THE LIFE OF WILLIAM CARSTARES.*
THERE is perhaps no class of literary productions which is capable of affecting the mind in so many different ways as is the art of Biography. It includes within its range almost every phase of intellectual influence, and appeals, as it pleases, to sentiment and to common-sense, to the philosophical or historical faculties, to the. religious-minded or the political reader, with equal ease and equal access to the special audience it addressee. In many memoirs it is what we are accustomed to call the "human element "which pre- dominates most, and the story is as the most real of romances to. the delighted reader ; in some, the greater affairs of the world push the individual aside altogether, and the biography becomes a record of changes in government, of "the death of kings" and their successors, or of the progress of nations, rather than the record of William Cordaro : a Character and Career of the Revolutionary Epoch (1649-1715) By Robert H. Story, Minister of Hosneath. London; Macmillan and Co
one man's personal doings ; while in another, it is the history of thought, more or less subtly veiled by the specialities of individual being, which is chiefly brought under our notice. The book before us is not romantic or philosophical, but it is one of the best essays in historical biography which we have bad the luck to meet with for long enough. Mr. Story has already made more than one appearance in this department of literature, but never before with so much success. He has had the advantage of much real and valuable private information, which his relationship to the subject of his work made readily accessible to him ; his materials are fresh and unhackneyed ; the period he illustrates one of the utmost interest and importance in English, and still more in Scotch history ; his hero a man but little known, at least in detail, to the general reader ; and he has done himself the justice of confining his work within moderate and manageable limits, refraining from all temptation to deluge the text with comment, picturesque or otherwise. The result is a valuable and interesting work, the central figure in which is clearly but modestly kept before the reader, while at the same time the broader his- torical view of his generation and the many great measures in which he was involved is most successfully and distinctly given. The period of the Revolution is not a picturesque one, except to those amateurs of old china, of powder and brocade, who are in- creasing so largely among us day by day ; it can scarcely be said to possess merely msthetic or romantic interest. It is neither heroic nor poetical, and yet we suppose no other crisis of British history has involved so much, no other climax of national existence has had a greater effect upon our ordinary life. Great men with strongly marked individualities of character do not occupy the chief place in the records. William III., himself the most notable, as well as the most high-placed among them, has very little personal interest to the spectator. The most that even his applauding his- torians have been able to do for him is to say that he must have hid both noble and kindly sentiments under that cold and unlovely ex- terior, since his friends at least loved him, though the country to which in his way he came as a deliverer was capable of no enthusiasm for the phlegmatic Dutchman. He is not, to use the ordinary jargon of the day, "humanly interesting" at all, neither were his friends and counsellors to any remarkable degree. The age was one of many revolutions, the settling-down and arrangement of a practical and possible world after many a storm ; an age of measures, not of men. This book concerns itself specially with those measures, those social settlings and unsettlings, the conclu- sions and the commencements from which our present national existence has taken so much of its permanent form—which affect Scotland chiefly—and nothing can be more valuable to the histo- rical student than the light which it throws upon "the Revolution Settlement," and all the commotious and movements of the time.
William Carstares was born in 1649, a troublous time for Scot- land. He was the son of a Scotch minister, deeply involved in the troubles of the age,—a man subject to all the varying fortunes of his class, now visible on battle-fields, now in pulpits scarcely less warlike, fined, banished, imprisoned, yet struggling on to a peaceful end and grey hairs after all. His son, more distinguished than himself, after taking his degree at the University of Edin- burgh, went to Holland for the completion of his studies, and took Presbyterian Orders there. During his residence at Utrecht he was brought under the notice of the Prince of Orange, an event which seems to have decided the further course of his life. From this early beginning of friendship, made when he was still a very young man, he continued until the end of William's life his close adherent, and it is no small tribute to the clear-sighted sagacity of the Prince that he perceived the ability and judicious good-sense of the young Scotchman, and saw at once the good service which these qualities might do him in his great undertaking. The connections thus formed made of Carstares a politician and statesman, rather than a clergyman. He became eventu- ally William's chaplain, going with him everywhere in this capacity, but never until the death of his patron did his sacred functions become the leading occupation of his life. One of the earliest and most picturesque events in his career was the impri- sonment and torture to which he was subjected shortly after the Rye-House Plot, a conspiracy in which he seems to have been mixed up innocently enough, without any participation in the worst part of it, the intended assassination of King James. He tad, however, as an undoubted agent of the Prince of Orange, too many secrets in his hands to make his position a safe one. After enduring the torture of the thumbikins as long as his strength held out, Carstares was induced, under a promise that his deposi- tions should not be made use of before any public tribunal, At against any person whatsoever," to make what would appear to
have been a very skilful confession, in which, by various revela- tions touching the plot in which he was but slightly involved, he managed to avert suspicion from the other schemes in which he had fully committed himself. He had been in close correspondence with William and his advisers until the moment of his arrest. What the secrets of this correspondence were, "he would never," we are told, "even after the Revolution, reveal ; but Fagel spoke of them to Burnet as affairs of the greatest importance, the betrayal of which would have secured his free pardon, and laid the King and Government under lasting obligations to Carstares." His partial confession was thus a piece of able strategy. As might have been expected, the condition under which he made it was disregarded, and his depositions instantly made use of to pro- cure the sentence of Baillie of Jerviswood, a faithful adherent of the Presbyterian cause.
This sensational beginning of his life, however, gives no just idea of its further course. The conspirator turned into a states- man as soon as his Pretender became King, as no doubt many conspirators would, did the same happy chance occur to them. He developed, too, into such a statesman as could scarcely be looked for from the processes of education which formed him. The application of the thumbikins in Edinburgh Castle does not, at the first glance, look a likely operation to ripen a tolerant wisdom and the friendly calm of a moderate mind in the sufferer subjected to it; but nevertheless it is apparent that the leading features of Carstares' nature, as well as of the policy he recommended and furthered, were toleration, consideration, and an anxious desire to promote peace, and if possible, union, in his much-distracted country. Scotland, by the time her Dutch deliverer came, had fallen into that painful deterioration which is so often the result of a long struggle. The harassing and per- petual persecutions carried on by the Charleses and James had worn out the national temper, never of the mildest, and had fretted the national life into a miserable habit of quarrel and controversy, from which, perhaps, Scotland ecclesiastical has scarcely yet got free. In this unhappy country, now at peace, where miserable Test and Abjuration, and more miserable Indulgence, had been playing upon all the harsher and meaner passions for years, education had ceased to be the elevating and widening discipline which fits a mind to look at all sides of a subject, and recognise its general as well as local bearings ; and the men in whose hands the settlement especially of the Scotch Church rested were men of inferior character and attainments, as different as it is possible to conceive from the early leaders of the Scotch Reformation. The Church itself had fallen into a state of chaos curiously different from the coneeption of it commonly entertained by ordinary readers. The strongly-marked lines which now divide the Presbyterian from the Episcopalian scarcely seem to have had any existence in those days. "Had a General Assembly been invited to decide how the Church was to be governed, the vote of the majority would undoubtedly have de- clared for Episcopacy," says Mr. Story, with a confidence which, though apparently justified by some evidence, is contradicted by much that he himself tells us of the state of the Church in general, and takes away the breath of the reader whose head is full of reminiscences of the Covenant; but at least it is evident that the clearer distinction which exists in our days was unknown in those times. The unsettled state of the country had deranged all solemnities of worship, and that part of the Church which had an Episcopalian leaning had as little of liturgical grace or order in its services as had the rudest Presbyterians. A wild remnant of the Covenanting zealots on one side, and a smaller and feebler handful of Divine-right men on the other, con- tended on the outskirts for those absolute principles of supposed right and wrong which become all the more intense and tre- mendous, according as their foundation is less secure. Thus the Church had grown into a chaos;- with much ignorance, much pre- judice, and no small amount of indifference to struggle against. King William's treatment of this most troublesome of the many questions which awaited his decision was of the most wary and prudent character, and there seems little doubt that on this point his chief inspiration came from his chaplain. "Do not," Carstares wrote to his master, "afford the smallest suspicion to either party, whether in Church or State, that your Majesty is so far engrossed or monopolised by the other, as to adopt those private animosities or resentments with which they are influenced against each other." The modest minister, without any external distinctions to denote his remarkable influence, kept his constant place at William's side, and drew silently the strings which moved the country. There is a paper.of "Remarks," which Mr. Story prints in his narrative of the Church's settlement, the joint pro-
duction of the King and the chaplain, which shows their mutual sagacity and forbearance in the most remarkable way :—
"1st. Whereas in the draught it is said that the Church of Scotland was regained from Popery by Presbyters without prelacy, his Majesty thinks that though this matter of fact may be true, which he cloth not controvert ; yet it being contradicted by some, who speak of a power that Superintendents had in the beginning of the Reformation which was like to that that Bishops had afterwards, it were better it were otherwise expressed.
"2nd. Whereas it is said their Majesties do ratify the Presbyterian church government to ho the only government of Christ's Church in this kingdom, his Majesty desires it may be expressed otherwise, thus,—to be the government of the Church in this kingdom established by law. "3rd. Whereas it is said that the government is to be exercised by sound Presbyterians and such as shall hereafter be owned by Pres- byterian judicatories as such, his Majesty thinks that the rule is too general, depending as to its particular determinations upon particular men's opinion, and therefore he desires that what is said to be the meaning of the rule in the reasons that were sent along with the Act may be expressed in the Act itself, viz., that such as subscribe the Confession of Faith and the Catechisms, and are willing to submit to the government of the Church, being sober in their lives, sound in their doctrine, and qualified with gifts for the ministry, shall be admitted to the government."
Thus careful to offend no susceptibilities, and to make allowance even for the hair-splitting ingenuity of men ready to take offence at a word, William's clerical adviser worked with his master for peace and settlement. The results of such anxious care seldom produce any high ideal constitution, either for Church or State, but they succeeded in making it possible for people of very con- flicting opinions to meet for the general good of the country upon common ground ; and brought the wild Cameronian and the " rabbled " curate within the broad enclosure of one national Church, notwithstanding the explosive sentiment which naturally impelled them to separate as far as the poles from each other. Mr. Story allows that there was more "political tact and secular wis- dom " in this thau high religious feeling, and does not hesitate to admit that something "of a higher type than modern Scotch Presbyterianism and Episcopacy" might have been brought out of the chaos had higher means been resorted to, but the reader will have little difficulty in acquiescing in the accompanying assertion that "in such a period, a man like Carstares, unimpressionable, sagacious, just, charitable, liberal, of great experience, and of deep diplomatic skill, was of more practical avail than a hero or enthusiast."
Our space does not permit us to do more than mention the one other deeply sensational and romantic episode in the life of Car- stares, for which his biographer does not, indeed, claim our abso- lute credence, but which at least he represents as quite as likely as not to have been true,—i.e., the curious story of certain de.. spatches of a character to set the Church of Scotland in a flame, which had been made up and sent off during Carstares' absence, but which he arrived in time to arrest, venturing upon the bold step of demanding them in the King's name from the messenger, and invading William's bechamber at midnight, when the King was asleep, to explain and justify his extraordinary boldness. The story might have come straight out of a French historical romance of the boldest Dumas type, and breaks very curiously into the sober and dignified relations of these two sagacious politicians. But if it may be relied upon as true, it is an exciting episode, and lends piquancy to the grave record of events not at all romantic. Passing by this gleam of romance, however, there is a strong interest in the latter part of Carstaree' history when, after the death of his King and his own deposition from almost sovereign power over the internal affairs of his country, this dethroned monarch, instead of either scheming or sulking in his overthrow, transferred his ripe judgment and well- trained powers at once to the lists over which he had watched so closely from the umpire's chair, and became with scarcely a pause a fighting man in the arena. How he put himself at the bead of the most reasonable party in the Church, how he worked for the Union at a time when the Union was most unpopular ; how he stood fast against the encroachments made in Queen Anne's reign upon William's settlement, and resisted stoutly but unsuccess- fully the re-establishment of patronage ; and how, under both sovereigns, he stedfastly laboured for the cause of higher educa- tion, we can only indicate in the briefest way. The story is suffi- ciently interestiOg to claim the reader's attention on its own merits, and will be deeply attractive to those who love to trace the threads of history backward to their beginning, and note with what curious mixture of foresight and unconsciousness the chief workers at that varied web shoot the great shuttle, and watch the fabric grow.
Nor is the studbnt of character left without much to interest him in the tale. Carstares was no ideal hero, but an extremely natural man, ready to ask for favours for all his brothers-in-law and nephews, though he seems to have been little exacting for him- self, and with no special antipathy towards that good-natured patronage of the deserving which sometimes takes the form ill- naturedly called a "job." He liked to provide for his friends, an amiable and commendable quality, and was, it is apparent, a kind and genial personage, fond of his own family and relatives, and living on the most amiable terms with a large and creditable kin- dred. It is, however, less pleasant to note the curious silence of so influential a Scotsman in respect to such measures as the Glencoe massacre, and the almost equally cruel though passive agency of the supreme Government of England in the extinction of that great Darien enterprise which half ruined Scotland. All that can be said is that nothing seems to have been said by the successful and trusted adviser who in other matters had so much influence over William. He had nothing to do with those cruelties to his country- men, but at least he does not seem to have made any stand against them. His political connections, a Lowlander's indifference to the Highlands, a clergyman's ignorance of speculation, may have been the cause of this inaction ; but it detracts somewhat from Carstares' character, energetic and daring as it evidently was, in his capacity of champion for Scotland and general adviser to the Crown. Notwithstanding this drawback, it is the record of a thoroughly worthy and patriotic life which Mr. Story has given to the world in this memoir ; a life not perfect, not framed upon ideal lines, or setting forth any pretensions above the level of common humanity, but soberly great, full of an honest enlighten- ment and honourable determination to do the beet for Scotland, such as has moved many lesser and some greater souls. Some- thing that may be called selfish belongs to all patriotism which is so persistent and absorbing as the devotion which the northern half of this island has so often secured from her sons, but it is a noble and generous selfishness. Many interesting papers, hitherto unpub- lished, throw light upon the relations existing between the re- nowned William and his counsellor-chaplain which are full of interest ; and Mr. Story's narrative is always lucid, and never too long, a wonderful quality in this loquacious age. We recom- mend the volume, as a highly iotereating historical study, to the beat attention of your readers.
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