"AND WHEN HE FALLS----"
[Sidenote: 1741--Motions against Walpole]
Walpole soon found that his enemies were no less bitter against him, no
less resolute to harass and worry him, now that he had stooped to be
their instrument and do their work. Every unsuccessful movement in the
war was made the occasion of a motion for papers, a motion for an
inquiry, a vote of want of confidence, or some other direct or indirect
attack upon the Prime-minister. In the House of Lords, Lord Carteret
was especially unsparing, and was brilliantly supported by Lord
Chesterfield. In the House of Commons, Samuel Sandys, a clever and
respectable country gentleman from Worcestershire, made himself quite a
sort of renown by his motions against Walpole. On Friday, February 13,
1741, a motion was made in each of the Houses of Parliament calling on
the King "to remove the Right Honorable Sir Robert Walpole, Knight of
the most noble Order of the Garter, First Commissioner for executing
the office of Treasurer of the Exchequer, Chancellor and
Under-Treasurer of the Exchequer, and one of his Majesty's most
honorable Privy Council, from his Majesty's presence and councils
forever." In the House of Lords the motion was made by Lord Carteret;
in the House of Commons by Mr. Sandys, who was nicknamed "the
motion-maker." The motion was lost by a large majority in the House of
Lords; and in the House of Commons there were only 106 for it, while
there were 290 against it. This was a victory; but it did not deceive
Walpole. There would soon be a new Parliament, and Walpole knew very
well that the country was already growing sick of the unmeaning war,
and that he was held {186} responsible alike for the war policy which
he had so long opposed, and the many little disasters of the war with
which he had nothing to do. In Walpole's utter emergency he actually
authorized a friend to apply for him to James Stuart at Rome, in the
hope of inducing James to obtain for him the support of some of the
Jacobites at the coming elections. What he could possibly have thought
he could promise James in return for the solicited support it is hard,
indeed, to imagine; for no one can question the sincerity of Walpole's
attachment to the reigning House. Perhaps if James had consented to go
into the negotiations Walpole might have made some pledges about the
English Catholics. Nothing came of it, however. James did not seem to
take to the suggestion, and Walpole was left to do the best he could
without any helping hand from Rome. Lord Stanhope thinks it not
unlikely that King George was fully aware of this curious attempt to
get James Stuart to bring his influence to bear on the side of Walpole.
The elections were fought out with unusual vehemence of partisanship,
even for those days, and the air was thick with caricatures of Walpole
and lampoons on his policy and his personal character. When the
election storm was over, it was found that the Ministry had distinctly
lost ground. In Scotland and in parts of the west of England the loss
was most manifest. Walpole now was as well convinced as any of his
enemies could be that the fall was near. He must have felt like some
desperate duellist, who, having fought his fiercest and his best, is
conscious at last that his strength is gone; that he is growing fainter
and fainter from loss of blood; and conscious, too, that his antagonist
already perceives this and exults in the knowledge, and is already
seeking out with greedy eye for the best place in which to give the
final touch of the rapier's point.
The new Parliament met on December 1, 1741, and re-elected Mr. Onslow
as Speaker. The speech from the throne was almost entirely taken up
with somewhat cheerless references to the war with Spain, and the
debate on {187} the address was naturally made the occasion for new
attacks on the policy of the Government. "Certainly, my Lords," said
Chesterfield, "it is not to be hoped that we should regain what we have
lost but by measures different from those which have reduced us to our
present state, and by the assistance of other counsellors than those
who have sunk us into the contempt and exposed us to the ravages of
every nation throughout the world." This was the string that had been
harped upon in all the pamphlets and letters of the Patriots during the
progress of the war. Walpole had done it all; Walpole had delayed the
war to gratify France; he had prevented the war from being carried on
vigorously in order to assist France; he had obtained a majority in
Parliament by the most outrageous and systematic corruption; he was an
enemy of his country, and so forth. All these charges and allegations
were merely founded on Walpole's public policy. They simply came to
this, that a certain course of action taken by Walpole, with the
approval of Parliament, was declared by Walpole to have been taken from
patriotic motives and for the good of England, and was declared by his
enemies to have been taken from unpatriotic motives and in the interest
of France. It was of no avail for Walpole to point out that everything
he had done thus far had been done with the approval of the House of
Commons. The answer was ready: "Exactly; and there is another of your
crimes: you bribed and corrupted every former House of Commons."
[Sidenote: 1742--Pulteney's attempt to refer]
On January 21, 1742, Pulteney brought forward a motion to refer all the
papers concerning the war, which had just been laid on the table, to a
select committee of the House, in order that the committee should
examine the papers, and report to the House concerning them. This was
simply a motion for a committee of inquiry into the manner in which
ministers were carrying on the war. The House was the fullest that had
been known for many years. Pulteney had 250 votes with him; Walpole
had only 253--a majority of three. Some of the efforts made {188} on
both sides to bring up the numbers on this occasion remind one of
Hogarth's picture of the "Polling Day," where the paralytic, the
maimed, the deaf, and the dying are carried up to record their vote.
Men so feeble from sickness that they could not stand were brought down
to the House wrapped up like mummies, and lifted through the division.
Walpole seems to have surpassed himself in the speech which he made in
his own defence. At least such is the impression we get from the
declaration of some of those who heard it, Pulteney himself among the
rest. Pulteney always sat near to Walpole on the Treasury bench;
Pulteney, of course, not admitting that he had in any way changed his
political principles since Walpole and he were friends and colleagues.
Pulteney offered to Walpole his warm congratulations on his speech, and
added, "Well, nobody can do what you can." Pulteney might afford to be
gracious. The victory of three was a substantial defeat. It was the
prologue to a defeat which was to be formal as well as substantial.
The Patriots were elated. The fruit of their long labors was about to
come at last.
All this was telling hard upon Walpole's health. We get melancholy
accounts of the cruel work which his troubles were making with that
frame which once might have seemed to be of iron. The robust animal
spirits which could hardly be kept down in former days had now changed
into a mournful and even a moping temperament. His son, Horace
Walpole, gives a very touching picture of him in these decaying years.
"He who was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow--for I have
frequently known him snore ere they had drawn his curtains--now never
sleeps above an hour without waking; and he who at dinner always forgot
he was minister, and was more gay and thoughtless than all the company,
now sits without speaking, and with his eyes fixed for an hour
together." Many of his friends implored him to give up the hopeless
and thankless task. Walpole still clung to office; still tried new
stratagems; planned new combinations; racked {189} his brain for new
devices. He actually succeeded in inducing the King to have an offer
made to the Prince of Wales of an addition of fifty thousand pounds a
year to his income, provided that Frederick would desist from
opposition to the measures of the Government. The answer was what
every one--every one, surely, but Walpole, must have expected. The
prince professed any amount of duty to his father, but as regards
Walpole he was implacable. He would listen to no terms of compromise
while the great enemy of himself and of his party remained in office.
[Sidenote: 1742--"The thanes fly from me!"]
The Duke of Newcastle had notoriously turned traitor to Walpole. Lord
Wilmington, whose "evaporation" as Sir Spencer Compton marked Walpole's
first great success under George the Second, was approached by some of
Walpole's enemies, and besought to employ his influence with the King
to get Walpole dismissed. It is said that even Lord Hervey now began
to hold aloof from him. It was only a mere question of time and the
hour. Walpole's enemies were already going about proclaiming their
determination not to be satisfied with merely turning him out of
office; he must be impeached and brought to condign punishment.
Walpole's friends--those of them who were left--made this another
reason for imploring him to resign. They pleaded that by a timely
resignation he might at least save himself from the peril of an
impeachment. Walpole showed a determination which had much that was
pitiable and something that was heroic about it. He would not
fly--bear-like, he would fight the course.
The final course soon came. The battle was on a petition from the
defeated candidates for Chippenham, who claimed the seats on the ground
of an undue election and return. Election petitions were then heard
and decided by the House of Commons itself, and not by a committee of
the House, as in more recent days. The decision of the House was
always simply a question of party; and no one had ever insisted more
strongly than Walpole himself that it must be a question of party. The
Government desired the Chippenham petition to succeed. On some
disputed {190} point the Opposition prevailed over the Government by a
majority of one. It is always said that Walpole then at once made up
his mind to resign; and that the knowledge of his intention put such
heart into those who were falling away from him as to bring about the
marked increase which was presently to take place in the majority
against him. We are inclined to think that he even still hesitated,
and that his hesitation caused the increase in the hostile majority.
He must go--he has to go--people said; and the sooner we make this
clear to him the better. Anyhow, the end was near. The Chippenham
election was carried against him by a majority of sixteen--241 votes
against 225. A note at the bottom of the page of the Parliamentary
Debates for that day says: "The Chippenham election being thus carried
in favor of the sitting members, it was reported that Sir Robert
Walpole publicly declared he would never enter the House of Commons
more." This was on February 2, 1742. Next day the Lord Chancellor
signified the pleasure of the King that both Houses of Parliament
should adjourn until the eighteenth of the month. Everybody knew what
had happened. The long administration of twenty years was over; the
great minister had fallen, never to lift his head again. The
Parliamentary record thus tells us what had happened: "The same evening
the Right Honorable Sir Robert Walpole resigned his place of First
Commissioner of the Treasury and Chancellor and Under-Treasurer of the
Exchequer, which he had held ever since April 4, 1721, in the former of
which he succeeded the Earl of Sunderland, and in the latter Mr.
Aislabie."
That, however, was not the deepest depth of the fall. The same record
announces that "three days afterwards his Majesty was pleased to create
him Earl of Orford, Viscount Walpole, and Baron of Houghton."
"Posterity," says Macaulay, "has obstinately refused to degrade Francis
Bacon into Viscount St. Albans." Posterity has in like manner
obstinately refused to degrade Robert Walpole into the Earl of Orford.
He will be known {191} as Robert Walpole so long as English history
itself is known.
[Sidenote: 1742--The new Administration]
Walpole, then, was on the ground--down in the dust--never to rise
again. Surely it would seem the close of his career as a
Prime-minister must be the opening of that of his rival and conqueror.
Any one now--supposing there could be some one entirely ignorant of
what did really happen--would assume, as a matter of course, that
Pulteney would at once become Prime-minister and proceed to form an
administration. This was naturally in Pulteney's power. But Pulteney
suddenly remembered having said long ago that he would accept no
office, and he declared that he would positively hold to his word. At
a moment of excitement, it would seem, and stung by some imputation of
self-seeking, Pulteney had adopted the high Roman fashion, and
announced that he would prove his political disinterestedness by
refusing to accept any office in any administration. The King
consulted Walpole during all these arrangements, and Walpole strongly
recommended him to offer the position of Prime-minister to Lord
Wilmington. Time had come round indeed--this was the Sir Spencer
Compton for whom King George at his accession had endeavored to thrust
away Walpole, but whom Walpole had quietly thrust away. He was an
utterly incapable man. Walpole probably thought that it would ruin the
new administration in the end if it were to have such a man as Compton,
now Lord Wilmington, at its head. Lord Wilmington accepted the
position. Lord Carteret had desired the post for himself, but Pulteney
would not hear of it. The office of Secretary of State--of the
Secretary of State who had to do with foreign affairs--was the proper
place, he insisted, for a man like Carteret. The secretaries then
divided their functions into a Northern department and a Southern
department. The Northern department was concerned with the charge of
Russia, Prussia, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Poland, and Saxony;
the Southern department looked after France, Spain, Italy, Portugal,
Switzerland, Turkey, {192} and the States along the southern shore of
the Mediterranean. So Carteret became one secretary, and the grotesque
Duke of Newcastle remained the other. The duke's brother, Henry
Pelham, remained in his place as Paymaster, Lord Hardwicke retained his
office as Lord Chancellor, and Mr. Samuel Sandys, who had moved the
resolution calling for Walpole's dismissal, took Walpole's place as
Chancellor of the Exchequer. There seems some humor in the appointment
of such a man as successor to Robert Walpole.
[Sidenote: 1742--The combined four]
Then Pulteney's career as a great Prime-minister is not beginning?
No--not beginning--never to begin. By one of the strangest strokes of
fate the events which closed the career of Walpole closed the career of
Pulteney too. Yet but a few months, and Pulteney ceases as completely
as Walpole has done to move the world of politics. The battle is over
and the rival leaders have both fallen. One monument might suffice for
both, like that for Wolfe and Montcalm at Quebec. Pulteney was offered
a peerage, an offer which he had contemptuously rejected twice before.
He accepted it now. It will probably never be fully and certainly
known why he committed this act of political suicide. Walpole appears
to have been under the impression that it was by his cleverness the
King had been prevailed upon to drive Pulteney into the House of Lords.
Walpole, indeed, very probably made the suggestion to the King, and no
doubt had as his sole motive in making it the desire to consign
Pulteney to obscurity; but it does not seem as if his was the influence
which accomplished the object. Lord Carteret and the Duke of Newcastle
both hated Pulteney, who as cordially hated them. Newcastle was
jealous of Pulteney because of his immense influence in the House of
Commons, which he fancied must be in some sort of way an injury to
himself and his brother; and, stupid as he was, he felt certain that if
Pulteney consented to enter the House of Lords the popularity and the
influence would vanish. Carteret's was a more reasonable if not a more
noble jealousy. He was determined to come {193} to the head of affairs
himself--to be Prime-minister in fact if not in name; and he feared
that he never could be this so long as Pulteney remained, what some one
had called him, the Tribune of the Commons. Once get him into the
House of Lords and there was an end to the tribune and the tribune's
career. As for himself, Carteret, he would then be able to domineer
over both Houses by his commanding knowledge of foreign affairs, now of
such paramount importance to the State, and by his entire sympathy with
the views of the King. The King hated Pulteney--had never forgiven him
his championship of the Prince of Wales--and would be delighted to see
him reduced to nothingness by a removal to the House of Lords. But if
it was plain alike to such men of intellect as Walpole and Carteret,
and to such stupid men as King George and the Duke of Newcastle, that
removal to the House of Lords would mean political extinction for
Pulteney, how is it that no thought of the kind seems to have entered
into the mind of Pulteney himself? Even as a question of the purest
patriotism, such a man as Pulteney, believing his own policy to be for
the public good, ought to have sternly refused to allow himself to be
forced into any position in which his public influence must be
diminished or destroyed. As regarded his personal interests and his
fame, Pulteney must have had every motive to induce him to remain in
the House where his eloquence and his debating power had won him such a
place. It is impossible to believe that he could have been allured
just then, at the height of his position and his renown, by the bauble
of a coronet which he had twice before refused--contemptuously refused.
Probably the real explanation may be found in the fact that Pulteney,
for all his fighting capacity, was not a strong but a weak man.
Probably he was, like Goethe's Egmont, brilliant in battle but weak in
council. All unknown to himself, four men, each man possessed of an
overmastering power of will, were combined against him for a single
purpose--to drive him into the House of Lords--that is, to drive him
out of the {194} House of Commons. His enemies prevailed against him.
As Lord Chesterfield put it, he "shrank into insignificance and an
earldom." We are far from saying that a man might not be a good
minister and a statesman of influence after having accepted a seat in
the House of Lords. But it was beginning to be found, even in
Pulteney's time, that the place of a great Prime-minister is in the
House of Commons; and certainly the place of a tribune of the people
can hardly be the House of Lords. Pulteney was born for the House of
Commons: transplantation meant death to a genius like his. When the
news of his "promotion" became public, a wild outcry of anger and
despair broke from his population of admirers. He was denounced as
having committed an act of perfidy and of treason. He had accepted a
peerage, it was said, as a bribe to induce him to consent to let Robert
Walpole go unimpeached and unpunished. The outcry was quite unjust,
but was certainly not unnatural. People wanted some sort of
explanation of an act which no ordinary reasoning could possibly
explain. Pulteney's conduct bitterly disappointed the Tory section of
the Opposition as well as the populace of his former adorers
out-of-doors. Bolingbroke, who had hurried back to England, found that
all his dreams of a genuine Coalition Ministry, representing fairly
both wings of the forces of Opposition, had vanished with the morning
light. Except for the removal of Walpole, hardly any change was made
in the composition of recent English administration. The Tories and
Jacobites, who had helped so signally in the fight, were left out of
the spoils of victory. Bolingbroke found that he was no nearer to
power than he would have been if Walpole still were at the head of
affairs. Nothing was changed for him; only a stupid man had taken the
place of a statesman. Pulteney appears to have acted very generously
towards his immediate political colleagues, and to have remained in the
House of Commons, where he now had all the power, until he had got for
them the places they desired. Then he was gazetted as Earl of Bath;
and we {195} have all heard the famous anecdote of the first meeting in
the House of Lords between the man who had been Robert Walpole and the
man who had been William Pulteney, and the greeting given by the new
Lord Orford to the new Lord Bath; "Here we are, my lord, the two most
insignificant fellows in England." With these words the first great
leader of Opposition in the House of Commons, the man who may almost be
said to have created the parliamentary part of leader of Opposition,
may be allowed to pass out of the political history of his time.
Many attempts were made to impeach Walpole, as we still must call him.
Secret committees of inquiry were moved for. Horace Walpole, _the_
Horace Walpole, Sir Robert's youngest son, made his first speech in the
House of Commons, in defence of his father, against such a motion. A
secret committee was at last obtained, but it did not succeed, although
composed almost altogether of Walpole's enemies, in bringing out
anything very startling against him. Public money had been spent, no
doubt, here and there very freely for purely partisan work. There
could be no question that some of it had gone in political corruption.
But everybody had already felt sure that this had been done by all
ministries and parties. The report of the committee, when it came at
last, was received with cold indifference or unconcealed contempt.
[Sidenote: 1742-1745--Death of Walpole]
Walpole still kept a good deal in touch with the King. George
consulted him privately, and indeed with much mystery about the
consultations. The King sometimes sent a trusty messenger, who met
Walpole at midnight at the house of a friend. It was indeed a summons
from George which hastened the great statesman's death. The King
wished to consult Walpole, and Walpole hurried up from Houghton for the
purpose. The journey greatly increased a malady from which he
suffered, and he was compelled by pain to have recourse to heavy doses
of opium, which kept him insensible for the greater part of every day
during more than six weeks. When the stupefying effect of the opium
was not on him--that is, for {196} some two or three hours each day--he
talked with all that former vivacity which of late years seemed to have
deserted him. He knew that the end was coming, and he bore the
knowledge with characteristic courage. On March 18, 1745, he died at
his London house in Arlington Street. Life could have had of late but
little charm for him. He had always lived for public affairs and for
power. He had none of the gifts of seclusion. Except for his love of
pictures, he had no in-door intellectual resources. He could not bury
himself in literature as Carteret could do; or, at a later day, Charles
James Fox; or, at a later day still, Mr. Gladstone. Walpole's life
really came to an end the day he left the House of Commons; the rest
was silence. He was only in his sixty-ninth year when he died. It was
fitting that he should lose his life in striving to assist and counsel
the sovereign whose family he more than any other man or set of men had
seated firmly on the throne of England. His faults were many; his
personal virtues perhaps but few. One great and consummate public
virtue he certainly had: he was devoted to the interests of his
country. In the building of Nelson's ships it was said that the oak of
Houghton Woods excelled all other timber. Oak from the same woods was
used to make musket-stocks for Wellington's soldiers in the long war
against Napoleon. Walpole's own fibre was something like that of the
oaks which grew on his domain. His policy on two of the most eventful
occasions of his life has been amply justified by history. He was
right in the principles of his Excise Bill; he was right in opposing
the war policy of the Patriots. The very men who had leagued against
him in both these instances acknowledged afterwards that he was right
and that they were wrong. It was in an evil moment for himself that he
yielded to the policy of the Patriots, and tried to carry on a war in
which he had no sympathy, and from which he had no hope. He was a
great statesman; almost, but not quite, a great man.
[Sidenote: 1744--Death of Pope]
Not very long before Walpole's death a star of all but {197} the first
magnitude had set in the firmament of English literature. Alexander
Pope died on May 30, 1744, at his house in Twickenham, where "Thames'
translucent wave shines a broad mirror," to use his own famous words.
He died quietly; death was indeed a relief to him from pain which he
had borne with a patience hardly to be expected from one of so fitful a
temper. Pope's life had been all a struggle against ill-health and
premature decrepitude. He was deformed; he was dwarfish; he was
miserably weak from his very boyhood; a rude breath of air made him
shrink and wither; the very breezes of summer had peril in them for his
singularly delicate constitution and ever-quivering nerves. He was but
fifty-six years old when death set him free. Life had been for him a
splendid success indeed, but the success had been qualified by much
bitterness and pain. He was sensitive to the quick; he formed strong
friendships, fierce and passionate enmities; and the friendships
themselves turned only too often into enmities. Unsparing with the
satire of his pen, he made enemies everywhere. He professed to be
indifferent to the world's praise or censure, but he was nevertheless
morbidly anxious to know what people said of him. He was as egotistic
as Rousseau or Byron; but he had none of Byron's manly public spirit,
and none of Rousseau's exalted love of humanity. Pope's place in
English poetry may be taken now as settled. He stands high and stands
firmly in the second class: that is, in the class just below
Shakespeare and Milton and a very few others. He has been
extravagantly censured and extravagantly praised. Byron at one time
maintained that he was the greatest English poet, and many vehement
arguments have been used to prove that he was not a poet at all. One
English critic believed he had settled the question forever when he
described Pope as "a musical rocking-horse." Again and again the world
has been told that Pope has disappeared from the sky of literature, but
the world looks up, and behold, there is the star shining just as
before. Many scholars and many poets have scoffed at his translations
of {198} Homer, but generations of English school-boys have learned to
love the "Iliad" because of the way in which Pope has told them the
story; and as to the telling of a story, the judgment of a school-boy
sometimes counts for more than the judgment of a sage. Pope's "Iliad"
and "Odyssey" are certainly not for those who can read the great
originals in their own tongue, or even for those who have a taste
strong and refined enough to enjoy the severe fidelity of a prose
translation. But Pope has brought the story of Achilles' wrath, and
Helen's pathetic beauty, and Hector's fall, and Priam's agony home to
the hearts of millions for whom they would otherwise have no life. We
have no intention of writing a critical dissertation on the poetry of
Pope. One fact may, however, be remarked and recorded concerning it.
After Shakespeare, and possibly Milton, no English poet is so much
quoted from as Pope. Lines and phrases of his have passed into the
common vernacular of our daily life. We talk Pope, many of us, as the
too-often cited _bourgeois gentilhomme_ of Molière talked prose,
without knowing it. There is hardly a line of "The Rape of the Lock"
or "The Dunciad" that has not thus passed into the habitual
conversation of our lives. This of itself would not prove that Pope
was a great poet, but it is a striking testimony to his extraordinary
popularity, and his style is not that which of itself would seem
calculated to insure popularity. The very smoothness and perfection of
his verse make it seem to many ears nothing better than a melodious
monotony. Pope had not imagination enough to be a great poet of the
highest order--the order of creative power. He had marvellous fancy,
which sometimes, as in "The Rape of the Lock" and in passages of the
fierce "Dunciad," rose to something like imagination. Every good
Christian ought no doubt to lament that a man of such noble gifts
should have had also such a terrible gift of hate. But even a very
good Christian could hardly help admitting that it must have been all
for the best, seeing that only for that passion of hatred we should
never have had "The Dunciad."
{199}