The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1, Thomas Babington Macaulay [ebook pc reader txt] 📗

a year.55 George Monk, Duke of Albemarle,

who had been rewarded for his eminent services with immense

grants of crown land, and who had been notorious both for

covetousness and for parsimony, left fifteen thousand a year of

real estate, and sixty thousand pounds in money which probably

yielded seven per cent.56 These three Dukes were supposed to be

three of the very richest subjects in England. The Archbishop of

Canterbury can hardly have had five thousand a year.57 The

average income of a temporal peer was estimated, by the best

informed persons, at about three thousand a year, the average

income of a baronet at nine hundred a year, the average income of

a member of the House of Commons at less than eight hundred a

year.58 A thousand a year was thought a large revenue for a

barrister. Two thousand a year was hardly to be made in the Court

of King's Bench, except by the crown lawyers.59 It is evident,

therefore, that an official man would have been well paid if he

had received a fourth or fifth part of what would now be an

adequate stipend. In fact, however, the stipends of the higher

class of official men were as large as at present, and not seldom

larger. The Lord Treasurer, for example, had eight thousand a

year, and, when the Treasury was in commission, the junior Lords

had sixteen hundred a year each. The Paymaster of the Forces had

a poundage, amounting, in time of peace, to about five thousand a

year, on all the money which passed through his hands. The Groom

of the Stole had five thousand a year, the Commissioners of the

Customs twelve hundred a year each, the Lords of the Bedchamber a

thousand a year each.60 The regular salary, however, was the

smallest part of the gains of an official man at that age. From

the noblemen who held the white staff and the great seal, down to

the humblest tidewaiter and gauger, what would now be called

gross corruption was practiced without disguise and without

reproach. Titles, places, commissions, pardons, were daily sold

in market overt by the great dignitaries of the realm; and every

clerk in every department imitated, to the best of his power, the

evil example.


During the last century no prime minister, however powerful, has

become rich in office; and several prime ministers have impaired

their private fortune in sustaining their public character. In

the seventeenth century, a statesman who was at the head of

affairs might easily, and without giving scandal, accumulate in

no long time an estate amply sufficient to support a dukedom. It

is probable that the income of the prime minister, during his

tenure of power, far exceeded that of any other subject. The

place of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was popularly reported to be

worth forty thousand pounds a year.61 The gains of the Chancellor

Clarendon, of Arlington, of Lauderdale, and of Danby, were

certainly enormous. The sumptuous palace to which the populace of

London gave the name of Dunkirk Mouse, the stately pavilions, the

fishponds, the deer park and the orangery of Euston, the more

than Italian luxury of Ham, with its busts, fountains, and

aviaries, were among the many signs which indicated what was the

shortest road to boundless wealth. This is the true explanation

of the unscrupulous violence with which the statesmen of that day

struggled for office, of the tenacity with which, in spite of

vexations, humiliations and dangers, they clung to it, and of the

scandalous compliances to which they stooped in order to retain

it. Even in our own age, formidable as is the power of opinion,

and high as is the standard of integrity, there would be great

risk of a lamentable change in the character of our public men,

if the place of First Lord of the Treasury or Secretary of State

were worth a hundred thousand pounds a year. Happy for our

country the emoluments of the highest class of functionaries have

not only not grown in proportion to the general growth of our

opulence, but have positively diminished.


The fact that the sum raised in England by taxation has, in a

time not exceeding two long lives, been multiplied forty-fold, is

strange, and may at first sight seem appalling. But those who are

alarmed by the increase of the public burdens may perhaps be

reassured when they have considered the increase of the public

resources. In the year 1685, the value of the produce of the soil

far exceeded the value of all the other fruits of human industry.

Yet agriculture was in what would now be considered as a very

rude and imperfect state. The arable land and pasture land were

not supposed by the best political arithmeticians of that age to

amount to much more than half the area of the kingdom.62 The

remainder was believed to consist of moor, forest, and fen. These

computations are strongly confirmed by the road books and maps of

the seventeenth century. From those books and maps it is clear

that many routes which now pass through an endless succession of

orchards, cornfields, hayfields, and beanfields, then ran through

nothing but heath, swamp, and warren.63 In the drawings of

English landscapes made in that age for the Grand Duke Cosmo,

scarce a hedgerow is to be seen, and numerous tracts; now rich

with cultivation, appear as bare as Salisbury Plain.64 At

Enfield, hardly out of sight of the smoke of the capital, was a

region of five and twenty miles in circumference, which contained

only three houses and scarcely any enclosed fields. Deer, as free

as in an American forest, wandered there by thousands.65 It is to

be remarked, that wild animals of large size were then far more

numerous than at present. The last wild boars, indeed, which had

been preserved for the royal diversion, and had been allowed to

ravage the cultivated land with their tusks, had been slaughtered

by the exasperated rustics during the license of the civil war.

The last wolf that has roamed our island had been slain in

Scotland a short time before the close of the reign of Charles

the Second. But many breeds, now extinct, or rare, both of

quadrupeds and birds, were still common. The fox, whose life is

now, in many counties, held almost as sacred as that of a human

being, was then considered as a mere nuisance. Oliver Saint John

told the Long Parliament that Strafford was to be regarded, not

as a stag or a hare, to whom some law was to be given, but as a

fox, who was to be snared by any means, and knocked on the head

without pity. This illustration would be by no means a happy one,

if addressed to country gentlemen of our time: but in Saint

John's days there were not seldom great massacres of foxes to

which the peasantry thronged with all the dogs that could be

mustered. Traps were set: nets were spread: no quarter was given;

and to shoot a female with cub was considered as a feat which

merited the warmest gratitude of the neighbourhood. The red deer

were then as common in Gloucestershire and Hampshire, as they now

are among the Grampian Hills. On one occasion Queen Anne,

travelling to Portsmouth, saw a herd of no less than five

hundred. The wild bull with his white mane was still to be found

wandering in a few of the southern forests. The badger made his

dark and tortuous hole on the side of every hill where the

copsewood grew thick. The wild cats were frequently heard by

night wailing round the lodges of the rangers of whittlebury and

Needwood. The yellow-breasted martin was still pursued in

Cranbourne Chase for his fur, reputed inferior only to that of

the sable. Fen eagles, measuring more than nine feet between the

extremities of the wings, preyed on fish along the coast of

Norfolk. On all the downs, from the British Channel to Yorkshire

huge bustards strayed in troops of fifty or sixty, and were often

hunted with greyhounds. The marshes of Cambridgeshire and

Lincolnshire were covered during some months of every year by

immense clouds of cranes. Some of these races the progress of

cultivation has extirpated. Of others the numbers are so much

diminished that men crowd to gaze at a specimen as at a Bengal

tiger, or a Polar bear.66


The progress of this great change can nowhere be more clearly

traced than in the Statute Book. The number of enclosure acts

passed since King George the Second came to the throne exceeds

four thousand. The area enclosed under the authority of those

acts exceeds, on a moderate calculation, ten thousand square

miles. How many square miles, which were formerly uncultivated or

ill cultivated, have, during the same period, been fenced and

carefully tilled by the proprietors without any application to

the legislature, can only be conjectured. But it seems highly

probable that a fourth part of England has been, in the course of

little more than a century, turned from a wild into a garden.


Even in those parts of the kingdom which at the close of the

reign of Charles the Second were the best cultivated, the

farming, though greatly improved since the civil war, was not

such as would now be thought skilful. To this day no effectual

steps have been taken by public authority for the purpose of

obtaining accurate accounts of the produce of the English soil.

The historian must therefore follow, with some misgivings, the

guidance of those writers on statistics whose reputation for

diligence and fidelity stands highest. At present an average crop

of wheat, rye, barley, oats, and beans, is supposed considerably

to exceed thirty millions of quarters. The crop of wheat would be

thought wretched if it did not exceed twelve millions of

quarters. According to the computation made in the year 1696 by

Gregory King, the whole quantity of wheat, rye, barley, oats, and

beans, then annually grown in the kingdom, was somewhat less than

ten millions of quarters. The wheat, which was then cultivated

only on the strongest clay, and consumed only by those who were

in easy circumstances, he estimated at less than two millions of

quarters. Charles Davenant, an acute and well informed though

most unprincipled and rancorous politician, differed from King as

to some of the items of the account, but came to nearly the same

general conclusions.67


The rotation of crops was very imperfectly understood. It was

known, indeed, that some vegetables lately introduced into our

island, particularly the turnip, afforded excellent nutriment in

winter to sheep and oxen: but it was not yet the practice to feed

cattle in this manner. It was therefore by no means easy to keep

them alive during the season when the grass is scanty. They were

killed and salted in great numbers at