Volume 1 — CHAPTER LXXI. JAMES II. (continued 2)

The militia fell much to decay during these two reigns, partly by the policy of the kings, who had entertained a diffidence of their subjects, partly by that ill-judged law which limited the king’s power of mustering and arraying them. In the beginning, however, of Charles’s reign, the militia was still deemed formidable. De Wit having proposed to the French king an invasion of England during the first Dutch war, that monarch replied, that such an attempt would be entirely fruitless, and would tend only to unite the English. In a few days, said he, after our landing, there will be fifty thousand men at least upon us.[v]

Charles in the beginning of his reign had in pay near five thousand men, of guards and garrisons. At the end of his reign, he augmented this number to near eight thousand. James, on Monmouth’s rebellion, had on foot about fifteen thousand men; and when the prince of Orange invaded him, there were no fewer than thirty thousand regular troops in England.

The English navy, during the greater part of Charles’s reign, made a considerable figure, for number of ships, valor of the men, and conduct of the commanders. Even in 1678, the fleet consisted of eighty-three ships;[*] besides thirty which were at that time on the stocks. On the king’s restoration, he found only sixty-three vessels of all sizes.[**] During the latter part of Charles’s reign, the navy fell somewhat to decay, by reason of the narrowness of the king’s revenue: but James, soon after his accession, restored it to its former power and glory; and before he left the throne, carried it much further. The administration of the admiralty under Pepys, is still regarded as a model for order and economy. The fleet at the revolution consisted of one hundred and seventy-three vessels of all sizes, and required forty-two thousand seamen to man it.[***] That king, when duke of York, had been the first inventor of sea signals. The military genius during these two reigns had not totally decayed among the young nobility. Dorset, Mulgrave, Rochester, not to mention Ossory, served on board the fleet, and were present in the most furious engagements against the Dutch.

The commerce and riches of England did never, during any period, increase so fast as from the restoration to the revolution. The two Dutch wars, by disturbing the trade of that republic, promoted the navigation of this island; and after Charles had made a separate peace with the states, his subjects enjoyed unmolested the trade of Europe. The only disturbance which they met with, was from a few French privateers, who infested the channel; and Charles interposed not in behalf of his subjects with sufficient spirit and vigor.

The recovery or conquest of New York and the Jerseys was a considerable accession to the strength and security of the English colonies; and, together with the settlement of Pennsylvania and Carolina which was effected during that reign, extended the English empire in America. The persecutions of the dissenters, or, more properly speaking, the restraints imposed upon them contributed to augment and people these colonies. Dr. Davenant affirms,[*] that the shipping of England more than doubled during these twenty-eight years. Several new manufactures were established; in iron brass, silk, hats, glass, paper, etc. One Brewer, leaving the Low Countries when they were threatened with a French conquest, brought the art of dying woollen cloth into England, and by that improvement saved the nation great sums of money. The increase of coinage during these two reigns was ten millions two hundred and sixty-one thousand pounds. A board of trade was erected in 1670; and the earl of Sandwich was made president. Charles revived and supported the charter of the East India Company; a measure whose utility is by some thought doubtful: he granted a charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company; a measure probably hurtful.

We learn from Sir Josiah Child,[**] that in 1688 there were on the Change more men worth ten thousand pounds than there were in 1650 worth a thousand; that five hundred pounds with a daughter was, in the latter period, deemed a larger portion than two thousand in the former; that gentlewomen, in those earlier times, thought themselves well clothed in a serge gown, which a chambermaid would, in 1688, be ashamed to be seen in; and that, besides the great increase of rich clothes, plate, jewels, and household furniture, coaches were in that time augmented a hundred fold.

The duke of Buckingham introduced from Venice the manufacture of glass and crystal into England. Prince Rupert was also an encourager of useful arts and manufactures: he himself was the inventor of etching.

The first law for erecting turnpikes was passed in 1662: the places of the turnpikes were Wadesmill, Caxton, and Stilton: but the general and great improvement of highways took not place till the reign of George II.

In 1663 was passed the first law for allowing the exportation of foreign coin and bullion.

In 1667 was concluded the first American treaty between England and Spain: this treaty was made more general and complete in 1670. The two states then renounced all right of trading with each other’s colonies; and the title of England was acknowledged to all the territories in America of which she was then possessed.

The French king, about the beginning of Charles’s reign, laid some impositions on English commodities: and the English, partly displeased with this innovation, partly moved by their animosity against France, retaliated, by laying such restraints on the commerce with that kingdom as amounted almost to a prohibition. They formed calculations, by which they persuaded themselves that they were losers a million and a half or near two millions a year by the French trade. But no good effects were found to result from these restraints, and in King James’s reign they were taken off by parliament.

Lord Clarendon tells us, that, in 1665, when money, in consequence of a treaty, was to be remitted to the bishop of Munster, it was found, that the whole trade of England could not supply above a thousand pounds a month to Frankfort and Cologne, nor above twenty thousand pounds a month to Hamburgh: these sums appear surprisingly small.[*]

At the same time that the boroughs of England were deprived of their privileges, a like attempt was made on the colonies. King James recalled the charters, by which their liberties were secured; and he sent over governors invested with absolute power. The arbitrary principles of that monarch appear in every part of his administration.

The people, during these two reigns, were in a great measure cured of that wild fanaticism by which they had formerly been so much agitated. Whatever new vices they might acquire, it may be questioned, whether by this change they were, in the main, much losers in point of morals. By the example of Charles II. and the cavaliers, licentiousness and debauchery became prevalent in the nation. The pleasures of the table were much pursued. Love was treated more as an appetite than a passion. The one sex began to abate of the national character of chastity, without being able to inspire the other with sentiment or delicacy.

The abuses in the former age, arising from overstrained pretensions to piety, had much propagated the spirit of irreligion; and many of the ingenious men of this period lie under the imputation of Deism. Besides wits and scholars by profession, Saftesbury, Halifax, Buckingham, Mulgrave, Sunderland Essex, Rochester, Sidney, Temple, are supposed to have adopted these principles.

The same factions which formerly distracted the nation were revived, and exerted themselves in the most ungenerous and unmanly enterprises against each other. King Charles, being in his whole deportment a model of easy and gentleman-like behavior, improved the politeness of the nation; as much as faction, which of all things is most destructive to that virtue, could possibly permit. His courtiers were long distinguishable in England by their obliging and agreeable manners.

Till the revolution, the liberty of the press was very imperfectly enjoyed in England, and during a very short period. The star chamber, while that court subsisted, put effectual restraints upon printing. On the suppression of that tribunal in 1641, the long parliament, after their rupture with the king, assumed the same power with regard to the licensing of books; and this authority was continued during all the period of the republic and protectorship.[*]

Two years after the restoration, an act was passed reviving the republican ordinances. This act expired in 1679; but was revived in the first of King James. The liberty of the press did not even commence with the revolution. It was not till 1694 that the restraints were taken off; to the great displeasure of the king and his ministers, who, seeing nowhere, in any government, during present or past ages, any example of such unlimited freedom, doubted much of its salutary effects; and probably thought, that no books or writings would ever so much improve the general understanding of men, as to render it safe to intrust them with an indulgence so easily abused.

In 1677, the old law for burning heretics was repealed; a prudent measure, while the nation was in continual dread of the return of Papery.

Amidst the thick cloud of bigotry and ignorance which overspread the nation during the commonwealth and protectorship, there were a few sedate philosophers, who, in the retirement of Oxford, cultivated their reason, and established conferences for the mutual communication of their discoveries in physics and geometry. Wilkins, a clergyman, who had married Cromwell’s sister, and was afterwards bishop of Chester, promoted these philosophical conversations. Immediately after the restoration, these men procured a patent, and having enlarged their number, were denominated the Royal Society. But this patent was all they obtained from the king. Though Charles was a lover of the sciences, particularly chemistry and mechanics, he animated them by his example alone not by his bounty. His craving courtiers and mistresses, by whom he was perpetually surrounded, engrossed all his expense, and left him neither money nor attention for literary merit. His contemporary Lewis, who fell short of the king’s genius and knowledge in this particular, much exceeded him in liberality. Besides pensions conferred on learned men throughout all Europe, his academies were directed by rules and supported by salaries; a generosity which does great honor to his memory; and, in the eyes of all the ingenious part of mankind, will be esteemed an atonement for many of the errors of his reign. We may be surprised that this example should not be more followed by princes; since it is certain that that bounty, so extensive, so beneficial, and so much celebrated, cost not this monarch so great a sum as is often conferred on one useless, overgrown favorite or courtier.

But though the French Academy of Sciences was directed, encouraged, and supported by the sovereign, there arose in England some men of superior genius, who were more than sufficient to cast the balance, and who drew on themselves and on their native country the regard and attention of Europe. Besides Wilkins, Wren, Wallis, eminent mathematicians, Hooke, an accurate observer by microscopes, and Sydenham, the restorer of true physic, there flourished during this period a Boyle and a Newton; men who trod with cautious, and therefore the more secure steps, the only road which leads to true philosophy.

Boyle improved the pneumatic engine, invented by Otto Guericke, and was thereby enabled to make several new and curious experiments on the air, as well as on other bodies: his chemistry is much admired by those who are acquainted with that art: his hydrostatics contain a greater mixture of reasoning and invention with experiment than any other of his works; but his reasoning is still remote from that boldness and temerity which had led astray so many philosophers. Boyle was a great partisan of the mechanical philosophy; a theory which by discovering some of the secrets of nature, and allowing us to imagine the rest, is so agreeable to the natural vanity and curiosity of men. He died in 1691, aged sixty-five.

In Newton this island may boast of having produced the greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species. Cautious in admitting no principles but such as were founded on experiment, but resolute to adopt every such principle, however new or unusual; from modesty, ignorant of his superiority above the rest of mankind, and thence less careful to accommodate his reasonings to common apprehension; more anxious to merit than acquire fame; he was from these causes long unknown to the world; but his reputation at last broke out with a lustre which scarcely any writer, during his own lifetime, had ever before attained. While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain. He died in 1727, aged eighty-five.

This age was far from being so favorable to polite literature as to the sciences. Charles, though fond of wit, though possessed himself of a considerable share of it, though his taste in conversation seems to have been sound and just, served rather to corrupt than improve the poetry and eloquence of his time. When the theatres were opened at the restoration, and freedom was again given to pleasantry and ingenuity, men, after so long an abstinence, fed on these delicacies with less taste than avidity, and the coarsest and most irregular species of wit was received by the court as well as by the people. The productions represented at that time on the stage were such monsters of extravagance and folly, so utterly destitute of all reason or even common sense, that they would be the disgrace of English literature, had not the nation made atonement for its former admiration of them by the total oblivion to which they are now condemned. The duke of Buckingham’s Rehearsal, which exposed these wild productions, seems to be a piece of ridicule carried to excess; yet in reality, the copy scarcely equals some of the absurdities which we meet with in the originals.[*]

This severe satire, together with the good sense of the nation, corrected, after some time, the extravagancies of the fashionable wit; but the productions of literature still wanted much of that correctness and delicacy which we so much admire in the ancients, and in the French writers, their judicious imitators. It was, indeed, during this period chiefly, that that nation left the English behind them in the productions of poetry, eloquence, history, and other branches of polite letters; and acquired a superiority which the efforts of English writers, during the subsequent age, did more successfully contest with them. The arts and sciences were imported from Italy into this island as early as into France; and made at first more sensible advances. Spenser, Shakspeare, Bacon, Jonson, were superior to their contemporaries who flourished in that kingdom. Milton, Waller, Denham, Cowley, Harvey, were at least equal to their contemporaries. The reign of Charles II., which some preposterously represent as our Augustan age, retarded the progress of polite literature in this island; and it was then found, that the immeasurable licentiousness, indulged or rather applauded at court, was more destructive to the refined arts, than even the cant, nonsense, and enthusiasm of the preceding period.

Most of the celebrated writers of this age remain monuments of genius, perverted by indecency and bad taste; and none more than Dryden, both by reason of the greatness of his talents and the gross abuse which he made of them. His plays, excepting a few scenes, are utterly disfigured by vice or folly, or both. His translations appear too much the offspring of haste and hunger: even his fables are ill-chosen tales, conveyed in an incorrect, though spirited versification. Yet amidst this great number of loose productions, the refuse of our language, there are found some small pieces, his Ode to St. Cecilia, the greater part of Absalom and Achitophel, and a few more, which discover so great genius, such richness of expression, such pomp and variety of numbers, that they leave us equally full of regret and indignation, on account of the inferiority or rather great absurdity of his other writings. He died in 1701, aged sixty-nine.

The very name of Rochester is offensive to modest ears, yet does his poetry discover such energy of style and such poignancy of satire, as give ground to imagine what so fine a genius, had he fallen in a more happy age, and had followed better models, was capable of producing. The ancient satirists often used great liberties in their expressions; but their free-* *dom no more resembles the licentiousness of Rochester, than the nakedness of an Indian does that of a common prostitute.

Wycherley was ambitious of the reputation of wit and libertinism, and he attained it: he was probably capable of reaching the fame of true comedy and instructive ridicule. Otway had a genius finely turned to the pathetic; but he neither observed strictly the rules of the drama, nor the rules, still more essential, of propriety and decorum. By one single piece, the duke of Buckingham did both great service to his age and honor to himself. The earls of Mulgrave, Dorset, and Roscommon wrote in a good taste; but their productions are either feeble or careless. The marquis of Halifax discovers a refined genius; and nothing but leisure and an inferior station seem wanting to have procured him eminence in literature.

Of all the considerable writers of this age, Sir William Temple is almost the only one that kept himself altogether unpolluted by that inundation of vice and licentiousness which overwhelmed the nation. The style of this author, though extremely negligent, and even infected with foreign idioms, is agreeable and interesting. That mixture of vanity which appears in his works, is rather a recommendation to them. By means of it we enter into acquaintance with the character of the author, full of honor and humanity; and fancy that we are engaged, not in the perusal of a book, but in conversation with a companion. He died in 1698, aged seventy.

Though Hudibras was published, and probably composed, during the reign of Charles II., Butler may justly, as well as Milton, be thought to belong to the foregoing period. No composition abounds so much as Hudibras in strokes of just and inimitable wit; yet are there many performances which give as great or greater entertainment on the whole perusal. The allusions in Butler are often dark and far-fetched; and though scarcely any author was ever able to express his thoughts in so few words, he often employs too many thoughts on one subject, and thereby becomes prolix after an unusual manner. It is surprising how much erudition Butler has introduced with so good a grace into a work of pleasantry and humor: Hudibras is perhaps one of the most learned compositions that is to be found in any language. The advantage which the royal cause received from this poem, in exposing the fanaticism and false pretences of the former parliamentary party, was prodigious. The king himself had so good a taste as to be highly pleased with the merit of the work, and had even got a great part of it by heart: yet was he either so careless in his temper, or so little endowed with the virtue of liberality, or, more properly speaking, of gratitude, that he allowed the author, a man of virtue and probity, to live in obscurity, and die in want.[*]

Dryden is an instance of a negligence of the same kind. His Absalom sensibly contributed to the victory which the tories obtained over the whigs, after the exclusion parliaments; yet could not this merit, aided by his great genius, procure him an establishment which might exempt him from the necessity of writing for bread. Otway, though a professed royalist, could not even procure bread by his writings; and he had the singular fate of dying literally of hunger. These incidents throw a great stain on the memory of Charles; who had discernment, loved genius, was liberal of money, but attained not the praise of true generosity.