BOOKS OF THE DAY
The Constant Meddler
John Wildman, Plotter and Postmastir. A Study of the English Republican Movement in the Seventeenth Century. By Maurice Ashley. (Cape. 15s.) THERE are several different John Wildmans at large among historians and observers of the days of the Civil War and the Restoration—it is not always easy to recognise them as the same person. There is Disraeli's " soul of English politics " in the most eventful period of our history ; an instance of a remarkable feature of that history as it is written—" the absence in its pages of some of its most influen- tial persons." This on; according to his champion, " seemed more than once to hold the balance that was to decide the permanent form of our government." There is Macaulay's fanatical anti- monarchist to whose enthusiasm was joined—a typical Macaulayesque paradox—" a tender care for his own safety." This one " had a wonderful skill in grazing the edge of treason, and such was his cunning that, though always plotting, always known to be plotting, and though long malignantly watched by a vindictive government, he died in his bed, having seen two generations of his accomplices die on the gallows." There is Bishop Burnet's " constant meddler on all occasions in everything that looked like sedition," whom Burnet met in the train of William of Orange at The Hague in i688 and noted as bringing with him " his usual ill-humour, and his peculiar talent in possessing others by a sort of contagion with jealousy and discontent." There is Hallam's "dark and restless spirit, who delighted in the deep game of conspiring against every government," and who re-appears in Carlyle's " stirring man, very flaming and very fuliginous, perhaps the noisiest man in England."
And then there is the John Wildman of his own drawing, whose instructions to his executors modestly suggest the placing " near his ashes of some stone of small price, to signify without foolish flattery to his posterity that in that age there lived a man who spent the best part of his days in prison, without crimes, being conscious of no offence fowards man, for he so loved his God that he could serve no man's will, and wished the liberty and happiness of his country and all mankind."
Of all these characterisations it is the last which most convincingly gives its author away for what he actually was. Equally significant are what it says and what it leaves out. It leaves out the large fortune which Wildman not only amassed in those troublous times out of shrewd speculation in confiscated real estate, but also retained till it earned him his knighthood, his Postmaster-Generalship, and the reputation of being one of the wealthiest aldermen of London. And it brings out the morbid passion for self-justification which drives so many otherwise sensible men into strange company and uncomfortable circumstances—running into and out of all sorts of difficulties and dangers, to prove to themselves and to other people that they are as high-principled, devoted and heroic as anyone else. Wildman wants no pretentious monument in the parish church of his principal estate—a small stone is good enough for him. Flattery?—he scorns it. But it is with pardonable pride as well as
becoming modesty that he wishes to put on record the occasions on which he was actually imprisoned, without a shadow of justifica- tion, for conduct which puts to shame at once the self-righteous bigotry of religious fanatics and the subservience of grovelling sycophants. It was some consolation for all the risks he had run that on reaching three score years and ten he could honestly say that he was conscious of never having done anything in all those years which could be construed as an offence against either God or man.
Mr. Ashley takes his subject almost as seriously as Wildman does himself. His " plotter " is much less self-preservative than Macaulay's, less cantankerous than Burnet's, less sinister than Hallam's or Carlyle's. He is more impressed, on the other hand, by Wildman's homicidal intentions against both Cromwell and Charles H than either of his proposed victims seem to have been, and he sees in the establishment of William III's limited monarchy an almost complete fulfilment of Wildman's ideas and schemes. For him, as for Disraeli, Wildman is the harbinger of nineteenth- century constitutionalism, a John the Baptist of parliamentary democracy. It seems as difficult for him as it was for contemporary critics of Cromwell to understand that the only reason why the ingenuous and ingenious busy-bodies, who accused the Protector of betraying the cause which he had carried to victory, were able to air their antagonism to him, was that Cromwell's strong arm was keeping the Royalist majority under control and the seas inviolate. A free Parliament such as they clamoured for would have brought not a Republic but the Restoration years before it came or a third Civil War. While Wildman was bleating about manhood suffrage, religious toleration and civil and political liberty, and trying to pass himself off as a reliable secret agent to Thurloe and the Protectorate and Clarendon and the exiled royalists simultaneously, Cromwell was governing England in the only way it could be governed in the aftermath of civil war. Cromwell's death soon proved how indispen- sable he was to the anti-monarchists, and it was Clarendon, not Cromwell, who gave Wildman his longest spell of imprisonment.
Actually what Wildman's career proves is neither his cunning nor his fanaticism, nor his foresight nor his " fuliginousness," but, pace Macaulay, the absence of malignancy and vindictiveness in the various Governments which incurred his disapproval. A good deal less rope than he contrived to get for himself would have sufficed to hang him several times over almost anywhere but in England. The noisy little man owed his success in self-preservation and his conspiratorial perseverance to the strength of the Governments he tried to under- mine and the sense of humour of the tyrants he proposed to murder. He was allowed to talk and write so much because they were never really afraid of what he would do. If any responsible person of his own time had seen as much significance in his career as Mr. Ashley does, his biography would have made a much shorter book.
KENNETH BELL.
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