Part 18

Every one of the circumstances on which we may presume that Mr. Macaulay would rely as justifying these charges has been long since, to more candid judgments, either disproved, explained, or excused, and in truth whatever blame can be justly attributed to any of them, belongs mainly, if not exclusively, to those whose violence and injustice drove a naturally upright and most conscientious man into the shifts and stratagems of self-defence. With the greatest fault and the only crime that Charles in his whole life committed Mr. Macaulay does not reproach him--the consent to the execution of Lord Strafford--that indeed, as he himself penitentially confessed, was a deadly weight on his conscience, and is an indelible stain on his character; but even that guilt and shame belongs in a still greater degree to Mr. Macaulay's patriot heroes.

This leads us to the conclusive plea which we enter to Mr. Macaulay's indictment, namely--that all those acts alleged as the excuses of rebellion and regicide occurred after the rebellion had broken out, and were at worst only devices of the unhappy King to escape from the regicide which he early foresaw. It was really the old story of the wolf and the lamb. It was far down the stream of rebellion that these acts of supposed perfidy on the part of Charles could be said to have troubled it.

But while he thus deals with the lamb, let us see how he treats the wolf. We have neither space nor taste for groping through the long and dark labyrinth of Cromwell's proverbial duplicity and audacious apostacy: we shall content ourselves with two facts, which, though stated in the gentlest way by Mr. Macaulay, will abundantly justify the opinion which all mankind, except a few republican zealots, hold of that man's sincerity, of whose abilities, wonderful as they were, the most remarkable, and perhaps the most serviceable to his fortunes, was his hypocrisy; so much so, that South--a most acute observer of mankind, and who had been educated under the Commonwealth and Protectorate--in his sermon on "Worldly Wisdom," adduces Cromwell as an instance of "habitual dissimulation and imposture." Oliver, Mr. Macaulay tells us, modelled his army on the principle of composing it of men fearing God, and zealous for _public liberty_, and in the very next page he is forced to confess that

thirteen years followed in which for the first and the last time the civil power of our country was subjected to military dictation.--i. 120.

Again,

Oliver had made his choice. He had kept the hearts of his soldiers, but he had _broken_ with every other class of his fellow citizens.--i. 129.

That is, he had broken through all the promises, pledges, and specious pretences by which he had deceived and enslaved the nation, which Mr. Macaulay calls with such opportune _naïveté, his fellow citizens_! Then follows, not a censure of this faithless usurpation, but many laboured apologies, and even defences of it, and a long series of laudatory epithets, some of which are worth collecting as a rare contrast to Mr. Macaulay's usual style, and particularly to the abuse of Charles, which we have just exhibited.

His _genius and resolution_ made him more _absolute master of his country_ than any of her legitimate Kings had been.--i. 129.

He having cut off the legitimate King's head on a pretence that Charles had wished to make himself _absolutely master of the country_.

Everything yielded to the _vigour and ability_ of Cromwell.--i. 130.

The Government, though in the form of a Republic, was in truth a despotism, moderated only by the _wisdom, the sober-mindedness, and the magnanimity_ of the despot.--i. 137.

With a vast deal more of the same tone.

But Mr. Macaulay particularly expatiates on the influence that Cromwell exercised over foreign states: and there is hardly any topic to which he recurs with more pleasure, or, as we think, with less sagacity, than the terror with which Cromwell and the contempt with which the Stuarts inspired the nations of Europe. He somewhat exaggerates the extent of this feeling, and greatly misstates or mistakes the cause; and as this subject is in the present state of the world of more importance than any others in the work, we hope we may be excused for some observations tending to a sounder opinion on that subject.

It was not, as Mr. Macaulay everywhere insists, the personal abilities and genius of Cromwell that exclusively, or even in the first degree, carried his foreign influence higher than that of the Stuarts. The internal struggles that distracted and consumed the strength of these islands throughout their reigns necessarily rendered us little formidable to our neighbours; and it is with no good grace that a Whig historian stigmatises that result as shameful; for, without discussing whether it was justifiable or not, the fact is certain, that it was opposition of the Whigs--often in rebellion and always in faction against the Government--which disturbed all progress at home and paralysed every effort abroad. We are not, we say, now discussing whether that opposition was not justifiable and may not have been ultimately advantageous in several constitutional points; we think it decidedly was: but at present all we mean to do is to show that it had a great share in producing on our foreign influence the lowering effects of which Mr. Macaulay complains.

And there is still another consideration which escapes Mr. Macaulay in his estimate of such usurpers as Cromwell and Buonaparte. A usurper is always more terrible both at home and abroad than a legitimate sovereign: first, the usurper is likely to be (and in these two cases was) a man of superior genius and military glory, wielding the irresistible power of the sword; but there is still stronger contrast-- legitimate Governments are bound--at home by laws--abroad by treaties, family ties, and international interests; they acknowledge the law of nations, and are limited, even in hostilities, by many restraints and bounds. The despotic usurpers had no fetters of either sort--they had no opposition at home, and no scruples abroad. Law, treaties, rights, and the like, had been already broken through like cobwebs, and kings naturally humbled themselves before a vigour that had dethroned and murdered kings, and foreign nations trembled at a power that had subdued in their own fields and cities the pride of England and the gallantry of France! To contrast Cromwell and Charles II, Napoleon and Louis XVIII, is sheer nonsense and mere verbiage--it is as if one should compare the house-dog and the wolf, and argue that the terror inspired by the latter was very much to his honour. All this is such a mystery to Mr. Macaulay that he wanders into two theories so whimsical, that we hesitate between passing them by as absurdities, or producing them for amusement; we adopt the latter. One is that Cromwell could have no interest and therefore no personal share in the death of Charles. "Whatever Cromwell was," says Mr. Macaulay, "he was no fool; and he must have known that Charles I was obviously a less difficulty in his way than Charles II." Cromwell, we retain the phrase, "was no fool," and he thought and _found_ that Charles II, was, as far as he was concerned, no difficulty at all. The real truth was, that the revolutionary party in England in 1648, like that in France in 1792, was but a rope of sand which nothing could cement and consolidate but the _blood of the Kings--that_ was a common crime and a common and indissoluble tie which gave all their consistency and force to both revolutions--a stroke of original sagacity in Cromwell and of imitative dexterity in Robespierre. If Mr. Macaulay admits, as he subsequently does (i. 129), that the regicide was "a sacrament of blood," by which the party became irrevocably bound to each other and separated from the rest of the nation, how can he pretend that Cromwell derived no advantage from it? In fact, his admiration--we had almost said fanaticism--for Cromwell betrays him throughout into the blindest inconsistencies.

The second vision of Mr. Macaulay is, if possible, still more absurd. He imagines a Cromwell dynasty! If it had not been for Monk and his army, the rest of the nation would have been loyal to the son of the illustrious Oliver.

Had the Protector and the Parliament been suffered to proceed undisturbed, there can be little doubt that an order of things similar to that which was afterwards established under the House of Hanover, would have been established under the house of Cromwell.--i. 142.

And yet in a page or two Mr. Macaulay is found making an admission-- made, indeed, with the object of disparaging Monk and the royalists--but which gives to his theory of a Cromwellian dynasty the most conclusive refutation.

It was probably not till Monk had been some days in the capital that he made up his mind. The cry of the whole people was for a free parliament; and there could _be no doubt that a parliament really free would instantly restore the exiled family_.--i. 147.

All this hypothesis of a Cromwellian dynasty _looks_ like sheer nonsense; but we have no doubt it has a meaning, and we request our readers not to be diverted by the almost ludicrous partiality and absurdity of Mr. Macaulay's speculations from an appreciation of the deep hostility to the monarchy from which they arise. They are like bubbles on the surface of a dark pool, which indicate there is something rotten below.

We should if we had time have many other complaints to make of the details of this chapter, which are deeply coloured with all Mr. Macaulay's prejudices and passions. He is, we may almost say of course, violent and unjust against Strafford and Clarendon; and the most prominent touch of candour that we can find in this period of his history is, that he slurs over the murder of Laud in an abscure half-line (i. 119) as if he were--as we hope he really is--ashamed of it.

We now arrive at what we have heard called the celebrated third chapter --celebrated it deserves to be, and we hope our humble observations may add something to its celebrity. There is no feature of Mr. Macaulay's book on which, we believe, he more prides himself, and which has been in truth more popular with his readers, than the descriptions which he introduces of the residences, habits, and manners of our ancestors. They are, provided you do not look below the surface, as entertaining as Pepys or Pennant, or any of the many scrap-book histories which have been recently fabricated from those old materials; but when we come to examine them, we find that in these cases, as everywhere else, Mr. Macaulay's propensity to caricature and exaggerate leads him not merely to disfigure circumstances, but totally to forget the principle on which such episodes are admissible into regular history--namely, the illustration of the story. They should be, as it were, woven into the narrative, and not, as Mr. Macaulay generally treats them, stitched on like patches. This latter observation does not of course apply to the collecting a body of miscellaneous facts into a separate chapter, as Hume and others have done; but Mr. Macaulay's chapter, besides, as we shall show, the prevailing inaccuracy of its details, has one general and essential defect specially its own.

The moment Mr. Macaulay has selected for suspending his narrative to take a view of the surface and society of England is the death of Charles II. Now we think no worse point of time could have been chosen for tracing the obscure but very certain connection between political events and the manners of a people. The restoration, for instance, was an era in manners as well as in politics--so was in a fainter degree the Revolution--either, or both, of those periods would have afforded a natural position for contemplating a going and a coming order of things; but we believe that there are no two periods in our annals which were so identical in morals and politics--so undistinguishable, in short, in any national view--as the latter years of Charles and the earlier years of James. Here then is an objection _in limine_ to this famous chapter--and not _in limine_ only, but in substance; for in fact the period he has chosen would not have furnished out the chapter, four-fifths of which belong to a date later than that which he professes to treat of. In short, the chapter is like an old curiosity-shop, into which--no matter whether it happens to stand in Charles Street, William Street, or George Street--the knick-knacks of a couple of centuries are promiscuously jumbled. What does it signify, in a history of the reign of Charles II, that a writer, "_sixty years after the Revolution_" (i. 347), says that in the lodging-houses at Bath "the hearth-slabs" were "freestone, not marble"--that "the best apartments were hung with coarse woollen stuff, and furnished with rush-bottomed chairs"?--nay, that he should have the personal good taste to lament that in those Boeotian days "_not a wainscot was painted_" (348); and yet this twaddle of the reign of George II, patched into the times of Charles II, is the appropriate occasion which he takes to panegyrise this new mode of elucidating history?--...

It is a curious and, to persons of our opinions, not unsatisfactory circumstance, that, though Mr. Macaulay almost invariably applies the term _Tory_ in an opprobrious or contemptuous sense, yet so great is the power of truth in surmounting the fantastical forms and colours laid over it by this brilliant _badigeonneur_, that on the whole no one, we believe, can rise from the work without a conviction that the Tories (whatever may be said of their prejudices) were the honestest and most conscientious of the whole _dramatis personae_; and it is this fact that in several instances and circumstances imprints, as it were by force, upon Mr. Macaulay's pages an air of impartiality and candour very discordant from their general spirit.

We are now arrived at the fourth chapter--really the first, strictly speaking, of Mr. Macaulay's history--the accession of James II, where also Sir James Mackintosh's history commences. And here we have to open to our readers the most extraordinary instance of _parallelism_ between two writers, unacknowledged by the later one, which we have ever seen. Sir James Mackintosh left behind him a history of the Revolution, which was published in 1834, three years after his death, in quarto: it comes down to the Orange invasion, and, though it apparently had not received the author's last corrections, and was clumsily edited, and tagged with a continuation by a less able hand, the work is altogether (bating not a little ultra-Whiggery) very creditable to Mackintosh's diligence, taste, and power of writing; it is indeed, we think, his best and most important work, and that by which he will be most favourably known to posterity. From that work Mr. Macaulay has borrowed largely--prodigally-- helped himself with both hands--not merely without acknowledging his obligation, but without so much as alluding to the existence of any such work. Nay--though this we are sure was never designed--he inserts a note full of kindness and respect to Sir James Mackintosh, which would naturally lead an uninformed reader to conclude that Sir James Mackintosh, though he had _meditated_ such a work, had never even begun writing it. On the 391st page of Mr. Macaulay's first volume, at the mention of the old news-letters which preceded our modern newspapers, Mr. Macaulay says, that "they form a valuable part of the literary treasures collected by the late Sir James Mackintosh"; and to this he adds the following foot-note:

I take this opportunity of expressing my warm gratitude to the family of my dear and honoured friend Sir James Mackintosh, for confiding to me the materials collected by him _at a time when he meditated a work similar to that which I have undertaken._ I have never seen, and I do not believe that there anywhere exists, within the same compass, so noble a _collection of extracts_ from public and private archives. The judgment with which Sir James, in great masses of the rudest ore of history, selected what was valuable and rejected what was worthless, can be fully appreciated only by one who has toiled after him in the same mine.--i. 391.

Could any one imagine from this that Mackintosh had not only _meditated_ a work, but actually written, and that his friends had published, a large closely printed quarto volume, on the same subject, from the same materials, and sometimes in the very same words as Mr. Macaulay's?

The coincidence--the identity, we might almost say--of the two works is so great, that, while we have been comparing them, we have often been hardly able to distinguish which was which. We rest little on the similiarity of facts, for the facts were ready made for both; and Mr. Macaulay tells us that he worked from Mackintosh's materials; there would, therefore, even if he had never seen Mackintosh's work, be a community of topics and authorities; but, seeing as we do in every page that he was writing with Mackintosh's volume before his eyes, we cannot account for his utter silence about it....

Having thus shown Mr. Macaulay's mode of dealing with what forms the chief and most characteristic feature of his book--its anecdotical gossip--we shall now endeavour to exhibit the deceptive style in which he treats the larger historical facts: in truth the style is the same--a general and unhesitating sacrifice of accuracy and reality to picturesque effect and party prejudices. He treats historical personages as the painter does his _layman_--a supple figure which he models into what he thinks the most striking attitude, and dresses up with the gaudiest colours and most fantastical draperies.

It is very difficult to condense into any manageable space the proofs of a general system of accumulating and aggravating all that was ever, whether truly or falsely, reproached to the Tories, and alleviating towards the Whigs the charges which he cannot venture to deny or even to question. The mode in which this is managed so as to keep up some show of impartiality is very dexterous. The reproach, well or ill founded, which he thinks most likely to damage the character of any one he dislikes, is repeated over and over again in hope that the iteration will at last be taken for proof, such as the perfidy of Charles I, the profligacy and selfishness of Charles II, the cold and cruel stupidity of James, the baseness of Churchill, the indecent violence of Rochester, the contemptible subserviency of his brother, Clarendon, and so on through a whole dictionary of abuse on every one whom he takes or mistakes for a Tory, and on a few Whigs whom for some special reasons of his own he treats like Tories. On the other hand, when he finds himself reluctantly forced to acknowledge even the greatest enormity of the Whigs--corruption--treason--murder he finds much gentler terms for the facts; selects a scapegoat, some subaltern villain, or some one whom history has already gibbeted, "to bear upon him all their iniquities," and that painful sacrifice once made, he avoids with tender care a recurrence to so disagreeable a subject....

After so much political detail it will be some kind of diversion to our readers to examine Mr. Macaulay's most elaborate strategic and topographical effort, worked up with all the combined zeal and skill of an ex-Secretary-at-War and a pictorial historian--a copious description of the battle of Sedgemoor. Mr. Macaulay seems to have visited Bridgwater with a zeal worthy of a better result: for it has produced a description of the surrounding country as pompous and detailed as if it had been the scene of some grand strategic operations--a parade not merely unnecessary, but absurd, for the so-called battle was but a bungling skirmish. Monmouth had intended to surprise the King's troops in their quarters by a midnight attack, but was stopped by a wide and deep trench, of which he was not apprised, called Bussex Rhine, behind which the King's army lay. "The trenches which drain the moor are," Mr. Macaulay adds, "in that country called _rhines_." On each side of this ditch the parties stood firing at each other in the dark. Lord Grey and the cavalry ran away without striking a blow; Monmouth followed them, too, soon; for some time the foot stood with a degree of courage and steadiness surprising in such raw and half-armed levies; at last the King's cavalry got round their flank, and they too ran: the King's foot then crossed the ditch with little or no resistance, and slaughtered, with small loss on their own side, a considerable number of the fugitives, the rest escaping back to Bridgwater. Our readers will judge whether such a skirmish required a long preliminary description of the surrounding country. Mr. Macaulay might just as usefully have described the plain of Troy. Indeed at the close of his long topographical and etymological narrative Mr. Macaulay has the tardy candour to confess that--

little is now to be learned by visiting the field of battle, for the face of the country has been greatly changed, and the old _Bussex Rhine_, on the banks of which the great struggle took place, has long disappeared.

This is droll. After spending a deal of space and fine writing in describing the present prospect, he concludes by telling us candidly it is all of no use, for the whole scene has changed. This is like Walpole's story of the French lady who asked for her lover's picture; and when he demurred observing that, if her husband were to see it, it might betray their secret--"O dear, no," she said--just like Mr. Macaulay--"I _will have the picture_, but it _need not be like_!"

But even as to the change, we again doubt Mr. Macaulay's accuracy. The word _Rhine_ in Somersetshire, as perhaps--_parva componere magnis_--in the great German river, means _running_ water, and we therefore think it very unlikely that a running stream should have disappeared; but we also find in the Ordnance Survey of Somersetshire, made in our own time, the course and name of _Bussck's Rhine_ distinctly laid down in front of Weston, where it probably ran in Monmouth's day; and we are further informed, in return to some inquiries that we have caused to be made, that the _Rhine_ is now, in 1849, as visible and well known as ever it was.

But this grand piece of the military topography of a battlefield where there was no battle must have its picturesque and pathetic episode, and Mr. Macaulay finds one well suited to such a novel. When Monmouth had made up his mind to attempt to _surprise_ the royal army, Mr. Macaulay is willing (for a purpose which we shall see presently) to persuade himself that the Duke let the whole town into his secret:--