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

the envy of practiced rhetoricians.239

His courage was singularly cool and imperturbable. During many

years of anxiety and peril, he never, in any emergency, lost even

for a moment, the perfect use of his admirable judgment.


In his twenty-third year he was sent with his regiment to join

the French forces, then engaged in operations against Holland.

His serene intrepidity distinguished him among thousands of brave

soldiers. His professional skill commanded the respect of veteran

officers. He was publicly thanked at the head of the army, and

received many marks of esteem and confidence from Turenne, who

was then at the height of military glory.


Unhappily the splendid qualities of John Churchill were mingled

with alloy of the most sordid kind. Some propensities, which in

youth are singularly ungraceful, began very early to show

themselves in him. He was thrifty in his very vices, and levied

ample contributions on ladies enriched by the spoils of more

liberal lovers. He was, during a short time, the object of the

violent but fickle fondness of the Duchess of Cleveland. On one

occasion he was caught with her by the King, and was forced to

leap out of the window. She rewarded this hazardous feat of

gallantry with a present of five thousand pounds. With this sum

the prudent young hero instantly bought an annuity of five

hundred a year, well secured on landed property.240 Already his

private drawer contained a hoard of broad pieces which, fifty

years later, when he was a Duke, a Prince of the Empire, and the

richest subject in Europe, remained untouched.241


After the close of the war he was attached to the household of

the Duke of York, accompanied his patron to the Low Countries and

to Edinburgh, and was rewarded for his services with a Scotch

peerage and with the command of the only regiment of dragoons

which was then on the English establishment.242 His wife had a

post in the family of James's younger daughter, the Princess of

Denmark.


Lord Churchill was now sent as ambassador extraordinary to

Versailles. He had it in charge to express the warm gratitude of

the English government for the money which had been so generously

bestowed. It had been originally intended that he should at the

same time ask Lewis for a much larger sum; but, on full

consideration, it was apprehended that such indelicate greediness

might disgust the benefactor whose spontaneous liberality had

been so signally displayed. Churchill was therefore directed to

confine himself to thanks for what was past, and to say nothing

about the future.243


But James and his ministers, even while protesting that they did

not mean to be importunate, contrived to hint, very intelligibly,

what they wished and expected. In the French ambassador they had

a dexterous, a zealous, and perhaps, not a disinterested

intercessor. Lewis made some difficulties, probably with the

design of enhancing the value of his gifts. In a very few weeks,

however, Barillon received from Versailles fifteen hundred

thousand livres more. This sum, equivalent to about a hundred and

twelve thousand pounds sterling, he was instructed to dole out

cautiously. He was authorised to furnish the English government

with thirty thousand pounds, for the purpose of corrupting

members of the New House of Commons. The rest he was directed to

keep in reserve for some extraordinary emergency, such as a

dissolution or an insurrection.244


The turpitude of these transactions is universally acknowledged:

but their real nature seems to be often misunderstood: for though

the foreign policy of the last two Kings of the House of Stuart

has never, since the correspondence of Barillon was exposed to

the public eye, found an apologist among us, there is still a

party which labours to excuse their domestic policy. Yet it is

certain that between their domestic policy and their foreign

policy there was a necessary and indissoluble connection. If they

had upheld, during a single year, the honour of the country

abroad, they would have been compelled to change the whole system

of their administration at home. To praise them for refusing to

govern in conformity with the sense of Parliament, and yet to

blame them for submitting to the dictation of Lewis, is

inconsistent. For they had only one choice, to be dependent on

Lewis, or to be dependent on Parliament.


James, to do him justice, would gladly have found out a third

way: but there was none. He became the slave of France: but it

would be incorrect to represent him as a contented slave. He had

spirit enough to be at times angry with himself for submitting to

such thraldom, and impatient to break loose from it; and this

disposition was studiously encouraged by the agents of many

foreign powers.


His accession had excited hopes and fears in every continental

court: and the commencement of his administration was watched by

strangers with interest scarcely less deep than that which was

felt by his own subjects. One government alone wished that the

troubles which had, during three generations, distracted England,

might be eternal. All other governments, whether republican or

monarchical, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, wished to see

those troubles happily terminated.


The nature of the long contest between the Stuarts and their

Parliaments was indeed very imperfectly apprehended by foreign

statesmen: but no statesman could fail to perceive the effect

which that contest had produced on the balance of power in

Europe. In ordinary circumstances, the sympathies of the courts

of Vienna and Madrid would doubtless have been with a prince

struggling against subjects, and especially with a Roman Catholic

prince struggling against heretical subjects: but all such

sympathies were now overpowered by a stronger feeling. The fear

and hatred inspired by the greatness, the injustice, and the

arrogance of the French King were at the height. His neighbours

might well doubt whether it were more dangerous to be at war or

at peace with him. For in peace he continued to plunder and to

outrage them; and they had tried the chances of war against him

in vain. In this perplexity they looked with intense anxiety

towards England. Would she act on the principles of the Triple

Alliance or on the principles of the treaty of Dover? On that

issue depended the fate of all her neighbours. With her help

Lewis might yet be withstood: but no help could be expected from

her till she was at unity with herself. Before the strife between

the throne and the Parliament began, she had been a power of the

first rank: on the day on which that strife terminated she became

a power of the first rank again: but while the dispute remained

undecided, she was condemned to inaction and to vassalage. She

had been great under the Plantagenets and Tudors: she was again

great under the princes who reigned after the Revolution: but,

under the Kings of the House of Stuart, she was a blank in the

map of Europe. She had lost one class of energies, and had not

yet acquired another. That species of force, which, in the

fourteenth century had enabled her to humble France and Spain,

had ceased to exist. That species of force, which, in the

eighteenth century, humbled France and Spain once more, had not

yet been called into action. The government was no longer a

limited monarchy after the fashion of the middle ages. It had not

yet become a limited monarchy after the modern fashion. With the

vices of two different systems it had the strength of neither.

The elements of our polity, instead of combining in harmony,

counteracted and neutralised each other All was transition,

conflict, and disorder. The chief business of the sovereign was

to infringe the privileges of the legislature. The chief business

of the legislature was to encroach on the prerogatives of the

sovereign. The King readily accepted foreign aid, which relieved

him from the misery of being dependent on a mutinous Parliament.

The Parliament refused to the King the means of supporting the

national honor abroad, from an apprehension, too well founded,

that those means might be employed in order to establish

despotism at home. The effect of these jealousies was that our

country, with all her vast resources, was of as little weight in

Christendom as the duchy of Savoy or the duchy of Lorraine, and

certainly of far less weight than the small province of Holland.


France was deeply interested in prolonging this state of

things.245 All other powers were deeply interested in bringing it

to a close. The general wish of Europe was that James would

govern in conformity with law and with public opinion. From the

Escurial itself came letters, expressing an earnest hope that the

new King of England would be on good terms with his Parliament

and his people.246 From the Vatican itself came cautions against

immoderate zeal for the Roman Catholic faith. Benedict

Odescalchi, who filled the papal chair under the name of Innocent

the Eleventh, felt, in his character of temporal sovereign, all

those apprehensions with which other princes watched the progress

of the French power. He had also grounds of uneasiness which were

peculiar to himself. It was a happy circumstance for the

Protestant religion that, at the moment when the last Roman

Catholic King of England mounted the throne, the Roman Catholic

Church was torn by dissension, and threatened with a new schism.

A quarrel similar to that which had raged in the eleventh century

between the Emperors and the Supreme Pontiffs had arisen between

Lewis and Innocent. Lewis, zealous even to bigotry for the

doctrines of the Church of Rome, but tenacious of his regal

authority, accused the Pope of encroaching on the secular rights

of the French Crown, and was in turn accused by the Pope of

encroaching on the spiritual power of the keys. The King, haughty

as he was, encountered a spirit even more determined than his

own. Innocent was, in all private relations, the meekest and

gentlest of men: but when he spoke officially from the chair of

St. Peter, he spoke in the tones of Gregory the Seventh and of

Sixtus the Fifth. The dispute became serious. Agents of the King

were excommunicated. Adherents of the Pope were banished. The

King made the champions of his authority Bishops. The Pope

refused them institution. They took possession of the Episcopal

palaces and revenues: but they were incompetent to perform the

Episcopal functions. Before the struggle terminated, there were

in France thirty prelates who could not confirm or ordain.247


Had any prince then living, except Lewis, been engaged in such a

dispute with the Vatican, he would have had all Protestant

governments on his side. But the fear and resentment which the

ambition and insolence of the French King had inspired were such

that whoever had the courage manfully to oppose him was sure of