Which simpleness and merit purchaseth.”
In this way any man may, with little sagacity and little trouble, be
considered by those whose good opinion is not worth having as a great
judge of character.
It is said that the hasty and rapacious Kneller used to send away the
ladies who sate to him as soon as he had sketched their faces, and to
paint the figure and hands from his housemaid. It was in much the same
way that Walpole portrayed the minds of others. He copied from the life
only those glaring and obvious peculiarities which could not escape the
most superficial observation. The rest of the canvas he filled up, in a
careless dashing way, with knave and fool, mixed in such proportions as
pleased Heaven. What a difference between these daubs and the masterly
portraits of Clarendon!
There are contradictions without end in the sketches of character which
abound in Walpole’s works. But if we were to form our opinion of his
eminent contemporaries from a general survey of what he has written
concerning them, we should say that Pitt was a strutting, ranting,
mouthing actor, Charles Townshend an impudent and voluble jack-pudding,
Murray a demure, cold-blooded, cowardly hypocrite, Hardwicke an insolent
upstart, with the understanding of a pettifogger and the heart of
a hangman, Temple an impertinent poltroon, Egmont a solemn coxcomb,
Lyttelton a poor creature whose only wish was to go to heaven in a
coronet, Onslow a pompous proser, Washington a braggart, Lord Camden
sullen, Lord Townshend malevolent, Secker an atheist who had shammed
Christian for a mitre, Whitefield an impostor who swindled his converts
out of their watches. The Walpoles fare little better than their
neighbours. Old Horace is constantly represented as a coarse, brutal,
niggardly buffoon, and his son as worthy of such a father. In short, if
we are to trust this discerning judge of human nature, England in his
time contained little sense and no virtue, except what was distributed
between himself, Lord Waldegrave, and Marshal Conway.
Of such a writer it is scarcely necessary to say, that his works are
destitute of every charm which is derived from elevation, or
from tenderness of sentiment. When he chose to be humane and
magnanimous,--for he sometimes, by way of variety, tried this
affectation,--he overdid his part most ludicrously. None of his many
disguises sat so awkwardly upon him. For example, he tells us that he
did not choose to be intimate with Mr. Pitt. And why? Because Mr.
Pitt had been among the persecutors of his father? Or because, as he
repeatedly assures us, Mr. Pitt was a disagreeable man in private? Not
at all; but because Mr. Pitt was too fond of war, and was great with too
little reluctance. Strange that a habitual scoffer like Walpole should
imagine that this cant could impose on the dullest reader! If Moliere
had put such a speech into the mouth of Tartuffe, we should have said
that the fiction was unskilful, and that Orgon could not have been such
a fool as to be taken in by it. Of the twenty-six years during which
Walpole sat in Parliament, thirteen were years of war. Yet he did not,
during all those thirteen years, utter a single word or give a single
vote tending to peace. His most intimate friend, the only friend,
indeed, to whom he appears to have been sincerely attached, Conway, was
a soldier, was fond of his profession, and was perpetually entreating
Mr. Pitt to give him employment. In this Walpole saw nothing but
what was admirable. Conway was a hero for soliciting the command of
expeditions which Mr. Pitt was a monster for sending out.
What then is the charm, the irresistible charm, of Walpole’s writings?
It consists, we think, in the art of amusing without exciting. He never
convinces the reason or fills the imagination, or touches the heart;
but he keeps the mind of the reader constantly attentive and constantly
entertained. He had a strange ingenuity peculiarly his own, an ingenuity
which appeared in all that he did, in his building, in his gardening, in
his upholstery, in the matter and in the manner of his writings. If we
were to adopt the classification, not a very accurate classification,
which Akenside has given of the pleasures of the imagination, we should
say that with the Sublime and the Beautiful Walpole had nothing to do,
but that the third province, the Odd, was his peculiar domain. The motto
which he prefixed to his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors might have
been inscribed with perfect propriety over the door of every room in his
house, and on the title-page of every one of his books; “Dove Diavolo,
Messer Ludovico, avete pigliate tante coglionerie?” In his villa, every
apartment is a museum; every piece of furniture is a curiosity; there
is something strange in the form of the shovel; there is a long story
belonging to the bell-rope. We wander among a profusion of rarities, of
trifling intrinsic value, but so quaint in fashion, or connected
with such remarkable names and events, that they may well detain our
attention for a moment. A moment is enough. Some new relic, some new
unique, some new carved work, some new enamel, is forthcoming in an
instant. One cabinet of trinkets is no sooner closed than another is
opened. It is the same with Walpole’s writings. It is not in their
utility, it is not in their beauty, that their attraction lies. They are
to the works of great historians and poets, what Strawberry Hill is to
the Museum of Sir Hans Sloane or to the Gallery of Florence. Walpole is
constantly showing us things, not of very great value indeed, yet things
which we are pleased to see, and which we can see nowhere else. They
are baubles; but they are made curiosities either by his grotesque
workmanship or by some association belonging to them. His style is one
of those peculiar styles by which everybody is attracted, and which
nobody can safely venture to imitate. He is a mannerist whose manner
has become perfectly easy to him, His affectation is so habitual and so
universal that it can hardly be called affectation. The affectation
is the essence of the man. It pervades all his thoughts and all his
expressions. If it were taken away, nothing would be left. He coins new
words, distorts the senses of old words, and twists sentences into forms
which make grammarians stare. But all this he does, not only with an
air of ease, but as if he could not help doing it. His wit was, in its
essential properties, of the same kind with that of Cowley and Donne.
Like theirs, it consisted in an exquisite perception of points of
analogy and points of contrast too subtile for common observation. Like
them, Walpole perpetually startles us by the ease with which he yokes
together ideas between which there would seem, at first sight, to be no
connection. But he did not, like them, affect the gravity of a lecture,
and draw his illustrations from the laboratory and from the schools. His
tone was light and fleeting; his topics were the topics of the club and
the ballroom; and therefore his strange combinations and far-fetched
allusions, though very closely resembling those which tire us to death
in the poems of the time of Charles the First, are read with pleasure
constantly new.
No man who has written so much is so seldom tiresome. In his books there
are scarcely any of those passages which, in our school-days, we used to
call skip. Yet he often wrote on subjects which are generally considered
as dull, on subjects which men of great talents have in vain endeavoured
to render popular. When we compare the Historic Doubts about Richard
the Third with Whitaker’s and Chalmers’s books on a far more interesting
question, the character of Mary Queen of Scots; when we compare the
Anecdotes of Painting with the works of Anthony Wood, of Nichols, of
Granger, we at once see Walpole’s superiority, not in industry, not
in learning, not in accuracy, not in logical power, but in the art of
writing what people will like to read. He rejects all but the attractive
parts of his subject. He keeps only what is in itself amusing or what
can be made so by the artifice of his diction. The coarser morsels
of antiquarian learning he abandons to others, and sets out an
entertainment worthy of a Roman epicure, an entertainment consisting of
nothing but delicacies, the brains of singing birds, the roe of mullets,
the sunny halves of peaches. This, we think, is the great merit of his
romance. There is little skill in the delineation of the characters.
Manfred is as commonplace a tyrant, Jerome as commonplace a confessor,
Theodore as commonplace a young gentleman, Isabella and Matilda as
commonplace a pair of young ladies, as are to be found in any of the
thousand Italian castles in which condottieri have revelled or in which
imprisoned duchesses have pined. We cannot say that we much admire the
big man whose sword is dug up in one quarter of the globe, whose helmet
drops from the clouds in another, and who, after clattering and rustling
for some days, ends by kicking the house down. But the story, whatever
its value may be, never flags for a single moment. There are no
digressions, or unseasonable descriptions, or long speeches. Every
sentence carries the action forward. The excitement is constantly
renewed. Absurd as is the machinery, insipid as are the human actors, no
reader probably ever thought the book dull.
Walpole’s Letters are generally considered as his best performances,
and, we think, with reason. His faults are far less offensive to us
in his correspondence than in his books. His wild, absurd, and
ever-changing opinions about men and things are easily pardoned in
familiar letters. His bitter, scoffing, depreciating disposition does
not show itself in so unmitigated a manner as in his Memoirs. A writer
of letters must in general be civil and friendly to his correspondent at
least, if to no other person.
He loved letter-writing, and had evidently studied it as an art. It
was, in truth, the very kind of writing for such a man, for a man very
ambitious to rank among wits, yet nervously afraid that, while obtaining
the reputation of a wit, he might lose caste as a gentleman. There was
nothing vulgar in writing a letter. Not even Ensign Northerton, not
even the Captain described in Hamilton’s Bawn,--and Walpole, though the
author of many quartos, had some feelings in common with those gallant
officers,--would have denied that a gentleman might sometimes correspond
with a friend. Whether Walpole bestowed much labour on the composition
of his letters, it is impossible to judge from internal evidence. There
are passages which seem perfectly unstudied. But the appearance of
ease may be the effect of labour. There are passages which have a very
artificial air. But they may have been produced without effort by a mind
of which the natural ingenuity had been improved into morbid quickness
by constant exercise. We are never sure that we see him as he was. We
are never sure that what appears to be nature is not disguised art. We
are never sure that what appears to be art is not merely habit which has
become second nature.
In wit and animation the present collection is not superior to those
which have preceded it. But it has one great advantage over them all. It
forms a connected whole, a regular journal of what appeared to Walpole
the most important transactions of the last twenty years of George the
Second’s reign. It furnishes much new information concerning the history
of that time, the portion of English history of which common readers
know the least.
The earlier letters contain the most lively and interesting account
which we possess of that “great Walpolean battle,” to use the words of
Junius, which terminated in the retirement of Sir Robert. Horace entered
the House of Commons just in time to witness the last desperate struggle
which his father, surrounded by enemies and traitors, maintained, with
a spirit as brave as that of the column of Fontenoy, first for victory,
and then for honourable retreat. Horace was, of course, on the side of
his family. Lord Dover seems to have been enthusiastic on the same side,
and goes so far as to call Sir Robert “the glory of the Whigs.”
Sir Robert deserved this high eulogium, we think, as little as he
deserved the abusive epithets which have often been coupled with his
name. A fair character of him still remains to be drawn; and, whenever
it shall be drawn, it will be equally unlike the portrait by Coxe and
the portrait by Smollett.
He had, undoubtedly, great talents and great virtues. He was not,
indeed, like the leaders of the party which opposed his government, a
brilliant orator. He was not a profound scholar, like Carteret, or a
wit and a fine gentleman, like Chesterfield. In all these respects his
deficiencies were remarkable. His literature consisted of a scrap or
two of Horace and an anecdote or two from the end of the Dictionary.
His knowledge of history was so limited that, in the great debate on the
Excise Bill, he was forced to ask Attorney-General Yorke who Empson and
Dudley were. His manners were a little too coarse and boisterous even
for that age of Westerns and Topehalls. When he ceased to talk of
politics, he could talk of nothing but women and he dilated on his
favourite theme with a freedom which shocked even that plain-spoken
generation, and which was quite unsuited to his age and station. The
noisy revelry of his summer festivities at Houghton gave much scandal
to grave people, and annually drove his kinsman and colleague, Lord
Townshend, from the neighbouring mansion of Rainham.
But, however ignorant Walpole might be of general history and of general
literature, he was better acquainted than any man of his day with what
it concerned him most to know, mankind, the English nation, the Court,
the House of Commons, and the Treasury. Of foreign affairs he knew
little; but his judgment was so good that his little knowledge went
very far. He was an excellent parliamentary debater, an excellent
parliamentary tactician, an excellent man of business. No man ever
brought more industry or more method to the transacting of affairs. No
minister in his time did so much; yet no minister had so much leisure.
He was a good-natured man who had during thirty years seen nothing but
the worst parts of human nature in other men. He was familiar with the
malice of kind people, and the perfidy of honourable people. Proud men
had licked the dust before him. Patriots had begged him to come up to
the price of their puffed and advertised integrity. He said after his
fall that it was a dangerous thing to be a minister, that there were few
minds which would not be injured by the constant spectacle of meanness
and depravity. To his honour it must be confessed that few minds have
come out of such a trial so little damaged in the most important parts.
He retired, after more than twenty years of supreme power, with a temper
not soured, with a heart not hardened, with simple tastes, with frank
manners, and with a capacity for friendship. No stain of treachery, of
ingratitude, or of cruelty rests on his memory. Factious hatred, while
flinging on his name every other foul aspersion, was compelled to own
that he was not a man of blood. This would scarcely seem a high
eulogium on a statesman of our times. It was then a rare and honourable
distinction. The contests of parties in England had long been carried on
with a ferocity unworthy of a civilised people. Sir Robert Walpole was
the minister who gave to our Government that character of lenity which
it has since generally preserved. It was perfectly known to him that
many of his opponents had dealings with the Pretender. The lives of some
were at his mercy. He wanted neither Whig nor Tory precedents for using
his advantage unsparingly. But with a clemency to which posterity has
never done justice, he suffered himself to be thwarted, vilified, and at
last overthrown, by a party which included many men whose necks were in
his power.
That he practised corruption on a large scale, is, we think,
indisputable. But whether he deserves all the invectives which have been
uttered against him on that account may be questioned. No man ought to
be severely censured for not being beyond his age in virtue. To buy
the votes of constituents is as immoral as to buy the votes of
representatives. The candidate who gives five guineas to the freeman is
as culpable as the man who gives three hundred guineas to the member.
Yet we know that, in our own time, no man is thought wicked or
dishonourable, no man is cut, no man is black-balled, because, under
the old system of election, he was returned in the only way in which
he could be returned, for East Redford, for Liverpool, or for Stafford.
Walpole governed by corruption, because, in his time, it was impossible
to govern otherwise. Corruption was unnecessary to the Tudors, for their
Parliaments were feeble. The publicity which has of late years been
given to parliamentary proceedings has raised the standard of morality
among public men. The power of public opinion is so great that, even
before the reform of the representation, a faint suspicion that a
minister had given pecuniary gratifications to Members of Parliament in
return for their votes would have been enough to ruin him. But, during
the century which followed the Restoration, the House of Commons was
in that situation in which assemblies must be managed by corruption, or
cannot be managed at all. It was not held in awe, as in the sixteenth
century, by the throne. It was not held in awe as in the nineteenth
century, by the opinion of the people. Its constitution was
oligarchical. Its deliberations were secret. Its power in the State was
immense. The Government had every conceivable motive to offer bribes.
Many of the members, if they were not men of strict honour and probity,
had no conceivable motive to refuse what the Government offered. In the
reign of Charles the Second, accordingly, the practice of buying votes
in the House of Commons was commenced by the daring Clifford, and
carried to a great extent by the crafty and shameless Danby. The
Revolution, great and manifold as were the blessings of which it was
directly or remotely the cause, at first aggravated this evil. The
importance of the House of Commons was now greater than ever. The
prerogatives of the Crown were more strictly limited than ever; and
those associations in which, more than in its legal prerogatives, its
power had consisted, were completely broken. No prince was ever in so
helpless and distressing a situation as William the Third. The party
which defended his title was, on general grounds, disposed to curtail
his prerogative. The party which was, on general grounds, friendly to
prerogative, was adverse to his title. There was no quarter in which
both his office and his person could find favour. But while the
influence of the House of Commons in the Government was becoming
paramount, the influence of the people over the House of Commons was
declining. It mattered little in the time of Charles the First whether
that House were or were not chosen by the people; it was certain to act
for the people, because it would have been at the mercy of the Court but
for the support of the people. Now that the Court was at the mercy of
the House of Commons, those members who were not returned by popular
election had nobody to please but themselves. Even those who were
returned by popular election did not live, as now, under a constant
sense of responsibility. The constituents were not, as now, daily
apprised of the votes and speeches of their representatives. The
privileges which had in old times been indispensably necessary to the
security and efficiency of Parliaments were now superfluous. But
they were still carefully maintained, by honest legislators from
superstitious veneration, by dishonest legislators for their own selfish
ends. They had been an useful defence to the Commons during a long and
doubtful conflict with powerful sovereigns. They were now no longer
necessary for that purpose; and they became a defence to the members
against their constituents. That secrecy which had been absolutely
necessary in times when the Privy Council was in the habit of sending
the leaders of Opposition to the Tower was preserved in times when a
vote of the House of Commons was sufficient to hurl the most powerful
minister from his post.
The Government could not go on unless the Parliament could be kept in
order. And how was the Parliament to be kept in order? Three hundred
years ago it would have been enough for the statesman to have the
support of the Crown. It would now, we hope and believe, be enough for
him to enjoy the confidence and approbation of the great body of the
middle class. A hundred years ago it would not have been enough to have
both Crown and people on his side. The Parliament had shaken off the
control of the Royal prerogative. It had not yet fallen under the
control of public opinion. A large proportion of the members had
absolutely no motive to support any administration except their own
interest, in the lowest sense of the word. Under these circumstances,
the country could be governed only by corruption. Bolingbroke, who was
the ablest and the most vehement of those who raised the clamour
against corruption, had no better remedy to propose than that the Royal
prerogative should be strengthened. The remedy would no doubt have been
efficient. The only question is, whether it would not have been worse
than the disease. The fault was in the constitution of the Legislature;
and to blame those ministers who managed the Legislature in the only
way in which it could be managed is gross injustice. They submitted
to extortion because they could not help themselves. We might as well
accuse the poor Lowland farmers who paid black-mail to Rob Roy of
corrupting the virtue of the Highlanders, as accuse Sir Robert Walpole
of corrupting the virtue of Parliament. His crime was merely this, that
he employed his money more dexterously, and got more support in return
for it, than any of those who preceded or followed him.
He was himself incorruptible by money. His dominant passion was the love
of power: and the heaviest charge which can be brought against him is
that to this passion he never scrupled to sacrifice the interests of his
country.
One of the maxims which, as his son tells us, he was most in the habit
of repeating, was quieta non movere. It was indeed the maxim by which
he generally regulated his public conduct. It is the maxim of a man
more solicitous to hold power long than to use it well. It is remarkable
that, though he was at the head of affairs during more than twenty
years, not one great measure, not one important change for the better or
for the worse in any part of our institutions, marks the period of his
supremacy. Nor was this because he did not clearly see that many changes
were very desirable. He had been brought up in the school of toleration,
at the feet of Somers and of Burnet. He disliked the shameful laws
against Dissenters. But he never could be induced to bring forward a
proposition for repealing them. The sufferers represented to him the
injustice with which they were treated, boasted of their firm attachment
to the House of Brunswick and to the Whig party, and reminded him of
his own repeated declarations of goodwill to their cause. He listened,
assented, promised, and did nothing. At length, the question was brought
forward by others, and the Minister, after a hesitating and evasive
speech, voted against it. The truth was that he remembered to the latest
day of his life that terrible explosion of high-church feeling which the
foolish prosecution of a foolish parson had occasioned in the days of
Queen Anne. If the Dissenters had been turbulent he would probably have
relieved them; but while he apprehended no danger from them, he would
not run the slightest risk for their sake. He acted in the same manner
with respect to other questions. He knew the state of the Scotch
Highlands. He was constantly predicting another insurrection in that
part of the empire. Yet, during his long tenure of power, he never
attempted to perform what was then the most obvious and pressing duty of
a British Statesman, to break the power of the Chiefs, and to establish
the authority of law through the furthest corners of the Island. Nobody
knew better than he that, if this were not done, great mischiefs would
follow. But the Highlands were tolerably quiet in his time. He was
content to meet daily emergencies by daily expedients; and he left the
rest to his successors. They had to conquer the Highlands in the
midst of a war with France and Spain, because he had not regulated the
Highlands in a time of profound peace.
Sometimes, in spite of all his caution, he found that measures which he
had hoped to carry through quietly had caused great agitation. When this
was the case he generally modified or withdrew them. It was thus that
he cancelled Wood’s patent in compliance with the absurd outcry of the
Irish. It was thus that he frittered away the Porteous Bill to nothing,
for fear of exasperating the Scotch. It was thus that he abandoned the
Excise Bill, as soon as he found that it was offensive to all the great
towns of England. The language which he held about that measure in a
subsequent session is strikingly characteristic. Pulteney had insinuated
that the scheme would be again brought forward. “As to the wicked
scheme,” said Walpole, “as the gentleman is pleased to call it, which
he would persuade gentlemen is not yet laid aside, I for my part assure
this House I am not so mad as ever again to engage in anything that
looks like an Excise; though, in my private opinion, I still think it
was a scheme that would have tended very much to the interest of the
nation.”
The conduct of Walpole with regard to the Spanish war is the great
blemish of his public life. Archdeacon Coxe imagined that he had
discovered one grand principle of action to which the whole public
conduct of his hero ought to be referred.
“Did the administration of Walpole,” says the biographer, “present any
uniform principle which may be traced in every part, and which gave
combination and consistency to the whole? Yes, and that principle was,
THE LOVE OF PEACE.” It would be difficult, we think, to bestow a higher
eulogium on any statesman. But the eulogium is far too high for the
merits of Walpole. The great ruling principle of his public conduct was
indeed a love of peace, but not in the sense in which Archdeacon Coxe
uses the phrase. The peace which Walpole sought was not the peace of
the country, but the peace of his own administration. During the greater
part of his public life, indeed, the two objects were inseparably
connected. At length he was reduced to the necessity of choosing between
them, of plunging the State into hostilities for which there was no
just ground, and by which nothing was to be got, or of facing a violent
opposition in the country, in Parliament, and even in the royal closet.
No person was more thoroughly convinced than he of the absurdity of the
cry against Spain. But his darling power was at stake, and his choice
was soon made. He preferred an unjust war to a stormy session. It is
impossible to say of a Minister who acted thus that the love of peace
was the one grand principle to which all his conduct is to be referred.
The governing principle of his conduct was neither love of peace nor
love of war, but love of power.
The praise to which he is fairly entitled is this, that he understood
the true interest of his country better than any of his contemporaries,
and that he pursued that interest whenever it was not incompatible with
the interest of his own intense and grasping ambition. It was only in
matters of public moment that he shrank from agitation and had recourse
to compromise. In his contests for personal influence there was no
timidity, no flinching. He would have all or none. Every member of the
Government who would not submit to his ascendency was turned out or
forced to resign. Liberal of everything else, he was avaricious of
power. Cautious everywhere else, when power was at stake he had all
the boldness of Richelieu or Chatham. He might easily have secured his
authority if he could have been induced to divide it with others. But he
would not part with one fragment of it to purchase defenders for all the
rest. The effect of this policy was that he had able enemies and feeble
allies. His most distinguished coadjutors left him one by one, and
joined the ranks of the Opposition. He faced the increasing array of his
enemies with unbroken spirit, and thought it far better that they should
attack his power than that they should share it.
The Opposition was in every sense formidable. At its head were two royal
personages, the exiled head of the House of Stuart, the disgraced heir
of the House of Brunswick. One set of members received directions from
Avignon. Another set held their consultations and banquets at Norfolk
House. The majority of the landed gentry, the majority of the parochial
clergy, one of the universities, and a strong party in the City of
London and in the other great towns, were decidedly adverse to the
Government. Of the men of letters, some were exasperated by the neglect
with which the Minister treated them, a neglect which was the more
remarkable, because his predecessors, both Whig and Tory, had paid court
with emulous munificence to the wits and poets; others were honestly
inflamed by party zeal; almost all lent their aid to the Opposition. In
truth, all that was alluring to ardent and imaginative minds was on that
side; old associations, new visions of political improvement, high-flown
theories of loyalty, high-flown theories of liberty, the enthusiasm of
the Cavalier, the enthusiasm of the Roundhead. The Tory gentleman,
fed in the common-rooms of Oxford with the doctrines of Filmer and
Sacheverell, and proud of the exploits of his great-grandfather, who
had charged with Rupert at Marston, who had held out the old manor-house
against Fairfax, and who, after the King’s return, had been set down for
a Knight of the Royal Oak, flew to that section of the Opposition which,
under pretence of assailing the existing administration, was in truth
assailing the reigning dynasty. The young republican, fresh from his
Livy and his Lucan, and glowing with admiration of Hampden, of Russell,
and of Sydney, hastened with equal eagerness to those benches from which
eloquent voices thundered nightly against the tyranny and perfidy of
courts. So many young politicians were caught by these declamations that
Sir Robert, in one of his best speeches, observed that the Opposition
consisted of three bodies, the Tories, the discontented Whigs, who were
known by the name of the Patriots, and the Boys. In fact almost every
young man of warm temper and lively imagination, whatever his political
bias might be, was drawn into the party adverse to the Government; and
some of the most distinguished among them, Pitt, for example, among
public men, and Johnson, among men of letters, afterwards openly
acknowledged their mistake.
The aspect of the Opposition, even while it was still a minority in the
House of Commons, was very imposing. Among those who, in Parliament
or out of Parliament, assailed the administration of Walpole, were
Bolingbroke, Carteret, Chesterfield, Argyle, Pulteney, Wyndham,
Doddington, Pitt, Lyttelton, Barnard, Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot,
Fielding, Johnson, Thomson, Akenside, Glover.
The circumstance that the Opposition was divided into two parties,
diametrically opposed to each other in political opinions, was long the
safety of Walpole. It was at last his ruin. The leaders of the minority
knew that it would be difficult for them to bring forward any important
measure without producing an immediate schism in their party. It was
with very great difficulty that the Whigs in opposition had been induced
to give a sullen and silent vote for the repeal of the Septennial
Act. The Tories, on the other hand, could not be induced to support
Pulteney’s motion for an addition to the income of Prince Frederic. The
two parties had cordially joined in calling out for a war with Spain;
but they now had their war. Hatred of Walpole was almost the only
feeling which was common to them. On this one point, therefore, they
concentrated their whole strength. With gross ignorance, or gross
dishonesty, they represented the Minister as the main grievance of the
State. His dismissal, his punishment, would prove the certain cure for
all the evils which the nation suffered. What was to be done after his
fall, how misgovernment was to be prevented in future, were questions
to which there were as many answers as there were noisy and ill-informed
members of the Opposition. The only cry in which all could join was,
“Down with Walpole!” So much did they narrow the disputed ground, so
purely personal did they make the question, that they threw out friendly
hints to the other members of the Administration, and declared that they
refused quarter to the Prime Minister alone. His tools might keep their
heads, their fortunes, even their places, if only the great father of
corruption were given up to the just vengeance of the nation.
If the fate of Walpole’s colleagues had been inseparably bound up with
his, he probably would, even after the unfavourable elections of 1741,
have been able to weather the storm. But as soon as it was understood
that the attack was directed against him alone, and that, if he were
sacrificed, his associates might expect advantageous and honourable
terms, the ministerial ranks began to waver, and the murmur of sauve
qui peut was heard. That Walpole had foul play is almost certain, but to
what extent it is difficult to say. Lord Islay was suspected; the Duke
of Newcastle something more than suspected. It would have been strange,
indeed, if his Grace had been idle when treason was hatching.
“Ch’ i’ ho de’ traditor’ sempre sospetto, E Gan fu traditor prima che
nato.”
“His name,” said Sir Robert, “is perfidy.”
Never was a battle more manfully fought out than the last struggle of
the old statesman. His clear judgment, his long experience, and his
fearless spirit, enabled him to maintain a defensive war through half
the session. To the last his heart never failed him--and, when at last
he yielded, he yielded not to the threats of his enemies, but to the
entreaties of his dispirited and refractory followers. When he could
no longer retain his power, he compounded for honour and security,
and retired to his garden and his paintings, leaving to those who had
overthrown him shame, discord, and ruin.
Everything was in confusion. It has been said that the confusion was
produced by the dexterous policy of Walpole; and, undoubtedly, he did
his best to sow dissension amongst his triumphant enemies. But there was
little for him to do. Victory had completely dissolved the hollow truce,
which the two sections of the Opposition had but imperfectly observed,
even while the event of the contest was still doubtful. A thousand
questions were opened in a moment. A thousand conflicting claims were
preferred. It was impossible to follow any line of policy which would
not have been offensive to a large portion of the successful party. It
was impossible to find places for a tenth part of those who thought
that they had a right to office. While the parliamentary leaders were
preaching patience and confidence, while their followers were clamouring
for reward, a still louder voice was heard from without, the terrible
cry of a people angry, they hardly know with whom, and impatient they
hardly knew for what. The day of retribution had arrived. The Opposition
reaped that which they had sown. Inflamed with hatred and cupidity,
despairing of success by any ordinary mode of political warfare, and
blind to consequences, which, though remote, were certain, they had
conjured up a devil whom they could not lay. They had made the public
mind drunk with calumny and declamation. They had raised expectations
which it was impossible to satisfy. The downfall of Walpole was to
be the beginning of a political millennium; and every enthusiast had
figured to himself that millennium according to the fashion of his own
wishes. The republican expected that the power of the Crown would
be reduced to a mere shadow, the high Tory that the Stuarts would be
restored, the moderate Tory that the golden days which the Church and
the landed interest had enjoyed during the last years of Queen Anne
would immediately return. It would have been impossible to satisfy
everybody. The conquerors satisfied nobody.
We have no reverence for the memory of those who were then called
the patriots. We are for the principles of good government against
Walpole,--and for Walpole against the Opposition. It was most desirable
that a purer system should be introduced; but, if the old system was to
be retained, no man was so fit as Walpole to be at the head of
affairs. There were grievous abuses in the Government, abuses more than
sufficient to justify a strong Opposition. But the party opposed to
Walpole, while they stimulated the popular fury to the highest point,
were at no pains to direct it aright. Indeed they studiously misdirected
it. They misrepresented the evil. They prescribed inefficient and
pernicious remedies. They held up a single man as the sole cause of all
the vices of a bad system which had been in full operation before his
entrance into public life, and which continued to be in full operation
when some of these very brawlers had succeeded to his power. They
thwarted his best measures. They drove him into an unjustifiable war
against his will. Constantly talking in magnificent language about
tyranny, corruption, wicked ministers, servile courtiers, the liberty
of Englishmen, the Great Charter, the rights for which our fathers
bled, Timoleon, Brutus, Hampden, Sydney, they had absolutely nothing
to propose which would have been an improvement on our institutions.
Instead of directing the public mind to definite reforms which might
have completed the work of the revolution, which might have brought the
legislature into harmony with the nation, and which might have prevented
the Crown from doing by influence what it could no longer do by
prerogative, they excited a vague craving for change, by which they
profited for a single moment, and of which, as they well deserved, they
were soon the victims.
Among the reforms which the State then required, there were two of
paramount importance, two which would alone have remedied almost every
gross abuse, and without which all other remedies would have been
unavailing, the publicity of parliamentary proceedings, and the
abolition of the rotten boroughs. Neither of these was thought of. It
seems us clear that, if these were not adopted, all other measures would
have been illusory. Some of the patriots suggested changes which would,
beyond all doubt, have increased the existing evils a hundredfold. These
men wished to transfer the disposal of employments and the command of
the army from the Crown to the Parliament; and this on the very ground
that the Parliament had long been a grossly corrupt body. The security
against malpractices was to be that the members, instead of having a
portion of the public plunder doled out to them by a minister, were to
help themselves.
The other schemes of which the public mind was full were less dangerous
than this. Some of them were in themselves harmless. But none of them
would have done much good, and most of them were extravagantly absurd.
What they were we may learn from the instructions which many constituent
bodies, immediately after the change of administration, sent up to their
representatives. A more deplorable collection of follies can hardly
be imagined. There is, in the first place, a general cry for Walpole’s
head. Then there are better complaints of the decay of trade, a decay
which, in the judgment of these enlightened politicians, was brought
about by Walpole and corruption. They would have been nearer to the
truth if they had attributed their sufferings to the war into which
they had driven Walpole against his better judgment. He had foretold the
effects of his unwilling concession. On the day when hostilities against
Spain were proclaimed, when the heralds were attended into the city by
the chiefs of the Opposition, when the Prince of Wales himself stopped
at Temple Bar to drink success to the English arms, the minister heard
all the steeples of the city jingling with a merry peal, and muttered,
“They may ring the bells now; they will be wringing their hands before
long.”
Another grievance, for which of course Walpole and corruption were
answerable, was the great exportation of English wool. In the judgment
of the sagacious electors of several large towns, the remedying of
this evil was a matter second only in importance to the hanging of Sir
Robert. There were also earnest injunctions that the members should vote
against standing armies in time of peace, injunctions which were, to
say the least, ridiculously unseasonable in the midst of a war which was
likely to last, and which did actually last, as long as the Parliament.
The repeal of the Septennial Act, as was to be expected, was strongly
pressed. Nothing was more natural than that the voters should wish for
a triennial recurrence of their bribes and their ale. We feel firmly
convinced that the repeal of the Septennial Act, unaccompanied by a
complete reform of the constitution of the elective body, would have
been an unmixed curse to the country. The only rational recommendation
which we can find in all these instructions is that the number of
placemen in Parliament should be limited, and that pensioners should not
he allowed to sit there. It is plain, however, that this cure was far
from going to the root of the evil, and that, if it had been adopted
without other reforms, secret bribery would probably have been more
practised than ever.
We will give one more instance of the absurd expectations which the
declamations of the Opposition had raised in the country. Akenside was
one of the fiercest and most uncompromising of the young patriots out of
Parliament. When he found that the change of administration had produced
no change of system, he gave vent to his indignation in the Epistle to
Curio, the best poem that he ever wrote, a poem, indeed, which seems to
indicate, that, if he had left lyric composition to Gray and Collins,
and had employed his powers in grave and elevated satire, he might have
disputed the pre-eminence of Dryden. But whatever be the literary merits
of the epistle, we can say nothing in praise of the political doctrines
which it inculcates. The poet, in a rapturous apostrophe to the spirits
of the great men of antiquity, tells us what he expected from Pulteney
at the moment of the fall of the tyrant.
“See private life by wisest arts reclaimed, See ardent youth to
noblest manners framed, See us achieve whate’er was sought by you, If
Curio--only Curio--will be true.”
It was Pulteney’s business, it seems, to abolish faro, and masquerades,
to stint the young Duke of Marlborough to a bottle of brandy a day, and
to prevail on Lady Vane to be content with three lovers at a time.
Whatever the people wanted, they certainly got nothing. Walpole retired
in safety; and the multitude were defrauded of the expected show on
Tower Hill. The Septennial Act was not repealed. The placemen were
not turned out of the House of Commons. Wool, we believe, was still
exported. “Private life” afforded as much scandal as if the reign of
Walpole and corruption had continued; and “ardent youth” fought with
watchmen and betted with blacklegs as much as ever.
The colleagues of Walpole had, after his retreat, admitted some of the
chiefs of the Opposition into the Government, and soon found themselves
compelled to submit to the ascendency of one of their new allies. This
was Lord Carteret, afterwards Earl Granville. No public man of that age
had greater courage, greater ambition, greater activity, greater talents
for debate or for declamation. No public man had such profound and
extensive learning. He was familiar with the ancient writers, and loved
to sit up till midnight discussing philological and metrical questions
with Bentley. His knowledge of modern languages was prodigious. The
privy council, when he was present; needed no interpreter. He spoke and
wrote French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, even Swedish. He had
pushed his researches into the most obscure nooks of literature. He was
as familiar with Canonists and Schoolmen as with orators and poets. He
had read all that the universities of Saxony and Holland had produced on
the most intricate questions of public law. Harte, in the preface to the
second edition of his History of Gustavus Adolphus, bears a remarkable
testimony to the extent and accuracy of Lord Carteret’s knowledge. “It
was my good fortune or prudence to keep the main body of my army (or
in other words my matters of fact) safe and entire. The late Earl of
Granville was pleased to declare himself of this opinion; especially
when he found that I had made Chemnitius one of my principal guides; for
his Lordship was apprehensive I might not have seen that valuable and
authentic book, which is extremely scarce. I thought myself happy to
have contented his Lordship even in the lowest degree: for he understood
the German and Swedish histories to the highest perfection.”
With all this learning, Carteret was far from being a pedant. His was
not one of those cold spirits of which the fire is put out by the fuel.
In council, in debate, in society, he was all life and energy. His
measures were strong, prompt, and daring, his oratory animated and
glowing. His spirits were constantly high. No misfortune, public or
private, could depress him. He was at once the most unlucky and the
happiest public man of his time.
He had been Secretary of State in Walpole’s Administration, and had
acquired considerable influence over the mind of George the First. The
other ministers could speak no German. The King could speak no English.
All the communication that Walpole held with his master was in very bad
Latin. Carteret dismayed his colleagues by the volubility with which he
addressed his Majesty in German. They listened with envy and terror to
the mysterious gutturals which might possibly convey suggestions very
little in unison with their wishes.
Walpole was not a man to endure such a colleague as Carteret. The King
was induced to give up his favourite. Carteret joined the Opposition,
and signalised himself at the head of that party till, after the
retirement of his old rival, he again became Secretary of State.
During some months he was chief Minister, indeed sole Minister. He
gained the confidence and regard of George the Second. He was at the
same time in high favour with the Prince of Wales. As a debater in
the House of Lords, he had no equal among his colleagues. Among
his opponents, Chesterfield alone could be considered as his match.
Confident in his talents, and in the royal favour, he neglected
all those means by which the power of Walpole had been created and
maintained. His head was full of treaties and expeditions, of schemes
for supporting the Queen of Hungary and for humbling the House of
Bourbon. He contemptuously abandoned to others all the drudgery, and,
with the drudgery, all the fruits of corruption. The patronage of the
Church and of the Bar he left to the Pelhams as a trifle unworthy of his
care. One of the judges, Chief Justice Willes, if we remember rightly,
went to him to beg some ecclesiastical preferment for a friend. Carteret
said, that he was too much occupied with continental politics to think
about the disposal of places and benefices. “You may rely on it, then,”
said the Chief Justice, “that people who want places and benefices will
go to those who have more leisure.” The prediction was accomplished.
It would have been a busy time indeed in which the Pelhams had wanted
leisure for jobbing; and to the Pelhams the whole cry of place-hunters
and pension-hunters resorted. The parliamentary influence of the two
brothers became stronger every day, till at length they were at the head
of a decided majority in the House of Commons. Their rival, meanwhile,
conscious of his powers, sanguine in his hopes, and proud of the storm
which he had conjured up on the Continent, would brook neither superior
nor equal. “His rants,” says Horace Walpole, “are amazing; so are his
parts and his spirits.” He encountered the opposition of his colleagues,
not with the fierce haughtiness of the first Pitt, or the cold unbending
arrogance of the second, but with a gay vehemence, a good-humoured
imperiousness, that bore everything down before it. The period of his
ascendency was known by the name of the “Drunken Administration”; and
the expression was not altogether figurative. His habits were extremely
convivial; and champagne probably lent its aid to keep him in that state
of joyous excitement in which his life was passed.
That a rash and impetuous man of genius like Carteret should not have
been able to maintain his ground in Parliament against the crafty and
selfish Pelhams is not strange. But it is less easy to understand why
he should have been generally unpopular throughout the country. His
brilliant talents, his bold and open temper, ought, it should seem,
to have made him a favourite with the public. But the people had been
bitterly disappointed; and he had to face the first burst of their rage.
His close connection with Pulteney, now the most detested man in the
nation, was an unfortunate circumstance. He had, indeed, only three
partisans, Pulteney, the King, and the Prince of Wales, a most singular
assemblage.
He was driven from his office. He shortly after made a bold, indeed a
desperate, attempt to recover power. The attempt failed. From that time
he relinquished all ambitious hopes, and retired laughing to his books
and his bottle. No statesman ever enjoyed success with so exquisite
a relish, or submitted to defeat with so genuine and unforced a
cheerfulness. Ill as he had been used, he did not seem, says Horace
Walpole, to have any resentment, or indeed any feeling except thirst.
These letters contain many good stories, some of them no doubt grossly
exaggerated, about Lord Carteret; how, in the height of his greatness,
he fell in love at first sight on a birthday with Lady Sophia Fermor,
the handsome daughter of Lord Pomfret; how he plagued the Cabinet
every day with reading to them her ladyship’s letters; how strangely he
brought home his bride; what fine jewels he gave her; how he fondled
her at Ranelagh; and what queen-like state she kept in Arlington Street.
Horace Walpole has spoken less bitterly of Carteret than of any
public man of that time, Fox, perhaps, excepted; and this is the more
remarkable, because Carteret was one of the most inveterate enemies of
Sir Robert. In the Memoirs, Horace Walpole, after passing in review all
the great men whom England had produced within his memory, concludes by
saying, that in genius none of them equalled Lord Granville. Smollett,
in Humphrey Clinker, pronounces a similar judgment in coarser language.
“Since Granville was turned out, there has been no minister in this
nation worth the meal that whitened his periwig.”
Carteret fell; and the reign of the Pelhams commenced. It was Carteret’s
misfortune to be raised to power when the public mind was still smarting
from recent disappointment. The nation had been duped, and was eager for
revenge. A victim was necessary, and on such occasions the victims of
popular rage are selected like the victim of Jephthah. The first person
who comes in the way is made the sacrifice. The wrath of the people
had now spent itself; and the unnatural excitement was succeeded by an
unnatural calm. To an irrational eagerness for something new,
succeeded an equally irrational disposition to acquiesce in everything
established. A few months back the people had been disposed to impute
every crime to men in power, and to lend a ready ear to the high
professions of men in opposition. They were now disposed to surrender
themselves implicitly to the management of Ministers, and to look with
suspicion and contempt on all who pretended to public spirit. The name
of patriot had become a by-word of derision. Horace Walpole scarcely
exaggerated when he said that, in those times, the most popular
declaration which a candidate could make on the hustings was that he had
never been and never would be a patriot. At this conjecture took place
the rebellion of the Highland clans. The alarm produced by that
event quieted the strife of internal factions. The suppression of the
insurrection crushed for ever the spirit of the Jacobite party. Room
was made in the Government for a few Tories. Peace was patched up with
France and Spain. Death removed the Prince of Wales, who had contrived
to keep together a small portion of that formidable opposition of which
he had been the leader in the time of Sir Robert Walpole. Almost every
man of weight in the House of Commons was officially connected with the
Government. The even tenor of the session of Parliament was ruffled only
by an occasional harangue from Lord Egmont on the army estimates.
For the first time since the accession of the Stuarts there was no
opposition. This singular good fortune, denied to the ablest statesmen,
to Salisbury, to Strafford, to Clarendon, to Somers, to Walpole, had
been reserved for the Pelhams.
Henry Pelham, it is true, was by no means a contemptible person. His
understanding was that of Walpole on a somewhat smaller scale. Though
not a brilliant orator, he was, like his master, a good debater, a good
parliamentary tactician, a good man of business. Like his master, he
distinguished himself by the neatness and clearness of his financial
expositions. Here the resemblance ceased. Their characters were
altogether dissimilar. Walpole was good-humoured, but would have his
way: his spirits were high, and his manners frank even to coarseness.
The temper of Pelham was yielding, but peevish: his habits were regular,
and his deportment strictly decorous. Walpole was constitutionally
fearless, Pelham constitutionally timid. Walpole had to face a strong
opposition; but no man in the Government durst wag a finger against him.
Almost all the opposition which Pelham had to encounter was from members
of the Government of which he was the head. His own pay-master spoke
against his estimates. His own secretary-at-war spoke against his
Regency Bill. In one day Walpole turned Lord Chesterfield, Lord
Burlington, and Lord Clinton out of the royal household, dismissed the
highest dignitaries of Scotland from their posts, and took away the
regiments of the Duke of Bolton and Lord Cobham, because he suspected
them of having encouraged the resistance to his Excise Bill. He would
far rather have contended with the strongest minority, under the ablest
leaders, than have tolerated mutiny in his own party. It would have
gone hard with any of his colleagues, who had ventured, on a Government
question, to divide the House of Commons against him. Pelham, on the
other hand, was disposed to bear anything rather than drive from office
any man round whom a new opposition could form. He therefore endured
with fretful patience the insubordination of Pitt and Fox. He thought it
far better to connive at their occasional infractions of discipline
than to hear them, night after night, thundering against corruption and
wicked ministers from the other side of the House.
We wonder that Sir Walter Scott never tried his hand on the Duke of
Newcastle. An interview between his Grace and Jeanie Deans would have
been delightful, and by no means unnatural. There is scarcely any public
man in our history of whose manners and conversation so many particulars
have been preserved. Single stories may be unfounded or exaggerated. But
all the stories about him, whether told by people who were perpetually
seeing him in Parliament and attending his levee in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields, or by Grub Street writers who never had more than a glimpse
of his star through the windows of his gilded coach, are of the same
character. Horace Walpole and Smollett differed in their tastes and
opinions as much as two human beings could differ. They kept quite
different society. Walpole played at cards with countesses, and
corresponded with ambassadors. Smollett passed his life surrounded
by printers’ devils and famished scribblers. Yet Walpole’s Duke
and Smollett’s Duke are as like as if they were both from one hand.
Smollett’s Newcastle runs out of his dressing-room, with his face
covered with soap-suds, to embrace the Moorish envoy. Walpole’s
Newcastle pushes his way into the Duke of Grafton’s sick-room to kiss
the old nobleman’s plasters. No man was so unmercifully satirised. But
in truth he was himself a satire ready made. All that the art of the
satirist does for other men, nature had done for him. Whatever was
absurd about him stood out with grotesque prominence from the rest of
the character. He was a living, moving, talking caricature. His gait
was a shuffling trot; his utterance a rapid stutter; he was always in
a hurry; he was never in time; he abounded in fulsome caresses and in
hysterical tears. His oratory resembled that of justice Shallow. It
was nonsense--effervescent with animal spirits and impertinence. Of his
ignorance many anecdotes remain, some well authenticated, some
probably invented at coffee-houses, but all exquisitely characteristic.
“Oh--yes--yes--to be sure--Annapolis must be defended--troops must be
sent to Annapolis--Pray where is Annapolis?”--“Cape Breton an island!
Wonderful!--show it me in the map. So it is, sure enough. My dear sir,
you always bring us good news. I must go and tell the King that Cape
Breton is an island.”
And this man was, during near thirty years, Secretary of State, and,
during near ten years, First Lord of the Treasury! His large fortune,
his strong hereditary connection, his great parliamentary interest,
will not alone explain this extraordinary fact. His success is a signal
instance of what may be effected by a man who devotes his whole heart
and soul without reserve to one object. He was eaten up by ambition. His
love of influence and authority resembled the avarice of the old usurer
in the Fortunes of Nigel. It was so intense a passion that it supplied
the place of talents, that it inspired even fatuity with cunning. “Have
no money dealings with my father,” says Marth to Lord Glenvarloch; “for,
dotard as he is, he will make an ass of you.” It was as dangerous to
have any political connection with Newcastle as to buy and sell with old
Trapbois. He was greedy after power with a greediness all his own. He
was jealous of all his colleagues, and even of his own brother. Under
the disguise of levity he was false beyond all example of political
falsehood. All the able men of his time ridiculed him as a dunce, a
driveller, a child who never knew his own mind for an hour together; and
he overreached them all round.
If the country had remained at peace, it is not impossible that this man
would have continued at the head of affairs without admitting any other
person to a share of his authority until the throne was filled by a new
Prince, who brought with him new maxims of government, new favourites,
and a strong will. But the inauspicious commencement of the Seven Years’
War brought on a crisis to which Newcastle was altogether unequal. After
a calm of fifteen years the spirit of the nation was again stirred to
its inmost depths. In a few days the whole aspect of the political world
was changed.
But that change is too remarkable an event to be discussed at the end of
an article already more than sufficiently long. It is probable that we
may, at no remote time, resume the subject.