EDWARD SOMERSET,

EARL OF GLAMORGAN,

AND

MARQUIS OF WORCESTER,

APPEARS in a very different light in his public character, and in that of author: in the former he was an active zealot; in the latter a fantastic projector and mechanic-in both very credulous. Though literary character be the intention of this Catalogue, it is impossible to give any idea of this lord merely from the sole work that he has published, it being nothing more than, scarce so much as, heads of chapters. His political character is so remarkable, that it opens and makes even his whimsicalness as a writer less extraordinary. In short, this was the famous earl of Glamorgan, so created by Charles the first, while heir-apparent to the Marquis of Worcester. He was a bigotted Catholic, but in times when that was no disrecommendation at court, and when it grew a merit. Being of a nature extremely enterprising, and a warm royalist, he was dispatched into Ireland by the king. Here history lays its finger; at least is inter

rupted by controversy.

The censurers of

king Charles charge that prince with sending this lord to negotiate with the Irish rebel Catholics, and to bring over a great body of them for the king's service. The devotees of Charles would disculpate him, and accuse the lord Glamorgan of forging powers from the king for that purpose. The fact stands thus: the treaty was discovered; the earl was imprisoned by the king's servants in Ireland3; was dismissed by them unpunished before the king's pleasure was known. The parliament complained; the king disavowed the earl^, yet wrote to have any sentence against him suspended, renewed his confidence in him; nor did the earl ever seem to resent the king's disavowal, which, with much good-nature, he imputed to the necessity of his majesty's affairs. This mysterious business has been treated at large in a book published in 1747; and again, with an appendix, in 1756, called An Inquiry into the Share which King Charles

By the parliament of England.

3 See lord Digby's and Glamorgan's letters on this affair in the Parl. Hist. vol. xiv. p. 224.

4 [James the first had acted a similar part in regard to a letter written to the pope by his Scotch secretary of state, which Bellarmine upbraided him with; and queen Elizabeth expostulating with James upon it, he laid the blame on Balmerino. Dr. Lort.}

the First had in the Transactions of the Earl of Glamorgan, &c. It is there strenuously asserted against Mr. Carte, that the king was privy to the negotiation. Seven years elapsed without Mr. Carte's reply. Two months before he died, he was supposed to be the author of an advertisement, promising an answer. From the treatise just mentioned, it appears plainly that the king was at least far from disapproving the attempt for his service; that the oftener he disavowed it, the more faintly he denied it; and that his best friends cannot but confess that he had delivered blank warrants or powers to the earl; and his majesty's own letters seem to allow every latitude which the earl took, or could take, in filling them up. Thus stands the dispute. I cannot help forming an opinion, which, without reconciling, will comprehend what may be the strongest sentiments on either side. With the king's enemies, I cannot but believe he commissioned the earl to fetch Irish forces:

with his favourers, I cannot think him so much to blame if he did. It requires very primitive resignation in a monarch to sacrifice his crown and his life, when persecuted by subjects of his own sect, rather than preserve both by the assistance of others of his subjects,

who differed from him in ceremonials or articles of belief. The dreadful Irish Papists (and they certainly were horrid men) sounded very pathetically, in a party remonstrance of the parliament; but when he was dipped in a civil war, can we in this age seriously impute it to him as a crime, that he endeavoured to raise an army wherever he could? His fault was not in proposing to bring over the Irish, but in having made them necessary to his affairs. Every body knew that he wanted to do without them, all that he could have done with them. He had found the crown in possession of greater power than is fit to be trusted in a single hand; he had exerted it to the utmost. Could a man, who had stretched every string of prerogative, consent, with a good grace, to let it be curtailed ?—I argue for the man, not for the particular man. I think Charles to be pitied, because few men in his situation would have acted better. I am sure, if he had acted with more wisdom, it had been worse for us! It required a nobleness of soul

His majesty at least, in accepting their support, would but have acted as a pious princess has done since, whom nobody would suspect of tenderness for heretics. In the last war, the empress queen excused herself to the pope, for making use of the assistance of England, with this remarkable expression, "Ces sont des braves impies."

and an effort of understanding united, neither of which he possessed, to prefer the happiness of mankind to his own will. He had been bred in a palace; what idea could that give him of the wretchedness of a cottage? Besides, Charles did not desire to oppress the poor; he wanted to humble, perhaps to enslave, some free speakers in the house of commons, who possibly, by the bye, he knew were ambitious, interested, worthless men. Hedid not know, or did not reflect, that by enslaving or silencing two or three hundred bad men, he would entail slavery on millions of poor honest men, and on their posterity. He did not consider, that if he might send a member to the Tower, an hundred of his subaltern ministers would, without his knowledge, send a thousand poor men to jail. He did not know, that, by his

[6 Sir E. Brydges asks "what does the noble writer mean by this, as applied to his subject? Does he mean that no monarch can regard the liberties of his people, unless he has himself been bred in a cottage? He is endeavouring to excuse the king's despotic measures: if, therefore, his argument proves any thing, it proves too much. Yet this is just the kind of plausible sentiment calculated ad captandum vulgus. And many, no doubt, have been the readers who have admired the author's liberality of sentiment in this place."]

7 [Lord Woodhouselee remarked on this passage-" It does not seem to be a sound and logical inference, that a power in the sovereign to punish by a direct exertion of his authority an inso