book, they affirmed, tended to disturb the Church and State as putting a jealousy betwixt the King and his well-affected subjects.. These he (Mountagu) calls Puritans, but does not define a Puritan ;' . . . and the encouragement he gives to Popery, by affirming Rome to be a true Church.' The third charge was, that he had printed his book before it was examined by My Lord of Canterbury, and so infringed the privileges of Parliament, knowing that there was a complaint in the House against him! For these notable offences he was not sent to the Tower, as Mr. Green states, but was committed to the Sergeantat-Arms, with an intimation that he would be released on giving a recognisance for 20007.

In consequence of the plague and the scanty attendance, the House was adjourned to Oxford, on the 1st of August, but not until the Commons had given a further indication of their new disposition by restricting the grant of tonnage and poundage to one year. What Mr. Green means by saying that while 'voting a subsidy, the Commons restricted the grant of certain customs duties,' we do not understand, for two subsidies had been granted already, and it was not until afterwards that the Commons insisted on restraining tonnage and poundage to a single year. From the days of Edward IV. the right of levying these dues had been granted to the Sovereign for life. They had become, in fact, part of the royal prerogative, for the assent of the Commons was regarded as merely formal. Charles refused to accept the grant,' says Mr. Green; but the opportunity was never afforded him of refusing. The Bill was thrown out by the Lords in consequence of this unusual restriction. This decision left the matter unsolved, and Charles levied tonnage and poundage, waiting until the two Houses could agree between themselves whether to grant or deny it.

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What follows is equally puzzling. Mr. Green makes Buckingham resolve to break with the Parliament' before it met at Oxford. He suddenly demanded a new subsidy,'-but this was afterwards a demand made merely to be denied. . . . But the denial increased the King's irritation, and he marked it by drawing Mountagu from the Tower and promoting him to a Royal chaplaincy.' As Mountagu was never sent to the Tower, it is needless to say he was not taken from it. Besides, Mountagu had been Royal Chaplain already some months before. So Mr. Green's chronology and all his deductions fall together.*

In his more generous moments, Mr. Green is candid enough

* At page 482, Mr. Green adds, Sir Thomas Wentworth, Cope, and four other leading patriots were made sheriff's.' We suppose for Cope is meant Coke.

to

purpose

to admit that Charles had no design at the outset 'of establishing a tyranny, or of changing what he conceived to be the older constitution of the realm.' He had no settled of abolishing Parliament; but his belief was that England' -rather the Commons- would in time recover its senses, and that then Parliament might re-assemble without inconvenience to the Crown.'* But these moods are rare; and Charles stands forth in his pages as one whom the victories of Protestantism abroad had no power to draw out of the petty circle of politics at home'; as one who had given his assent to the Petition of Right, bidding Parliament rely on his royal word, but paltered with his pledge-quite a mistake, as Mr. Gardiner has shown -as one who was unworthy of the loyalty of those who supported him; perfidious alike in his negotiations with the Parliament and the army, jangling with Bradshaw and the Judges' at his trial, and only gracing his life by his manner of leaving it.f A most harsh and ungenerous judgment.

But

Mr. Green has much to learn, and no little to unlearn. There cannot be a greater mistake than to suppose that Charles was indifferent to the victories of Protestantism abroad, as Mr. Green states, if by that is meant the support of his sister's cause. that support was impossible so long as the Commons refused the necessary supplies. It was not the King but the Commons who could not be drawn out of the circle of domestic politics to consider the dignity of the nation in its foreign relations, or take a just and true view of international policy. Much as he is maligned, there was, perhaps, only one man at the time who saw that a period had arrived when this nation must remodel its diplomacy. In their narrow puritanism the Commons determined their policy by their religious prejudices. Spain had been the nation of priests and Jesuits, therefore every true Protestant must insist upon war with Spain; and peace with Spain was rank Popery. But Spain had for some time ceased to be formidable. France, under Louis XIII., was laying up stores for the ambition and aggrandisement of Louis XIV. Holland, whilst England was exclusively engrossed in the petty circle of politics at home,' was covering the seas with its fleets, and was prepared to dispute the naval supremacy of England. A war of England with Spain was exactly what Richelieu and what the Dutch wanted; and if the King and his advisers had been driven into such a war, as the Commons professed to desire, the naval greatness of this country would have been in great danger of being eclipsed for ever.

If Mr. Green does not imagine that the tax on ship-money was a mere pretext for raising revenue, his language is at least incautious on that head. So far from being of any pecuniary advantage to the Crown, and without cost to the Exchequer,' the reverse was the case, for not only every shilling of the tax was expended on the navy, but, in his desire to furnish an efficient fleet, the King spent large sums of his own.† Ship-money was, in fact, a much heavier impost upon the Crown than upon the subject; for, like all the Stuarts, Charles took special pride in the navy, and to the Stuarts this arm of the service is greatly indebted. More than this, it was this very navy, built by shipmoney, which protected England from the insults and aggressions of the Dutch in the time of the Commonwealth, and was turned by the Parliament against the King. How else does Mr. Green suppose that Tromp could have been driven out of the Channel? Did Cromwell or the Commons give their thoughts to the navy? Did they employ their revenues in ship-building?

We have scarcely space to notice Mr. Green's extraordinary defence of the execution of Strafford, on the ground that the nation in the last resort retains the right of self-defence,' and that the Bill of Attainder was the assertion of such a right.' No doubt in the last resort.' But before such a plea can be fairly urged, it is necessary to show that the accused has become so dangerous an enemy to his country as to justify it in proceeding to such extremities. That was not shown in Strafford's case. If it had been, there would have been no need for the Commons to abandon his impeachment and resort to a Bill of Attainder. This looks, as in truth it was, a determination on the part of the Commons to crush him at all hazards; to assert the dangerous doctrine advocated by St. John, their representative, that they had the same right of taking his life without legal process, as they had 'to knock wolves and foxes on the head.' But Mr. Green has strange notions of law and equity. He thinks that for the first six months of the Long Parliament' the changes it had wrought, of which this impeachment and execution of Strafford was one,

*Shifts of this kind,' he says, 'did little to fill the Treasury,' p. 502.

I shall remove a scandal that hath been put upon the King, how that his Majesty hath meant to make a private, personal, and annual profit by it [shipmoney]. What he hath done is well known, and I dare confidently say all hath been spent without any account to himself, and that his Majesty hath been at great charge besides towards the same purpose; and I heard it from his own royal mouth. . . . that it never entered into his heart to make such use of it, and said he was bound in conscience to convert it to that use it was received for, and none other; and that he would sooner eat the money than convert it to his own private use.'-Chief Justice Finch, in Rushworth, iii., App. 233. The correctness of this statement is fully borne out by original Records.

'Short History,' p. 523.

'had

6

'had been based strictly on precedent, and had, in fact, been simply a restoration of the older English Constitution as it existed at the close of the Wars of the Roses.'* Yet within those six months Parliament had violated its own Petition of Right'; in the letter, by committing Laud to the Tower without specific charges to which he might answer according to law ;' in the spirit, by its arbitrary proceedings against Strafford. In those six months it had incapacitated the bishops from sitting in the House of Lords; it had sent commissioners to deface and desecrate the churches; it had impeached the Judges for giving sentence at the King's request in the case of ship-money-an unheard-of punishment for bad logic or bad law (if it was bad law), and a penalty, if impartially administered, sufficient to have exterminated all Parliaments. It had expelled from the House all projectors and monopolists, except such as favoured its own proceedings. In its hatred of illegal subsidies, it had borrowed of the City 100,000l. to bribe the Scotch, and yet condemned the subsidies legally granted to the King by Convocation. Finally, to show its tender regard for the Constitution, and how much it was concerned in taking up the thread of it where it was snapped at the Wars of the Roses,' it extorted from the King's necessities, and his desire of saving Strafford, an Act to provide that neither House 'should be adjourned except at their own order, or Parliament be dissolved except by Act of Parliament.'

On its subsequent proceedings we need not insist. There was not a single arbitrary act which it had condemned in the King that it did not imitate and outdo. It may be questioned whether if Charles had gained the victory he would have overthrown the Constitution; unfortunately there is no room for that doubt in the history of the Long Parliament. Charles met the close of his unfortunate career with dignity, and has rooted in the minds of Englishmen a feeling of personal loyalty to the Sovereign which all Englishmen acknowledge, whatever be their politics. The Long Parliament, unable to maintain its own dignity and the freedom of the people, sunk in a universal hiss of ignominy and contempt.

But the culminating injustice of Mr. Green's book will be found in his treatment of George III. He cannot find words strong enough to express his fixed and rooted aversion for a Sovereign, whose main fault it was, in the eyes of his political enemies, that he wished to restore something like the equilibrium of parties, set aside by his predecessors, and to rescue the nation from a narrow and permanent oligarchy. Mr. Green admits

that even the best of the Whigs, with Rockingham and Burke at their head, were unfavourable to all schemes of Reform.* They shrunk, he asserts, from all sympathy with public opinion. At a time when it had become all-powerful in the State, when Government hung simply on its will, the House of Commons had ceased in any real and effective sense to represent the Commons at all.'† We stay not to inquire under what party or by whose agency this country had been reduced to a condition so disastrous. For nearly half a century the Whigs had monopolised place and power; and never in the history of England, not even in the reign of Charles II., had the arts of corruption been more actively or unscrupulously plied. Never had it been more unblushingly avowed that honesty and patriotism were mere names for venality. Under any circumstances it was not desirable that such a state of things should continue ; nor would they have existed at all, or certainly not in such excess, had there been an Opposition to criticise and resist the 'hoary jobbers' represented by Newcastle, or the haughty intimidations of a ruling oligarchy. If then George III. had had no higher object in view than that of airing himself in the character which Bolingbroke had invented of a Patriot King,' as Mr. Green contemptuously declares; even if he had had no higher purpose than to break up a vicious system which had led to such fatal results, George III. would have deserved the thanks of his people.

6

But Mr. Green cannot see or acknowledge any good in any act or motive whatever of George III. For the first and last time,' he observes, since the accession of the House of Hanover, England saw a King who was resolved to play a part in English politics; and the part which George III. succeeded in playing was undoubtedly a memorable one. In ten years he reduced government to a shadow, and turned the loyalty of his subjects into disaffection. In twenty he had forced the colonies of America into revolt and independence, and brought England to the brink of ruin.' And further on, in reference to the accession of Lord North to office, Mr. Green does not scruple to say: 'George was, in fact, sole minister during the eight years which followed; and the shame of the darkest hour of English history lies wholly at his door.'§

Is this the language, we ask, which a thoughtful historian, writing for young readers, would feel that he was justified in employing? Is it such as can be with safety commended to inexperienced judgments? To our sense nothing can be more extravagant, abusive, or immodest. Mr. Green writes not like *Short History,' p. 751. † Ibid. p. 743. + Ibid. p. 740. § Ibid. p. 749. a grave