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

difference between London in an

ordinary year and London in a year of cholera.


Still more important is the benefit which all orders of society,

and especially the lower orders, have derived from the mollifying

influence of civilisation on the national character. The

groundwork of that character has indeed been the same through

many generations, in the sense in which the groundwork of the

character of an individual may be said to be the same when he is

a rude and thoughtless schoolboy and when he is a refined and

accomplished man. It is pleasing to reflect that the public mind

of England has softened while it has ripened, and that we have,

in the course of ages, become, not only a wiser, but also a

kinder people. There is scarcely a page of the history or lighter

literature of the seventeenth century which does not contain some

proof that our ancestors were less humane than their posterity.

The discipline of workshops, of schools, of private families,

though not more efficient than at present, was infinitely

harsher. Masters, well born and bred, were in the habit of

beating their servants. Pedagogues knew no way of imparting

knowledge but by beating their pupils. Husbands, of decent

station, were not ashamed to beat their wives. The implacability

of hostile factions was such as we can scarcely conceive. Whigs

were disposed to murmur because Stafford was suffered to die

without seeing his bowels burned before his face. Tories reviled

and insulted Russell as his coach passed from the Tower to the

scaffold in Lincoln's Inn Fields.204 As little mercy was shown by

the populace to sufferers of a humbler rank. If an offender was

put into the pillory, it was well if he escaped with life from

the shower of brickbats and paving stones.205 If he was tied to

the cart's tail, the crowd pressed round him, imploring the

hangman to give it the fellow well, and make him howl.206

Gentlemen arranged parties of pleasure to Bridewell on court days

for the purpose of seeing the wretched women who beat hemp there

whipped.207 A man pressed to death for refusing to plead, a woman

burned for coining, excited less sympathy than is now felt for a

galled horse or an overdriven ox. Fights compared with which a

boxing match is a refined and humane spectacle were among the

favourite diversions of a large part of the town. Multitudes

assembled to see gladiators hack each other to pieces with deadly

weapons, and shouted with delight when one of the combatants lost

a finger or an eye. The prisons were hells on earth, seminaries

of every crime and of every disease. At the assizes the lean and

yellow culprits brought with them from their cells to the dock an

atmosphere of stench and pestilence which sometimes avenged them

signally on bench, bar, and jury. But on all this misery society

looked with profound indifference. Nowhere could be found that

sensitive and restless compassion which has, in our time,

extended a powerful protection to the factory child, to the

Hindoo widow, to the negro slave, which pries into the stores and

watercasks of every emigrant ship, which winces at every lash

laid on the back of a drunken soldier, which will not suffer the

thief in the hulks to be ill fed or overworked, and which has

repeatedly endeavoured to save the life even of the murderer. It

is true that compassion ought, like all other feelings, to be

under the government of reason, and has, for want of such

government, produced some ridiculous and some deplorable effects.

But the more we study the annals of the past, the more shall we

rejoice that we live in a merciful age, in an age in which

cruelty is abhorred, and in which pain, even when deserved, is

inflicted reluctantly and from a sense of duty. Every class

doubtless has gained largely by this great moral change: but the

class which has gained most is the poorest, the most dependent,

and the most defenceless.


The general effect of the evidence which has been submitted to

the reader seems hardly to admit of doubt. Yet, in spite of

evidence, many will still image to themselves the England of the

Stuarts as a more pleasant country than the England in which we

live. It may at first sight seem strange that society, while

constantly moving forward with eager speed, should be constantly

looking backward with tender regret. But these two propensities,

inconsistent as they may appear, can easily be resolved into the

same principle. Both spring from our impatience of the state in

which we actually are. That impatience, while it stimulates us to

surpass preceding generations, disposes us to overrate their

happiness. It is, in some sense, unreasonable and ungrateful in

us to be constantly discontented with a condition which is

constantly improving. But, in truth, there is constant

improvement precisely because there is constant discontent. If we

were perfectly satisfied with the present, we should cease to

contrive, to labour, and to save with a view to the future. And

it is natural that, being dissatisfied with the present, we

should form a too favourable estimate of the past.


In truth we are under a deception similar to that which misleads

the traveller in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is

dry and bare: but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the

semblance of refreshing waters. The pilgrims hasten forward and

find nothing but sand where an hour before they had seen a lake.

They turn their eyes and see a lake where, an hour before, they

were toiling through sand. A similar illusion seems to haunt

nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and

barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civilisation.

But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it

recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It is

now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times when

noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be

intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers

breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot

in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was

a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men

died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the

most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in

the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana.

We too shall, in our turn, be outstripped, and in our turn be

envied. It may well be, in the twentieth century, that the

peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably paid with

twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may

receive ten shillings a day; that labouring men may be as little

used to dine without meat as they now are to eat rye bread; that

sanitary police and medical discoveries may have added several

more years to the average length of human life; that numerous

comforts and luxuries which are now unknown, or confined to a

few, may be within the reach of every diligent and thrifty

working man. And yet it may then be the mode to assert that the

increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefited the

few at the expense of the many, and to talk of the reign of Queen

Victoria as the time when England was truly merry England, when

all classes were bound together by brotherly sympathy, when the

rich did not grind the faces of the poor, and when the poor did

not envy the splendour of the rich.


CHAPTER IV.


THE death of King Charles the Second took the nation by surprise.

His frame was naturally strong, and did not appear to have

suffered from excess. He had always been mindful of his health

even in his pleasures; and his habits were such as promise a long

life and a robust old age. Indolent as he was on all occasions

which required tension of the mind, he was active and persevering

in bodily exercise. He had, when young, been renowned as a tennis

player,208 and was, even in the decline of life, an indefatigable

walker. His ordinary pace was such that those who were admitted

to the honour of his society found it difficult to keep up with

him. He rose early, and generally passed three or four hours a

day in the open air. He might be seen, before the dew was off the

grass in St. James's Park, striding among the trees, playing with

his spaniels, and flinging corn to his ducks; and these

exhibitions endeared him to the common people, who always love to

See the great unbend.209


At length, towards the close of the year 1684, he was prevented,

by a slight attack of what was supposed to be gout, from rambling

as usual. He now spent his mornings in his laboratory, where he

amused himself with experiments on the properties of mercury. His

temper seemed to have suffered from confinement. He had no

apparent cause for disquiet. His kingdom was tranquil: he was not

in pressing want of money: his power was greater than it had ever

been: the party which had long thwarted him had been beaten down;

but the cheerfulness which had supported him against adverse

fortune had vanished in this season of prosperity. A trifle now

sufficed to depress those elastic spirits which had borne up

against defeat, exile, and penury. His irritation frequently

showed itself by looks and words such as could hardly have been

expected from a man so eminently distinguished by good humour and

good breeding. It was not supposed however that his constitution

was seriously impaired.210


His palace had seldom presented a gayer or a more scandalous

appearance than on the evening of Sunday the first of February

1685.211 Some grave persons who had gone thither, after the

fashion of that age, to pay their duty to their sovereign, and

who had expected that, on such a day, his court would wear a

decent aspect, were struck with astonishment and horror. The

great gallery of Whitehall, an admirable relic of the

magnificence of the Tudors, was crowded with revellers and

gamblers. The king sate there chatting and toying with three

women, whose charms were the boast, and whose vices were the

disgrace, of three nations. Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland,

was there, no longer young, but still retaining some traces of

that superb and voluptuous loveliness which twenty years before

overcame the hearts of all men. There too was the Duchess of

Portsmouth, whose soft and infantine features were lighted up

with the vivacity of France. Hortensia Mancini, Duchess of

Mazarin, and niece of the great Cardinal, completed the group.

She had