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. 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 a grave historian, but as a partisan of Wilkes, Beckford, and Junius-as if he had been poaching on their preserves for the choicest flowers of violent and vulgar rhetoric. To answer these and other accusations in detail would be quite beyond the question. If George III. was the vain, selfish, unscrupulous tyrant he is described by Mr. Green, how is it that the longer he reigned the more was he beloved by his subjects? How is it that when dynasties were falling, and revolutions were subverting all other thrones, the throne of George III. stood safer and securer every hour? How is it that in spite of his youth and inexperience, in spite of the numerous difficulties he had to encounter at the outset, his government became at every decade more firm, more steady, and more acceptable to his subjects? How is it that he lived down the bitter, factious, and unscrupulous opposition of a party who had resolved to dictate to him what ministers he should choose and what measures he should follow, until, not merely the House of Commons, as Mr. Green insinuates, but the people at large rallied round the King and withdrew all confidence from his opponents? Every fresh historical investigation has lightened the load of malignant aspersions once resting on his memory. Nobody now, except Mr. Green, believes in Burke's 'Thoughts on the present Discontents, or accepts, as an accurate statement of facts, his theory of an interior cabinet of the King's friends.' No one now thinks that this clever but unscrupulous calumny was anything better than a party invention to conceal the incapacity of the Whigs and their mutual recriminations. It is not true that George III. in ten years reduced government to a shadow, even on Mr. Green's own showing; for with all the array of talent against him, with the Stamp Act and other measures hostile to the American colonists bequeathed to him by the Whigs, Lord North's administration, though not free from mistakes, defied all attempts to shake it. Equally untrue is it that the King forced the American colonists into revolt. That revolt was the result of causes over which the King had no control. It would have come under any circumstances. Was the King to allow the claim of Independence? Was he to submit without a struggle to the dismemberment of the Empire-for America was as much a part of the Empire as Scotland or as Ireland? That, at all events, was not the opinion of the nation, not of Chatham, not of Burke, not of Rockingham, not of Bedford. What would Mr. Green have? The right of the mother-country to tax the Colonies had always been insisted on, though not enforced. It was asserted by all parties alike, however divergent their political opinions. In deference to the will of the nation the the King was bound to assert that right when it was called in question on the other side of the Atlantic. Whatever might be his private opinions he could do no otherwise; for that he acted from a sense of duty and not wholly from inclination is now very well known. Burke might argue that it was inexpedient to press the right, but the clearer judgment of men in general saw that the question could not be so decided. It was a right that we claimed, and as a right it was denied ; and it was nobler for this country, and for America itself, that it should be so, and that by Lord North's reduction of the tax to a nominal sum the baser motives of gain should not demoralise or confuse the question. As to Mr. Green's remark that by this tax the nation was brought to the brink of ruin he is only airing himself as a poet or epigrammatist. The statement is mere nonsense. The War of Independence, measured even by its material results, was not less advantageous to us than it was to our Colonists. Instead of diminishing it augmented our prosperity. We cannot spare room for further criticism, or we should be inclined to protest against Mr. Green's tirade that, it is touching even now to listen to such an appeal of reason and of culture against the tide of dogmatism which was soon to flood Christendom with Augsburg Confessions, and Creeds of Pope Pius, and Westminster Confessions, and Thirty-nine Articles. Nor can we dwell, as we had intended, upon his singular hostility to the Church of England. But we cannot forbear noticing his strange assertion that the Church of England alone among all the religious bodies of Western Christendom has failed through two hundred years to devise a single new service of prayer or of praise.' If that remark be intended to apply to the public services of the Church of England, we are not inclined to accept it as any condemnation. But if it is to be taken in its largest sense, if Mr. Green includes in it devotional services for the use of families or individuals, or of praise in the sense of hymnology, he has forgotten Ken, Wilson, Keble, and a score of others. Upon inaccuracies in detail we have not insisted, prejudicial as such inaccuracies must be in a manual intended for schools, for it is not to be expected that in so wide a subject they could be altogether avoided. Our objections are of a graver and more general kind. It is against the whole tone and teaching of the book that we feel ourselves called upon most emphatically to protest. Under the disguise of a school history, Mr. Green has * Short History,' p. 307. † Ibid. p. 610. disseminated |