WALPOLE YIELDS TO WAR.
[Sidenote: 1739--Horatio Walpole's prediction]
The nation was plunging, not drifting, into war. Walpole himself,
while still striving hard to put off any decisive step, and even yet
perhaps hoping against hope that the people would return to their
senses and leave the Patriots to themselves, did not venture any longer
to meet the demands of the Opposition by bold argument founded on the
principles of justice and wisdom. He had sometimes to talk the same
"tall talk" as that in which the Patriots delighted, and to rave a
little about the great deeds that would have to be done if Spain did
not listen to reason very soon. But he still pleaded that Spain would
listen to reason soon, very soon, and that if war must come sooner or
later he preferred to take it later. That, it need hardly be said, was
not Walpole's expression--it belongs to a later day--but it represents
his mode of argument.
On March 6th the House of Commons met for the purpose of taking the
foredoomed convention into consideration. So intense was the interest
taken in the subject, so highly strung was political feeling, that more
than four hundred members were in their places at eight o'clock in the
morning. Seldom indeed is anxiety expressed in so emphatic and
conclusive a form among members of the House of Commons. Readers may
remember one day within recent years when a measure of momentous
importance was to be introduced into the House of Commons, and when,
long before eight in the morning, every seat in the House was occupied.
On this March 6, 1739, the House resolved itself into committee, and
spent the whole {171} day in hearing some of the merchants and other
witnesses against the convention. The whole of the next day
(Wednesday) was occupied in the reading of documents bearing on the
subject, and it was not until Thursday that the debate began. The
debate was more memorable for what followed it than for itself. In
itself it was the familiar succession of fierce and unscrupulous
attacks on the policy of peace, mixed up with equally fierce but
certainly very well-deserved attacks on the character of the
convention. William Pitt wound up his speech by declaring that "this
convention, I think from my soul, is nothing but a stipulation for
national ignominy; an illusory expedient to baffle the resentment of
the nation; a truce without a suspension of hostilities on the part of
Spain; on the part of England a suspension, as to Georgia, of the first
law of nature, self-preservation and self-defence; a surrender of the
rights and the trade of England to the mercy of plenipotentiaries, and,
in this infinitely highest and sacred point, future security, not only
inadequate, but directly repugnant to the resolutions of Parliament and
the gracious promise from the throne. The complaints of your
despairing merchants, the voice of England, have condemned it; be the
guilt of it upon the head of its adviser! God forbid that this
committee should share the guilt by approving it!"
One point in the debate is worthy of notice. The address to the King
approving of the convention was moved by Horatio Walpole, the
diplomatist, brother of Sir Robert. In the course of his speech
Horatio Walpole declared that the outbreak of war between England and
any great continental State would be certain to be followed by a new
blow struck by the Pretender and his followers. Some of the orators of
Opposition spoke with immense scorn of the possibility of a Jacobite
movement ever again being heard of in England. The Walpoles both
generally understood pretty well what they were talking about. The
prediction of Horatio Walpole came true.
{172}
[Sidenote: 1739--The secession]
The address was carried by 260 against 232. The ministerial majority
had run down to 28. Next day the battle was renewed. According to
parliamentary usage, the report of the address was brought up, and
Pulteney seized the opportunity to make another vehement attack on the
convention and the ministers. He accused the Prime-minister of meanly
stooping to the dictates of a haughty, insolent Court, and of bartering
away the lives and liberties of Englishmen for "a sneaking, temporary,
disgraceful expedient." But the interest of the day was to come. The
address was agreed to by a majority of 262 against 234. This was
exactly the same majority as before, only with both sides slightly
strengthened. Then the principal leaders of Opposition thought the
time had come for them to intervene with a deliberately planned _coup
de théâtre_. Acting, it is understood, under the advice of
Bolingbroke, they had been looking out for an opportunity to secede
from the House of Commons on the ground that it was vain for patriotic
men to try to do their duty to their country in a House of which the
majority, narrow though it was, was yet the absolute slave of such a
minister as Walpole. They hoped that such a step would have two
effects. It would, they believed, create an immense sensation all over
England and make them the heroes of the hour; and they fondly hoped
that it would scare Walpole, and prevent him from passing in their
absence the measures which their presence was unable to prevent. Such,
we have no doubt, were the ideas of Bolingbroke and of Pulteney and of
others; but we do not say that they were the ideas of the man who was
intrusted with the duty of announcing the intentions of his party.
This was Sir William Wyndham; and we do not believe that any hope of
being one of the heroes of the hour entered for a moment into his mind.
He only in a general honest thought, and common good to all, made one
of them. Wyndham rose, and in a speech of great solemnity announced
that he was about to pay his last duty to his country as a member of
that {117} House. What hope, he asked, was there when the eloquence of
one man had so great an effect within the walls of the House of
Commons, and the unanimous voice of a brave, suffering people without
had so little? He implied that the majority of the House must have
been determined "by arguments that we have not heard." He bade an
adieu to Parliament. "Perhaps," he said, "when another Parliament
shall succeed, I may again be at liberty to serve my country in the
same capacity." In other words, if the next Parliament should declare
war on Spain after having got rid of Walpole, then Wyndham and his
friends might be prevailed on to return. "I therefore appeal to a
future, free, uninfluenced Parliament. Let it be the judge of my
conduct and that of my friends on this occasion. Meantime I shall
conclude with doing that duty to my country which I am still at liberty
to perform--which is to pray for its preservation. May, therefore,
that Power which has so often and so visibly before interposed on
behalf of the rights and liberties of this nation continue its care
over us at this worst and most dangerous juncture; while the insolence
of enemies without, and the influence of corruption within, threaten
the ruin of her Constitution."
This speech created, as will readily be imagined, an immense sensation
in the House. A member of the Administration, one of the Pelhams, lost
his head so completely that he sprang up with the intention of moving
that Wyndham be committed to the Tower. Walpole, who was not in the
habit of losing his head, prevented the ardent Pelham from carrying out
his purpose. Walpole knew quite well that something better could be
done than to evoke for any of the Patriots the antiquated terrors of
the Tower. Walpole delivered a speech which, for its suppressed
passion and its stern severity, was well equal to the occasion. The
threat of Wyndham and his friends gave him, he said, no uneasiness.
The friends of the Parliament and the nation were obliged to them for
pulling off the mask--"We can be upon our guard {174} against open
rebellion; it is hard to guard against secret treason." "The faction I
speak of never sat in this House, they never joined in any public
measure of the Government but with a view to distress it and to serve a
Popish interest." Walpole was delighted to have an opportunity of
paying off the Opposition for their constant denunciations of his
alleged subservience to the throne of France, by flinging in Wyndham's
teeth his old devotion to the cause of the Stuarts. "The gentleman,"
he said, "who is now the mouth of this faction was looked upon as the
head of those traitors who, twenty-five years ago, conspired the
destruction of their country and of the royal family to set a Popish
Pretender on the throne. He was seized by the vigilance of the then
Government and pardoned by its clemency, but all the use he has
ungratefully made of that clemency has been to qualify himself
according to law, that he and his party may some time or other have an
opportunity to overthrow all law." For himself, Walpole declared he
was only afraid that the gentlemen would not be as good as their word,
and that they would return to Parliament. "For I remember," he said,
"that in the case of their favorite prelate who was impeached of
treason"--Atterbury--"the same gentleman and his faction made the same
resolution. They then went off like traitors as they were; but their
retreat had not the detestable effect they expected and wished, and
therefore they returned. Ever since they have persevered in the same
treasonable intention of serving that interest by distressing the
Government."
[Sidenote: 1739--The policy of secession]
The House broke up in wild excitement; such excitement as had not been
known there since the Excise Bill or the South Sea Bubble. About sixty
of the Opposition kept for the time their promise of secession. Sir
John Barnard, and two or three other men of mark in the party, had the
good-sense to see that they could serve their cause, whatever it might
be, better by remaining at their posts than by withdrawing from public
life. The secession of a party from the House of Commons can {175}
hardly ever be anything but a mistake. We are speaking now, of course,
of a secession more serious and prolonged than that which concerns a
particular stage of some measure. There have been occasions when the
party in Opposition, after having fought their best against some
obnoxious measure in all its former stages, and finding that further
struggle would be unavailing, consider that they can make their protest
more effectively, and draw public attention more directly to the nature
of the controversy, by withdrawing in a body from the House of Commons,
and leaving the Government alone with their responsibility. Such a
course as this has been taken more than once in our own days. It can
do no practical harm to the public interest, and it may do some service
as a political demonstration. But a genuine secession, a prolonged
secession, must, in the nature of things, do harm. It is wrong in
principle; for a man is elected to the House of Commons in order that
he may represent his constituents and maintain their interests there.
To do that is his plain duty and business, which is not to be put away
for the sake of indulging in any petulant or romantic impulse to
withdraw from an assembly because one cannot have one's way there. No
matter how small the minority on one side of the question, we have seen
over and over again what work of political education may be done by a
resolute few who will not cease to put forward their arguments and to
fight for their cause.
In the case with which we are now dealing Wyndham and his friends only
gratified Walpole by their unwise course of action. They enabled him
to get through some of the work of the session smoothly and easily. A
division hardly ever was known, and of some debates on really important
questions there is positively no record. There was, for instance, a
motion made in the House of Commons on March 30th for leave to bring in
a Bill "to repeal so much of an Act passed in the 25th of King Charles
the Second, entitled An Act for preventing {176} Dangers which may
happen from Popish Recusants, as obligeth all persons who are admitted
to any office, civil or military, to receive the Sacrament of the
Lord's Supper within a time limited by the said Act; and for explaining
and amending so much of the said Act as relates to the declaration
against trans-substantiation." This proposal was supported by some of
Walpole's friends; and, of course, Walpole himself was in favor of its
principle. But he was not disposed in the least to trouble his master
or himself about the repeal of Test Acts, either in the interest of the
Roman Catholics or the Non-conformists, and he opposed the motion.
There was a long debate, but the record says that "the particulars of
it not having been made public, we can give no further account of it,
but that many of the members being retired from Parliament, as before
mentioned, and most of those concerned in the Administration being
against it, the question passed in the negative, 188 noes to 89 yeas."
The Government were also enabled to pass without any resistance in the
House of Commons a very ignoble and shabby little treaty with the King
of Denmark, by which England undertook to pay to Denmark seventy
thousand pounds a year for three years on condition that Denmark should
furnish to King George a body of troops, six thousand men in all, these
troops to be ready at any time when the King of England should call for
them, and he being bound to pay a certain sum "by way of levy-money"
for each soldier. This was not really an English measure at all. It
had nothing to do with the interests of England, or of George as
Sovereign of England. It was merely an arrangement between the King of
Denmark and the Elector of Hanover, and was the settlement or
composition of a miserable quarrel about a castle and a scrap of ground
which George had bought from the Duchy of Holstein, and which Denmark
claimed as her own. The dispute led to a military scuffle, in which
the Danes got the worst of it, and it might have led to a war but that
the timely treaty and the promised annual {177} payment brought the
King of Denmark round to George's views. The treaty met with some
opposition, or at all events some remonstrance, in the House of Lords.
Carteret, however, gave it his support, and declared that he thought
the treaty a wise and a just measure. Carteret was always in favor of
the Hanoverian policy of King George.
[Sidenote: 1739--Walpole has it his own way]
So far, therefore, Walpole had things his own way. He was very glad to
be rid of the Opposition for the time. He might well have addressed
them in words like those which a modern American humorist says were
called out with enthusiasm to him when he was taking leave of his
friends and about to sail for Europe: "Don't hurry back--stay away
forever if you like."
But war was to come all the same. Walpole was not strong enough to
prevent that. The incessant attacks made in both Houses of Parliament
had inflamed the people of Spain into a passion as great as that which
in England was driving Walpole before it. The Spanish Government would
not pay the amount arranged for in the convention. They put forward as
their justification the fact, or alleged fact, that the South Sea
Company had failed to discharge its obligations to Spain. The British
squadron had been sent to the Mediterranean, and the Spaniards declared
that this was a threat and an insult to the King of Spain. The claim
to the right of search was asserted more loudly and vehemently than
ever. Near to the close of the session there was a passionate debate
in the House of Lords on the whole subject. The Opposition insisted
that the honor of England would not admit of further delay, and that
the sword must be unsheathed at once. The Duke of Newcastle could only
appeal to the House on the part of the Government not to pass a
resolution calling upon the King to declare war, but to leave it to the
King to choose his own opportunity. Newcastle feebly pleaded that to
pass a resolution would be to give untimely warning to England's
enemies, and reminded the House that England was likely to have to
{178} encounter an enemy stronger and more formidable than Spain. Lord
Hardwicke and Lord Scarborough could only urge on the House the
prudence and propriety of leaving the time and manner of action in the
hands of the Ministry, in the full assurance that the ministers would
do all that the nation desired. In other words, the ministers were
already pledged to war. The session was brought to an end on June
14th, and on October 19th England declared war against Spain. The
proclamation was greeted with the wildest outburst of popular
enthusiasm; an enthusiasm which at the time seemed to run through all
orders and classes. Joy-bells rang out their inspiring chimes from
every church. Exulting crowds shouted in a stentorian chorus of
delight. Cities flamed with illuminations at night. The Prince of
Wales and some of the leaders of the Opposition took part in the public
demonstration. The Prince stopped at the door of a tavern in Fleet
Street, as if he were another Prince Hal carousing with his mates, and
called for a goblet of wine, which he drank to the toast of coming
victory. The bitter words of Walpole have indeed been often quoted,
but they cannot be omitted here: "They may ring their bells now; before
long they will be wringing their hands." Walpole was thinking, no
doubt, of the Family Compact, and of "the King over the Water."
Parliament met in November, 1739, and the seceders were all in their
places again. They had been growing heartily sick of secession and
inactivity, and they insisted on regarding the declaration of war
against Spain as a justification of their return to parliamentary life.
Pulteney made himself their spokesman in the debate on the Address.
"Our step," he said, meaning their secession, "is so fully justified by
the declaration of war, so universally approved, that any further
vindication of it would be superfluous." They seceded when they felt
that their opposition was ineffectual, and that their presence was only
made use of to give the appearance of a fair debate to that which had
already been ratified. "The {179} state of affairs is now changed; the
measures of the ministers are altered; and the same regard for the
honor and welfare of their country that determined these gentlemen to
withdraw has now brought them hither once more, to give their advice
and assistance in those measures which they then pointed out as the
only means of asserting and retrieving them." Walpole's reply was a
little ungracious. It was, in effect, that he thought the country
could have done very well without the services of the honorable
members; that they never would have been missed; and that the nation
was generally wide-awake to the fact that the many useful and popular
measures passed towards the close of the last session owed their
passing to the happy absence from Parliament of Pulteney and his
friends. One might well excuse Walpole if he became sometimes a little
impatient of the attitudinizing and the vaporing of the Patriots.
[Sidenote: 1739-1740--Death of Wyndham]
One of the Patriots was not long to trouble Walpole. On July 17, 1740,
Sir William Wyndham died. Wyndham was a man of honor and a man of
intellect. We have already in this history described his abilities and
his character, his political purity, his personal consistency. He had
always been in poor health; his incessant parliamentary work certainly
could not have tended to improve his physical condition; and he was but
fifty-three years old when he died. Had he lived yet a little longer
he must have taken high office in a new administration, and he might
have proved himself a statesman as well as a party leader and a
parliamentary orator. Perhaps, on the whole, it is better for his fame
that he should have been spared the test. It proved too much for
Carteret. We may give Bolingbroke credit for sincerity when he poured
out, in letter after letter, his lament for Wyndham's death. There is
something, however, characteristic of the age and the man in
Bolingbroke's instant assumption that Walpole must regard the death as
a fine stroke of good-luck for himself. "What a star has our
Minister," Bolingbroke wrote to a friend--"Wyndham dead!" It seems
strange {180} that Bolingbroke should not even then have been able to
see that the star of the great minister was about to set. The death of
Wyndham brought Walpole no profit; gave him no security. But Wyndham's
premature end withdrew a picturesque and a chivalric figure from the
life of the House of Commons. He was one of the few, the very few,
really unselfish and high-minded men who then occupied a prominent
position in Parliament. He was not fighting for his own hand. He was
not a mere partisan. He had enough of the statesman in him to be able
to accept established facts, and not to argue with the inexorable. He
was not a scholar like Carteret, or an orator like Bolingbroke; he was
not an ascetic; but he had stainless political integrity, and was a
true friend to his friends.
[Sidenote: 1740--Walpole's fatal mistake]
Walpole committed the great error of his life when he consented to
accept the war policy which his enemies had proclaimed, and which he
had so long resisted. Even if we consider his conduct not as a
question of principle, but only as one of mere expediency, it must
still be condemned. No statesman is likely to be able to conduct a
great war whose heart is all the time filled only with a longing for
peace. Walpole was perhaps less likely than any other statesman to
make a war minister. He could not throw his heart into the work. He
went to it because he was driven to it. It was simply a choice between
declaring war and resigning office, and he merely preferred to declare
war. This is not the temper, these are not the conditions, for
carrying out a policy of war. But, as a question of principle,
Walpole's conduct admits of no defence. His plain duty was to refuse
to administer a policy of which he did not approve, and to leave the
responsibility of the war to those who did approve of it. It is said
that he tendered his resignation to the King; that the King implored
Walpole to stand by him--not to desert him in that hour of need--and
that Walpole at last consented to remain in office. This may possibly
be true; some such form may have been gone through. But it does not
alter the historical judgment about Walpole's {181} action. Walpole
ought not to have gone through any forms at such a time. He hated the
war policy; he knew that he was not a war minister; he ought to have
refused to administer such a policy, and have stood by his refusal. It
is said that, in his conversation with the King, Walpole pointed out
that to the minister would be attributed every disaster that might
occur during a war, his opposition to which would always be considered
a crime. But would there be anything very unfair or unreasonable in
that? When a statesman who has fought hard against a war policy
suddenly yields to it, and consents to put it into action, would it be
unreasonable, if disaster should occur, that his enemies should say,
"This comes of trying to conduct a war in which you have no heart or
spirit?" Burke passes severe censure even on Walpole's manner of
carrying on his opposition to the war party. "Walpole," says Burke,
"never manfully put forward the strength of his cause; he temporized;
he managed; and, adopting very nearly the sentiments of his
adversaries, he opposed their inferences. This, for a political
commander, is the choice of a weak post. His adversaries had the best
of the argument as he handled it; not as the reason and justice of his
cause enabled him to manage it." Then Burke adds this emphatic
sentence: "I say this after having seen, and with some care examined,
the original documents concerning certain important transactions of
those times; they perfectly satisfied me of the extreme injustice of
that war, and of the falsehood of the colors which, to his own ruin,
and guided by a mistaken policy, he suffered to be daubed over that
measure." To his own ruin? Yes, truly. The consequence of Walpole's
surrender was to himself and his political career fatal--irretrievable.
His wrong-doing brought its heavy punishment along with it. He has yet
to struggle for a short while against fate and his own fault; he has
still to receive a few successive humiliations before the great and
final fall. But the day of his destiny is over. For all real work his
career may be said to have closed on the day when he consented to
remain in {182} office and become the instrument of his enemies. With
that day he passed out of the real world and life of politics, and
became as a shadow among shadows.
We need not trouble ourselves much about the war with Spain. On
neither side of the struggle was anything done which calls for grave
historical notice. Every little naval success one of our admirals
accomplished in the American seas, as they were then called, was
glorified as if it had been an anticipated Trafalgar; and our admirals
accomplished blunders and failures as well as petty victories. The
quarrel very soon became swallowed up in the great war which broke out
on the death of Charles the Sixth of Spain, and the occupation of
Silesia by Frederick of Prussia. England lent a helping hand in the
great war, but its tale does not belong to English history. Two
predictions of Walpole's were very quickly realized. France almost
immediately took part with Spain, in accordance with the terms of the
Family Compact. In 1740 an organization was got up in Scotland by a
number of Jacobite noblemen and other gentlemen, pledging themselves to
stake fortune and life on the Stuart cause whenever its standard,
supported by foreign auxiliaries, should be raised in Great Britain.
This was the shadow cast before by the coming events of
"forty-five"--events which Walpole was not destined to see.
[Sidenote: 1743--George at Dettingen]
One link of personal interest connects England with the war. George
sent a body of British and Hanoverian troops into the field to support
Maria Theresa of Hungary. The troops were under the command of Lord
Stair, the veteran soldier and diplomatist, whose brilliant career has
been already described in this history. George himself joined Lord
Stair and fought at the battle of Dettingen, where the French were
completely defeated; one of the few creditable events of the war, so
far as English arms were concerned. George behaved with great courage
and spirit. If the poor, stupid, puffy, plucky little man did but know
what a strange, picturesque, memorable figure he was as he stood up
against the enemy at that battle of Dettingen! {183} The last king of
England who ever appeared with his army in the battle-field! There, as
he gets down off his unruly horse, determined to trust to his own stout
legs--because, as he says, they will not run away--there is the last
successor of the Williams, and the Edwards, and the Henrys; the last
successor of the Conquerer, and Edward the First, and the Black Prince,
and Henry the Fourth, and Henry of Agincourt, and William of Nassau;
the last English king who faces a foe in battle. With him went out, in
this country, the last tradition of the old and original duty and right
of royalty--the duty and the right to march with the national army in
war. A king in older days owed his kingship to his capacity for the
brave squares of war. In other countries the tradition lingers still.
A continental sovereign, even if he have not really the generalship to
lead an army, must appear on the field of battle, and at least seem to
lead it, and he must take his share of danger with the rest. But in
England the very idea has died out, never in all probability to come
back to life again. If one were to follow some of the examples set us
in classical imaginings, we might fancy the darkening clouds on the
west, where the sun has sunk over the battlefield, to be the phantom
shapes of the great English kings who led their people and their armies
in the wars. Unkingly, indeed unheroic, little of kin with them they
might well have thought that panting George; and yet they might have
looked on him with interest as the last of their proud race.
We have been anticipating a little; let us anticipate a little more and
say what came of the war, so far as the claims originally made by
England, or rather by the Patriots, were concerned. When peace was
arranged, nearly ten years after, the _asiento_ was renewed for four
years, and not one word was said in the treaty about Spain renouncing
the right of search. The great clamor of the Patriots had been that
Spain must be made to proclaim publicly her renunciation of the right
of search; and when a treaty of settlement came to be drawn up not a
{184} sentence was inserted about the right of search, and no English
statesman troubled his head about the matter. The words of Burke,
taken out of one of his writings from which a quotation has already
been made, form the most fitting epitaph on the war as it first broke,
out--the war of Jenkins's ear. "Some years after it was my fortune,"
says Burke, "to converse with many of the principal actors against that
minister (Walpole), and with those who principally excited that clamor.
None of them--no, not one--did in the least defend the measure or
attempt to justify their conduct. They condemned it as freely as they
would have done in commenting upon any proceeding in history in which
they were totally unconcerned." Let it not be forgotten, however,
that, while this is a condemnation of the Patriots, it is no less a
condemnation of Walpole. The policy which none of them could
afterwards defend, which he himself had always condemned and
reprobated, he nevertheless undertook to carry out rather than submit
to be driven from office. Schiller in one of his dramas mourns over
the man who stakes reputation, health, and all upon success--and no
success in the end. It was to be thus with Walpole.
{185}