BOOKS.
THE STRUGGLE FOR PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT.* So long did the career of Royalist historians remain unchecked, and their statements unquestioned, that it was certain the reaction, if the tide should ever turn against them, would be a stubborn One. The tide has turned and the reaction has set in with a spirit that quails not under the strong light of truth. As inquiry and research did their work and bore fruit, 'men ceased to adhere so closely to the grooves laid down for them by Clarendon and Hume and ventured to hold opinions of their own. Some of these in turn grew as intolerant as their predecessors had been, but there is now a desire and tendency to treat the troublous period of the Civil War more dispassionately, and to believe that History of the Struggle for Partianzentary Government in Engtancl. By Andrew moot, In 2 yob,. TiennOLI Usury S. Etat; and 09. 1877.
men on both sides were actuated by something better than the sordid or ambitious motives attributed to them by hostile biographers.
Nearly all the English history of recent years has been anti- Royalist. Cromwell is the hero of this, as of the last generation; or if the history be of earlier times, Simon de Montfort, the leader in the Barons' war of the thirteenth century, shares the hero-worship with him. With such champions as Carlyle and Macaulay to defend the cause of the Protector so vigorously as they have done, it might have seemed unnecessary for Mr. Bisset to take up the cudgels on his behalf, unless, indeed, he were anxious to atone for his harsh treatment of him in the History of the Commonwealth of England, which he published ten years ago. We do not see that history in general or Cromwell In particular has gained by this new contribution ; it had been better unwritten. To the student of history, as an authoritative work, it is without value, and to the general reader, as a book of ordi- nary interest, it will fail to commend itself. Mr. Bisset, unfortunately, does not possess, or at least does not evince, the requisite quali- ties of the historian. Materials are plentiful, but he shows no dexterity in handling them ; and he overreaches himself in the attempt to prove too much. It is a marvel why he should have made the effort, for in this case he has not even the "original materials" to fall back upon which he made so much of in his previous work. The motive and the apology may be found in the remark that Mr. Bisset thinks that novelty, in regard to mere facts concerning the period of which he is writing, is not to be ex- pected, but that the interpretation of the facts so as to bring out the meaning of them does admit of novelty. The new interpre- tation Mr. Bisset has discovered is that it was the deliberate purpose of the later Plantagenets, of the Tudors, and of the Stuarts, to destroy utterly the English Constitution, as it had existed from the establishment of the House of Commons by Simon de Montfort, and to reduce the people to a state of abso- lute slavery. To obviate this, the execution, as soon as prac- ticable, of any one of these Sovereigns was a political necessity, and the only remedy, Mr. Bisset considers, for the preservation in its integrity of that House of Commons without which good government was impossible. Having started his theories, Mr. Bisset proceeds to support them by the introduction of endless quotations, gathered from any writers of the same leaning as him- self. Instead of collecting his details, placing them in a new light, and giving his readers his interpretation, he promulgates his own ideas on a particular point, and gleans what evidence he can in sup- port of them. Mr. Bisset has such a poor opinion of all our Sovereigns, that it is difficult to point to one who would approach Mr. Bisset's standard, without going back to the earliest periods of our history, for he considers that "if all the achievements in war of all the Plan- tagenets and all the Tudors and all the Stuarts were put into one scale of a balance, and the achievements in war of Fairfax, Cromwell, and Blake into the other, the latter would probably be found to outweigh the former ;" and he further thinks that the intention of all these tyrannical Sovereigns was to establish a pure despotism in England, assisted materially in their object by the frequent use of torture. Although he states generally that the latter practice was "frequent and uninterrupted" from 1468 to the time of the Commonwealth, we are inclined to think, with Sir Edward Creasy, that though it was used occasionally in cases of high treason, there is no proof of ordinary criminals having been put to the question by torture in England. Capricious in the treatment of events, Mr. Bisset seems to lack the power of gauging their value, and whilst passing over important circum- stances does not grudge the space for puerile details or pet similitudes. Ile does not hesitate to leave his history and his readers to shift for themselves, whilst be is far away in some elaborate argument of his own originating. A page is not 'too much to tell how Archbishop Laud was wont to dream of Williams, the deposed Lord Keeper, and how the latter always figured as the demon of his nightmare, yet the• First Parliament of Charles I, is introduced and dismissed with a wave of the hand. He says not a word about Eliot's famous speech on religion, about the recuse.ncy petition drawn up by Pym and Sandys, by which the King was asked to execute the penal laws in all their strictness, and otherwise to prevent the spread of Roman Catholic doctrines ; about the eventual voting of two small subsidies to the King, about Wentworth's election as Member for Yorkshire, the debate thereon and its subsequent nullity ; about the opposition to ton- nage and poundage, about the growing hostility to Buckingham, about the adjournment to Oxford, and about the stormy proceed- ings there, which culminated in the dissolution of that memorable Parliament. This dissolution, says one of our living historians, opened the flood-gates of that long contention with the Crown, never, except for one brief moment, to be closed again till the Revolution of 1688 came to change the conditions of Govern- ment in England. But instead of insisting on these matters, Mr. Bisset breaks off to denounce Buckingham, declaring that not since the days of Caligula and his horse had a greater insult been offered to a nation, than the entrusting to him by the Sovereign of the post of Prime Minister and the command of the fleets and armies of England, " It would be an insult to Nikias to compare him with Buckingham, and an insult to the Athenian Democracy to compare it with the Stuarts, and men can learn nothing from the enterprises of such things as Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban." After this outburst, an allusion is made, en passant, to the expedition against Cadiz in 1625, but so slight that it does not state whether it was successful or not, or how much the result contributed to the storm gathering on all sides against the Duke of Buckingham. Mr, Bisset next proceeds to describe the state of England under "this King Charles," in 1627-8 and the evils of the billeting-system, and then abruptly turns back to the Second Parliament of Charles I. We were now in hopes of getting under way and well into the narrative, but our author suddenly diverges again, to indulge for two pages in a double resemblance he has discovered between Sir John Eliot and Cicero and between the Duke of Buckingham and Antony. Now this, is not the way to write the history of the infancy of the struggle after which his book is named. The in- cessant introduction of characters from ancient history or else- where is most distracting ; it diverts attention from the thread of the narrative, throws no new light upon it, and makes one impatient at the constant interruptions.
What, too, shall we say of writing such as the following, and there is plenty of it?—' Charles had a taste for pictures, a taste which, it would seem, does not go far towards the well-ordering of a commonwealth ; and the young lords about town who were good dancers probably figured afterwards among the gallant Cava- liers' who went down before the charge of the grim Puritans, who were neither good dancers nor had much taste for pic- tures." Then, again, the quotations are most wearisome. It would have been sufficient, in the majority of cases, to have given, at the foot of the page, the reference to the passage of the author whose aid Mr. Bisset was borrowing, instead of inserting the pas- sages at full length. The selections, too, show no discernment ; the same man's writing is found to be good enough to quote on one occasion but not on another. So long as an author fitly colours the circumstances to Mr. Bisset's mind, he is considered useful for the purpose, and he is cited to strengthen the case. Again, Mr. Bisset often takes refuge in quoting other men's opinions, and ap- pears to think that in that way he incurs no responsibility of his own, so reminding us of the fable of the trumpeter who, when taken prisoner, pleaded for his life because he had not been fighting himself. For example, in the second volume, when alluding to the King's chance of escape from Carisbrooke Castle had he been properly assisted by his friends, he gives a long passage from Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, in which occurs the sentence :••••–‘t It cannot be imagined how wonderfully fearful some persons in France were that he should have made Ms escape, and the dread he had ef his coming thither." Having shielded his in- sinuation under another'e garb, Mr. Bisset selects Lord Ashb urn- ham's comments on what is italicised Of the many whose curiosity has been satiated by the reading of Lord Clarendon'e History alone, it is probable that few have surmised that by scow persons, who were wonderfully fearful that the King should make his escape, and dreaded his coming to France, is meant the Queen." Lord Aehburnham further states that Bishops Burnet, Kennet, and Warburton were unanimous in affirming that for some time previous to the King's death, he (Jermyu) was her Majesty's paramour and subsequently her husband. Having committed this to paper, without committing himself, Mr. Bisset quits the scene abruptly, and tongue-tied, goes off to a mutiny in the Fleet, leaving the ungenerous seed to do its work. Why he should borrow from Lord Aehburnham's Vindication of John Ashburnhani his explanation of an ambiguous phrase of Lord Clarendon's, and then insert it in this work without one word of comment, it is not necessary to inquire, if we bear in mind Mr. Bisset's antipathies.
The language Mr. Bisset employs in representing the personages he does not like is wanting in moderation and taste, making it clear that he has failed to read their characters. In portraying individuals, he gets too close to them, and sees defects that a broader and more judicious survey would render less distinct. Strafford is an "arrogant braggart," "blinded by overween- ing self-conceit and ill-grounded eel-confidence." Charles I. is a Tiberius or a Ctesar Borgia, "one of the falsest and cruelest men that ever lived,"—and a man who, "though wearing a crown and called a king," ought to be made to know that he "had a joint in his neck." Surely this is making too free a use of that fierce light which beats upon a throne and darkens every Spot, and lays the writer open to charges of animus and arrogance unworthy of an historian. If Mr. Bisset's book had been inspired with something of Mr. Forster's careful treatment, or invigorated by a closer intimacy with the ma,sterly opinions of Hallam, Cromwell would not have suffered, and we might have possessed an "omitted chapter" of English history, But where judgment and modera- tion are conspicuous only by their absence, and where digressions and incoherences are but too frequent, it is not surprising that we put down the book with a feeling somewhat stronger than that of disappointment.
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