PARTIES AND LEADERS.
[Sidenote: 1714--Whig and Tory]
All the closing months of Queen Anne's reign were occupied by Whigs and
Tories, and indeed by Anne herself as well, in the invention and
conduct of intrigues about the succession. The Queen herself, with the
grave opening before her, kept her fading eyes turned, not to the world
she was about to enter, but to the world she was about to leave. She
was thinking much more about the future of her throne than about her
own soul and future state. The Whigs were quite ready to maintain the
Hanoverian succession by force. They did not expect to be able to
carry matters easily, and they were ready to encounter a civil war.
Their belief seems to have been that they and not their opponents would
have to strike the blow, and they had already summoned the Duke of
Marlborough from his retirement in Flanders to take the lead in their
movement. Having Marlborough, they knew that they would have the army.
On the other hand, if Bolingbroke and the Tories really had any actual
hope of a restoration of the Stuarts, it is certain that up to the last
moment they had made no substantial preparations to accomplish their
object.
The Whigs and Tories divided between them whatever political force
there was in English society at this time. Outside both parties lay a
considerable section of people who did not distinctly belong to the one
faction or the other, but were ready to incline now to this and now to
that, according as the conditions of the hour might inspire them.
Outside these again, and far outnumbering these and all others
combined, was the great mass of the English {17} people--hard-working,
much-suffering, poor, patient, and almost absolutely indifferent to
changes in governments and the humors and struggles of parties. "These
wrangling jars of Whig and Tory," says Dean Swift, "are stale and old
as Troy-town story." But if the principles were old, the titles of the
parties were new. Steele, in 1710, published in the _Tatler_ a letter
from Pasquin of Rome to Isaac Bickerstaff, asking for "an account of
those two religious orders which have lately sprung up amongst you, the
Whigs and the Tories." Steele declared that you could not come even
among women "but you find them divided into Whig and Tory." It was
like the famous lawsuit in Abdera, alluded to by Lucian and amplified
by Wieland, concerning the ownership of the ass's shadow, on which all
the Abderites took sides, and every one was either a "Shadow" or an
"Ass."
Various explanations have been given of these titles Whig and Tory.
Titus Oates applied the term "Tory," which then signified an Irish
robber, to those who would not believe in his Popish plot, and the name
gradually became extended to all who were supposed to have sympathy
with the Catholic Duke of York. The word "Whig" first arose during the
Cameronian rising, when it was applied to the Scotch Presbyterians, and
is derived by some from the whey which they habitually drank, and by
others from a word, "whiggam," used by the western Scottish drovers.
The Whigs and the Tories represent in the main not only two political
doctrines, but two different feelings in the human mind. The natural
tendency of some men is to regard political liberty as of more
importance than political authority, and of other men to think that the
maintenance of authority is the first object to be secured, and that
only so much of individual liberty is to be conceded as will not
interfere with authority's strictest exercise. Roughly speaking,
therefore, the Tories were for authority, and the Whigs for liberty.
The Tories naturally held to the principle of the monarchy and of the
State church; the Whigs {18} were inclined for the supremacy of
Parliament, and for something like an approach to religious equality.
[Sidenote: 1714--Political change] Up to this time at least the Tory
party still accepted the theory of the Divine origin of the king's
supremacy. The Whigs were even then the advocates of a constitutional
system, and held that the people at large were the source of
monarchical power. To the one set of men the sovereign was a divinely
appointed ruler; to the other he was the hereditary chief of the realm,
having the source of his authority in popular election. The Tories, as
the Church party, disliked the Dissenters even more than they disliked
the Roman Catholics. The Whigs were then even inclined to regard the
Church as a branch of the Civil Service--to adopt a much more modern
phrase--and they were in favor of extending freedom of worship to
Dissenters, and in a certain sense to Roman Catholics. According to
Bishop Burnet, it was in the reign of Queen Anne that the distinction
between High-Church and Low-Church first marked itself out, and we find
almost as a natural necessity that the High-Churchmen were Tories, and
the Low-Churchmen were Whigs. Then as now the chief strength of the
Tories was found in the country, and not in the large towns. So far as
town populations were concerned, the Tories were proportionately
strongest where the borough was smallest. The great bulk of the
agricultural population, so far as it had definite political feelings,
was distinctly Tory. The strength of the Whigs lay in the
manufacturing towns and the great ports. London was at that time much
stronger in its Liberal political sentiments than it has been more
recently. The moneyed interest, the bankers, the merchants, were
attached to the Whig party. Many peers and bishops were Whigs, but
they were chiefly the peers and bishops who owed their appointments to
William the Third. The French envoy, D'Iberville, at this time
describes the Whigs as having at their command the best purses, the
best swords, the ablest heads, and the handsomest women. The Tory
party was strong at the University of Oxford; the Whig party was {19}
in greater force at Cambridge. Both Whigs and Tories, however, were in
a somewhat subdued condition of mind about the time that Anne's reign
was closing. Neither party as a whole was inclined to push its
political principles to anything like a logical extreme. Whigs and
Tories alike were practically satisfied with the form which the English
governing system had put on after the Revolution of 1688. Neither
party was inclined for another revolution. The civil war had carried
the Whig principle a little too far for the Whigs. The Restoration had
brought a certain amount of scandal on sovereign authority and the
principle of Divine right. The minds of men were settling down into
willingness for a compromise. There were, of course, among the Tories
the extreme party, so pledged to the restoration of the Stuarts that
they would have moved heaven and earth, at all events they would have
convulsed England, for the sake of bringing them back. These men
constituted what would now be called in the language of French politics
the Extreme Right of the Tory party; they would become of importance at
any hour when some actual movement was made from the outside to restore
the Stuarts. Such a movement would of course have carried with it and
with them the great bulk of the new quiescent Tory party; but in the
mean time, and until some such movement was made, the Jacobite section
of the Tories was not in a condition to be active or influential, and
was not a serious difficulty in the way of the Hanoverian succession.
The Whigs had great advantages on their side. They had a clear
principle to start with. The constitutional errors and excesses of the
Stuarts had forced on the mind of England a recognition of the two or
three main principles of civil and religious liberty. The Whigs knew
what they wanted better than the Tories did, and the ends which the
Whigs proposed to gain were attainable, while those which the Tories
set out for themselves were to a great extent lost in dream-land. The
uncertainty and vagueness of many of the Tory aims made some of the
{20} Tories themselves only half earnest in their purposes. Many a
Tory who talked as loudly as his brothers about the king having his own
again, and who toasted "the king over the water" as freely as they, had
in the bottom of his heart very little real anxiety to see a rebellion
end in a Stuart restoration. But, on the other hand, the Whigs could
strive with all their might and main to carry out their principles in
Church and in State without the responsibility of plunging the country
into rebellion, and without any dread of seeing their projects melt
away into visions and chimeras. A great band of landed proprietors
formed the leaders of the Whigs. Times have changed since then, and
the representatives of some of those great houses which then led the
Whig party have passed or glided insensibly into the ranks of the
Tories; but the main reason for this is because a Tory of our day
represents fairly enough, in certain political aspects, the Whig of the
days of Queen Anne. What is called in American politics a new
departure has taken place in England since that time; the Radical party
has come into existence with political principles and watchwords quite
different even from those of the early Whigs. Some of the Whig houses,
not many, have gone with the forward movement; some have remained
behind, and so lapsed almost insensibly into the Tory quarter. But at
the close of Queen Anne's reign all the great leading Whigs stood well
together. They understood better than the Tories did the necessity of
obtaining superior influence in the House of Commons. They even
contrived at that time to secure the majority of the county
constituencies, while they had naturally the majority of the commercial
class on their side. Then, as in later days, the vast wealth of the
Whig families was spent unstintingly, and it may be said unblushingly,
in securing the possession of the small constituencies, the
constituencies which were only to be had by liberal bribery. Then, as
afterwards, there was perceptible in the Whig party a strange
combination of dignity and of meanness, of great principles and of
somewhat degraded practices. They had high {21} purposes; they
recognized noble principles, and they held to them; they were for
political liberty as they then understood it, and they were for
religious equality--for such approach at least to religious equality as
had then come to be sanctioned by responsible politicians in England.
They were ready to make great sacrifices in defence of their political
creed. But the principles and purposes with which they started, and to
which they kept, did not succeed in purifying and ennobling all their
parliamentary strategy and political conduct. They intrigued, they
bribed, they bought, they cajoled, they paltered, they threatened, they
made unsparing use of money and of power, they employed every art to
carry out high and national purposes which the most unscrupulous cabal
could have used to secure the attainment of selfish and ignoble ends.
Their enemies had put one great advantage into their hands. The
conduct of Bolingbroke and of Oxford during recent years had left the
Whigs the sole representatives of constitutional liberty.
[Sidenote: 1714--Anarchy or "Perkin"]
The two great political parties hated and denounced each other with a
ferocity hardly known before, and hardly possible in our later times.
The Whigs vituperated the Tories as rebels and traitors; the Tories
cried out against the Whigs as the enemies of religion and the
opponents of "the true Church of England." Many a ballad of that time
described the Whigs as men whose object it was to destroy both mitre
and crown, to introduce anarchy once again, as they had done in the
days of Oliver Cromwell. The Whig balladists retorted by describing
the Tories as men who were engaged in trying to bring in "Perkin" from
France, and prophesied the halter as a reward of their leading
statesmen. In truth, the bitterness of that hour was very earnest;
most of the men on both sides meant what they said. Either side, if it
had been in complete preponderance, would probably have had very little
scruple in disposing of its leading enemies by means of the halter or
the prison. It was for the time not so much a struggle of political
parties as a {22} struggle of hostile armies. The men were serious and
savage, because the crisis was serious and portentous. The chances of
an hour might make a man a prime-minister or a prisoner. Bolingbroke
soon after was in exile, and Walpole at the head of the administration.
The slightest chance, the merest accident, might have sent Walpole into
exile, and put Bolingbroke at the head of the State.
[Sidenote: 1714--John Churchill]
The eyes of the English public were at this moment turned in especial
to watch the movements of two men--the Duke of Marlborough and Lord
Bolingbroke. Marlborough was beyond question the greatest soldier of
his time. He had gone into exile when Queen Anne consented to degrade
him and to persecute him, and now he was on his way home, at the urgent
entreaty of the Whig leaders, in order to lend his powerful influence
to the Hanoverian cause.
The character of the Duke of Marlborough is one which ought to be
especially attractive to the authors of romance and the lovers of
strong, bold portrait-painting. One peculiar difficulty, however, a
romancist would have in dealing with Marlborough--he could hardly
venture to paint Marlborough as nature and fortune made him. The
romancist would find himself compelled to soften and to modify many of
the distinctive traits of Marlborough's character, in order that he
might not seem the mere inventor of a human paradox, in order that he
might not appear to be indulging in the fantastic and the impossible.
Pope has called Bacon "the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind," but
Bacon was not greater in his own path than Marlborough in his, and
Bacon's worst meannesses were nobility itself compared with some of
Marlborough's political offences. Marlborough started in life with
almost every advantage that man could have--with genius, with boundless
courage, with personal beauty, with favoring friends. From his early
youth he had been attached to James the Second and James the Second's
court. One of Marlborough's {23} biographers even suggests that the
Duchess of York, James's first wife, was needlessly fond of young
Churchill. The beautiful Duchess of Cleveland--she of whom Pepys said
"that everything she did became her"--was passionately in love with
Marlborough, and, according to some writers, gave him his first start
in life when she presented him with five thousand pounds, which
Marlborough, prudent then as ever, invested in an annuity of five
hundred a year. Burnet said of him that "he knew the arts of living in
a court beyond any man in it; he caressed all people with a soft and
obliging deportment, and was always ready to do good offices." His
only personal defect was in his voice, which was shrill and
disagreeable. He was, through all his life, avaricious to the last
degree; he grasped at money wherever he could get it; he took money
from women as well as from men. A familiar story of the time
represents another nobleman as having been mistaken for the Duke of
Marlborough by a mob, at a time when Marlborough was unpopular, and
extricating himself from the difficulty by telling the crowd he could
not possibly be the Duke of Marlborough, first, because he had only two
guineas in his pocket, and next, because he was perfectly ready to give
them away. Marlborough had received the highest favors from James the
Second, but he quitted James in the hour of his misfortunes, only,
however, it should be said, to return secretly to his service at a time
when he was professing devotion to William the Third. He betrayed each
side to the other. In the same year, and almost in the same month, he
writes to the Elector at Hanover and to the Pretender in France,
pouring forth to each alike his protestations of devotion. "I shall be
always ready to hazard my fortune and my life for your service," he
tells the Elector. "I had rather have my hands cut off than do
anything prejudicial to King James's cause," he tells an agent of the
Stuarts. James appears to have believed in Marlborough, and William,
while he made use of him, to have had no faith in him. "The Duke of
Marlborough," William {24} said, "has the best talents for a general of
any man in England; but he is a vile man and I hate him, for though I
can profit by treasons I cannot bear the traitor." William's saying
was strikingly like that one ascribed to Philip of Macedon. Schomberg
spoke of Marlborough as "the first lieutenant-general whom I ever
remember to have deserted his colors." Lord Granard, who was in the
camp of King James the Second on Salisbury Plain, told Dr. King, who
has recorded the story, that Churchill and some other colonels invited
Lord Granard to supper, and opened to him their design of deserting to
the Prince of Orange. Granard not merely refused to enter into the
conspiracy, but went to the King and told him the whole story, advising
him to seize Marlborough and the other conspirators. Perhaps if this
advice had been followed, King William would never have come to the
throne of England. James, however, gave no credit to the story, and
took no trouble about it. Next morning he found his mistake; but it
was then too late. The truth of this story is corroborated by other
authorities, one of them being King James himself, who afterwards
stated that he had received information of Lord Churchill's designs,
and was recommended to seize his person, but that he unfortunately
neglected to avail himself of the advice. "Speak of that no more,"
says Egmont, in Goethe's play; "I _was_ warned."
[Sidenote: 1714--Marlborough]
Swift said of Marlborough that "he is as covetous as hell, and
ambitious as the prince of it." Marlborough was as ignorant as he was
avaricious. Literary taste or instinct he must have had, because he
read with so much eagerness the historical plays of Shakespeare, and
indeed frankly owned that his only knowledge of English history was
taken from their scenes. Even in that time of loose spelling his
spelling is remarkably loose. He seems to spell without any particular
principle in the matter, seldom rendering the same word a second time
by the same combination of letters. He was at one period of his life a
libertine of the loosest order, so far as morals were {25} concerned,
but of the shrewdest kind as regarded personal gain and advancement.
He would have loved any Lady Bellaston who presented herself, and who
could have rewarded him for his kindness. He was not of the type of
Byron's "Don Juan," who declares that
The prisoned eagle will not pair, nor I
Serve a Sultana's sensual phantasy.
Marlborough would have served any phantasy for gain. It has been said
of him that the reason for his being so successful with women as a
young man was that he took money of them. Yet, as another striking
instance of the paradoxical nature of his character, he was intensely
devoted to his wife. He was the true lover of Sarah Jennings, who
afterwards became Duchess of Marlborough. A man of the most undaunted
courage in the presence of the enemy, he was his wife's obedient,
patient, timid slave. He lived more absolutely under her control than
Belisarius under the government of his unscrupulous helpmate. Sarah
Jennings was, in her way, almost as remarkable as her husband. She was
a woman of great beauty. Colley Gibber, in his "Apology," pays devoted
testimony to her charms. He had by chance to attend on her in the
capacity of a sort of amateur lackey at an entertainment in Nottingham,
and he seems to have been completely dazzled by her loveliness. "If so
clear an emanation of beauty, such a commanding grace of aspect, struck
me into a regard that had something softer than the most profound
respect in it, I cannot see why I may not without offence remember it,
since beauty, like the sun, must sometimes lose its power to choose,
and shine into equal warmth the peasant and the courtier." He quaintly
adds, "However presumptuous or impertinent these thoughts may have
appeared at my first entertaining them, why may I not hope that my
having kept them decently a secret for full fifty years may be now a
good round plea for their pardon?" The imperious spirit which could
rule Churchill long dominated the feeble nature of Queen Anne. But
{26} when once this domination was overthrown, Sarah Jennings had no
art to curb her temper into such show of respect and compliance as
might have won back her lost honors. She met her humiliation with the
most childish bursts of passion; she did everything in her power to
annoy and insult the Queen who had passed from her haughty control.
She was always a keen hater; to the last day of her life she never
forgot her resentment towards all who had, or who she thought had,
injured her. In long later years she got into unseemly lawsuits with
her own near relations. But if one side of her character was harsh and
unlovely enough, it may be admitted that there was something not
unheroic about her unyielding spirit--something noble in the respect to
her husband's memory, which showed itself in the declaration that she
would not marry "the emperor of the world," after having been the wife
of John, Duke of Marlborough.
[Sidenote: 1714--Bolingbroke]
Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, was in his way as great a man as
the Duke of Marlborough. At the time we are now describing he seemed
to have passed through a long, a varied, and a brilliant career, and
yet he had only arrived at the age when public men in England now begin
to be regarded as responsible politicians. He was in his thirty-sixth
year. The career that had prematurely begun was drawing to its
premature close. He had climbed to his highest position; he is
Prime-minister of England, and has managed to get rid of his old
colleague and rival, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. Bolingbroke had
almost every gift and grace that nature and fortune could give. Three
years before this Swift wrote to Stella, "I think Mr. St. John the
greatest young man I ever knew; wit, capacity, beauty, quickness of
apprehension, good learning and an excellent taste; the greatest orator
in the House of Commons, admirable conversation, good nature and good
manners, generous, and a despiser of money." Yet, as in the fairy
story, the benign powers which had combined to endow him so richly had
withheld the one gift which might have made all the rest of {27}
surpassing value, and which being denied left them of little account.
If Bolingbroke had had principle he would have been one of the greatest
Englishmen of any time. His utter want of morality in politics, as
well as in private life, proved fatal to him; he only climbed high in
order to fall the lower. He was remarkable for profligacy even in that
heedless and profligate time. Voltaire, in one of his letters, tells a
story of a famous London courtesan who exclaimed to some of her
companion nymphs on hearing that Bolingbroke had been made Secretary of
State, "Seven thousand guineas a year, girls, and all for us!" Even if
the story be not true it is interesting and significant as an evidence
of the sort of impression which Bolingbroke had made upon his age. It
was his glory to be vicious; he was proud of his orgies. He liked to
be known as a man who could spend the whole night in a drunken revel,
and the afternoon in preparing some despatch on which the fortunes of
his country or the peace of the world might depend. The sight of a
beautiful woman could turn him away for the time from the gravest
political purposes. He was ready at such a moment to throw anything
over for the sake of the sudden love-chase which had come in his way.
He bragged of his amours, and boasted that he had never failed of
success with any woman who seemed to him worth pursuing. Like Faust,
he loved to reel from desire to enjoyment, and from enjoyment back
again into desire. Bolingbroke was the first of a great line of
parliamentary debaters who have made for themselves a distinct place in
English history, and whose rivals are not to be found in the history of
any other parliament. It is difficult at this time to form any
adequate idea of Bolingbroke's style as a speaker or his capacity for
debate when compared with other great English parliamentary orators.
But so far as one may judge, we should be inclined to think that he
must have had Fox's readiness without Fox's redundancy and repetition;
and that he must have had the stately diction and the commanding style
of the younger Pitt, with a certain freshness and force which {28} the
younger Pitt did not always exhibit. Bolingbroke's English prose style
is hardly surpassed by that of any other author, either before his time
or since. It is supple, strong, and luminous; not redundant, but not
bare; ornamented where ornament is suitable and even useful, but
nowhere decorated with the purple rags of unnecessary and artificial
brilliancy. Such a man, so gifted, must in any case have held a high
place among his contemporaries, and probably if Bolingbroke had
possessed the political and personal virtues of men like Burke and
Pitt, or even the political virtues of a man like Charles Fox, he would
have been remembered as the greatest of all English parliamentary
statesmen. But, as we have already said, the one defect filled him
with faults. The lack of principle gave him a lack of purpose, and
wanting purpose he persevered in no consistent political path. Swift
has observed that Bolingbroke "had a great respect for the characters
of Alcibiades and Petronius, especially the latter, whom he would
gladly be thought to resemble." He came nearer at his worst to
Petronius than at his best to Alcibiades. Alcibiades, to do him
justice, admired and understood virtue in others, however small the
share of it he contrived to keep for himself. It is impossible to read
that wonderful compound of dramatic humor and philosophic thought,
Plato's "Banquet," without being moved by the generous and impassioned
eulogy which Alcibiades, in the fulness of his heart and of his wine,
pours out upon the austere virtue of Socrates. Such as Alcibiades is
there described we may suppose Alcibiades to have been, and no one who
has followed the career of Bolingbroke can believe it possible that he
ever could have felt any sincere admiration for virtue in man or woman,
or could have thought of it otherwise than as a thing to be sneered at
and despised. The literary men, and more especially the poets of the
days of Bolingbroke, seem to have had as little scruple in their
compliments as a French _petit-maître_ might have in sounding the
praises of his mistress to his mistress's ears. Pope talks of his
villa, where, "nobly {29} pensive, St. John sat and thought," and
declared that such only might
Tread this sacred floor
Who dare to love their country and be poor.
[Sidenote: 1714--Pope's praises]
It is hard to think of Bolingbroke, even in his more advanced years, as
"nobly pensive," sitting and thinking, and certainly neither
Bolingbroke nor any of Bolingbroke's closer political associates was
exactly the sort of man who would have dared "to love his country and
be poor." In Bolingbroke's latest years we hear of him as amusing
himself by boasting to his second wife of his various successful
amours, until at last the lady, weary of the repetition, somewhat
contemptuously reminds him that however happy as a lover he may have
been once, his days of love were now over, and the less he said about
it the better.
Nor was Pope less extravagant in his praise to Harley than to St. John.
He says:
If aught below the seats divine
Can touch immortals, 'tis a soul like thine;
A soul supreme, in each hard instance tried,
Above all pain, all passion, and all pride,
The rage of power, the blast of public breath,
The lust of lucre, and the dread of death.
These lines, it is right to remember, were addressed to Harley, not in
his power, but after his fall. Even with that excuse for a friend's
overcharged eulogy, they read like a satire on Harley rather than like
his panegyric. Caricature itself could not more broadly distort the
features of a human being than his poetic admirer has altered the
lineaments of Oxford. Harley had been intriguing on both sides of the
field. He professed devoted loyalty to the Queen and to her appointed
successor, and he was at the same time coquetting, to put it mildly,
with the Stuart family in France. Nothing surprises a reader more than
the universal duplicity that seems to have prevailed in the days of
Anne and of the early Georges. Falsehood appears to have been a
recognized diplomatic {30} and political art. Statesmen, even of the
highest rank and reputation, made no concealment of the fact that
whenever occasion required they were ready to state the thing which was
not, either in private conversation or in public debate. Nothing could
exceed or excuse the boundless duplicity of Marlborough, but it must be
owned that even William the Third told almost as many falsehoods to
Marlborough as Marlborough could have told to him. At a time when
William detested Marlborough, he yet occasionally paid him in public
and in private the very highest compliments on his integrity and his
virtue. Men were not then supposed or expected to speak the truth. A
statesman might deceive a foreign minister or the Parliament of his own
country with as little risk to his reputation as a lady would have
undergone, in later days, who told a lie to the custom-house officer at
the frontier to save the piece of smuggled lace in her trunk.
[Sidenote: 1714--Harley]
If a man like William of Nassau could stoop to deceit and falsehood for
any political purpose, it is easy to understand that a man like Harley
would make free use of the same arts, and for personal objects as well.
Harley's political changes were so many and so rapid that they could
not possibly be explained by any theory consistent with sincerity. It
was well said of him that "his humor is never to deal clearly or
openly, but always with reserve, if not dissimulation, and to love
tricks when not necessary, but from an inward satisfaction in
applauding his own cunning." He entered Parliament in 1689, and in
1700 was chosen Speaker of the House of Commons. At that time, and for
long after, it was not an uncommon thing that a man who had been
Speaker should afterwards become a Secretary of State, sitting in the
same House. This was Harley's case: in 1704 he was made principal
Secretary of State. In 1708 Harley resigned office, and immediately
after took the leadership of the Tory party. In about two years he
overthrew the Whig administration, and became the head of a new
government, with the place of Lord High Treasurer, and the title of
Earl of Oxford. {31} His craft seems only to have been that low kind
of artifice which enables an unscrupulous man to cajole his followers
and to stir up division among his enemies. His word was not to be
relied upon by friend or enemy, and when he most affected a tone of
frankness or of candor he was least to be trusted. As Lord Stanhope
well says of him "His slender and pliant intellect was well fitted to
crawl up to the heights of power through all the crooked mazes and
dirty by-paths of intrigue; but having once attained the pinnacle, its
smallness and meanness were exposed to all the world." Even his
private life had not the virtues which one who reads some of the
exalted panegyrics paid to him by contemporary poets and others would
be apt to imagine. He was fond of drink and fond of pleasure in a
small and secret way; his vices were as unlike the daring and brilliant
profligacy of his colleague and rival Bolingbroke as his intellect was
inferior to Bolingbroke's surpassing genius. For all Pope's poetic
eulogy, the poet could say in prose of Lord Oxford that he was not a
very capable minister, and had a good deal of negligence into the
bargain. "He used to send trifling verses from court to the Scriblerus
Club every day, and would come and talk idly with them almost every
night, even when his all was at stake." Pope adds that Oxford "talked
of business in so confused a manner that you did not know what he was
about, and everything he went to tell you was in the epic way, for he
always began in the middle." Swift calls him "the greatest
procrastinator in the world." It is of Lord Oxford that the story is
originally told which has been told of so many statesmen here and in
America since his time. Lord Oxford, according to Pope, invited Rowe,
the dramatic poet, to learn Spanish. Rowe went to work, and studied
Spanish under the impression that some appointment at the Spanish court
would follow. When he returned to Harley and told him he had
accomplished the task, Harley said, "Then, Mr. Rowe, I envy you the
pleasure of reading 'Don Quixote' in the original." Pope asks, "Is not
that cruel?" But {32} others have held that it was unintentional on
Lord Oxford's part, and merely one of his unthinking oddities.
[Sidenote: 1714--Walpole]
Another man, fifteen years younger than Harley, a school-fellow at Eton
of Bolingbroke, was rising slowly, surely, into prominence and power.
All the great part of his career is yet to come; but even already,
while men were talking of Marlborough and Bolingbroke, they found
themselves compelled to give a place in their thoughts to Robert
Walpole. If Bolingbroke was the first, and perhaps the most brilliant,
of the great line of parliamentary debaters who have made debate a
moving power in English history, Walpole was the first of that line of
statesmen who, sprung from the class of the "Commoner," have become
leaders of the English Parliament. In position and in influence,
although not in personal character or accomplishments, Walpole may be
described as the direct predecessor of Peel and Gladstone. Just two
years before the death of William the Third, Walpole entered Parliament
for the first time. He married, entered Parliament, and succeeded to
his father's estates in the same year, 1700. Walpole was only
twenty-four years of age when he took his seat in the House of Commons
as member for Castle Rising in Norfolk. He was a young country squire
of considerable fortune, and a thorough supporter of the Whig party.
Walpole came into Parliament at that happy time for men of his position
when the change was already taking place which marked the
representative assembly as the controlling power in the State. The
Government as a direct ruling power was beginning to grow less and less
effective, and the House of Commons beginning to grow more and more
strong. This change had begun to set in during the Restoration, and by
the time Walpole came to be known in Parliament it was becoming more
and more evident that the Ministers of State were in the future only to
be men intrusted with the duty of carrying out the will of the majority
in the House of Commons. Before that majority every other power in the
State was ultimately to bend. The man, therefore, {33} who could by
eloquence, genuine statesmanship, and force of character, or even by
mere tact, secure the adhesion of that majority, had become virtually
the ruler of the State. But as will easily be seen, his rule even then
was something very different indeed from the rule of an arbitrary
minister. He would have to satisfy, to convince, to conciliate the
majority. A single false step, an hour's weakness of purpose, nay,
even a failure for which he was not himself accountable in home or
foreign policy, might deprive him of his influence over the majority,
and might reduce him to comparative insignificance. Therefore, the
controlling power which a great minister acquired was held by virtue of
the most constant watchfulness, the most unsparing labor, energy, and
devotion, and also in a great measure by the favor of fortune and of
opportunity.
Walpole was a man eminently qualified to obtain influence over the
House of Commons, and to keep it up when he had once obtained it. No
man could have promised less in the beginning. That was an acute
observer who divined the genius of Cromwell under Cromwell's homely
exterior when he first came up to Parliament. Almost as much acuteness
would have been needed to enable any one to see the future
Prime-minister of England and master of the House of Commons in the
plain, unpromising form, the homely, almost stolid countenance, the
ungainly movements and gestures of Walpole. Walpole was as much of a
rustic as Lord Althorp in times nearer to our own acknowledged himself
to be. Althorp said he ought to have been a grazier, and that it was
an odd chance which made him Prime-minister. But the difference was
great. Walpole had the gifts which make a man prime-minister, despite
his country gentleman or grazier-like qualities. It was not chance,
but Walpole himself which raised him to the position he came to hold.
Walpole knew nothing and cared nothing about literature and art. His
great passion was for hunting; his next love was for wine, and his
third for his dinner. Without any natural gift of eloquence he became
a great debater. {34} Nature, which seemed to have lavished all her
most luxurious gifts on Bolingbroke, appeared to have pinched and
starved Walpole. Where Bolingbroke was richest Walpole was poorest;
Bolingbroke's genius required a frequent rein; Walpole's intellect
needed the perpetual spur. Yet Walpole, with his lack of imagination,
of eloquence, of wit, of humor, and of culture, went farther and did
more than the brilliant Bolingbroke. It was the old fable of the hare
and the tortoise over again; perhaps it should rather be called a new
version of the old fable. The farther the hare goes in the wrong way
the more she goes astray, and thus many of Bolingbroke's most rapid
movements only helped the tortoise to get to the goal before him. In
1708 Walpole, now recognized as an able debater, a clever tactician,
and, above all things, an excellent man of business, was appointed
Secretary at War. He became at the same time leader of the House of
Commons. He was one of the managers in the unfortunate impeachment of
the empty-headed High-Church preacher, Dr. Sacheverell. He resigned
office with the other Whig ministers in 1710. Harley coming into power
offered him a place in the new administration, which Walpole declined
to accept. The Tories, reckless and ruthless in their majority,
expelled Walpole from the House in 1712 and imprisoned him in the
Tower. The charge against him was one of corruption, a charge easily
made in those days against any minister, and which, if high moral
principles were to prevail, might probably have been as easily
sustained as it was made. Walpole, however, was not worse than his
contemporaries; nor, even if he had been, would the contemporaries have
been inclined to treat his offences very seriously so long as they were
not inspired to act against him by partisan motives. At the end of the
session he was released, and now, in the closing days of Anne's reign,
all eyes turned to him as a rising man and a certain bulwark of the new
dynasty.
[Sidenote: 1714--The Dean of St. Patrick's]
It would be impossible not to regard Jonathan Swift as one of the
politicians, one of the statesmen, of this age. {35} Swift was a
politician in the highest sense, although he had seen little of the one
great political arena in which the battles of English parties were
fought out. He has left it on record that he never heard either
Bolingbroke or Harley speak in Parliament or anywhere in public. He
was at this time about forty-seven years of age, and had not yet
reached his highest point in politics or in literature. The "Tale of a
Tub" had been written, but not "Gulliver's Travels;" the tract on "The
Conduct of the Allies," but not the "Drapier's Letters." Even at this
time he was a power in political life; his was an influence with which
statesmen and even sovereigns had to reckon. No pen ever served a
cause better than his had served, and was yet to serve, the interests
of the Tory party. He was probably the greatest English pamphleteer at
a time when the pamphlet had to do all the work of the leading article
and most of the work of the platform. His churchmen's gown sat
uneasily on him; he was like one of the fighting bishops of the Middle
Ages, with whom armor was the more congenial wear. He had a fierce and
domineering temper, and indeed out of his strangely bright blue eyes
there was already beginning to shine only too ominously the wild light
of that _saeva indignatio_ which the inscription drawn up by his own
hand for his tomb described as lacerating his heart. The ominous light
at last broke out into the fire of insanity. We shall meet Swift
again; just now we only stop to note him as a political influence. At
this time he is Dean of St. Patrick's in Ireland; he has been lately in
London trying, and without success, to bring about a reconciliation
between Bolingbroke and Harley; and, finding his efforts ineffectual,
and seeing that troubled times were near at hand, he has quietly
withdrawn to Berkshire. Before leaving London he wrote the letter to
Lord Peterborough containing the remarkable words with which we have
opened this volume. It is curious that Swift himself afterwards
ascribed to Harley the saying about the Queen's health and the heedless
{36} behavior of statesmen. In his "Enquiry into the Behaviour of the
Queen's Last Ministry," dated June, 1715, he tells us that "about
Christmas, 1713," the Treasurer said to him "whenever anything ails the
Queen these people are out of their wits; and yet they are so
thoughtless that as soon as she is well they act as if she were
immortal." To which Swift adds the following significant comment: "I
had sufficient reason, both before and since, to allow his observation
to be true, and that some share of it might with justice be applied to
himself." It was at the house of a clergyman at Upper Letcomb, near
Wantage, in Berkshire, that Swift stayed for some time before returning
to his Irish home. From Letcomb the reader will perhaps note with some
painful interest that Swift wrote to Miss Esther Vanhomrigh, whom all
generations will know as Vanessa, a letter, in which he describes his
somewhat melancholy mode of life just then, tells her "this is the
first syllable I have wrote to anybody since you saw me," and adds that
"if this place were ten times worse, nothing shall make me return to
town while things are in the situation I left them."
[Sidenote: 1714--Addison]
Swift, in his heart, trusted neither Bolingbroke nor Harley. It seems
clear that Lady Masham was under the impression that she had Swift as
her accomplice in the intrigue which finally turned Harley out of
office. She writes to him while he is at Letcomb a letter which could
not have been written if she were not in that full conviction; and he
does not reply until the whole week's crisis is past and a new
condition of things arisen; and in the reply he commits himself to
nothing. If he distrusted Bolingbroke he could not help admiring him.
Bolingbroke was the only man then near the court whose genius must not
have been rebuked by Swift. But Swift must, for all his lavish praises
of Harley, have sometimes secretly despised the hesitating,
time-serving statesman, with whom indecision was a substitute for
prudence, and to be puzzled was to seem to deliberate. That Harley
should have had the playing of a great political game {37} while Swift
could only look on, is one of the anomalies of history which Swift's
sardonic humor must have appreciated to the full. Swift took his
revenge when he could by bullying his great official friends now and
then in the roughest fashion. He knew that they feared him, and
flattered him because they feared him, and he was glad of it, and
hugged himself in the knowledge. He knew even that at one time they
were uncertain of his fidelity, and took much pains by their praises
and their promises to keep him close at their side; and this, too,
amused him. He was amused as a tyrant might be at the obvious efforts
of those around him to keep him in good-humor, or as a man conscious of
incipient madness might find malign delight in the anxiety of his
friends to fall in with all his moods and not to cross him in anything
he was pleased to say.
Joseph Addison had a political position and influence on the other side
of the controversy which entitle him to be ranked among the statesmen
of the day. Only in the year before his tragedy of "Cato" had been
brought out, and it had created an altogether peculiar sensation. Each
of the two great political parties seized upon the opportunity given by
Gate's pompous political virtue, and claimed him as the spokesman of
their cause. The Whigs, of course, had the author's authority to
appropriate the applause of Cato, and the Whigs had endeavored to pack
the House in order to secure their claim. But the Tories were equal to
the occasion. They appeared in great numbers, Bolingbroke, then
Secretary of State, at their head. When Cato lamented the extinguished
freedom of his country the Whigs were vociferous in their cheers, and
glared fiercely at the Tories; but when the austere Roman was made to
denounce Caesar and a perpetual dictatorship, the Tories professed to
regard this as a denunciation of Marlborough, and his demand to be made
commander-in-chief for life, and they gave back the cheering with
redoubled vehemence. At last Bolingbroke's own genius suggested a
master-stroke. He sent for the actor who played Cato's part, thanked
him in face of the {38} public, and presented him with a purse of gold
because of the service he had done in sustaining the cause of liberty
against the tyranny of a perpetual dictator.
Addison held many high political offices. He was Secretary to a Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland more than once; he was made Secretary to the
"Regents," as they were called--the commissioners intrusted by George
the First with the task of administration previous to his arrival in
England. He sat in Parliament; he was appointed Under-secretary of
State, and was soon to be for a while one of the principal Secretaries
of State. The last number of his _Spectator_ was published at the
close of 1714. This was indeed still a time when literary men might
hold high political office. The deadening influence of the Georges had
not yet quite prevailed against letters and art. Matthew Prior, about
whose poetry the present age troubles itself but little, sat in
Parliament, was employed in many of the most important diplomatic
negotiations of the day, and had not long before this time held the
office of Plenipotentiary in Paris. Richard Steele not merely sat in
the House of Commons, but was considered of sufficient importance to
deserve the distinction of a formal expulsion from the House because of
certain political diatribes for which he was held responsible and which
the Commons chose to vote libellous. At the time we are now describing
he had re-entered Parliament, and was still a brilliant penman on the
side of the Whigs. His career as politician, literary man, and
practical dramatist combined, seems in some sort a foreshadowing of
that of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Gay was appointed Secretary to Lord
Clarendon on a diplomatic mission to Hanover. Nicholas Rowe, the
author of the "Fair Penitent" and the translator of Lucan's
"Pharsalia," was at one time an Under-Secretary of State. Rowe's
dramatic work is not yet absolutely forgotten by the world. We still
hear of the "gallant gay Lothario," although many of those who are glib
with the words do not know that they come from the "Fair Penitent," and
would not care even if they did know.
{39}