastical to the Civil Court, and this rule applied to all tithe cases in which the defendant pleaded any custom, modus, or composition. The Ecclesiastical Court had, therefore, only to enforce an undisputed right, and in cases of dues or tithes under the value of 40 s. a law of William III. provided a summary process by which they might be recovered before a justice of the peace. 1 The discipline the Spiritual Courts exercised in cases of immorality, and especially in cases of non-attendance at church, gradually faded away, from the impossibility of enforcing it. The only place where in the eighteenth century the discipline of the Anglican Church appears to have been habitually and severely enforced was in the Isle of Man under the episcopate of Bishop Wilson.
Already in the seventeenth century it had become customary to commute these penances for a money payment, 2 and such payments in cases which were mainly pro salute animi gradually ceased. Archbishop Secker in 1753 complained bitterly of the difficulty of enforcing any kind of ecclesiastical discipline. Yet in remote country parishes, even in the closing years of the eighteenth century, the spectacle might be occasionally seen of some poor woman arrayed in a white sheet doing public penance for her fault. 3
In cases, however, of the wrongs which I have enumerated, and also in cases of defamation, the Ecclesiastical Courts retained all their vigour, and there were bitter complaints of their abuses and of the excessive expense of their procedure. They possessed also a peculiar weapon of terrible force. The sentence of excommunication might be imposed by them for many offences; but it was most commonly employed as a punishment for contempt of the Ecclesiastical Court in not appearing before it, or not obeying its decrees, or not paying its fees or costs. An excommunicated person in England was placed almost wholly beyond the protection of the law. He could not be a witness or a juryman. He could not bring an action to secure or recover his property. If he died without the removal of his sentence he had no right to Christian burial. 1 Nor was this all. After forty days' contumacy he might be arrested by the writ ‘De excommunicato capiendo,’ issued by the Court of Chancery, and imprisoned till he was reconciled to the Church.
It is a singular fact that such a tremendous power, which in theory at least might extend even to perpetual imprisonment, should during the whole of the eighteenth century have been lodged with an Ecclesiastical Court, and that it might be applied to men who had committed such trivial offences as the non-payment of fees or costs. Nor was it by any means a dead letter. Howard, in the course of his visits to the English gaols, mentions that in Rothwell gaol, in Yorkshire, he found a weaver named William Carr, who, ‘having given a bad name to a woman who was said not to deserve a very good one,’ was cited before the Ecclesiastical Court and imprisoned ‘until he shall have made satisfaction to the Holy Church, as well for the contempt as for the injury by him done unto it.’ He lay in prison from May 1774 to July 1776, when he was released by an Insolvent Act which forgave that class of debtors their fees. 1 In 1787 two women were committed to Northampton gaol by virtue of the writ ‘De excommunicato capiendo,’ ‘because they had wickedly contemned the power of the keys.’ 2 In this year, however, an Act was carried limiting the time of commencing suits in these Courts for different offences to six or eight months. 3 But the most serious abuses connected with them continued to the present century. In 1812 Lord Folkestone brought forward the subject when presenting a petition from a young woman who had lain for two years in Bristol gaol as an excommunicated person. She had neglected to perform a penance imposed on her by the Ecclesiastical Court; had been excommunicated and imprisoned in consequence; and, as she was too poor to pay the fees that had been incurred, she was unable to obtain her release. Lord Folkestone related six or seven other cases of a similar kind, and in about half of them the excommunicated person had been at least three years in prison. 4 In 1813 an important Act was passed regulating the Ecclesiastical Courts. The power of excommunication for contempt and non-payment of fees was taken away. The penalty was reserved only for certain expressly defined offences, and no civil penalty or disability, except imprisonment not exceeding six months, could any longer attach to excommunication. 5
A very scandalous form of persecution, in which, however, religious motives had no part, was practised in the last years of George II. and the early years of George III. by no less a body than the Corporation of the City of London. In 1748 that Corporation made a bye-law imposing a fine of 400 l. and 20 marks on any person who, being nominated by the Lord Mayor for the office of Sheriff, refused to stand the election of the Common Hall, and 600 l. on anyone who, being elected, refused to serve. The proceeds of these fines were to be employed in building the New Mansion House, which had just been begun. But the office of Sheriff was one of those in which no one could serve who had not previously taken the Sacrament according to the Anglican rite, and it was, therefore, one of those from which Dissenters were excluded. It would appear almost incredible, if the facts were not amply attested, that under these circumstances the City of London systematically elected wealthy Dissenters to the office in order that they should be objected to and fined, and that in this manner it extorted no less than 15,000 l.
The electors appointed these Dissenters with a clear knowledge that they would not serve, and with the sole purpose of extorting money. One of those whom they selected was blind; another was bedridden. Sometimes the victims appealed against the sentence, but the case was brought in the first instance before a City court, which always gave verdicts for the Corporation, and the cost of appeals against the whole weight of the City influence was so great that few men were rich enough or determined enough to encounter it. At last a gentleman named Evans, who had been elected Sheriff, determined to fight the battle to the end. For no less than ten years the case was before the Courts. It was contended on the part of the Corporation that the Toleration Act did nothing more than suspend the penalties for attending the Nonconformist, and neglecting the Anglican, service; that it left the Dissenters liable to every other penalty and inconvenience to which they had been previously subject, and that they might, therefore, be legally fined for refusing to serve in an office which they could not legally fill without going through a ceremony repugnant to their conscience. This doctrine was finally overthrown in 1767 by a judgment of the House of Lords. After consultation with the judges, and after one of the most admirable of the many admirable speeches of Lord Mansfield, the House decided that the Toleration Act took away the crime as well as the penalty of Nonconformity, and that no fine could be legally imposed on Nonconformists who refused to serve in offices to which conscientious Dissenters were ineligible by law. 1
The next important question relating to religious liberty was one to which I have already adverted in another connection. The movement for abolishing the subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles was defended mainly on the principles of Locke and of Hoadly. Though not absolutely coextensive, it was at least closely connected with the growth of the Arian school of which Clarke, Sykes, Clayton, and Lindsey were prominent representatives, and it received a great impulse in 1766 from the publication and the popularity of the ‘Confessional’ of Archdeacon Blackburne. In 1771 a society called the Feathers Tavern Association was formed for the purpose of applying to the Legislature for relief. Blackburne and Lindsey were its most active members, and in February 1772 a petition, drawn up by Blackburne and signed by 250 persons, was presented to the House of Commons by Sir W. Meredith. Of those who signed it about 200 were clergymen, and the remainder were lawyers and doctors, who protested especially against the custom which prevailed at the universities of obliging students who came up for matriculation, at the age of sixteen or even earlier, 1 and who were not intended for the Church, to subscribe their consent to the Articles. It was remarked that Oxford was strongly opposed to the movement, while a powerful party at Cambridge supported it. Watson, who was afterwards Bishop of Llandaff, and who was at this time Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, published, under the signature of ‘A Christian Whig,’ two letters in favour of it, which were presented to every Member of Parliament the day before the petition was taken into consideration. 2 Paley, who was then rising to prominence as a lecturer at Cambridge, refused to sign the petition on the characteristic ground that he was ‘too poor to keep a conscience,’ but he fully concurred in it, and he wrote anonymously in its support. 3 It was signed by Jebb and John Law, who were prominent tutors at Cambridge, and it was countenanced by the Bishop of Carlisle, who was father of John Law, and also, it is said, in some degree by Bishop Lowth. 4
Lord North was anxious that the petition should be received and silently laid aside; but Sir Roger Newdigate, who was violently opposed to it, insisted upon moving its rejection, and a very interesting debate ensued. On the side of the petitioners the chief topics were the obscurities, the absurdities, and inconsistencies of the Articles, the manifest severity with which they pressed upon many clerical consciences, the folly of asking schoolboys of sixteen to declare their assent to a long series of complicated dogmatic assertions, the individual right and duty of every Protestant to interpret Scripture freely for himself, the essentially Popish character of all attempts to prescribe religious opinions by human formularies, the danger and the immorality of holding out temptations to dissimulation and prevarication by annexing rewards or punishments to particular opinions, the duty of opening the Church as wide as possible to all conscientious men. The petitioners were quite ready to assent to Scripture as the inspired Word of God, and to abjure all Popish tendencies, but they refused to be bound by any merely human formularies.
Among the arguments on the other side may be mentioned the appearance, perhaps for the first time, of two political doctrines which were afterwards destined, in connection with Irish politics, and with the Roman Catholic question, to attain a great importance. It was contended that the Coronation Oath made it unlawful for the Sovereign to give his assent to any law which changed the form or character of the Established Church, and that a similar incapacity was imposed upon Parliament by the articles of the Scotch Union, which enacted the permanent maintenance of the then existing Church establishments in the two countries. 1 It is remarkable that Burke, while strongly opposing the petition, took great pains to disclaim all sympathy with these arguments, and asserted that the Coronation Oath only bound the Sovereign to respect the religion which his Parliament had sanctioned, and that the Act of Union was no bar to the right of the united Parliament to revise and modify the ecclesiastical conditions of the country. 1
The King was very strongly opposed to the prayer of the petitioners, 2 and Lord North, in a temperate speech, opposed it as disturbing what was now quiet, and as likely to introduce anarchy, confusion, and dissension into the Church. The petition was supported among others by Lord George Germaine, Sir George Savile, and Thomas Pitt, the nephew of Chatham, who belonged to different political connections, and its advocates appear to have been chiefly Whigs. Dowdeswell, however, and Burke on this question severed themselves from their friends, 3 and the speech of Burke was by far the ablest in the debate. He urged the great danger of religious alterations, which usually pave the way to religious tumults and shake one of the capital pillars of the State. He dwelt upon the complete indifference of the great majority of the people to the subject, and he laid down very emphatically the principle which always governed his own attitude and that of the section of the Whig party which he inspired, towards proposed reforms. ‘The ground for a legislative alteration of a legal establishment is this and this only: that you find the inclinations of the majority of the people, concurring with your own sense of the intolerable nature of the abuse, are in favour of a change.’ No such desire existed in the present case. While strongly asserting the right of every man to follow his own convictions in religion, he as strongly maintained the undoubted right of the Legislature ‘to annex its own conditions to benefits artificially created,’ and ‘to take a security that a tax raised on the people shall be applied only to those who profess such doctrines and follow such a mode of worship as the Legislature representing the people has thought most agreeable to their general sense, binding as usual the minority not to an assent to the doctrines, but to a payment of the tax.’ The present question, he said, is not a question of the rights of private conscience, but of the title to public emoluments. He drew a vivid picture of the utter unsuitability of the Bible to be treated as a bond of union or a summary of faith, 1 and he dilated upon the impossibility of maintaining a religious organisation without any fixed code of belief, and the confusion and anarchy which an abolition of subscription would probably produce. By a majority of 217 to 71 the House refused to receive the petition. 2
The question was again introduced in 1773 and 1774, but it made no progress either in the House or in the country, though the subscription of students at Cambridge was soon after modified. Several of the leaders of the movement seceded from the Church of England to Unitarianism; the school of Hoadly was in its decadence, and a new spirit was arising in the Church. It was a significant fact that the Methodists, and the section of the Anglican clergy who were most imbued with their principles, were the most ardent opponents of the relaxation of subscription, 1 and the strongly dogmatic character of the Evangelical school, and the Calvinistic theology which soon became dominant within it, tended to attach its members to the Articles. The opposition to them soon died away, and when it was next revived it was by the school which was beyond all others the most opposed to that of Hoadly, by members of the school of Newman, who justly looked upon the Articles as the stronghold of that Protestant faith which they desired to extirpate from the Church.
In the course of the debates on the subscription, Lord North said that if the application for relief had come from Dissenting ministers, who received no emoluments from the Establishment, he could see no objection to it, and this remark encouraged the Dissenters to apply for a relief from their subscription. As we have seen, their ministers, schoolmasters, and tutors were compelled by the Toleration Act to assent to thirty-five and a half of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. No such subscription had been exacted in the Irish Toleration Act of 1719, which legalised the position of the Irish Protestant Dissenters, and it was on various grounds unpopular among the Dissenters in England. Many had drifted far from the orthodoxy of their fathers; many had adopted the views of Hoadly, that all subscriptions to human formularies were wrong, and many others who cordially believed the doctrinal articles regarded the subscription to them as a humiliating act of homage to a rival Church. The law, indeed, appears to have been very rarely enforced, and there was a party among the more orthodox Dissenters who desired its maintenance, and even petitioned against the abolition of the subscription to the Anglican Articles as tending to encourage the growth of Arianism. 1 The prevailing Dissenting opinion, however, was on the other side, and the relief Bill was extremely well received in the House of Commons. The ministers, though they did not take it under their own charge, appear to have favoured it, or at least to have been divided on the subject. On the side of the Opposition, Burke spoke strongly in its favour, and the great body of the Whigs supported it. It was carried through the House of Commons by large majorities in 1772 and 1773, but the bishops—strongly countenanced by the King, and, apparently at his orders, by the ministry 2 —opposed it in the Lords, and in spite of the warm support of Chatham it was defeated in that House. In 1779, however, it was brought in with more success, and by the concurrence of both parties Dissenting ministers and tutors were admitted to the benefits of the Toleration Act without a subscription to the Articles, provided they declared themselves Christians and Protestants, and believers in the Old and New Testaments. 3 In the same year the Irish Parliament relieved the Irish Nonconformists from the Test Act.
On these questions the tendency of the Whigs was somewhat more decidedly towards religious liberty than that of the Tories. This was, however, in some degree due to the greater freedom of an Opposition, and in some degree to the old alliance of the Dissenters with the Whigs; each party was much divided, and Lord North's own disposition was far removed from intolerance. In one most important measure, which marks an epoch in the history of religious liberty, the Government, as we have already seen, represented the liberal, and the Opposition the intolerant side. The Quebec Act of 1774, establishing Catholicism in Canada, would a generation earlier have been impossible, and it was justly considered a remarkable sign of the altered condition of opinion that such a law should be enacted by a British Parliament, and should have created no serious disturbances in the country. The Church party was at this time closely allied with the Court against the Americans. The bishops were on nearly all questions steady supporters of Lord North, and only one of them actively opposed the Quebec Bill.
The Whig party and the City politicians were fiercely hostile to the measure. Chatham denounced it as ‘a breach of the Reformation, of the Revolution, and of the King's Coronation Oath,’ ‘a gross violation of the Protestant religion.’ The City of London presented an address to the King petitioning him not to give his assent to a Bill which was inconsistent with his Coronation Oath and with his position as protector of the Protestant religion. When the King went down to the House of Lords to give his assent to the Bill, he was met by cries of ‘No Popery!’ from an angry mob, 1 and the Sovereign who in his later years was justly regarded as the bitterest enemy of his Catholic subjects in Ireland was now described as leaning more strongly to Popery than any English monarch since the Stuarts. It was customary to compare George III. in this respect to Charles I. 1 When Burke, in 1775, moved his famous scheme for conciliating America, Horace Walpole commented upon it in these terms: ‘It is remarkable that in his proposed repeal he did not mention the Quebec Bill—another symptom of his old Popery.’ 2
The success of the Quebec Act led Parliament, a few years later, to undertake the relief of the Catholics at home from some part of the atrocious penal laws to which they were still subject. The absurdity of maintaining such laws suspended over the heads of a small and peaceful fraction of the nation, in an age of general enlightenment and toleration, was now keenly felt, and it was the more conspicuous on account of the marked change which had passed over the spirit of the chief Catholic Governments of Europe. Religion had everywhere ceased to be a guiding motive in politics. Nearly all the Catholic governments of Europe were animated by a purely secular spirit, and were completely emancipated from clerical influence. Pombal in Portugal; Choiseul, Malesherbes, and Turgot in France; Aranda and Grimaldi in Spain, however much they may have differed on other points, were in this perfectly agreed. If Austria, under Maria Theresa, formed a partial exception, the accession to the empire of Joseph II. in 1764 had already given a new bias to its policy. The Jesuits, who represented especially the intolerance and aggressiveness of Catholicism, had, for many years, lost all credit and almost all power. They had been expelled from Portugal in 1759, from France in 1764, from Bohemia and Denmark in 1766, from Spain, the Spanish colonies in America, Venice, and Genoa in 1767, from Malta, Naples, and Parma in 1768, and, at last, in 1773, Clement XIV. had been induced to issue his famous bull suppressing the order. In nearly all Catholic countries, the tendency was to enlarge the bounds of religious liberty, to secularise the Government, and to restrict the power of the Church. Charles III. had almost completely fettered the Inquisition of Spain. In the course of a few years, stringent laws were made reducing the power of the clergy in Venice, Austrian Lombardy, Piedmont, Parma, and the two Sicilies. An imperial edict in 1776 had abolished some of the worst forms of persecution in Austria and Hungary, and in the same year Necker, though an austere Calvinist, obtained a foremost place among the ministers of France.
All these things made the legal position of the English Catholics appear especially shameful, and the laws against them manifestly reflected the passions and the intolerance of another age. In considering, however, the real working of these laws, we must remember the curious conservatism of English legislators, who have continually preferred to allow a bad or an unpopular law to become dormant rather than repeal it. The statute book is by no means a true reflex of contemporary opinion and practice, for it is full of strange survivals of other ages. Thus a law of Henry V. which provided that all members of counties and boroughs must be residents in the constituencies they represented, and that no non-resident could be a voter, was suffered to be completely obsolete for centuries, and was at last removed from the statute book in 1774. 1 I have already referred to the law for slowly pressing to death prisoners who refused to plead, which was only repealed in 1772, 2 and to the law for punishing Irish witches with death, wich was only repealed in 1821, 3 and several other almost equally striking instances may be adduced. Shortly before the Restoration, thirteen gipsies were executed at one Suffolk assize, under a law of Elizabeth, which made all gipsies found in England liable to death, 4 and this law, though censured by a committee of the House of Commons in 1772, 5 was not repealed till 1783. 6 The mediæval ‘appeal of murder,’ which enabled the heir of the deceased person to challenge the alleged murderer to battle, after his acquittal by a jury, and which took away from the Crown all power of pardoning the accused if he were defeated, was recognised by English law during the whole of the eighteenth century. It was eulogised in Parliament by Dunning in 1774, 7 and it was only abolished in 1819 on account of an appellee having, in the previous year, thrown down his glove in the Court of King's Bench and demanded his legal right of trial by battle. 8 The ‘wager of law,’ according to which a man who was charged with a debt was released from it if he denied the obligation, and obtained eleven neighbours to swear, from a general knowledge of his character, that they believed him, existed in English law till 1833. 9
From time to time an ingenious man exhumed some obsolete and forgotten law for the purpose of extorting money or gratifying revenge. Thus, in 1761, we find a lady tried at Westminster to recover a penalty of 20 l ., under a law of Elizabeth, because she had not attended any authorised place of worship for a month previously, and acquitted by the jury on the ground of her ill health. 1 In 1772, a vicar was fined 10 l . and his curate 5 l . for not having read in church an old Act against cursing and swearing. The vicar, it appears, had dismissed his curate, and the sons of the latter, having discovered the existence of this long-forgotten law, brought the action in revenge, not knowing that their father would be involved in the condemnation. 2 In 1774, a gentleman was indicted at the Chester Assizes for having broken the law of Elizabeth, which, in order to prevent the increase of the poor, made it penal to erect any detached cottage without accompanying it with four acres of freehold land. 3 The judges expressed great indignation at the proceeding, and at their representation the statute was repealed in the following session. 4 Two statutes of Charles II. requiring that the dead should be buried in woollen, and imposing a penalty of 5 l . on clergymen who neglected to certify to the churchwarden any instances in which the Act was not complied with, were only repealed in 1814, on account of a number of actions being brought by a common informer to recover the penalties. 5
In all, or nearly all, of these cases, the prosecutions were due to private motives of revenge or avarice, and similar motives, no doubt, inspired most of those directed against Catholics. The Act still subsisted which gave a reward of 100 l . to any informer who procured the conviction of a Catholic priest performing his functions in England, and there were occasional prosecutions, though the judges strained the law to the utmost in order to defeat them, and insisted upon a rigour and fulness of proof that would not have been exacted in any other case. In 1767, a priest named John Baptist Malony was tried at Croydon on the charge of having administered the sacrament to a sick person, was found guilty and was condemned to perpetual imprisonment. He lay for some years 1 in confinement, and was then banished from England. In the same year, a mass-house in Southwark was suppressed, but the priest succeeded in escaping by a back-door. Two priests, named Webb and Talbot—the latter a brother of Lord Shrewsbury—were prosecuted in 1768 and 1769, but were acquitted through a defect in the evidence establishing their orders. Malony was, I believe, the only priest actually convicted during the reign of George III., but prosecutions were sufficiently frequent to make the position of all priests exceedingly precarious. Mrs. Lingard, the mother of the historian, who died in 1824 at the age of ninety-two, is said to have remembered the time when her family had to go in a cart at night to hear mass, the priest wearing a round frock to resemble a poor man. 1
Mansfield and Camden, who differed on most questions, agreed cordially in discountenancing legal measures against Catholics. One priest appears to have escaped conviction mainly through the extraordinary ingenuity with which Mansfield from the bench suggested doubts and difficulties in the evidence of a very clear case, and thus gave the jury a pretext for acquitting the prisoner. 2 Sir William Stanley, of Hooton, was indicted in 1770 for refusing to part with his four coach-horses when a 20 l . note was tendered to him, but he was acquitted upon the ground that a bank-note was not legal tender. 3 In another case, the owner of an estate in the north of England endeavoured to reduce a lady, who was a near relative of his own, to utter poverty by depriving her of her jointure, which was in the form of a rent-charge on his estate, on the plea that being a Catholic she could take no estate or interest in land. Lord Camden took up her case with great zeal, and finding that there was no remedy in the existing law, he took the extreme step of bringing in and carrying a special Act of Parliament for her relief. 1 The position of Catholics, however, and especially of Catholic landowners, was always one of extreme precariousness. They were still subject to a double landtax. They were at the mercy of their Protestant relatives, who might easily deprive them of their land; at the mercy of common informers; at the mercy of any two justices who might at any time tender to them the oath of supremacy. They were virtually outlaws in their own country, doomed to a life of secrecy and retirement, and sometimes obliged to purchase by regular contributions an exemption from prosecution.
Several of their largest landowners had recently taken the oath, and the English Catholics were a small body with no power in the State. A Catholic writer, in 1781, estimated that in that year they counted 7 peers, 22 baronets, and about 150 other gentlemen of landed property. Several of the peers and three or four of the baronets were men of great estates, but the landed properties of the remaining commoners did not average more than 1,000 l . a year, and not more than two or three Catholics held prominent positions in the mercantile world. 2
The worst part of the persecution of Catholics was based upon a law of William III., and in 1778 Sir George Savile introduced a Bill to repeal those portions of this Act which related to the apprehending of Popish bishops, priests, and Jesuits, which subjected these and also Papists keeping a school to perpetual imprisonment, and which disabled all Papists from inheriting or purchasing land. In order to obtain the benefits of the law, it was necessary that the Catholics should take a special oath abjuring the Pretender, the temporal jurisdiction and deposing power of the Pope, and the doctrine that faith should not be kept with heretics, and that heretics, as such, may be lawfully put to death. 1
It is an honourable fact that this Relief Bill was carried without a division in either House, without any serious opposition from the bench of bishops, and with the concurrence of both parties in the State. The law applied to England only, but the Lord Advocate promised, in the ensuing session, to introduce a similar measure for Scotland.
It was hoped that a measure which was so manifestly moderate and equitable, and which was carried with such unanimity through Parliament, would have passed almost unnoticed in the country; but fiercer elements of fanaticism than politicians perceived were still smouldering in the nation. The first signs of the coming storm were seen among the Presbyterians of Scotland. The General Assembly of the Scotch Established Church was sitting when the English Relief Bill was pending, and it rejected by a large majority a motion for a remonstrance to Parliament against it. But in a few months an agitation of the most dangerous description spread swiftly through the Lowlands. It was stimulated by many incendiary resolutions of provincial synods, by pamphlets, handbills, newspapers, and sermons, and a ‘Committee for the Protestant Interests’ was formed at Edinburgh to direct it. The Scotch Catholics were exceedingly alarmed, and they endeavoured to avert the danger which they feared by signing and publishing, in the beginning of 1779, a letter to Lord North, entreating him to forego his intention of putting them in the same position as their brethren in England, as any such attempt would arouse a spirit of fanaticism in Scotland that would endanger their lives and property. But it was now too late. Furious riots broke out in January 1779, both in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Several houses in which Catholics lived, or the Catholic worship was celebrated, were burnt to the ground. The shops of Catholic tradesmen were wrecked, and their goods scattered, plundered, or destroyed. Catholic ladies were compelled to take refuge in Edinburgh Castle. The houses of many Protestants who were believed to sympathise with the Relief Bill were attacked, and among the number was that of Robertson the historian. The troops were called out to suppress the riot, but they were resisted and pelted, and not suffered to fire in their defence; and the fears or sympathies of the Edinburgh magistrates were clearly shown in the almost grotesque servility of the proclamation which they issued to the rioters. ‘To remove the fears and apprehensions,’ they wrote, ‘which had distressed the minds of many well-meaning people in the metropolis, with regard to the repeal of the penal statutes against Papists, the public are informed that the Act of Parliament passed for that purpose was totally laid aside, and therefore it was expected that all peaceable subjects would carefully avoid connecting themselves with any tumultuous assembly for the future.’ 1
The flame soon spread southwards. For some years letters on the increase of Popery had been frequently appearing in the London newspapers. 2 Many murmurs had been heard at the enactment of the Quebec Act, and many striking instances in the last ten years had shown how easily the spirit of riot could be aroused, and how impotent the ordinary watchmen were to cope with it. Great discontent had undoubtedly been produced in large sections of the population by the Relief Act of 1778; the success of the Scotch riots in preventing the introduction of a similar measure for Scotland encouraged the hopes of procuring its repeal; and the fanatical party had unfortunately acquired an unscrupulous leader in the person of Lord George Gordon, whose name now attained a melancholy celebrity. He was a young man of thirty, of very ordinary talents, and with nothing to recommend him but his connection with the ducal house of Gordon, and his position as a member of Parliament, and he had for some time distinguished himself by coarse, violent, and eminently absurd speeches on the enormities of Popery, which only excited ridicule in the House of Commons, but which found admirers beyond its walls. He was a Scotchman, and appears to have been honestly fanatical, but his fanaticism was mixed with something of the vanity and ambition of a demagogue, and with a vein of recklessness and eccentricity closely akin to insanity. A ‘Protestant Association,’ consisting of the worst agitators and fanatics, was formed, and at a great meeting. held on May 29, 1780, and presided over by Lord George Gordon, it was determined that 20,000 men should march to the Parliament House to present a petition for the repeal of the Relief Act.
It was about half-past two on the afternoon of Friday, June 2, that three great bodies, consisting of many thousands of men, wearing blue cockades, and carrying a petition which was said to have been signed by near 120,000 persons, arrived by different roads at the Parliament House. Their first design appears to have been only to intimidate, but they very soon proceeded to actual violence. The two Houses were just meeting, and a scene ensued which has scarcely been paralleled in England, though it resembled on a large scale and in an aggravated form the great riot around the Parliament House in Dublin, which took place during the administration of the Duke of Bedford. The members were seized, insulted, compelled to put blue cockades in their hats, to shout ‘No Popery!’ and to swear that they would vote for the repeal; and many of them, but especially the members of the House of Lords, were exposed to the grossest indignities. Lord Mansfield, who was now in his seventy-sixth year, was particularly obnoxious to the mob on account of the recent acquittal of a Popish priest by his influence. The windows of his carriage were broken, the panels were forced in, and he was in great danger of being torn to pieces, when the Archbishop of York succeeded with much courage in extricating him from the grasp of his assailants. The Chancellor, Lord Thurlow, who was equally unpopular, was not present, but the mob speedily recognised his brother, the Bishop of Lincoln. In a few moments a wheel of his carriage was wrenched off, and the bishop was for a time in extreme danger, when a law student succeeded in dragging him, half fainting, into a neighbouring house, where he disguised himself and then escaped over the roofs. The carriage of Lord Stormont was shattered to pieces, and he was for half an hour in the hands of the mob. Bathurst, Boston, Townshend, Hillsborough, and many other peers underwent the grossest ill-usage.
The Duke of Richmond was that day bringing in a motion—to which the insensate proceedings of the mob furnished a ghastly commentary—in favour of putting all power in the hands of the populace by granting them universal suffrage and annual parliaments. But no serious discussion was possible. Pale, bruised, and agitated, with their wigs torn off, their hair dishevelled, their clothes torn and bespattered with mud, the peers of England sat listening to the frantic yells of the multitude who already thronged the lobbies.
In the Commons Lord George Gordon presented the petition, and demanded its instant consideration. The House behaved with much courage, and after a hurried debate it was decided by 192 to 7 to adjourn its consideration till the 6th. Lord George Gordon several times appeared on the stairs of the gallery, and addressed the crowd, denouncing by name those who opposed him, and especially Burke and North; but Conway rebuked him in the sight and hearing of the mob, and Colonel Gordon, one of his own relatives, declared that the moment the first man of the mob entered the House he would plunge his sword into the body of Lord George. The doors were locked. The strangers' gallery was empty, but only a few doorkeepers and a few other ordinary officials protected the House, while the mob is said at first to have numbered not less than 60,000 men. Lord North succeeded in sending a messenger for the Guards, but many anxious hours passed before they arrived. Twice attempts were made to force the doors. At one time the danger seemed so imminent that Colonel Luttrell proposed that they should be thrown open, and that the members should, with their drawn swords, endeavour to cut their way through the mob. Happily, however, the crowd, though it contained some desperate fanatics, and some desperate criminals, consisted chiefly of idle, purposeless ruffians of the lowest class, bent only on mischief and amusement, but animated by no very bitter animosity, and they were content with having kept the two Houses of Parliament for several hours blockaded and imprisoned. The stifling heat of the day caused many to drop away. Lord Mahon harangued the crowd with some effect from the window of a neighbouring coffee-house; Alderman Sawbridge and the Assistant Chaplain expostulated with them, but without much success, and at last about nine o'clock the troops appeared, and the crowd, without resisting, agreed to disperse.
A great part of them, however, were bent on further outrages. They attacked the Sardinian Minister's chapel in Duke Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields. They broke it open, carried away the silver lamps and other furniture, burnt the benches in the street, and flung the burning brands into the chapel. The Bavarian Minister's chapel in Warwick Street, Golden Square, was next attacked, plundered, and burnt before the soldiers could intervene. They at last appeared upon the scene, and some slight scuffling ensued, and thirteen of the rioters were captured.
It was hoped that the riot had expended its force, for Saturday and the greater part of Sunday passed with little disturbance, but on Sunday afternoon new outrages began in Moorfields, where a considerable Catholic population resided. Several houses were attacked and plundered, and the chapels utterly ruined. The mob tore up altars, pulpits, pews and benches, and made large fires of them. Nothing but the bare walls remained, and even these sometimes fell before the heat. The soldiers were called in, but only when it was too late, and they were not suffered to fire. Authority seemed completely paralysed. The impunity that had hitherto attended the outrages, the hope of gigantic plunder, the madness which every hour became stronger and more contagious, the desperation of men who had already compromised themselves beyond return, all added to the flame. The mob were fast finding their leaders; and as their confidence in themselves increased, they loudly boasted that they would root out Popery from the land, release the prisoners who had been confined in Newgate for the outrages on Friday, and take signal vengeance on the magistrates who had committed them, and on all who had given evidence against them.
Monday, June 5, was the anniversary of the King's birthday, and the signs of official rejoicing contrasted strangely with the panic that was abroad. The military preparations were still miserably inadequate. A proclamation was issued promising a reward of 500 l . for the detection of those who were concerned in plundering the Sardinian and Bavarian chapels, but the rioters were as far as possible from being intimidated. One party, carrying spoils of the chapels they had plundered, marched in triumph to Lord George Gordon's house in Welbeck Street, and then burnt them in the adjoining fields. Another party went to Virginia Lane, Wapping, and a third to Nightingale Lane, and in each of these places a Catholic chapel was soon in a blaze. A Catholic school at Hoxton was next destroyed. They then attacked the houses and shops of those who had given evidence against the rioters, burnt them, and plundered their contents. Sir George Savile's house in Leicester Square underwent the same fate. As the proposer of the Relief Bill, he was especially obnoxious to the fanatical portion of the rioters, and he had prudently taken the precaution of secretly removing his plate and some other valuables. The house, however, was completely wrecked, and when the evening closed in, it was little more than a ruin. The iron rails that surrounded it were torn up, and became formidable weapons in the hands of the mob.
All this was done with complete impunity, and as a natural consequence the spirits of the rioters rose higher and higher. On Tuesday, June 6, more daring enterprises were attempted. All the troops in London were concentrated on a few points, such as the Tower, the Houses of Parliament, St. James's Palace, and St. George's-in-the-Fields, and great districts were almost wholly unprotected. No Catholic house was any longer secure. No one knew how many were implicated in or sympathised with the rioters, for the most peaceful subjects now wore blue cockades as a protection from the mob. The two Houses met under strong military protection, but, in spite of that protection, Lord Sandwich, on his way to Parliament, was torn out of his carriage, which was broken in pieces, his face was cut, and he was rescued with difficulty by the Horse-guards. An attack was made on the house of Lord North, but it was successfully defended by a party of light horse, who with drawn swords charged the mob and trampled several men under their horses' hoofs. At six in the evening a party went to the house of Justice Hyde, near Leicester Fields, which in less than half an hour was utterly wrecked; while another party, consisting of many thousands of desperate men, passed rapidly through Long Acre, and down Holborn, till they arrived at Newgate. They summoned Mr. Akerman, the keeper, to release their comrades, and on his refusal they at once besieged the gaol.
It had been lately built at an expense of 40,000 l ., and was esteemed the strongest in England. The mob, however, were under the direction of men who well knew what they had undertaken, and they had provided themselves with sledge-hammers and pickaxes to batter down the door, and long ladders to scale the walls. For a time the great iron gate resisted their efforts, and no gunpowder appears to have been employed. But another and not less formidable means of assault was speedily discovered. The house of the chief keeper, which adjoined the gaol, was easily broken open, and great masses of furniture were flung down through the windows, piled against the prison door, and then ignited. New combustibles were brought in from all sides, and a furious blaze was kindled, till the door was red-hot and tottering upon its hinges. In the meantime the keeper's house was set on fire, and the prison chapel caught the flames, while men, climbing on high ladders, flung burning brands through the grated orifices, and soon ignited the woodwork of the prison. The fire spread far and fast, casting its red and fluctuating glare upon the dense and savage crowd half-mad with drink and with excitement. One hundred constables endeavoured to disperse them, but the rioters closed around them and overpowered them, and flung their staves into the flames, and sentinels kept watch at every street to guard the depredators against surprise. About 300 prisoners, four of whom were under sentence of death, were confined in Newgate. They were divided between the hope of escape and the still more pressing fear of being burnt alive or smothered by the dense volumes of smoke that already rolled through the prison, and their piercing cries were clearly heard above the tumult. At length the iron door gave way beneath the heat and the repeated blows. The crowd rushed in; some climbed to the roof, and made a hole through the rafters; others penetrated through a gap made by the burning chapel. The cells were broken open, and the prisoners dragged out. All seem to have been saved except some intoxicated rioters, who sank down stupefied with drink, and perished in the fall of the burning rafters. In a short time little but blackened walls remained of the greatest prison in London, and a new contingent of desperate malefactors was added to the rioters.
The mob had triumphed, but they did not pause in their career of crime. Parties were at once told off for different enterprises. One party attacked the Catholics in Devonshire Street, Red Lion Square; another destroyed the house of Justice Cox, in Great Queen Street; a third broke open the new prison in Clerken-well, and released all the prisoners; a fourth attacked and wrecked the house of Sir John Fielding, who, as the most active magistrate in London, was especially obnoxious to them; a fifth, shortly after midnight, attacked the great house of Lord Mansfield in Blooms bury Square. Lord and Lady Mansfield had but just time to escape through the back when it was broken open, and in a few minutes the furniture was thrown out of the windows, and kindled into a blaze before the door. A collection of precious pictures, a noble law library, many priceless manuscripts from the pen of Mansfield himself, many important legal papers which were in his care, were thrown in to feed the flames. The wine cellars were broken open, and the crowd was soon mad with drink. A party of guards arrived when the ruin was almost accomplished, and, the Riot Act having been read, the magistrates ordered them to fire, and six men and a woman were killed, and several wounded; but the passions of the mob had risen too high for fear. It was remembered that Lord Mansfield possessed a country house between Highgate and Hampstead, and a party was sent to burn it; but they were anticipated and repelled by a party of horse. Eleven or twelve private houses were, however, that night in a blaze, and the conflagration mingled with the splendour of a general illumination; for the mob compelled every householder to illuminate in honour of their triumph.