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

an unmerited stain from a name long

illustrious in our annals. A bill for reversing the attainder of

Stafford was passed by the Upper House, in spite of the murmurs

of a few peers who were unwilling to admit that they had shed

innocent blood. The Commons read the bill twice without a

division, and ordered it to be committed. But, on the day

appointed for the committee, arrived news that a formidable

rebellion had broken out in the West of England. It was

consequently necessary to postpone much important business. The

amends due to the memory of Stafford were deferred, as was

supposed, only for a short time. But the misgovernment of James

in a few months completely turned the tide of public feeling.

During several generations the Roman Catholics were in no

condition to demand reparation for injustice, and accounted

themselves happy if they were permitted to live unmolested in

obscurity and silence. At length, in the reign of King George the

Fourth, more than a hundred and forty years after the day on

which the blood of Stafford was shed on Tower Hill, the tardy

expiation was accomplished. A law annulling the attainder and

restoring the injured family to its ancient dignities was

presented to Parliament by the ministers of the crown, was

eagerly welcomed by public men of all parties, and was passed

without one dissentient voice.318


It is now necessary that I should trace the origin and progress

of that rebellion by which the deliberations of the Houses were

suddenly interrupted.


CHAPTER V.


TOWARDS the close of the reign of Charles the Second, some Whigs

who had been deeply implicated in the plot so fatal to their

party, and who knew themselves to be marked out for destruction,

had sought an asylum in the Low Countries.


These refugees were in general men of fiery temper and weak

judgment. They were also under the influence of that peculiar

illusion which seems to belong to their situation. A politician

driven into banishment by a hostile faction generally sees the

society which he has quitted through a false medium. Every object

is distorted and discoloured by his regrets, his longings, and

his resentments. Every little discontent appears to him to

portend a revolution. Every riot is a rebellion. He cannot be

convinced that his country does not pine for him as much as he

pines for his country. He imagines that all his old associates,

who still dwell at their homes and enjoy their estates, are

tormented by the same feelings which make life a burden to

himself. The longer his expatriation, the greater does this

hallucination become. The lapse of time, which cools the ardour

of the friends whom he has left behind, inflames his. Every month

his impatience to revisit his native land increases; and every

month his native land remembers and misses him less. This

delusion becomes almost a madness when many exiles who suffer in

the same cause herd together in a foreign country. Their chief

employment is to talk of what they once were, and of what they

may yet be, to goad each other into animosity against the common

enemy, to feed each other with extravagant hopes of victory and

revenge. Thus they become ripe for enterprises which would at

once be pronounced hopeless by any man whose passions had not

deprived him of the power of calculating chances.


In this mood were many of the outlaws who had assembled on the

Continent. The correspondence which they kept up with England

was, for the most part, such as tended to excite their feelings

and to mislead their judgment. Their information concerning the

temper of the public mind was chiefly derived from the worst

members of the Whig party, from men who were plotters and

libellers by profession, who were pursued by the officers of

justice, who were forced to skulk in disguise through back

streets, and who sometimes lay hid for weeks together in

cocklofts and cellars. The statesmen who had formerly been the

ornaments of the Country Party, the statesmen who afterwards

guided the councils of the Convention, would have given advice

very different from that which was given by such men as John

Wildman and Henry Danvers.


Wildman had served forty years before in the parliamentary army,

but had been more distinguished there as an agitator than as a

soldier, and had early quitted the profession of arms for

pursuits better suited to his temper. His hatred of monarchy had

induced him to engage in a long series of conspiracies, first

against the Protector, and then against the Stuarts. But with

Wildman's fanaticism was joined a tender care for his own safety.

He had a wonderful skill in grazing the edge of treason. No man

understood better how to instigate others to desperate

enterprises by words which, when repeated to a jury, might seem

innocent, or, at worst, ambiguous. Such was his cunning that,

though always plotting, though always known to be plotting, and

though long malignantly watched by a vindictive government, he

eluded every danger, and died in his bed, after having seen two

generations of his accomplices die on the gallows.319 Danvers was

a man of the same class, hotheaded, but fainthearted, constantly

urged to the brink of danger by enthusiasm, and constantly

stopped on that brink by cowardice. He had considerable influence

among a portion of the Baptists, had written largely in defence

of their peculiar opinions, and had drawn down on himself the

severe censure of the most respectable Puritans by attempting to

palliate the crimes of Matthias and John of Leyden. It is

probable that, had he possessed a little courage, he would have

trodden in the footsteps of the wretches whom he defended. He

was, at this time, concealing himself from the officers of

justice; for warrants were out against him on account of a

grossly calumnious paper of which the government had discovered

him to be the author.320


It is easy to imagine what kind of intelligence and counsel men,

such as have been described, were likely to send to the outlaws

in the Netherlands. Of the general character of those outlaws an

estimate may be formed from a few samples.


One of the most conspicuous among them was John Ayloffe, a lawyer

connected by affinity with the Hydes, and through the Hydes, with

James. Ayloffe had early made himself remarkable by offering a

whimsical insult to the government. At a time when the ascendancy

of the court of Versailles had excited general uneasiness, he had

contrived to put a wooden shoe, the established type, among the

English, of French tyranny, into the chair of the House of

Commons. He had subsequently been concerned in the Whig plot; but

there is no reason to believe that he was a party to the design

of assassinating the royal brothers. He was a man of parts and

courage; but his moral character did not stand high. The Puritan

divines whispered that he was a careless Gallio or something

worse, and that, whatever zeal he might profess for civil

liberty, the Saints would do well to avoid all connection with

him.321


Nathaniel Wade was, like Ayloffe, a lawyer. He had long resided

at Bristol, and had been celebrated in his own neighbourhood as a

vehement republican. At one time he had formed a project of

emigrating to New Jersey, where he expected to find institutions

better suited to his taste than those of England. His activity in

electioneering had introduced him to the notice of some Whig

nobles. They had employed him professionally, and had, at length,

admitted him to their most secret counsels. He had been deeply

concerned in the scheme of insurrection, and had undertaken to

head a rising in his own city. He had also been privy to the more

odious plot against the lives of Charles and James. But he always

declared that, though privy to it, he had abhorred it, and had

attempted to dissuade his associates from carrying their design

into effect. For a man bred to civil pursuits, Wade seems to have

had, in an unusual degree, that sort of ability and that sort of

nerve which make a good soldier. Unhappily his principles and his

courage proved to be not of sufficient force to support him when

the fight was over, and when in a prison, he had to choose

between death and infamy.322


Another fugitive was Richard Goodenough, who had formerly been

Under Sheriff of London. On this man his party had long relied

for services of no honourable kind, and especially for the

selection of jurymen not likely to be troubled with scruples in

political cases. He had been deeply concerned in those dark and

atrocious parts of the Whig plot which had been carefully

concealed from the most respectable Whigs. Nor is it possible to

plead, in extenuation of his guilt, that he was misled by

inordinate zeal for the public good. For it will be seen that

after having disgraced a noble cause by his crimes, he betrayed

it in order to escape from his well merited punishment.323


Very different was the character of Richard Rumbold. He had held

a commission in Cromwell's own regiment, had guarded the scaffold

before the Banqueting House on the day of the great execution,

had fought at Dunbar and Worcester, and had always shown in the

highest degree the qualities which distinguished the invincible

army in which he served, courage of the truest temper, fiery

enthusiasm, both political and religious, and with that

enthusiasm, all the power of selfgovernment which is

characteristic of men trained in well disciplined camps to

command and to obey. When the Republican troops were disbanded,

Rumbold became a maltster, and carried on his trade near

Hoddesdon, in that building from which the Rye House plot derives

its name. It had been suggested, though not absolutely

determined, in the conferences of the most violent and

unscrupulous of the malecontents, that armed men should be

stationed in the Rye House to attack the Guards who were to

escort Charles and James from Newmarket to London. In these

conferences Rumbold had borne a part from which he would have

shrunk with horror, if his clear understanding had not been

overclouded, and his manly heart corrupted, by party spirit.324


A more important exile was Ford Grey, Lord Grey of Wark. He had

been a zealous Exclusionist, had concurred in the design of

insurrection, and had been committed to the Tower, but had

succeeded in making his keepers drunk, and in effecting his

escape to the Continent. His parliamentary abilities were great,

and his manners pleasing: but his life had been sullied by a

great domestic crime. His wife was a daughter of the noble house

of Berkeley. Her sister, the Lady Henrietta Berkeley, was allowed

to associate and correspond with