A PERILOUS VICTORY.
[Sidenote: 1737--Incentives to valor]
On Tuesday, February 22d, the debate took place in the House of Commons.
It came on in the form of a motion for an address to the Sovereign,
praying that he would make to the Prince of Wales an independent
allowance of one hundred thousand a year. The motion was proposed by
Pulteney himself. Lord Hervey seems to be surprised that Pulteney, after
having advised the prince not to press on any such motion, should,
nevertheless, when the prince did persevere, actually propose the motion
himself. But such a course is common enough even in our own days, when
statesmen make greater effort at political and personal consistency. A
man often argues long and earnestly in the Cabinet or in the councils of
the Opposition against some particular proposal, and then, when it is, in
spite of his advice, made a party resolve, he goes to the House of
Commons and speaks in its favor; nay, even it may be, proposes it.
Pulteney made a long and what would now be called an exhaustive speech.
It was stuffed full of portentous erudition about the early history of
the eldest sons of English kings. The speech was said to have been
delivered with much less than Pulteney's usual force and fire; and
indeed, so far as one can judge by the accounts--they can hardly be
called reports--preserved of it, one is obliged to regard it as rather a
languid and academical dissertation. We start off with what Henry the
Third did for his son, afterwards Edward the First, when that noble youth
had reached the unripe age of fourteen. He granted to him the Duchy of
Guienne; he put him in possession of the Earldom of {83} Chester; he made
him owner of the cities and towns of Bristol, Stamford, and Grantham,
with several other castles and manors; he created him Prince of Wales, to
which, lest it should be merely a barren title, he annexed all the
conquered lands in Wales; and he created him Governor of Ireland. All
this, to be sure, was mightily liberal on the part of Henry the Third,
and a very handsome and right royal way of providing for his own family;
but it might be supposed an argument rather to frighten than to encourage
a modern English Parliament. But the orator went on to show what
glorious deeds in arms were done by this highly endowed prince, and the
inferences which he appeared to wish his audience to draw were twofold:
first, that Edward would never have done these glorious deeds if his
father had not given him these magnificent allowances; and next, that if
an equal, or anything like an equal, liberality were shown to Frederick,
Prince of Wales, it was extremely probable that he would rush into the
field at the first opportunity and make a clean sweep of the foes of
England.
We need not follow the orator through his account of what was done for
Edward the Black Prince, and what Edward the Black Prince had done in
consequence; and how Henry the Fifth had been able to conquer France
because of his father's early liberality. The whole argument tended to
impress upon the House of Commons the maxim that in a free country, above
all others, it is absolutely necessary to have the heir-apparent of the
crown bred up in a state of grandeur and independency. Despite the
high-flown sentiments and the grandiose historical illustrations in which
the speaker indulged, there seems to the modern intelligence an inherent
meanness, a savor of downright vulgarity, through the whole of it. If
you give a prince only fifty thousand a year, you can't expect anything
of him. What can he know of grandeur of soul, of national honor, of
constitutional rights, of political liberty? You can't get these
qualities in a prince unless you pay him at least a hundred thousand a
year while his {84} father is living. [Sidenote: 1737--Providing for a
Prince] The argument would have told more logically if the English
Parliament were going into the open market to buy the best prince they
could get. There would be some show of reason in arguing that the more
we pay the better article we shall have. But it is hard indeed to
understand how a prince who is to be worth nothing if you give him only
fifty thousand a year, will be another Black Prince or Henry the Fifth if
you let him have the spending of fifty thousand a year more. Walpole led
the Opposition to the motion. Much of the argument on both sides was
essentially sordid, but there was a good deal also which was keen, close,
and clever, and which may have even now a sort of constitutional
interest. The friends of the prince knew they would have to meet the
contention that Parliament had no right to interfere with the Sovereign's
appropriation of the revenues allotted to him. They therefore contended,
and, as it seems to us, with force and justice, that the Parliament which
made the grants had a perfect right to see that the grants were
appropriated to the uses for which they were intended, to follow out the
grants in the course of their application, and even to direct that they
should be applied to entirely different purposes; even, if need were, to
resume them. It would naturally seem to follow from this assumption,
that Parliament had a right to call on the King to make the allowance to
the prince, but it would seem to follow also that the allowance ought not
to be made independent and absolute. For, if the Prince of Wales had an
allowance absolutely independent of the will of any one, he had something
which Pulteney and his friends were contending, as it was their business
just then to contend, that the English Parliament had never consented to
give to the King. On the other hand, it was pointed out with much effect
that there never had been any express regulation in England to provide
that the Prince of Wales should be made independent of his father, and
there was clear good-sense in the contempt with which Walpole treated the
argument that the State dependency upon his father in {85} which the son
of a great family usually lives, must necessarily tend to the debasing of
the son's mind and the diminishing of his intelligence, or that the
dignity and grandeur even of a Prince of Wales could not be as well
supported by a yearly allowance as by a perpetual and independent
settlement. Some of the speakers on Walpole's side--indeed, Walpole
himself occasionally--strove to show their willingness to serve the
prince by utterances which must have caused the prince to smile a grim,
sardonic smile if he had any existing sense of humor. Please do not
imagine--this was the line of observation--that we think one hundred
thousand a year too much for his Royal Highness. Oh dear, no; nothing of
the kind; we do not think it would be half enough if only the nation had
the money to give away. "Why," exclaimed one gushing orator, "if we had
the money the only course we could take would be to offer his Royal
Highness whatever he pleased to accept, and even in that case we should
have reason to fear lest his modesty might do an injury to his generosity
by making him confine his demand within the strictest bounds of bare
necessity." "Were we," another member of the Court party declared, "to
measure the prince's allowance by the prince's merit, as we know no
bounds to the latter, we could prescribe no bounds to the former."
Therefore, as it was totally impossible that the treasury of any State
could reward this extraordinary prince according to his merit, the
speakers on Walpole's side mildly pleaded that they had only to fall back
on the cold and commonplace rules of ordinary economy, and try to find
out what sum the nation could really afford to hand over.
The men who talked these revolting absurdities were saying among
themselves an hour after that the prince was an avaricious and greedy
beast, and were openly proclaiming their pious wish that Providence would
be graciously inclined to rid the world of him. Nothing strikes one as
more painful and odious in the ways of that Court and that Parliament
than the language of sickening sycophancy which is used by all statesmen
alike in public {86} with regard to kings and princes, for whom in
private they could find no words of abuse too strong and coarse, no curse
too profane. Never was an Oriental despot the most vain and cruel
addressed in language of more nauseous flattery by great ministers and
officers of State than were the early English sovereigns of the House of
Hanover. The filthy indecency which came so habitually from the lips of
Walpole, of other statesmen, of the King--sometimes even of the Queen
herself--hardly seems more ignoble, more demoralizing, than the
outpouring of a flattery as false as it was gross, a flattery that ought
to have sickened alike the man who poured it out and the man whom it was
poured over. Poor, stupid George seems to have been always taken in by
it. Indeed, in his dull, heavy mind there was no praise the voice of man
could utter which could quite come up to his perfections. The
quicker-witted Queen sometimes writhed under it.
[Sidenote: 1737--Comparisons]
Walpole, however, did not depend upon argument to carry his point. The
stone up his sleeve, to use a somewhat homely expression, which he meant
to fling at his enemy, was something quite different from any question of
Constitution or prescription or precedent; of the genius of the Black
Prince, and the manner in which Wild Hal, Falstaff's companion, had been
endowed and allowanced into Henry, the victor of Agincourt. Walpole
flung down, metaphorically speaking, on the table of the House the record
of the interview between the Prince of Wales and the great peers who
waited on him, bearing the message of the King. The record set forth all
that had happened: how the King had declared himself willing to provide
at once a suitable jointure for the Princess of Wales; how he had shown
that this had been under consideration, and explained in the simplest way
the reason why the arrangement had been delayed; how his Majesty had
voluntarily taken it on himself that the prince should have fifty
thousand a year absolutely independent of the Sovereign's future action,
and over and above the revenues arising from the duchy of Cornwall, which
his Majesty {87} thinks a very competent allowance, considering his own
numerous issue and the great expenses which do, and which necessarily
must, attend an honorable provision for his whole royal family. And then
the record gave the answer of the Prince of Wales and its peculiar
conclusion; "Indeed, my lords, it is in other hands--I am sorry for it;"
"or," as the record of the peers cautiously concluded, "to that effect."
The reading of this document had one effect, which was instantly invoked
for it by Walpole. It brought the whole controversy down to the question
whether the prince's father or the prince's friends ought to be the
better authority as to the amount which the King could afford to give,
and the amount which the prince ought to be encouraged to demand. It
shrunk, in fact, into a mean discussion about the cost of provisions and
the amounts of the land-tax; the number of children George the Second had
to maintain as compared with the small family George the First had to
provide for; the fact that George the Second had a wife to maintain in
becoming state in England, whereas George the First had saved himself
from the occasion of any such outlay; the total amount left for George
the Second to spend as compared with the total amount which the differing
conditions left at the disposal of his illustrious father. Let us see
what the income of the Prince of Wales was computed to be by his friends
at that time. He had fifty thousand a year allowance. From that, said
his friends, we must deduct the land-tax, which at two shillings in the
pound amounts to 5000 pounds a year. This brings the allowance down to
45,000 pounds. Then comes the sixpenny duty to the Civil List lottery,
which has also to be deducted from the poor prince's dwindling pittance,
and likewise the fees payable at the Exchequer; and the sixpenny duty
amounts to 1250 pounds, and the fees to about 750 pounds, so that
altogether 7000 pounds would have to be taken off, leaving the prince
only 43,000 pounds allowance. Then, to be sure, there was the duchy of
Cornwall, the revenues of which, it was insisted, {88} did not amount to
more than 9000 pounds a year, so that, all told, the prince's income
available for spending purposes was but 53,000 pounds a year. And yet,
they pleaded pathetically, the yearly expense of the prince's household,
acknowledged and ratified by the King himself, came to 63,000 pounds
without allowing his Royal Highness one shilling for the indulgence of
that generous and charitable disposition with which Heaven had so
bounteously endowed him.
[Sidenote: Wealthy King; semi-starved people]
Walpole's instinct had conducted him right. The reading of the message,
which Walpole delivered with great rhetorical effect, carried confusion
into the Tory ranks. Two hundred and four members voted for the Address,
two hundred and thirty-four voted against it. The King's friends were in
a majority of thirty. Archdeacon Coxe in his "Life of Walpole" gives it
as his opinion that the victory was obtained because some forty-five of
the Tories quitted the House in a body before the division, believing
that they were thus acting on constitutional principles, and that the
interference of the House of Commons would be an unconstitutional,
democratic, and dangerous innovation. But it is hardly possible to
believe that the managers of the prince's case could have been kept in
total ignorance up to the last moment of the fact that forty-five Tories
were determined to regard the interference of Parliament as
unconstitutional, and to abstain from taking part in the division. It is
declared to be positively certain that the "whips," as we should now call
them, of the prince's party had canvassed every man on their own side, if
not on both sides. They could not have made up anything like the number
they announced in anticipation to the prince if they had taken into
account forty-five probable or possible abstentions among their own men.
The truth evidently is that the reading of the King's message compelled a
good many Tories to withdraw who already were somewhat uncertain as to
the constitutionalism, in the Tory sense, of the course their leaders
were taking. They would probably have swallowed {89} their scruples but
for the message; that dexterous stroke of policy was too much for them.
How can we--they probably thus reasoned with themselves--back up to the
last a prince who positively refused to listen to the offer of a
compromise spontaneously made by his father?
Money went much further in those days than it does in ours. Fifty
thousand pounds a year must have been a magnificent fortune for a Prince
of Wales in the earlier part of the last century. On the other hand,
George the Second was literally stuffed and bloated with money. He had
between eight and nine hundred thousand a year, and his wife was richly
provided for. Odious bad taste, selfishness, and griping avarice were
exhibited on both sides of the dispute; it would be hard to say which
side showed to the lesser advantage. There was much poverty all this
time in London, and indeed over the whole country. Trade was depressed;
employment was hard to get; within a stone's-throw of St. James's Palace
men, women, and children were living in a chronic condition of
semi-starvation. The Court and the Parliament were wrangling fiercely
over the question whether a king with a revenue of nearly a million could
afford to give his eldest son an extra fifty thousand a year, and whether
a Prince of Wales could live in decency on fifty-three thousand a year.
The patient, cool-headed people of England who knew of all this--such of
them as did--and who hated both king and prince alike, yet put up with
the whole thing simply because they had come to the conviction that
nothing was to be gained by any attempt at a change. They had been
passing through so many changes, they had been the victims of so many
experiments, that they had not the slightest inclination to venture on
any new enterprise. They preferred to bear the ills they had; but they
knew that they were ills, and put on no affectation of a belief that they
were blessings.
The debate in the House of Lords took place on Friday, February 25th.
Lord Carteret proposed the motion for the Address to the King, and went
over much of the {90} same historical ground that Pulteney had traversed
in the Commons. The Duke of Newcastle replied in his usual awkward and
bungling fashion, with the uneasy attitudes and clownish gestures which
were characteristic of him. He was not able to make any effective use of
the King's message, and the Lord Chancellor read it for him. The
division in the House of Lords showed seventy-nine votes and twenty-four
proxies for the King, in all one hundred and three; and twenty-eight
votes and twelve proxies for the prince, in all forty; the King had a
majority, therefore, of sixty-three. Some of the peers, among them Lord
Carteret and Lord Chesterfield, signed a protest against the decision of
the House. The protest is like so many other protests of the Lords--a
very interesting and even valuable State paper, setting forth as it does
all the genuine arguments of the prince's supporters in the clearest form
and in the fewest words. The House of Lords at that time was a more
independent body than it has shown itself in later years. Even already,
however, it was giving signs of that decay as an effective political
institution which had begun to set in, and which was the direct result of
Walpole's determination to rely upon the representative Chamber for the
real work of governing the country. Neither Walpole nor any one else
seemed to care very much about the debate or the division in the House of
Lords. Already discussions in that Chamber, no matter how eloquent and
earnest in themselves, were beginning to assume that academic character
which always, sooner or later, is exhibited where political debate is not
endowed with any power to act directly on legislation.
[Sidenote: 1737--A man of consequence]
Walpole's victory was a very cheap affair in one sense; it cost only 900
pounds, of which 500 pounds were given to one man and 400 pounds to
another. Even these two sums, Walpole used to say, were only advances.
The bribed men were to have had the money at the end of the session in
any case, but they took advantage of the crisis to demand their pay at
once. But in another sense it was a dear, {91} a very dear, victory to
the minister. The consent of the King to the offer of compromise had
been extorted, more than extorted, by Walpole. Indeed, as Walpole often
afterwards told the story, it was on his part not an extortion, but an
actual disregard and overriding of the King's command. The King refused
at the last moment to send the message to the prince; Walpole said the
Peers were waiting to carry it, and that carry it they should, and he
would not allow the King time to retract his former consent, and
thereupon rushed off to the Lords of the Council and told them to go to
the prince with the message. Even the Queen, Walpole said, had never
given a real assent to the policy of the message. When the victory in
the Commons was won, the King and Queen were at first well satisfied; but
afterwards, when the prince became more rude and insolent in his conduct,
they both blamed Walpole for it, and insisted that his policy of
compromise had only filled the head and heart of the young man with pride
and obstinacy, and that he regarded himself as a conqueror, even though
he had been nominally conquered. The King felt bitterly about this, and
the grudge he bore to Walpole was of long endurance and envenomed anger.
The King and Queen would have got rid of him then if they could, Walpole
thought. "I have been much nearer than you think," he said to Lord
Hervey, "to throwing it all up and going to end my days at Houghton in
quiet." But he also told Hervey that he believed he was of more
consequence than any man before him ever was, or perhaps than any man
might ever be again, and so he still held on to his place. No doubt
Walpole meant that he was of more consequence than any man had been or
probably would be in England. He did not mean, as Lord Hervey would seem
to give out, that he believed he was a greater and more powerful man than
Julius Caesar. Lord Hervey's comment, however, is interesting. "With
regard to States and nations," he coldly says, "nobody's understanding is
so much superior to the rest of mankind as to be missed in a week after
they have gone; and, with {92} regard to particulars, there is not a
great banker that breaks who does not distress more people than the
disgrace or retirement of the greatest minister that ever presided in a
Cabinet; nor is there a deceased ploughman who leaves a wife and a dozen
brats behind him that is not lamented with greater sincerity, as well as
a loss to more individuals, than any statesman that ever wore a head or
deserved to lose it." There is a good deal of wholesome, although
perhaps somewhat melancholy, truth in what Lord Hervey says. Perhaps we
ought not to call it melancholy; it ought rather to be considered
cheerful and encouraging, in the national sense. The world, some modern
writer has said, shuts up the shop for no man. Yet there is,
nevertheless, a tinge of melancholy in the thought of a great man
toiling, striving, giving up all his days and much of his nights to the
service of some cause or country, all the while firmly believing his life
indispensable to the success of the cause, the prosperity of the country;
and he dies, and the cause and the country go on just the same.
{93}