Page images
PDF
EPUB

the progress of sound opinions from their embryo state to their full maturity. He eagerly culls from old Despatches and Minutes every expression in which he can discern the imperfect germ of any great truth which has since been fully developed. He never fails to bestow praise on those who, though far from coming up to his standard of perfection, yet rose in a small degree above the common level of their contemporaries. It is thus that the annals of past times ought to be written. It is thus, especially, that the annals of our own country ought to be written.

The history of England is emphatically the history of progress. It is the history of a constant movement of the public mind which produced a constant change in the institutions of a great society. We see that society, at the beginning of the twelfth century, in a state more miserable than the state in which the most degraded nations of the East now are. We see it subjected to the tyranny of a handful of armed foreigners. We see a strong distinction of caste separating the victorious Norman from the vanquished Saxon. We see the great body of the population in a state of personal slavery. We see the most debasing and cruel superstition exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and benevolent minds. We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance, and the studious few engaged in acquiring what did not deserve the name of knowledge. In the course of seven centuries this wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw,-have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe,-have scattered the seeds of mighty empires and republics over vast continents of which no dim intimation had ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo,— have created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa together,—have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, every thing that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical, -have produced a literature abounding with works not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us,-have discovered the laws which regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies,— have speculated with exquisite subtlety on the operations of the human mind, have been the acknowledged leaders of the human race in the career of political improvement. The history of England is the history of this great change in the moral, intellectual, and physical state of the inhabitants of our own island. There is much amusing and instructive episodical matter; but this is the main action. To us, we will own, nothing is so interesting and delightful as to contemplate the steps by which the England

of Domesday Book,-the England of the Curfew and the Forest Laws, the England of crusaders, monks, schoolmen, astrologers, serfs, outlaws,-became the England which we know and love, the classic ground of liberty and philosophy, the school of all knowledge, the mart of all trade. The Charter of Henry Beauclerk, the Great Charter, the first assembling of the House of Commons, the extinction of personal slavery,-the separation from the See of Rome,-the Petition of Right,-the Habeas Corpus Act,-the Revolution,-the establishment of the liberty of unlicensed printing,-the abolition of religious disabili ties, the reform of the representative system,-all these seem to us to be the successive stages of one great revolution; nor can we fully comprehend any one of these memorable events unless we look at it in connexion with those which preceded, and with those which followed it. Each of those great and ever-memorable struggles,-Saxon against Norman,-Vilein against Lord,Protestant against Papist,-Roundhead against Cavalier,—Dissenter against Churchman,-Manchester against Old Sarum, was, in its own order and season, a struggle, on the result of which were staked the dearest interests of the human race; and every man who in the contest which, in his time, divided our country, distinguished himself on the right side, is entitled to our gratitude and respect.

Whatever the conceited editor of this book may think, those persons who estimate most correctly the value of the improvements which have recently been made in our institutions, are precisely the persons who are least disposed to speak slightingly of what was done in 1688. Such men consider the revolution as a reform, imperfect indeed, but still most beneficial to the English people and to the human race,—as a reform which has been the fruitful parent of reforms, -as a reform, the happy effects of which are at this moment felt, not only throughout our own country, but in the cities of France, and in the depth of the forests of Ohio. We shall be pardoned, we hope, if we call the attention of our readers to the causes and to the consequences of that great event.

We said that the history of England is the history of progress, and, when we take a comprehensive view of it, it is so. But, when examined in small separate portions, it may with more propriety be called a history of actions and reactions. We have often thought that the motion of the public mind in our country resembles that of the sea when the tide is rising. Each successive wave rushes forward, breaks, and rolls back; but the great flood is steadily coming in. A person who looked on the waters only for a moment might fancy that they were retiring, or that they obeyed no fixed law, but were rushing capriciously to and fro.

But when he keeps his eye on them for a quarter of an hour, and sees one sea-mark disappear after another, it is impossible for him to doubt of the general direction in which the ocean is moved. Just such has been the course of events in England. In the history of the national mind, which is, in truth, the history of the nation, we must carefully distinguish that recoil which regularly follows every advance from a great general ebb. If we take short intervals-if we compare 1640 and 1660, 1680 and 1685, 1708 and 1712, 1782 and 1794, we find a retrogression. But if we take centuries,-if, for example, we compare 1794 with 1660, or with 1685,-we cannot doubt in which direction society is proceeding.

The interval which elapsed between the Restoration and the Revolution, naturally divides itself into three periods. The first extends from 1660 to 1679, the second from 1679 to 1681, the third from 1681 to 1688.

In 1660 the whole nation was mad with loyal excitement. If we had to choose a lot from among all the multitude of those which men have drawn since the beginning of the world, we would select that of Charles the Second on the day of his return. He was in a situation in which the dictates of ambition coincided with those of benevolence, in which it was easier to be virtuous than to be wicked, to be loved than to be hated, to earn pure and imperishable glory than to become infamous. For once the road of goodness was a smooth descent. He had done nothing to merit the affection of his people. But they had paid him in advance without measure. Elizabeth, after the rout of the Armada, or after the abolition of Monopolies, had not excited a thousandth part of the enthusiasm with which the young exile was welcomed home. He was not, like Louis the Eighteenth, imposed on his subjects by foreign conquerors; nor did he, like Louis the Eighteenth, come back to a country which had undergone a complete change. The house of Bourbon was placed in Paris as a trophy of the victory of the European confederation. Their return was inseparably associated in the public mind with the cession of extensive provinces, with the payment of an immense. tribute, with the devastation of flourishing departments, with the occupation of the kingdom by hostile armies, with the emptiness of those niches in which the Gods of Athens and Rome had been the objects of a new idolatry, with the nakedness of those walls on which the Transfiguration had shone with light as glorious as that which overhung Mount Tabor. They came back to a land in which they could recognise nothing. The seven sleepers of the legend, who closed their eyes when the Pagans were persecuting the Christians, and woke when the Christians were perse

cuting each other, did not find themselves in a world more completely new to them. Twenty years had done the work of twenty generations. Events had come thick. Men had lived fast. The old institutions and the old feelings had been torn up by the roots. There was a new Church founded and endowed by the usurper; a new nobility whose titles were taken from fields of battle, disastrous to the ancient line; a new chivalry whose crosses had been won by exploits which had seemed likely to make the banishment of the emigrants perpetual. A new code was administered by a new magistracy. A new body of proprietors held the soil by a new tenure. The most ancient local distinctions had been effaced. The most familiar names had become obsolete. There was no longer a Normandy or a Burgundy, a Britanny or a Guienne. The France of Louis the Sixteenth had passed away as completely as one of the Preadamite worlds. Its fossil remains might now and then excite curiosity. But it was as impossible to put life into the old institutions as to animate the skeletons which are embedded in the depths of primeval strata. It was as absurd to think that France could again be placed under the ancient system, as that our globe could be overrun by mammoths. The revolution in the laws, and in the form of government, was but an outward sign of that mightier revolution which had taken place in the heart and brain of the people, and which affected every transaction of life,-trading, farming, studying, marrying, and giving in marriage. The French whom the emigrant Prince had to govern were no more like the French of his youth, than the French of his youth were like the French of the Jaquerie. He came back to a people who knew not him nor his house, to a people to whom a Bourbon was no more than a Carlovingian or a Merovingian. He might substitute the white flag for the tricolor; he might put lilies in the place of bees; he might order the initials of the Emperor to be carefully effaced. But he could turn his eyes no where without meeting some object which reminded him that he was a stranger in the palace of his fathers. He returned to a country in which even the passing traveller is every moment reminded that there has lately been a great dissolution and reconstruction of the social system. To win the hearts of a people under such circumstances would have been no easy task even for Henry the Fourth.

In the English Revolution the case was altogether different. Charles was not imposed on his countrymen, but sought by them. His restoration was not attended by any circumstance which could inflict a wound on their national pride. Insulated by our geographical position, insulated by our character, we had fought out our quarrels and effected our reconciliation among

ourselves. Our great internal questions had never been mixed up with the still greater question of national independence. The political doctrines of the Roundheads were not, like those of the French Philosophers, doctrines of universal application. Our ancestors, for the most part, took their stand not on a general theory, but on the particular constitution of the realm. They asserted the rights, not of men, but of Englishmen. Their doctrines therefore were not contagious, and, had it been otherwise, no neighbouring country was then susceptible of the contagion. The language in which our discussions were generally conducted was scarcely known even to a single man of letters out of the islands. Our local situation rendered it almost impossible that we should make great conquests on the Continent. The Kings of Europe had, therefore, no reason to fear that their subjects would follow the example of the English Puritans. They looked with indifference, perhaps with complacency, on the death of the monarch and the abolition of the monarchy. Clarendon complains bitterly of their apathy. But we believe that this apathy was of the greatest service to the royal cause. If a French or

Spanish army had invaded England, and if that army had been cut to pieces, as we have no doubt that it would have been, on the first day on which it came face to face with the soldiers of Preston and Dunbar,-with Colonel Fight-the-good-Fight, and Captain Smite-them-hip-and-thigh, the House of Cromwell would probably now have been reigning in England. The nation would have forgotten all the misdeeds of the man who had cleared the soil of foreign invaders.

Happily for Charles, no European state, even when at war with the Commonwealth, chose to bind up its cause with that of the wanderers who were playing in the garrets of Paris and Cologne at being Princes and Chancellors. Under the administration of Cromwell, England was more respected and dreaded than any power in Christendom; and, even under the ephemeral governments which followed his death, no foreign state ventured to treat her with contempt. Thus Charles came back, not as a mediator between his people and a victorious enemy, but as a mediator between internal factions. He was heir to the conquests, and to the influence of the able usurper who had excluded him.

The old government of England, as it had been far milder than the old government of France, had been far less violently and completely subverted. The old institutions had been spared, or imperfectly eradicated. The laws had undergone little alteration. The tenures of the soil were still to be learned from Littleton and Coke. The great charter was mentioned with as much reverence in the parliaments of the Commonwealth as in those of any ear

« PreviousContinue »