GEORGE AND THE DRAGONS.
[Sidenote: 1760--George the Third as a "Briton"]
The King was not lucky in his first act of sovereignty. In his speech
at the opening of Parliament on November 18, 1760, he used a form of
words which he, and some of those who advised him, evidently believed
to be eminently calculated to advance his popularity. "Born and
educated in this country, I glory in the name of Briton," the King
said; and the words would seem to suggest such an intimacy of
association between the King and the kingdom as must needs knit the
hearts of ruler and of ruled more closely together. Yet the choice of
words gave offence in certain quarters, and for two quite distinct
reasons. Many of the adherents and admirers of the late King--for even
George the Second had his admirers--were indignant at the contrast
which the new King seemed deliberately to draw between himself and his
grandfather. In accentuating the fact that he was born and bred in
England, George the Third appeared by imputation to be casting a slur
upon the German nature and German prejudices of George the Second.
This boast, however much it might offend the feelings of the friends of
the late King, was not at all calculated to affect the mass of the
public, who had little love for George the Second, and whose affection
for the new King was based mainly on the hope and the assumption that
he would prove to be as unlike the old King as possible. But there was
another interpretation to be put upon the royal words which was likely
to cause a wider impression and a wider hostility. It would seem that
some of the King's advisers wished him to write that he gloried in the
name of Englishman; it would even seem that the King had actually used
this word in the written draft of his speech. {23} Lord Bute, it was
said, had struck out the word "Englishman," and had induced the King to
accept the word "Briton" as a substitute. The difference would not be
quite without moment now: it appeared very momentous to many then, who
read in the word chosen a most convincing proof of the Scotch influence
behind the throne. The King's pride in styling himself a Briton was
taken to be, what indeed it was, evidence of his affection for the
Scotch peer who had been so lately sworn into his Privy Council; and
the alarm and indignation of all who resented the Scotch influence was
very great. The Duke of Newcastle in especial was irritated by the use
of the word "Briton," and the evidence it forced upon him of his own
waning influence and the waxing power of Bute. He even went so far as
to wish that some notice should be taken of the "royal words" both in
the motion and the address; but in the end he and those who thought
with him felt that they must submit and stifle their anger for the
time, and so the King, unchallenged, proclaimed himself a Briton.
Whatever else George had learned in the days of his tutelage, he had
learned to form an ideal of what a king should be and a determination
to realize that ideal in his own rule. The old idea of the personal
authority of the sovereign seemed to be passing away, to be dropping
out of the whole scheme and system of the English Constitution along
with the belief in the theory of the Divine right of kings. The new
King, however, was resolved to prove that he was the head of the state
in fact as well as in name; that with his own hands he would restore to
himself the power and authority which his grandfather and his
great-grandfather had allowed unwisely to slip through their fingers.
The difficulties in the way of such an enterprise might very well have
disheartened any being less headstrong, any spirit less stubborn.
There were forces opposed to him that seemed to overmatch his puny
purpose as much as the giants overmatched the pigmy hero of the nursery
tale. St. George in the chivalrous legend had but one dragon to
destroy; the young royal St. George set himself {24} with a light heart
to attack a whole brood of dragons--the dragons of the great Whig party.
When George the Third came to the throne the government of the country
was entirely in the hands of the Whigs. The famous stately Whig
Houses, the Houses of Cavendish, of Russell, of Temple, of Bentinck, of
Manners, of Fitzroy, of Lennox, of Conway, of Pelham, of Wentworth,
were as little subservient to the sovereign as the great Frankish
nobles who stood about the throne of the Do-nothing kings. The Tory
party was politically almost non-existent. No Tory filled any office,
great or little, that was at the disposal of the Whigs, and the Whigs
had retained their ascendency for well-nigh half a century. Jacobitism
had been the ruin of the Tory cause. All Tories were not Jacobites,
but, roughly speaking, all Jacobites were Tories, and there were still,
even at the date of George's accession, stout-hearted, thick-headed
Tory gentlemen who believed in or vaguely hoped for a possible
restoration of a Stuart prince. It is curious to find that, though the
Whig ranks stood fast in defence of the House of Hanover, had made that
House, and owed their ascendency to their loyalty to that House, the
latest Hanoverian sovereign not only disliked them, but dealt them blow
after blow until he overthrew their rule. The Tories, who sighed for a
Stuart prince over the water, suddenly found to their astonishment that
they had a friend in the Hanoverian Guelph, whose name they hated,
whose right to the throne they challenged, and whose authority they
derided, when they dared not despise.
[Sidenote: 1761--The corrupt methods of the Whig party]
It cannot be denied that the Whigs had often abused, and more than
abused, the privileges which their long lease of power had given to
them. All political parties ruled by corruption during the last
century. The Whig was not more corrupt than the Tory, but it can
hardly be maintained that he was less corrupt. The great Whig Houses
bought their way to power with resolute unscrupulousness. A majority
in either House was simply a case of so much money down. The genius of
Walpole had secured his own pre-eminence at the cost of the almost
total degradation {25} of the whole administrative system of the
country. When George the Third came to the throne the Whigs were
firmly established in a powerful league of bigotry and in tolerance,
cemented by corruption, by bribery, by purchase of the most
uncompromising, of the basest kind. George the Third had fostered
through youthful years of silence those strong ideas of his own about
the importance of the kingly office which he was now to proclaim by his
deeds. In the way of those strong ideas, in the way of the steadfast
determination to be King in fact as well as in name, stood the great
Whig faction, flushed with its more than forty years' debauch of power,
insolent in the sense of its own omnipotence. George was resolute to
show that the claim to omnipotence was a sham, and, to do him justice,
he succeeded in his resolve.
At the head of the Whig party in the House of Lords was the Duke of
Newcastle. At its head in the House of Commons was William Pitt.
These two ministers seemed fixed and irremovable in their supreme
authority. While Newcastle lavished the money of the state in that
spacious system of bribery which welded the party into so formidable a
mass, it was the proud privilege of Pitt to illuminate its policy by
his splendid eloquence at home and by the splendor of his enterprises
abroad. Both the ministers were an enormous expense to the country.
Newcastle never counted the cost so long as there was a county member
to be bought or a placeman to be satisfied. Pitt never counted the
cost so long as he could add another trophy of victory to the walls of
Westminster Abbey and inscribe another triumph on England's roll of
battles. The sordid skill of Newcastle and the dazzling genius of Pitt
seemed between them to make the Whig party invulnerable and
irresistible. There was no opposition in Upper or Lower House; there
had been for many years no hint of royal opposition. Everything
promised a long continuance of the undisputed Whig sway when suddenly
the secret determination of a young King and the secret instigations of
a Scotch peer dissipated the stately fabric that had endured so long.
{26}
The fixed purpose of Lord Bute was to get rid of Pitt. The fixed
purpose of Lord Bute created the fixed purpose of the King, and the
hours of Pitt's administration were numbered. After a season of rare
glory, of resplendent triumph, Pitt found himself face to face with a
formidable coalition of interests against him, a coalition of interests
none the less formidable because it was headed by a man for whose
attainments, opinions, and ability Pitt must have felt, and scarcely
concealed, the greatest contempt. Pitt had not made himself an object
of personal affection to those with whom he was brought into immediate
contact. In the time of his supremacy he had carried himself with a
haughty arrogance, with an austere disdain which had set the smaller
men about him raging in secret antagonism. The King, driven on by his
own dreams of personal authority, disliked the great minister. Bute,
drunk with the wild ambitions of a weak man, seems to have believed
that in succeeding to Pitt's place he could also succeed to Pitt's
genius. Pitt soon became aware of the strength of the cabal against
him. While some of his colleagues were disaffected, others were almost
openly treacherous. Bute's manner waxed more arrogant in Council. The
King's demeanor grew daily cooler. The great question of war or peace
was the question that divided the Cabinet. On a question of war or
peace Bute triumphed and Pitt fell.
Pitt was all for carrying on the war, which had thus far proved so
successful for the British flag. But Pitt was not powerfully supported
in his belief. If he had his brothers-in-law James Grenville and Lord
Temple on his side, he had ranged against him a powerful opposition
formed by Henry Fox and George Grenville, by Lord Hardwicke and the
Duke of Bedford. On the side of the peace party Bute ranged himself,
bringing with him all the enormous weight that his influence with the
King gave him. The case of the peace party was a simple,
straight-forward case. Why, they asked, should we continue to fight?
Our sweet enemy France is on her knees and ready to accept our terms.
Let us enforce those terms and make {27} a triumphant peace instead of
further bleeding our exhausted treasury in the prosecution of a war
from which we have now nothing more to gain. Chance gave the peace
party their opportunity. Pitt had become cognizant of the treaty
between France and Spain known as the "Family Compact," the secret
treaty which we have already fully described, by which the two Bourbon
princes agreed to make common cause against England. Pitt straightway
proposed that the hostile purposes of Spain should be anticipated by an
immediate declaration of war against Spain and the immediate despatch
of a fleet to Cadiz. Bute promptly opposed the proposal in the
Cabinet, and carried the majority of the Council with him in his
opposition. Pitt instantly resigned.
[Sidenote: 1761--Pitt's probity]
A curious thing had happened at the coronation ceremony. One of the
largest jewels in the royal crown got loose and fell from its place.
This was looked upon at the time by superstitious people as a sinister
omen. These now saw the fulfilment of their forebodings in the loss to
the state of the services of the great minister. The King himself had
no sense that his regal glory was dimmed in its lustre by the
resignation of Pitt. He was so delighted at having got rid thus easily
of the great obstacle to his own authority that he could readily
consent to lend to the act of parting a gracious air of regret. Much
was done to lighten Pitt's fall. Very liberal offers were made by the
King, offers which seemed to many to mask a hope, and more than a hope,
of undermining the popularity of the great leader. Pitt declined
several offers that were personal to himself, but expressed his
readiness to accept some signs of the royal favor on behalf of his wife
and his family. A barony was conferred upon Pitt's wife and a pension
of three thousand a year upon Pitt for three lives. There was nothing
unworthy in Pitt's action. He was notoriously poor; he was no less
notoriously honest; it was perfectly certain that, in an age when a
successful politician was for the most part a peculator, no shilling of
public money had ever stuck to Pitt's fingers. If he was instantly
attacked by libels and pamphlets that were {28} probably paid for by
Bute, or that at least were inspired by a desire to please Bute, the
attacks did Pitt more good than harm. They produced a prompt reaction,
and only had the effect of making Pitt more dear to the people than
before. His pictures had an enormous sale, and his partisans on the
press poured out caricatures and lampoons upon Bute and his Scotchmen
in greater volume and with greater violence than ever.
Bute was not content with the overthrow of Pitt. He wished to stand in
isolated splendor, and to accomplish this Newcastle too must go. The
great briber of yesterday had to give way to the great briber of
to-day, and Bute stood alone before the world, the head of the King's
Ministry, the favorite of the King, the champion of a policy that
promised peace abroad and purity at home, and that resulted in a
renewal of war under conditions of peculiar disadvantage and a renewed
employment of the basest forms of political corruption. Bute had
gained the power he longed for, but Bute was soon to learn that power
need not and did not mean popularity. "The new Administration begins
tempestuously," Walpole wrote on June 20, 1762. "My father was not
more abused after twenty years than Lord Bute is after twenty days.
Weekly papers swarm, and, like other swarms of insects, sting." Bute
affected an indifference to this unpopularity which he did not really
feel. It is not flattering to a statesman's pride to be unable to go
abroad without being hissed and pelted by the mob, and it is hard for a
minister to convince himself of the admiration of a nation when a
strong bodyguard is necessary to secure him from the constant danger of
personal attacks. Bute's character did not refine under the tests
imposed upon it. His objectionable qualities grew more and more
unpopular. The less he was liked the less he deserved to be liked.
Adversity did not magnify that small soul. In his mean anger he sought
for mean revenge. Every person who owed an appointment to the former
ministry felt the weight of the favorite's wrath. Dismissal from
office was the order of the day, and Whig after Whig was forced to
leave his place or office open for {29} some Tory who was ready to
express an enthusiasm for the statesmanship of Bute.
[Sidenote: 1762--Bute's foreign policy]
Bute's idea of a foreign policy was to reverse the policy of Pitt. He
abandoned Frederick of Prussia to his enemies by cutting off the
subsidy which Pitt had paid him, on the ground that the time agreed on
for the subsidy was up, and that as England only granted it for her own
purposes, and not to benefit Frederick, she was justified in
discontinuing it whenever it suited her. Only a chance saved the Great
Frederick from what seemed like inevitable ruin. The Czarina,
Elizabeth of Russia, died, and was succeeded by Peter the Third. With
the change of sovereign came a change in the purposes of Russia. The
Russian army, which had fought with Austria against Frederick, now
received orders to fight with Frederick against Austria. The war with
Spain that Pitt had predicted Bute was obliged to wage. The conduct of
Spain made it impossible for him not to declare war, and, aided by
Pitt's preparations, he was able to carry on the war with considerable
success. But the credit for such success was generally given to Pitt,
and when Bute made peace with Spain and France it was generally felt
that the terms were not such as Pitt would have exacted after so long
and splendid a succession of victories. There was, indeed, a good deal
to be said for the peace, but at the time those who tried to say it did
not get a very patient hearing. It was well that the long Continental
war was ended. Few of those engaged in it had gained much by it.
Prussia, indeed, though it left her wellnigh bankrupt and almost ruined
by the enormous burdens she had sustained, was better in position. She
came out of the struggle without the loss of a single acre of
territory, and with what Frederick especially coveted, the rank of a
first-rate Power in Europe. If Prussia, which had been so long
England's ally, had gained, England had not lost. Undoubtedly Pitt's
war was popular; no less undoubtedly Bute's peace was unpopular, and
the unpopularity of the policy intensified the unpopularity of the
minister. In the eyes of the bulk of the English people Lord Bute, as
a Scotchman, was {30} a foreigner, as much a foreigner as if he hailed
from France or the Low Countries. Lord Chesterfield was finely
disdainful of the popular opposition to Bute on account of his
nationality. "If the vulgar are ever right," he said, "they are right
for the wrong reason. What they selected to attack in Lord Bute was
his being a Scotchman, which was precisely what he could not help."
But it was not Bute's nationality, so much as his flagrant partiality
to his fellow-countrymen, that made him unpopular. His affection for
his own countrymen, however admirable and even touching in itself, was
resented fiercely by the English people, who found themselves
threatened by a new invasion of the Picts and Scots. Across the Border
came a steady stream of Bute's henchmen, men with names that seemed
outlandish and even savage to the Londoner, and every Scotchman found,
or hoped to find, through the influence of Bute his way to office and
emolument. The growing hatred for Bute extended itself as rapidly as
unjustly to the nation from which Bute came.
The story of Bute's Ministry is a story of astonishing mistakes. The
Tories, who for five-and-forty years had inveighed against the
political corruption which, fostered by Walpole, seemed to have
culminated under Newcastle, now boldly went in for a system of flagrant
bribery which surpassed anything yet essayed by the most cynical of
Whig ministers. The Paymaster's Office became a regular mart where
parliamentary votes were bought and sold as unblushingly as humbler
folk bought and sold groceries across a counter. A Ministry weakened
by an unpopular peace, and only held together by such cynical
merchandise, was not likely to withstand a strong storm, and the storm
was not long in rising.
To swell the exchequer, the Ministry proposed to raise revenue by a tax
on cider and perry. It was resolved to levy an imposition of four
shillings per hogshead on the grower of the apple wine and the pear
wine. The cider counties raised a clamor of indignation that found a
ready echo in London. Pitt, Beckford, Lyttelton, Hardwicke, Temple,
all spoke against the proposed measure and {31} denounced its
injustice. George Grenville defended the bill.
[Sidenote: 1763--George Grenville's characteristics]
Grenville was one of those honorable and upright statesmen who do not
contrive to make either honor or rectitude seem lovable qualities. He
had first made himself conspicuous as one of the Boy Patriots who
rallied with Pitt against Walpole. His abilities ran with swiftness
along few and narrow channels. He was desperately well informed about
many things, and desperately in earnest about anything which he
undertook. Blessed or cursed with a solemnity that never was enlivened
by a gleam of humor, a ray of fancy, or a flash of eloquence, Grenville
regarded the House of Commons with the cold ferocity of a tyrannical
and pompous schoolmaster. A style of speech that would have made a
discourse upon Greek poetry seem arid and a dissertation upon Italian
painting colorless--if it were possible to conceive Grenville as
wasting time or thought on such trifles--added no grace to the
exposition of a fiscal measure or charm to the formality of a phalanx
of figures. He was gloomy, dogged, domineering, and small-minded. His
nearest approach to a high passion was his worship of economy; his
nearest approach to a splendid virtue was his stubborn independence.
He abandoned Pitt for Bute because he detested Pitt's prodigal policy,
but Bute was the more deceived if he fancied that he was to find in
Grenville the convenient mask that he had lost in Newcastle; and the
King himself had yet to learn how indifferent the dry, morose pedant
and preacher could be not merely to royal favor, but even to the
expression of royal opinion. It was truly said of him by the greatest
of his contemporaries that he seemed to have no delight out of the
House except in such things as in some way related to the business that
was to be done within it. The "undissipated and unwearied application"
which he devoted to everything that he undertook was now employed in
exasperating the country. The time was not yet ripe for it to be
employed in dismembering the empire.
In his support of the cider tax Grenville managed to {32} make it and
himself ridiculous at the same time. In his defence he kept asking,
over and over again, "Where will you find another tax? tell me where."
Pitt, who was listening disdainfully to his arguments, followed one of
these persistent interrogations by softly singing to himself, very
audibly, the words which belonged to a popular song, "Gentle shepherd,
tell me where." The House took the hint with delight, and the title of
Gentle Shepherd remained an ironical adornment of Grenville for the
rest of his life.
Bute's disregard of public opinion was contrasted to his disadvantage
with the conduct of Sir Robert Walpole, who bowed to the demonstration
against his far wiser system of excise. Bute forced his tax forward in
defiance of the popular feeling, and then, apparently alarmed by the
strength of the spirit he had himself raised, he answered the general
indignation by a sudden and welcome resignation on April 8, 1763. This
was the end of Bute's attempt to be the recognized head of a
government, though he still hoped and believed that he could rule from
behind the throne instead of standing conspicuously at its side. To
his unpopularity as a foreigner, to his unpopularity as a favorite,
public hostility added a fresh, if a far-fetched and fantastic reason
for detesting Bute. It was pointed out that he had Stuart blood in his
veins, that an ancestor of his had been the brother of a Scottish King.
Any stick is good enough to strike an unpopular statesman with, and
there were not wanting people to assert, and perhaps even to believe,
that Bute had entertained insidious schemes for raising himself to the
throne. Bute is said to have declared that he resigned in order to
avoid involving the King in the dangers with which his minister was
threatened. If he did feel any fears for the King's safety he had
certainly done his best to make those fears reasonable. It has not
often been given to any statesman to hold the highest office in the
state for so short a time, and in that time to accomplish so large an
amount of harm. And the immediate harm of that year and a half was
little as compared with the harm that was to follow, a fatal legacy,
{33} from the principles that Bute advocated and the policy that Bute
initiated.
[Sidenote: 1763--The retirement of Bute]
With Bute retired two of his followers, Dashwood and Fox. Dashwood
went to the Upper House as Lord Le Despencer; Fox accompanied him as
Lord Holland. The disappearance of Dashwood from the Commons was a
matter of little importance. The disappearance of Fox marked the
conclusion of what had been a remarkable, of what might have been a
great career. From this time Fox ceased to take any real part in
public business, and if his presence lent no lustre to the Lords, his
absence made the character of the Commons more honorable. Fox, with
all his faults, and they were many and grave, had in him the gifts of
the politician and the capacity of the statesman. Dashwood was a
vulgar fool, who, as Horace Walpole said, with the familiarity and
phrase of a fishwife, introduced the humors of Wapping behind the veil
of the Treasury. But Fox was a very different type of man. Had he
been as keen for his own honor as he was eager in the acquisition of
money, had he been as successful in building up a record of great deeds
as he was successful in building up an enormous fortune, he might have
left behind him one of the greatest names in the history of his age.
But he carried with him to the Upper House the rare abilities which he
had put to such unworthy uses, and he lives in memory chiefly as the
father of his son. In having such a son he rendered the world a good
service, which he himself labored with infinite pains to make into an
evil service.
A young, inexperienced, and headstrong King found himself suddenly the
central figure of perhaps as singular a set of men as ever were
gathered together for the purpose of directing the destinies of a
nation. A famous caricature of the period represents the front of a
marionette-show, through an aperture of which the hand of Bute pulls
the wires that make the political puppets work, while Bute himself
peeps round the corner of the show to observe their antics. No
stranger dolls ever danced around a royal figure to the manipulation of
a favorite's fingers. At {34} a time when political parties as they
are now familiar to us did not exist, when Whiggism was so dominant
that Opposition in the modern sense was unknown, when the pleasures and
the gains of administration were almost entirely reserved for a
privileged caste, and when self-interest was the rarely disavowed spur
of all individual action, it is scarcely surprising to find that the
vast majority of the statesmen of the day were as unadmirable in their
private as they were unheroic in their public life. For then and long
after, the political atmosphere, bad at its best, was infamous at its
worst, and by an unhappy chance the disposition of the King led him to
favor in their public life the very men whose private life would have
filled him with loathing, and to detest, where it was impossible to
despise, the men who came to the service of their country with
characters that were clean from a privacy that was honorable. Many, if
not most, of the leading figures of that hour would have been more
appropriately situated as the members of a brotherhood of thieves and
the parasites of a brothel than as the holders of high office and the
caretakers of a royal conscience. There were men upon the highway,
rogues with a bit of crape across their foreheads and a pair of pistols
in their holsters, haunting the Portsmouth Road or Hounslow Heath, with
the words "Stand and deliver" ever ready on their lips, who seem
relatively to be men of honor and probity compared with a man like the
first Lord Holland or like Rigby. There were poor slaves of the stews,
wretched servants of the bagnios, whose lives seem sweet and decorous
when compared with those of a Sandwich or a Dashwood or a Duke of
Grafton. Yet these men, whose companionship might be rejected by Jack
Sheppard, and whose example might be avoided by Pompey Bum, are the men
whose names are ceaselessly prominent in the early story of the reign,
and to whose power and influence much of its calamities are directly
due.
[Sidenote: 1763--The Duke of Grafton]
It is not easy to accord a primacy of dishonor to any one of the many
statesmen whose names degrade the age. Possibly the laurels of shame,
possibly the palms of infamy {35} may be proffered to Augustus Henry
Fitzroy, third Duke of Grafton. When George the Third came to the
throne the Duke of Grafton was only twenty-five years old, and had been
three years in the House of Lords, after having passed about twice as
many months in the House of Commons. Destined to live for more than
half a century after the accession, and to die while the sovereign had
still many melancholy years to live, the Duke of Grafton enjoyed a long
career, that was unadorned by either public or private virtue. There
is no need to judge Grafton on the indictment of the satirist who in a
later day made the name of Junius more terrible to the advisers of King
George than ever was the name of Pietro Aretino to the princes whom he
scourged. The coldest chronicle of the Duke's careers, the baldest
narrative of his life, proves him to have been no less dangerous to the
public weal as a statesman than he was noxious to human society as an
individual. He had not even the redeeming grace that the charm of
beauty of person lent to some of his companions in public incompetency
and private profligacy. His face and presence were as unattractive as
his manners were stiff and repellent. His grandfather, the first Duke,
was an illegitimate son of Charles the Second by the Duchess of
Cleveland, and the Duke's severest critic declared that he blended the
characteristics of the two Charles Stuarts. Sullen and severe without
religion, and profligate without gayety, he lived like Charles the
Second, without being an amiable companion, and might die as his father
did, without the reputation of a martyr.
Grafton did not die the death of his royal ancestor. He lived through
seventy-six years, of which less than half were passed in the fierce
light of a disgraceful notoriety, and more than half in a retirement
which should be styled obscure rather than decent. The only
conspicuously creditable act of that long career was the patronage he
extended to the poet Bloomfield, a patronage that seems to have been
prompted rather by the fact that the writer was born near Grafton's
country residence than by any intelligent appreciation of literature.
His curious want of taste {36} and feeling allowed him to parade his
mistress, Nancy Parsons, in the presence of the Queen, at the Opera
House, and to marry, when he married the second time, a first cousin of
the man with whom his first wife had eloped, John, Earl of Upper
Ossory. If his example as a father was not admirable, at least he
showed it to a numerous offspring, for by his two marriages he was the
parent of no fewer than sixteen children.
[Sidenote: 1763--Rigby and the Duke of Bedford]
Perhaps the prize for sheer political ruffianism, for the frank
audacity of the freebooter, unshadowed by the darker vices of his
better-born associates, may be awarded to Rigby. Not that Rigby
redeemed by many private virtues the unblushing effrontery of his
public career. It was given to few men to be as bad as Dashwood, and
Rigby was not one of the few. But his gross and brutal disregard of
all decency in his acts of public plunder--for even peculation may be
done with distinction--was accompanied by a gross and brutal disregard
of all decency in his tastes and pleasures with his intimate
associates. Richard Rigby sprang from the trading class. He was the
son of a linen-draper who was sufficiently lucky to make a fortune as a
factor to the South Sea Company, and who was, in consequence, able to
afford his son the opportunity of a good education, and to launch him
on the grand tour of Europe with every aptitude for the costly vices
that men in those days seemed to think it the chief object of travel to
cultivate, and with plenty of money in his pocket to gratify all his
inclinations. Rigby did not take much advantage of his educational
opportunities. His Latinity laid him open to derision in the House of
Commons, and there were times when his spelling would have reflected
little credit upon a seamstress. But he was quite capable of learning
abroad all the evil that the great school of evil was able to teach a
willing student. He returned to England, and began his life there with
three pronounced tastes: for gambling, for wine, and for the baser uses
of politics. His ambitions prompted him to adhere to the party of the
Prince of Wales, and his ready purse won him a welcome among the
courtiers of Leicester House. The Prince of {37} Wales did little to
gratify his hopes, and Rigby would have found it difficult to escape
from the straits into which his debts had carried him if his gift of
pleasing had not procured for him a powerful patron. The Duke of
Bedford had been attracted by the remarkable convivial powers of Rigby,
powers remarkable in an age when to be conspicuous for conviviality
demanded very unusual capacity both of head and of stomach. To be
admired by Bedford was in itself a patent of dishonor, but it was a
profitable patent to Rigby. The Duke, who was accused at times of a
shameful parsimony, was generous to profusion towards the bloated
buffoon who was able and willing to divert him, and from that hour
Rigby's pockets never wanted their supply of public money.
There were few redeeming features in Rigby's character. It was his
peculiar privilege to be false to his old friends and to corrupt his
young ones. In an age when sobriety was scorned or ignored he had the
honor to be famous for his insobriety. A sycophant to those who could
serve him and a bully to those who could not, Rigby added the meanness
of the social parvenu to the malignity of the political bravo. At a
time when men of birth and rank came to the House of Commons in the
negligence of morning dress, Rigby was conspicuous for the splendor of
his attire, and illuminated the green benches by a costume whose glow
of color only faintly attenuated the glowing color of his face. There
were baser and darker spirits ready for the service of the King; there
was no one more unlovely.
Rigby's patron was as unadmirable as Rigby himself. He was fifty years
old when George the Third came to the throne, and he had lived his half
a century in the occupation of many offices and through many
opportunities for distinction without distinguishing himself. He had
still eleven years to live without adding anything of honor or credit
to his name, or earning any other reputation than that of a corrupt
politician whose private life was passed chiefly in the society of
gamblers, jockeys, and buffoons. He had been Governor-General of
Ireland, and had {38} governed it as well as Verres had governed
Sicily. He had been publicly horsewhipped by a county attorney on the
racecourse at Lichfield. His career, always unimportant, was
ignominious when it was not incapable, and it was generally both the
one and the other.
All the statesmen of the day were not of the school of Grafton. There
were numerous exceptions to the rule of Rigby. The Graftons and the
Rigbys gain an unnatural prominence from the fact that then and later
it was to such tools the King turned, and that he always found such
tools ready to his hands. There were many men who, without any show of
austerity or any burden of morality, were at least of a very different
order from the creatures whom the King did not indeed delight to honor,
but whom he condescended to employ. The Earl of Granville, with the
weight of seventy years upon his shoulders, carried into active
political life under his fourth sovereign the same qualities both for
good and evil that adorned or injured the name of Carteret. He
accepted Lord Bute's authority, and he did not live long enough to
witness Bute's fall. He accorded to the peace brought about by Bute
"the approbation of a dying statesman," as the most honorable peace the
country had ever seen. He died in the January of 1763, leaving behind
him the memory of a long life which had always been lived to his own
advantage but by no means to the disadvantage of his country. He left
behind him a memory of rare public eloquence and graceful private
conversation, of an elegant scholarship that prompted him to the
patronage of scholars, of a profound belief in his own judgment, and a
no less profound contempt for the opinions of others. His public life
was honest in an epoch when public dishonesty was habitual, and the
best thing to be said of him was the best thing he said of himself,
that when he governed Ireland he governed so as to please Dean Swift.
[Sidenote: 1763--Dr. Samuel Johnson]
At a time when the King was surrounded by such advisers as we have
seen, the King's chief servant and most loyal subject was a man no
longer young, who had nothing to do with the courts or councils, and
who yet was of {39} greater service to the throne and its occupier than
all the House of Lords and half the House of Commons. Long years
before George the Third was born, a struggling, unsuccessful
schoolmaster gave up a school that was well-nigh given up by its
scholars and came to London to push his fortune as a man of letters.
When George the Third came to the throne the schoolmaster had not found
fortune--that he never found--but he had found fame, and the name of
Samuel Johnson was known and loved wherever an English word was spoken
or an English book read. The conditions of political life in England
in the eighteenth century made it impossible for such a man as Samuel
Johnson ever to be the chosen counsellor, the minister of an English
king. The field of active politics was reserved for men of family, of
wealth, or of the few whom powerful patronage served in lieu of birth
and aided to the necessary opulence. Johnson was one of the most
influential writers of his day, one of the strongest intellectual
forces then at work, one of the greatest personalities then alive. But
it would no more have occurred to him to dream of administrative honors
and a place in a Ministry than it would have occurred to George the
Third to send one of his equerries to the dingy lodgings of an author
with the request that Dr. Johnson would step round to St. James's
Palace and favor his Majesty with his opinion on this subject or on
that. It is not certain that the King would have gained very much if
he had done anything so unusual. Dr. Johnson's views were very much
the King's views, and we know that he would have been as obstinate as
the King in many if not most of the cases in which the King's obstinacy
was very fatal to himself.
When Queen Anne was still upon the throne of England, when James the
Second still lived with a son who dreamed of being James the Third, and
when George the First was only Elector of Hanover, people still
attributed to the sovereign certain gifts denied to subjects. They
believed, for instance, that the touch of the royal fingers could cure
the malady of scrofula, then widely known in consequence of that belief
as the King's Evil. In obedience to that {40} belief, in the spring of
1712 some poor folk of Lichfield travelled to London with their infant
son, in the hope that Queen Anne would lay her hand upon the child and
make him whole. There were days appointed for the ceremony of the
touch, and on one of those days the Johnsons of Lichfield carried their
little Samuel into the royal presence, and Queen Anne stroked the child
with her hand. For more than seventy years a dim memory remained with
Johnson of a stately lady in black; for more than seventy years the
malady that her touch was thought to heal haunted him. When the man
who had been the sick child died, the third prince of a foreign house
was seated on the throne of England, and the third of the line owed,
unconscious of the debt, no little of his security on his throne and no
little of his popularity with the mass of his people to the struggling
author who had received the benediction of the last Stuart sovereign of
England.
Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, in Staffordshire, on September 8,
1709. His father was a bookseller, perhaps too fond of books to be a
good dealer in them. But his crowded shelves were a paradise to his
son when at the age of sixteen he came home from the last of many
schoolings, each of which had taught him much. For two years he read
his way recklessly, riotously, and joyously through his father's
migratory library. He took the advice of the varlet in "The Taming of
the Shrew," and studied what he most affected. His memory was as vast
as his head was huge and his body bulky. He read what he liked, and he
stored his mind with as miscellaneous a mass of knowledge as ever was
heaped up within the pent-house of one human skull. That youthful zeal
and fiery heat of study remained youthful with him to the end of his
many days; the passion for learning never burned low in that mighty
brain. The man who in his old age studied Dutch to test the acquiring
powers of his intellect, and still found them freshly tempered, acted
in his ebullient boyhood as if, like Bacon, he had taken all knowledge
to be his province. The man who in his old age found an exquisite
entertainment in reading a Spanish romance of chivalry, in his eager
{41} boyhood found the Latin poems of Petrarch sweeter than apples.
The great Italian who counted the sonnets to which he owes his
immortality but as the clouds of a dream, and who built his hopes of
fame upon that "Africa" which the world has been willing to forget,
found the reader he would have welcomed and the student he would have
cherished in the ungainly youth who pored over him in a garret. The
boy Johnson, bent over the great folio, forgot that he was poor, forgot
that he was ill-clad, under the spell of the stately lines that their
poet believed to be not less than Virgilian. He had set out on an
errand even more trivial than that of Saul the son of Kish, and he had
found the illimitable kingdom of dreams.
[Sidenote: 1728--The college days of Dr. Johnson]
Chance sent the student of Petrarch to Pembroke College, Oxford, where
he passed two years eating the bitter bread of poverty in the bitter
pride of youth. He was hungry, he was ragged, he was conscious of his
great knowledge and his great gifts, and he saw all around him men in
high places whose attainments he despised, and men seeking the same
goal as himself whose happy ease of circumstances he affected to
disdain and was compelled to envy. His wild soul rose in rebellion at
the inequalities of life. He passed for a mutineer.
His college days were bitter and rebellious; days of hunger and thirst
and ruined raiment. Some well-meaning person, moved to pity by the
sight of Johnson's shabby shoes, patched and mended till they were past
all wholesome cobbling, placed a new sound pair at Johnson's door in
nameless benevolence. Johnson cast them from him with fury, too proud
to be shod by another man's bounty. He drifted through his few and
gloomy college days deriding and despising those in authority;
seemingly wasting his time and yet not wasting it; translating Pope's
"Messiah" into such noble Latin that Pope, moved by honest admiration,
declared that future times would be unable to tell which was the
original and which was the translation. Johnson could be nowhere
without learning, and he learned something at Oxford; but in any case
his stay was short, and he drifted back to Lichfield, leaving on the
{42} banks of the Isis an amazing memory of a sullen savage creature,
brimmed with the strangest miscellaneous learning. In Lichfield his
father's death, following hard upon his return from Oxford, left him
lonelier and poorer than ever, troubled by the grim necessity to be
fed, clothed, and sheltered, and by the uncertainty how to set about
it. He did set about it, earnestly, strenuously, if not very
fruitfully.
[Sidenote: 1737--Johnson and his work]
He was ready to do anything, to turn to anything, to write, to
translate, to teach. He fell in love with an amazing woman more than
twenty years his senior, monstrously fat, monstrously painted,
monstrously affected and absurd; he fell in love with her, and he
married her. She had a little money, and Johnson set up an academy for
the instruction of youth. But youth would not come to be instructed.
One youth came, one of the very few, a soldier's son and a grandson of
a Huguenot refugee, named David Garrick. The master and the pupil
became friends, and the friendship lasted with life. Master and pupil
resolved to make the adventure of the town together. The eyes of
aspiring provincials turned always to the great city, every ambitious
provincial heart beat with desire for the conquest of London. The
priest of letters and the player of parts, the real man and the shadow
of all men, packed up bag and baggage and came to London to very
different fame and very different fortune. The great city had one kind
of welcome to give to the man who desired to speak truth and another to
the man who proposed to give pleasure. The chances for men of letters
and for players were very unlike just then. The two strands of life
ran across the web of London, the strand of Johnson iron-gray, the
strand of Garrick gleaming gold. Through long years Johnson hid in
dingy courts and alleys, ill-clothed, ill-fed, an uncouth Apollo in the
service of Admetus Cave and his kind, while the marvellous actor was
climbing daily higher and higher on the ladder of an actor's fame, the
friend of the wealthy, the favored of the great, the admired, the
applauded, the well-beloved. Garrick deserved his fame and his
fortune, his splendid successes and {43} his shining rewards; but the
grand, rough writer of books did not deserve his buffets and mishaps,
his ferocious hungers, his acquaintanceship with sponging-houses, and
all the catalogue of his London agonies. His struggle for life was a
Titan's struggle, and it was never either selfish or ignoble. He
wanted to live and be heard because he knew that he had something to
say that was worth hearing. He needed to live for the sake of his
ardent squalid affections, for the sake of the people who were always
dependent upon his meagre bounty, for the sake of the wife he loved so
deeply, mourned so truly when she died, and remembered with such tender
loyalty so long as life was left to him. Miserably poor himself, he
always had about him people more miserable and more poor, who looked to
him for the very bread and water of their affliction, dependents whom
he tended not merely generously, but, what was better still,
cheerfully. Under conditions of existence that would have seemed
crushing to men of letters with a tithe of Johnson's greatness of soul,
Johnson fought his way inch by inch in the terrible career of the man
who lived by his pen, and by his pen alone. He wrote anything and
everything so long as it was honorable to write and promised to make
the world better. But it was not what Johnson wrote so much as what
Johnson did that commanded his age and commands posterity. In the
truest sense of the word, he lived beautifully. "Rasselas" and "The
Idler," "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes," "The Rambler" and
the "Sessions of Lilliput," and the "Lives of the Poets," and even the
famous "Dictionary," only claim remembrance because they were done by a
man who would be as interesting a study and as ennobling an example if
he had never written a line of the works that bear his signature in
every sentence of their solemn, even their portentous majesty. Johnson
had the kindest heart wrapped in a rugged hide. One of the noblest of
the many noble stories about him relates how he and a friend, whose
name of Burke was not then famous, found a poor woman of the streets
houseless, hungry, and exhausted in the streets. Burke had a room
which he could {44} offer the poor creature for a night's shelter; but
Burke could not get the woman there. Johnson had no room--his
dependents swarmed over every available space at his command--but he
had the strength of a giant, and he used it as a giant should, in
carrying the poor wretch in his arms to the roof that Burke could offer
her. Long years later, another man of letters, hungry, homeless, and
friendless, sick almost unto death, found a kind friend and gentle
nurse in a woman of the streets. In succoring De Quincey we may well
think that Anne was repaying something of the debt owed by one of her
unhappy class to two of the glories of literature and of humanity.
Slowly and surely Johnson's fame spread. The "Dictionary," massive
fruit of many vigils, reward of many supplications, made him
illustrious. It might have been dedicated to Chesterfield, if
Chesterfield had shown to the struggling author the courtesy he was
eager to extend to the established writer. Chesterfield need not be
blamed if he was reluctant to welcome a queer ungainly creature whose
manners were appalling, and of whose genius no one save himself was
assured. But he was to be blamed, and he deserved the stern punishment
he received in Johnson's stinging letter of repudiation, for
attempting, when Johnson was distinguished and beyond his power to
help, to win the great honor of a dedication by a proffer of friendship
that came too late. Johnson needed no Chesterfield now. London had
learned to reverence him, had learned to love him. His friends were
the best Englishmen alive; the club which Johnson established bore on
its roll the most illustrious names in the country; at the home of the
Thrales Johnson tasted and appreciated all that was best in the home
life of the time. He had a devoted friend in the person of a fussy,
fantastic, opinionated, conceited little Scotch gentleman, Mr. James
Boswell of Auchinleck, who clung to his side, treasured his utterances,
cherished his sayings, and made himself immortal in immortalizing his
hero. It is good to remember that when George the Third came to the
throne a man like Johnson was alive. It is not so good to remember how
seldom he found himself {45} face to face with the King, whom he might
have aided with his wisdom, his counsel, and his friendship.
[Sidenote: 1763--Johnson's influence on literature]
Johnson's presence adorned and honored four-and-twenty years of a reign
that was to last for sixty years. He was the friend or the enemy of
every man worthy to arouse any strong emotion of love or scorn in a
strong spirit. He had the admiration of all whose admiration was worth
the having. The central figure of the literary London of his lifetime,
he exercised something of the same social and intellectual influence
over all Londoners that Socrates exercised over all Athenians. The
affection he inspired survived him, and widens with the generations.
In the hundred years and more that have passed since Johnson's death,
his memory has grown greener. The symbol of his life and of its lesson
is to be found in what Hawthorne beautifully calls the sad and lovely
legend of the man Johnson's public penance in the rain, amid the
jeering crowd, to expiate the offence of the child against its father.
Johnson was the very human apostle of a divine righteousness.
{46}