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“ART. VII. — Vaughan’s Memorials of the Stuarts. Memorials of the Stuart Dynasty, including the Constitutional and Ecclesiastical History of England from the Decease of Elizabeth to the Abdication of James II. By ROBERT VAUGHAN. 2 vols. 8vo. London. 1831,” The North American Review, vol. 37, no. 80 (July 1833), pp. 164–89; selection from pp. 165, 173–7.
[Charles Francis Adams]
Charles Francis Adams (1807–86), the son of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), was a Boston born politician, diplomat, and miscellaneous writer. Adams wrote on a number of historical topics. Authorship of this review is attributed to C. F. Adams in William Cushing, Index to the North American Review (Cambridge, 1878), p. 117. On C.F. Adams see Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Charles Francis Adams (1900; reprinted New York and London, 1980); Kinley Brauer, “Charles Francis Adams,” ANB, vol. 1, pp. 74–7; Martin B. Duberman, Charles Francis Adams (1960).
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At this time of day, nobody thinks of placing reliance upon the account of the British revolution given by Mr. Hume. Many writers have within a few years combined to expose his inaccuracies of fact and his partiality of judgment. He was a Scotch tory of the last century in politics, and a skeptic in religion. He was bred up in attachment to that law which made the Roman Emperors absolute sovereigns in their dominions, and he nursed in himself a supreme contempt for every thing that savored of devotion. Admirable, therefore, as the literary acquirements of Mr. Hume certainly were, he was by no means the person to compose a textbook upon English history. He is to be heard not as a judge, but as an attorney pleading a cause, and his arguments are worth no more from him, than they would be coming from Clarendon himself. Indeed, they are not worth so much, for Clarendon was a religious man. He could understand the sincerity of religious belief, even when it did not come exactly within the line of his own practice.
Numerous as the corrections of Hume have been, few, we might say not one, has been directed particularly to the point where he was most unjust, — the history of the Puritans. We are therefore delighted at last to take up a work which undertakes to supply this deficiency; which proposes, in a brief compass, to review and rectify what has heretofore been written.
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We must now pass to the consideration of the critical reign of Charles the First. The history of England furnished to each of the great parties which divided the kingdom, the precedents upon which they rested their opposite claims. And each began to revive those practices, which were best likely to serve their present design. Charles and his lawyers found themselves sustained by the examples of the Tudors, while the other party looked beyond, to the reign of the Plantagenets. The monarch set in operation his forced loans, his benevolences, ship money, forest laws, the honor of arbitrary knighthood, Star Chamber and High Commission Courts, forming together a complete net-work of despotism over the country, while his opponents claimed the support of the Charter of Runymede and the authority of Parliament. Precedent has great influence in the way of restraining the passions of men, and is therefore always of considerable value as a support to justice. But we cannot admit that the case of the resisting party could have been a whit less just, if every one of the acts of Charles had been practised from time immemorial, and there had been no offset against them to be shown on the face of the statue book. Man has rights beyond the bar of limitation, and it is only necessary for him to claim them understandingly, to place his cause upon an eternal basis. The British people had arrived so far in the reign of the first Charles, — and it was the wrong-headed resistance of that king which destroyed him, and drove them to madness.
It will be perceived, from this view of the case, that we are disposed to rely very little, for a justification of the Revolution, upon the mere records of ancient times, — nor are we at all aware that such reliance is necessary, excepting perhaps in a single point. A doubt might reasonably be entertained, whether forcible resistance was justifiable by the degree of oppression, that had yet been experienced by the people at large. The well known rule is, that the danger of suffering by submission must exceed that likely to result from any attempt at change. Clarendon has drawn a striking picture of the national prosperity at this time, for the purpose of illustrating that question; and even Mr. Fox, whose partialities are by no means on the same side, has, in his Historical Fragment, treated as a doubtful case the propriety of the appeal to the ultima ratio, at the time when it was made.
There is always a disadvantage attending measures of prevention. Men look back after a danger has passed harmlessly over, and wonder how they could have been so much alarmed, without reflecting that their own acts had dispelled it. In this way it is, that a skeptical nature, like that of Hume, has every advantage. The actual consequences of a measure do not appear to correspond with the dread entertained of it previously. Immediately, such an author attributes personal motives to the leaders for ‘so unnecessarily’ exciting the public feeling. Charles on the throne, having dissolved three Parliaments in less than his three first years, and reigning for twelve more without calling one, with Strafford for his right and Laud for his left hand man, and with all the instruments which the ingenuity of the crown lawyers were devising to support his tyranny, might well be deemed an enemy to the public peace, fit to be resisted. But apart from this consideration, so far as the Puritans constituted the popular party, they had no other resource. Archbishop Laud required conformity to that which their consciences would not permit them to conform to, — and the only peaceable alternative, that of secession from the State, he as resolutely refused to them. Cromwell, Hampden, Haselrig and others were prevented, by his interposition, from sailing to this country, after they were actually on board a vessel. The choice, therefore, was to them between war or total humiliation. It seems difficult to suppose a case in which a struggle is justifiable, if this attack upon religious opinions and civil rights together do not make one. Mr. Fox seems to us to have erred, as many other writers have done, — by placing the contest of 1640 too exclusively in a popular light. Had resistance been confined strictly to the defenders of civil liberty, it may well be doubted, whether at that stage it was completely justifiable. We must be permitted to add a doubt, whether it would have happened. The Puritans and they alone felt the double motive.
It has been said, that the king was willing to concede, and did concede enough to satisfy reasonable men, but that his opponents never relaxed in their enmity, — and this has been brought as an argument to show their ambitious views. Nobody who judges fairly of the character of Charles, can be long blinded upon this point. It has been the practice of such writers as Hume, to cover this monarch’s failings, under the mantle of sympathy for his hard fate. Yet it cannot be denied, that dissimulation and double dealing were his peculiar characteristics. The consequences were exceedingly unfortunate for himself. The popular leaders could never rely upon him, even when he was most sincere. They felt themselves embarked in a new and adventurous undertaking. Loyalty had all the power hat European prescription could give it. The popular idea of ‘the divinity that doth hedge a king,’ was not then worn away. If they had submitted, and Charles had been false to his word, their cause would have been almost irrecoverably lost. Now that Charles would have been in fact false, there is every reason to believe. His letters found at Naseby prove it; his mode of treating the petition of right proves it; his first appearance before Parliament to bolster up Buckingham’s false account of the business of the Spanish Marriage proves it; his voluntary and violated promise to impose a restriction upon his wife’s religious establishment proves it. Throughout all his history, if we consider it by the aid of private documents that have since reached the light, it would be difficult to fix upon one act of his reign, that can be called a sincere concession to the feelings of his people.
Yet this is the man, whose cause Mr. Hume takes up against what he considers the hypocrisy of the Puritans. This is the man in whose favor that historian ventures to make an insinuation against the memory of Hampden, and in justification of another of whose acts, he coolly pens the following paragraph.
‘Because Sir John Eliot happened to die while in custody, a great clamor was raised against the administration, and he was universally regarded as a martyr to the liberties of England.’
Now Sir John Eliot was ‘in custody’ three years on account of his performing a certain portion of his duty in Parliament; his physician declared his health to be affected by the imprisonment, and the king knew it, yet refused him any indulgence. We are somewhat at a loss to know, what claim short the stake or the axe, could be stronger to the title of a martyr. And withal the philosophical historian proceeds to generalize, and quotes with approbation some old royalist writer, who says that the Puritans, though they would not swear and drink, yet would lie and deceive. In just such a spirit does Mr. Achille Murat remark of the people of New England at this day, that they go to church, and are strict in the performance of religious exercises, while, at the same time, they do not stick at a fraudulent bankruptcy. The sweeping character of such charges ought always to inspire a doubt, not only of their correctness, but also of the authority that pretends to make them. All bodies of men are necessarily composed unequally. Some members will have gross vices. It is manifestly unjust to judge of the mass by the exceptions. The proper method of arriving at a conclusion, would be to compare the general character for morality of one portion of the community with that of another. New England need not shrink from such a comparison with any portion of the earth, nor will the character of the Puritans, even by Hume’s own admission elsewhere, suffer by comparison with that of the cavaliers.
But it is hardly worth while to grow indignant against Hume. His work has much merit, even if he did forget the old rule, ne quid falsi dicere audcat, ne quid veri non audeat. We will close our notice of him, by quoting, as strikingly applicable to condemn him, the words of one of his contemporaries. ‘The man,’ says Dr. Johnson, ‘who considers himself as constituted the ultimate judge of disputable characters, and entrusted with the distribution of the last terrestrial rewards of merit, ought to summon all his fortitude to the support of his integrity, and resolve to discharge an office of such dignity with the most vigilant caution and scrupulous justice. To deliver examples to posterity, and to regulate the opinion of future times, is no slight or trivial undertaking; nor is it easy to commit more atrocious treason against the great republic of humanity, than by falsifying its records and misguiding its decrees.’