CHANGES.
[Sidenote: 1751--"Give us back our eleven days"]
Meanwhile some changes were taking place in political affairs at home
which were full of importance to the coming time. William Pitt had
taken office; not, indeed, an office important enough for his genius,
but still one which gave him an opportunity of making his power felt.
The King still detested him; all the more, perhaps, because it was now
becoming more and more evident that the King would have to reckon with
him as Prime-minister before very long. The stately form of Pitt was,
indeed, already throwing a gigantic shadow before it. Henry Fox, too,
was beginning to show himself an administrator and a debater, and, it
may be added, a political intriguer, of all but consummate ability.
Murray was beginning to be recognized as a great advocate, and even a
great man. Lyttelton was still making brilliant way in politics, but
was even yet hovering somewhat uncertain between politics and
literature, destined in the end to become another illustration of the
career marred for both fields by the effort to work in both fields. On
the other hand, Chesterfield had given up office. He had had a dispute
with his colleagues when he was strongly in favor of making a peace,
and they would not have it, and he left them to go their own way. He
refused the title of duke which the King offered him. He withdrew for
the remainder of his years to private life, saying: "I have been behind
the scenes both of pleasure and business; I have seen all the coarse
pulleys and dirty ropes which exhibit and move all the gaudy machines;
and I have seen and smelt the tallow candles which illuminate the whole
{275} decoration to the astonishment and admiration of the ignorant
multitude." He seldom spoke in Parliament afterwards; he was growing
deaf and weary. In 1751 he broke silence, and with success, when he
delivered his celebrated speech on the reform of the calendar. He was
"coached," as we should say now, by two able mathematicians, the Earl
of Macclesfield and Mr. Bradley. The ignorant portion of the public
were greatly excited by what they considered the loss of eleven days,
and were strongly opposed to the whole scheme. Years later, when Mr.
Bradley was sinking under mortal disease, many people ascribed his
sufferings to a judgment from Heaven for having taken part in that
"impious undertaking."
The "impious undertaking" was a very needed scientific reform in the
calendar, which had long before been adopted in some other countries.
Julius Caesar was the first great regulator of the calendar; his work
in that way was not the least wonderful of his achievements. The
calculations of his astronomers, however, were discovered in much later
times to be "out" by eleven minutes in each year. When Pope Gregory
the Thirteenth came to the throne of the papacy, in 1572, he found that
the eleven minutes had grown by mere process of time to eleven days.
He started a new reform of the calendar, which was adopted at once in
Italy, Spain, and Portugal. It gradually commended itself to France
and Germany, and it was adopted by Denmark and Sweden in 1700. England
only came into line with the reform of the calendar in 1751. The Act
of Parliament which sanctioned the change brought in the use of the
words "new style" and "old style." Only Russia and Greece now of
European countries cling to the old style. But the new style, as we
have said, was bitterly resented by the mob in England, and every one
remembers Hogarth's picture of the patriot drunk in the gutter with his
banner near him bearing the inscription, "Give us back our eleven days."
Chesterfield laughed at the success of his speech on the {276} reform
of the calendar, and made little of it. Perhaps he helped thus to
explain the comparative failure of his whole career. Life was to him
too much of a gibe and a sarcasm, and life will not be taken on those
terms.
Lord Chesterfield was then out of the running, and Lord Granville's
active career had closed. The men of the older school had had their
day; the new men had pushed them from their stools. The age of Walpole
is closed. The age of Chatham is about to open.
[Sidenote: 1751--Fred's epitaphs]
Early in the year 1751 death removed one of the elements of discord
from the family circle of George the Second. The end had come for
Frederick, Prince of Wales. The long, unnatural struggle was brought
very suddenly to a close. On the 12th of March, 1751, the prince, who
had been suffering from pleurisy, went to the House of Lords, and
caught a chill which brought on a relapse. "Je sens la mort," he cried
out on the 20th of March, and the princess, hearing the cry, ran
towards him, and found that he was indeed dead. The general feeling of
the country was perhaps not unfairly represented in the famous epigram
which became the talk of the town:
"Here lies Fred,
Who was alive and is dead.
Had it been his father,
I had much rather;
Had it been his brother,
Still better than another;
Had it been his sister,
No one would have missed her;
Had it been the whole generation,
Still better for the nation.
But since it is only Fred,
Who was alive and is dead,
There's no more to be said."
It is curious to contrast this grim suggestion for an epitaph on the
dead prince with the stately volume which the University of Oxford
issued from the Clarendon Press: "Epicedia Oxoniensia in obitum
celsissimi et desideratissimi Frederici Principis Walliae." Here an
{277} obsequious vice-chancellor displayed all the splendors of a
tinsel Latinity in the affectation of offering a despairing king and
father such consolations for his loss as the Oxonian Muses might offer.
Here Lord Viscount Stormont, in desperate imitation of Milton, did his
best to teach
"The mimic Nymph that haunts the winding Verge
And oozy current of Parisian Seine"
to weep for Frederick.
"For well was Fred'rick loved and well deserv'd,
His voice was ever sweet, and on his lips
Attended ever the alluring grace
Of gentle lowliness and social zeal."
The hind who labored was to weep for him, and the artificer to ply his
varied woof in sullen sadness, and the mariner,
"Who many moons
Has counted, beating still the foamy Surge,
And treads at last the wish'd-for beach, shall stand
Appall'd at the sad tale."
Here all the learned languages, and not the learned languages alone,
contributed their syllables of simulated despair. Many scholastic
gentlemen mourned in Greek; James Stillingfleet found vent in Hebrew;
Mr. Betts concealed his tears under the cloak of the Syriac speech;
George Costard sorrowed in Arabic that might have amazed Abu
l'Atahiyeh; Mr. Swinton's learned sock stirred him to Phoenician and
Etruscan; and Mr. Evans, full of national fire and the traditions of
the bards, delivered himself, and at great length too, in Welsh. The
wail of this "Welsh fairy" is the fine flower of this funeral wreath of
pedantic and unconscious irony.
Poor Frederick had played a little with literature in his idle time.
He had amused himself with letters as he had amused himself with
literary men, and sometimes with rallying a bevy of the maids of honor
to the bombardment of a pasteboard citadel and a cannonade of
sugar-plums. {278} He had written verses; among the rest, a love
tribute to his wife, full of rapture and enriched with the most
outspoken description of her various charms of person, which, however,
he assures us, were nothing to her charms of mind. Probably he was
very fond of his wife; we have already said that it is likely he
carried on his amours with other women chiefly because he thought it
one of the duties of his princely station. Perhaps we may assume that
he must have had some good qualities of his own; he certainly got
little teaching or example of goodness from most of those who
surrounded him in the days when he could yet have been taught.
The new heir to the throne was George, Frederick's eldest son, who was
born in London on June 4, 1738, and was now, therefore, in his
thirteenth year. Frederick's wife had already given birth to eight
children, and was expected very soon to bring forth another. George
was a seven-months' child. His health was so miserably delicate that
it was believed he could not live. It was doubted at first whether it
would be physically possible to rear him; and it would not have been
possible if the ordinary Court customs were to be followed. But the
infant George was wisely handed over to the charge of a robust and
healthy young peasant woman, a gardener's wife, who took fondest care
of him and adored him, and by whose early nursing he lived to be George
the Third.
[Sidenote: 1753--The last of Bolingbroke]
The year 1751, which may be said to have opened with the death of poor
Frederick, closed with the death of a man greater by far than any
prince of the House of Hanover. On December 12th Bolingbroke passed
away. He had settled himself quietly down in his old home at
Battersea, and there he died. He had outlived his closest friends and
his keenest enemies. The wife--the second wife--to whom, with all his
faults, he had been much devoted--was long dead. Pope and Gay, and
Arbuthnot, and "Matt" Prior and Swift were dead. Walpole, his great
opponent, was dead. All chance of a return to public life had faded
years before. New conditions and {279} new men had arisen. He was
old--was in his seventy-fourth year; there was not much left to him to
live for. There had been a good deal of the spirit of the classic
philosopher about him--the school of Epictetus, not the school of
Aristotle or Plato. He was a Georgian Epictetus with a dash of
Gallicized grace about him. He made the most out of everything as it
came, and probably got some comfort out of disappointment as well as
out of success. Life had been for him one long dramatic performance,
and he played it out consistently to the end. He had long believed
himself a formidable enemy to Christianity--at least to revealed
religion. He made arrangements by his will for the publication, among
other writings, of certain essays which were designed to give
Christianity its death-blow, and, having satisfactorily settled that
business and disposed in advance of the faith of coming ages, he turned
his face to the wall and died.
The reign of George the Second was not a great era of reform; but there
was accomplished about this time a measure of reform which we cannot
omit to mention. This was the Marriage Act, brought in and passed by
Lord Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor, in 1753. The Marriage Act
provided that no marriage should be legal in England unless the banns
had been put up in the parish church for three successive Sundays
previously, or a special license had been obtained from the archbishop,
and unless the marriage were celebrated in the parish church. The Bill
provided that any clergyman celebrating a marriage without these
formalities should be liable to penal servitude for seven years. This
piece of legislation put a stop to some of the most shocking and
disgraceful abuses in certain classes of English social life. With
other abuses went the infamous Fleet marriages--marriages performed by
broken-down and disreputable clergymen whose headquarters were very
commonly the Fleet prison--"couple-beggars" who would perform the
marriage ceremony between any man and woman without asking questions,
sometimes not even asking their names, provided {280} they got a fee
for the performance. Men of this class, a scandal to their order, and
still more to the system of law which allowed them to flourish, were to
be found at almost every pothouse in the populous neighborhoods, ready
to ply their trade at any moment. Perhaps a drunken young lad was
brought up to be married in a half unconscious state to some elderly
prostitute, perhaps some rich young woman was carried off against her
will to be married forcibly to some man who wanted her money. The
Fleet parson asked no questions, did his work, and pocketed his
fee--and the marriage was legal. Lord Hardwicke's Act stopped the
business and relegated the Fleet parson to the pages of romance.
[Sidenote: 1759--England's control in North America]
Years went on--years of quiet at home, save for little ministerial
wrangles--years of almost uninterrupted war abroad. The peace that was
patched up at Aix-la-Chapelle was evidently a peace that could not
last--that was not meant to last. If no other European power would
have broken it, England herself probably would, for the arrangements
were believed at home to be very much to her disadvantage, and were
highly unpopular. But there was no need for England to begin. The
Family Compact was in full force. The Bourbons of France were
determined to gain more than they had got; the Bourbons of Spain were
eager to recover what they had lost. The genius and daring of
Frederick of Prussia were not likely to remain inactive. As we have
seen, the war between England and France raged on in India without
regard to treaties and truces on the European continent. There was, in
fact, a great trial of strength going on, and it had to be fought out.
England and France had yet another stage to struggle on as well as
Europe and India. They had the continent of North America. There were
always some disputes about boundaries going on there; and a dispute
concerning a boundary between two States which are mistrustful of one
another is like a flickering flame close to a train of gunpowder. The
renewal of war on the Continent gave for the first time its full chance
to the {281} genius of William Pitt as a great war minister. The
breaking out of war in North America established England as the
controlling power there, and settled forever the pretensions of France
and of Spain. It is not necessary for us in this history to follow the
course of the continental wars. The great results of these to England
were worked out on other soil.
{282}