he served. It is, indeed, not easy to form a fair estimate in this
respect of the conduct of public men at the period of the revolution.
Historians rarely make sufficient allowance for the degree in which the
judgments and dispositions even of the best men are colored by the
moral tone of the age, society, or profession in which they live, or for
the temptations of men of great genius and of natural ambition in times
when no highly scrupulous man could possibly succeed in public life.
Marlborough struggled into greatness from a very humble position, in one
of the most profligate periods of English politics, and he lived through
a long period when the ultimate succession of the crown was very
doubtful. A very large proportion of the leading statesmen during this
long season of suspense made such overtures to the deposed dynasty as
would at least secure them from absolute ruin in the event of a change,
and their conduct is surely susceptible of much palliation.
The apparent interests and the apparent wishes of the nation hung so
evenly and oscillated so frequently that strong convictions were rare,
and even good men might often be in doubt. But the obligations of
Churchill to James were of no common order, and his treachery was of no
common dye. He had been raised by the special favor of his sovereign
from the position of a page to the peerage, to great wealth, to high
command in the army. He had been trusted by him with the most absolute
trust. He not only abandoned him in the crisis of his fate, with
circumstances of the most deliberate and aggravated treachery, but also
employed his influence over the daughter of his benefactor to induce her
to fly from her father and to array herself with his enemies. Such
conduct, if it had indeed been dictated, as he alleged, solely by a
regard for the interests of Protestantism, would have been certainly, in
the words of Hume, “a signal sacrifice to public virtue of every duty in
private life”; and it “required ever after the most upright,
disinterested, and public-spirited behavior, to render it justifiable.”
How little the later career of Marlborough fulfilled this condition is
well known.
When we find that, having been loaded under the new Government with
titles, honors, and wealth, having been placed in the inner council and
intrusted with the most important state secrets, he was one of the
first Englishmen to enter into negotiations with St. Germain’s; that he
purchased his pardon from James by betraying important military secrets
to the enemies of his country, and that, during a great part of his
subsequent career, while holding office under the Government, he was
secretly negotiating with the Pretender, it is difficult not to place
the worst construction upon his public life. It is probable, indeed,
that his negotiations with the Jacobites were never sincere, that he had
no real desire for a restoration, and that his guiding motive was much
less ambition than a desire to secure what he possessed; but these
considerations only slightly palliate his conduct. At the period of his
downfall his later acts of treason were for the most part unknown, but
his conduct toward James weighed heavily upon his reputation, and his
intercourse with the Pretender, though not proved, was at least
suspected by many. Neither Hanoverians nor Jacobites trusted him,
neither Whigs nor Tories could regard him without reserve as their own.
And with this feeling of distrust there was mingled a strong element of
fear. In the latter years of Queen Anne the shadow of Cromwell fell
darkly across the path of Marlborough. To those who prefer the violent
methods of a reforming despotism to the slow process of parliamentary
amelioration, to those who despise the wisdom of following public
opinion and respecting the prejudices and the associations of a nation,
there can be no better lesson than is furnished by the history of
Cromwell. Of his high and commanding abilities it is not here necessary
to speak, nor yet of the traits of magnanimity that may, no doubt, be
found in his character. Everything that great genius and the most
passionate sympathy could do to magnify these has in this century been
done, and a long period of unqualified depreciation has been followed by
a reaction of extravagant eulogy.
But the more the qualities of the man are exalted the more significant
are the lessons of his life. Despising the national sentiment of
loyalty, he and his party dethroned and beheaded the king. Despising the
ecclesiastical sentiment, they destroyed the Church. Despising the deep
reverence for the constitution, they subverted the Parliament. Despising
the oldest and most cherished customs of the people, they sought to mold
the whole social life of England in the die of an austere Puritanism.
They seemed for a time to have succeeded, but the result soon appeared.
Republican equality was followed by the period of most obsequious,
servile loyalty England has ever known. The age when every amusement was
denounced as a crime was followed by the age when all virtue was treated
as hypocrisy, and when the sense of shame seemed to have almost vanished
from the land. The prostration of the Church was followed, with the full
approbation of the bulk of the nation, by the bitter, prolonged
persecution of Dissenters. The hated memory of the Commonwealth was for
more than a century appealed to by every statesman who desired to
prevent reform or discredit liberty, and the name of Cromwell gathered
around it an intensity of hatred approached by no other in the history
of England. This was the single sentiment common in all its vehemence to
the Episcopalians of England, the Presbyterians of Scotland, and the
Catholics of Ireland, and it had more than once considerable political
effects. The profound horror of military despotism, which is one of the
strongest and most salutary of English sentiments, has been, perhaps,
the most valuable legacy of the Commonwealth. In Marlborough, for the
first time since the restoration, men saw a possible Cromwell, and they
looked forward with alarm to the death of the queen as a period
peculiarly propitious to military usurpation. Bolingbroke never
represented more happily the feelings of the people than in the
well-known scene at the first representation of the “Cato” of Addison.
Written by a great Whig writer, the play was intended to advocate Whig
sentiments; but when the Whig audience had made the theatre ring with
applause at every speech on the evil of despotism and arbitrary
principles, the Tory leader availed himself of the pause between the
acts to summon the chief actor, to present him with a purse of money,
and to thank him publicly for having defended the cause of liberty so
well against a perpetual military dictator.
SIR ROBERT WALPOLE.
BY WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY.
[Afterward Earl of Orford, born 1676, died 1745; one of the most
powerful forces in the history of English politics. Without
brilliancy of talent, and utterly corrupt both as man and
statesman, he was in many ways a patriot and a far-sighted
supporter of the best interests of his country. He was first made
prime minister in 1715, and in 1717 brought forward a scheme for
the reduction of the public debt, which may be regarded as the
earliest germ of a national sinking fund. After the accession of
George II he became the foremost political figure of his time, and
kept his position against all attacks by great political dexterity
and the favor of Queen Caroline. He held the premiership for
twenty-one years, and was the first of the great English finance
ministers.]
It is worthy of notice that the long ascendency of Walpole was in no
degree owing to any extraordinary brilliancy of eloquency. He was a
clear and forcible reasoner, ready in reply, and peculiarly successful
in financial exposition, but he had little or nothing of the temperament
or the talent of an orator. It is the custom of some writers to decry
parliamentary institutions as being simply government by talking, and to
assert that when they exist mere rhetorical skill will always be more
valued than judgment, knowledge, or character. The enormous exaggeration
of such charges may be easily established. It is, no doubt, inevitable
that where business is transacted chiefly by debate, the talent of a
debater should be highly prized; but it is perfectly untrue that
British legislatures have shown less skill than ordinary sovereigns in
distinguishing solid talent from mere showy accomplishments, or that
parliamentary weight has in England been usually proportioned to
oratorical power.
St. John was a far greater orator than Harley; Pulteney was probably a
greater orator than Walpole; Stanley in mere rhetorical skill was
undoubtedly the superior of Peel. Godolphin, Pelham, Castlereagh,
Liverpool, Melbourne, Althorpe, Wellington, Lord J. Russell, and Lord
Palmerston are all examples of men who, either as statesmen or as
successful leaders of the House of Commons, have taken a foremost place
in English politics without any oratorical brilliancy. Sheridan,
Plunket, and Brougham, though orators of almost the highest class, left
no deep impression on English public life; the ascendancy of Grey and
Canning was very transient, and no Opposition since the early Hanoverian
period sank so low as that which was guided by Fox. The two Pitts and
Mr. Gladstone are the three examples of speakers of transcendent power
exercising for a considerable time a commanding influence over English
politics. The younger Pitt is, I believe, a real instance of a man whose
solid ability bore no kind of proportion to his oratorical skill, and
who, by an almost preternatural dexterity in debate, accompanied by
great decision of character, and assisted by the favor of the king, by
the magic of an illustrious name, and by a great national panic,
maintained an authority immensely greater than his deserts. But in this
respect he stands alone. The pinnacle of glory to which the elder Pitt
raised his country is a sufficient proof of the almost unequaled
administrative genius which he displayed in the conduct of a war; and in
the sphere of domestic policy it may be questioned whether any other
English minister since the accession of the house of Brunswick has
carried so many measures of magnitude and difficulty or exhibited so
perfect a mastery over the financial system of the country as the great
living statesman.
The qualities of Walpole were very different, but it is impossible, I
think, to consider his career with adequate attention without
recognizing in him a great minister, although the merits of his
administration were often rather negative than positive, and although it
exhibits few of those dramatic incidents, and is but little susceptible
of that rhetorical coloring on which the reputation of statesmen largely
depends.
Without any remarkable originality of thought or creative genius, he
possessed in a high degree one quality of a great statesman--the power
of judging new and startling events in the moments of excitement or of
panic as they would be judged by ordinary men when the excitement, the
novelty, and the panic had passed. He was eminently true to the
character of his countrymen. He discerned with a rare sagacity the lines
of policy most suited to their genius and to their needs, and he had a
sufficient ascendency in English politics to form its traditions, to
give a character and a bias to its institutions. The Whig party, under
his guidance, retained, though with diminished energy, its old love of
civil and of religious liberty, but it lost its foreign sympathies, its
tendency to extravagance, its military restlessness. The landed gentry,
and in a great degree the Church, were reconciled to the new dynasty.
The dangerous fissures which divided the English nation were filled up.
Parliamentary government lost its old violence, it entered into a period
of normal and pacific action, and the habits of compromise, of
moderation, and of practical good sense, which are most essential to its
success, were greatly strengthened.
These were the great merits of Walpole. His faults were very manifest,
and are to be attributed in part to his own character, but in a great
degree to the moral atmosphere of his time. He was an honest man in the
sense of desiring sincerely the welfare of his country and serving his
sovereign with fidelity; but he was intensely wedded to power,
exceedingly unscrupulous about the means of grasping or retaining it,
and entirely destitute of that delicacy of honor which marks a
high-minded man. In the opinion of most of his contemporaries, Townshend
and Walpole had good reason to complain of the intrigues by which
Sunderland and Stanhope obtained the supreme power in 1717; but this
does not justify the factious manner in which Walpole opposed every
measure the new ministry brought forward--even the Mutiny Act, which was
plainly necessary to keep the army in discipline; even the repeal of the
Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts, though he had himself denounced
those acts as more like laws of Julian the Apostate than of a Christian
legislature.
He was sincerely tolerant in his disposition, and probably did as much
for the benefit of the Dissenters as could have been done without
producing a violent and dangerous reaction of opinion; but he took no
measure to lighten the burden of the Irish penal code, and he had no
scruple in availing himself of the strong feeling against the English
Catholics and non-jurors to raise one hundred thousand pounds, by a
special tax upon their estates, or in promising the Dissenters that he
would obtain the repeal of the Test Act, when he had no serious
intention of doing so. He warned the country faithfully against the
South Sea scheme, but when his warning was disregarded he proceeded to
speculate skillfully and successfully in it himself. He labored long and
earnestly to prevent the Spanish war, which he knew to be eminently
impolitic; but when the clamors of his opponents had made it inevitable
he determined that he would still remain at the helm, and he accordingly
declared it himself. He governed the country mildly and wisely, but he
was resolved at all hazards to secure for himself a complete monopoly of
power; he steadily opposed the reconciliation of the Tories with the
Hanoverian dynasty, lest it should impair his ascendancy, surrounded
himself with colleagues whose faculties rarely rose above the tamest
mediocrity, drove from power every man of real talent who might
possibly become his rival, and especially repelled young men of promise,
character, and ambition, whom a provident statesman, desirous of
perpetuating his policy beyond his lifetime, would especially seek to
attract.
The scandal and also the evil effects of his political vices were
greatly increased by that total want of decorum which Burke has justly
noted as the weakest point of his character. In this respect his public
and private life resembled one another. That he lived for many years in
open adultery and indulged to excess in the pleasures of the table were
facts which in the early part of the eighteenth century were in
themselves not likely to excite much attention; but his boisterous
revelries at Houghton exceeded even the ordinary license of the country
squires of his time, and the gross sensuality of his conversation was
conspicuous in one of the coarsest periods of English history. When he
did not talk of business, it was said, he talked of women; politics and
obscenity were his tastes. There seldom was a court less addicted to
prudery than that of George II, but even its tolerance was somewhat
strained by a minister who jested with the queen upon the infidelity of
her husband; who advised her on one occasion to bring to court a
beautiful but silly woman as a “safe fool” for the king to fall in love
with; who, on the death of the queen, urged her daughters to summon
without delay the two mistresses of the king in order to distract the
mind of their father; who at the same time avowed, with a brutal
frankness, as the scheme of his future policy, that though he had been
for the wife against the mistress, he would be henceforth for the
mistress against the daughters.
In society he had the weakness of wishing to be thought a man of
gallantry and fashion, and his awkward addresses, rendered the more
ludicrous by a singularly corpulent and ungraceful person, as well as
the extreme coarseness into which he usually glided when speaking to and
of women, drew down upon him much ridicule and some contempt. His
estimate of political integrity was very similar to his estimate of
female virtue. He governed by means of an assembly which was saturated
with corruption, and he fully acquiesced in its conditions and resisted
every attempt to improve it. He appears to have cordially accepted the
maxim that government must be carried on by corruption or by force, and
he deliberately made the former the basis of his rule. He bribed George
II by obtaining for him a civil list exceeding by more than one hundred
thousand pounds a year that of his father. He bribed the queen by
securing for her a jointure of one hundred thousand pounds a year, when
his rival, Sir Spencer Compton, could only venture to promise sixty
thousand pounds. He bribed the dissenting ministers to silence by the
Regium Donum for the benefit of their widows. He employed the vast
patronage of the crown uniformly and steadily with the single view of
sustaining his political position, and there can be no doubt that a
large proportion of the immense expenditure of secret-service money
during his administration was devoted to the direct purchase of members
of Parliament.
His influence upon young men appears to have been peculiarly pernicious.
If we may believe Chesterfield, he was accustomed to ask them in a tone
of irony upon their entrance into Parliament whether they too were going
to be saints or Romans, and he employed all the weight of his position
to make them regard purity and patriotism as ridiculous or unmanly. Of
the next generation of statesmen, Fox, the first Lord Holland,[28] was
the only man of remarkable ability who can be said to have been his
disciple, and he was, perhaps, the most corrupt and unscrupulous of the
statesmen of his age.
[Illustration: FREDERICK THE GREAT.]
FREDERICK THE GREAT.
BY THOMAS CARLYLE.
[Otherwise Frederick II, third king of Prussia, son of Frederick
William I, and grandson of George I of England, born 1712, died
1786. Regarded in his youth, before his accession to the throne, as
a spendthrift and voluptuary or as a prince of weak and vacillating
character, his accession to the throne in 1740 instantly brought
out his true character as the most able and masterful of rulers.
His protracted wars with odds against him, often of four to one, in
which he fought the banded armies of Europe, stamped him as a
soldier of splendid genius and iron tenacity of endurance and
purpose. During the Seven Years’ War he stood with only five
million subjects against a hundred million. On the declaration of
peace he devoted himself, with the same energy, to the restoration
of the commerce, agriculture, and industries of Prussia as that
with which he had fought her enemies, and with as much success.
Frederick was not only a great soldier and civil administrator,
though on somewhat despotic lines, but keenly sympathetic with
literature, art, and science. All these he encouraged and fostered
by every means. He was the true founder of the Prussian monarchy.]
About fourscore years ago there used to be seen sauntering on the
terraces of Sans Souci, for a short time in the afternoon, or you might
have met him elsewhere at an earlier hour, riding or driving in a rapid
business manner on the open roads or through the scraggy woods and
avenues of that intricate amphibious Potsdam region, a highly
interesting lean little old man, of alert though slightly stooping
figure, whose name among strangers was King _Friedrich the Second_, or
Frederick the Great of Prussia, and at home among the common people, who
much loved and esteemed him, was _Vater Fritz_--Father Fred--a name of
familiarity which had not bred contempt in that instance. He is a king,
every inch of him, though without the trappings of a king. Presents
himself in a Spartan simplicity of vesture; no crown but an old military
cocked hat--generally old, or trampled and kneaded into absolute
_softness_ if new--no scepter but one like Agamemnon’s, a walking-stick
cut from the woods, which serves also as a riding-stick (with which he
hits the horse “between the ears,” say authors)--and for royal robes, a
mere soldier’s blue coat with red facings, coat likely to be old, and
sure to have a good deal of Spanish snuff on the breast of it; rest of
the apparel dim, unobtrusive in color or cut, ending in high overknee
military boots, which may be brushed (and, I hope, kept soft with an
underhand suspicion of oil), but are not permitted to be blackened or
varnished; Day and Martin with their soot-pots forbidden to approach.
The man is not of godlike physiognomy, any more than of imposing stature
or costume; close-shut mouth with thin lips, prominent jaws and nose,
receding brow, by no means of Olympian height; head, however, is of long
form, and has superlative gray eyes in it. Not what is called a
beautiful man; nor yet, by all appearance, what is called a happy. On
the contrary, the face bears evidence of many sorrows, as they are
termed, of much hard labor done in this world, and seems to anticipate
nothing but more still coming. Quiet stoicism, capable enough of what
joys there were, but not expecting any worth mention; great unconscious
and some conscious pride, well tempered with a cheery mockery of
humor--are written on that old face, which carries its chin well
forward, in spite of the slight stoop about the neck; snuffy nose,
rather flung into the air, under its old cocked hat--like an old snuffy
lion on the watch; and such a pair of eyes as no man or lion or lynx of
that century bore elsewhere, according to all the testimony we have.
“Those eyes,” says Mirabeau, “which, at the bidding of his great soul,
fascinated you with seduction or with terror (_portaient, au gré de son
âme héroïque, la séduction ou la terreur_).” Most excellent potent
brilliant eyes, swift-darting as the stars, steadfast as the sun; gray,
we said, of the azure-gray color; large enough, not of glaring size;
the habitual expression of them vigilance and penetrating sense,
rapidity resting on depth, which is an excellent combination, and gives
us the notion of a lambent outer radiance springing from some great
inner sea of light and fire in the man.
The voice, if he speak to you, is of similar physiognomy--clear,
melodious, and sonorous; all tones are in it, from that of ingenuous
inquiry, graceful sociality, light-flowing banter (rather prickly for
most part), up to definite word of command, up to desolating word of
rebuke and reprobation; a voice “the clearest and most agreeable in
conversation I ever heard,” says witty Dr. Moore. “He speaks a great
deal,” continues the doctor, “yet those who hear him regret that he does
not speak a good deal more. His observations are always lively, very
often just, and few men possess the talent of repartee in greater
perfection.”
This was a man of infinite mark to his contemporaries, who had witnessed
surprising feats from him in the world; very questionable notions and
ways, which he had contrived to maintain against the world and its
criticisms, as an original man has always to do, much more an original
ruler of men. The world, in fact, had tried hard to put him down, as it
does, unconsciously or consciously, with all such, and after the most
conscious exertions, and at one time a dead-lift spasm of all its
energies for seven years, had not been able. Principalities and powers,
imperial, royal, czarish, papal, enemies innumerable as the sea-sand,
had risen against him, only one helper left among the world’s potentates
(and that one only while there should be help rendered in return), and
he led them all such a dance as had astonished mankind and them.