Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 402, April, 1849. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
in peril of foreign invasion, as Poland proved from the triumph of the same selfish principles.
It is true Charles at length became a dissembler, and made many promises which were afterwards broken. But why did he become a dissembler? How did it happen that his nature, originally open, unreserved, and chivalrous, even to a fault, became at length cautious, and marked by dissimulation? Simply because he was assailed on all sides by dissemblers and dissimulators. He was driven to it by stern necessity in his own defence, and as the only way of carrying on the government. The whole conduct of his parliaments to him was one tissue of falsehood and deceit. They constantly professed loyalty with their lips, while they were thinking only of treason in their hearts; they were loud in their protestations of zeal for the public service, when they were thinking only of keeping close their purse-strings, and shaking off every imaginable tax levied for the public defence. Like their descendants in Transatlantic realms, they, "preferred any load of infamy, however great, to any burden of taxation, however light." It was only by fair words, by promising more than he was able to perform, by bartering the prerogative of the crown for parsimonious grants – £200,000 one year, £300,000 another – that he was able to provide, in the most penurious way, for the public service. His faithful Commons were impressed with the idea, and proceeded on the principle, that the monarch was an enemy cased in armour, and that it was their business to strip him of every article he possessed, so as to leave him entirely at their mercy, and reduce the government to a pure untaxed democracy. They first got the shield; they next seized the helmet; the breast-plate could not long be withheld; and at last they began to fight for the sword. Was consistency, or perfect sincerity of conduct, practicable with such men? Have not the English, in their wars in the East, been under the necessity of borrowing from their opponents much of their vigour and violence, and not unfrequently their ambition and dissimulation? Let us figure to ourselves Queen Victoria, without a national debt or parliamentary influence, going to Mr Cobden and the Commons in Free-Trade Hall, Manchester, and asking for funds to support the army and navy in a defensive war, which promised no extension of the market for cotton goods; or the president of the American republic proposing a direct income-tax of five per cent on his faithful repudiators, to support a war which held out a prospect neither of Mexican silver nor Californian gold, and we shall have some idea of the difficulties with which the unhappy Charles had to contend in his parliamentary struggles, and appreciate the stern necessity which turned even his noble and chivalrous character to temporary shifts, and sometimes discreditable expedients.
Again, as to the death of Charles, can it be regarded in any other light but as a foul and atrocious murder? He was tried neither by the Peers nor the Commons – neither by the courts of law, nor a national convention – but by a self-constituted junto of military officers, rebels to his government, traitors to their country, who, having exhausted in their remorseless career every imaginable crime of robbery, rape, arson, assault, and treason, now added WILFUL MURDER – cold-blooded murder, to the number. However it is viewed, the crime was equally unpardonable and inexpedient. If the country was still to be regarded as a monarchy, though torn by intestine divisions, then were Cromwell and all his brother regicides not only murderers, but traitors, for they put to death their lawful sovereign. If the bonds of allegiance are to be held as having been broken in the preceding convulsions, and the contest considered as that of one state with another – which is the most favourable view to adopt for the regicides – then Charles, when he fell into their hands, was a prisoner of war; and it was as much murder to put him to death as it would have been in the English, if they had slain Napoleon when he came on board the Bellerophon, or in Charles V., if he had despatched Francis I. when he became his prisoner after the battle of Pavia. The immediate object at issue when the civil war began – the right claimed by the Commons of appointing officers to the militia – was one in which they were clearly and confessedly in the wrong, and one which, if granted by Charles, as all the previous demands of the Commons had been, would infallibly have landed the nation in the bottomless pit of an untaxed, unbridled, and senseless democracy, as incapable of self-defence as Poland, as regardless of external rights as Rome in ancient, or America in modern times.
The extreme peril to English liberties and independence which arose from the exorbitant pretensions and disastrous success of the Long Parliament, with their canting military successors, distinctly appears in the deplorable state and disgraceful situation of England from the Restoration in 1661 to the Revolution in 1688. Notwithstanding all their professions of regard for freedom, and their anxiety to secure the liberties of the subject, the Long Parliament had done nothing for either in future times, while they had destroyed both in present. They had not even introduced a habeas corpus act to guard against arbitrary imprisonment. They had not given life appointments to the judges. They had made no provision for the impartial selection of juries. They had left the courts of law what, till the Revolution, they had ever been in English history – the arena in which the contending factions in the state alternately overthrew or murdered each other. They were too decided tyrants in their hearts to part with any of the weapons of tyranny in their hands. They had made no permanent provision for the support of the crown, or the maintenance of a force by sea and land adequate to the public defence; but left their sovereign at the mercy of a parliament of Cavaliers eager for vengeance, thirsting for blood, but nearly as indisposed to make any suitable grants for the public service as any of their predecessors had been. The "ignorant impatience of taxation" was as conspicuous in the parsimony of their supplies as it had been in those of Charles's parliament. But such was the strength of the reaction in favour of monarchy and royal authority, in consequence of the intensity of the evils which had been suffered from democratic and parliamentary government, that there was scarcely any sacrifice of public liberties that the royalist parliaments were not at first disposed to have made, provided it could be done without trenching on their pecuniary resources. An untaxed despotism was their idea of the perfection of government, as an untaxed republic had been the bright vision of the parliamentary leaders. Had Charles II. been a man of as much vigour and perseverance as he was of quickness and talent, and had his abilities, which were wasted in the boudoirs of the Duchess of Portsmouth or the Countess of Castlemaine, been devoted, like those of Louis XI. or Cardinal Richelieu, to a systematic attack on the public liberties, he might, without difficulty, have subverted the freedom of England, and left, as a legacy of the Long Parliament, to future times, not only the murder of their sovereign, but the final ruin of the national liberties.
Mr Macaulay has done one essential service to the cause of truth by the powerful and graphic, and, we doubt not, correct account he has given in his first volume of the desperate feuds of the rival parties with each other during this reign, and the universal prostitution of the forms of justice, and the sanctity of courts of law, to the most cruel and abominable purposes. There is no picture of human iniquity and cruelty more revolting than is presented in the alternate triumphs of the Whig and Tory parties, from the excitement produced by the Popish and Ryehouse plots, and the noble blood which was shed alternately by both parties in torrents on the scaffold, to allay the terrors of insensate folly, or satiate the revenge of aroused indignation. The hideous iniquity of the courts of law during those disastrous days, and the entire concurrence of the ruling majority of the moment in their atrocious proceedings, demonstrate how lamentably the Long Parliament had failed in erecting any bulwarks for the public liberties, or strengthening the foundations of public virtue. At the same time, the disgraceful spectacle of our fleets swept from the Channel, or burnt in their harbours by the Dutch, proves how wretched a provision the Great Rebellion had made for the lasting defence of the realm. Nor was private morality, either in high or low places, on a better footing. The king and all his ministers received the pensions of Louis XIV.; the whole leaders of the patriots, from Algernon Sidney downwards, with the exception of Lord Russell, followed his example. The ladies of the metropolis, as well as the court, were intent only on intrigue. The licentiousness of the stage was such as almost exceeds belief. Nothing was thought of in the House of Commons but saving money, or satisfying revenge. Such was the parsimony of parliament, whether the majority was Whig or Royalist, that the most necessary expenses of the royal household could only be defrayed by pensions from France. French mistresses directed the king's councils, and almost exclusively occupied his time; French alliance misdirected the national forces; French manners entirely subverted the national morals. England, from its vacillation in foreign policy, had forfeited all the respect of foreign nations, while, from the general selfishness and corruption which prevailed,