Dissertation Upon Parties
Henry St. John Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Sir: -- To corrupt and to divide are the trite and wicked expedients, by which some ministers in all ages have affected to govern; but especially such as have been least capable of exerting the true arts of government. There is however a difference to be made between these two expedients, to the advantage of the latter, and by consequence between the characters of those who put them in practice.

Every busy, ambitious child of fortune, who hath himself a corrupt heart, and becomes master of a large purse, hath all that is necessary to employ the expedient of corruption with success. A bribe, in the hand of the most blundering coxcomb that ever disgraced honour and wealth and power, will prevail as much as in the hand of a man of sense, and go farther too, if it weigh more. An intriguing chamber-maid may slip a bank-note into a griping paw, as well as the most subtle demon of hell. H--e may govern as triumphantly by this expedient as the great knight his brother, and the great knight as Burghley himself. But every character cannot attempt the other expedient of dividing, or keeping up divisions, with equal success. There is, indeed, no occasion for any extraordinary genius to divide; and true wisdom despises the infamous task. But there is need of that left-handed wisdom, called cunning, and of those habits in business, called experience. He that is corrupted, co-operates with him that corrupts. He runs into his arms at the first beckon; or, in order sometimes to raise the price, he meets him but half way. On the other hand, to divide, or to maintain and renew the divisions of parties in a state, a system of seduction and fraud is necessary to be carried on. The divided are so far from being accessory to the guilt, that they would not be divided, if they were not first deceived.

From these differences, which I have observed between the two expedients, and the characters and means proper to put them in practice with success, it may be discovered perhaps why, upon former occasions, as I shall hereafter show, the expedient of dividing prospered so much better than that of corrupting; and why, upon some later occasions, the expedient of corrupting succeeds so well in those hands, which are not, and I trust will not be so lucky in maintaining or renewing our party divisions.

Much hath been written by you, Mr D'Anvers, by your correspondents and others, who have drawn their pens in the cause of truth, virtue, and liberty, against the right reverend, as well as undignified, the noble, as well as ignoble assertors of corruption; enough surely to shame those who have not lost all sense of shame, out of so ignominious a crime; and to make those who have not lost every other sense tremble at the consequences of it. We may flatter ourselves that those honest endeavours have had some effect; and have reason to hope that far greater will follow from those illustrious examples of repulses which have been lately given to the grand corrupter, notwithstanding his frequent and insolent declarations that he could seduce whomsoever he had a mind to gain. These hopes are farther confirmed to us by repeated declarations of the sense of Parliament, and will be turned, we doubt not, into certainty, whenever the wisdom of the two Houses shall again think it proper to raise new barriers of law against this encroaching vice.

In the meantime, I think nothing can better answer the design of your papers, nor promote the public good more effectually in the present conjuncture, than to put our countrymen frequently on their guard against the artifice which is clumsily, but industriously employed to maintain, and, if it be possible, to create new divisions amongst them. That day, which our fathers wished to see, and did not see, is now breaking upon us. Shall we suffer this light to be turned again into party-darkness by the incantations of those who would not have passed for conjurers, even in the days of superstition and ignorance? The nation is not only brought into an uniformity of opinion concerning the present administration, by the length and the righteous conduct of it; but we are grown into a unanimity about principles of government, which the most sanguine could scarce have expected, without extravagance. Certain associations of ideas were made so familiar to us, about half a century ago, and became in the course of time so habitual, that we should not have been able, even a few years ago, to break them, nor have been easily induced to believe, on the faith of any prediction, that experience and the evidence of facts would, in a few years more, break them for us, destroy all our notions of party, and substitute new ones in their room.

The power and majesty of the people, an original contract, the authority and independency of Parliament, liberty, resistance, exclusion, abdication, deposition; these were ideas associated, at that time, to the idea of a Whig, and supposed by every Whig to be incommunicable, and inconsistent with the idea of a Tory.

Divine, hereditary, indefeasible right, lineal succession, passive-obedience, prerogative, non-resistance, slavery, nay and sometimes property too, were associated in many minds to the idea of a Tory, and deemed incommunicable and inconsistent in the same manner, with the idea of a Whig.

But now that which neither side would have believed on the faith of any prediction, is come to pass:

... quod divum promittere nemo
Auderet, volvenda dies en! attulit ultro.

These associations are broken; these distinct sets of ideas are shuffled out of their order; new combinations force themselves upon us; and it would actually be as absurd to impute to the Tories the principles, which were laid to their charge formerly, as it would be to ascribe to the projector and his faction the name of Whigs, whilst they daily forfeit that character by their actions. The bulk of both parties are really united; united on principles of liberty, in opposition to an obscure remnant of one party, who disown those principles, and a mercenary detachment from the other, who betray them.

How this change for the better comes to have been wrought in an age, when most things have changed for the worse; and since it hath been wrought, why the old distinctions are kept up in some measure, will I think be accounted for in treating this subject farther. At present, what shall we say to these who publicly speak of this national union as impracticable and chimerical, yet privately act against it, with all their might, as a practicable thing, and a real evil to them? If it be as complete and as well cemented, as I imagine it is, and as every honest Briton wishes it may be; nay, if there be nothing more than a strong tendency on all sides towards it, which no man of the least observation and candour will deny; it is surely the duty of every one, who desires the prosperity of his country, to seize the opportunity to cultivate and improve it. If men are to be known by their works, the works of those, who oppose this union, denote them sufficiently. Wicked and unhappy men! who seek their private safety, in opposing public good. Weak and silly men! who vainly imagine that they shall pass for the nation, and the nation for a faction; that they shall be judged in the right, and the whole body of the people in the wrong -- On whom would they impose? How long do they imagine that so unequal a contest can last?

There is no complaint which hath been more constantly in the mouths, no grief hath lain more heavily at the hearts of all good men, than those about our national divisions; about the spirit of party, which inspires animosity and breeds rancour; which hath so often destroyed our inward peace, weakened our national strength, and sullied our glory abroad. It is time therefore that all, who desire to be esteemed good men, and to procure the peace, the strength and the glory of their country by the only means, by which they can be procured effectually, should join their efforts to heal our national divisions, and to change the narrow spirit of party into a diffusive spirit of public benevolence.

That we may be more encouraged to do so, it will be of use perhaps to consider, in some particulars, what advances are already made towards that national union, without which no national good can be expected in such circumstances as ours.

Let us begin with the present temper of the members of the Church of England towards the Dissenters. Those laws, by which the latter were debarred from serving God after their own way, have not been these many years a terror to them. Those which were designed to hinder the propagation of their principles, and those which shut the door of all public preferment, even to such amongst them as conformed occasionally, are repealed. Far from desiring to impose any new hardships upon them, even those who have been reputed their enemies, and who have acted as such on several occasions, acknowledge their error. Experience hath removed prejudice. They see that indulgence hath done what severity never could; and from the frankness of these, if I was a Dissenter, I should sooner entertain hopes of future favour, than from the double dealing of those who lean on the Dissenters when they are out of power, and who esteem them a load upon them when they are in it. We are now in the true and only road, which can possibly lead to a perfect reconciliation among Protestants; to the abolition of all their differences; or to terms of difference so little essential, as to deserve none of distinction. These happy ends must be obtained by mutual good will. They never can be obtained by force. It is true, indeed, that force, which is the effect of a majority and superior power, may support a rivalship and erect even counter establishments. But then, by the same means, our ancient disputes will be revived; the Church will be thought really in danger; and religious feuds, which have been so long and so beneficially kept down, will once more disturb the peace of the state. It is a certain truth, that our religious and civil contests have mutually, and almost alternately, raised and fomented each other. Churchmen and Dissenters have sometimes differed, and sometimes thought, or been made to think, that they differed, at least, as much about civil as religious matters. There can be therefore no way so effectual to compose their differences on the latter, as to improve the growing union between them on the former. 'Idem sentire de republica', to think alike about political affairs, hath been esteemed necessary to constitute and maintain private friendships. It is obviously more essential in public friendships. Bodies of men in the same society can never unite, unless they unite on this principle; and if they once unite on this principle, they will unite on all others, or they will readily and cheerfully make one another easy about them. -- Let me speak plainly. It becomes a man to do so, who means honestly. In our political divisions of Whig and Tory, the Dissenters have adhered to the former, and they want no apology for doing so. They joined themselves to those with whom they agreed, and stood in opposition to those with whom they differed in principles of government. There could be no objection brought against them on this account. They certainly did not follow power. They did not act like a sect, or a faction, who had, and pursued, an interest distinct from the interest of the whole. Their non-conformity hath nothing to do here. They concurred with conformists; and if they had been conformists themselves, as they were Dissenters, they would have acted in the same manner. But if this division of parties, on the same principles, subsists no longer; if there be in truth neither a Tory, nor a Whig, as I have said above, but a Court and a Country party in being; if the political principles, which the Dissenters have formerly avowed, are manifestly pursued on one side; and those which they have opposed, or others equivalent to them in their effects, are pursued on the other; can the Dissenters hesitate about the option they are to make? I am persuaded they cannot. I know that several amongst them do not. What might be, and certainly would be said, if they made their option to stand by the M--, I will not so much as suggest. What must be the consequence of their standing by the nation, in opposition to him, for between these two powers the present contest lies, it is easy to tell, and impossible to deny. They will prove, in this case, to the whole world, that the spirit of liberty animates, and conscience alone determines their conduct. They, who could never brook a regal, will have the merit of saving their country from a ministerial tyranny; and their country will owe them all the acknowledgements, which are due from good and grateful citizens of the same commonwealth.

As to the other great and national division of Whig and Tory; he, who recollects what hath passed in Parliament, and observes what passes out of it, can differ very little in his opinion from what hath been said concerning it. The principal articles of your civil faith, published some time ago, or, to speak more properly, the civil faith of the Old Whigs, are assented and consented to by the Country party; and I say, upon good authority, that if this creed was made a test of political orthodoxy, there would appear at this time but very few heretics amongst us. How different the case is on the other side, will appear not only from the actions, but from the principles of the Court-party, as we find them avowed in their writings; principles more dangerous to liberty, though not so directly, nor so openly levelled against it, than even any of those, bad as they were, which some of these men value themselves for having formerly opposed.

In short, the Revolution is looked upon by all sides as a new era; but the settlement then made is looked upon by the whole Country party as a new Magna Carta, from whence new interests, new principles of government, new measures of submission, and new obligations arise. From thence we must date both king and people. His majesty derives his title from Acts, made in consequence of it. We likewise derive, not our privileges, for they were always ours, but a more full and explicit declaration, and a more solemn establishment of them from the same period. On this foundation all the reasonable, independent Whigs and Tories unite. They could unite on this alone; for the Whigs have always professed the principles which paved the way for the Revolution; and whatever the Tories may have professed, they acted upon the same principles, or they acted upon none, which would be too absurd to assert, when they brought about that great event, in concert with the rest of the nation, as I shall some time or other prove.

To this Magna Carta, and these principles, let us adhere inviolably, in opposition to the two extremes mentioned by me at the beginning of this letter, viz., to those who disown them, and to those who betray them. -- Let neither the polemical skill of Leslie, nor the antique erudition of Bedford, persuade us to put on again those old shackles of false law, false reason, and false gospel, which were forged before the Revolution, and broken to pieces by it. -- As little let us suffer the arch slyness of G--, the dogmatical dryness of H-- or the sousing prostitution of S-- to slip new shackles on us, which are inconsistent with the constituent principles of our establishment. Let us maintain and improve the national union, so happily begun, and bless God for disposing the temper of the nation almost universally to it. -- Such a coalition hath been long wanted in this kingdom, and never more than at this important crisis; for on this it will depend whether they, who not only oppose the progress of that growing corruption, which had well nigh overspread the land, but endeavour to extirpate it by the roots, shall prevail; or they who nourish and propagate it, who eat themselves, and tempt others to eat the baneful fruit it bears. -- On this it will depend whether they shall prevail, who constantly insist against the continuance of a standing. army in time of peace, agreeably to the principles of our constitution; or they who plead for it, and endeavour to make it a necessary part of that constitution, though incompatible with public liberty. -- On this it will depend whether they shall prevail, who endeavour to conceal the frauds which are practised, and to screen the fraudulent, at the risk of ruining credit, and destroying trade, as well as to monopolize in the hands of a few the whole wealth of the nation; or they who do their utmost to bring the former to light, and the latter to punishment, at a time when glaring fraud, or very strong symptoms of fraud, appear in so many parts of public management, from some of the greatest companies down to the turnpike at Hyde Park Corner. -- On this it will depend whether they shall prevail, who desire that Great Britain should maintain such a dignity and prudent reserve in the broils of Europe, as become her situation, suit her interest, and alone can enable her to cast the balance; or they who are eager, on every occasion, to prostitute her dignity, to pawn her purse, and to sacrifice her commerce, by entangling her not only too much with the other great powers of Europe, from whom she may sometimes want reciprocal engagements, but even with those diminutive powers, from whom it would be ridiculous to expect any.

I am, sir, yours, etc.

Sir: -- Whilst I was writing my last letter to you, it came into my thoughts that nothing would illustrate the subject better, nor enforce more strongly the exhortation to an union of parties, in support of that constitution, on the terms of which alone all right to govern us, and all our obligation to obey is now founded, than an enquiry into the rise and progress of our late parties; or a short history of Toryism and Whiggism from their cradle to their grave, with an introductory account of their genealogy and descent.

Your papers have been from the first consecrated to the information of the people of Britain; and I think they may boast very justly a merit singular enough, that of never speaking to the passions, without appealing to the reason of mankind. It is fit they should keep up this character, in the strictest manner, whilst they are employed on the most important subject, and published at the most important crisis. I shall therefore execute my design with sincerity and impartiality. I shall certainly not flatter, and I do not mean to offend. Reasonable men and lovers of truth, in whatever party they have been engaged, will not be offended at writings, which claim no regard but on this account, that they are founded in reason and truth, and speak with boldness what reason and truth conspire to dictate. As for the drummers and trumpeters of faction, who are hired to drown the voice of both in one perpetual din of clamour, and would endeavour to drown, in the same manner, even the dying groans of their country, if she was already brought into that extreme condition; they shall not provoke me to break a most contemptuous silence. The subject is too solemn. They may profane it, by writing on it. Far be it from me to become guilty of the same crime by answering them.

If the enquiry I am going to make into the rise and progress of our late parties should produce in any degree the good which I intend, it will help to confirm and improve the national union, so happily begun, by taking off some remains of shyness, distrust and prejudice, which may still hang about men, who think alike, and who press on from different quarters to the same common point of view. It will help to unmask more effectually the wicked conduct of those, who labour with all the skill, and, which is much more considerable, with all the authority they possess, to keep up the division of parties; that each of these may continue to be, in its turn, what all of them have been too often and too long, the instruments and the victims of private ambition. It will do something more. A few reflections on the rise and progress of our distemper, and the rise and progress of our cure, will help us of course to make a true judgment on our present state, and will point out to us, better perhaps than any other method, the specific remedies still necessary to preserve our constitution in health and vigour. -- Having premised this, I come to the point.

Queen Elizabeth designed, and the nation called, King James to the throne, though the whole Scottish line had been excluded by the will of Henry the Eighth, made indeed under the authority of an Act of Parliament, and yet little regarded either by the Parliament, or the people. As soon as he was on the throne, a flattering Act of Recognition passed; for though all princes are flattered on their first accession, yet those princes are sure to be flattered most, who deserve panegyric least. In this Act the Parliament acknowledged, on the knees of their hearts, such was the cant of the age, the indubitable right, by which they declared that the crown descended to him immediately, on the decease of Queen Elizabeth. Of this Act, and of the use, which some men, very weakly I think, endeavoured to make of it, I shall have occasion to speak hereafter. I would only observe here, that this is the era of hereditary right, and of all those exalted notions, concerning the power and prerogative of kings, and the sacredness of their persons. All together they composed such a system of absurdity as had never been heard of in this country, till that anointed pedant broached them. They have been spoken of pretty much at large in your papers; particularly in some of those published under the name of Oldcastle. To them I refer.

To assert that the extravagant principles of ecclesiastical and civil government, which began to be propagated in this reign, and were carried still higher in the next, gave Occasion to those of another kind, or of another extreme, which were taught with success, and gained by degrees great vogue in the nation, would be too much. Opinions very different from those which received the sanction of a legal establishment in Church and state, had crept about obscurely, if not silently, even whilst the government of Elizabeth lasted. But this I say; that the principles by which King James and King Charles the First governed, and the excesses of hierarchical and monarchical power, exercised in consequence of them, gave great advantage to the opposite opinions, and entirely occasioned the miseries which followed. Frenzy. provoked frenzy, and two species of madness infected the whole mass of the people. It hath cost us a century to lose our wits, and to recover them again.

If our grievances under King Charles the First had been redressed by a sober, regular, parliamentary reformation of the state; or, if the civil war happening, a new government had been established on principles of the constitution, not of faction, of liberty, not of licentiousness, as there was on the abdication of King James the Second; we may conclude, both from reason and experience, that the absurd and slavish doctrines I have mentioned would have been exploded early. They would have been buried in the recent grave of him who first devised them; and the memory of him and of them would have stunk together in the nostrils of mankind. But the contrary fell out. The state was subverted, instead of being reformed; and all the fury of faction and enthusiasm was employed to destroy the constitution to the very foundations. A natural consequence followed. If the principles of King James' and King Charles' reigns had been disgraced by better, they would not have risen again: but they were only kept down for a time by worse; and therefore they rose again at the Restoration, and revived with the monarchy. Thus that epidemical taint, with which King James infected the minds of men, continued upon us: and it is scarce hyperbolical to say, that this prince hath been the original cause of a series of misfortunes to this nation, as deplorable as a lasting infection of our air, of our water, of our earth, would have been. The spirit of his reign was maintained in that of his son (for how could it well be otherwise, when the same ministers were continued in power?), and the events of both produced the civil war. The civil war ended in the death of the King, and the exile of his family. The exile of these princes reconciled them to the religion of Rome, and to the politics of foreign nations, in such degrees as their different characters admitted. Charles sipped a little of the poisonous draught, but enough however to infect his whole conduct. As for James,

Ille impiger hausit
Spumantem pateram,

he drank the chalice off to the lowest and foulest dregs.

That principles as absurd as those in their nature, and as terrible in their consequences, such as would shock the common sense of a Samovede, or an Hottentot, and had just before deluged the nation in blood, should come into vogue again at the Restoration, will not appear strange to those who carry themselves back as it were to that point of time. The wounds of the civil war were bleeding, and the resentments of the cavaliers, who came into power at court and in Parliament, were at their height. No wonder then if few men had, in such a ferment as this, penetration enough to discern, or candour enough to acknowledge, or courage enough to maintain, that the principles we speak of were truly and primarily the cause of all their misfortunes. The events, which proved them so, were recent; but for that very reason, because they were recent, it was natural for men in such a circumstance as this, to make wrong judgments about them. It was natural for the royal party to ascribe all their and their country's misfortunes, without any due distinction, to the principles on which King Charles and even King James had been opposed; and to grow more zealous for those on which the governments of these two princes had been defended, and for which they had suffered. Add to this the national transport, on so great a revolution; the excess of joy which many felt, and many feigned; the adulation employed by many to acquire new merit; and by many to atone for past demerit; and you will find reason to be surprised, not that the same principles of government, as had threatened our liberties once, and must by necessary consequence do so again, were established; but that our liberties were not immediately, and at once given up. That they were saved, we owe not to Parliament, no not to the Convention Parliament, who brought the King home; but to those great and good men, Clarendon and Southampton. Far from taking advantage of the heat and fervour of the times to manage Parliaments into scandalous jobs, and fatal compliances with the crown, to their immortal honour, with gratitude and reverence to their memories be it spoken, they broke the army, stinted the revenue, and threw their master on the affections of his people. -- But I return.

Besides these reasons, drawn from the passions of men, others of a more sober kind may be given to account for the making a settlement at the Restoration upon principles too near akin to those which had prevailed before the war, and which had in truth caused it. Certain it is, that although the nonconformists were stunned by the blow they had just received, and though their violence was restrained by the force of the present conjuncture; yet they still existed. Symptoms of this appeared, even whilst the government was settling, and continued to appear long after it was settled. Now, every symptom of this kind renewed the dread of relapsing into those miseries, from which the nation had so lately recovered itself; and this dread had the natural effect of all extreme fears. It hurried men into every principle, as well as measure, which seemed the most opposite to those of the persons feared, and the most likely, though at any other risk, to defeat their design, and to obviate the present danger, real or imaginary. May we not fairly conjecture, for it is but conjecture, something more? In such a temper of mind, and such a situation of circumstances, might not even those, who saw how groundless and dangerous such extravagant notions about the right, power and prerogative of kings were, imagine however that it was a part of prudence to give way to them, and to countenance them in the present conjuncture; to suffer the opinions of the nation to be bent too far on one side, as they had been bent too far on the other; not that they might remain crooked, but that they might become straight?

The same spirit and much the same reasons that determined our settlement, at the Restoration, upon such high principles of monarchy, prevailed relatively to our religious differences, and the settlement of the Church. I shall speak of it with that freedom which a man may take, who is conscious that he means nothing but the public good, hath no by-ends, nor is under the influence of serving any particular cause.

I say then very frankly, that the Church and the King having been joined in all the late contests, both by those who attacked them, and those who defended them, ecclesiastical interests, resentments, and animosities came in to the aid of secular, in making the new settlement. Great lenity was shown at the Restoration, in looking backwards; unexampled and unimitated mercy to particular men, which deserved no doubt much applause. This conduct would have gone far towards restoring the nation to its primitive temper and integrity, to its old good manners, its old good humour, and its old good nature (expressions of my Lord Chancellor Clarendon, which I could never read without being moved and softened), if great severity had not been exercised immediately after, in looking forwards, and great rigour used to large bodies of men, which certainly deserves censure, as neither just, nor politic -- I say, not just; because there is, after all, a real and a wide difference between moral and party justice. The one is founded in reason; the other takes its colour from the passions of men, and is but another name for injustice. Moral justice carries punishment as far as reparation, and necessary terror require; no farther. Party justice carries it to the full extent of our power, and even to the gorging and sating of our revenge; from whence it follows that injustice and violence once begun, must become perpetual in the successive revolutions of parties, as long as these parties exist. -- I say, not politic; because it contradicted the other measures taken for quieting the minds of men. It alarmed all the sects anew; confirmed the implacability, and whetted the rancour of some; disappointed and damped a spirit of reconciliation in others; united them in a common hatred to the Church; and roused in the Church a spirit of intolerance and persecution. This measure was the more imprudent, because the opportunity seemed fair to take advantage of the resentments of the Presbyterians against the other sectaries, and to draw them, without persecuting the others, by the cords of love into the pale of the Church, instead of driving them back by severe usage into their ancient confederacies. But when resentments of the sort we now mention were let loose, to aggravate those of the other sort, there was no room to be surprised at the violences which followed; and they, who had acted greater, could not complain of these, great as they were, with any very good grace.

If we may believe one, who certainly was not partial against these sects, both Presbyterians and independents had carried the principles of rigour, in the point of conscience, much higher, and acted more implacably upon it, than ever the Church of England hath done, in its angriest fits. The securing themselves therefore against those, who had ruined them and the constitution once already, was a plausible reason for the Church party to give, and I doubt not the true and sole motive of many for exercising, and persisting in the exercise of great severity. General, prudential arguments might, and there is a reason to believe they did, weigh with particular men; but they could have little force, at such a time, on numbers. As little could some other considerations have then, whatever they have now. The promises at Breda, for instance, and the terms of the declaration sent from thence, could not be urged with force to a Parliament, who had no mind, and was strictly under no obligation, to make good such promises as the King had made, beyond his power of promising, if taken absolutely; or from which, if taken conditionally, he was discharged, on the refusal of Parliament to confirm them. -- Thus again, the merit pleaded by the Presbyterians, on account of the share they had in the Restoration, which was very real and very considerable, could avail however but little. That they went along with the national torrent, in restoring the constitution of Church and state, could not be denied. But then it was remembered too that these fruits of repentance came late; not till they had been oppressed by another sect, who turned upon them, wrested the power out of their hands, and made them feel, what they had made others feel, the tyranny of a party.

Such reasons and motives, as I have mentioned prevailed; and worse than these would have been sufficient, when the passions of men ran so high, to lay the Dissenters, without any distinction, under extreme hardships. They seemed to be the principal object of the fears and jealousies of Parliament. Addresses were continually made, and the edge of the law continually whetted against them, from 1660 to 1669, when the law for suppressing conventicles, and the last of those penal statutes passed, as I remember. Experience will justify me for saying that this long and extreme rigour was unwise, as well as unjust. It appears, indeed, from the memorials of those times, that they who suffered had given abundant provocation, though not sufficient excuse, to the rigour under which they suffered. Some former hardships which the Dissenters had endured from the Church, made them more violent against it, when they got possession of an usurped power. Just so the violence which they exercised at that time, stimulated the severity they felt in their turn, when the legal constitution of the Church was restored. Notwithstanding all which, I incline, upon very good reasons, to think that this severity was not in the first design of the ministers, nor would have been shown, if another fatal influence had not prevailed. The influence I mean is that of popery. It prevailed from the first moments to the last of the reign of King Charles the Second. The best ministers were frequently driven off their bias by it. The worst had a sure hold on their master, by complying with it. On the occasion now mentioned, this influence and the artifice of the popish faction worked very fatally on the passions of parties, and the private interests of individuals; and the ministers, and the Church, and the Dissenters, were bubbles alike of their common enemy. Bare faced popery could ask no favour, because popery could expect none. Protestant Dissenters were therefore to serve as stalking horses, that papists might creep behind them, and have hopes of being some time or other, admitted with them. The Church party was hallooed on the Dissenters; whilst the Dissenters were encouraged to unite and hold out; whilst they were flattered with an high opinion of their own strength, and the King's favour; and whilst some leading men amongst them, who thought it better to be at the head of a sect than at the tail of an establishment, were perhaps encouraged and confirmed in that thought, by the private applications of the court.

These arts, these wicked arts (for such they were) prevailed; and though the two thousand ministers, who went out of their churches on one day, were far from being all of the same mind, or having one positive consistent scheme; though many of them must have lost their benefices, even if they had complied with the Act of Uniformity, because they were intruders, and in actual possession of benefices legally belonging to others; yet, by uniting in the point of non-conformity, they appeared as one body, and in some sense they were so. Several of them were popular for certain modes of devotion, suited to the humour of the time; and several were men eminent for true learning and unaffected piety. They increased the zeal of their flocks, and created compassion in others. Here the court began to reap the fruits of their management, in the struggle for a toleration. I use the word, though I know it may be simply cavilled at. The first step made was an application to the King, who declared himself ready and willing to dispense, in their favour, with several things in the Act of Uniformity.. and thus the Dissenters were made, by the severity of the Parliament and the intrigues of the court, the instruments of introducing a dispensing power. Such attempts were made more than once; but happily failed as often as made, through the vigorous opposition of Parliament; till at last the scene began to open more, and the Dissenters to see that they were made the tools of promoting what they never intended, the advancement of the prerogative above law, and the toleration of popery against it.

To conclude. By such means as I have described, the constitution of parties after the Restoration preserved unhappily too near a resemblance to the constitution of parties before the war. The prerogative was not, indeed, carried so high in some instances, as James and Charles the First had attempted to carry it. Nay, some supports of it were bought off, and taken away; and others more dangerous, as we have observed, were prevented by the virtue of the men at that time in power. But still the government was established on principles sufficient to invite a king to exercise arbitrary power, and support him by their consequences in the exercise of it afterwards; so that, in this respect, the seeds of future divisions were sowed abundantly. The Dissenters had, indeed, lost much of their credit and all their power. But still they had numbers, and property, and industry, and compassion, for them; so that here was another crop of dissensions planted to nurse up, and to strengthen the other. They did not inflame the contest which followed, into a civil war, as they had helped to do formerly; but I think that without them, and the disunion and hatred among Protestants, consequent upon them, the zeal against popery could not have run into a kind of factious fury, as we shall be obliged to confess it did. I think that fears of falling once more under Presbyterian, or republican power, could not have been wrought up in the manner they were, towards the end of this reign, so as to drown even the fear of popery itself; so as to form a party, in favour of a popish successor; so as to transport both clergy and laity into an avowal of principles, which must have reduced us to be at this time slaves, not freemen, papists, not Protestants; if the very men, who had avowed such principles, had not saved themselves and us, in direct opposition to them. But I am running into the subject of another letter, when this is grown too prolix already.

I am, sir, yours, etc.

Letter III

Sir, The sum of what hath been said, concerning the settlement of Church and state, and the division of parties at the Restoration, amounts to this; that as the attempts of King James and King Charles the First, against the spirit of the constitution, threw the nation into a civil war, and all the miserable consequences, both necessary and contingent, of that calamity; so the fury, enthusiasm and madness of those factions which arose during that unnatural ferment, frightened the nation back, if not into all, yet more generally perhaps than before, into most of the notions that were established to justify the excesses of former reigns. Hereditary, indefeasible right, passive obedience and non-resistance, those corner-stones, which are an improper foundation for any superstructure, but that of tyranny, were made, even by Parliament, the foundation of the monarchy; and all those, who declined an exact and strict conformity to the whole establishment of the Church, even to the most minute parts of it, were deprived of the protection, nay, exposed to the prosecution of the state. Thus one part of the nation stood proscribed by the other; the least, indeed, by the greatest; whereas a little before the greatest stood proscribed by the least. Roundhead and cavalier were, in effect, no more. Whig and Tory were not yet in being. The only two apparent parties were those of Churchmen and Dissenters; and religious differences alone at this time maintained the distinction.

Such was the state of party, upon the meeting of the first parliament called by King Charles the Second, and for some years afterwards, as nearly as I have been able to observe by what I have read in history, and received from tradition. -- How the notions then in vogue began to change, and this spirit to decline, some time after the Restoration; how the zeal of Churchmen and Dissenters against one another began to soften, and a Court and Country party to form themselves; how faction mingled itself again in the contest, and renewed the former resentments and jealousies; how Whig and Tory arose, the furious offspring of those inauspicious parents roundhead and cavalier; how the proceedings of one party might have thrown us back into a civil war, confusion and anarchy; how the success of the other had like to have entailed tyranny on the state, and popery in Church; how the Revolution did, and could alone, deliver us from the grievances we felt, and from the dangers we feared; how this great event was brought about by a formal departure of each side from the principles objected to them by the other. how this renewal of our constitution, on the principles of liberty, by the most solemn, deliberate, national act, that ever was made, did not only bind at least every one of those, who concurred in any degree to bring it about (and that description includes almost the whole nation); but how absurd it is for any man, who was born since that era, or who, being born before it, hath been bound by no particular, legal tie to any other settlement, to be willing to give up the advantages of the present constitution, any more than he would give up the privileges of the great charter, which was made and ratified so many ages ago; all these points are to be now touched in that summary manner which I have prescribed to myself, and which will be sufficient, in so plain a case, where men are to be reminded of what they know already, rather than to be informed, and to be confirmed, not to be convinced.

I proceed therefore to observe, that the nation began to be indisposed to the court, soon after the Restoration. The sale of Dunkirk helped to ruin a great and good minister, though it be still doubtful at least, notwithstanding the clamour raised, and the negotiations with d'Estrades so much insisted upon, whether he was strictly answerable for this measure. Who knows how soon the reestablishment of the same port and harbour may be laid in form to the charge of those two men, who are strictly and undeniably answerable for it, and who stagger already under the weight of so many other just imputations?

The first Dutch war, which was lightly and rashly undertaken, and which ended ignominiously for the nation, augmented the public indisposition. Nay misfortunes, such as the plague, and the burning of London, as well as mismanagement, had this effect. But we must place at the head of all, a jealousy of popery, which was well founded, and therefore gathered strength daily. This soon heated the minds of men to such a degree, that it seems almost wonderful the plague was not imputed to the papists, as peremptorily as the fire.

The death of my lord Southampton, and the disgrace and banishment of my lord Clarendon, made room for new causes of jealousy and dissatisfaction; and the effects increased in proportion. These two noble lords had stood in the breach against popery and foreign politics; and what one of them said to the other, that is, Southampton of Clarendon, may be applied with justice to both. They were true Protestants, and honest Englishmen. Whilst they were in place, our laws, our religion, and our liberties were in safety. When they were removed, England felt the ill effects of the change; for when they were removed, all those were in danger. How glorious a panegyric is this, in which the unanimous voice of posterity does and must agree? It is preferable surely to all the titles and honours and estates, which those illustrious patriots left behind them: and so I persuade myself it is esteemed by the young noblemen, who are heirs to their virtues as well as their fortunes.

King Charles, and more than him, the duke and the popish faction, were now at liberty to form new schemes; or rather to pursue old ones, with less reserve, against the religion and liberty of England. As soon as the famous cabal had the whole administration of affairs, these designs were pushed without any reserve at all. I am not writing the history of this reign; nor have I undertaken any thing more than to make a few observations on the several turns of parties in it. I need not therefore descend into particular proofs of the designs which I attribute to the court; nor into a deduction of the measures taken to promote them, and the efforts made to defeat them. That these designs were real, can be doubted of by no man; since without quoting many printed accounts, which are in the hands of every one, or insisting on other proofs, which have not seen the light, and such there are, the abbot Primi's relation of the secret negotiations between the King and his sister, the duchess of Orléans, published in 1682, as I think, and immediately suppressed, as well as the history of the Jesuit d'Orléans, written on memorials furnished to him by King James the Second, put the whole matter out of dispute, and even beyond the reach of cavil. It is sufficient for my purpose to observe, that the tide of party, which had run so strongly for the court, and had been seldom so much as slackened hitherto, began now to turn, and to run year after year more strongly the other way.

When this Parliament sat down, for it deserves our particular observation that both houses were full of zeal for the present government, and of resentment against the late usurpations, there was but one party in Parliament; and no other party could raise its head in the nation. This might have been the case much longer, probably as long as King Charles had sat on the throne, if the court had been a little honester, or a little wiser. No Parliament ever did more to gain their prince than this. They seemed for several years, to have nothing so much at heart as securing his government, advancing his prerogative, and filling his coffers. The grants they made him were such as passed for instances of profusion in those days; when one million two hundred thousand pounds a year for the civil list, the fleet, the guards and garrisons, and all the ordinary expenses of the government, was thought an exorbitant sum; how little a figure soever it would make in our times, when two thirds of that sum, at least, are appropriated to the use of the civil list singly. But all this was to no purpose: a foreign interest prevailed; a cabal governed; and sometimes the cabal, and sometimes a prime minister had more credit with the King than the whole body of his people. When the Parliament saw that they could not gain him over to his own, and to their common interest; nor prevail on him by connivance, compliance, and other gentle methods; they turned themselves to such as were rough, but agreeable to law and the custom of Parliament, as well as proportionable to the greatness of the exigency. That they lost their temper, on some particular occasions, must not be denied. They were men, and therefore frail: but their frailties of this kind proceeded from their love of their country. They were transported, when they found that their religion and liberty were constantly in danger from the intrigues of a popish faction; and they would have been so transported, no doubt, if liberty alone had been attacked by a Protestant faction. Then it was, that this High-Church Parliament grew favourable to Protestant Dissenters, and ready to make that just distinction, so long delayed between them and popish recusants, that the whole Protestant interest might unite in the common cause. Then it was, that this prerogative-Parliament defied prerogative, in defence of their own privileges, and of the liberties of their country. Then it was, that this passive-obedience and non-resistance Parliament went the utmost lengths of resistance, in a parliamentary way; and the necessary consequence of the steps they made in this way, must have been resistance in another, if the King had not dropped his ministers, retracted his pretensions, redressed some and given expectation of redressing other grievances. In fine, this pensioner-Parliament, as it hath been styled, with some corruption in the house, and an army sometimes at the door of it, disbanded the army in England, and protested against the militia settled in Scotland by Act of Parliament, and appointed to march for any service, wherein the King's honour, authority, and greatness were concerned, in obedience to the orders of the Privy Council. That I may not multiply particular instances, they not only did their utmost to secure their country against immediate danger, but projected to secure it against remote danger, by an exclusion of the Duke of York from the crown, after they had endeavoured strenuously, but in vain, to prevent his entailing popery more easily upon us, by his marriage with a popish princess; for he had declared himself a papist with as much affectation, as if he expected to grow popular by it; had already begun to approve his zeal, and exercise his talent in conversions, by that of his first wife; and was notoriously the agent of Rome and France, in order to seduce his brother into stronger measures than King Charles was willing to take. King Charles, to use an expression of the lord Halifax of that age, would trot; but his brother would gallop.

When I reflect on the particulars here mentioned, and a great many others, which might be mentioned to the honour of this Parliament, I cannot hear it called the pensioner-Parliament, as it were by way of eminence, without a degree of honest indignation; especially in the age in which we live, and by some of those who affect the most to bestow upon it this ignominious appellation. Pensions indeed, to the amount of seven or eight thousand pounds, as I remember, were discovered to have been given to some members of the House of Commons. But then let it be remembered likewise, that this expedient of corrupting Parliaments began under the administration of that boisterous, over-bearing, dangerous minister, Clifford. As long as there remained any pretence to say that the court was in the interest of the people, the expedient of bribery was neither wanted, nor practised. When the court was evidently in another interest, the necessity and the practice of bribing the representatives of the people commenced. Should a Parliament of Britain act in compliance with a court, against the sense and interest of the nation, mankind would be ready to pronounce very justly that such a Parliament was under the corrupt influence of the court. But, in the case now before us, we have a very comfortable example of a court wicked enough to stand in need of corruption, and to employ it; and of a Parliament virtuous enough to resist the force of this expedient; which Philip of Macedon boasted that he employed to invade the liberties of other countries; and which had been so often employed by men of less genius, as well as rank, to invade the liberties of their own. All that corruption could do in this Parliament, was to maintain the appearance of a Court party, whilst the measures of the court united a Country party, in opposition to them. Neither places nor pensions could hinder courtiers in this Parliament from voting, on many signal occasions, against the court; nor protect either those who drew the King into ill measures, nor those who complied with him in them. Nay, this pensioner Parliament, if it must be still called so, gave one proof of independency, besides that of contriving a test in 1675, to purge their members on oath from all suspicion of corrupt influence, which ought to wipe off this stain from the most corrupt. They drove one of their paymasters out of court, and impeached the other, in the fullness of his power; even at a time, when the King was so weak as to make, or so unhappy as to be forced to make, on account of pensions privately negotiated from France, the cause of the crown and the cause of the minister one, and to blend their interests together.

What I have said to the honour of the long Parliament is just; because in fact the proceedings of that Parliament were agreeable to the representation I have given of them. But now, if some severe censor should appear, and insist that the dame was chaste, only because she was not enough tempted; that more pensions would have made more pensioners; that much money and little prerogative is more dangerous to liberty than much prerogative and little money; and that the worst and weakest minister King Charles ever had, might have been absolute in this very parliament whose character I defend, if such a minister had been able to enlist, with places, pensions and occasional bribes, not a slender majority, which the defection of a few might at any time defeat, but such a bulky majority, as might impose on itself: if any one, I say, should refine in this manner, and continue to insist that such a minister, with such a purse, would have stood his ground in the Parliament I speak of, with how much contempt and indignation soever he might have been everywhere treated by the people; I shall not presume to assert the contrary. It might have been so. Our safety was owing as much, perhaps, to the poverty of the court, as to the virtue of the Parliament. We might have lost our liberties. But then I would observe before I conclude, that if this be true, the preservation of our religion and liberty, at that time, was owing to these two circumstances: first, that King Charles was not parsimonious, but squandered on his pleasures, what he might have employed to corrupt this Parliament; secondly, that the ministers in that reign, fingering no money but the revenue, ordinary and extraordinary, had no opportunity to filch in the pockets of every private man, and to bribe the bubbles very often with their own money; as might be done now, when funding hath been so long in fashion, and the greatest minister hath the means of being the greatest stockjobber, did not the eminent integrity of the minister, and the approved virtue of the age, secure us from any such danger.

We have now brought the deduction of parties very near to the era of Whig and Tory, into which the court found means to divide the nation, and by this division to acquire in the nation a superiority, which had been attempted ineffectually, even by corruption in Parliament. But this I reserve for another letter, and am,

sir, yours, etc.

Letter IV

Sir, There is a passage in Tully so extremely applicable to the mischievous, but transitory, prevalence of those principles of government, which King James the First imported into this country, that since it occurs to my memory, I cannot begin this letter better than by quoting it to you, and making a short commentary on it. Opinionum commenta delet dies, naturae judicia confirmat. Groundless opinions are destroyed, but rational judgments, or the judgments of nature, are confirmed by time. It is Balbus, who makes this observation very properly, when he is about to prove the existence of a supreme being. The same observation might have been employed as properly, on other occasions, against Balbus himself; and the truth of it might have been exemplified, by comparing the paradoxes and superstitious opinions of his own sect, as well as the tales of an hippocentaur, or a chimera, with the eternal truths of genuine theism, and sound philosophy. In short, the application of it might have been justly made then, and may be so now in numberless instances, taken from the most important subjects, on which the thoughts of men are exercised, or in which their interests, as men and members of society, are concerned.

The authority of a sect, and much more of a state, is able to inspire, and habit to confirm, the most absurd opinions. Passion, or interest, can create zeal. But nothing can give stability and durable uniformity to error. Indolence, or ignorance, may keep it floating, as it were, on the surface of the mind, and sometimes hinder truth from penetrating; or force may maintain it in profession, when the mind assents to it no longer. But such opinions, like human bodies, tend to their dissolution from their birth. They will be soon rejected in theory, where men can think, and in practice, where men can act with freedom. They maintain themselves no longer, than the same means of seduction, which first introduced them, or the same circumstances, which first imposed them, attend and continue to support them. Men are dragged into them, and held down in them, by chains of circumstances. Break but these chains, and the mind returns with a kind of intellectual elasticity to its proper object, truth. This natural motion is so strong, that examples might be cited of men embracing truth in practice, before they were convinced of it in theory. There are cases, where reason, freed from constraint, or roused by necessity, acts in some sort the part of instinct. We are impelled by one, before we have time to form an opinion. We are often determined by the other, against our opinion; that is, before we can be said properly to have changed it. But observe here the perverseness of that rational creature, man. When this happens; when the judgment of nature, for so we may speak after Tully, hath prevailed against the habitual prejudice of opinion; instead of acknowledging the victorious truth, which determined him to act, instead of condemning the erroneous opinion, against which he acted, he is too often apt to endeavour, peevishly and pedantically, to reconcile his actions to his error; nay, to persist in renouncing true, and asserting false maxims, whilst he reaps the benefit, and maintains the consequences of the former.

You see whither we are brought by these general reflections. The absurd opinions (fictae et vanae our Roman orator would have called them) about the right, power, and prerogative of kings, were so little able to take a deep root, and to stand the blasts of opposition, that few of those who drew their swords on the side of King Charles the First, were determined to it by them. I assert this fact on contemporary authority; on the authority even of some who were themselves engaged in that cause, from the beginning to the end of our civil wars. A more recent tradition assures us, that when the same opinions revived at the Restoration, they did not sink deep even then into the minds of men; but floated so superficially there, that the Parliament (the very parliament, who had authorized them, and imposed them, as I observed in the last letter) proceeded a great way, and was ready to have proceeded farther, in direct opposition to them. A tradition still more recent will inform us, and that is to be the subject of this letter; that when these opinions revived again, at the latter end of the same reign, with an appearance of greater strength, and of a more national concurrence than ever, they revived but to be exploded more effectually than ever. King Charles made use of them to check the ferment raised against his government; but did not seem to expect that they would subsist long in force. His wiser brother depended much on them; but his dependence was vain. They were, at that time, wearing out apace; and they wore out the faster by the extravagant use which was made of them. They were in the mouths of many, but in the hearts of few; for almost all those who had them in their mouths, acted against them. Thus were these wicked and ridiculous principles of government twice revived, and twice destroyed again, in less than thirty years from the Restoration.

Ter si resurgat murus aheneus,
-- Ter pereat!

The second revival of these principles, for enough hath been said of the first, happened soon after the dissolution of the long Parliament; and there, I think, we must place the birth of Whig and Tory, though these parties did not grow up into full maturity, nor receive their names till about two years afterwards. The dissolution of this Parliament was desired by men of very different complexions; by some, with factious views; by others, on this honest and true maxim, that a standing Parliament, or the same Parliament long continued, changes the very nature of the constitution, in the fundamental article on which the preservation of our whole liberty depends. But whatever motives others might have to desire this dissolution, the motives which prevailed on the King, were probably those. This Parliament not only grew more reserved in their grants of money, and stiff and inflexible in other matters, but seemed to have lost that personal regard which they had hitherto preserved for him. They brought their attacks home to his family; nay, to himself, in the heats which the discovery and prosecution of the Popish Plot occasioned. That on the Queen provoked him. That on his brother embarrassed him. But that which provoked and embarrassed him both, was the prosecution of the Earl of Danby, in the manner in which it was carried on. I will not descend into the particulars of an affair, at this time so well understood. This minister was turned out, and might have been punished in another manner, and much more severely than I presume any one, who knows the anecdotes of that age, thinks that he deserved to be. But the intention of this attack, according to Rapin, was to show that the King, as well as his brother, was at the head of a conspiracy to destroy the government, and the Protestant religion. This is a very bold assertion, and such a one as I do not pretend to warrant. But thus much is certain; that if the Earl of Danby's impeachment had been tried, he must have justified himself, by showing what every one knew to be true, that the secret negotiations with France, and particularly that for money, were the King's negotiations, not his.

Now, whether the King hoped, by dissolving the Parliament, to stop this prosecution; or to soften that of the Popish Plot; or to defeat the project of excluding the Duke of York; his hopes were all disappointed. The following Parliaments trod in the steps of this. How, indeed, could they do otherwise in those days, when the temper of the people determined the character of the Parliament; when an influence on elections by prerogative, was long since over, and private, indirect means of gaining another more illegal influence were not yet found, or the necessary supports of such means were not yet acquired; when any man, who had desired people, who knew neither his fortune, his character, nor even his person, to choose him their representative in Parliament, that is, to appoint him their trustee, would have been looked upon and treated as a madman; in short, when a Parliament, acting against the declared sense of the nation, would have appeared as surprising a phenomenon in the moral world, as a retrograde motion of the sun, or any other signal deviation of things from their ordinary course in the natural world.

There was indeed one point, which this Parliament had taken extremely to heart, and which was no longer open to the Parliaments that followed; I mean the conduct of the King in foreign affairs, during the war between France, and Holland and her allies, which ended by the Treaty of Nijmegen. This war was not made in remote countries. It was made at our door. The motives to it, on the part of the aggressor, were neither injuries received, nor rights invaded; but a spirit of conquest, and barefaced usurpation. The interest we had in it was not such as depended on a long chain of contingencies, and required much subtlety to find out, but plain and immediate. The security, and at one time, the very existence of the Dutch commonwealth depended on the event of it. No wonder then, if the conduct of the King, who joined openly with France at first, and served her privately to better purpose at last, furnished ample matter to the public discontent, and helped to increase the ill humour of succeeding Parliaments on two other points, which were still open, and continued to draw their whole attention, as long as King Charles suffered any to sit, during the rest of his reign.

These two points were the prosecution of persons involved in the Popish Plot, and the exclusion of the Duke of York. The first of these had prepared mankind for the second. The truth is, that if nothing which affected the Duke had been produced, besides Coleman's letters, these proofs of his endeavours to subvert the religion and liberty of the people he pretended to govern, joined to so many others of public notoriety, which showed the whole bent of soul, and the whole scheme of his policy, would have afforded reason more than sufficient for sacrificing the interest, or even the right (if you will call it so) of one man to the preservation of three kingdoms. I know how partial we are in the judgments we make, conceding ourselves, and our own interests. I know that this partiality is the immediate effect of self-love, the strongest spring in the human, nay in the whole animal system; and yet I cannot help being surprised that a man should expect to be trusted with a crown, because he is born a prince, in a country where he could not be trusted by law, and ought not to be trusted in reason, with a constable's staff, if he was born a private person. Let me add, that such an expectation must be deemed more unreasonable in a descendant of Henry the Fourth of France, if possible, than in any other man. The hereditary title of the house of Bourbon, on the extinction of that of Valois, was certainly as clear, and much better established by the laws and usages of France, than the hereditary right of any prince of the house of Stuart to the crown of England; and yet Henry the Fourth, with all the personal qualifications which could recommend a prince to the esteem and love of his subjects, would never have been received into the throne by the French nation, if he had not been of the religion of that nation. On what foundation then could it be expected that a Protestant and a free people should be less animated by religion and liberty both, than their neighbours had been by religion alone; for liberty had nothing to do in that contest? Our fathers were thus animated, at the time I am speaking of. The long Parliament projected the exclusion; and if the design had been carried on, in the spirit of a Country party, it would probably have been carried on with a national concurrence, and would consequently have succeeded in effect, though not perhaps at once, nor in the very form at first proposed.

The violent and sanguinary prosecution of the Popish Plot was intended, no doubt, to make the success of the exclusion more secure, by raising the passions of men so high, that no expedient but an absolute and immediate exclusion, in the terms of the bill, should be thought sufficient. I cannot help saying on this occasion, that I wish this laudable and just design had not been pursued, by wading through the blood of so many men: enemies to our religion and liberty, indeed; but convicted, for the most part on evidence, which could hardly have passed at any other time. I wish we had done nothing which might be interpreted to the disrepute of our own religion, whilst we attempted to proscribe theirs. In fine, I wish, for the honour of my country, that the prosecution on account of this plot, and much more on account of another, which was set up as a kind of retaliation for this, and which caused some of the noblest, as well as some of the meanest blood in the nation to be spilt, could be erased out of the records of history. But there is still a farther reason to wish that greater temper had been joined, at this time, to the same zeal for religion and liberty. Men were made to believe that the King, who had yielded on so many other occasions, would yield on this; that he, who had given up so many ministers, would give up his brother at last; and that if the Parliament would accept nothing less than the exclusion in their own way, it would be extorted from him. Now in this they were fatally deceived: and I must continue to suspect, till I meet with better reasons than I have yet found to the contrary, that they were so deceived by the intrigues of two very opposite cabals; by the Duke of York's, who were averse to all exclusions, whether absolute, or limited, but most to the last; and by the Duke of Monmouth's, who could not find their account in any but an absolute exclusion; nor in this neither, unless the bill passed without any mention of the Duke's daughters, as next in succession: to which, as bishop Burnet tells us, the Prince of Orange was willing to comply, on the faith of assurances he had received from hence; a fact, which the bishop might know, and we may therefore take on his word, as extraordinary as it seems. I would only observe that King William, then Prince of Orange, could have no reason for consenting that his wife's pretensions to the crown should not be confirmed by an act which excluded her father, except one; and that was the necessity, real, or apparent, of uniting different private interests in the public measure of excluding the Duke of York. Now, if this was his reason, the same reason proves, what shall be farther confirmed in the next letter, that a spirit of faction ran through the proceedings of those who promoted the bill of exclusion: and when faction was opposed to faction, there is no room to wonder, if that of the court prevailed. The King, who had not used to show firmness on other occasions, was firm on this: and the consequence of pushing the exclusion in this manner, was giving him an opportunity of breaking the Country party; of dividing the nation into Whig and Tory: of governing himself without Parliaments; and of leaving the throne open to his brother, not only without our limitations or conditions, but with a more absolute power established, than any prince of his family had enjoyed.

As soon as the court had got, by management, a plausible pretence of objecting a spirit of faction to those in the opposition, the strength of the opposition was broken, because the national union was dissolved. A Country party must be authorized by the voice of the country. It must be formed on principles of common interest. It cannot be united and maintained on the particular prejudices, any more than it can, or ought to be, directed to the particular interests of any set of men whatsoever. A party, thus constituted, is improperly called party. It is the nation, speaking and acting in the discourse and conduct of particular men. It will prevail in all struggles sooner or later, as long as our constitution subsists; and nothing is more easy to demonstrate than this, that whenever such a party finds it difficult to prevail, our constitution is in danger; and when they find it impossible, our constitution must in fact be altered. On the other hand, whenever the prejudices and interests of particular sets of men prevail, the essence of a Country party is annihilated, and the very appearance of it will soon be lost. Every man will resort in this case to that standard, under which he hath been marshalled in former divisions; to which his inclinations lead him; or which, though he does not entirely approve, vet disapproves the least.

Such a dissolution of a Country party was brought about at the period to which we are now come in our deduction of parties, by the passions, the public pique, and private interest of particular men, and by the wily intrigues of the court. The dissolution of this party, and the new division of the nation into Whig and Tory, brought us into extreme danger. This extreme danger reunited the nation again, and a coalition of parties saved the whole. Such an experience might have showed them, that how opposite soever their professions were, yet they really differed more on negative than on positive principles; that they saw one another in a false light, for the most part, and fought with phantoms, conjured up to maintain their divisions, rather than with real beings. Experience had not this happy effect soon. The swell of the sea continued long after the storm was over; and we have seen these parties kick and cuff like drunken men, when they were both of the same side. -- Let us hope that this scene of tragical folly is over, to the disappointment of those who are conscious of past iniquity, or who meditate future mischief. There are no others who wish and endeavour to prolong it.

I am, sir, etc.

Letter V

Sir, Nothing is more useful, nothing more necessary, in the conduct of public affairs, than a just discernment of spirits. I mean here not only that natural private sagacity which is conversant about individuals, and enables some men to pry, as it were, into the heads and hearts of others, and to discover within them those latent principles which constitute their true characters, and are often disguised in outward action; but I mean principally that acquired, public, political sagacity, which is of the same kind, though I think not altogether the same thing as the former; which flows from nature too, but requires more to be assisted by experience, and formed by art. This is that superior talent of ministers of state, which is so rarely found in those of other countries, and which abounds so happily at present in those of Great Britain. It is by this, that they discover the most secret dispositions of other courts; and, discovering those dispositions, prevent their designs, or never suffer themselves to be surprised by them. It is by this, that they watch over the public tranquillity at home; foresee what effect every event that happens, and much more every step they make themselves, will have on the sentiments and passions of mankind. This part of human wisdom is therefore everywhere of use; but is of indispensable necessity in free countries, where a greater regard is to be constantly had to the various fluctuations of parties; to the temper, humour, opinion and prejudices of the people. Without such a regard as this, those combinations of peculiar circumstances, which we commonly call conjunctures, can never be improved to the best advantage, by acting in conformity, and in proportion to them; and without improving such conjunctures to the best advantage, it is impossible to achieve any great undertaking, or even to conduct affairs successfully in their ordinary course.

A want of this just discernment of spirits, if I am not extremely mistaken, defeated the designs of those who prosecuted with so much vigour the Popish Plot, and the exclusion of the Duke of York. Several of them were men of very great abilities; and yet we shall have no reason to be surprised that they failed in this point, if we reflect how unfit even the greatest genius is to discern the spirit of others, when he hath once overheated his own. All men are fallible: but here lies the difference. Some men, such as I have just mentioned, crossed by difficulties, pressed by exigencies, transported by their own passions, or by the passions of those who fight under their banner, may now and then deviate into error, and into error of long and fatal consequence. But there are some men, such as I shall not mention upon this occasion (because I reserve them for another and a better), who never deviate into the road of good sense; who, crossed by no difficulties, pressed by no exigencies, meeting scarce opposition enough to excite their industry, and guiding a tame well-tutored flock, that follow their bell-wether obstinately, but never tread on his heels: there are men, I say, whose special privilege it is to proceed with all these advantages, deliberately and superciliously, from blunder to blunder, from year to year, in one perpetual maze of confused, incoherent, inconsistent, unmeaning schemes of business.

But having nothing to do with the men of this character at present, I return to those of the former class; to the men who led the Whig party, at its first appearance, in the time of King Charles the Second. The foundation upon which they built all their hopes of success, was this: that they should frighten and force the King into a compliance with them: but they did not enough consider that the methods they took were equally proper to frighten and force a great part of the nation from them, by reason of the particular circumstances of that time. They did not enough consider, that when they began to put their designs in execution, scarce twenty years had passed from the Restoration; and that the highest principles, in favour of the Church and the monarchy, had prevailed almost universally during one half of that time, and very generally during the other half; that they had the accidental passions of the people for them, but the settled habits of thinking against them; that they were going off from a broad to a narrow bottom; from the nation to a part of the nation; and this at a time, when they wanted a more than ordinary concurrence of the whole body. They did not enough consider that they were changing the very nature of their party, and giving an opportunity to the court, which was then become, in the strict sense of the word, a faction, to grow up into a party again, and such a party as would divide, at least, the people with them, upon principles, plausible in those days, and sufficient to raise a spirit capable to disappoint all their endeavours.

The same resentments and prejudices, the same jealousies and fears, which burst out with violence, upon many occasions a few years before, lay still in the hearts of men; latent and quiet, indeed, and wearing out by degrees, but yet easy to be revived, and to be blown up anew. If we compare the conduct of the long Parliament in 1674 and 1675, with the attempts which had been lately made, during the administration of the Cabal; with the secret of the second Dutch war, and many other designs and practices of the court, which were then come lately and very authentically to light; with the state of Scotland, which was then subdued under a real tyranny and with that of Ireland, where, to say no more, the Act of Settlement was but ill observed; if we make this comparison, it will not yet appear that the proceedings of the House of Commons were immoderate, though they were warm; nor factious, though they were vigorous; nor that any danger could be then reasonably apprehended from them, except to the enemies of the constitution in Church and state; and yet even then the old resentments, prejudices, jealousies and fears began to revive; and an apprehension of falling back under the influence of Presbyterians and republican principles began to show itself in the House of Lords, and in the nation. It is true, that this had no immediate consequence; because the Popish Plot broke out soon afterwards like a mighty flame, in which these little fires, that began to burn anew, were lost. This great event made the Church and the Dissenters continue to run into one, as they had begun to do before; and the sole division of parties was that of the Court and the Country, as long as this Parliament lasted. But still it was evident with how delicate an hand every thing that related to our former disputes, required to be touched. It was evident that the least alarm given to the Church, or to those who value themselves on the principles of loyalty then in fashion, would be sufficient to open those wounds which were just skinned over, and to raise two new parties out of the ashes of the old.

These parties were not raised, whilst the long Parliament sat; because a general opinion prevailed, and well enough founded on their precedent conduct, that however angry the King might be with the Parliament, or the Parliament with the King, a few popular steps made on one side, and a little money granted on the other, would soften matters between them, and dispose them to forget all former quarrels. As hot therefore as the Parliament grew, and as much as some people might think that they exceeded their bounds; yet still it was difficult to persuade even these people that a Parliament, like this, would push things to the last extremity; destroy the constitution they had settled and supported with so much zeal; or draw the sword against a prince, to whom they had borne so much affection. But in the Parliaments which followed, the case was not the same; and I will state as shortly as I can, upon authorities, which no man likely to contradict me must refuse, what made the difference. These authorities shall be that of Burnet, and that of Rapin; whom I quote, on this occasion, for the same reason that I would quote my lord Clarendon against King Charles the First, or Ludlow for him.

In the year 1676, before we have grounds sufficient to affirm that the design of excluding the Duke of York was formed, but not before we have reason to suspect that it might be in the thoughts of several, those who stood foremost in the opposition to the court, were very industrious to procure a dissolution of the long Parliament; so industrious, that they negotiated the affair with the Duke, who had concurred in a vote for an address to dissolve it; and they undertook that a new parliament should be more inclinable to grant the papists a toleration, than they would ever find this would prove. The papists were in earnest for this measure; since Coleman drew a declaration for justifying it, and since their design in it was to divide the King and his people. It is fair to conclude that the Protestants, who had been in it at the time I mention, upon party views, were at least as much so, when their views rose higher. This Parliament had pushed a strict and thorough examination into the Popish Plot, with great sincerity and zeal. Nay, the project of the exclusion had been started, though not prosecuted, in the last session. May we not take it for granted however, that they, who were now resolved to carry the exclusion, in a manner in which they soon attempted to carry it, and who foresaw by consequence the difficulties that would be opposed to them, and the strong measures they should be obliged to pursue, in order to overcome these difficulties; I say, might not they think this Parliament much less proper than any other to engage and persist in such measures? They thought thus, without doubt; and so far they judged better than the King, who came into the dissolution; upon very different motives. But as to the consequence of engaging a new Parliament in such strong measures, the event showed that the King judged better than they, in the progress of this affair.

The Dissenters, who had been long persecuted by the parliament, and bantered and abused by the court, were encouraged by the conjuncture to lift up their heads. They took advantage of the horror and indignation, which the discovery of the Popish Plot, and the use made of this discovery had raised all over the kingdom. They could not be more zealous in this cause than the members of the established Church had shown themselves to be; but they cried, perhaps, louder for it. In short, whatever their management was, or however they were abetted, certain it is that they were very active, and very successful too, in the elections of the Parliament which followed the long Parliament, according to Rapin, who asserts that many of the members, chosen into this House of Commons, were Presbyterians. He might have said as much, upon just as good grounds, of the two Parliaments which followed this; and I shall speak of them indiscriminately. The leaders, who mustered all their forces, in order to push the Bill of Exclusion, looked on this turn in the elections as an advantage to them: and it might not have been a disadvantage, if they and the Dissenters had improved it with more moderation. But they were far from doing so, as Rapin himself seems to own a little unwillingly, when he says, that complaisance for the Presbyterians were carried, perhaps, too far in the bill for the comprehension of Protestant Dissenters. Bishop Burnet speaks more plainly. He owns that many began to declare openly in favour of the nonconformists; that upon this the nonconformists behaved themselves very indecently. that they fell severely on the body of the clergy; and that they made the bishops and clergy apprehend that a rebellion, and with it the pulling the Church to pieces, was designed. Several other passages of the same strength, and to the same purpose, might be collected from this historian; and he, who reads them, will not be surprised, I think, to find that such proceedings as these, both in Parliament and out of it, gave an alarm to the clergy, and set them to make parallels between the late and the present times; and to infuse the fears and the passions, which agitated them, into the nation. The bishop accuses them, indeed, of doing this with much indecency. But they, who are frightened out of their wits, will be apt to be indecent; and indecency begets indecency.

At the same time that the jealousies of a design to destroy the Church prevailed, others prevailed likewise of a design to alter the government of the state; of a design not only against the successor, but against the possessor of the crown. Many well-meaning men, says bishop Buret upon one occasion, began to dislike these practices, and to apprehend that a change of government was designed. -- The King came to think himself, says the same author upon another occasion, levelled at chiefly, though for decency's sake his brother was only named. Rapin goes farther; for, speaking of the same time, he uses this remarkable expression; that 'Things seemed to be taking the same course as in the year 1640; and there was reason to think that the opposing party had no better intentions towards the king now than the enemies of King Charles the First had towards him.' But whatever some particular men, who knew themselves irreconcilable with the King, as well as the Duke, or some others, who had still about them a tang of religious enthusiasm and republican whimsies, might intend; I am far from thinking that the party, who promoted the exclusion, meant to destroy, on the contrary it is plain that they meant to preserve, by that very measure, the constitution in Church and state. The reason why I quote these passages, and refer to others of the same kind, is not to show what was really designed, but what was apprehended; for as the distinction of Whig and Tory subsisted long after the real differences were extinguished, so were these parties at first divided, not so much by overt acts committed, as by the apprehensions, which each of them entertained of the intentions of the other. When the resolution was once taken of rejecting all limitations, on the belief artfully, and, I think, knavishly propagated, that the King would yield, if the Parliament persisted; the necessary consequences of the King's adhering inflexibly to his brother were those which followed, those fulmina parliamentaria, harsh votes, angry proceedings, addresses, that were in truth remonstrances, projects of associations, pretensions to a power of dispensing with the execution of laws (that very prerogative they had so justly refused to the crown) and many others, which I omit. All these would have been blasts of wind, bruta fulmina, no more, if the King had yielded: and that they were pushed in this confidence by the bulk of the party who pushed them, cannot be doubted; since it cannot be doubted that the bulk of the party depended on the King's yielding almost, perhaps, even to the last. Some few might be willing, nay desirous, that he should not yield, and hope to bring things into a state of confusion; which none but madmen, or those, whom their crimes, or their fortunes render desperate, can ever wish to see. But it would be hard, indeed, if parties were to be characterized, not by their common view, or the general tenor of their conduct, but by the private views imputed to some amongst them, or by the particular sallies, into which mistake, surprise, or passion, hath sometimes betrayed the best-intentioned, and even the best-conducted bodies of men. Whig and Tory were now formed into parties; but I think they were not now, nor at any other time, what they believed one another, nor what they have been represented by their enemies, nay by their friends. The Whigs were not roundheads, though the measures they pursued, being stronger than the temper of the nation would then bear, gave occasion to the suspicions I have mentioned. The Tories were not cavaliers, though they took the alarm so sudden and so warm for the Church and the King; and though they carried the principles in favour of the King, at least, whilst the heat of their contests with the opposite party lasted, higher than they had been ever carried before. The Whigs were not Dissenters, nor republicans, though they favoured the former, and though some inconsiderable remains of the latter, might find shelter in their party. The Tories had no disposition to become slaves, or papists, though they abetted the exercise of an exorbitant power by the crown, and though they supported the pretensions of a popish successor to it. -- Thus I think about the parties, which arose in the reign of King Charles the Second; and as I deliver my thoughts with frankness, I hope they will be received with candour. Some farther and stronger reasons for receiving them so, may perhaps appear in a subsequent letter.

I am, sir, your, etc.

Letter VI

Sir, If King Charles the Second could have been prevailed upon to sacrifice the chimerical divine right of his brother to the real interest, and right too, of his people; that happy event would have made him ample amends in future ease and quiet, and the nation in future security, for all precedent disorders, dangers, and fears of danger. But instead of this, he was every day confirmed in the resolution of not giving up, directly and in terms, that right to his brother, which he thought reflected strength on his own. The very measures taken to force him to submit, enabled him to resist. The opposite spirit spent itself in blood and violence. The spirit of him rose visibly in the nation; and he saw very soon the time approach, when he might venture to appeal to his people against his parliament. This time was come, when men were once convinced that a Country party prevailed no longer, but that faction had taken its place. Many appearances, which I have not room to enumerate, served to propagate this opinion; particularly the behaviour and almost avowed pretensions of the Duke of Monmouth; which were carried on even in defiance of the solemn declaration made by the King, that he had never married the Duke's mother.

Some of the worthiest and warmest men, who were engaged for the exclusion, complained themselves, even from the first, of the private interests and factious intrigues which prevailed amongst them. 'I must confess', says a very considerable man, who laid down his life for this cause afterwards, and whose original letter is still extant; 'I must confess, I do not know three men of a mind; and that a spirit of giddiness reigns amongst us, far beyond any I have ever observed in my life.' And yet he had lived and acted in as factious a time as this nation ever saw. He proceeds: 'Some look who is fittest to succeed. -- They are for the most part divided between the Prince of Orange, and the Duke of Monmouth. The first hath plainly the most plausible title. -- I need not tell you the reasons against Monmouth. The strongest for him are, that whoever is opposed to York will have a good party. and all Scotland, which is every day like to be in arms, doth certainly favour him, and may probably be of as much importance in the troubles that are now likely to fall upon us, as they were in the beginning of the last. Others are only upon negatives', etc.

I could easily multiply proofs of this kind; but I think I need not take any pains to show that there was such a faction formed at this time; nor to refute Welwood, who asserts that the Duke of Monmouth was not ambitious to the degree of aspiring to the crown, till after his landing in the west. I will only remark, that the efforts of this faction amongst those who drove on the bill of exclusion, furnished another motive to the division and animosity of parties. The Tories, who had divided from the others, on jealousies of designs to change the constitution in Church and state, began now to apprehend that the opposite party might succeed in another view, and set up a king of their own nomination. A notion then entertained by many, that the worse title a man had, the better King he was likely to make, did not persuade them. They had suffered under the tyranny of a party; many of them had been themselves the abettors of a party-administration; and they feared with reason a party King. Thus personal interests were mingled on both sides with public considerations; and the Duke of York gained a great number of adherents, not by affection to him, but by an aversion to Monmouth; which increased among the Tories, in proportion as the Duke's popularity increased among the Whigs; not by any favourable disposition in the Tories to popery and arbitrary power, but by a dread, as I have observed already, of returning in the least degree under the influence of those principles, and the power of those men, whose yoke had galled the necks of many that were still alive and active on the stage of public affairs. 'Men grew jealous of the design' (says bishop Burnet, speaking of Monmouth's popularity) 'and fancied here was a new civil war to be raised. Upon this, they joined with the Duke's party'; meaning the Duke of York's.

I say nothing of the apprehensions entertained on one side, and the expectations entertained on the other from Scotland; because though there was, even in the beginning of these struggles, a concert between those who were oppressed by the court there, and those who opposed it here, which grew afterwards into a closer correspondence, and became riper for action; yet the seditious spirit, that gave occasion to these apprehensions and expectations, was roused and exasperated by the inhumanity of the Duke of Lauderdale, who, though a Presbyterian himself, was the butcher of that party; pushed the warmest of them into unjustifiable excesses; revived their silly zeal for the Covenant; and wrought up their enthusiasm even to assassination and rebellion. Let me only observe, that this was plainly the fault of the court, and could not therefore be imputed to the Whigs, whatever use some of that party might propose to make of such a disposition. The violence of the conventiclers was founded high, in order to palliate the severities exercised in the government of that kingdom. But the reasonable men of all parties thought then, as they think now, and always will think, that it is the duty of those who govern, to discern the spirit of the people; to consider even their passions; to have a regard to their weaknesses; and to show indulgence to their prejudices; and that ministers, who punish what they might prevent, are more culpable than those who offend.

As the two parties were formed, so was their division maintained by mutual jealousies and fears; which are often sufficient to nourish themselves, when they have once taken root in the mind; and which were, at this time, watered and cultivated with all the factious industry possible. The most improbable reports, the most idle surmises, carried about in whispers, were sufficient, as I might easily show in various instances, to raise a panic terror in one party, or the other. In both, there were but too many persons on the watch, to improve and to propagate these terrors, and by a frequent repetition of such impressions to raise the alarm and hatred of parties to the highest pitch. He, who went about to allay this extravagant ferment, was called a trimmer; and he, who was in truth a common friend, was sure of being treated like a common enemy. Some, who voted for the bill of exclusion, were very far from being heartily for it; but I have seen good reasons to believe, and such there are even in our public relations, that some of those who voted against it, and declared for limitations, concurred in the end, though they differed in the means, with those who promoted the bill. And yet such men were constantly marked out as favourers of popery and enemies to their country. Thus in the other party, men, who had no other view but that of securing their religion and liberty, and who meant nothing more than to force the court into such compliances as they judged necessary to establish this security, were stigmatized with the opprobrious names of fanatic and republican. Thus it happened in those days; and thus it happens in ours; when any man who declares against a certain person, against whom the voice of the nation hath already declared, or complains of things which are so notorious, that no man in the nation can deny them, is sure to be followed by the cry of Jacobitism, or republicanism. But there is a great difference, God be praised, between the two cases. The pre sent cry being void of pretence, is therefore without effect. It is heard in few places, and believed only in one. But to return.

When the nation was divided in this manner, the heat of the parties increased as their contest lasted, according to the usual course of things. New engagements were daily taken; new provocations and offences were daily given. Public disputes begot private pique; and private pique supported public disputes with greater rancour and obstinacy. The opposite principles advanced by the two parties, were carried higher and higher, as they grew more inflamed; and the measures they pursued, in order to get the better each of his adversary, without overmuch regard to any other consequence, became stronger and stronger, and perhaps equally dangerous. The meeting of the Parliament at Oxford had a kind of hostile appearance; and as soon as Parliaments were laid aside, which happened on the sudden and indecent dissolution of this, the appearance grew worse. No security having been obtained by parliamentary methods, against the dangers of a popish succession, it is probable that they, who looked on these dangers as nearest and greatest, began to cast about how they might secure themselves and their country against them, by methods of another kind; such as extreme necessity, and nothing but extreme necessity can authorize. Such methods were happily pursued and attended with glorious success, a few years afterwards, when this succession had taken place; and, by taking place, had justified all that had been said against it, or foreboded of it; when the nation was ripe for resistance, and the Prince of Orange ready and able, from a multitude of fortunate, concurring circumstances, to support so great an enterprise. But the attempts, which were wise at one time, would have been desperate at the other; and the measures which produced a revolution in the reign of King James, would have produced in the reign of King Charles, a civil war of uncertain event at best: I say of uncertain event at best, because it seems to me, that whoever revolves in his thoughts the state of England and Scotland, as well as the situation of our neighbours on the continent, at that time, must be of opinion, that if the quarrel about the exclusion had broke out into a war, the best cause would have been the worst supported. The King, more united than ever with his brother, would have prevailed. What was projected in 167o, and perhaps more than was then intended, would have been effected; and the religion and liberty of Great Britain would have been destroyed by consequence. We cannot say, and it would be presumption to pretend to guess, how far the heads of party had gone, in Scotland, or in England, into measures for employing force. Perhaps, little more had passed, in which they who became the principal sacrifices, were any way concerned, than rash discourse about dangerous, but rude, indigested schemes, started by men of wild imaginations, or desperate fortunes, and rather hearkened to than assented to; nay, possibly despised and neglected by them. But the court, who wanted a plot to confirm and increase their party, and to turn the popular tide in their favour, took the first opportunity of having one; which was soon furnished to them by the imprudent, but honest zeal of some, and by the villainy, as well as madness of others: and they prosecuted it so severely, with the help of forward sheriffs, willing juries, bold witnesses and mercenary judges, that it answered all their ends. The design of assassinating the King and the Duke, was certainly confined to a few desperate villains; but too many had heard it from them, who were both so foolish and so wicked, as not to discover them; and this reflected great prejudice, though I doubt not in many cases very unjustly, against all those who had acted upon better principles, but yet were involved in those prosecutions.

As this event disarmed, dispirited and broke one party, so it strengthened, animated and united the other. The Tories, who looked on the dangers they apprehended from the Whigs to be greater and nearer than those which they had apprehended, as well as the Whigs, before this new division of parties, from a popish succession, were now confirmed in their prejudices. Under this persuasion, they run headlong into all the measures which were taken for enlarging the King's authority, and securing the crown to the Duke of York. The principles of divine hereditary right, of passive obedience, and nonresistance, were revived and propagated with greater zeal than ever. Not only the wild whimsies of enthusiasm, of schoolmen and philosophers, but the plainest dictates of reason were solemnly condemned in favour of them, by learned and reverend bodies of men; who little thought that in five years' time, that is in 1688, they should act conformably to some of the very propositions, which at this time they declared false, seditious and impious.

In short, the Guelphs and Ghibellines were not more animated against each other at any time, than the Tories and Whigs at this; and in such a national temper, considerable steps were made, as they well might be, towards the destruction of our constitution. One of those which Rapin enumerates, and insists upon very gravely, can scarce be mentioned without smiling. 'The King', says he, 'in order to make his people feel the slavery he had newly imposed on them, affected to review his troops; and these troops amounted, by the return of the garrison of Tangier, to four thousand men, effective, and well-armed.' The Whigs, indeed, in those days, were so averse to standing armies, that they thought even those troops, commonly called guards, unlawful; and bishop Burnet argues, in his reflections on my lord Russell's trial, that a design to seize on them amounted to no more than a design to seize on a part of the King's army. But it is possible that the Tories, who had showed their dislike of standing armies sufficiently in the long Parliament, might think it however no unreasonable thing, when designs of insurrections, and even of assassinations had come so lately to light, that a number of regular troops, sufficient to defend the person of the King, but not sufficient to oppress the liberties of the people, and five times less than we have since seen kept up in the midst of the most secure tranquillity, should be winked at, till these distempers were entirely over.

Another step, which the same author mentions, was indeed of the greatest consequence, and laid the axe to the root of all our liberties at once, by giving the crown such an influence over the elections of members to serve in Parliament, as could not fail to destroy that independency, by which alone the freedom of our government hath been, and can be supported. I mean the proceedings by quo warranto, and the other methods taken to force, or persuade, the corporations to surrender their old charters, and accept new ones, under such limitations and conditions as the King thought fit to innovate. These proceedings were violent, the judgments upon them arbitrary, and the other methods employed scandalous. But still it was the end, it was the consequence, that alarmed and terrified all those who had not sold themselves to the court, or who had not lost, in their zeal for party, all regard to their country, much more than the means that were employed upon this occasion. If, instead of garbling corporations by prerogative, the court could have purchased their elections by money, we may reasonably believe that the surer and more silent way would have been taken. But would the alarm have been less among all the friends of liberty? Certainly not. They would have seen that the end was the same, and have disliked those means the more, for being less liable to observation and clamour. A prince, asserting an illegal and dangerous prerogative, and applauded for doing so, and seconded in the attempt by a numerous party in the nation, carried no doubt a very terrible aspect. But still there was room to hope, the violent character of the Duke of York considered (and that hope was actually entertained by many), that the party, who abetted these usurpations of the prerogative, might be soon frightened back again from a Court to a Country interest; in which case, there was room to hope likewise, the milder character and better understanding of the King considered, that the evil might be in some degree redressed, and the consequences of it prevented. It was reasonable for the friends of liberty to expect that men, who were injured, would complain and seek relief, on the first favourable opportunity. But if they had been corrupted, and the practice of selling elections had been once established, I imagine that the friends of liberty would have thought the case more desperate. -- It is certainly an easier task, and there is somewhat less provoking, as well as less dangerous in it, to struggle even with a great prince who stands on prerogative, than a weak, but profligate minister, if he hath the means of corruption in his power, and if the luxury and prostitution of the age have enabled him to bring it into fashion. Nothing surely could provoke men, who had the spirit of liberty in their souls, more than to figure to themselves one of these saucy creatures of fortune, whom she raises in the extravagance of her caprice, dispatching his emissaries, ecclesiastical and secular, like so many evil demons, to the north and to the south, to buy the votes of the people with the money of the people, and to choose a representative body, not of the people, but of the enemy of the people, of himself.

This was not the case at the time we are speaking of. It was prerogative, not money, which had like to have destroyed our liberties then. Government was not then carried on by undertakers, to whom so much power was farmed out for returns of so much money, and so much money entrusted for returns of so much Power. But though the case was not so desperate, yet was it bad enough in all conscience; and among all the excesses into which the Tories ran, in favour of the crown, and in hopes of fixing dominion in their own party, their zeal to support the methods of garbling corporations was, in my opinion, that which threatened public liberty the most. It hath been reproached to them by many; but if among those who reproached them, there should be some who have shared since that time in the most dangerous practice of corrupting corporations, such men must have fronts of brass, and deserve all the indignation which is due to iniquity, aggravated by impudence. The others abetted, in favour of a prerogative, supposed real by many in those days, and under the pretence at least of law, a power, which gave the crown too much influence in the elections of members of the House of Commons; but these men, if there are any such, have been concerned in a practice, for the sake of their own vile interest, which spreads like a gangrene over the whole body of a nation, and to every branch of government; and which hath never failed, in any one instance, where it hath been suffered, to become the bane of liberty.

We have now carried the two parties through that period of time, when the conduct of both was most liable to the objections made to them by their adversaries. -- The Tories acted on the most abject principles of submission to the King; and, on those of hereditary right, were jealous for the succession of a prince, whose bigot rendered him unfit to rule a Protestant and a free people. -- The Whigs maintained the power of Parliament to limit the succession to the crown, and avowed the principle of resistance; in which they had law, example and reason for them. But then the fury of faction was for doing that without Parliament, which could only be legally done by it: and, in order to this, the principles of resistance were extended too far; and the hottest men of the party taking the lead, they acted in an extravagant spirit of licence, rather than a sober spirit of liberty; and the madness of a few, little inferior to that of Cromwell's enthusiasts, dishonoured the whole cause for a time. My intention was not to have left them here; but to have carried these observations on so far as to justify, notwithstanding these appearances, what is said at the conclusion of my last letter, concerning the true characters of both parties. But either the abundance of matter hath deceived me, or I have wanted skill and time to abridge it; so that I must defer this part of my task, and crave your indulgence, as well as that of your readers, for my prolixity.

I am, sir, etc.

Letter VII

Sir, I advanced, in the first of these essays, something to this effect; that every clumsy, busy, bungling child of fortune, on whom she bestows the means and the opportunity of corrupting, may govern by this infamous expedient; and, having gratified his ambition and avarice, may have a chance to secure himself from punishment, by destroying the liberties of his country. It was advanced likewise, in the same paper, that every character is not equally fit to govern a people, by dividing them; because some cunning, some experience, nay, some skill to form, and some address to conduct a system of fraud, are necessary in this case. I persuade myself that no man, who read that paper, was at a loss to find an instance to confirm the truth of the first of these propositions; and we have now before us another, which may serve to confirm the truth of the second. Though I do not think the designs of King Charles the Second either deeply laid, or deeply fixed in his own mind; yet in general they were founded on bad principles, and directed to bad ends. He desired indeed to be easy, and to make his people so; but then he desired both these on such conditions, as were inconsistent with good government, during the whole course of his reign; and with the security of religion and liberty, during the latter part of it. We have seen how the intemperate conduct of many, and the flagitious designs of some among the Whigs, weakened their own party, and gave new strength and new provocations to the other. But we have not yet considered some other advantages, without which these divisions could neither have been fomented, nor supported as they were. Now these advantages arose chiefly from the character and conduct of the King himself. If King Charles had found the nation plunged in corruption; the people choosing their representatives for money, without any other regard; and these representatives of the people, as well as the nobility, reduced by luxury to beg the unhallowed alms of a court; or to receive, like miserable hirelings, the wages of iniquity from a minister: if he had found the nation, I say, in this condition (which extravagant supposition one cannot make without horror) he might have dishonoured her abroad, and impoverished and oppressed her at home, though he had been the weakest prince on earth, and his ministers the most odious and contemptible men that ever presumed to be ambitious. Our fathers might have fallen into circumstances, which compose the very quintessence of political misery. They might have sold their birth-right for porridge, which was their own. They might have been bubbled by the foolish, bullied by the fearful, and insulted by those whom they despised. They would have deserved to be slaves, and they might have been treated as such. When a free people crouch, like camels, to be loaded, the next at hand, no matter who, mounts them, and they soon feel the whip, and the spur of their tyrant; for a tyrant, whether prince or minister, resembles the devil in many respects, particularly in this. He is often both the tempter and tormentor. He makes the criminal, and he punishes the crime.

But this was not the state of the English nation, at the time we speak of. We were not yet corrupted, nor even quite ripe for corruption. Parties there were; and the contests of these parties gave occasion to the rise and growth of factions; some of which ran into the most seditious practices against the government, and others into the vilest submission to it. But still a spirit of liberty remained in many, uncorrupted and un-extinguished, and such as worked our national deliverance in the days of distress, that soon followed. We were freemen then, in the proper sense and full extent of the words; because not only the laws, which asserted our common rights, were maintained and improved, but private independency, which can alone support public liberty under such a government as ours, was itself supported by some of that ancient economy and simplicity of manners, that were growing, but not grown, out of fashion. Such a people, as we then were, could neither be bought, nor driven; and I think King Charles could not have divided and led them, if he had wanted any of the qualities he possessed, or had held another conduct than he held. Far from being proud, haughty, or brutal, 'he had not a grain of pride, or vanity, in his whole composition'; but was the most affable, best-bred man alive. He treated his subjects like noblemen, like gentlemen, like freemen, not like vassals, or boors. Whatever notion he had of his hereditary right, he owned his obligation for the crown he wore to his people, as much as he would have been bound to do, in reason, in justice, in honour, and in prudence, if he had stood at the greatest distance from it, in the course of lineal succession, and had been called to it from the low state in which he was before, by the free gift and choice of the nation. His professions were plausible, and his whole behaviour engaging; so that he won upon the hearts, even whilst he lost the good opinion of his subjects, and often balanced their judgment of things, by their personal inclination. These qualities and this part of his conduct went a great way to give him credit with his people, and an hold on their affections. But this was not all. He observed their temper, and he complied with it. He yielded to them in points, from which he had determined, and declared too, that he would never depart. To know when to yield in government, is at least as necessary, as to know when to lose in trade; and he who cannot do the first, is so little likely to govern a kingdom well, that it is more than probable he would govern a shop ill. King Charles gave up to the murmurs of his people, not one or two such ministers as may be found almost behind every desk, those awkward pageants of courts, those wooden images, which princes gild and then worship; but several great and able men, nay, whole cabals of such, who had merit with him, though they had none with the nation. He started often out of the true interest of his people, but the voice of his people almost as often reclaimed him. He made the first Dutch war, but he made the Triple Alliance too. He engaged with France in the war of 1672, but he made a separate peace with Holland. True it is, indeed, that neither the representations of his parliament, nor the desires of his people, could prevail on him to go farther, and to enter in earnest into the war against France. But the confidence between him and his parliament was so broken at that time, that they would not trust him, nor he them. At this I am not surprised, and for that very reason, I confess, I have always been so at the strong and repeated instances made to force him into that war; since it cannot surely be better policy to drive a prince into a war, which he has no inclination to make, than it would be to be drawn by him into a war, if he had no ability to conduct it. In home affairs, besides his frequent concessions, whenever the nation took umbrage at his proceedings, he passed the Test and Habeas Corpus bills, and many others for the public benefit: and I scarce remember any popular act, which stopped at the throne in his time, except that about the militia, which he apprehended to be a dangerous encroachment on his prerogative, and another in favour of the Dissenters, which was contrived, meanly enough, to be stolen off the table in the House of Lords.

What has been touched here, and in former papers, will be sufficient to show, in some measure, how King Charles was enabled to divide a nation so united and so heated as this nation was, on the discovery of the Popish Plot; to oppose so avowedly and so resolutely the exclusion of his brother, the prospect of whose succeeding to the crown was become still more dreadful, even by that small part of Coleman's correspondence, which had come to light: and yet to attach so numerous a party to himself, nay to his brother; to lay aside Parliaments for several years, and not only to stand his ground, but to gain ground in the nation, at the same time. But there is still something more to be added. He had not only prepared for the storm, but he acquired new strength in the midst of it; that is, in the proceedings on the Popish Plot, and the bill of exclusion. He would gladly have kept the former out of Parliament; but when it was once there, he put on the appearances of great zeal for the prosecution of it. These appearances helped him to screen his brother; as the ill success of the Exclusion Bill in the House of Lords, where it was rejected by sixty-three against thirty, helped to screen himself from the violence of the House of Commons. But that which gave him the principal advantage, in the present contests, was another management. As soon as the first preparatory steps were made to the bill of exclusion in 1678, he declared himself, in a speech to his Parliament, ready to pass any bills to make his people safe in the reign of his successor, so they tended not to impeach the right of succession, nor the descent of the crown in the true line. He persisted in his declaration to the last; and if he had done nothing else, I imagine that he would have gained no great popularity. When a free people lie under any grievance, or apprehend any danger, and try to obtain their prince's consent to deliver them from one, or prevent the other, a flat refusal, on his part, reduces them to the melancholy alternative of continuing to submit to one, and to stand exposed to the other, or of freeing themselves from both, without his consent; which can hardly be done by means very consistent with his and their common interest. King Charles was too wise to push the nation to such an extremity. He refused what his Parliament pressed on him, in the manner and on the principle they pressed it; but then his refusal was followed by expedients, which varied the manner, and yet might have been managed so as to produce the effect; and which seemed to save, rather than actually saved, the principle. Numbers concurred, at that time, in avowing the principle; and the tests had made many persons think religion safe; as the King's offers made them think it no fault of his, if it was not made safer. The council had prepared some expedients; and the limitations, and other provisions against a popish successor, proposed directly from the throne by the Chancellor in 1679, went a great way towards binding the hands of such a successor, and lodging the power, taken from him, in the Parliament. But the scheme of expedients, debated in the Oxford Parliament, was a real exclusion from every thing, but the title of a king. The first article banished the Duke of York, during his life, to the distance of five hundred miles from England, Scotland and ireland; and the tenth, to mention no more, excluded him ipso facto, if he came into any of these kingdoms; directed that he should suffer, in this case, as by the former bill; and that the sovereignty should vest forthwith in the regent, that is, in the Princess of Orange. Surely this was not to vote the lion in the lobby into the house. It would have been to vote him out of the house, and lobby both, and only suffer him to be called lion still. I am not ignorant of the refinements urged by Sir William Jones and others against this scheme: but I know that men run into errors from both extremes; from that of seeing too much, as well as that of seeing too little; and that the most subtle refiners are apt to miss the true point of political wisdom, which consists in distinguishing justly between what is absolutely best in speculation, and what is the best of things practicable in particular conjunctures. The scheme, no doubt, was built on a manifest absurdity, and was liable to many inconveniencies, difficulties and dangers; but still it was the utmost that could be hoped for at that moment: and the single consideration, one would think, should have been this: whether, united under such an Act of Parliament, they would not have opposed the succession of the Duke of York, with less inconveniency, less difficulty and danger, than disunited, and with the laws against them. The truth is, that as there were men at this time, desirous that the King should be on desperate terms with his Parliament, because they were so themselves; in like manner there were others, who desired, for a reason of the same nature, that the Parliament should be on desperate terms with the King. These were factious interests, and they prevailed against the national interest, which required that the King should be separated at any rate from his brother, instead of being united to him by a fear made common to both. But the die was thrown; and the leaders of the Whig party were resolved. 'to let all lie in confusion, rather than hearken to any thing, besides the exclusion'. Obstinacy provoked obstinacy. The King grew obstinate, and severe too, against his natural easiness and former clemency of temper. The Tory party grew as obstinate, and as furious on their side, according to a natural tendency in the disposition of all parties: and thus the nation was delivered over, on the death of King Charles, 'à la sottise de son frère'; 'to the folly and madness of his brother'.

It was this folly and madness however, that cured the folly and madness of party. As the common danger approached, the impressions of terror which it made, increased. Whig and Tory then felt them alike, and were brought by them, as drunken men sometimes are, to their senses. The events of King James's reign, and the steps by which the Revolution was brought about, are so recent, and so well known, that I shall not descend into any particular mention of them. A few general remarks on the behaviour of his prince, and on the behaviour of parties in his reign, and at the Revolution, will be sufficient to wind up the history of Whig and Tory, and to prove what I have so often asserted, that both sides purged themselves on this great occasion, of the imputations laid to their charge by their adversaries; that the proper and real distinction of the two parties expired at this era, and that although their ghosts have continued to haunt and divide us so many years afterwards, yet there neither is, nor can be any division of parties at this time, reconcilable with common sense, and common honesty, among those who are come on the stage of the world under the present constitution, except those of Churchmen and Dissenters, those of Court and Country.

This behaviour and conduct of King James the Second would be sufficient, if there was no other instance, and there are thousands, to show that as strong prejudices, however got, are the parents, so a weak understanding is the nurse of bigotry, and injustice and violence and cruelty its of