Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

To return to the Rye House plotters. We are told by those given to speculation and organisation that in all calculations a large allowance should be made for that which upsets most plans – the unforeseen. On this occasion the conspirators were so sanguine of their scheme as never to imagine it might be put to nought by pure accident. The farm had been engaged, the men instructed, the necessary hiding-places prepared, and all things were ready for the murderous deed. Suddenly the unforeseen occurred, and all the careful measures of the would-be regicides were rendered abortive. Owing to his house having caught fire, Charles was obliged to leave Newmarket eight days earlier than he had intended, and thus, thanks to this happy conflagration, passed unscathed by the Rye House, then completely deserted; his Majesty was comfortably ensconced at Whitehall, toying with his mistresses and sorting their bonbons, whilst his enemies, unconscious of his escape, were congratulating themselves that in another week their work would be done, and their victim fall an easy prey to their designs.

And now the result ensued which invariably attends upon treason which has failed and which fears detection. It was an age when plots were freely concocted against the Crown and those in supreme authority, yet, often as conspiracies were entered into, there were always witnesses ready to come forward and swear away the lives of their former accomplices, to divulge what they had pledged themselves to keep secret, and if need be to follow in every detail the example of the biggest scoundrel of the seventeenth century, Doctor Titus Oates of Salamanca. Among the minor persons engaged in the Rye House plot was, as we have said, Josiah Keeling; he was now fearful of the fate which might befall him should the authorities at Whitehall get wind of the past deliberations, and accordingly with that prudence which characterised him he was determined to be first in the field to make a clean breast of all that had been planned and suggested. First he went to Lord Dartmouth, of the Privy Council, and told his tale, and then was referred by that statesman to his colleague, Mr. Secretary Jenkins. Jenkins took down the deposition of the man, but said that unless the evidence was supported by another witness, no investigation of the matter could be proceeded with. Keeling was, however, equal to the occasion, and induced his brother John, a turner in Blackfriars, to corroborate his statements. The plot now authenticated by the two requisite witnesses, the Secretary of State thought it his duty to communicate the affair to the rest of the advisers of the Crown. It appears, however, that a few days after his confession the conscience of the younger brother, John Keeling, pricked him, and he secretly availed himself of the first opportunity to inform Richard Goodenough that the plot had been discovered by the Government, and advised all who had been engaged in it to fly beyond sea.

This news coming to the ears of Colonel Romsey and Robert West, who were bosom friends, the two, unconscious of the revelations of the Keelings, thought it now prudent to save their own skins by informing ministers of all that had occurred, and, indeed, to make their story the more palatable to the Government, of a little more than had occurred. Accordingly they wended their way to Whitehall, and there told how the house at Rye had been offered them by Rumbald, the maltster; how at this house forty men well armed and mounted, commanded in two divisions by Romsey and Walcot, were to assemble; and how on the return of the King from Newmarket, Romsey with his division was to stop the coach, and murder Charles and his brother, whilst Walcot was to busy himself in engaging with the guards. So far the narrative of the informers tallied with the confessions of the Keelings. But Romsey and West, aware how hateful Lord William Russell, Algernon Sydney, and the rest of the cabal were to the Government, by their open opposition to the home and foreign policy of the court, essayed to give the impression that the Council of Six were also implicated in the detestable designs of the Rye House plotters.73 When unscrupulous men in supreme power are anxious to gratify their animosity, any evidence calculated to bring foes within reach is acceptable. The hints of Romsey and West were sufficient for the purpose, and orders were instantly issued by the Secretaries of State for the arrest of the Six. The first victim was Lord William, who was at once taken before the council for examination; but as he denied all the charges brought against him, he was forthwith sent to the Tower. Algernon Sydney next followed. He had been seized whilst at his lodgings, and all his papers sealed and secured by a messenger. Once before the council, he answered a few questions, “respectfully and without deceit,” but his examination was brief, for on his refusal to reply to certain queries put to him, he also was despatched to the Tower. Monmouth, having received timely warning, had placed the North Sea between him and the court. Ford, Lord Grey, had been brought before the council, had been examined and sent to the Tower, but managing to bribe his guards, had escaped. Lord Essex and Hampden were imprisoned: shortly after his confinement, Essex, who was subject to constitutional melancholy, committed suicide by cutting his throat. Lord Howard was still at large, protesting that there was no plot, and that he had never heard of any. Orders were, however, issued for his arrest, and when the officers came to his house, they found him secreted up the chimney in one of his rooms. As Keeling had informed against the Rye House plotters, so Lord Howard now informed against the Six. Weeping at the fact that he was a prisoner, he promised to reveal all; his revelations were considered so satisfactory that within a few days after their being taken down by the council, both Lord William Russell and Algernon Sydney were put upon their trial for high treason.

Russell was the first to stand at the bar. It appears that one evening he had been present at the house of Thomas Shepherd in Abchurch Lane, where the Rye House conspirators were occasionally in the habit of meeting and discussing their plans. He had gone thither to taste some wine. “It was the greatest accident in the world I was there,” said Russell at his trial, “and when I saw that company was there I would have been gone again. I came there to speak with Mr. Shepherd, for I was just come to town.” His excuse was raised in vain. Romsey, Shepherd, and Howard were playing into the hands of the Crown, and each did his best by hard swearing and false testimony to make the prisoner’s conviction certain. The gallant colonel asserted that he had seen his lordship at the house of Shepherd, where discourse was being held by the cabal of conspirators as to surprising the King’s guards and creating an insurrection throughout the country. Thomas Shepherd next followed, and gave very much the same evidence as Romsey – that his house in Abchurch Lane was let as a place of rendezvous for the disaffected; that the substance of the discourse of those who met there was how to surprise the guards and organise a rising; that two meetings were held at his house, and that he believed the prisoner attended both, but that he was certainly at the meeting when they talked of seizing the guards. Then Lord Howard was called as a witness. He said that he was one of the Six, and had attended the meetings at the house of Shepherd; at such meetings it had been agreed to begin the insurrection in the country before raising the city, and there had also been some talk of dealing with the discontented Scotch; at these deliberations no question was put or vote collected, and he of course concluded by the presence of Lord William that the prisoner gave his consent like the rest to the designs of the cabal.

In his defence Russell denied that he ever had any intention against the life of the King; he was ignorant of the proceedings of the Rye House plotters, and his mixing with the conspirators on the sole occasion he had visited Shepherd at Abchurch Lane was purely due to accident. He had gone thither about some wine. He did not admit that he had listened to any talk as to the possibility of creating an insurrection; but even had he made such an admission, talk of that nature could not be construed into treason, for by a special statute (the old statute of treasons) passed in the reign of Edward III., “a design to levy war is not treason;” besides, such talk had not been acted upon; they had met to consult, but they acted nothing in pursuance of that consulting. The attorney-general held a different view, and asserted it had often been determined that to prepare forces to fight against the King was a design within the statute of Edward III. to kill the King. The presiding judge, as a creature of the court, was, of course, of the same opinion; he summed up the evidence, deeming it unfavorable to the prisoner; and the jury, basing their verdict upon the tone of the bench, brought in a sentence of guilty of high treason. In spite of every effort that affection could inspire and interest advocate, Lord William Russell ended his days on the scaffold. “That which is most certain in the affair is,” writes Charles James Fox in his history of James II., “that Russell had committed no overt act indicating the imagining the King’s death even according to the most strained construction of the statute of Edward III.; much less was any such act legally proved against him; and the conspiring to levy war was not treason, except by a recent statute of Charles II., the prosecutions upon which were expressly limited to a certain time which in these cases had elapsed; so that it is impossible not to assent to the opinion of those who have ever stigmatised the condemnation and execution of Russell as a most flagrant violation of law and justice.”

The same measure was now meted out to Algernon Sydney as had been dealt to Russell. In the eyes of the bench, conspiring to levy war and conspiring against the King’s life were considered one and the same thing. It was in vain that Sydney asserted that he had not conspired to the death of the King, that he had not levied war, and that he had not written anything to stir up the people against the King. It was in vain that even the Rye House plotters had to confess they knew nothing of him, and had never seen him at the different meetings. Canting Nadab, however – as Dryden, in his immortal satire, calls Lord Howard – was there, ready to swear away a colleague’s life or do any other dirty trick provided his own skin and estate were not forfeited for past misdeeds; his evidence was the chief trump card on which the court relied to score the game. Accordingly his lordship began his testimony by relating what had passed at the meetings of the Six, as to the best means for defending the public interest from invasion, and the advisability of the rising breaking out first in the country instead of in the city. He also stated that it was the special province of Algernon Sydney to deal with the malcontent Scots, and had carried out this task through the agency of one Aaron Smith, who had gone north and been provided with funds for the purpose. This assertion, though Howard candidly said he only spoke from hearsay, was deemed sufficient by the advisers of the Crown to place Sydney’s head in jeopardy. As the law, however, demanded that in all trials for high treason there should be two witnesses against the prisoner before sentence could be passed, and as no other witness had the baseness to act the part so well played by Lord Howard, it was necessary for the court to resort to some expedient which would sufficiently answer its purpose of convicting Sydney. The Court was equal to the emergency. Search was made among Sydney’s papers, and it was discovered that he had written a treatise – his famous discourse on Government – which particularly discussed the paramount authority of the people and the legality of resisting an oppressive Government. A few isolated passages of the work were read here and there, the extracts given were garbled, and, thanks to the coloring of the prosecution, the case against the prisoner looked black indeed. Entering upon his defence, Sydney, like Russell, denied that he had ever conspired to the death of Charles; nor was he a friend of Monmouth, with whom he had spoken but three times in his life: he objected to the evidence of Howard, which was based upon hearsay, but if such testimony were true, he was but one witness, and the law required two. As for regarding a mangled portion of his treatise as a second witness, it was iniquitous. “Should a man,” he cried, “be indicted for treason for scraps of papers, innocent in themselves, but when pieced and patched with Lord Howard’s story, made a contrivance to kill the King? Let them not pick out extracts, but read the work as a whole. If they took Scripture to pieces, they could make all the penmen of the Scripture blasphemous. They might accuse David of saying there is no God; the evangelists of saying that Christ was a blasphemer and seducer, and of the apostles that they were drunk.” Then he ended by denying that he had any connection with the malcontents in Scotland. “I have not sent myself,” he said, “nor written a letter into Scotland ever since 1659; nor do I know one man in Scotland to whom I can write, or from whom I ever received one.” He refuted the charges brought against him in vain. The notorious Jeffries was now the presiding judge, and never was summing up from the bench more culpably partial or more flagrantly at variance with the clauses of the judicial oath. “I look upon the meetings of the Six,” said Jeffries to the jury, “and the meetings of the Rye House plotters as having one and the same end in view; I place implicit faith in the evidence of Howard; I deny that it is necessary that there shall be two witnesses to convict a prisoner of high treason; and as for the treatise of Sydney, I declare it is sufficient to condemn the author as being guilty of compassing and imagining the death of the King.” Upon the jury retiring to consider their verdict, Jeffries sternly informed them that he had explained the law, and that they were bound to accept his interpretation of it. Thus left without any option in the matter, the jury returned at the end of half an hour into court, and brought in a verdict of guilty. After a brief confinement. Algernon Sydney was beheaded on Tower Hill, Dec. 7, 1683.

Thus ended one of the most iniquitous and unjust trials that the annals of justice ever had to record. “The proceedings in the case of Algernon Sydney,” writes Fox, “were most detestable. The production of papers containing speculative opinions upon government and liberty, written long before, and perhaps never intended to be published, together with the use made of those papers in considering them as a substitute for the second witness to the overt act, exhibited such a compound of wickedness and nonsense as is hardly to be paralleled in the history of judicial tyranny. But the validity of pretences was little attended to at that time in the case of a person whom the court had devoted to destruction; and upon evidence such as has been stated was this great and excellent man condemned to die.” Upon the accession of “the Deliverer” to the throne, an Act was passed annulling and making void the attainder of Algernon Sydney on account of its having been obtained “without sufficient legal evidence of any treason committed by him,” and “by a partial and unjust construction of the statute declaring what was his treason.” The fate of the Rye House conspirators was very various. Some fled never to return, and were outlawed like Ferguson and Goodenough; others confessed, and were pardoned like Romsey; whilst a third offered in vain to purchase life by turning informers, as was the case with Walcot and Armstrong. Two years later those who had been outlawed, and were living in exile, again tried their hand at insurrection by aiding Monmouth in his revolt. —Gentleman’s Magazine.

MR. ARNOLD’S LAY SERMON

Mr. Arnold’s lay sermon to “the sacrificed classes” at Whitechapel contrasts doubly with the pulpit sermons which we too often hear. It is real where these sermons are unreal, and frankly unreal where these sermons are real. It does honestly warn the people to whom it was addressed, of the special danger to which “the sacrificed classes” are exposed, whenever they in their turn get the upper-hand, the danger of simply turning the tables on the great possessing and aspiring classes. “If the sacrificed classes,” he said, “under the influence of hatred, cupidity, desire of change, destroy, in order to possess and enjoy in their turn, their work, too, will be idolatrous, and the old work will continue to stand for the present, or at any rate their new work will not take its place.” It must be work done in a new spirit, not in the spirit of hatred or cupidity, or eagerness to enjoy and appropriate the privileges of others, which can alone stand the test of time and judgment. So far, Mr. Arnold was much more real than too many of our clerical preachers. He warned his hearers against a temptation which he knew would be stirring constantly in their hearts, and not against abstract temptations which he had no reason to think would have any special significance to any of his audience.

On the other hand, if he were more real in what was addressed to his particular audience than pulpit-preachers often are, he resorted once more, with his usual hardened indifference to the meaning of words and the principles of true literature, to that practice of debasing the coinage of religious language, and using great sayings in a new and washed-out sense of his own, of which pulpit-preachers are seldom guilty. This practice of Mr. Arnold’s is the only great set-off against the brilliant services he has rendered to English literature, but it is one which we should not find it easy to condemn too strongly. Every one knows how, in various books of his, Mr. Arnold has tried to “verify” the teaching of the Bible, while depriving the name of God of all personal meaning; to verify the Gospel of Christ, while denying that Christ had any message to us from a world beyond our own; and even, – wildest enterprise of all, – so to rationalise the strictly theological language of St. John as to rob it of all its theological significance. Well, we do not charge this offence on Mr. Arnold as in any sense whatever an attempt to play fast-and-loose with words; for he has again and again confessed to all the world, with the explicitness and vigor which are natural to him, the precise drift of his enterprise. But we do charge it on Mr. Arnold as in the highest possible sense a great literary misdemeanor, that he has lent his high authority to the attempt to give to a great literature a pallid, faded, and artificial complexion, though, with his view of it, his duty obviously was to declare boldly that that literature teaches what is, in his opinion, false and superstitious, and deserves our admiration only as representing a singularly grand, though obsolete, stage in man’s development. Mr. Arnold is as frank and honest as the day. But frank and honest as he is, his authority is not the less lent to a non-natural rendering of Scripture infinitely more intolerable than that non-natural interpretation of the Thirty-nine Articles which once brought down the wrath of the world of Protestants on the author of “Tract 90.” In this Whitechapel lecture Mr. Arnold tells his hearers that in the “preternatural and miraculous aspect” which the popular Christianity assumes Christianity is not solid or verifiable, but that there is another aspect of Christianity which is solid and verifiable, which aspect of it makes no appeal to a preternatural [i. e., supernatural] world at all. Then he goes on, after eulogising Mr. Watts’s pictures, – of one of which a great mosaic has been set up in Whitechapel as a memorial of Mr. Barnett’s noble work there, – to remark that good as it is to bring home to “the less refined classes” the significance of Art and Beauty, it is none the less true that “whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again,” and to suggest, of course, by implication, that there is a living water springing up to everlasting life, of which he who drinks shall never thirst. Then he proceeds thus: —

“No doubt the social sympathies, the feeling for Beauty, the pleasure of Art, if left merely by themselves, if untouched by what is the deepest thing in human life – religion – are apt to become ineffectual and superficial. The art which Mr. Barnett has done his best to make known to the people here, the art of men like Mr. Watts, the art manifested in works such as that which has just now been unveiled upon the walls of St. Jude’s Church, has a deep and powerful connection with religion. You have seen the mosaic, and have read, perhaps, the scroll which is attached to it. There is the figure of Time, a strong young man, full of hope, energy, daring, and adventure, moving on to take possession of life; and opposite to him there is that beautiful figure of Death, representing the breakings-off, the cuttings short, the baffling disappointments, the heart-piercing separations from which the fullest life and the most fiery energy cannot exempt us. Look at that strong and bold young man, that mournful figure must go hand in hand with him for ever. And those two figures, let us admit if you like, belong to Art. But who is that third figure whose scale weighs deserts, and who carries a sword of fire? We are told again by the text printed on the scroll, ‘The Eternal [the scroll, however, has ‘the Lord’] is a God of Judgment; blessed are they that wait for him.’ It is the figure of Judgment, and that figure, I say, belongs to religion. The text which explains the figure is taken from one of the Hebrew Prophets; but an even more striking text is furnished us from that saying of the Founder of Christianity when he was about to leave the world, and to leave behind him his Disciples, who, so long as he lived, had him always to cling to, and to do all their thinking for them. He told them that when he was gone they should find a new source of thought and feeling opening itself within them, and that this new source of thought and feeling should be a comforter to them, and that it should convince, he said, the world of many things. Amongst other things, he said, it should convince the world that Judgment comes, and that the Prince of this world is judged. That is a text which we shall do well to lay to heart, considering it with and alongside that text from the Prophet. More and more it is becoming manifest that the Prince of this world is really judged, that that Prince who is the perpetual ideal of selfishly possessing and enjoying, and of the worlds fashioned under the inspiration of this ideal, is judged. One world and another have gone to pieces because they were fashioned under the inspiration of this ideal, and that is a consoling and edifying thought.”

Now, when we know, as Mr. Arnold wishes us all to know, that to him “the Eternal” means nothing more than that “stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,” that “Judgment” means nothing but the ultimate defeat which may await those who set themselves against this stream of tendency, if the stream of tendency be really as potent and as lasting as the Jews believed God to be, we do not think that the consoling character of this text will be keenly felt by impartial minds. Further, we should remember that according to Mr. Arnold, when Christ told his disciples that the Comforter should “reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; of sin because they believed not on me, of righteousness because I go to the Father, and ye see me no more; of judgment because the prince of this world is judged,” we should understand this as importing, to those at least who agree with Mr. Arnold, only that, for some unknown reason, a new wave of feeling would follow Christ’s death, which would give mankind a new sense of their unworthiness, a new vision of Christ’s holiness, and a new confidence in the power of that “stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,” in which Christ’s own personality would then be merged; and further, that this powerful stream of tendency would probably sweep away all institutions not tending to righteousness but opposing an obstacle to that tendency. Well, all we can say is that, in watering-down in this way the language of the Bible, Mr. Arnold, if he is doing nothing else, is doing what lies in his power to extinguish the distinctive significance of a great literature. The whole power of that literature depends from beginning to end on the faith in a Divine Being who holds the universe in his hand, whose will nothing can resist, who inspires the good, who punishes the evil, who judges kingdoms as he judges the hearts of men, and whose mind manifested in Christ promised to Christ’s disciples that which his power alone availed to fulfil. To substitute for a faith such as this, a belief – to our minds the wildest in the world, and the least verifiable – that “a stream of tendency” effects all that the prophets ascribed to God, or, at least so much of it as ever will be effected at all, and that Christ, by virtue merely of his complete identification with this stream of tendency, is accomplishing posthumously, without help from either Father, Son, or Spirit, all that he could have expected to accomplish through the personal agency of God, is to extract the kernel from the shell, and to ask us to accept the empty husk for the living grain. We are not reproaching Mr. Arnold for his scepticism. We are reproaching him as a literary man for trying to give currency in a debased form to language of which the whole power depends on its being used honestly in the original sense. “The Eternal” means one thing when it means the everlasting and supreme thought and will and life; it is an expression utterly blank and dead when it means nothing but a select “stream of tendency” which is assumed, for no particular reason, to be constant, permanent, and victorious. “Living water” means one thing when it means the living stream of God’s influence; it has no salvation in it at all when it means only that which is the purest of the many tendencies in human life. The shadow of judgment means one thing when it is cast by the will of the supreme righteousness; it has no solemnity in it when it expresses only the sanguine anticipation of human virtue. There is no reason on earth why Mr. Arnold should not water-down the teaching of the Bible to his own view of its residual meaning; but then, in the name of sincere literature, let him find his own language for it, and not dress up this feeble and superficial hopefulness of the nineteenth century in words which are undoubtedly stamped with an ardor and a peace for which his teaching can give us no sort of justification. “Solidity and verification,” indeed! Never was there a doctrine with less bottom in it and less pretence of verification than his; but be that as it may, he must know, as well as we know, that his doctrine is as different from the doctrine of the Bible as the shadow is different from the substance. Has Mr. Arnold lately read Dr. Newman’s great Oxford sermon on “Unreal Words”? If not, we wish he would refer to it again, and remember the warning addressed to those who “use great words and imitate the sentences of others,” and who “fancy that those whom they imitate had as little meaning as themselves,” or “perhaps contrive to think that they themselves have a meaning adequate to their words.” It is to us impossible to believe that Mr. Arnold should have indulged such an illusion. He knows too well the difference between the great faith which spoke in prophet and apostle, and the feeble faith which absorbs a drop or two of grateful moisture from a “stream of tendency” on the banks of which it weakly lingers. Mr. Arnold is really putting Literature, – of which he is so great a master, – to shame, when he travesties the language of the prophets, and the evangelists, and of our Lord himself, by using it to express the dwarfed convictions and withered hopes of modern rationalists who love to repeat the great words of the Bible, after they have given up the strong meaning of them as fanatical superstitions. Mr. Arnold’s readings of Scriptures are the spiritual assignats of English faith. —Spectator.