The Press.
London, England, 1858-02-20 00:00:00

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it tra u rt.

History of the Life and Times of Edmund
Burke. By Thomas Macknight. Vols. I.
and 11. London : Chapman and Hall.
ABOUT ten miles from the city of Oxford, and
some two or three from the little town of
Watlington, on a wide, level space hut recently
inclosed, and bounded by the rising slopes
of the long Chiltern Hills, stands a small and
unpretending column. But the stranger,
should he inquire the name of the adjoining
village, would at once recognise that he stood
upon historic ground. Tho village is Chal-
grove, and within a few yards of that unim-
posing monument Hampden received his
mortal wound. This event is recorded on the
stone in language of simple and touching
dignity ; but one sentence is, in our opinion,
especially significant. " Here," we are told,
" fell John Hampden, fighting for the free
" monarchy and ancient liberties of England."
Whether it was really for these objects
that Hampden died we care not now to
inquire, but the words at least show for what
the noblemen and gentlemen who erected this
memorial believe that he ought to have died
—our ancient liberties and our free monarchy !
This we are to accept as the modern Whig
construction of the resistance to King Charles
I. What then, it may be proper to ask, was '
our free monarchy, and what were our ancient
liberties? If they are to be judged by the
causes which produced the Civil War, an an•
swer is not difficult. The lil,futies were free-
dom from arbitrary taxatio:. and arbitrary
imprisonment; the 1. oloirch.s was one in
which the sovereign was u,..t the nresentative
of a faction. And if they are to be judged from
the general tone of the inscription we have
quoted, there can be no doubt that two dif-
ferent things are meant by the two
phrases we have quoted. It is too terse
and well written for us to believe that
its composers would have been guilty of a
mere sounding piece of tautology; and we
may therefore fairly assume that the freedom
of the subject did not, in the minds of emi-
nent parliamentary leaders, exclude or
seem inconsistent with the freedom of the
sovereign. That such still continues to be
the theory of the Whig party we are entitled to
presume from the opinion recently put for-
ward by an eminent Whig statesman in his
essay on Parliamentary Reform. Earl Grey
anticipates with gloom the hour when Minis•
tars shall be the servants of the House of
Commons, and not the servants of the Crown.
Those persons who suppose that Boling-
broke's political conduct was based on the
theory of divine right and passive obedience
must be wonderfully unacquainted with his
writings. Regarding the monarchical form of
government as a settled question in England,
be casts about to find the best examples of it.
His ideal was one in which the Crown should
have sufficient independence to be above the
necessity of truckling to any party, and the
country sufficiently fortified by popular insti-
tutions to render a persistence in misgovern-
ment for any number of years impossible.
Under this system the Ministers of the Crown
might be chosen from the Whigs and Tories
alternately, as popular feeling should require
—the King exercising his more stable autho-
rity either to repress ebullitions of party ani-
mosity, to check precipitate legislation, or to
carry through difficult measures. The spec-
tacle of a Government in which the King re-
signed all his authority to the chief of a faction
who was notoriously corrupt and rapacious,
lent additional point to his assertion of these
views ; and it must have become perfectly evi•
dent by the middle of the last century to all
men who did not wish to see the English
monarchy superseded, that decisive measures
were necessary to preserve it from total
col lapse.
With the accession •of George 111. an oppor-
tunity presented itself. Inveterate evils de-
mand strong remedies. And we doubt if his
Government went a step farther than might
fairly have been expected from the vices of
the preceding reigns. A strong reaction had
met in, Jultnaon aid Goldsmith, Gibbon and