The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1 by Thomas Babington Macaulay (diy ebook reader .txt) π
Excerpt from the book:
Read free book Β«The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1 by Thomas Babington Macaulay (diy ebook reader .txt) πΒ» - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
Download in Format:
- Author: Thomas Babington Macaulay
Read book online Β«The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1 by Thomas Babington Macaulay (diy ebook reader .txt) πΒ». Author - Thomas Babington Macaulay
a year.55 George Monk, Duke of Albemarle,
who had been rewarded for his eminent services with immense
grants of crown land, and who had been notorious both for
covetousness and for parsimony, left fifteen thousand a year of
real estate, and sixty thousand pounds in money which probably
yielded seven per cent.56 These three Dukes were supposed to be
three of the very richest subjects in England. The Archbishop of
Canterbury can hardly have had five thousand a year.57 The
average income of a temporal peer was estimated, by the best
informed persons, at about three thousand a year, the average
income of a baronet at nine hundred a year, the average income of
a member of the House of Commons at less than eight hundred a
year.58 A thousand a year was thought a large revenue for a
barrister. Two thousand a year was hardly to be made in the Court
of King's Bench, except by the crown lawyers.59 It is evident,
therefore, that an official man would have been well paid if he
had received a fourth or fifth part of what would now be an
adequate stipend. In fact, however, the stipends of the higher
class of official men were as large as at present, and not seldom
larger. The Lord Treasurer, for example, had eight thousand a
year, and, when the Treasury was in commission, the junior Lords
had sixteen hundred a year each. The Paymaster of the Forces had
a poundage, amounting, in time of peace, to about five thousand a
year, on all the money which passed through his hands. The Groom
of the Stole had five thousand a year, the Commissioners of the
Customs twelve hundred a year each, the Lords of the Bedchamber a
thousand a year each.60 The regular salary, however, was the
smallest part of the gains of an official man at that age. From
the noblemen who held the white staff and the great seal, down to
the humblest tidewaiter and gauger, what would now be called
gross corruption was practiced without disguise and without
reproach. Titles, places, commissions, pardons, were daily sold
in market overt by the great dignitaries of the realm; and every
clerk in every department imitated, to the best of his power, the
evil example.
During the last century no prime minister, however powerful, has
become rich in office; and several prime ministers have impaired
their private fortune in sustaining their public character. In
the seventeenth century, a statesman who was at the head of
affairs might easily, and without giving scandal, accumulate in
no long time an estate amply sufficient to support a dukedom. It
is probable that the income of the prime minister, during his
tenure of power, far exceeded that of any other subject. The
place of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was popularly reported to be
worth forty thousand pounds a year.61 The gains of the Chancellor
Clarendon, of Arlington, of Lauderdale, and of Danby, were
certainly enormous. The sumptuous palace to which the populace of
London gave the name of Dunkirk Mouse, the stately pavilions, the
fishponds, the deer park and the orangery of Euston, the more
than Italian luxury of Ham, with its busts, fountains, and
aviaries, were among the many signs which indicated what was the
shortest road to boundless wealth. This is the true explanation
of the unscrupulous violence with which the statesmen of that day
struggled for office, of the tenacity with which, in spite of
vexations, humiliations and dangers, they clung to it, and of the
scandalous compliances to which they stooped in order to retain
it. Even in our own age, formidable as is the power of opinion,
and high as is the standard of integrity, there would be great
risk of a lamentable change in the character of our public men,
if the place of First Lord of the Treasury or Secretary of State
were worth a hundred thousand pounds a year. Happy for our
country the emoluments of the highest class of functionaries have
not only not grown in proportion to the general growth of our
opulence, but have positively diminished.
The fact that the sum raised in England by taxation has, in a
time not exceeding two long lives, been multiplied forty-fold, is
strange, and may at first sight seem appalling. But those who are
alarmed by the increase of the public burdens may perhaps be
reassured when they have considered the increase of the public
resources. In the year 1685, the value of the produce of the soil
far exceeded the value of all the other fruits of human industry.
Yet agriculture was in what would now be considered as a very
rude and imperfect state. The arable land and pasture land were
not supposed by the best political arithmeticians of that age to
amount to much more than half the area of the kingdom.62 The
remainder was believed to consist of moor, forest, and fen. These
computations are strongly confirmed by the road books and maps of
the seventeenth century. From those books and maps it is clear
that many routes which now pass through an endless succession of
orchards, cornfields, hayfields, and beanfields, then ran through
nothing but heath, swamp, and warren.63 In the drawings of
English landscapes made in that age for the Grand Duke Cosmo,
scarce a hedgerow is to be seen, and numerous tracts; now rich
with cultivation, appear as bare as Salisbury Plain.64 At
Enfield, hardly out of sight of the smoke of the capital, was a
region of five and twenty miles in circumference, which contained
only three houses and scarcely any enclosed fields. Deer, as free
as in an American forest, wandered there by thousands.65 It is to
be remarked, that wild animals of large size were then far more
numerous than at present. The last wild boars, indeed, which had
been preserved for the royal diversion, and had been allowed to
ravage the cultivated land with their tusks, had been slaughtered
by the exasperated rustics during the license of the civil war.
The last wolf that has roamed our island had been slain in
Scotland a short time before the close of the reign of Charles
the Second. But many breeds, now extinct, or rare, both of
quadrupeds and birds, were still common. The fox, whose life is
now, in many counties, held almost as sacred as that of a human
being, was then considered as a mere nuisance. Oliver Saint John
told the Long Parliament that Strafford was to be regarded, not
as a stag or a hare, to whom some law was to be given, but as a
fox, who was to be snared by any means, and knocked on the head
without pity. This illustration would be by no means a happy one,
if addressed to country gentlemen of our time: but in Saint
John's days there were not seldom great massacres of foxes to
which the peasantry thronged with all the dogs that could be
mustered. Traps were set: nets were spread: no quarter was given;
and to shoot a female with cub was considered as a feat which
merited the warmest gratitude of the neighbourhood. The red deer
were then as common in Gloucestershire and Hampshire, as they now
are among the Grampian Hills. On one occasion Queen Anne,
travelling to Portsmouth, saw a herd of no less than five
hundred. The wild bull with his white mane was still to be found
wandering in a few of the southern forests. The badger made his
dark and tortuous hole on the side of every hill where the
copsewood grew thick. The wild cats were frequently heard by
night wailing round the lodges of the rangers of whittlebury and
Needwood. The yellow-breasted martin was still pursued in
Cranbourne Chase for his fur, reputed inferior only to that of
the sable. Fen eagles, measuring more than nine feet between the
extremities of the wings, preyed on fish along the coast of
Norfolk. On all the downs, from the British Channel to Yorkshire
huge bustards strayed in troops of fifty or sixty, and were often
hunted with greyhounds. The marshes of Cambridgeshire and
Lincolnshire were covered during some months of every year by
immense clouds of cranes. Some of these races the progress of
cultivation has extirpated. Of others the numbers are so much
diminished that men crowd to gaze at a specimen as at a Bengal
tiger, or a Polar bear.66
The progress of this great change can nowhere be more clearly
traced than in the Statute Book. The number of enclosure acts
passed since King George the Second came to the throne exceeds
four thousand. The area enclosed under the authority of those
acts exceeds, on a moderate calculation, ten thousand square
miles. How many square miles, which were formerly uncultivated or
ill cultivated, have, during the same period, been fenced and
carefully tilled by the proprietors without any application to
the legislature, can only be conjectured. But it seems highly
probable that a fourth part of England has been, in the course of
little more than a century, turned from a wild into a garden.
Even in those parts of the kingdom which at the close of the
reign of Charles the Second were the best cultivated, the
farming, though greatly improved since the civil war, was not
such as would now be thought skilful. To this day no effectual
steps have been taken by public authority for the purpose of
obtaining accurate accounts of the produce of the English soil.
The historian must therefore follow, with some misgivings, the
guidance of those writers on statistics whose reputation for
diligence and fidelity stands highest. At present an average crop
of wheat, rye, barley, oats, and beans, is supposed considerably
to exceed thirty millions of quarters. The crop of wheat would be
thought wretched if it did not exceed twelve millions of
quarters. According to the computation made in the year 1696 by
Gregory King, the whole quantity of wheat, rye, barley, oats, and
beans, then annually grown in the kingdom, was somewhat less than
ten millions of quarters. The wheat, which was then cultivated
only on the strongest clay, and consumed only by those who were
in easy circumstances, he estimated at less than two millions of
quarters. Charles Davenant, an acute and well informed though
most unprincipled and rancorous politician, differed from King as
to some of the items of the account, but came to nearly the same
general conclusions.67
The rotation of crops was very imperfectly understood. It was
known, indeed, that some vegetables lately introduced into our
island, particularly the turnip, afforded excellent nutriment in
winter to sheep and oxen: but it was not yet the practice to feed
cattle in this manner. It was therefore by no means easy to keep
them alive during the season when the grass is scanty. They were
killed and salted in great numbers at
who had been rewarded for his eminent services with immense
grants of crown land, and who had been notorious both for
covetousness and for parsimony, left fifteen thousand a year of
real estate, and sixty thousand pounds in money which probably
yielded seven per cent.56 These three Dukes were supposed to be
three of the very richest subjects in England. The Archbishop of
Canterbury can hardly have had five thousand a year.57 The
average income of a temporal peer was estimated, by the best
informed persons, at about three thousand a year, the average
income of a baronet at nine hundred a year, the average income of
a member of the House of Commons at less than eight hundred a
year.58 A thousand a year was thought a large revenue for a
barrister. Two thousand a year was hardly to be made in the Court
of King's Bench, except by the crown lawyers.59 It is evident,
therefore, that an official man would have been well paid if he
had received a fourth or fifth part of what would now be an
adequate stipend. In fact, however, the stipends of the higher
class of official men were as large as at present, and not seldom
larger. The Lord Treasurer, for example, had eight thousand a
year, and, when the Treasury was in commission, the junior Lords
had sixteen hundred a year each. The Paymaster of the Forces had
a poundage, amounting, in time of peace, to about five thousand a
year, on all the money which passed through his hands. The Groom
of the Stole had five thousand a year, the Commissioners of the
Customs twelve hundred a year each, the Lords of the Bedchamber a
thousand a year each.60 The regular salary, however, was the
smallest part of the gains of an official man at that age. From
the noblemen who held the white staff and the great seal, down to
the humblest tidewaiter and gauger, what would now be called
gross corruption was practiced without disguise and without
reproach. Titles, places, commissions, pardons, were daily sold
in market overt by the great dignitaries of the realm; and every
clerk in every department imitated, to the best of his power, the
evil example.
During the last century no prime minister, however powerful, has
become rich in office; and several prime ministers have impaired
their private fortune in sustaining their public character. In
the seventeenth century, a statesman who was at the head of
affairs might easily, and without giving scandal, accumulate in
no long time an estate amply sufficient to support a dukedom. It
is probable that the income of the prime minister, during his
tenure of power, far exceeded that of any other subject. The
place of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was popularly reported to be
worth forty thousand pounds a year.61 The gains of the Chancellor
Clarendon, of Arlington, of Lauderdale, and of Danby, were
certainly enormous. The sumptuous palace to which the populace of
London gave the name of Dunkirk Mouse, the stately pavilions, the
fishponds, the deer park and the orangery of Euston, the more
than Italian luxury of Ham, with its busts, fountains, and
aviaries, were among the many signs which indicated what was the
shortest road to boundless wealth. This is the true explanation
of the unscrupulous violence with which the statesmen of that day
struggled for office, of the tenacity with which, in spite of
vexations, humiliations and dangers, they clung to it, and of the
scandalous compliances to which they stooped in order to retain
it. Even in our own age, formidable as is the power of opinion,
and high as is the standard of integrity, there would be great
risk of a lamentable change in the character of our public men,
if the place of First Lord of the Treasury or Secretary of State
were worth a hundred thousand pounds a year. Happy for our
country the emoluments of the highest class of functionaries have
not only not grown in proportion to the general growth of our
opulence, but have positively diminished.
The fact that the sum raised in England by taxation has, in a
time not exceeding two long lives, been multiplied forty-fold, is
strange, and may at first sight seem appalling. But those who are
alarmed by the increase of the public burdens may perhaps be
reassured when they have considered the increase of the public
resources. In the year 1685, the value of the produce of the soil
far exceeded the value of all the other fruits of human industry.
Yet agriculture was in what would now be considered as a very
rude and imperfect state. The arable land and pasture land were
not supposed by the best political arithmeticians of that age to
amount to much more than half the area of the kingdom.62 The
remainder was believed to consist of moor, forest, and fen. These
computations are strongly confirmed by the road books and maps of
the seventeenth century. From those books and maps it is clear
that many routes which now pass through an endless succession of
orchards, cornfields, hayfields, and beanfields, then ran through
nothing but heath, swamp, and warren.63 In the drawings of
English landscapes made in that age for the Grand Duke Cosmo,
scarce a hedgerow is to be seen, and numerous tracts; now rich
with cultivation, appear as bare as Salisbury Plain.64 At
Enfield, hardly out of sight of the smoke of the capital, was a
region of five and twenty miles in circumference, which contained
only three houses and scarcely any enclosed fields. Deer, as free
as in an American forest, wandered there by thousands.65 It is to
be remarked, that wild animals of large size were then far more
numerous than at present. The last wild boars, indeed, which had
been preserved for the royal diversion, and had been allowed to
ravage the cultivated land with their tusks, had been slaughtered
by the exasperated rustics during the license of the civil war.
The last wolf that has roamed our island had been slain in
Scotland a short time before the close of the reign of Charles
the Second. But many breeds, now extinct, or rare, both of
quadrupeds and birds, were still common. The fox, whose life is
now, in many counties, held almost as sacred as that of a human
being, was then considered as a mere nuisance. Oliver Saint John
told the Long Parliament that Strafford was to be regarded, not
as a stag or a hare, to whom some law was to be given, but as a
fox, who was to be snared by any means, and knocked on the head
without pity. This illustration would be by no means a happy one,
if addressed to country gentlemen of our time: but in Saint
John's days there were not seldom great massacres of foxes to
which the peasantry thronged with all the dogs that could be
mustered. Traps were set: nets were spread: no quarter was given;
and to shoot a female with cub was considered as a feat which
merited the warmest gratitude of the neighbourhood. The red deer
were then as common in Gloucestershire and Hampshire, as they now
are among the Grampian Hills. On one occasion Queen Anne,
travelling to Portsmouth, saw a herd of no less than five
hundred. The wild bull with his white mane was still to be found
wandering in a few of the southern forests. The badger made his
dark and tortuous hole on the side of every hill where the
copsewood grew thick. The wild cats were frequently heard by
night wailing round the lodges of the rangers of whittlebury and
Needwood. The yellow-breasted martin was still pursued in
Cranbourne Chase for his fur, reputed inferior only to that of
the sable. Fen eagles, measuring more than nine feet between the
extremities of the wings, preyed on fish along the coast of
Norfolk. On all the downs, from the British Channel to Yorkshire
huge bustards strayed in troops of fifty or sixty, and were often
hunted with greyhounds. The marshes of Cambridgeshire and
Lincolnshire were covered during some months of every year by
immense clouds of cranes. Some of these races the progress of
cultivation has extirpated. Of others the numbers are so much
diminished that men crowd to gaze at a specimen as at a Bengal
tiger, or a Polar bear.66
The progress of this great change can nowhere be more clearly
traced than in the Statute Book. The number of enclosure acts
passed since King George the Second came to the throne exceeds
four thousand. The area enclosed under the authority of those
acts exceeds, on a moderate calculation, ten thousand square
miles. How many square miles, which were formerly uncultivated or
ill cultivated, have, during the same period, been fenced and
carefully tilled by the proprietors without any application to
the legislature, can only be conjectured. But it seems highly
probable that a fourth part of England has been, in the course of
little more than a century, turned from a wild into a garden.
Even in those parts of the kingdom which at the close of the
reign of Charles the Second were the best cultivated, the
farming, though greatly improved since the civil war, was not
such as would now be thought skilful. To this day no effectual
steps have been taken by public authority for the purpose of
obtaining accurate accounts of the produce of the English soil.
The historian must therefore follow, with some misgivings, the
guidance of those writers on statistics whose reputation for
diligence and fidelity stands highest. At present an average crop
of wheat, rye, barley, oats, and beans, is supposed considerably
to exceed thirty millions of quarters. The crop of wheat would be
thought wretched if it did not exceed twelve millions of
quarters. According to the computation made in the year 1696 by
Gregory King, the whole quantity of wheat, rye, barley, oats, and
beans, then annually grown in the kingdom, was somewhat less than
ten millions of quarters. The wheat, which was then cultivated
only on the strongest clay, and consumed only by those who were
in easy circumstances, he estimated at less than two millions of
quarters. Charles Davenant, an acute and well informed though
most unprincipled and rancorous politician, differed from King as
to some of the items of the account, but came to nearly the same
general conclusions.67
The rotation of crops was very imperfectly understood. It was
known, indeed, that some vegetables lately introduced into our
island, particularly the turnip, afforded excellent nutriment in
winter to sheep and oxen: but it was not yet the practice to feed
cattle in this manner. It was therefore by no means easy to keep
them alive during the season when the grass is scanty. They were
killed and salted in great numbers at
Free e-book: Β«The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1 by Thomas Babington Macaulay (diy ebook reader .txt) πΒ» - read online now on website american library books (americanlibrarybooks.com)
Similar e-books:
Comments (0)