It is here that his public career begins. His lot was cast in stirring
times. For the year of his entry into Parliament was the fourteenth of
Walpole's long administration, and it was not difficult to see menacing
cracks in the structure. The Minister himself seems to have been aware
that his position was critical; and at the general election in the
previous year he had spared no exertions to secure a majority. In his
own county of Norfolk, 10,000_l._ had been spent in support of his
candidates without averting their defeat: from his own private means he
is said, no doubt with gross exaggeration, to have expended no less than
60,000_l._ Figures like these, however swollen by rumour, denote the
intensity of the struggle. But in spite of all, his losses were
considerable. Even Scotland, in those days the hungry dependant of all
Governments, was shaken in her allegiance. And, though he gained the
victory, the toughness of the contest betokened clearly that his
stability was seriously impaired, and that the country was weary of his
domination.
For this there were many obvious causes. One, of course, was the
universal unpopularity of the Excise scheme. It was also one of the
moments in our history when the country is uneasily conscious of
weakness and possible humiliation abroad, and when the silent and
passive interests of peace weigh lightly in the balance against the
smarting burden of wounded self-respect. But the most operative cause
lay in Walpole himself.
There is no enigma about Walpole. He sprang from near a score of
generations of Norfolk squires who had spent six hundred years in
healthy obscurity and the simple pleasures of the country. None of them
apparently had brains, or the need of them. From these he inherited a
frame hardy and robust, and that taste for the sports of the field that
never left him. He had also the advantage of being brought up as a
younger son to work, and thus he gained that self-reliant and
pertinacious industry which served him so well through long years of
high office. From the beginning to the end he was primarily a man of
business. Had he not been a politician it cannot be doubted that he
would have been a great merchant or a great financier. And, though his
lot was cast in politics, a man of business he essentially remained.
This is not to say that he was not a consummate parliamentary debater,
for that he must have been. But it is to suggest that the key to
Walpole's character as Prime Minister lies in his instincts and
qualifications as a man of business. His main tendency was not, as with
Chesterfield and Carteret and Bolingbroke, towards high statesmanship.
His first object was to carry on the business of the country in a
business spirit, as economically and as peacefully as possible. His
chief preoccupation apart from this was the keeping out of the rival
house of Stuart, which would not have employed the firm of Walpole and
the Whigs to keep their accounts. It is quite possible that as a patriot
he may have also dreaded the probable evils of the Stuart dynasty. But
the first reason is amply sufficient. The corruption of which he was
undoubtedly guilty, but of which he was by no means the inventor, he
perhaps considered as the commission due to customers; or else he may
have argued, 'these men have to be bought by somebody, let us do it in a
business-like way.' His merciless crushing of any rivals was simply the
big firm crushing competition, a familiar feature of commerce. His
carrying on a war against Spain in spite of his own conscientious
disapproval can only be satisfactorily explained on the same hypothesis.
The nation would have war: well, if it must, he could carry it on more
cheaply, and limit its mischief more effectually than any other
contractor. Moreover, Walpole had all along been the merchants' man. He
had given them peace and wealth. Now for commercial purposes they wanted
war and he had to gratify them. They had been the main backers of his
administration, the deprivation of their support would have left him
bare; so when they turned round he had to follow, with scarcely the
appearance of leadership.
In these days we should undoubtedly condemn any statesman who declared a
war of which he disapproved. Lord Aberdeen morbidly and unjustly accused
himself of this offence, and refused to be comforted. That is the other
extreme to Walpole's position. But we must remember the political
morality of those times. Was there then living a statesman who would
have acted differently? From this sweeping question we cannot except
Pitt, who was bitterly denouncing Walpole for his pacific attitude, and
had afterwards to confess that Walpole had been right.
We regard Walpole, then, first and foremost as a man of business, led
into the great error with which history reproaches him by his brother
men of business. Still, his qualities in that capacity would not have
maintained him for years as Prime Minister. They proved him to be a
hard-working man with practical knowledge of affairs and strong common
sense; a sagacious man who hated extremes. He had besides the highest
qualities of a parliamentary leader. Of imagination, unless it may be
inferred from his palace and picture gallery, he seems to have been
totally destitute. But he had dauntless courage and imperturbable
temper.
To his courage George II., who was not profuse of praise, gave ardent
testimony. 'He is a brave fellow,' he would cry out vehemently, with a
flush and an oath, 'he has more spirit than any man I ever knew;' a
compliment ill-requited by Sir Robert, who declared that his master, if
he knew anything of him, was, 'with all his personal bravery, as great a
political coward as ever wore a crown.' Early in his career as Prime
Minister Sir Robert, who had the art, rare among eighteenth century
politicians, of inditing pointed and pregnant letters, had written to an
Irish Viceroy: 'I have weathered great storms before now, and shall not
be lost in an Irish hurricane.'[104] This was no vain boast; it was the
spirit in which he habitually conducted affairs. In truth Walpole's
courage stands in no need of witness, it speaks for itself; his very
defects arose from it or prove it. His jealousy of ability which
deprived him of precious allies and compelled him to fight
single-handed, his intolerance of independence in his party which had
the same effect, all show the dauntless self-confidence of the man. He
wanted no competitors, no dubious allies, no assistance but that of
unflagging votes or diligent service; for all else he relied on himself
alone.
This great Minister had all the defects of his qualities as well as one
which seemed curiously alien to them. Part of his strength lay in a
coarse and burly, if cynical, geniality. His temper, as we have said,
was imperturbable; we shall see this even in the closing scene of his
ministry; it was even cordial, and sometimes boisterous. He loved to
seem rather a country gentleman than a statesman. He seemed most natural
when shooting and carousing at Houghton, or carousing and hunting at
Richmond. But his appearance was deceptive; he was what the French would
call 'un faux bonhomme,' a spurious good fellow. Good nature perhaps
could hardly have survived the desperate battles and intrigues in which
this hard-bitten old statesman had been engaged all his life. And so
under this bluff and debonair exterior there was concealed a jealousy of
power, passing the jealousy of woman, and the ruthless vindictiveness of
a Red Indian. To the opposition of his political foes he opposed a stout
and unflinching front which shielded a gang of mediocrities; with these
enemies he fought a battle in which quarter was neither granted nor
expected. But his own forces were kept under martial law; anything like
opposition or rivalry within his ranks he crushed in the relentless
spirit of Peter the Great. By these methods he had not merely maintained
an iron discipline among his own supporters, but had himself constructed
by alienation and proscription the opposition to his administration, an
opposition which comprised consummate abilities and undying
resentments. For he had driven from him and united in a league of
implacable revenge almost all the men of power and leading in
Parliament. Politics to them were embodied in one controlling idea; how
to compass the fall, the ruin, the impeachment of Walpole. The undaunted
Minister faced them with confident serenity, though they were not
enemies to be disdained. Pulteney, Wyndham, Chesterfield, and Carteret
were men of the highest ability and distinction. Barnard and Polwarth,
Shippen and Sandys, were from character or intellect scarcely less
redoubtable. Behind them lurked Bolingbroke, excluded, indeed, from
Parliament by the vigilant detestation of Walpole, but guiding and
inspiring from his enforced retirement, the seer and oracle of all the
Minister's enemies, for--
'Princely counsel in his face yet shone,
Majestic, though in ruin.'
Prominent among these stately combatants was an anomalous figure with a
brain as shallow and futile as St. John's was active and brilliant, but
by the nature of things as formidable as Bolingbroke was impotent,
Frederick Prince of Wales. For Frederick was soon to add to the second
position in the country the leadership of the Opposition. The King's
health was supposed to be precarious, though he lived cheerfully and not
ingloriously for another quarter of a century. And the Heir Apparent,
feeling conscious of his advantages, and determined to assert himself,
became the complacent puppet of all the factions opposed to his father's
Government. His Court, indeed, resembled that famous cave to which were
gathered every one that was discontented and every one that was in
distress. All who had been spurned or ousted by Walpole, all who were
under the displeasure of the King, all who saw little prospect of
advancement under the present reign, hastened to rally round the Heir
Apparent. He was soon to employ Pitt about his person. It is well, then,
to pause a moment and consider this prominent and formidable figure.
Frederick, Prince of Wales, is one of the idle mysteries of English
history. The problem does not lie in his being a political leader, in
spite of the general contempt in which he was held by his contemporaries
and associates; for an heir-apparent to the Crown can always, if he
chooses, be a factor in party politics, though it is scarcely possible
that his intervention can be beneficial. But no circumstance known to us
can explain the virulence of aversion with which the King and Queen
regarded him, which was so intense as to be almost incredible. They were
both good haters, and yet they hated no one half so much as their eldest
son. His father called him the greatest beast and liar and scoundrel in
existence. His mother and his sister wished hourly to hear of his death.
This violence of unnatural loathing is not to be accounted for by any
known facts. Frederick was a poor creature, no doubt, a vain and fatuous
coxcomb. But human beings are constantly the parents of coxcombs without
regarding them as vermin. The only conjecture in regard to the matter
which seems to furnish adequate ground for these feelings is that the
King was bred in the narrow school of a little German State, where,
though nothing less than affection was expected between a prince and his
heir, discipline was rigidly observed; so that the conduct of Frederick,
in assuming a position independent and defiant of his father, and in
openly heading an opposition to his Government, was an offence the more
unspeakable and unpardonable as it had been absolutely beyond the limits
of Hanoverian contemplation. There was, it must be confessed, an
hereditary predisposition to this parental relation. The King himself,
when Prince of Wales, had been placed under arrest by his father for the
somewhat venial offence of insulting the Duke of Newcastle. He had
submitted himself to his disgrace, and his opposition had only been
passive and inarticulate; he had never dreamed of forming a faction
hostile to the Crown. His only real crimes had been his right of
succession and a fictitious popularity founded on dislike of his
father's mistresses. And yet his father hated him almost as much as
father ever hated son. It was reserved for George II. to discover a
deeper abhorrence for his own heir. With his views of absolute
authority, a peculiar degree of detestation had to be discovered for a
Prince of Wales who had not merely the inherent vice of heirship
apparent but the gratuitous offence of an active opposition which his
father deemed flagrant rebellion. Given violent temper, ill manners, and
a sort of family tradition, the cause of wrath can best be thus
explained.
Beyond this we know nothing for certain, and presumably shall never know
more. There are some facts, but they are insufficient.
It is said that as a mere boy he gamed and drank and kept a mistress. By
this last scandal the royal family was enabled to present to the world
the unedifying spectacle of grandfather, father, and son simultaneously
living under these immoral conditions; and all three, it is said,
successively with the same woman. But these facts alone would certainly
not have accounted for his father's displeasure. Again, it is narrated
that when his tutor complained of him his mother said that these were
page's tricks. 'Would to God they were, madam,' replied the tutor, 'but
they are rather the tricks of lackeys and knaves.' And tricky Frederick
undoubtedly was from the beginning to the end. But trickiness, though it
was not among the King's faults, and though it would excite his just
contempt, cannot alone have caused the intensity of his hatred.
One if not two of Frederick's escapades were concerned with designs of
marriage. He was discovered on the point of concluding a secret alliance
with Princess Wilhelmine of Prussia, with whom he professed himself in
love, and who afterwards became known to us as Margravine of Bareith; on
another occasion it is said that he was lured by a dowry of 100,000_l._
into a betrothal with Lady Diana Spencer, grand-daughter of Sarah,
Duchess of Marlborough. Both these affairs were interrupted at the last
moment. In both cases the King was irritated by the underhand
proceedings of his son, and by the total lack of a confidence which, as
he probably omitted to remember, he had done nothing to gain. But his
crowning outrage was a monkey-trick, both wanton and barbarous. When he
had at last married a princess of his father's choice, and his wife was
seized with the first pangs of maternity in the King's palace of Hampton
Court, he hurried her off, in her agony and in spite of her entreaties,
to St. James's. At any moment of the journey a catastrophe might have
occurred. What the motive was for this cruel and unmeaning escapade
cannot be guessed, for his own explanations were futile. It was said
that his father suspected him of an intention to foist a spurious child
on his family and that he resented the suspicion. If that were so his
action was exactly suited to confirm it. Whatever his purpose may have
been, the King and Queen, from whom the imminence of the Princess's
situation had been carefully concealed, were naturally and grossly
insulted. The King banished him from his palace and presence, and
forbade the Court to all who should visit him. Nor was there ever an
approach to reconciliation or forgiveness in the fourteen years that the
Prince had yet to live. The King would receive him at Court and would
express the hope that his wife was in good health; that was the extent
of their relations. But though this was the culminating point of his
known misconduct, it would almost seem that there was some more occult
reason which we do not know. We only guess at its existence from the
record of Lord Hardwicke. At the time of this last scandal 'Sir Robert
Walpole,' says the Chancellor, 'informed me of certain passages between
the King and himself, and between the King and the Prince, of too high
and secret a nature even to be trusted to this narrative; but from
thence I found great reason to think that this unhappy difference
between the King and Queen and His Royal Highness turned upon some
points of a more interesting and important nature than have hitherto
appeared.'[105] There, then, is the mystery, without a key, with no room
even for conjecture. But the cause must have been dire that evoked so
deadly a passion of hatred between parents and son.
Those who care to read in detail the coarse and violent expressions of
this unnatural repulsion may glut their appetite in Lord Hervey's
memoirs. One or two such passages will serve as specimens of the rest.
The Queen and Princess Caroline, Frederick's sister, made no ceremony of
wishing a hundred times a day that the Prince might drop down dead of an
apoplexy. Princess Caroline, who, Hervey tells us, 'had affability
without meanness, dignity without pride, cheerfulness without levity,
and prudence without falsehood,' who was in a word an exemplary and
charming person, declared that she grudged him every hour he had to
breathe, and reproached Hervey with being 'so great a dupe as to believe
the nauseous beast' (those were her words) 'cared for anything but his
own nauseous self, that he loved anything but money, that he was not the
greatest liar that ever spoke.' The Queen, not to be outdone, declared
that she would give it under her hand 'that my dear firstborn is the
greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the
greatest beast in the whole world, and that I most heartily wish he was
out of it.'[106] Even on her deathbed she could not be brought to
receive or forgive him. If Lord Hervey, his bitter enemy, can be
credited, this obduracy was not at the last without justification. Lord
Hervey declares that the Prince crowded the Queen's anteroom with his
emissaries to convey to him the earliest information of her condition.
As the bulletins of the Queen's decline reached him, he would say,
'Well, now we shall have some good news; she cannot hold out much
longer.' All this need not be literally believed, but it affords a
picture of family rancour which can scarcely have been equalled in the
history of mankind.
From the time of the public quarrel with his parents the Prince of Wales
gave himself up to political opposition. He wielded, indeed, formidable
weapons of offence. His father was avaricious, secluded, and disliked;
Frederick laid himself out to be thought generous, accessible, and
popular. He knew well that every symptom of national affection for
himself was a stab to the King. He and his family, at a time when French
fashions were all the rage, ostentatiously wore none but English goods.
He trained his children to act Addison's Cato. Nor did he disdain more
social arts. He would go to fairs, bull-baitings, races, and rowing
matches; he would visit gipsy encampments; he became familiar to the
people. He would assist at a fire in London, amid shouts from the mob,
as he and his court alleged, of 'Crown him! crown him!' At Epsom there
is a tradition that when living there he fought a chimney-sweep with his
fists, and erected a monument in generous acknowledgment of his own
defeat.
In private life he was essentially frivolous. When his father's troops
were besieging Carlisle, the Prince had a model of the citadel made in
confectionery, while he and the ladies of the court bombarded it with
sugar-plums. This seems emblematic of his whole career.
But his main and favourite diversion had a graver aspect: it lay in
political cabals of which he was the puppet and the figurehead, and in
forming futile ministries and policies for his own reign. Of these last
a curious example is preserved among the Bedford Papers.[107]
All political malcontents of the slightest importance were sure of a
cordial reception at Leicester House or Kew. There all could warm their
wants and disappointments with the sunshine of royal patronage and the
cheering prospect of a new reign. 'Remember that the King is sixty-one,
and I am thirty-seven,'[108] said Frederick, and this calculation
coloured his whole life. The future was freely discounted and
anticipated in the Prince's circle, so that there, as in the Court of
the Pretender, the faithful adherent might receive some high office to
be enjoyed after the death of the King, but with this substantial
difference: that whereas what James distributed were shadows, the awards
of Frederick required only common good faith and the death of an old man
to make them realities. Bubb for example, the most avid and unabashed of
political harlots, gravely kissed his patron's hand for a Secretaryship
of State, and, according to Walpole, a dukedom, immediately afterwards
nominating his under-secretary, to show the solidity of the arrangement.
Henley, who was afterwards under different circumstances to be
Chancellor, was grievously disappointed to find that Dr. Lee was to have
the seals. And so they snapped and snarled over the spoils, while the
Prince complacently made his appointments, and apportioned the functions
of the future. So far as he was concerned it was all barren enough. His
little projects, his little ambitions, his little ministries, his
political post-obits, were all cut short by the sudden shears of Death.
His councillors and followers were scattered to the winds, and Bubb had
to hasten to make his peace with the powers that be, and to exchange his
contingent Secretaryship of State for an actual Treasurership of the
Navy. The Prince's other post-obits, his debts, were, it would seem,
never paid.[109]
To sum up, with regard to Frederick we have a few certain facts: the
hatred of his parents and sisters, and a singular unanimity of scorn
from his contemporaries. There is not perhaps in existence a single
favourable testimony. We have many portraits, one at Windsor of an
innocent lad in a red coat playing the violoncello with his sisters,
which is pleasant enough; the later ones all stamped with a pretentious
silliness which affirms the verdict of his own day. Then we have the
mysterious intimation of Lord Hardwicke of some deep and sinister cause
for the alienation of his parents. This, however, unsupported and
unexplained, carries us no further, and is merely an excuse for the
unnatural aversion of his family. Beyond that mystery, the word
'fatuous' seems exactly to embody all that we know of this prince; his
appearance, morals, manners, and intellect are all summed up in that
single expression.
On the other hand, there are traits of generosity which are recorded,
there is his apparent popularity, there is the general grief for his
death; but it may well be surmised that it was not difficult for the son
of George II. and the grandson of George I. to be popular and regretted.
On the whole, may we not conclude that the arbitrary discipline of
Hanover in early life made him incurably tricky and untruthful, that he
was an empty and frivolous coxcomb, but not without kindly instincts;
and that his weaknesses and frailties, whatever they may have been, laid
a grave responsibility on the parents who reared and cursed him?