ONE:BEAUS AND BELLES OF THE REGENCY PERIOD.At this period, both the grand old styles of architecture, the Gothic for ecclesiastical buildings, and the Tudor and Elizabethan for palaces and mansions, had, for a time, run their course. A classical or Italian fashion had come in, and the picturesque churches and halls of our ancestors were deemed barbarous. Inigo Jones had introduced the semi-classical style, and now Sir Christopher Wren and Vanbrugh arose to render it predominant. Wren had the most extraordinary opportunity for distinguishing himself. The fire of London had swept away a capital, and to him was assigned the task of restoring it. Wren (b. 1632; d. 1723) was descended from a clerical family. In 1651 he was appointed to the chair of astronomy at Gresham College; three years afterwards to that of the Savilian professor at Oxford. In 1661 he was appointed by Charles II. to assist Sir John Denham, the surveyor-general, and in 1663 he was commissioned to examine the old cathedral of St. Paul, with a view to its restoration in keeping with the Corinthian colonnade which Inigo Jones had, with a strange blindness to unity, tagged on to a Gothic church. The old church was found to be so thoroughly dilapidated, that Wren recommended its entire removal and the erection of another. This created a terrible outcry amongst the clergy and citizens, who regarded the old fabric as a model of beauty.
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ONE:In the meantime, petitions, memorials, and remonstrances were presented from New York and other places, and from the British inhabitants of Canada, but all were rejected. On the 26th of May George III. prorogued Parliament, and expressed his perfect satisfaction in its proceedings; so utterly unconscious was this king that he was alienating a great empire, and which, indeed, was already virtually gone from him; for during the very time that Parliament had been protesting against even the contemptible crumbs of concession offered by Ministers, war had broken out, blood had flowed, and the Americans had triumphed!Such being the facts of the case, the Liberals came to the conclusion that a reform was inevitable. In order to adapt the Establishment to the requirements of the Protestant population, there must be a large reduction, and the surplus funds that remained ought to be applied to some object by which the moral and religious instruction of the people would be promoted. The least objectionable mode in which the money could be applied was the general education of the poor under the National Board, by which children of all denominations could be educated in harmony together, as they had been ever since its establishment. The reformers denied that there was any analogy between the revenues of the Established Church and private property. The Acts of Parliament securing those revenues had all treated them as being held in trust for the benefit of the nation; and after leaving ample means for the due execution of the trust, so far as it was really practicable, the Legislature was competent to apply the balance in accomplishing by other agency than the Protestant clergy, to some extent at least, the objects originally contemplated by the founders of the religious endowments.
Songs Listened
ONE:The Act of 1712 restored lay patronage, and then the strife began, but not between the people and the lay pastors, but between the clergy and the lay patrons. There grew up two parties in the General Assembly, styled the moderates, and the more advanced, or popular party. The moderates were those who were ready to concede to the demands of Government and lay patronage under a gentle protest; the more popular party, as it was called, was for transferring the right of presentation to the presbytery. The Act of William III., in 1690, gave the original and exclusive nomination to the heritors, land-owners, and elders. The person nominated was to be proposed to the congregation, who might approve or disapprove. But to what did this right amount? The congregation could not absolutely reject; and if they disapproved, the right passed on to the presbytery, whose decision was final. By this arrangement, either the landowners and elders remained the presenters,[168] or, after a vain show of conferring the choice upon the people, the appointment fell to the clergy, or presbytery. From 1690 to 1712, Sir Henry Moncrieff says, "there does not appear the least vestige of a doctrine, so much contended for at a later period, of a divine right in the people individually or collectively, to elect the parish minister." This opinion was fully maintained by the law of William III., in 1690, and confirmed by that of Anne, in 1712. Sir Henry Moncrieff, in confirmation of this doctrine that the people never had a right to elect their ministers in the Scottish Church, quotes the "First Book of Discipline," of 1567, which placed the election of pastors in the people at large; but this error, he says, was rectified by the "Second Book of Discipline," in 1581. By this book the congregation could only consentthe presbyters must finally determine. This contains the law of the Church of Scotland, and the great schism which took place in the Scottish Church, in 1843known as the Disruptionarose merely from the resistance to lay patronage, but with the intention of transferring that patronage to the clergy, not the people.Besides succeeding to the government of a country whose chief province was thus exhausted, the finances of the Company were equally drained, both in Calcutta and at home, and the Directors were continually crying to Hastings for money, money, money! As one means of raising this money, they sent him a secret order to break one of their most solemn engagements with the native princes. When they bribed Meer Jaffier to depose his master, by offering to set him in his seat, and received in return the enormous sums mentioned for this elevation, they settled on Meer Jaffier and his descendants an annual income of thirty-two lacs of rupees, or three hundred and sixty thousand pounds. But Meer Jaffier was now dead, and his eldest son died during the[324] famine. The second son was made Nabob, a weak youth in a weak government, and as the Company saw that he could not help himself, they ordered Hastings to reduce the income to one-half. This was easily done; but this was not enough, disgraceful as it was. Mohammed Reza Khan, who had been appointed by the Company the Nabob's Minister, on the ground that he was not only a very able but a very honest man, they ordered to be arrested on pretended pleas of maladministration. He and all his family and partisans must be secured, but not in an open and abrupt way, which might alarm the province; they were to be inveigled down from Moorshedabad to Calcutta, on pretence of affairs of government, and there detained. Nuncomar, the Hindoo, who had been displaced, in order to set up Mohammed, who was a Mussulman, and who had been removed on the ground of being one of the most consummate rogues in India, was to be employed as evidence against Mohammed. Hastings fully carried out the orders of the secret committee of the India House. He had Mohammed seized in his bed, at midnight, by a battalion of sepoys; Shitab Roy, the Minister of Bahar, who acted under Mohammed at Patna, was also secured; and these two great officers and their chief agents were sent down to Calcutta under guard, and there put into what Hastings called "an easy confinement." In this confinement they lay many months, all which time Nuncomar was in full activity preparing the charges against them. Shitab Roy, like Mohammed, stood high in the estimation of his countrymen of both faiths; he had fought on the British side with signal bravery, and appears to have been a man of high honour and feeling. But these things weighed for nothing with Hastings or his masters in Leadenhall Street. He hoped to draw large sums of money from these men; but he was disappointed. Though he himself arranged the court that tried them, and brought up upwards of a hundred witnesses against them, no malpractice whatever could be proved against them, and they were acquitted. They were therefore honourably restored, the reader will think. By no means. Such were not the intentions of the Company or of Hastings. Whilst Mohammed and Shitab Roy had been in prison, Hastings had been up at Moorshedabad, had abolished the office of Minister in both Patna and Moorshedabad, removed all the government business to Calcutta, cut down the income of the young Nabob, Muharek-al-Dowla, to one half, according to his instructions, and reduced the Nabob himself to a mere puppet. He had transferred the whole government to Calcutta, with all the courts of justice, so that, writes Hastings, "the authority of the Company is fixed in this country without any possibility of competition, and beyond the power of any but themselves to shake it."
Awards Earned
