We have seen that Sir Robert Walpole (S534) became the first Prime
Minister in 1721, and that he continued in office as head of the
Cabinet, or Government, until near the middle of the next reign. He
was an able financier, and succeeded in reducing the National Debt
(S503). He believed in keeping the country out of war, and also, as
we have seen, out of "bubble speculation" (S536). Finally, he was
determined at all cost to maintain the Whig party in power, and the
Protestant Hanoverian sovereigns on the throne (SS515, 532).
In order to accomplish these objects, he openly bribed members of
Parliament to support his party; he bought votes and carried elections
by gifts of titles, honors, and bank notes. He thus proved to his own
satisfaction the truth of his theory that most men "have their price,"
and that an appeal to the pocketbook is both quicker and surer than an
appeal to the principle. But before the end of his ministry he had to
confess that he had found in the House of Commons a "boy patriot," as
he sneeringly called him, named William Pitt (afterward Earl of
Chatham), whom neither his money could buy nor his ridicule move
(SS549, 550).
Bad as Walpole's policy was in its corrupting influence on the nation,
it as an admission that the time had come when the King could no
longer venture to rule by force, as in hte days of the Stuarts. It
meant that the Crown no longer possessed the arbitrary power it once
wielded. Walpole was a fox, not a lion; and "foxes," as Emerson tells
us, "are so cunning because they are not strong."