The Evolution of States Part 52

[Footnote 1146: It is to be noted in this connection that at first the secret was very well kept. There can be no reasonable doubt that Shaftesbury and Lauderdale were kept in the dark as to the Treaty of Dover, in which Charles agreed with Louis to introduce Catholicism in England. Macaulay's suggestion to the contrary comes of his determination to hear nothing in Shaftesbury's defence.]

[Footnote 1147: This is accepted by Armand Carrel, who calls him (_Histoire de la Contre-Revolution en Angleterre_, p. 6) "homme d'une immoralite profonde."]

[Footnote 1148: It is to be regretted that Green, while admitting that Mr. Christie was "in some respects" successful in his vindication of Shaftesbury, should have left his own account of Shaftesbury's character glaringly unfair. Verbally following Burnet, he p.r.o.nounces Ashley "at best a Deist" in his religion, and adds that his life was "that of a debauchee," going on to couple the terms "Deist and debauchee" in a very clerical fas.h.i.+on. And yet in the previous paragraph he admits that "the debauchery of Ashley was simply a mask. He was, in fact, _temperate by nature and habit_, and his ill-health rendered any great excess impossible." The non-correction of the flat contradiction must apparently be set down to Green's ill-health. As a matter of fact, the charge of debauchery is baseless. Long before Mr. Christie, one of the annotators of Burnet's _History_ (ed. 1838, p. 64, _note_) defended Shaftesbury generally, and pointed out that "in private life we have no testimony that he was depraved." Cp. Christie, _Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper_, 1871, i, 316.]

[Footnote 1149: _History of His Own Time_, ed. 1838, p. 290.]

[Footnote 1150: My old friend, Mr. Alfred Marks, whose masterly book, _Who Killed Sir Edmund Berry G.o.dfrey?_ (Burns and Oates, 1905), decisively establishes the suicide theory, and disposes of the counter-theory of Mr. John Pollock, did not dispute the fact of the vague plotting of Coleman. No one can say how much of such loose and futile scheming there was.]

[Footnote 1151: How odious it was may be gathered from Dryden's _Annus Mirabilis_ and Marvell's _Character of Holland_, pieces in which two men of genius exhibit every stress of vulgar ill-feeling that we can detect in the Jingo press and poets of our own day.]

[Footnote 1152: Dryden's charge, in _The Medal_, of "bartering his venal wit for sums of gold" during the Rebellion, is pure figment. It is an established fact that even as Councillor of State, to which office there was attached a salary of 1,000, Shaftesbury, then Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, received no salary at all. See note to Mr. Christie's (Globe) ed. of Dryden's poems, pp. 127, 128.]

[Footnote 1153: Christie's _Life of Ashley Cooper_, ii, 293, _note_.

Perhaps it is not sufficiently considered by Mr. Christie that Sidney regarded France as a possible ally for the overthrow of monarchy in England. Cp. Hallam, ii, 460-61. His position was not that of an ordinary Parliamentary bribe-taker. See Ludlow's _Memoirs_, iii, 165, _et seq._ And the English Government had sought to have him a.s.sa.s.sinated.]

[Footnote 1154: In 1603 Lord Mountjoy in Ireland laid it down as the doctrine of the Church of England that his master was "by right of descent an absolute king," and that it was unlawful for his subjects "upon any cause to raise arms against him." These words, says Dr.

Gardiner (_History 1604-43_, i, 370), "truly expressed the belief with which thousands of Englishmen had grown up during the long struggle with Rome." For earlier discussions see Stubbs, i, 593, More's _Utopia_, bk.

i, and Hooper's _Early Writings_, ed. 1843, p. 75.]

[Footnote 1155: As Hallam notes (_Middle Ages_, 11th ed. ii, 157), the French bishops in the ninth century had claimed sacerdotal rights of deposing kings in as full a degree as the Popes did later. In that period, however, bishops were often anti-papal; and the papal claim practically arose in the Roman and clerical resistance to the nomination of Popes by the Emperor, though Pope John VIII had in his time gone even further than Gregory VII did later, claiming power to choose the Emperor. _Id._ pp. 165-83.]

[Footnote 1156: Buckle is wrong (i, 394) in dating the beginning of the revival of the doctrine "about 1681." Saunderson's edition of Usher was first published in 1660.]

[Footnote 1157: The words of Thomas are extremely explicit: "Si [principes] non habeant justum princ.i.p.atum sed usurpatum, vel si injusta praecipiant, non tenentur eis subditi obedire." _Summa_, pt. ii, q. civ, art. 6. The right of the Pope to depose an apostate prince was, of course, constantly affirmed.]

[Footnote 1158: _Tractatus de Legibus_, lib. ii, c. ii, -- 3.]

[Footnote 1159: Hallam, _Literature of Europe_, ed. 1872, iii, 161.]

[Footnote 1160: Hallam, as last cited, p. 162. Bayle notes (art.

"Althusius," and _notes_) that the treatise was much denounced in Germany.]

[Footnote 1161: _Ecclesiastical Polity_, bk. i, ch. x, -- 8.]

[Footnote 1162: Amsterdam, 1689-90, 2 vols.]

[Footnote 1163: It is to be noted that "Pa.s.sive Obedience" had different degrees of meaning for those who professed to believe in it. For some it meant merely not taking arms against the sovereign, and did not imply that he was ent.i.tled to active obedience in all things. See Hallam, ii, 463.]

[Footnote 1164: Filmer begins his _Patriarcha_ (1680) with the remark that the doctrine of natural freedom and the right to choose governments had been "a common opinion ... since the time that school divinity began to flourish." Like Salmasius, he fathers the doctrine on the Papacy; and, indeed, the Church of Rome had notoriously employed it in its strifes with kings, at its own convenience; but it had as notoriously been put forward by many lay communities on their own behalf, and had been practically acted on in England over and over again. And it is clearly laid down in the third century by Tertullian, _Ad Scapulam_, ii.]

[Footnote 1165: _Memoirs_, 2nd ed. p. 177.]

[Footnote 1166: Though it is substantially maintained by Grotius, _De Jure Belli et Pacis_, 1625, I, iii, 9-12.]

[Footnote 1167: Johnson was moved to p.r.o.nounce Dryden the most excessive of the writers of his day in the "meanness and servility of hyperbolical adulation," excepting only Aphra Behn in respect of her address to "Eleanor Gwyn." But Malone vindicates the poet by citing rather worse samples, in particular Joshua Barnes's "Ode to Jefferies" (_Life_, in vol. i of _Prose Works of Dryden_, 1800, pp. 244-47). They all indicate the same corruption of judgment and character, special to the royalist atmosphere.]

[Footnote 1168: Toland's ed., 1700, p. 55.]

[Footnote 1169: Essay (xvi of pt. ii) on the _Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth_. Cp. Essay vii, on the tendencies of the British Government, where Harrington's unpracticality is sufficiently indicated.]

[Footnote 1170: Cp. Carrel, _Contre-Revolution_, p. 212, as to the "profound discouragement" that had fallen on the people in 1685. Cp. p.

213.]

[Footnote 1171: "Our late Warrs and Schisms having almost wholly discouraged men from the study of Theologie." W. Charleton, _The Immortality of the Human Soul demonstrated by the Light of Nature_, 1657, p. 50. (Cp. Baxter, _The Reformed Pastor_, 1656; ed. 1835, pp.

95-100.) Charleston, as his t.i.tle and that of his previous work on Atheism show, uses no ecclesiastical arguments.]

[Footnote 1172: The French Academy, formally founded in 1635, had in a similar way originated in a private gathering some six years before (Olivet et Pelisson, _Relation concernant l'Histoire de l'Academie Francoise_, ed. 1672, p. 5). There may of course have been many such private groups in England in the period of the Commonwealth.]

[Footnote 1173: _History of the Royal Society_, 1667, p. 53.]

[Footnote 1174: P. 67. Sprat mentions that many physicians gave great help (p. 130).]

[Footnote 1175: P. 53.]

[Footnote 1176: _History of the Royal Society_, 1667, p. 83. The French _beaux esprits_ were not afraid to discuss now and then the soul, or even G.o.d, contriving to do it without theological heat. See the _Collection_ cited, Conferences 6, 16, 79, 87, 142, etc.]

[Footnote 1177: _History_, p. 73.]

[Footnote 1178: P. 91.]

[Footnote 1179: P. 53.]

[Footnote 1180: So too with the non-combatants. Note, for instance, Locke's recoil from the scholastic philosophy, and his early eager interest in chemistry, medicine, and meteorology. Anthony a Wood records him as a student "of a turbulent spirit, clamorous, and never-contented"--that is to say, argumentative.]

[Footnote 1181: _History of the Royal Society_, p. 152.]

[Footnote 1182: Sprat, of course, carried the "free way of reasoning"

only to a certain length, feeling obliged to deprecate "that some Philosophers, by their carelessness of a Future Estate, have brought a discredit on knowledge itself" (p. 367); and "that many Modern Naturalists have bin negligent in the Wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d"; but he still insisted that "the universal Disposition of this Age is bent upon a rational Religion" (p. 366). Compare the _Discourse of Things above Reason, by a Fellow of the Royal Society_ (1681), attributed to Boyle, and published with a tract on the same theme by another Fellow.]

[Footnote 1183: If, that is, the section providing for slavery be his.

It probably was not. See Mr. Fox Bourne's _Life of Locke_, 1876, i, 239.

His influence may reasonably be traced in the remarkable provisions for the freedom of sects--under limitation of theism. _Id._ pp. 241-43. Mr.

Fox Bourne does not deal with the slavery clause.]

[Footnote 1184: Thoughtful observers already recognised in the time of James II that if England developed on the French lines religious freedom would disappear from Europe. See the tractate _L'Europe esclave si Angleterre ne rompt ses fers_, Cologne, 1677.]

[Footnote 1185: This may be taken as certain; but it is not clear how far he wished to go. Ranke (_History of England_, Eng. tr. iv, 437) and Ha.s.sencamp (_History of Ireland_, Eng. tr. p. 117) are satisfied with the evidence as to his having promised the German emperor to do his utmost to repeal the penal laws against the Catholics, and his having offered the Irish Catholics, before the Battle of Aghrim, religious freedom, half the churches in Ireland, and half their old possessions.

For this we have only a private letter. However this point may be decided, the Treaty of Limerick is plain evidence. On the point of William's responsibility for the breach of that Treaty, see the excellent sketch of _The Past History of Ireland_ by Mr. Bouverie-Pusey (1894).]

[Footnote 1186: Cp. the author's _Saxon and the Celt_, 1897, pp.

146-56.]

[Footnote 1187: _A Character of King Charles II_, ed. 1750, p. 45.]

[Footnote 1188: _Continuation of the Life of Clarendon_, in 1-vol. ed.

of _History_, 1843, p. 1006.]