The History of England from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 3 by Thomas Babington Macaulay (reading an ebook .txt) 📕

had made no change in the state of public affairs.463 Even of those whose understandings were fully convinced that obedience was due to the existing government, very few kissed the book with the heartiness with which they had formerly plighted their faith to Charles and James. Still the thing was done. Ten thousand clergymen had solemnly called heaven to attest their promise that they would be true liegemen to William; and this promise, though it by no means warranted him in expecting that they would strenuously support him, had at least deprived them of a great part of their power to injure him. They could not, without entirely forfeiting that public respect on which their influence depended, attack, except in an indirect and timidly cautious manner, the throne of one whom they had, in the presence of God, vowed to obey as their King. Some of them, it is true, affected to read the prayers for the new Sovereigns in a peculiar tone which could not be misunderstood.464 Others were guilty of still grosser indecency. Thus, one wretch, just after praying for William and Mary in the most solemn office of religion, took off a glass to their damnation. Another, after performing divine service on a fast day appointed by their authority, dined on a pigeon pie, and while he cut it up, uttered a wish that it was the usurper's heart. But such audacious wickedness was doubtless rare and was rather injurious to the Church than to the government.465

Those clergymen and members of the Universities who incurred the penalties of the law were about four hundred in number. Foremost in rank stood the Primate and six of his suffragans, Turner of Ely, Lloyd of Norwich, Frampton of Gloucester, Lake of Chichester, White of Peterborough, and Ken of Bath and Wells. Thomas of Worcester would have made a seventh: but he died three weeks before the day of suspension. On his deathbed he adjured his clergy to be true to the cause of hereditary right, and declared that those divines who tried to make out that the oaths might be taken without any departure from the loyal doctrines of the Church of England seemed to him to reason more jesuitically than the Jesuits themselves.466

Ken, who, both in intellectual and in moral qualities, ranked highest among the nonjuring prelates, hesitated long. There were few clergymen who could have submitted to the new government with a better grace. For, in the times when nonresistance and passive obedience were the favourite themes of his brethren, he had scarcely ever alluded to politics in the pulpit. He owned that the arguments in favour of swearing were very strong. He went indeed so far as to say that his scruples would be completely removed if he could be convinced that James had entered into engagements for ceding Ireland to the French King. It is evident therefore that the difference between Ken and the Whigs was not a difference of principle. He thought, with them, that misgovernment, carried to a certain point, justified a transfer of allegiance, and doubted only whether the misgovernment of James had been carried quite to that point. Nay, the good Bishop actually began to prepare a pastoral letter explaining his reasons for taking the oaths. But, before it was finished, he received information which convinced him that Ireland had not been made over to France: doubts came thick upon him: he threw his unfinished letter into the fire, and implored his less scrupulous friends not to urge him further. He was sure, he said, that they had acted uprightly: he was glad that they could do with a clear conscience what he shrank from doing: he felt the force of their reasoning: he was all but persuaded; and he was afraid to listen longer lest he should be quite persuaded: for, if he should comply, and his misgivings should afterwards return, he should be the most miserable of men. Not for wealth, not for a palace, not for a peerage, would he run the smallest risk of ever feeling the torments of remorse. It is a curious fact that, of the seven nonjuring prelates, the only one whose name carries with it much weight was on the point of swearing, and was prevented from doing so, as he himself acknowledged, not by the force of reason, but by a morbid scrupulosity which he did not advise others to imitate.467

Among the priests who refused the oaths were some men eminent in the learned world, as grammarians, chronologists, canonists, and antiquaries, and a very few who were distinguished by wit and eloquence: but scarcely one can be named who was qualified to discuss any large question of morals or politics, scarcely one whose writings do not indicate either extreme feebleness or extreme flightiness of mind. Those who distrust the judgment of a Whig on this point will probably allow some weight to the opinion which was expressed, many years after the Revolution, by a philosopher of whom the Tories are justly proud. Johnson, after passing in review the celebrated divines who had thought it sinful to swear allegiance to William the Third and George the First, pronounced that, in the whole body of nonjurors, there was one, and one only, who could reason.468

The nonjuror in whose favour Johnson made this exception was Charles Leslie. Leslie had, before the Revolution, been Chancellor of the diocese of Connor in Ireland. He had been forward in opposition to Tyrconnel; had, as a justice of the peace for Monaghan, refused to acknowledge a papist as Sheriff of that county; and had been so courageous as to send some officers of the Irish army to prison for marauding. But the doctrine of nonresistance, such as it had been taught by Anglican divines in the days of the Rye House Plot, was immovably fixed in his mind. When the state of Ulster became such that a Protestant who remained there could hardly avoid being either a rebel or a martyr, Leslie fled to London. His abilities and his connections were such that he might easily have obtained high preferment in the Church of England. But he took his place in the front rank of the Jacobite body, and remained there stedfastly, through all the dangers and vicissitudes of three and thirty troubled years. Though constantly engaged in theological controversy with Deists, Jews, Socinians, Presbyterians, Papists, and Quakers, he found time to be one of the most voluminous political writers of his age. Of all the nonjuring clergy he was the best qualified to discuss constitutional questions. For, before he had taken orders, he had resided long in the Temple, and had been studying English history and law, while most of the other chiefs of the schism had been poring over the Acts of Chalcedon, or seeking for wisdom in the Targurn of Onkelos.469 In 1689, however, Leslie was almost unknown in England. Among the divines who incurred suspension on the first of August in that year, the highest in popular estimation was without dispute Doctor William Sherlock. Perhaps no simple presbyter of the Church of England has ever possessed a greater authority over his brethren than belonged to Sherlock at the time of the Revolution. He was not of the first rank among his contemporaries as a scholar, as a preacher, as a writer on theology, or as a writer on politics: but in all the four characters he had distinguished himself. The perspicuity and liveliness of his style have been praised by Prior and Addison. The facility and assiduity with which he wrote are sufficiently proved by the bulk and the dates of his works. There were indeed among the clergy men of brighter genius and men of wider attainments: but during a long period there was none who more completely represented the order, none who, on all subjects, spoke more precisely the sense of the Anglican priesthood, without any taint of Latitudinarianism, of Puritanism, or of Popery. He had, in the days of the Exclusion Bill, when the power of the dissenters was very great in Parliament and in the country, written strongly against the sin of nonconformity. When the Rye House Plot was detected, he had zealously defended by tongue and pen the doctrine of nonresistance. His services to the cause of episcopacy and monarchy were so highly valued that he was made master of the Temple. A pension was also bestowed on him by Charles: but that pension James soon took away; for Sherlock, though he held himself bound to pay passive obedience to the civil power, held himself equally bound to combat religious errors, and was the keenest and most laborious of that host of controversialists who, in the day of peril, manfully defended the Protestant faith. In little more than two years he published sixteen treatises, some of them large books, against the high pretensions of Rome. Not content with the easy victories which he gained over such feeble antagonists as those who were quartered at Clerkenwell and the Savoy, he had the courage to measure his strength with no less a champion than Bossuet, and came out of the conflict without discredit. Nevertheless Sherlock still continued to maintain that no oppression could justify Christians in resisting the kingly authority. When the Convention was about to meet, he strongly recommended, in a tract which was considered as the manifesto of a large part of the clergy, that James should be invited to return on such conditions as might secure the laws and religion of the nation.470 The vote which placed William and Mary on the throne filled Sherlock with sorrow and anger. He is said to have exclaimed that if the Convention was determined on a revolution, the clergy would find forty thousand good Churchmen to effect a restoration.471 Against the new oaths he gave his opinion plainly and warmly. He declared himself at a loss to understand how any honest man could doubt that, by the powers that be, Saint Paul meant legitimate powers and no others. No name was in 1689 cited by the Jacobites so proudly and fondly as that of Sherlock. Before the end of 1690 that name excited very different feelings.

A few other nonjurors ought to be particularly noticed. High among them in rank was George Hickes, Dean of Worcester. Of all the Englishmen of his time he was the most versed in the old Teutonic languages; and his knowledge of the early Christian literature was extensive. As to his capacity for political discussions, it may be sufficient to say that his favourite argument for passive obedience was drawn from the story of the Theban legion. He was the younger brother of that unfortunate John Hickes who had been found hidden in the malthouse of Alice Lisle. James had, in spite of all solicitation, put both John Hickes and Alice Lisle to death. Persons who did not know the strength of the Dean's principles thought that he might possibly feel some resentment on this account: for he was of no gentle or forgiving temper, and could retain during many years a bitter remembrance of small injuries. But he was strong in his religious and political faith: he reflected that the sufferers were dissenters; and he submitted to the will of the Lord's Anointed not only with patience but with complacency. He became indeed a more loving subject than ever from the time when his brother was hanged and his brother's benefactress beheaded. While almost all other clergymen, appalled by the Declaration of Indulgence and by the proceedings of the High Commission, were beginning to think that they had pushed the doctrine of nonresistance a little too far, he was writing a vindication of his darling legend, and trying to convince the troops at Hounslow that, if James should be pleased to massacre them all, as Maximian had massacred the Theban legion, for refusing to commit idolatry, it would