danger was now fast approaching himself. Charles the Third of Spain had
early conceived a deadly hatred of England. Twenty years before, when he
was King of the Two Sicilies, he had been eager to join the coalition
against Maria Theresa. But an English fleet had suddenly appeared in the
Bay of Naples. An English captain had landed, had proceeded to the
palace, had laid a watch on the table, and had told his majesty that,
within an hour, a treaty of neutrality must be signed, or a bombardment
would commence. The treaty was signed; the squadron sailed out of the
bay twenty-four hours after it had sailed in; and from that day the
ruling passion of the humbled Prince was aversion to the English name.
He was at length in a situation in which he might hope to gratify that
passion. He had recently become King of Spain and the Indies. He saw,
with envy and apprehension, the triumphs of our navy, and the rapid
extension of our colonial Empire. He was a Bourbon, and sympathized with
the distress of the house from which he sprang. He was a Spaniard; and
no Spaniard could bear to see Gibraltar and Minorca in the possession of
a foreign power. Impelled by such feelings, Charles concluded a secret
treaty with France. By this treaty, known as the Family Compact, the two
powers bound themselves, not in express words, but by the clearest
implication, to make war on England in common. Spain postponed the
declaration of hostilities only till her fleet, laden with the treasures
of America, should have arrived.
The existence of the treaty could not be kept a secret from Pitt. He
acted as a man of his capacity and energy might be expected to act. He
at once proposed to declare war against Spain, and to intercept the
American fleet. He had determined, it is said, to attack without delay
both Havana and the Philippines.
His wise and resolute counsel was rejected. Bute was foremost in
opposing it, and was supported by almost the whole cabinet. Some of the
ministers doubted, or affected to doubt, the correctness of Pitt's
intelligence; some shrank from the responsibility of advising a course
so bold and decided as that which he proposed; some were weary of his
ascendency, and were glad to be rid of him on any pretext. One only of
his colleagues agreed with him, his brother-in-law, Earl Temple.
Pitt and Temple resigned their offices. To Pitt the young King behaved
at parting in the most gracious manner. Pitt, who, proud and fiery
everywhere else, was always meek and humble in the closet, was moved
even to tears. The King and the favorite urged him to accept some
substantial mark of royal gratitude. Would he like to be appointed
governor of Canada? A salary of five thousand pounds a year should be
annexed to the office. Residence would not be required. It was true that
the governor of Canada, as the law then stood, could not be a member of
the House of Commons. But a bill should be brought in, authorizing Pitt
to hold his government together with a seat in Parliament, and in the
preamble should be set forth his claims to the gratitude of his country.
Pitt answered, with all delicacy, that his anxieties were rather for his
wife and family than for himself, and that nothing would be so
acceptable to him as a mark of royal goodness which might be beneficial
to those who were dearest to him. The hint was taken. The same Gazette
which announced the retirement of the Secretary of State announced also
that, in consideration of his great public services, his wife had been
created a peeress in her own right, and that a pension of three thousand
pounds a year, for three lives, had been bestowed on himself. It was
doubtless thought that the rewards and honors conferred on the great
minister would have a conciliatory effect on the public mind. Perhaps,
too, it was thought that his popularity, which had partly arisen from
the contempt which he had always shown for money, would be damaged by a
pension; and, indeed, a crowd of libels instantly appeared, in which he
was accused of having sold his country. Many of his true friends thought
that he would have best consulted the dignity of his character by
refusing to accept any pecuniary reward from the court. Nevertheless,
the general opinion of his talents, virtues, and services, remained
unaltered. Addresses were presented to him from several large towns.
London showed its admiration and affection in a still more marked
manner. Soon after his resignation came the Lord Mayor's day. The King
and the royal family dined at Guildhall. Pitt was one of the guests. The
young Sovereign, seated by his bride in his state coach, received a
remarkable lesson. He was scarcely noticed. All eyes were fixed on the
fallen minister; all acclamations directed to him. The streets, the
balconies, the chimney tops, burst into a roar of delight as his chariot
passed by. The ladies waved their handkerchief's from the windows. The
common people clung to the wheels, shook hands with the footmen, and
even kissed the horses. Cries of "No Bute!" "No Newcastle salmon!" were
mingled with the shouts of "Pitt forever!" When Pitt entered Guildhall,
he was welcomed by loud huzzas and clapping of hands, in which the very
magistrates of the city joined. Lord Bute, in the meantime, was hooted
and pelted through Cheapside, and would, it was thought, have been in
some danger, if he had not taken the precaution of surrounding his
carriage with a strong bodyguard of boxers. Many persons blamed the
conduct of Pitt on this occasion as disrespectful to the King. Indeed,
Pitt himself afterwards owned that he had done wrong. He was led into
this error, as he was afterwards led into more serious errors, by the
influence of his turbulent and mischievous brother-in-law Temple.
The events which immediately followed Pitt's retirement raised his fame
higher than ever. War with Spain proved to be, as he had predicted,
inevitable. News came from the West Indies that Martinique had been
taken by an expedition which he had sent forth. Havana fell; and it was
known that he had planned an attack on Havana. Manila capitulated; and
it was believed that he had meditated a blow against Manila. The
American fleet, which he had proposed to intercept, had unloaded an
immense cargo of bullion in the haven of Cadiz, before Bute could be
convinced that the Court of Madrid really entertained hostile
intentions.
The session of Parliament which followed Pitt's retirement passed over
without any violent storm. Lord Bute took on himself the most prominent
part in the House of Lords. He had become Secretary of State, and indeed
prime minister, without having once opened his lips in public except as
an actor. There was, therefore, no small curiosity to know how he would
acquit himself. Members of the House of Commons crowded the bar of the
Lords, and covered the steps of the throne. It was generally expected
that the orator would break down; but his most malicious hearers were
forced to own that he had made a better figure than they expected.
They, indeed, ridiculed his action as theatrical, and his style as
tumid. They were especially amused by the long pauses which, not from
hesitation, but from affectation, he made at all the emphatic words, and
Charles Townshend cried out, "Minute guns!" The general opinion however
was, that, if Bute had been early practised in debate, he might have
become an impressive speaker.
In the Commons, George Grenville had been entrusted with the lead. The
task was not, as yet, a very difficult one; for Pitt did not think fit
to raise the standard of opposition. His speeches at this time were
distinguished, not only by that eloquence in which he excelled all his
rivals, but also by a temperance and a modesty which had too often been
wanting to his character. When war was declared against Spain, he justly
laid claim to the merit of having foreseen what had at length become
manifest to all, but he carefully abstained from arrogant and
acrimonious expressions; and this abstinence was the more honorable to
him, because his temper, never very placid, was now severely tried, both
by gout and by calumny. The courtiers had adopted a mode of warfare,
which was soon turned with far more formidable effect against
themselves. Half the inhabitants of the Grub Street garrets paid their
milk scores, and got their shirts out of pawn, by abusing Pitt. His
German war, his subsidies, his pension, his wife's peerage, were shin of
beef and gin, blankets and baskets of small coal, to the starving
poetasters of the Fleet. Even in the House of Commons, he was, on one
occasion during this session, assailed with an insolence and malice
which called forth the indignation of men of all parties; but he endured
the outrage with majestic patience. In his younger days he had been but
too prompt to retaliate on those who attacked him; but now, conscious of
his great services, and of the space which he filled in the eyes of all
mankind, he would not stoop to personal squabbles. "This is no season,"
he said, in the debate on the Spanish war, "for altercation and
recrimination. A day has arrived when every Englishman should stand
forth for his country. Arm the whole; be one people; forget everything
but the public. I set you the example. Harassed by slanderers, sinking
under pain and disease, for the public I forget both my wrongs and my
infirmities!" On a general review of his life, we are inclined to think
that his genius and virtue never shone with so pure an effulgence as
during the session of 1762.
The session drew towards the close; and Bute, emboldened by the
acquiescence of the Houses, resolved to strike another great blow, and
to become first minister in name as well as in reality. That coalition,
which a few months before had seemed all powerful, had been dissolved.
The retreat of Pitt had deprived the government of popularity. Newcastle
had exulted in the fall of the illustrious colleague whom he envied and
dreaded, and had not foreseen that his own doom was at hand. He still
tried to flatter himself that he was at the head of the government; but
insults heaped on insults at length undeceived him. Places which had
always been considered as in his gift, were bestowed without any
reference to him. His expostulations only called forth significant hints
that it was time for him to retire. One day he pressed on Bute the
claims of a Whig Prelate to the archbishopric of York. "If your grace
thinks so highly of him," answered Bute, "I wonder that you did not
promote him when you had the power." Still the old man clung with a
desperate grasp to the wreck. Seldom, indeed, have Christian meekness
and Christian humility equalled the meekness and humility of his patient
and abject ambition. At length he was forced to understand that all was
over. He quitted that court where he had held high office during
forty-five years, and hid his shame and regret among the cedars of
Claremont. Bute became first lord of the treasury.
The favorite had undoubtedly committed a great error. It is impossible
to imagine a tool better suited to his purposes than that which he thus
threw away, or rather put into the hands of his enemies. If Newcastle
had been suffered to play at being first minister, Bute might securely
and quietly have enjoyed the substance of power. The gradual
introduction of Tories into all the departments of the government might
have been effected without any violent clamor, if the chief of the great
Whig connection had been ostensibly at the head of affairs. This was
strongly represented to Bute by Lord Mansfield, a man who may justly be
called the father of modern Toryism, of Toryism modified to suit an
order of things under which the House of Commons is the most powerful
body in the state. The theories which had dazzled Bute could not impose
on the fine intellect of Mansfield. The temerity with which Bute
provoked the hostility of powerful and deeply rooted interests was
displeasing to Mansfield's cold and timid nature. Expostulation,
however, was vain. Bute was impatient of advice, drunk with success,
eager to be, in show as well as in reality, the head of the government.
He had engaged in an undertaking in which a screen was absolutely
necessary to his success, and even to his safety. He found an excellent
screen ready in the very place where it was most needed; and he rudely
pushed it away.
And now the new system of government came into full operation. For the
first time since the accession of the House of Hanover, the Tory party
was in the ascendant. The prime minister himself was a Tory. Lord
Egremont, who had succeeded Pitt as Secretary of State, was a Tory, and
the son of a Tory. Sir Francis Dashwood, a man of slender parts, of
small experience, and of notoriously immoral character, was made
Chancellor of the Exchequer, for no reason that could be imagined,
except that he was a Tory, and had been a Jacobite. The royal household
was filled with men whose favorite toast, a few years before, had been
the King over the water. The relative position of the two great national
seats of learning was suddenly changed. The University of Oxford had
long been the chief seat of disaffection. In troubled times, the High
Street had been lined with bayonets; the colleges had been searched by
the King's messengers. Grave doctors were in the habit of talking very
Ciceronian treason in the theatre; and the undergraduates drank bumpers
to Jacobite toasts, and chanted Jacobite airs. Of four successive
Chancellors of the University, one had notoriously been in the
Pretender's service; the other three were fully believed to be in secret
correspondence with the exiled family. Cambridge had therefore been
especially favored by the Hanoverian Princes, and had shown herself
grateful for their patronage. George the First had enriched her library;
George the Second had contributed munificently to her Senate House.
Bishoprics and deaneries were showered on her children. Her Chancellor
was Newcastle, the chief of the Whig aristocracy; her High Steward was
Hardwicke, the Whig head of the law. Both her burgesses had held office
under the Whig ministry. Times had now changed. The University of
Cambridge was received at St. James's with comparative coldness. The
answers to the addresses of Oxford were all graciousness and warmth.
The watchwords of the new government were prerogative and purity. The
sovereign was no longer to be a puppet in the hands of any subject, or
of any combination of subjects. George the Third would not be forced to
take ministers whom he disliked, as his grandfather had been forced to
take Pitt. George the Third would not be forced to part with any whom he
delighted to honor, as his grandfather had been forced to part with
Carteret. At the same time, the system of bribery which had grown up
during the late reigns was to cease. It was ostentatiously proclaimed
that, since the accession of the young King, neither constituents nor
representatives had been bought with the secret service money. To free
Britain from corruption and oligarchical cabals, to detach her from
Continental connections, to bring the bloody and expensive war with
France and Spain to a close, such were the specious objects which Bute
professed to procure.
Some of these objects he attained. England withdrew, at the cost of a
deep stain on her faith, from her German connections. The war with
France and Spain was terminated by a peace, honorable indeed and
advantageous to our country, yet less honorable and less advantageous
than might have been expected from a long and almost unbroken series of
victories, by land and sea, in every part of the world. But the only
effect of Bute's domestic administration was to make faction wilder, and
corruption fouler than ever.
The mutual animosity of the Whig and Tory parties had begun to languish
after the fall of Walpole, and had seemed to be almost extinct at the
close of the reign of George the Second. It now revived in all its
force. Many Whigs, it is true, were still in office. The Duke of Bedford
had signed the treaty with France. The Duke of Devonshire, though much
out of humor, still continued to be Lord Chamberlain. Grenville, who led
the House of Commons, and Fox, who still enjoyed in silence the immense
gains of the Pay Office, had always been regarded as strong Whigs. But
the bulk of the party throughout the country regarded the new minister
with abhorrence. There was, indeed, no want of popular themes for
invective against his character. He was a favorite; and favorites have
always been odious in this country. No mere favorite had been at the
head of the government since the dagger of Felton had reached the heart
of the Duke of Buckingham. After that event, the most arbitrary and the
most frivolous of the Stuarts had felt the necessity of confiding the
chief direction of affairs to men who had given some proof of
parliamentary or official talent. Strafford, Falkland, Clarendon,
Clifford, Shaftesbury, Lauderdale, Danby, Temple, Halifax, Rochester,
Sunderland, whatever their faults might be, were all men of acknowledged
ability. They did not owe their eminence merely to the favor of the
sovereign. On the contrary, they owed the favor of the sovereign to
their eminence: Most of them, indeed, had first attracted the notice of
the court by the capacity and vigor which they had shown in opposition.
The Revolution seemed to have forever secured the state against the
domination of a Carr or a Villiers. Now, however, the personal regard of
the King had at once raised a man who had seen nothing of public
business, who had never opened his lips in Parliament, over the heads of
a crowd of eminent orators, financiers, diplomatists. From a private
gentleman, this fortunate minion had at once been turned into a
Secretary of State. He had made his maiden speech when at the head of
the administration. The vulgar resorted to a simple explanation of the
phenomenon, and the coarsest ribaldry against the Princess Mother was
scrawled on every wall and sung in every alley.
This was not all. The spirit of party, roused by impolitic provocation
from its long sleep, roused in turn a still fiercer and more malignant
Fury, the spirit of national animosity. The grudge of Whig against Tory
was mingled with the grudge of Englishman against Scot. The two sections
of the great British people had not yet been indissolubly blended
together. The events of 1715 and of 1745 had left painful and enduring
traces. The tradesmen of Cornhill had been in dread of seeing their
tills and warehouses plundered by bare-legged mountaineers from the
Grampians. They still recollected that Black Friday, when the news came
that the rebels were at Derby, when all the shops in the city were
closed, and when the Bank of England began to pay in sixpences. The
Scots, on the other hand, remembered with natural resentment, the
severity with which the insurgents had been chastised, the military
outrages, the humiliating laws, the heads fixed on Temple Bar, the
fires and quartering blocks on Kennington Common. The favorite did not
suffer the English to forget from what part of the island he came. The
cry of all the south was that the public offices, the army, the navy,
were filled with high-cheeked Drummonds and Erskines, Macdonalds and
Macgillivrays, who could not talk a Christian tongue, and some of whom
had but lately begun to wear Christian breeches. All the old jokes on
hills without trees, girls without stockings, men eating the food of
horses, pails emptied from the fourteenth story, were pointed against
these lucky adventurers. To the honor of the Scots it must be said that
their prudence and their pride restrained them from retaliation. Like
the princess in the Arabian tale, they stopped their ears tight, and,
unmoved by the shrillest notes of abuse, walked on, without once looking
round, straight towards the Golden Fountain.
Bute, who had always been considered as a man of taste and reading,
affected, from the moment of his elevation, the character of a Maecenas.
If he expected to conciliate the public by encouraging literature and
art, he was grievously mistaken. Indeed, none of the objects of his
munificence, with the single exception of Johnson, can be said to have
been well selected; and the public, not unnaturally, ascribed the
selection of Johnson rather to the Doctor's political prejudices than to
his literary merits; for a wretched scribbler named Shebbeare, who had
nothing in common with Johnson except violent Jacobitism, and who had
stood in the pillory for a libel on the Revolution, was honored with a
mark of royal approbation, similar to that which was bestowed on the
author of the English Dictionary, and of the Vanity of Human Wishes. It
was remarked that Adam, a Scotchman, was the court architect, and that
Ramsay, a Scotchman, was the court painter, and was preferred to
Reynolds. Mallet, a Scotchman, of no high literary fame, and of
infamous character, partook largely of the liberality of the government.
John Home, a Scotchman, was rewarded for the tragedy of Douglas, both
with a pension and with a sinecure place. But, when the author of the
Bard, and of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, ventured to ask for a
Professorship, the emoluments of which he much needed, and for the
duties of which he was, in many respects, better qualified than any man
living, he was refused; and the post was bestowed on the pedagogue under
whose care the favorite's son-in-law, Sir James Lowther, had made such
signal proficiency in the graces and in the humane virtues.
Thus, the first lord of the treasury was detested by many as a Tory, by
many as a favorite, and by many as a Scot. All the hatred which flowed
from these various sources soon mingled, and was directed in one torrent
of obloquy against the treaty of peace. The Duke of Bedford, who had
negotiated that treaty, was hooted through the streets. Bute was
attacked in his chair, and was with difficulty rescued by a troop of the
guards. He could hardly walk the streets in safety without disguising
himself. A gentleman who died not many years ago used to say that he
once recognized the favorite Earl in the piazza of Covent Garden,
muffled in a large coat, and with a hat and wig drawn down over his
brows. His lordship's established type with the mob was a jack boot, a
wretched pun on his Christian name and title. A jack boot, generally
accompanied by a petticoat, was sometimes fastened on a gallows, and
sometimes committed to the flames. Libels on the court, exceeding in
audacity and rancor any that had been published for many years, now
appeared daily both in prose and verse. Wilkes, with lively insolence,
compared the mother of George the Third to the mother of Edward the
Third, and the Scotch minister to the gentle Mortimer. Churchill, with
all the energy of hatred, deplored the fate of his country, invaded by a
new race of savages, more cruel and ravenous than the Picts or the
Danes, the poor, proud children of Leprosy and Hunger. It is a slight
circumstance, but deserves to be recorded, that in this year
pamphleteers first ventured to print at length the names of the great
men whom they lampooned. George the Second had always been the K----.
His ministers had been Sir R---- W----, Mr. P----, and the Duke of
N----. But the libellers of George the Third, of the Princess Mother,
and of Lord Bute did not give quarter to a single vowel.
It was supposed that Lord Temple secretly encouraged the most scurrilous
assailants of the government. In truth, those who knew his habits
tracked him as men track a mole. It was his nature to grub underground.
Whenever a heap of dirt was flung up, it might well be suspected that he
was at work in some foul crooked labyrinth below. Pitt turned away from
the filthy work of opposition, with the same scorn with which he had
turned away from the filthy work of government. He had the magnanimity
to proclaim everywhere the disgust which he felt at the insults offered
by his own adherents to the Scottish nation, and missed no opportunity
of extolling the courage and fidelity which the Highland regiments had
displayed through the whole war. But, though he disdained to use any but
lawful and honorable weapons, it was well known that his fair blows were
likely to be far more formidable than the privy thrusts of his
brother-in-law's stiletto.