Charles’s English ministers would have liked to govern Scotland from London and to unite the two Parliaments, but the patriotic spirit of the smaller country was as yet entirely against this.
King Charles II came back to find a new kind of England, an England less high-minded,
less romantic, more “modern,” and more commonplace than before the war. The country was again set upon peace, order, and moneygetting. The King set a bad example in his private life, but in his public life he was not by any means a bad King. He was very clever,
and had a keen eye for the interests of trade,of the Colonies, and of the Navy. The Cromwellians had bequeathed to him a very fine
Navy; but too often he let it rot for want of spending money on it. His sailors were badly paid and badly cared for; he let his contractors swindle him, and he was too idle to look into small but important matters himself. Also he was always shockingly in want of money to spend upon pleasure, and, if Parliament would not give him enough, he was apt to ask the
King of France to pay him large sums, in return for which he would promise to do something which that King wanted — not always to the honour of England. But, when he had got the money, Charles very seldom kept his promises to King Louis.
France was now taking the place in the eyes of Englishmen which Spain had held in the period 1560-1640, the place, that is, of the national bugbear and terror, whose vast army and vast wealth were to be used to help the
Pope and to spread the Catholic faith. Englishmen wanted to fight King Louis, just as they had wanted to fight King Philip in James I’s days. Charles II, however, saw that our real rivals were the Protestant Dutch, whose merchant-ships covered all seas, whose trading stations were all over the world. And, if you are to understand this, it is time that Itold you something about the growth of our own Colonial Empire.
The first idea of all voyages to distant countries had been to get either gold and silver,
Sor precious goods like silk and spices, which could not be grown in Europe. Spain, Portugal, Holland, and France had all been ahead of us in the race of discovery; but we were going to beat them all in the long run. It was Sir
Walter Raleigh, in Elizabeth’s reign, who first imagined a true “colony.” He did not mean,
as the Spaniards meant, a sort of shop, in which
Englishmen were to buy gold or silk or spices;
but rather a “plantation” of Englishmen in some distant land who were to buy all their goods, their iron tools, their woollen clothes,
their linen and their boots from England.
This would, in the first place, give an enormous lift to English manufacturers, and, in the second place, would create a piece of “Englandbeyond-the-sea,” a piece, in fact, of an English
Empire. Raleigh planned to plant such a colony in Virginia, on the shore of North America;
it collapsed for want of funds. But the idea lived on, and in 1606 it was taken up again by a group of London merchants, who subscribed money and sent out colonists. By the year 1620
Virginia was a flourishing little state.
In that year some sturdy Puritans, since calledthe “Pilgrim Fathers,” got leave to emigrate to North America. They objected to being compelled to use the Prayer Book service in
England, and wanted to worship God in their own fashion; and they founded a little state called “Plymouth” on the American coast.
Other colonies, some religious, some commercial in their origin, soon followed, and by 1660
the whole eastern coast of North America was dotted with little English states; but between
Virginia and the more sternly Puritan “New
England” lay a little wedge on the valley of the River Hudson, which had been settled by the Dutch. There was no gold in North
America, and, except tobacco, no rich natural crop; but there was a virgin soil of great fertility, vast forests full of valuable timber,
swarms of fur-bearing animals like beavers,
and splendid fisheries on the coasts. So these peoples rapidly grew into rich and prosperous little states, working, in a climate not unlike that of Europe, at the same sort of work that their fathers had known across the ocean.
But many of the Colonies were full of Puritans and Protestant Dissenters, the very men who,
in King Charles I’s reign, had fought against the Crown. So there was born, in all our colonists, a spirit of resistance to government in general, and the quite foolish notion that allgovernment is oppressive. Such a spirit might easily lead to rebellion. The colonists, however, knew well that all round them were
Frenchmen, Dutchmen, and Spaniards, casting greedy eyes on their riches, and that against these foes only the English fleet could protect them. So some sort of pretence of loyalty to their Mother Country was for many years almost a necessity to them. The Mother Country usually left them to themselves; it never taxed them; it sent them Governors, who hoisted a British flag outside their houses, and “took the lead in Society,” but did little other governing. Each colony set up a miniature House of Commons, or something like it, of its own,
and made its own laws on the English model.
On one thing only England insisted, that the colonists were to buy their goods wholly from
English merchants; and if they produced any goods which England wanted and could not grow herself (e. <7., tobacco, rice, beaver skins)
they were to send all such goods to England.
Charles II fought two great wars with the
Dutch during his reign; and great sailors came to the front, though none as great as Robert
Blake, who had been Cromwell’s admiral.
The sailors and the Navy covered themselves with glory, but, as I said above, the management of the service was shockingly bad, and
it was no thanks to King Charles that the Dutch did not win.
The Dutch in the Medway
If war were won by feasting,
Or victory by song,
Or safety found in sleeping sound,
How England would be strong!
But honour and dominion
Are not maintained so,
They’re only got by sword and shot,
And this the Dutchmen know!
The moneys that should feed us
You spend on your delight;
How can you then have sailor-men
To aid you in your fight?
Our fish and cheese are rotten,
Which makes the scurvy grow —
We cannot serve you if we starve,
And this the Dutchmen know!
Our ships in every harbour
Be neither whole nor sound,
And, when we seek to mend a leak,
No oakum can be found,
Or, if it is, the caulkers,
And carpenters also,
For lack of pay, have gone away,
And this the Dutchmen know!
Mere powder, guns, and bullets
We scarce can get at all,
Their price was spent in merriment
And revel at Whitehall,
While we in tattered doublets,
From ship to ship must row,
Beseeching friends for odds and ends —
And this the Dutchmen know/
No king will heed our warnings,
No Court will pay our claims —
Our King and Court for their disport
Do sell the very Thames!
For, now De Ruyter’s topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet —
And this the Dutchmen know!
There were some fearful drawn battles, both in the North Sea and the Channel. Once the
Dutch sailed into the Thames and the Medway and burned a lot of our ships at Chatham. But the main result of these wars was that the Dutch gave up to us their colony in North America,
which was henceforth to be called New York.
In the same re
ign “North and South Carolina”
were added to our American list of states; they lie south of Virginia, are hot and swampy, and produce mainly rice and tobacco.
Besides these Colonies we possessed several valuable West Indian Islands, notably Jamaica,
which grew sugar; we had a whale-fishing and fur-trading station in Hudson’s Bay, northward from the French settlements in Canada;
we had several little dots of land protected by forts on the west coast of Africa, whence we imported black slaves to our own and the
Spanish colonies; and, in India, we had Bombay and Madras. The “East India Company”
had been founded to trade with the Far East
(from which the Dutch had steadily driven out the first European traders, the Portuguese),
as far back as the end of Elizabeth’s reign.
. Dutch, Frenchmen, and Englishmen scrambled
, against each other to get permission, from the
“Great Moguls” and other Eastern Kings with magnificent names, to sell and buy in those countries; and, on the whole, during the seventeenth century the English company got the best of trade with Hindostan into its hands.
So you see the seeds of a great empire were already sown, and the colonial trade made
English merchants both rich and very adventurous.
I wish I could say as much good for Charles 3
II’s reign at home as abroad, but I cannot. J
And this is mainly because in his reign we feel that England had ceased to be united, and seemed to have little chance of recovering its unity. The notion that “all Kings are trying
to oppress all peoples,” seems to have grown up; it was the outcome of the Civil War.
So there are now two “parties”,in Parliament and even in the nation. There are the party of the King and his ministers and the party of those who are not his ministers, but would like to be. These parties were then called
“Tories” and “Whigs;” in our days they call themselves “Conservatives” and “Liberals”
(or “Radicals”). Each was supposed to represent certain principles of government; the
Tories were for Church and Crown and gentlemen; the Whigs for dissenters, for trade, and for all who would bully the King.
Tories were supposed to be against all changes in laws or institutions; the Whigs were supposed to favour moderate and slow changes of law. Both professed to be utterly loyal to the Constitution — i.e., to government by King,
Lords, and Commons. But neither was really true to its original principles. The Whigs originally favoured a vast empire, and the careful protection of British trade, by war if necessary, especially by war with Catholic
France, whereas the Tories were all for a French alliance and despised trade and colonies. Nowadays things have reversed themselves; and it is the Conservatives (or Tories) who want to protect British trade, to keep a large Army and
Navy always ready for war, and to win the love of our brothers in the Colonies. Each party has constantly taken a different view of what the exact needs of Britain are, and each has exaggerated its own view, out of rivalry with the other party.
And this has been unfortunate; for it has too often made the leaders of each party tell lies to the people of Great Britain, in order to get their friends elected to Parliament, and themselves to office as the King’s ministers. For you will see, if you reflect, that, when every law and every grant of money has to be passed by both houses of Parliament, it would be of no use to a king to have Whig ministers if there was a Tory majority in the House of Commons;
a king who wanted to govern well and without quarrels must take ministers from the party which, for the time, has the upper hand in the
House of Commons. In those days the House of Commons was chosen by a very small body of electors; now it is chosen by almost all the grown-up men in Great Britain. But the principle was the same then as now; a king who,
perhaps, wanted to make a “ Whig “ war or carry a “Whig” law might suddenly find himself,
after the election of a new Parliament, face to face with a “Tory” House of Commons, and so he would have to dismiss his Whig ministers,take Tory ministers, and drop his “Whig”
war or his “Whig” law. No doubt it has made kings govern according to what was supposed to be the wish of their people for the time being; but, in the first place, a people as a whole seldom wishes the same thing for many years on end, and does not by any means always wish what is best for the country; in the second place, the system leads to friction and quarrel between parties, and so to waste of power and lack of union in the nation.
All this was only beginning in Charles II’s reign, but it was beginning, and it was going to go on and get worse. It has gone on and got worse every day until now. In Charles
II’s time Parliament was constantly the scene of fierce party disputes, mainly upon religion.
Charles had no lawful sons, and his heir was his brother James, who after the death of his first wife had become a Catholic and married an
Italian Catholic lady; Charles himself was accused of favouring Catholics, even of being secretly a Catholic. Wild stories were started and believed of “Popish plots” to kill Charles and set up James. (Charles, who was perhaps the most genuinely humorous of all our kings,
said to his brother, “Dear James, no one would be such a fool as to kill me in order to make you
King.”) The Whigs got up a plan to shut out
James from the succession and to set up a bastard son of Charles in his place; in 16801681 it looked almost like a civil war between
Tories and Whigs. But all moderate men dreaded this, and the King played his game so cleverly that, when he died in 1685, his brother
James succeeded him without trouble. Charles had taken sharp vengeance on some of the
Whig plotters, and their families did not forget the fact.
James II, however, was not merely the
Catholic King of a strongly Protestant people,
but he was also the most obstinate man in
England. If not, like Edward II, a crowned ass, he was at least a crowned mule. In three years he had wrecked his own throne, and very nearly pulled down the ancient monarchy of
England on the top of himself. His Parliament was quite loyal and quite prepared to shut its eyes to his Catholic faith, if he would not flaunt it in every one’s face. But, from the very first, he set himself not only to do this,
but to make the Catholics supreme in the
State. He wished to give them all posts in
Army, Navy and Civil Service, and even in the
Church of England. He thought that by promising to abolish all laws against the Protestant
Dissenters he might get them to help him to abolish the laws against the Catholics also.
But the Dissenters, who certainly had never loved the Church of England, feared a Catholic king much more, and altogether refused to listen to James; they threw in their lot with those very churchmen and bishops who had bullied them. In Ireland, James appealed to the wildest passions of the Irish against the
Protestant colonies of Englishmen which had been planted there by Elizabeth, by James I
and by Cromwell, and who had been confirmed in their lands by Charles II. To the one person who could perhaps have helped him to put down England by the sword — namely, King
Louis of France — this crowned mule turned a deaf ear, and professed that he wanted no such help. In short, he listened to nobody but a few
Catholic priests in his own household.
Until 1688 his heir had been his eldest daughter, the good and beloved Princess Mary,
who had been married in 1677 to her Dutch cousin, Prince William of Orange, who was now the leader of Protestant Europe against the
King of France. Most Englishmen were content to wait till James should die; then this darling Protestant girl would be their queen.
But in June, 1688, James had a so
n born to him, who would, of course, be brought up as a Papist. The whole nation shivered at the prospect; its leaders, Whig and moderate
Tory alike, would wait no longer, and a secret message was at once despatched to Prince William begging him to come over to England,
either to turn out King James or to teach him by force (for nothing but force would ever convince such a character) to govern better.
Prince William of Orange was the son of
Charles I’s daughter Mary. He was a frail little creature, nearly always ill, with an enormous hook-nose and cold gray eyes, which only lighted up in battle. His manners were also cold and unkind; but underneath all he had a soul of fire. He cared for but one thing on earth, to smash King Louis of France. He saw that rich England had been, since Cromwell’s time, too much the ally of France, too much the enemy of Holland. He thought she had played false to Protestantism. If he came to England to deliver it from King James, he meant afterward to throw the whole weight and wealth of England into the alliances which he was forever knitting together against his hated enemy, France. For English “politics” and the English Constitution, for the squabble of Whigs and Tories in the English
Parliament, he cared nothing at all. But he was the husband of the heiress of England, and here was his chance of power.
Men went about saying that the child justborn to King James was not his son at all,
was no true Prince of Wales, “he had been smuggled into the Palace in a warming pan” —
and much other nonsense of that sort. It suited William to believe this, or to pretend to believe it. James was well warned of what was coming, but he shut his ears, and so was quite unready to meet William and his Dutch fleet, which had a lot of English and Scottish soldiers and exiles on board it. William landed in Devonshire and moved slowly toward London. James had an army, many of whose regiments would have fought faithfully for him if he would only have led them; but he turned tail and fled to France; and just before Christmas, 1688, William entered London.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 839