Part 7 (1/2)

Nevertheless, Queen Anne had given Tindal a present of 500 for his book, and told him that she believed he had banished Popery beyond a possibility of its return. Tindal himself, it should be said, had become a Roman Catholic under James II. and then a Protestant again, but whether before or after the abdication of James is not quite clear. He placed a high value on his own work, for when, in December 1707, the Grand Jury of Middles.e.x presented _The Rights_ its author sagely reflected that such a proceeding would ”occasion the reading of one of the best books that have been published in our age by many more people than otherwise would have read it.” This probably was the case, with the result that it was burnt, as aforesaid, by the hangman in 1710 by order of the House of Commons, at the instance of Sacheverell's friends, in the very same week that Sacheverell's sermons themselves were burnt! The House wished perhaps to show itself impartial. The victory, for the time at least, was with Sacheverell and the Church. The Whig ministry was overturned, and its Tory successor pa.s.sed the Bill against Occasional Conformity, and the Schism Act; and, had the Queen's reign been prolonged, would probably have repealed the very meagre Toleration Act of 1689. Tindal, however, despite the Tory reaction, continued to write on the side of civil and religious liberty, keeping his best work for the last, published within three years of his death, when he was past seventy, namely, _Christianity as Old as the Creation; or, the Gospel a republication of the Religion of Nature_ (1730). Strange to say, this work, criticised as it was, was neither presented nor burnt. I have no reason, therefore, to present it here, and indeed it is a book of which rather to read the whole than merely extracts.

About the same time that Sacheverell's sermons were the sensation of London, a sermon preached in Dublin on the Presbyterian side was attended there with the same marks of distinction. In November 1711 Boyse's sermon on _The Office of a Scriptural Bishop_ was burnt by the hangman, at the command of the Irish House of Lords. Unfortunately one cannot obtain this sermon without a great number of others, amongst which the author embedded it in a huge and repulsive folio comprising all his works. The sermon was first preached and printed in 1709, and reprinted the next year: it enters at length into the historical origin of Episcopacy in the early Church, the author alluding as follows to the Episcopacy aimed at by too many of his own contemporaries: ”A grand and pompous sinecure, a domination over all the churches and ministers in a large district managed by others as his delegates, but requiring little labour of a man's own, and all this supported by large revenues and attended with considerable secular honours.” Boyse could hardly say the same in these days, true, no doubt, as it was in his own. Still, that even an Irish House of Lords should have seen fit to burn his sermon makes one think that the political extinction of that body can have been no serious loss to the sum-total of the wisdom of the world.

The last writer to incur a vote of burning from the House of Commons in Queen Anne's reign was William Fleetwood, Bishop of St. Asaph; and this for the preface to four sermons he had preached and published: (1) on the death of Queen Mary, 1694; (2) on the death of the Duke of Gloucester, 1700; (3) on the death of King William, 1701; (4) on the Queen's Accession, in 1702. It was voted to the public flames on June 10th, 1712, as ”malicious and factious, highly reflecting upon the present administration of public affairs under Her Majesty, and tending to create discord and sedition among her subjects.” The burning of the preface caused it to be the more read, and some 4,000 numbers of the _Spectator_, No. 384, carried it far and wide. Probably it was more read than the prelate's numerous tracts and sermons, such as his _Essay on Miracles_, or his _Vindication of the Thirteenth of Romans_.

The bishop belonged to the party that was dissatisfied with the terms of the Peace of Utrecht, then pending, and his preface was clearly written as a vehicle or vent for his political sentiments. The offensive pa.s.sage ran as follows: ”We were, as all the world imagined then, just entering on the ways that promised to lead to such a peace as would have answered all the prayers of our religious Queen . . . when G.o.d, for our sins, permitted the spirit of discord to go forth, and by troubling sore the camp, the city, and the country (and oh! that it had altogether spared the places sacred to His wors.h.i.+p!), to spoil for a time the beautiful and pleasing prospect, and give us, in its stead, I know not what--our enemies will tell the rest with pleasure.” Writing to Bishop Burnet, he expresses himself still more strongly: ”I am afraid England has lost all her constraining power, and that France thinks she has us in her hands, and may use us as she pleases, which, I daresay, will be as scurvily as we deserve. What a change has two years made! Your lords.h.i.+p may now imagine you are growing young again; for we are fallen, methinks, into the very dregs of Charles the Second's politics.”

a.s.suredly Bishop Fleetwood had done better to reserve his political opinions for private circulation, instead of exposing them to the world under the guise and shelter of what purported to be a religious publication.

But he belonged to the age of the great political churchmen, when the Church played primarily the part of a great political inst.i.tution, and her more ambitious members made the profession of religion subsidiary to the interests of the political party they espoused. The type is gradually becoming extinct, and the time is long since past when the preface to a bishop's sermons, or even his sermons themselves, could convulse the State. One cannot, for instance, conceive the recurrence of such a commotion as was raised by Fleetwood or Sacheverell, possible as everything is in the zigzag course of history. Still less can one conceive a repet.i.tion of such persecution of Dissent as has been ill.u.s.trated by the cases of Delaune and Defoe. For either the Church moderated her hostility to Dissent, or her power to exercise it lessened; no instance occurring after the reign of Queen Anne of any book being sentenced to the flames on the side either of Orthodoxy or Dissent.

FOOTNOTES:

[137:1] In _Notes and Queries_ for March 11th, 1854, Mr. James Graves, of Kilkenny, mentions as in his possession a copy of Molyneux, considerable portions of which had been consumed by fire.

[150:1] In a letter in his _Vindicius Liberius_ he says: ”As for the Christian religion in general, that book is so far from calling it in question that it was purposely written for its service, to defend it against the imputations of contradiction and obscurity which are frequently objected by its opposers.”

[154:1] Wilson's _Defoe_, iii. 52.

[160:1] See Somers' _Tracts_ (1748), VII., 223, and the _Entire Confutation of Mr. Hoadley's Book_, for the decree itself, and the authors condemned. After the Rye House Plot, which caused this decree, Oxford addressed Charles II. as ”the breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the Lord”; Cambridge called him ”the Darling of Heaven!” Could the servility of ultra-loyalty go further?

CHAPTER VII.

OUR LAST BOOK-FIRES.

The eighteenth century, which saw the abolition, or the beginning of the abolition, of so many bad customs of the most respectable lineage and antiquity, saw also the hangman employed for the last time for the punishment of books. The custom of book-burning, never formally abolished, died out at last from a gradual decline of public belief in its efficacy; just as tortures died out, and judicial ordeals died out, and, as we may hope, even war will die out, before the silent, disintegrating forces of increasing intelligence. As our history goes on, one becomes more struck by the many books which escape burning than by the few which incur it. The tale of some of those which were publicly burnt during the eighteenth century has already been told; so that it only remains to bring together, under their various heads, the different literary productions which complete the record of British works thus a.s.sociated with the memory of the hangman.

After the beginning of the Long Parliament, the House of Commons const.i.tuted itself the chief book-burning authority; but the House of Lords also, of its own motion, occasionally ordered the burning of offensive literary productions. Thus, on March 29th, 1642, they sentenced John Bond, for forging a letter purporting to be addressed to Charles I. at York from the Queen in Holland, to stand in the pillory at Westminster Hall door and in Cheapside, with a paper on his head inscribed with ”A contriver of false and scandalous libels,” the said letter to be called in and burnt near him as he stood there.

On December 18th, 1667, they sentenced William Carr, for dispersing scandalous papers against Lord Gerrard, of Brandon, to a fine of 1000 to the King, and imprisonment in the Fleet, and ordered the said papers to be burnt.

On March 17th, 1697, a sentence of burning was voted by them against a libel called _Mr. Bertie's Case, with some Remarks on the Judgment Given Therein_.

Sometimes they thought in this way to safeguard not merely truth in general, or the honour of their House, but also the interests of religion; as when, on December 8th, 1693, they ordered to be burnt by the hangman the very next day a pamphlet that had been sent to several of them, ent.i.tled _A Brief but Clear Confutation of the Trinity_, a copy of which possibly still lies hid in some private libraries, but about which, not having seen it, I can offer no judgment. At that time Lords and Commons alike disquieted themselves much over religious heresy, for in 1698 the Commons pet.i.tioned William III. to suppress pernicious books and pamphlets directed against the Trinity and other articles of the Faith, and gave ready a.s.sent to a Bill from the Lords ”for the more effectual suppressing of atheism, blasphemy, and profaneness.” But it would seem that these efforts had but a qualified success, for on February 12th, 1720, the Lords condemned a work which, ”in a daring, impious manner, ridiculed the doctrine of the Trinity and all revealed religion,” and was called, _A Sober Reply to Mr. Higgs' Merry Arguments from the Light of Nature for the Tritheistic Doctrine of the Trinity, with a Postscript relating to the Rev. Dr. Waterland_. This work, which was the last to be burnt as an offence against religion, was the work of one Joseph Hall, who was a gentleman and a serjeant-at-arms to the King, and in this way won his small t.i.tle to fame.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the House of Lords had come to a.s.sume a more active jurisdiction over the Press.

Thus in 1702, within a few days we find them severely censuring the notorious Dr. Drake's _History of the Last Parliament, begun 1700_; somebody's _Tom Double, returned out of the Country; or, The True Picture of a modern Whig_; Dr. Blinke's violent sermon, preached on January 30th, 1701, before the Lower House of Convocation; and a pamphlet, inviting over the Elector of Hanover. In the same month they condemned to be burnt by the hangman a book ent.i.tled, _Animadversions upon the two last 30th of January Sermons: one preached to the Honourable House of Commons, the other to the Lower House of Convocation. In a letter._ They resolved that it was ”a malicious, villainous libel, containing very many reflections on King Charles I., of ever-blessed memory, and tending to the subversion of the Monarchy.”

But the more general practice was for the House of Lords to seek the concurrence of the other House in the consignment of printed matter to the flames; a concurrence which in those days was of far more easy attainment over book-burning or anything else than it is in our own time, or is ever likely to be in the future. It would also seem that during the eighteenth century it was generally the House of Lords that took the initiative in the time-honoured practice of condemning disagreeable opinions to the care of the hangman.

The unanimity alluded to between our two Houses was displayed in several instances. Thus on November 16th, 1722, the Commons agreed with the resolution of the Peers to have burnt at the Exchange the Declaration of the Pretender, beginning: ”Declaration of James III., King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, to all his loving Subjects of the three Nations, and to all Foreign Princes and States, to serve as a Foundation for a Lasting Peace in Europe,” and signed ”James Rex.” In this interesting doc.u.ment, George I. was invited to quietly deliver up his possession of the British throne in return for James's bestowal on him of the t.i.tle of king in his native dominions, and the ultimate succession to the same t.i.tle in England. The indignation of the Peers raised their effusive loyalty to fever point, and they promptly voted this singular doc.u.ment ”a false, insolent, and traitorous libel, the highest indignity to his most sacred Majesty King George, our lawful and undoubted sovereign, full of arrogance and presumption, in supposing the Pretender in a condition to offer terms to his Majesty; and injurious to the honour of the British nation, in imagining that a free, Protestant people, happy under the government of the best of princes, can be so infatuated as, without the utmost contempt and indignation, to hear of any terms from a Popish bigoted Pretender.” But was it loyalty or sycophancy that could thus trans.m.u.te even George I. into ”the best of princes”?

A less serious cause of alarm to their loyalty occurred in 1750, when certain _Const.i.tutional Queries_ were ”earnestly recommended to the serious consideration of every true Briton.” This was directed against the Duke of c.u.mberland, of Culloden fame, who was in it compared to the crooked-backed Richard III.; and it was generally attributed to Lord Egmont, M.P., as spokesman of the opposition to the government of George II., then headed by the Prince of Wales, who died the year following. It caused a great sensation in both Houses, though several members in the Commons defended it. Nevertheless, at a conference both Houses voted it ”a false, malicious, scandalous, infamous, and seditious libel, containing the most false, audacious, and abominable calumnies and indignities against his Majesty, and the most presumptuous and wicked insinuations that our laws, liberties, and properties, and the excellent const.i.tution of this kingdom, were in danger under his Majesty's legal, mild, and gracious government” . . .

and that ”in abhorrence and detestation of such abominable and seditious practices,” it should be burnt in New Palace Yard by the hangman on January 25th. Even a reward of 1,000 failed to discover the author, printer, or publisher of this paper, the condemnation of which rather whets the curiosity than satisfies the reason. I would shrink from saying that a paper so widely disseminated no longer exists; but even if it does not, its non-existence affords no proof that in its time it lacked justification.

But what justification was there for George King, the bookseller, who a few years later did a very curious thing, actually forging and publis.h.i.+ng a Royal speech--'_His Majesty's most Gracious Speech to, both Houses of Parliament on Thursday December 2nd, 1756_'? Surely never since the giants of old a.s.saulted heaven, was there such an invasion of sanct.i.ty, or so profane a scaling of the heights of intellect! What could the Lords do, being a patriotic body, but vote such an attempt, without even waiting for a conference with the Commons, ”an audacious forgery and high contempt of his Majesty, his crown and dignity,” and condemn the said forgery to be burnt on the 8th at Westminster, and three days later at the Exchange? How could they sentence King to less than six months of Newgate and a fine of 50, though, in their gentleness or fickleness, they ultimately released him from some of the former and all the latter penalty? Happy those who possess this political curiosity, and can compare it with the speech which the King really did make on the same day, and which, perhaps, did not show any marked superiority over the forged imitation.

The next book-fire to which history brings us is a.s.sociated with one of the most important and singular episodes in the annals of the British Const.i.tution. I allude to the famous _North Briton_, No. 45, for which, as const.i.tuting a seditious libel, Wilkes, then member for Aylesbury, was, in spite of his privilege as a member, seized and imprisoned in the Tower (1763). We know from the experiences of recent times how ready the House of Commons is to throw Parliamentary or popular privileges to the winds whenever they stand in the way of political resentment, and so it was in our fathers' times. For, in spite of a vigorous speech from Pitt against a surrender of privilege which placed Parliament entirely at the mercy of the Crown, the Commons voted, by 258 to 133, that such privilege afforded no protection against the publication of seditious libels. The House of Lords, of course, concurred, but not without a protest from the dissentient minority, headed by Lord Temple, which has the true ring of political wisdom; and, like so many similar protests, is so instinct with zeal for public liberty as to atone in some measure for the fundamental injustice of the existence of an hereditary chamber. They held it ”highly unbecoming the dignity, gravity, and wisdom of the House of Peers, as well as of their justice, thus judicially to explain away and diminish the privileges of their persons,” etc.