Adopt my honorable friend's amendment [Mr. | Calcraft], and you reduce them to about four thousand, which is still somewhat above their number in the last peace. responsibili ty if the in jurious sys tem is pursued. Sir, I have done. I have discharged my duty Peroration: to the country; I have accepted the The speaker free from all challenge of the ministers to discuss the question; I have met them fairly, and grappled with the body of the argument. I may very possibly have failed to convince the House that this establishment is enormous and unjustifiable, whether we regard the burdened condition of the country, or the tranquil state of its affairs at home, or the universal repose in which the world is lulled, or the experience of former times, or the mischievous tendency of large standing armies in a constitutional point of view, or the dangerous nature of the arguments urged in their support upon the present occasion. All this I feel very deeply; and I am also very sensible how likely it is that, on taking another view, you should come to an opposite determination. Be it so; I have done my duty; I have entered my protest. It can not be laid to my charge that a force is to be maintained in profound and general peace twice as great as was formerly deemed sufficient when all Europe was involved in domestic troubles, and war raged in some parts, and was about to spread over the whole. It is not my fault that peace will have returned without its accustomed blessings; that our burdens are to remain undiminished; that our liberties are to be menaced by a standing army, without the pretense of necessity in any quarter to justify its continuance. The blame is not mine that a brilliant and costly army of household troops, of unprecedented numbers, is allowed to the Crown without the shadow of use, unless it be to pamper a vicious appetite for military show, to gratify a passion for parade, childish and contemptible; unless, indeed, that nothing can be an object of contempt which is at once dangerous to the Constitution of the country, and burdensome to the resources of the people. I shall further record my resistance to this system by my vote; and never did I give my voice to any proposition with more hearty satisfaction than I now do to the amendment of my honorable friend. The amendment was voted down by a majority of eighty. SPEECH OF MR. BROUGHAM IN BEHALF OF WILLIAMS WHEN PROSECUTED FOR A LIBEL ON THE CLERGY OF DURHAM, DELIVERED AT DURHAM BEFORE THE COURT OF KING'S BENCH, AUGUST 9, 1822. INTRODUCTION. MR. WILLIAMS was editor of the Chronicle, a paper published at Durham, in the north of England, and distinguished for its assertion of free principles in Church and State. When Queen Caroline died, August 7, 1821, the established clergy of Durham would not allow the bells of their churches to be tolled in the ordinary manner as a token of respect to her memory. This fact called out the following remarks from Mr. Williams, in his paper of August 10, 1821: "So far as we have been able to judge from the accounts in the public papers, a mark of respect to her late Majesty has been almost universally paid throughout the kingdom, when the painful tidings of her decease were received, by tolling the bells of the cathedrals and churches. But there is one exception to this very creditable fact which demands especial notice. In this episcopal city, containing six churches independently of the cathedral, not a single bell announced the departure of the magnanimous spirit of the most injured of queens-the most persecuted of women. Thus the brutal enmity of those who embittered her mortal existence pursues her in her shroud. "We know not whether any actual orders were issued to prevent this customary sign of mourning; but the omission plainly indicates the kind of spirit which predominates among our clergy. Yet these men profess to be followers of Jesus Christ, to walk in his footsteps, to teach his precepts, to inculcate his spirit, to promote harmony, charity, and Christian love! Out upon such hypocrisy! It is such conduct which renders the very name of our established clergy odious, till it stinks in the nostrils; that makes our churches look like deserted sepulchers, rather than temples of the living God; that raises up conventicles in every corner, and increases the brood of wild fanatics and enthusiasts; that causes our beneficed dignitaries to be regarded as usurpers of their possessions; that deprives them of all pastoral influence and respect; that, in short, has left them no support or prop in the attachment or veneration of the people. Sensible of the decline of their spiritual and moral influence, they cling to temporal power, and lose in their officiousness in political matters, even the semblance of the character of ministers of religion. It is impossible that such a system can last. It is at war with the spirit of the age, as well as with justice and reason, and the beetles who crawl about amid its holes and crevices act as if they were striving to provoke and accelerate the blow, which, sooner or later, will inevitably crush the whole fabric and level it with the dust." Mr. Williams was prosecuted for these remarks as a libel on the clergy of Durham, and was defended by Mr. Brougham in the following speech, which for bitter irony and withering invective has hardly its equal in our language. Remarks on the speech of the Attorney General as showing how much he felt the difficulties of his case. SPEECH, &c. As my invariably a condition following close behind, which entirely retracted the concession—“ provided always the discussion be carried on harmlessly, temperately, calmly"—that is to say, in such a manner as to leave the subject untouched, and the reader unmoved; to satisfy the public prosecutor, and to please the persons attacked. like the other institutions of the country, is established by law. My learned friend has asked if the defendant knows that the Church is established The Church, He knows it, and so do I. by law? The Church is established by law, as the civil government-as all the institutions of the country are established by lawas all the offices under the Crown are established by law, and all who fill them are by the law protected. It is not more established, nor more protected, than those institutions, officers, and office-bearers, each of which is recognized and favored by the law as much as the Church; but I never yet have heard, and I trust I never shall; least of all do I expect, in the lesson which your verdict this day will read, to hear that those officers and office-bearers, and all those institutions, sacred and secular, and the conduct of all, whether laymen or priests, who administer them, are not the fair subjects of open, untrammeled, manly, zealous, and even vehement discussion, as long as this country pretends to liberty, and prides herself on the possession of a free press. GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY,-My learned friend [Mr. Scarlett], the Attorney General for the Bishop of Durham, having at considerable length offered to you various conjectures as to the line of defense which he supposed I should pursue upon this occasion; having nearly exhausted every topic which I was not very likely to urge, and elaborately traced, with much fancy, all the ground on which I could hardly be expected to tread-perhaps it may be as well that I should now, in my turn, take the liberty of stating to you what really is the defendant's case, and that you should know from myself what I do intend to lay before you. learned friend has indulged in so many remarks upon what I shall not say, I may take leave to offer a single observation on what he has said; and I think I may appeal to any one of you who ever served upon a jury or witnessed a trial, and ask if you ever before this day saw a public prosecutor who stated his case with so much art and ingenuity-wrought up his argument with such pains-wandered into so large a field of declamation-or altogether performed his task in so elaborate and eloquent a fashion as the Attorney General has done upon the present occaI venture not sion. I do not blame this course. even to criticise the discretion he has exercised in the management of his cause; and I am far, But I call upon indeed, from complaining of it. you to declare that inference which I think you must already have drawn in your own minds, and come to that conclusion at which I certainly have arrived that he felt what a laboring case he had that he was aware how very different his situation to-day is from any he ever before knew in a prosecution for libel-and that the extraordinary pressure of the difficulties he had to struggle with drove him to so unusual a course. He has called the defendant "that unhappy man." Unhappy he will be, indeed, but not the only unhappy man in this country, if the doctrines laid down by my learned friend are sanctioned by your verdict; for those doctrines, I fearlessly tell you, must, if established, inevitably destroy the whole liberties of us all. Not that he has ventured to deny the right of discussion generally upon all subjects, even upon the present, or to screen from free inquiry the foundations of the Established Church, and the conduct of its ministers as a body (which I shall satisfy you are not even commented on in the pub-state which, because it is sacred, because it bears lication before you). Far from my learned friend is it to impugn those rights in the abstract; nor, indeed, have I ever yet heard a prosecutor for libel-an Attorney General (and I have seen a good many in my time), whether of our Lord the King or our Lord of Durham, who, while in the act of crushing every thing like unfettered discussion, did not preface his address to the jury with “God forbid that the fullest inquiry should But then the admission had not be allowed." LLL like them, to the severest scrutiny. In the publication before you the defendant has not attempted to dispute the high It is liable, character of the Church; on that Establishment, or its members generally, he has not endeavored to fix any stigma. Those topics, then, are foreign to the present inquiry, and I have no interest in discussing them; yet, after what has fallen from my learned friend, it is fitting that I should claim for this defendant, and for all others, the right to question-freely to question-not only the conduct of the ministers of the Established Church, but even the foundations of the Church itself. It is, indeed, unnecessary for my present purpose, because I shall demonstrate that the paper before you does not touch upon those points; but unnecessary though it be, as my learned friend has defied me, I will follow him to the field and say that if there is any one of the institutions of the country which, more emphatically than all the rest, justifies us in arguing strongly, feeling powerfully, and expressing our sentiments as well as urging our reasons with vehemence, it is that branch of the connection with higher principles than any in- The Church of especially to England ought court that scrutiny. For the country different and opposing church' be open to the voke discussion; to stand upon that title and in the world. Let us hope (many indeed there challenge the most unreserved inquiry-it is the are, not afar off, who will, with unfeigned devoProtestant Church of England; first, because she tion, pray) that his Majesty may return safe from has nothing to dread from it; secondly, because the dangers of his excursion into such a counshe is the very creature of free inquiry, the off-try-an excursion most perilous to a certain porspring of repeated revolutions, and the most re- tion of the Church, should his royal mind be informed of the reformed churches of Europe. fected with a taste for cheap establishments, a But surely if there is any one corner of Protest-working clergy, and a pious congregation! ant Europe where men ought not to be rigorous- But compassion for our brethren in the North y judged in ecclesiastical controversy-where a has drawn me aside from my pur- Durham, expe large allowance should be made for the conflict pose, which was merely to remind yo of irreconcilable opinions-where the harshness you how preposterous it is in a coun- freest remarks of jarring tenets should be patiently borne, and try of which the ecclesiastical polity is framed strong, or even violent language be not too nar- upon plans so discordant, and the religious tenrowly watched-it is this very realm, in which ets themselves are so various, to require any very we live under three different ecclesiastical or- measured expressions of men's opinions upon ders, and owe allegiance to a Sovereign who in questions of church government. And if there one of his kingdoms is the head of the Church, is any part of England in which an ample license acknowledged as such by all men; while, in an- ought more especially to be admitted in handling other neither he nor any earthly being is al- such matters, I say, without hesitation, it is this lowed to assume that name-a realm composed very Bishopric, where, in the nineteenth century, of three great divisions, in one of you live under a Palatine Prince, the Lord of is divided into which Prelacy is favored by law Durham; where the endowment of the hieand approved in practice by an rarchy-I may not call it enormous, but I trust organizations. Episcopalian people; while in an- I shall be permitted, without offense, to term other it is protected, indeed, by law, but abjured splendid; where the Establishment-I dare not in practice by a nation of sectaries, Catholic and whisper-proves grinding to the people, but I Presbyterian; and in a third, it is abhorred alike will rather say is an incalculable, an inscrutable by law and in practice, repudiated by the whole blessing-only it is prodigiously large-showinstitutions of the country, scorned and detested ered down in a profusion somewhat overpowerby the whole of its inhabitants. His Majesty, ing; and laying the inhabitants under a load of almost at the time in which I am speaking, is obligation overwhelming by its weight. It is in about to make a progress through the northern Durham, where the Church is endowed with a provinces of this island, accompanied by certain splendor and a power unknown in monkish times of his chosen counselors-a portion of men who and Popish countries, and the clergy swarm in enjoy, unenvied, and in an equal degree, the ad- every corner an' it were the patrimony of St. miration of other countries and the wonder of Peter; it is here, where all manner of conflicts their own-and there the Prince will see much are at each moment inevitable between the peoloyalty, great learning, some splendor, the re- ple and the priests, that I feel myself warranted, mains of an ancient monarchy, and of the insti- on their behalf and for their protection-for the tutions which made it flourish. But one thing sake of the Establishment, and as the discreet he will not see. Strange as it may seem, and advocate of that Church and that clergy; for the to many who hear me incredible, from one end defense of their very existence-to demand the of the country to the other he will see no such most unrestrained discussion for their title, and thing as a Bishop; not such a thing is to be their actings under it. For them in this age found from the Tweed to John O'Groats; not to screen their conduct from investigation, is to a mitre; no, nor so much as a minor canon, or stand self-convicted; to shrink from the discuseven a rural dean; and in all the land not one sion of their title is to confess a flaw; he must single curate, so entirely rude and barbarous are be the most shallow, the most blind of mortals they in Scotland; in such outer darkness do they who does not at once perceive that if that title sit, that they support no cathedrals, maintain no is protected only by the strong arm of the law, pluralists, suffer non-residence; nay, the poor be- it becomes not worth the parchment on which it nighted creatures are ignorant even of tithes! is engrossed, or the wax that dangles to it for a Not a sheaf, or a lamb, or a pig, or the value of seal. I have hitherto ali along assumed that a plow-penny do the hapless mortals render from there is nothing impure in the practice under the year's end to year's end! Piteous as their lot system; I am admitting that every person enis, what makes it infinitely more touching is to gaged in its administration does every one act witness the return of good for evil in the de- which he ought, and which the law expects him meanor of this wretched race. Under all this to do; I am supposing that up to this hour not eruel neglect of their spiritual concerns, they are one unworthy member has entered within its actually the most loyal, contented, moral, and re- pale; I am even presuming that up to this moligious people any where, perhaps, to be found ment not one of those individuals has stepped be1 The King visited Scotland on this occasion for yond the strict line of his sacred functions, or the first time, leaving London on the tenth of Au- given the slightest offense or annoyance to any gust, 1822, and spending nearly three weeks on his human being. I am taking it for granted that they all act the part of good shepherds, making tour. the welfare of their flock their first care, and only occasionally bethinking them of shearing, in order to prevent the too luxuriant growth of the fleece proving an encumbrance, or to eradicate disease. If, however, those operations be so constant that the flock actually live under the knife; if the shepherds are so numerous, and employ so large a troop of the watchful and eager animals that attend them (some of them, too, with a cross of the fox, or even the wolf, in their breed) can it be wondered at, if the poor creatures thus fleeced, and hunted, and barked at, and snapped at, and from time to time worried, should now and then bleat, dream of preferring the rot to the shears, and draw invidious, possibly disadvantageous comparisons between the wolf without and the shepherd within the fold-it can not be helped; it is in the nature of things that suffering should beget complaint; but for those who have caused the pain to complain of the outery and seek to punish it-for those who have goaded to scourge and to gag, is the meanest of all injustice. It is, moreover, the most pitiful folly for the clergy to think of retaining their power, privileges, and enormous wealth, without allowing free vent for complaints against abuses in the Establishment and delinquency in its members; and in this prosecution they have displayed that folly in its supreme degree. I will even put it that there has been an attack on the hierarchy itself; I do so for argument's sake only; denying all the while that any thing like such an attack is to be found within the four corners of this publication. Milton in supply; and yet they eat and yet they live at the rate of earls, and yet hoard up; they who chase away all the faithful shepherds of the flock, and bring in a dearth of spiritual food, robbing thereby the Church of her dearest treasure, and sending herds of souls starving to hell, while they feast and riot upon the labors of hireling curates, consuming and purloining even that which by their foundation is allowed and left to the poor, and the reparation of the Church. These are they who have bound the land with the sin of sacrilege, from which mortal engagement we shall never be free till we have totally removed with one labor, as one individual thing, prelaty and sacrilege." "Thus have ye heard, readers" (he continues, after some advice to the Sovereign to check the usurpations of the hierarchy), "how many shifts and wiles the prelates have invented to save their ill got booty. And if it be true, as in Scripture it is foretold, that pride and covetousness are the sure marks of those false prophcts which are to come, then boldly conclude these to be as great seducers as any of the latter times. For between this and the judgment-day do not look for any arch-deceivers, who, in spite of reformation, will use more craft or less shame to defend their love of the world and their ambition, than these prelates have done."2 Burnet. If Mr. Williams had dared to publish the tithe part of what I have just read; if any thing Example in sentiment or in language approaching of Bishop to it were to be found in his paper, I should not stand before you with the confidence which I now feel; but what he has published forms a direct contrast to the doctrines contained in this passage. Nor is such language confined to the times in which Milton lived, or to a period of convulsion when prelacy was in danger. I will show you that in tranquil, episcopal times, when the Church existed peacefully and securely as by law established, some of its most distinguished members, who have added to its stability as well as its fame, by the authority of their learning and the purity of their lives, the fathers and brightest ornaments of that Church, have used expressions nearly as free as those which I have cited from Milton, and ten-fold stronger than any thing attributed to the defendant. I will read you a passage from Bishop Burnet, one of those Whig founders of the Constitution, whom the Attorney General has so lavishly praised. He says, "I have lamented during my whole life that I saw so little true zeal among our clergy; I saw much of it in the clergy of the Church of Rome, though it is both ill directed and ill conducted; I saw much zeal, likewise, throughout the foreign churches." But suppose it had been otherwise; I will show Example of you the sort of language in which the wisest and the best of our countrymen this respect. have spoken of that Establishment. I am about to read a passage in the immortal writings of one of the greatest men, I may say, the greatest genius which this country or Europe has in modern times produced. You shall hear what the learned and pious Milton has said of prelacy. He is arguing against an Episcopalian antagonist, whom, from his worldly and unscript.al doctrines, he calls a "Carnal Textman, and it signifies not that we may differ widely n opinion with this illustrious man; I only give his words as a sample of the license with, which he was permitted to press his argument, and which in those times went unpunished: "That which he imputes as sacrilege to his country, is the only way left them to purge that abominable sacrilege out of the land, which none but the prelates are guilty of; who for the discharge of one single duty receive and keep that which might be enough to satisfy the labors of many painful ministers better deserving than themselves Now comparisons are hateful to a proverb; who possess huge benefices for lazy perform- | and it is for making a comparison that the deances, great promotions only for the exercise fendant is to-day prosecuted; for his words can of a cruel disgospelling jurisdiction-who en-have no application to the Church generally, exgross many pluralities under a non-resident and slumbering dispatch of souls-who let hundreds of parishes famish in one diocese, while they the prelates are mute, and yet enjoy that wealth that would furnish all those dark places with able cept in the way of comparison. And with whom does the venerable Bishop here compare the clergy? Why, with anti-Christ-with the Church 2 Apology for Smectymnus-published in 1642. of Rome-casting the balance in her favor ists, but of men neither possessing the higher giving the advantage to our ghostly adversary. preferments of the Church, nor placed in that sitNext comes he to give the Dissenters the prefer- uation of expectancy so dangerous to virtue; the ence over our own clergy; a still more invidious hard-working, and I fear too often hard-living, topic; for it is one of the laws which govern resident clergy of this kingdom, who are an ortheological controversy almost as regularly as nament to their station, and who richly deserve gravitation governs the universe, that the mutu- that which in too many instances is almost all al rancor of conflicting sects is inversely as their the reward they receive, the gratitude and vendistance from each other; and with such hatred eration of the people committed to their care. do they regard those who are separated by the But I read this passage from Dr. Hartley, not as slightest shade of opinion, that your true intoler- a precedent followed by the defendant; for he ant priest abhors a pious sectary far more de- has said nothing approaching to it—not as provoutly than a blasphemer or an atheist; yet to pounding doctrine authorized by the fact; or the sectary also does the good Bishop give a de- which in reasoning he approves-but only for cided preference: "The Dissenters have a great the purpose of showing to what lengths such disdeal (that is of zeal) among them, but I must cussion of ecclesiastical abuses (which, it seems, own that the main body of our clergy has always we are now, for the first time, to hold our peace appeared dead and lifeless to me; and instead of | about) was carried near a century ago, when the animating one another, they seem rather to lay one freedom of speech, now to be stifled as licenanother asleep." "I say it with great regret" tiousness, went not only unpunished, but unques(adds the Bishop), "I have observed the clergy tioned and unblamed. in all the places through which I have traveled, Papists, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Dissenters; but of them all, our clergy is much the most remiss in their labors in private, and the least severe in their lives. And let me say this freely to you, now I am out of the reach of envy and censure" (he bequeathed his work to be given to the world after his death), "unless a better spirit possess the clergy, arguments and, which is more, laws and authority will not prove strong enough to preserve the Church.' Of Dr. Hartley. 173 I will now show you the opinion of a very learned and virtuous writer, who was much followed in his day, and whose book, at that time, formed one of the manuals by which our youth were taught the philosophy of morals to prepare them for their theological studies, I mean Dr. Hartley: "I choose to speak of what falls under the observation of all serious, attentive persons in the kingdom. The superior clergy are in general ambitious, and eager in the pursuit of riches-flatterers of the great, and subservient to party interest-negligent of their own particular charges, and also of the inferior clergy. The inferior clergy imitate their superiors, and in general take little more care of their parishes than barely what is necessary to avoid the censure of the law; and the clergy of all ranks are in general either ignorant, or, if they do apply, it is rather to profane learning, to philosophical or political matters, than in the study of the Scriptures, of the Oriental languages, and the Fathers. I say this is, in general, the case; that is, far the greater part of the clergy of all ranks in the kingdom are of this kind.” I here must state that the passage I have just read is very far from meeting my approval, any more than it speaks the defendant's sentiments, and especially in its strictures upon the inferior clergy; for certainly it is impossible to praise too highly those pious and useful men, the resident, working parish priests of this country. I speak not of the dignitaries, the pluralists and sinecur History of His own Times, ii.. 641. To take a much later period, I hold in my hand an attack upon the hierarchy by of a clergyman one of their own body-a respectable in Chester. and beneficed clergyman in the sister county Palatine of Chester, who undertook to defend the Christian religion, itself the basis, I presume I may venture to call it, of the Church, against Thomas Paine. In the course of so pious a work, which he conducted most elaborately, as you may perceive by the size of this volume, he inveighs in almost every page against the abuses of the Establishment, but in language which I am very far from adopting. In one passage is the following energetic, and I may add, somewhat violent invective, which I will read, that you may see how a man, unwearied in the care of souls, and so zealous a Christian that he is in the act of confuting infidels and putting scoffers to silence, may yet, in the very course of defending the Church and its faith, use language, any one word of which, if uttered by the defendant, would make my learned friend shudder at the license of the modern press upon sacred subjects. "We readily grant, therefore, you see, my countrymen, that the corruptions of Christianity shall be purged and done away; and we are persuaded the wickedness of Christians so called, the lukewarmness of professors, and the reiterated attacks of infidels upon the Gospel, shall all, under the guidance of infinite Wisdom, contribute to accomplish this end." I have read this sentence to show you the spirit of piety in which the work is composed; now see what follows: "The lofty looks of lordly prelates shall be brought low; the supercilious airs of downy doctors and perjured pluralists shall be humbled : the horrible sacrilege of non-residents, who shear the fleece, and leave the flock thus despoiled to the charge of uninterested hirelings that care not for them, shall be avenged on their impiens heads. Intemperate priests, avaricious clerks. and buckish parsons, those curses of Christendom, shall be confounded. All secular hierarchies in the Church shall be tumbled into ruin; luke |