MODERN ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
ENGLAND AND ITS EMPIRE
1760-1767
[Sidenote: The Seven Years' War.]
Never had England played so great a part in the history of mankind as in
the year 1759. It was a year of triumphs in every quarter of the world.
In September came the news of Minden, and of a victory off Lagos. In
October came tidings of the capture of Quebec. November brought word of
the French defeat at Quiberon. "We are forced to ask every morning what
victory there is," laughed Horace Walpole, "for fear of missing one."
But it was not so much in the number as in the importance of its
triumphs that the Seven Years' War stood and remains still without a
rival. It is no exaggeration to say that three of its many victories
determined for ages to come the destinies of mankind. With that of
Rossbach began the re-creation of Germany, the revival of its political
and intellectual life, the long process of its union under the
leadership of Prussia and Prussia's kings. With that of Plassey the
influence of Europe told for the first time since the days of Alexander
on the nations of the East. The world, in Burke's gorgeous phrase, "saw
one of the races of the north-west cast into the heart of Asia new
manners, new doctrines, new institutions." With the triumph of Wolfe on
the Heights of Abraham began the history of the United States. By
removing an enemy whose dread had knit the colonists to the mother
country, and by breaking through the line with which France had barred
them from the basin of the Mississippi, Pitt laid the foundation of the
great republic of the west.
[Sidenote: England a World-Power.]
Nor were these triumphs less momentous to Britain. The Seven Years' War
is in fact a turning-point in our national history, as it is a
turning-point in the history of the world. Till now the relative weight
of the European states had been drawn from their possessions within
Europe itself. Spain, Portugal, and Holland indeed had won a dominion in
other continents; and the wealth which two of these nations had derived
from their colonies had given them for a time an influence among their
fellow-states greater than that which was due to their purely European
position. But in the very years during which her rule took firm hold in
South America, Spain fell into a decay at home which prevented her
empire over sea from telling directly on the balance of power; while the
strictly commercial character of the Dutch settlements robbed them of
political weight. France in fact was the first state to discern the new
road to greatness which lay without European bounds; and the efforts of
Dupleix and Montcalm aimed at the building up of an empire which would
have lifted her high above her European rivals. The ruin of these hopes
in the Seven Years' War was the bitterest humiliation to which French
ambition has ever bowed. But it was far from being all that France had
to bear. For not only had the genius of Pitt cut her off from the chance
of rising into a world-power, and prisoned her again within the limits
of a single continent, but it had won for Britain the position that
France had lost. From the close of the Seven Years' War it mattered
little whether England counted for less or more with the nations around
her. She was no longer a mere European power; she was no longer a rival
of Germany or France. Her future action lay in a wider sphere than that
of Europe. Mistress of Northern America, the future mistress of India,
claiming as her own the empire of the seas, Britain suddenly towered
high above nations whose position in a single continent doomed them to
comparative insignificance in the after-history of the world.
[Sidenote: England in the Pacific.]
It is this that gives William Pitt so unique a position among our
statesmen. His figure in fact stands at the opening of a new epoch in
English history--in the history not of England only, but of the English
race. However dimly and imperfectly, he alone among his fellows saw that
the struggle of the Seven Years' War was a struggle of a wholly
different order from the struggles that had gone before it. He felt that
the stake he was playing for was something vaster than Britain's
standing among the powers of Europe. Even while he backed Frederick in
Germany, his eye was not on the Weser, but on the Hudson and the St.
Lawrence. "If I send an army to Germany," he replied in memorable words
to his assailants, "it is because in Germany I can conquer America!" But
greater even than Pitt's statesmanship was the conviction on which his
statesmanship rested. He believed in Englishmen, and in the might of
Englishmen. At a moment when few hoped that England could hold her own
among the nations of Europe, he called her not only to face Europe in
arms, but to claim an empire far beyond European bounds. His faith, his
daring, called the English people to a sense of the destinies that lay
before it. And once roused, the sense of these destinies could never be
lost. The war indeed was hardly ended when a consciousness of them
showed itself in the restlessness with which our seamen penetrated into
far-off seas. With England on one side and her American colonies on the
other, the Atlantic was dwindling into a mere strait within the British
Empire; but beyond it to the westward lay a reach of waters where the
British flag was almost unknown. The vast ocean which parts Asia from
America had been discovered by a Spaniard and first traversed by a
Portuguese; as early indeed as the sixteenth century Spanish settlements
spread along its eastern shore and a Spanish galleon crossed it year by
year from Acapulco to the Philippines. But no effort was made by Spain
to explore the lands that broke its wide expanse; and though Dutch
voyagers, coming from the eastward, penetrated its waters and first
noted the mighty continent that bore from that hour the name of New
Holland, no colonists followed in the track of Tasman or Van Diemen. It
was not till another century had gone by indeed that Europe again turned
her eyes to the Pacific. But in the very year which followed the Peace
of Paris, in 1764, two English ships were sent on a cruise of discovery
to the Straits of Magellan.
[Sidenote: Captain Cook.]
"Nothing," ran the instructions of their commander, Commodore Byron,
"nothing can redound more to the honour of this nation as a maritime
power, to the dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and to the
advancement of the trade and navigation thereof, than to make
discoveries of countries hitherto unknown." Byron himself hardly sailed
beyond Cape Horn; but three years later a second English seaman, Captain
Wallis, succeeded in reaching the central island of the Pacific and in
skirting the coral-reefs of Tahiti, and in 1768 a more famous mariner
traversed the great ocean from end to end. At first a mere ship-boy on a
Whitby collier, James Cook had risen to be an officer in the royal navy,
and had piloted the boats in which Wolfe mounted the St. Lawrence to the
Heights of Abraham. On the return of Wallis he was sent in a small
vessel with a crew of some eighty men and a few naturalists to observe
the transit of Venus at Tahiti, and to explore the seas that stretched
beyond it. After a long stay at Tahiti Cook sailed past the Society
Isles into the heart of the Pacific and reached at the further limits of
that ocean the two islands, as large as his own Britain, which make up
New Zealand. Steering northward from New Zealand over a thousand miles
of sea he touched at last the coast of the great "Southern Land" or
Australia, on whose eastern shore, from some fancied likeness to the
district at home on which he had gazed as he set sail, he gave the name
of New South Wales. In two later voyages Cook traversed the same waters,
and discovered fresh island groups in their wide expanse. But his work
was more than a work of mere discovery. Wherever he touched, in New
Zealand, in Australia, he claimed the soil for the English Crown. The
records which he published of his travels not only woke the interest of
Englishmen in these far-off islands, in their mighty reaches of deep
blue waters, where lands as big as Britain die into mere specks on the
huge expanse, in the coral-reefs, the palms, the bread-fruit of Tahiti,
the tattooed warriors of New Zealand, the gum-trees and kangaroos of the
Southern Continent, but they familiarized them more and more with the
sense of possession, with the notion that this strange world of wonders
was their own, and that a new earth was open in the Pacific for the
expansion of the English race.
[Sidenote: Britain and its Empire.]
Cook in fact pointed out the fitness of New Holland for English
settlement; and projects of its occupation, and of the colonization of
the Pacific islands by English emigrants, became from that moment, in
however vague and imperfect a fashion, the policy of the English crown.
Statesmen and people alike indeed felt the change in their country's
attitude. Great as Britain seemed to Burke, it was now in itself "but
part of a great empire, extended by our virtue and our fortune to the
furthest limits of the east and the west." Its parliament no longer
looked on itself as the local legislature of England and Scotland; it
claimed, in the words of the same great political thinker, "an imperial
character, in which as from the throne of heaven she superintends all
the several inferior legislatures, and guides and controls them all,
without annihilating any." Its people, steeped in the commercial ideas
of the time, saw in the growth of such a dominion, the monopoly of
whose trade was reserved to the mother country, a source of boundless
wealth. The trade with America alone was, in 1772, within less than
half-a-million of being equal to what England carried on with the whole
world at the beginning of the century. So rapid had been its growth that
since the opening of the eighteenth century it had risen from a value of
five hundred thousand pounds to one of six millions, and whereas the
colonial trade then formed but a twelfth part of English commerce, it
had now mounted to a third. To guard and preserve so vast and lucrative
a dominion, to vindicate its integrity alike against outer foes and
inner disaffection, to strengthen its unity by drawing closer the bonds,
whether commercial or administrative, which linked its various parts to
the mother country, became from this moment not only the aim of British
statesmen, but the resolve of the British people.
[Sidenote: England and America.]
And at this moment there were grave reasons why this resolve should take
an active form. Strong as the attachment of the Americans to Britain
seemed at the close of the war, keen lookers-on like the French
minister, the Duc de Choiseul, saw in the very completeness of Pitt's
triumph a danger to their future union. The presence of the French in
Canada, their designs in the west, had thrown America for protection on
the mother country. But with the conquest of Canada all need of
protection was removed. The attitude of England towards its distant
dependency became one of simple possession; and the differences of
temper, the commercial and administrative disputes, which had long
existed as elements of severance, but had been thrown into the
background till now by the higher need for union, started into a new
prominence. Day by day indeed the American colonies found it harder to
submit to the meddling of the mother country with their self-government
and their trade. A consciousness of their destinies was stealing in upon
thoughtful men, and spread from them to the masses around them. At this
very moment the quick growth of population in America moved John Adams,
then a village schoolmaster of Massachusetts, to lofty forebodings of
the future of the great people over whom he was to be called to rule.
"Our people in another century," he wrote, "will be more numerous than
England itself. All Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way
to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us." The sense
that such an independence was drawing nearer spread even to Europe.
"Fools," said a descendant of William Penn, "are always telling their
fears that the colonies will set up for themselves." Philosophers
however were pretty much of the same mind on this subject with the
fools. "Colonies are like fruits," wrote the foreseeing Turgot, "which
cling to the tree only till they ripen. As soon as America can take
care of itself it will do what Carthage did." But from the thought of
separation almost every American turned as yet with horror. The
Colonists still looked to England as their home. They prided themselves
on their loyalty; and they regarded the difficulties which hindered
complete sympathy between the settlements and the mother country as
obstacles which time and good sense could remove. England on the other
hand looked on America as her noblest possession. It was the wealth, the
growth of this dependency which more than all the victories of her arms
was lifting her to a new greatness among the nations. It was the trade
with it which had doubled English commerce in half-a-century. Of the
right of the mother country to monopolize this trade, to deal with this
great people as its own possession, no Englishman had a doubt. England,
it was held, had planted every colony. It was to England that the
Colonists owed not their blood only, but the free institutions under
which they had grown to greatness. English arms had rescued them from
the Indians, and broken the iron barrier with which France was holding
them back from the West. In the war which was drawing to a close England
had poured out her blood and gold without stint in her children's cause.
Of the debt which was mounting to a height unknown before no small part
was due to her struggle on behalf of America. And with this sense of
obligation mingled a sense of ingratitude. It was generally held that
the wealthy Colonists should do something to lighten the load of this
debt from the shoulders of the mother country. But it was known that all
proposals for American taxation would be bitterly resisted. The monopoly
of American trade was looked on as a part of an Englishman's birthright.
Yet the Colonists not only murmured at this monopoly but evaded it in
great part by a wide system of smuggling. And behind all these
grievances lay an uneasy sense of dread at the democratic form which the
government and society of the colonies had taken. The governors sent
from England wrote back words of honest surprise and terror at the
"levelling principles" of the men about them. To statesmen at home the
temper of the colonial legislatures, their protests, their bickerings
with the governors and with the Board of Trade, the constant refusal of
supplies when their remonstrances were set aside, seemed all but
republican.
[Sidenote: George the Third.]
To check this republican spirit, to crush all dreams of severance, and
to strengthen the unity of the British Empire by drawing closer the
fiscal and administrative bonds which linked the colonies to the mother
country, was one of the chief aims with which George the Third mounted
the throne on the death of his grandfather George the Second, in 1760.
But it was far from being his only aim. For the first and last time
since the accession of the House of Hanover England saw a king who was
resolved to play a part in English politics; and the part which George
succeeded in playing was undoubtedly a memorable one. During the first
ten years of his reign he managed to reduce government to a shadow, and
to turn the loyalty of his subjects at home into disaffection. Before
twenty years were over he had forced the American colonies into revolt
and independence, and brought England to what then seemed the brink of
ruin. Work such as this has sometimes been done by very great men, and
often by very wicked and profligate men; but George was neither
profligate nor great. He had a smaller mind than any English king before
him save James the Second. He was wretchedly educated, and his natural
powers were of the meanest sort. Nor had he the capacity for using
greater minds than his own by which some sovereigns have concealed their
natural littleness. On the contrary, his only feeling towards great men
was one of jealousy and hate. He longed for the time when "decrepitude
or death" might put an end to Pitt; and even when death had freed him
from "this trumpet of sedition," he denounced the proposal for a public
monument to the great statesman as "an offensive measure to me
personally." But dull and petty as his temper was, he was clear as to
his purpose and obstinate in the pursuit of it. And his purpose was to
rule. "George," his mother, the Princess of Wales, had continually
repeated to him in youth, "George, be king." He called himself always "a
Whig of the Revolution," and he had no wish to undo the work which he
believed the Revolution to have done. But he looked on the subjection of
his two predecessors to the will of their ministers as no real part of
the work of the Revolution, but as a usurpation of that authority which
the Revolution had left to the crown. And to this usurpation he was
determined not to submit. His resolve was to govern, not to govern
against law, but simply to govern, to be freed from the dictation of
parties and ministers, and to be in effect the first minister of the
State.
[Sidenote: Importance of his action.]
How utterly incompatible such a dream was with the Parliamentary
constitution of the country as it had received its final form from
Sunderland it is easy to see; and the effort of the young king to
realize it plunged England at once into a chaos of political and social
disorder which makes the first years of his reign the most painful and
humiliating period in our history. It is with an angry disgust that we
pass from the triumphs of the Seven Years' War to the miserable strife
of Whig factions with one another or of the whole Whig party with the
king. But wearisome as the story is, it is hardly less important than
that of the rise of England into a world-power. In the strife of these
wretched years began a political revolution which is still far from
having reached its close. Side by side with the gradual developement of
the English Empire and of the English race has gone on, through the
century that has passed since the close of the Seven Years' War, the
transfer of power within England itself from a governing class to the
nation as a whole. If the effort of George failed to restore the power
of the Crown, it broke the power which impeded the advance of the people
itself to political supremacy. Whilst labouring to convert the
aristocratic monarchy of which he found himself the head into a personal
sovereignty, the irony of fate doomed him to take the first step in an
organic change which has converted that aristocratic monarchy into a
democratic republic, ruled under monarchical forms.
[Sidenote: The Revolution and the nation.]
To realize however the true character of the king's attempt we must
recall for a moment the issue of the Revolution on which he claimed to
take his stand. It had no doubt given personal and religious liberty to
England at large. But its political benefits seemed as yet to be less
equally shared. The Parliament indeed had become supreme, and in theory
the Parliament was a representative of the whole English people. But in
actual fact the bulk of the English people found itself powerless to
control the course of English government. We have seen how at the very
moment of its triumph opinion had been paralyzed by the results of the
Revolution. The sentiment of the bulk of Englishmen remained Tory, but
the existence of a Stuart Pretender forced on them a system of
government which was practically Whig. Under William and Anne they had
tried to reconcile Toryism with the Revolution; but this effort ended
with the accession of the House of Hanover, and the bulk of the landed
classes and the clergy withdrew in a sulky despair from all permanent
contact with politics. Their hatred of the system to which they bowed
showed itself in the violence of their occasional outbreaks, in riots
over the Excise Bill, in cries for a Spanish war, in the frenzy against
Walpole. Whenever it roused itself, the national will showed its old
power to destroy; but it remained impotent to create any new system of
administrative action. It could aid one clique of Whigs to destroy
another clique of Whigs, but it could do nothing to interrupt the
general course of Whig administration. Walpole and Pelham were alike the
representatives of a minority of the nation; but the minority which they
represented knew its mind and how to carry out its mind, while the
majority of the people remained helpless and distracted between their
hatred of the House of Hanover and their dread of the consequences which
would follow on a return of the Stuarts.
[Sidenote: Parliament and the nation.]
The results of such a divorce between the government and that general
mass of national sentiment on which a government can alone safely ground
itself at once made themselves felt. Robbed as it was of all practical
power, and thus stripped of the feeling of responsibility which the
consciousness of power carries with it, among the mass of Englishmen
public opinion became ignorant and indifferent to the general progress
of the age, but at the same time violent and mutinous, hostile to
Government because it was Government, disloyal to the Crown, averse from
Parliament. For the first and last time in our history Parliament was
unpopular, and its opponents secure of popularity. But the results on
the governing class were even more fatal to any right conduct of public
affairs. Not only had the mass of national sentiment been so utterly
estranged from Parliament by the withdrawal of the Tories that the
people had lost all trust in it as an expression of their will, but the
Parliament did not pretend to express it. It was conscious that for
half-a-century it had not been really a representative of the nation,
that it had represented a minority, wiser no doubt than their
fellow-countrymen, but still a minority of Englishmen. At the same time
it saw, and saw with a just pride, that its policy had as a whole been
for the nation's good, that it had given political and religious freedom
to the people in the very teeth of their political and religious
bigotry, that in spite of their narrow insularism it had made Britain
the greatest of European powers. The sense of both these aspects of
Parliament had sunk in fact so deeply into the mind of the Whigs as to
become a theory of Parliamentary government. They were never weary of
expressing their contempt for public opinion. They shrank with
instinctive dislike from Pitt's appeals to national feeling, and from
the popularity which rewarded them. They denied that members of the
Commons sate as representatives of the people, and they shrank with
actual panic from the thought of any change which could render them
representatives. To a Whig such a change meant the overthrow of the work
done in 1688, the coercion of the minority of sound political thinkers
by the mass of opinion, so brutal and unintelligent, so bigoted in its
views both of Church and State, which had been content to reap the
benefits of the Revolution while vilifying and opposing its principles.
[Sidenote: Need of Parliamentary reform.]
And yet, if representation was to be more than a name, the very relation
of Parliament to the constituencies made some change in its composition
a necessity. That changes in the distribution of seats in the House of
Commons were called for by the natural shiftings of population and
wealth which had gone on since the days of Edward the First had been
recognized as early as the Civil Wars. But the reforms of the Long
Parliament were cancelled at the Restoration; and from the time of
Charles the Second to that of George the Third not a single effort had
been made to meet the growing abuses of our parliamentary system. Great
towns like Manchester or Birmingham remained without a member, while
members still sat for boroughs which, like Old Sarum, had actually
vanished from the face of the earth. The effort of the Tudor sovereigns
to establish a Court party in the House by a profuse creation of
boroughs, most of which were mere villages then in the hands of the
Crown, had ended in the appropriation of these seats by the neighbouring
landowners, who bought and sold them as they bought and sold their own
estates. Even in towns which had a real claim to representation the
narrowing of municipal privileges ever since the fourteenth century to a
small part of the inhabitants, and in many cases the restriction of
electoral rights to the members of the governing corporation, rendered
their representation a mere name. The choice of such places hung simply
on the purse or influence of politicians. Some were "the King's
boroughs," others obediently returned nominees of the Ministry of the
day, others were "close boroughs" in the hands of jobbers like the Duke
of Newcastle, who at one time returned a third of all the borough
members in the House. The counties and the great commercial towns could
alone be said to exercise any real right of suffrage, though the
enormous expense of contesting such constituencies practically left
their representation in the hands of the great local families. But even
in the counties the suffrage was ridiculously limited and unequal. Out
of a population of eight millions of English people, only a hundred and
sixty thousand were electors at all.
[Sidenote: Pressure of opinion.]
"The value, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons," said Burke, in
noble words, "consists in its being the express image of the feelings of
the nation." But how far such a House as that which now existed was from
really representing English opinion we see from the fact that in the
height of his popularity Pitt himself could hardly find a seat in it.
Purchase was becoming more and more the means of entering Parliament;
and seats were bought and sold in the open market at a price which rose
to four thousand pounds. We can hardly wonder that a reformer could
allege without a chance of denial, "This House is not a representative
of the people of Great Britain. It is the representative of nominal
boroughs, of ruined and exterminated towns, of noble families, of
wealthy individuals, of foreign potentates." The meanest motives
naturally told on a body returned by such constituencies, cut off from
the influence of public opinion by the secrecy of Parliamentary
proceedings, and yet invested with almost boundless authority. Walpole
and Newcastle had in fact made bribery and borough-jobbing the base of
their power. But bribery and borough-jobbing were every day becoming
more offensive to the nation at large. A new moral consciousness, as we
have seen in the movement of the Wesleys, was diffusing itself through
England; and behind this moral consciousness came a general advance in
the national intelligence, which could not fail to tell vigorously on
politics.
[Sidenote: The intellectual advance.]
Ever since the expulsion of the Stuarts an intellectual revolution had
been silently going on in the people at large. The close of the
seventeenth century was marked by a sudden extension of the world of
readers. The developement of men's minds under the political and social
changes of the day, as well as the rapid increase of wealth, and the
advance in culture and refinement which accompanies an increase of
wealth, were quickening the general intelligence of the people at large;
and the wider demand for books to read that came of this quickening gave
a new extension and vigour to their sale. Addison tells us how large and
rapid was the sale of his "Spectator"; and the sale of Shakspere's works
shows the amazing effect of the new passion for literature on the
diffusion of our older authors. Four issues of his plays in folio, none
of them probably exceeding five hundred copies, had sufficed to meet the
wants of the seventeenth century. But through the eighteenth ten
editions at least followed each other in quick succession; and before
the century was over as many as thirty thousand copies of Shakspere
were dispersed throughout England. Reprints of older works however were
far from being the only need of English readers. The new demand created
an organ for its supply in the publisher, and through the publisher
literature became a profession by which men might win their bread. That
such a change was a healthy one time was to show. But in spite of such
instances as Dryden, at the moment of the change its main result seemed
the degradation of letters. The intellectual demand for the moment
outran the intellectual supply. The reader called for the writer; but
the temper of the time, the diversion of its mental energy to industrial
pursuits, the influences which tended to lower its poetic and
imaginative aspirations, were not such as to bring great writers rapidly
to the front. On the other hand, the new opening which letters afforded
for a livelihood was such as to tempt every scribbler who could handle a
pen; and authors of this sort were soon set to hack-work by the Curles
and the Tonsons who looked on book-making as a mere business. The result
was a mob of authors in garrets, of illiterate drudges as poor as they
were thriftless and debauched, selling their pen to any buyer, hawking
their flatteries and their libels from door to door, fawning on the
patron and the publisher for very bread, tagging rimes which they called
poetry, or abuse which they called criticism, vamping up compilations
and abridgements under the guise of history, or filling the journals
with empty rhetoric in the name of politics.
[Sidenote: Pope.]
It was on such a literary chaos as this that the one great poet of the
time poured scorn in his "Dunciad." Pope was a child of the Revolution;
for he was born in 1688, and he died at the moment when the spirit of
his age was passing into larger and grander forms in 1744. But from all
active contact with the world of his day he stood utterly apart. He was
the son of a Catholic linen-draper, who had withdrawn from his business
in Lombard Street to a retirement on the skirts of Windsor Forest; and
there amidst the stormy years which followed William's accession the boy
grew up in an atmosphere of poetry, buried in the study of the older
English singers, stealing to London for a peep at Dryden in his
arm-chair at Will's, himself already lisping in numbers, and busy with
an epic at the age of twelve. Pope's latter years were as secluded as
his youth. His life, as Johnson says, was "a long disease"; his puny
frame, his crooked figure, the feebleness of his health, his keen
sensitiveness to pain, whether of mind or body, cut him off from the
larger world of men, and doomed him to the faults of a morbid
temperament. To the last he remained vain, selfish, affected; he loved
small intrigues and petty lying; he was incredibly jealous and touchy;
he dwelt on the fouler aspect of things with an unhealthy pruriency; he
stung right and left with a malignant venom. But nobler qualities rose
out of this morbid undergrowth of faults. If Pope was quickly moved to
anger, he was as quickly moved to tears; though every literary gnat
could sting him to passion, he could never read the lament of Priam over
Hector without weeping. His sympathies lay indeed within a narrow range,
but within that range they were vivid and intense; he clung passionately
to the few he loved; he took their cause for his own; he flung himself
almost blindly into their enthusiasms and their hates. But loyal as he
was to his friends, he was yet more loyal to his verse. His vanity never
led him to literary self-sufficiency; no artist ever showed a truer
lowliness before the ideal of his art; no poet ever corrected so much,
or so invariably bettered his work by each correction. One of his finest
characteristics, indeed, was his high sense of literary dignity. From
the first he carried on the work of Dryden by claiming a worth and
independence for literature; and he broke with disdain through the
traditions of patronage which had degraded men of letters into
hangers-on of the great.
[Sidenote: The Dunciad.]
With aims and conceptions such as these, Pope looked bitterly out on the
phase of transition through which English letters were passing. As yet
his poetic works had shown little of the keen and ardent temper that lay
within him. The promise of his spring was not that of a satirist but of
the brightest and most genial of verse writers. When after some fanciful
preludes his genius found full utterance in 1712, it was in the "Rape of
the Lock"; and the "Rape of the Lock" was a poetic counterpart of the
work of the Essayists. If we miss in it the personal and intimate charm
of Addison, or the freshness and pathos of Steele, it passes far beyond
the work of both in the brilliancy of its wit, in the lightness and
buoyancy of its tone, in its atmosphere of fancy, its glancing colour,
its exquisite verse, its irresistible gaiety. The poem remains Pope's
masterpiece; it is impossible to read it without feeling that his
mastery lay in social and fanciful verse, and that he missed his poetic
path when he laid down the humourist for the philosopher and the critic.
But the state of letters presented an irresistible temptation to
criticism. All Pope's nobler feelings of loyalty to his art revolted
from the degradation of letters which he saw about him: and after an
interval of hack-work in a translation of Homer he revealed his terrible
power of sarcasm in his poem of the "Dunciad." The poem is disfigured by
mere outbursts of personal spleen, and in its later form by attacks on
men whose last fault was dulness. But in the main the "Dunciad" was a
noble vindication of literature from the herd of dullards and dunces
that had usurped its name, a protest against the claims of the
journalist or pamphleteer, of the compiler of facts and dates, or the
grubber among archives, to the rank of men of letters.
[Sidenote: Revival of Letters.]
That there was work and useful work for such men to do, Pope would not
have denied. It was when their pretensions threatened the very existence
of literature as an art, when the sense that the writer's work was the
work of an artist, and like an artist's work must show largeness of
design, and grace of form, and fitness of phrase, was either denied or
forgotten, it was when every rimer was claiming to be a poet, every
fault-finder a critic, every chronicler an historian, that Pope struck
at the herd of book-makers and swept them from the path of letters. Such
a protest is as true now, and perhaps as much needed now, as it was true
and needed then. But it had hardly been uttered when the chaos settled
itself, and the intellectual impulse which had as yet been felt mainly
in the demand for literature showed itself in its supply. Even before
the "Dunciad" was completed a great school of novelists was rising into
fame; and the years which elapsed between the death of Pope in 1744 and
that of George the Second in 1760 were filled with the masterpieces of
Richardson, Smollett, and Fielding. Their appearance was but a prelude
of a great literary revival which marked the closing years of the
eighteenth century. But the instant popularity of "Clarissa" and "Tom
Jones" showed the work of intellectual preparation which had been going
on through Walpole's days in the people at large; and it was inevitable
that such a quickening of intelligence should tell on English politics.
The very vulgarization of letters indeed, the broadsheets and pamphlets
and catchpenny magazines of Grub Street, were doing for the mass of the
people a work which greater writers could hardly have done. Above all
the rapid extension of journalism had begun to give opinion a new
information and consistency. In spite of the removal of the censorship
after the Revolution the press had been slow to attain any political
influence. Under the first two Georges its progress had been hindered by
the absence of great topics for discussion, the worthlessness of the
writers, and above all the lethargy of the time. But at the moment of
George the Third's accession the impulse which Pitt had given to the
national spirit, and the rise of a keener interest in politics, was fast
raising the press into an intellectual and political power. Not only was
the number of London newspapers fast increasing, but journals were being
established in almost every considerable town.
[Sidenote: Return of the Tories.]
With impulses such as these telling every day on it more powerfully,
roused as it was too into action by the larger policy of Pitt, and
emboldened at once by the sense of growing wealth and of military
triumph, it is clear that the nation must soon have passed from its old
inaction to claim its part in the direction of public affairs. The very
position of Pitt, forced as he had been into office by the sheer force
of opinion in the teeth of party obstacles, showed the rise of a new
energy in the mass of the people. It showed that a king who enlisted the
national sentiment on his side would have little trouble in dealing with
the Whigs. George indeed had no thought of such a policy. His aim was
not to control the Parliament by the force of national opinion, but
simply to win over the Parliament to his side, and through it to govern
the nation with as little regard to its opinion as of old. But, whether
he would or no, the drift of opinion aided him. Though the policy of
Walpole had ruined Jacobitism, it long remained unconscious of its ruin.
But when a Jacobite prince stood in the heart of the realm, and not a
Jacobite answered his call, the spell of Jacobitism was broken; and the
later degradation of Charles Edward's life wore finally away the thin
coating of disloyalty which clung to the clergy and the squires. They
were ready again to take part in politics; and in the accession of a
king who unlike his two predecessors was no stranger but an Englishman,
who had been born in England and spoke English, they found the
opportunity they desired. From the opening of the reign Tories gradually
appeared again at court.
[Sidenote: The King's friends.]
It was only slowly indeed that the party as a whole swung round to a
steady support of the Government; and in the nation at large the old
Toryism was still for some years to show itself in opposition to the
Crown. But from the first the Tory nobles and gentry came in one by one;
and their action told at once on the complexion of English politics.
Their withdrawal from public affairs had left them untouched by the
progress of political ideas since the Revolution of 1688, and when they
returned to political life it was to invest the new sovereign with all
the reverence which they had bestowed on the Stuarts. In this return of
the Tories therefore a "King's party" was ready made to his hand; but
George was able to strengthen it by a vigorous exertion of the power and
influence which was still left to the Crown. All promotion in the
Church, all advancement in the army, a great number of places in the
civil administration and about the court, were still at the king's
disposal. If this vast mass of patronage had been practically usurped by
the ministers of his predecessors, it was resumed and firmly held by
George the Third; and the character of the House of Commons made
patronage a powerful engine in its management. George had one of
Walpole's weapons in his hands, and he used it with unscrupulous energy
to break up the party which Walpole had held so long together. The Whigs
were still indeed a great power. "Long possession of government, vast
property, obligations of favours given and received, connexion of
office, ties of blood, of alliance, of friendship, the name of Whigs
dear to the majority of the people, the zeal early begun and steadily
continued to the royal family, all these together," says Burke justly,
"formed a body of power in the nation." But George the Third saw that
the Whigs were divided among themselves by the factious spirit which
springs from a long hold of office, and that they were weakened by the
rising contempt with which the country at large regarded the selfishness
and corruption of its representatives.
[Sidenote: Pitt and the Whigs.]
More than thirty years before, the statesmen of the day had figured on
the stage as highwaymen and pickpockets. And now that statesmen were
represented by hoary jobbers such as Newcastle, the public contempt was
fiercer than ever, and men turned sickened from the intrigues and
corruption of party to a young sovereign who aired himself in a
character which Bolingbroke had invented, as a Patriot King. Had Pitt
and Newcastle held together indeed, supported as the one was by the
commercial classes, the other by the Whig families and the whole
machinery of Parliamentary management, George must have struggled in
vain. But the ministry was already disunited. The bulk of the party drew
day by day further from Pitt. Attached as they were to peace by the
traditions of Walpole, dismayed at the enormous expenditure, and haughty
with the pride of a ruling oligarchy, the Whigs were in silent revolt
against the war and the supremacy of the Great Commoner. It was against
their will that he rejected proposals of peace from France which would
have secured to England all her conquests on the terms of a desertion of
Prussia, and that his steady support enabled Frederick still to hold out
against the terrible exhaustion of an unequal struggle. The campaign of
1760 indeed was one of the grandest efforts of Frederick's genius.
Foiled in an attempt on Dresden, he again saved Silesia by a victory at
Liegnitz and hurled back an advance of Daun by a victory at Torgau:
while Ferdinand of Brunswick held his ground as of old along the Weser.
But even victories drained Frederick's strength. Men and money alike
failed him. It was impossible for him to strike another great blow, and
the ring of enemies again closed slowly round him. His one remaining
hope lay in the support of Pitt, and triumphant as his policy had been,
Pitt was tottering to his fall.
[Sidenote: Pitt resigns.]
The envy and resentment of the minister's colleagues at his undisguised
supremacy gave the young king an easy means of realizing his schemes.
George had hardly mounted the throne when he made his influence felt in
the ministry by forcing it to accept a Court favourite, the Earl of
Bute, as Secretary of State. Bute had long been his counsellor, and
though his temper and abilities were those of a gentleman usher, he was
forced into the Cabinet. The new drift of affairs was seen in the
instant desertion from Pitt of the two ablest of his adherents, George
Grenville and Charles Townshend, who attached themselves from this
moment to the rising favourite. It was seen yet more when Bute pressed
for peace. As Bute was known to be his master's mouthpiece, a peace
party at once appeared in the Cabinet itself, and it was only a majority
of one that approved Pitt's refusal to negotiate with France. "He is
madder than ever," was Bute's comment on this refusal in his
correspondence with the king; "he has no thought of abandoning the
Continent." Conscious indeed as he was of the king's temper and of the
temper of his colleagues, Pitt showed no signs of giving way. So far was
he from any thought of peace that he proposed at this moment a vast
extension of the war. In 1761 he learned the signature of a treaty which
brought into force the Family Compact between the Courts of Paris and
Madrid, and of a special convention which bound the last to declare war
on England at the close of the year. Pitt proposed to anticipate the
blow by an instant seizure of the treasure fleet which was on its way
from the Indies to Cadiz, and for whose safe arrival alone the Spanish
Court was deferring its action. He would have followed up the blow by
occupying the Isthmus of Panama, and by an attack on the Spanish
dominions in the New World. It was almost with exultation that he saw
the danger which had threatened her ever since the Peace of Utrecht
break at last upon England. His proud sense of the national strength
never let him doubt for a moment of her triumph over the foes that had
leagued against her. "This is the moment," he exclaimed to his
colleagues, "for humbling the whole House of Bourbon." But the Cabinet
shrank from plans so vast and daring; and the Duke of Newcastle, who had
never forgiven Pitt for forcing himself into power and for excluding him
from the real control of affairs, was backed in his resistance by the
bulk of the Whigs. The king openly supported them, and Pitt with his
brother-in-law Lord Temple found themselves alone. Pitt did not blind
himself to the real character of the struggle. The question, as he felt,
was not merely one of peace or war, it was whether the new force of
opinion which had borne him into office and kept him there was to govern
England or no. It was this which made him stake all on the decision of
the Cabinet. "If I cannot in this instance prevail," he ended his
appeal, "this shall be the last time I will sit in the Council. Called
to office by the voice of the people, to whom I conceive myself
accountable for my conduct, I will not remain in a situation which
renders me responsible for measures I am no longer allowed to guide."
His proposals were rejected; and the resignation of his post, which
followed in October 1761, changed the face of European affairs.
[Sidenote: George breaks with the Whigs.]
"Pitt disgraced!" wrote a French philosopher, "it is worth two victories
to us!" Frederick on the other hand was almost driven to despair. But
George saw in the removal of his powerful minister an opening for the
realization of his long-cherished plans. The Whigs had looked on Pitt's
retirement as the restoration of their rule, unbroken by the popular
forces to which it had been driven during his ministry to bow. His
declaration that he had been "called to office by the voice of the
people, to whom I conceive myself accountable," had been met with
indignant scorn by his fellow-ministers. "When the gentleman talks of
being responsible to the people," retorted Lord Granville, the Lord
Carteret of earlier days, "he talks the language of the House of
Commons, and forgets that at this board he is only responsible to the
King." But his appeal was heard by the people at large. When the
dismissed statesman went to Guildhall the Londoners hung on his
carriage-wheels, hugged his footmen, and even kissed his horses. Their
break with Pitt was in fact the death-blow of the Whigs. In betraying
him to the king they had only put themselves in George's power; and so
great was the unpopularity of the ministry that the king was able to
deliver his longed-for stroke at a party that he hated even more than
Pitt. Newcastle found he had freed himself from the great statesman only
to be driven from office by a series of studied mortifications from his
young master; and the more powerful of his Whig colleagues followed him
into retirement. George saw himself triumphant over the two great
forces which had hampered the free action of the Crown, "the power which
arose," in Burke's words, "from popularity, and the power which arose
from political connexion"; and the rise of Lord Bute to the post of
First Minister marked the triumph of the king.
[Sidenote: The Peace.]
Bute took office simply as an agent of the king's will; and the first
resolve of George the Third was to end the war. In the spring of 1762
Frederick, who still held his ground stubbornly against fate, was
brought to the brink of ruin by a withdrawal of the English subsidies;
it was in fact only his dogged resolution and a sudden change in the
policy of Russia, which followed on the death of his enemy the Czarina
Elizabeth, that enabled him at last to retire from the struggle in the
Treaty of Hubertsberg without the loss of an inch of territory. George
and Lord Bute had already purchased peace at a very different price.
With a shameless indifference to the national honour they not only
deserted Frederick but they offered to negotiate a peace for him on the
basis of a cession of Silesia to Maria Theresa and East Prussia to the
Czarina. The issue of the strife with Spain saved England from
humiliation such as this. Pitt's policy of instant attack had been
justified by a Spanish declaration of war three weeks after his fall;
and the year 1762 saw triumphs which vindicated his confidence in the
issue of the new struggle. Martinico, the strongest and wealthiest of
the French West Indian possessions, was conquered at the opening of the
year, and its conquest was followed by those of Grenada, St. Lucia, and
St. Vincent. In the summer the reduction of Havana brought with it the
gain of the rich Spanish colony of Cuba. The Philippines, the wealthiest
of the Spanish colonies in the Pacific, yielded to a British fleet. It
was these losses that brought about the Peace of Paris in February 1763.
So eager was Bute to end the war that he bought peace by restoring all
that the last year's triumphs had given him. In Europe he contented
himself with the recovery of Minorca, while he restored Martinico to
France, and Cuba and the Philippines to Spain. The real gains of Britain
were in India and America. In the first the French abandoned all right
to any military settlement. From the second they wholly withdrew. To
England they gave up Canada, Nova Scotia, and Louisiana as far as the
Mississippi, while they resigned the rest of that province to Spain, in
compensation for its surrender of Florida to the British Crown.
[Sidenote: George and the Parliament.]
We have already seen how mighty a change in the aspect of the world, and
above all in the aspect of Britain, was marked by this momentous treaty.
But no sense of its great issues influenced the young king in pressing
for its conclusion. His eye was fixed not so much on Europe or the
British Empire as on the petty game of politics which he was playing
with the Whigs. The anxiety which he showed for peace abroad sprang
mainly from his belief that peace was needful for success in his
struggle for power at home. So long as the war lasted Pitt's return to
office and the union of the Whigs under his guidance was an hourly
danger. But with peace the king's hands were free. He could count on the
dissensions of the Whigs, on the new-born loyalty of the Tories, on the
influence of the Crown patronage which he had taken into his own hands.
But what he counted on most of all was the character of the House of
Commons. So long as matters went quietly, so long as no gust of popular
passion or enthusiasm forced its members to bow for a while to outer
opinion, he saw that "management" could make the House a mere organ of
his will. George had discovered--to use Lord Bute's words--"that the
forms of a free and the ends of an arbitrary government were things not
altogether incompatible." At a time when it had become all-powerful in
the State, the House of Commons had ceased in any real and effective
sense to be a representative body at all; and its isolation from the
general opinion of the country left it at ordinary moments amenable only
to selfish influences. The Whigs had managed it by bribery and
borough-jobbing, and George in his turn seized bribery and
borough-jobbing as a base of the power he proposed to give to the
Crown. The royal revenue was employed to buy seats and to buy votes.
Day by day the young sovereign scrutinized the voting-list of the two
Houses, and distributed rewards and punishments as members voted
according to his will or no. Promotion in the civil service, preferment
in the Church, rank in the army, were reserved for "the king's friends."
Pensions and court places were used to influence debates. Bribery was
employed on a scale never known before. Under Bute's ministry an office
was opened at the Treasury for the purchase of members, and twenty-five
thousand pounds are said to have been spent in a single day.
[Sidenote: George III. and America.]
The result of these measures was soon seen in the tone of the
Parliament. Till now it had bowed beneath the greatness of Pitt; but in
the teeth of his denunciation the provisions of the Peace of Paris were
approved by a majority of five to one. It was seen still more in the
vigour with which George and his minister prepared to carry out the
plans over which they had brooded for the regulation of America. The
American question was indeed forced on them, as they pleaded, by the
state of the revenue. Pitt had waged war with characteristic profusion,
and he had defrayed the cost of the war by enormous loans. The public
debt now stood at a hundred and forty millions. The first need therefore
which met Bute after the conclusion of the Peace of Paris was that of
making provision for the new burthens which the nation had incurred,
and as these had been partly incurred in the defence of the American
Colonies it was the general opinion of Englishmen that the Colonies
should bear a share of them. In this opinion Bute and the king
concurred. But their plans went further than mere taxation. The amount
indeed which was expected to be raised as revenue by these changes, at
most two hundred thousand pounds, was far too small to give much relief
to the financial pressure at home. But this revenue furnished an easy
pretext for wider changes. Plans for the regulation of the government of
the Colonies had been suggested from time to time by subordinate
ministers, but they had been set aside alike by the prudence of Walpole
and the generosity of Pitt. The appointment of Charles Townshend to the
Presidency of the Board of Trade however was a sign that Bute had
adopted a policy not only of taxation, but of restraint. The new
minister declared himself resolved on a rigorous execution of the
Navigation laws, laws by which a monopoly of American trade was secured
to the mother country, on the raising of a revenue within the Colonies
for the discharge of the debt, and above all on impressing upon the
colonists a sense of their dependence upon Britain. The direct trade
between America and the French or Spanish West Indian Islands had
hitherto been fettered by prohibitory duties, but these had been easily
evaded by a general system of smuggling. The duties were now reduced,
but the reduced duties were rigorously exacted, and a considerable naval
force was despatched to the American coast by Grenville, who stood at
the head of the Admiralty Board, with a view of suppressing the
clandestine trade with the foreigner. The revenue which was expected
from this measure was to be supplemented by an internal Stamp Tax, a tax
on all legal documents issued within the Colonies, the plan of which
seems to have originated with Bute's secretary, Jenkinson, afterwards
the first Lord Liverpool. That resistance was expected was seen in a
significant step which was taken by the ministry at the end of the war.
Though the defeat of the French had left the Colonies without an enemy
save the Indians, a force of ten thousand men was still kept quartered
on their inhabitants, and a scheme was broached for an extension of the
province of Canada over the district round the Lakes, which would have
turned the western lands into a military settlement, governed at the
will of the Crown, and have furnished a base of warlike operations, if
such were needed, against the settled Colonies on the Atlantic.
Had Bute's power lasted it is probable that these measures would have
brought about the struggle between England and America long before it
actually began. Fortunately for the two countries the minister found
himself from the first the object of a sudden and universal hatred. The
great majority which had rejected Pitt's motion against the Peace had
filled the court with exultation. "Now indeed," cried the Princess
Dowager, "my son is king." But the victory was hardly won when king and
minister found themselves battling with a storm of popular ill-will such
as never since the overthrow of the Stuarts assailed the throne. Violent
and reckless as it was, the storm only marked a fresh advance in the
reawakening of public opinion. The bulk of the higher classes who had
till now stood apart from government were coming gradually in to the
side of the Crown. But the mass of the people was only puzzled and
galled by the turn of events. It felt itself called again to political
activity, but it saw nothing to change its hatred and distrust of
Parliament and the Crown. On the contrary it saw them in greater union
than of old. The House of Commons was more corrupt than ever, and it was
the slave of the king. The king still called himself a Whig, yet he was
reviving a system of absolutism which Whiggism, to do it justice, had
long made impossible. His minister was a mere favourite and in
Englishmen's eyes a foreigner. The masses saw all this, but they saw no
way of mending it. They knew little of their own strength, and they had
no means of influencing the Government they hated save by sheer
violence. They came therefore to the front with their old national and
religious bigotry, their long-nursed dislike of the Hanoverian Court,
their long-nursed habits of violence and faction, their long-nursed
hatred of Parliament, but with no means of expressing them save riot and
uproar.
[Sidenote: Wilkes.]
It was this temper of the masses which was seized and turned to his
purpose by John Wilkes. Wilkes was a worthless profligate; but he had a
remarkable faculty of enlisting popular sympathy on his side; and by a
singular irony of fortune he became in the end the chief instrument in
bringing about three of the greatest advances which our Constitution has
made. He woke the nation to a sense of the need for Parliamentary reform
by his defence of the rights of constituencies against the despotism of
the House of Commons. He took the lead in a struggle which put an end to
the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings. He was the first to establish
the right of the press to discuss public affairs. But in his attack upon
the Ministry of Lord Bute he served simply as an organ of the general
excitement and discontent. The bulk of the Tories were on fire to
gratify their old grudge against the Crown and its Ministers. The body
of the Whigs, and the commercial classes who backed them, were startled
and angered by the dismissal of Pitt, and by the revolt of the Crown
against the Whig system. The nation as a whole was uneasy and alarmed at
the sudden break-up of political tranquillity, and by the sense of a
coming struggle between opponents of whom as yet neither had fully its
sympathies. There were mobs, riots, bonfires in the streets, and
disturbances which culminated--in a rough spirit of punning upon the
name of the minister--in the solemn burning of a jack-boot. The
journals, which were now becoming numerous, made themselves organs for
this outburst of popular hatred; and it was in the _North-Briton_ that
Wilkes took a lead in the movement by denouncing the Cabinet and the
peace with peculiar bitterness, by playing on the popular jealousy of
foreigners and Scotchmen, and by venturing to denounce the hated
minister by name.
[Sidenote: Bute's fall.]
Ignorant and brutal as was the movement which Wilkes headed, it was a
revival of public opinion; and though the time was to come when the
influence of opinion would be exercised more wisely, even now it told
for good. It was the attack of Wilkes which more than all else
determined Bute to withdraw from office in 1763 as a means of allaying
the storm of popular indignation. But the king was made of more stubborn
stuff than his minister. If he suffered his favourite to resign he still
regarded him as the real head of administration; for the ministry which
Bute left behind him consisted simply of the more courtly of his
colleagues, and was in fact formed under his direction. George Grenville
was its nominal chief, but the measures of the Cabinet were still
secretly dictated by the favourite. The formation of the Grenville
ministry indeed was laughed at as a joke. Charles Townshend and the Duke
of Bedford, the two ablest of the Whigs who had remained with Bute after
Newcastle's dismissal, refused to join it; and its one man of ability
was Lord Shelburne, a young Irishman, who had served with credit at
Minden, and had been rewarded by a post at Court which brought him into
terms of intimacy with the young sovereign and Bute. Dislike of the Whig
oligarchy and of the war had thrown Shelburne strongly into the
opposition to Pitt, and his diplomatic talents were of service in
securing recruits for his party, as his eloquence had been useful in
advocating the peace; but it was not till he himself retired from office
that Bute obtained for his supporter the Presidency of the Board of
Trade. As yet however Shelburne's powers were little known, and he added
nothing to the strength of the ministry. It was in fact only the
disunion of its opponents which allowed it to hold its ground. Townshend
and Bedford remained apart from the main body of the Whigs, and both
sections held aloof from Pitt. George had counted on the divisions of
the opposition in forming such a ministry; and he counted on the
weakness of the ministry to make it the creature of his will.
[Sidenote: George Grenville.]
But Grenville had no mind to be a puppet either of the king or of Bute.
Narrow and pedantic as he was, severed by sheer jealousy and ambition
from his kinsman Pitt and the bulk of the Whigs, his temper was too
proud to stoop to the position which George designed for him. The
conflicts between the king and his minister soon became so bitter that
in August 1763 George appealed in despair to Pitt to form a ministry.
Never had Pitt shown a nobler patriotism or a grander self-command than
in the reception he gave to this appeal. He set aside all resentment at
his own expulsion from office by Newcastle and the Whigs, and made the
return to office of the whole party, with the exception of Bedford, a
condition of his own. His aim, in other words, was to restore
constitutional government by a reconstruction of the ministry which had
won the triumphs of the Seven Years' War. But it was the destruction of
this ministry and the erection of a kingly government in its place on
which George prided himself most. To restore it was, in his belief, to
restore the tyranny under which the Whigs had so long held the Crown.
"Rather than submit," he cried, "to the terms proposed by Mr. Pitt, I
would die in the room I now stand in." The result left Grenville as
powerful as he had been weak. Bute retired into the country and ceased
to exercise any political influence. Shelburne, the one statesman in the
ministry, and who had borne a chief part in the negotiations for the
formation of a new Cabinet, resigned to follow Pitt. On the other hand,
Bedford, irritated by Pitt's exclusion of him from his proposed
ministry, joined Grenville with his whole party, and the ministry thus
became strong and compact.
[Sidenote: Grenville and Wilkes.]
Grenville himself was ploddingly industrious and not without financial
ability. But his mind was narrow and pedantic in its tone; and, honest
as was his belief in his own Whig creed, he saw nothing beyond legal
forms. He was resolute to withstand the people as he had withstood the
Crown. His one standard of conduct was the approval of Parliament; his
one aim to enforce the supremacy of Parliament over subject as over
king. With such an aim as this, it was inevitable that Grenville should
strike fiercely at the new force of opinion which had just shown its
power in the fall of Bute. He was resolved to see public opinion only in
the voice of Parliament; and his resolve led at once to a contest with
Wilkes as with the press. It was in the press that the nation was
finding a court of appeal from the Houses of Parliament. The popularity
of the _North-Briton_ made Wilkes the representative of the new
journalism, as he was the representative of that mass of general
sentiment of which it was beginning to be the mouthpiece; and the fall
of Bute had shown how real a power lay behind the agitator's diatribes.
But Grenville was of stouter stuff than the court favourite, and his
administration was hardly reformed when he struck at the growing
opposition to Parliament by a blow at its leader. In "Number 45" of the
_North-Briton_ Wilkes had censured the speech from the throne at the
opening of Parliament, and a "general warrant" by the Secretary of State
was issued against the "authors, printers, and publishers of this
seditious libel." Under this warrant forty-nine persons were seized for
a time; and in spite of his privilege as a member of Parliament Wilkes
himself was sent to the Tower. The arrest however was so utterly illegal
that he was at once released by the Court of Common Pleas; but he was
immediately prosecuted for libel. The national indignation at the
harshness of these proceedings passed into graver disapproval when
Parliament took advantage of the case to set itself up as a judicial
tribunal for the trial of its own assailant. While the paper which
formed the subject for prosecution was still before the courts of
justice it was condemned by the House of Commons as a "false,
scandalous, and seditious libel." The House of Lords at the same time
voted a pamphlet found among Wilkes's papers to be blasphemous, and
advised a prosecution. Though Pitt at once denounced the course of the
two Houses as unconstitutional, his protest, like that of Shelburne in
the Lords, proved utterly ineffectual; and Wilkes, who fled in terror to
France, was expelled at the opening of 1764 from the House of Commons.
Rapid and successful blows such as these seem to have shown to how
frivolous an assailant Bute had yielded. But if Wilkes fled over the
Channel, Grenville found he had still England to deal with. The
assumption of an arbitrary judicial power by both Houses, and the system
of terror which the Minister put in force against the Press by issuing
two hundred injunctions against different journals, roused a storm of
indignation throughout the country. Every street resounded with cries of
"Wilkes and Liberty!" Every shutter through the town was chalked with
"No. 45"; the old bonfires and tumults broke out with fresh violence:
and the Common Council of London refused to thank the sheriffs for
dispersing the mob. It was soon clear that opinion had been embittered
rather than silenced by the blow at Wilkes.
[Sidenote: Grenville and the Colonies.]
The same narrowness of view, the same honesty of purpose, the same
obstinacy of temper, were shown by Grenville in a yet more important
struggle, a struggle with the American Colonies. The plans of Bute for
their taxation and restraint had fallen to the ground on his retirement
and that of Townshend from office. Lord Shelburne succeeded Townshend at
the Board of Trade, and young as he was, Shelburne was too sound a
statesman to suffer these plans to be revived. But the resignation of
Shelburne in 1763, after the failure of Pitt to form a united ministry,
again reopened the question. Grenville had fully concurred in a part at
least of Bute's designs; and now that he found himself at the head of a
strong administration he again turned his attention to the Colonies. On
one important side his policy wholly differed from that of Townshend or
Bute. With Bute as with the king the question of deriving a revenue from
America was chiefly important as one which would bring the claims of
independent taxation and legislation put forward by the colonies to an
issue, and in the end--as it was hoped--bring about a reconstruction of
their democratic institutions and a closer union of the colonies under
British rule. Grenville's aim was strictly financial. His conservative
and constitutional temper made him averse from any sweeping changes in
the institutions of the Colonies. He put aside as roughly as Shelburne
the projects which had been suggested for the suppression of colonial
charters, the giving power in the Colonies to military officers, or the
payment of Crown officers in America by the English treasury. All he
desired was that the colonies should contribute what he looked on as
their just share towards the relief of the burthens left by the war; and
it was with a view to this that he proceeded to carry out the financial
plans which had been devised for the purpose of raising both an external
and an internal revenue from America.
[Sidenote: The Colonies and the Stamp Act.]
If such a policy was more honest, it was at the same time more absurd
than that of Bute. Bute had at any rate aimed at a great revolution in
the whole system of colonial government. Grenville aimed simply at
collecting a couple of hundred thousand pounds, and he knew that even
this wretched sum must be immensely lessened unless his plans were
cordially accepted by the colonists. He knew too that there was small
hope of such an acceptance. On the contrary, they at once met with a
dogged opposition; and though the shape which that opposition took was a
legal and technical one, it really opened up the whole question of the
relation of the Colonies to the mother country. Proud as England was of
her imperial position, she had as yet failed to grasp the difference
between an empire and a nation. A nation is an aggregate of individual
citizens, bound together in a common and equal relation to the state
which they form. An empire is an aggregate of political bodies, bound
together by a common relation to a central state, but whose relations to
it may vary from the closest dependency to the loosest adhesion. To
Grenville and the bulk of his fellow-countrymen the Colonies were as
completely English soil as England itself, nor did they see any
difference in political rights or in their relation to the Imperial
legislature between an Englishman of Massachusetts and a man of Kent.
What rights their charters gave the Colonies they looked on as not
strictly political but municipal rights; they were not states but
corporations; and, as corporate bodies, whatever privileges might have
been given them, they were as completely the creatures and subjects of
the English Crown as the corporate body of a borough or of a trading
company. Their very existence in fact rested in a like way on the will
of the Crown; on a breach of the conditions under which they were
granted their charters were revocable and their privileges ceased, their
legislatures and the rights of their legislatures came to an end as
completely as the common council of a borough that had forfeited its
franchise or the rights of that common council. It was true that save in
matters of trade and navigation the Imperial Parliament or the Imperial
Crown had as yet left them mainly to their own self-government; above
all that it had not subjected them to the burthen of taxation which was
borne by other Englishmen at home. But it had more than once asserted
its right to tax the colonies; it had again and again refused assent to
acts of their legislatures which denied such a right; and from the very
nature of things they held it impossible that such a right could exist.
No bounds could be fixed for the supremacy of the king in Parliament
over every subject of the Crown, and the colonist of America was as
absolutely a subject as the ordinary Englishman. On mere grounds of law
Grenville was undoubtedly right in his assertion of such a view as this;
for the law had grown up under purely national conditions, and without
a consciousness of the new political world to which it was now to be
applied. What the colonists had to urge against it was really the fact
of such a world. They were Englishmen, but they were Englishmen parted
from England by three thousand miles of sea. They could not, if they
would, share the common political life of men at home; nature had
imposed on them their own political life; what charters had done was not
to create but to recognize a state of things which sprang from the very
circumstances under which the Colonies had originated and grown into
being. Nor could any cancelling of charters cancel those circumstances.
No Act of Parliament could annihilate the Atlantic. The political status
of the man of Massachusetts could not be identical with that of the man
of Kent, because that of the Kentish man rested on his right of being
represented in Parliament and thus sharing in the work of
self-government, while the other from sheer distance could not exercise
such a right. The pretence of equality was in effect the assertion of
inequality; for it was to subject the colonist to the burthens of
Englishmen without giving him any effective share in the right of
self-government which Englishmen purchased by supporting those burthens.
But the wrong was even greater than this. The Kentish man really took
his share in governing through his representative in Parliament the
Empire to which the colonist belonged. If the colonist had no such
share he became the subject of the Kentish man. The pretence of
political identity had ended in the establishment not only of serfdom
but of the most odious form of serfdom, a subjection to one's
fellow-subjects.
[Sidenote: The theory of the colonists.]
The only alternative for so impossible a relation was the recognition of
such relations as actually existed. While its laws remained national,
England had grown from a nation into an empire. Whatever theorists might
allege, the Colonies were in fact political bodies with a distinct life
of their own, whose connexion with the mother country had in the last
hundred years taken a definite and peculiar form. Their administration
in its higher parts was in the hands of the mother country. Their
legislation on all internal affairs, though lightly supervised by the
mother country, was practically in their own hands. They exercised
without interference the right of self-taxation, while the mother
country exercised with as little interference the right of monopolizing
their trade. Against this monopoly of their trade not a voice was as yet
raised among the colonists. They justly looked on it as an enormous
contribution to the wealth of Britain, which might fairly be taken in
place of any direct supplies, and which while it asserted the
sovereignty of the mother country, left their local freedom untouched.
The harshness of such a monopoly had indeed been somewhat mitigated by
a system of contraband trade which had grown up between American ports
and the adjacent Spanish islands, a trade so necessary for the Colonies,
and in the end so beneficial to British commerce itself, that statesmen
like Walpole had winked at its developement. The pedantry of Grenville
however saw in it only an infringement of British monopoly; and one of
his first steps was to suppress this contraband trade by a rigid
enforcement of the navigation laws. Harsh and unwise as these measures
seemed, the colonists owned their legality; and their resentment only
showed itself in a pledge to use no British manufactures till the
restrictions were relaxed. But such a stroke was a mere measure of
retaliation, whose pressure was pretty sure in the end to effect its
aim; and even in their moment of irritation the colonists uttered no
protest against the monopoly of their trade. Their position indeed was
strictly conservative; what they claimed was a continuance of the
existing connexion; and had their claim been admitted, they would
probably have drifted quietly into such a relation to the crown as that
of our actual colonies in Canada and Australasia.
[Sidenote: The Stamp Act passed.]
What the issue of such a policy might have been as America grew to a
population and wealth beyond those of the mother country, it is hard to
guess. But no such policy was to be tried. The next scheme of the
Minister--his proposal to introduce internal taxation within the bounds
of the Colonies themselves by reviving the project of an excise or stamp
duty, which Walpole's good sense had rejected--was of another order from
his schemes for suppressing the contraband traffic. Unlike the system of
the Navigation Acts, it was a gigantic change in the whole actual
relations of England and its colonies. They met it therefore in another
spirit. Taxation and representation, they asserted, went hand in hand.
America had no representatives in the British Parliament. The
representatives of the colonists met in their own colonial assemblies,
and these were willing to grant supplies of a larger amount than a
stamp-tax would produce. Massachusetts--first as ever in her
protest--marked accurately the position she took. "Prohibitions of trade
are neither equitable nor just; but the power of taxing is the grand
banner of British liberty. If that is once broken down, all is lost."
The distinction was accepted by the assembly of every colony; and it was
with their protest and offer that they despatched Benjamin Franklin, who
had risen from his position of a working printer in Philadelphia to high
repute among scientific discoverers, as their agent to England. In
England Franklin found few who recognized the distinction which the
colonists had drawn; it was indeed incompatible with the universal
belief in the omnipotence of the Imperial Parliament. But there were
many who held that such taxation was unadvisable, that the control of
trade was what a country really gained from its colonies, that it was no
work of a statesman to introduce radical changes into relations so
delicate as those of a mother country and its dependencies, and that,
boundless as was the power of Parliament in theory, "it should
voluntarily set bounds to the exercise of its power." It had the right
to tax Ireland but it never used it. The same self-restraint might be
extended to America, and the more that the colonists were in the main
willing to tax themselves for the general defence. Unluckily Franklin
could give no assurance as to a union for the purpose of such taxation,
and without such an assurance Grenville had no mind to change his plans.
In February 1765 the Stamp Act was passed through both Houses with less
opposition than a turnpike bill.
At this critical moment Pitt was absent from the House of Commons. "When
the resolution was taken to tax America, I was ill and in bed," he said
a few months later. "If I could have endured to be carried in my bed, so
great was the agitation of my mind for the consequences, I would have
solicited some kind hand to have laid me down on this floor, to have
borne my testimony against it." He was soon however called to a position
where his protest might have been turned to action. The Stamp Act was
hardly passed when an insult offered to the Princess Dowager, by the
exclusion of her name from a Regency Act, brought to a head the quarrel
which had long been growing between the ministry and the king. George
again offered power to William Pitt, and so great was his anxiety to
free himself from Grenville's dictation that he consented absolutely to
Pitt's terms. He waived his objection to that general return of the
whole Whig party to office which Pitt had laid down in 1763 as a
condition of his own. He consented to his demands for a change of policy
in America, for the abolition of general warrants, and the formation of
a Protestant system of German alliances as a means of counteracting the
family compact of the house of Bourbon. The formation of the new
ministry seemed secured, when the refusal of Earl Temple to join it
brought Pitt's efforts abruptly to an end. Temple was Pitt's
brother-in-law, and Pitt was not only bound to him by strong family
ties, but he found in him his only Parliamentary support. The Great
Commoner had not a single follower of his own in the House of Commons,
nor a single seat in it at his disposal. What following he seemed to
have was simply that of the Grenvilles; and it was the support of his
brothers-in-law, Lord Temple and George Grenville, which had enabled him
in great part to hold his own against the Whig connexion in the Ministry
of 1757. But George Grenville had parted from him at its close, and now
Lord Temple drew to his brother rather than to Pitt. His refusal to
join the Cabinet left Pitt absolutely alone so far as Parliamentary
strength went, and he felt himself too weak, when thus deserted, to hold
his ground in any ministerial combination with the Whigs. Disappointed
in two successive efforts to form a ministry by the same obstacle, he
returned to his seat in Somersetshire, while the king turned for help to
the main body of the Whigs.
[Sidenote: The Rockingham Ministry.]
The age and incapacity of the Duke of Newcastle had placed the Marquis
of Rockingham at the head of this section of the party, after it had
been driven from office to make way for the supremacy of Bute. Thinned
as it was by the desertion of Grenville and Townshend, as well as of the
Bedford faction, it still claimed an exclusive right to the name of the
Whigs. Rockingham was honest of purpose, he was free from all taint of
the corruption of men like Newcastle, and he was inclined to a pure and
lofty view of the nature and end of government. But he was young, timid,
and of small abilities, and he shared to the full the dislike of the
great Whig nobles to Pitt and the popular sympathies on which Pitt's
power rested. The weakness of the ministry which he formed in July 1765
was seen in its slowness to deal with American affairs. Rockingham
looked on the Stamp Act as inexpedient; but he held firmly against Pitt
and Shelburne the right of Parliament to tax and legislate for the
Colonies, and it was probably through this difference of sentiment that
Pitt refused to join his ministry on its formation. For six months he
made no effort to repeal the obnoxious Acts, and in fact suffered
preparations to go on for enforcing them. News however soon came from
America which made this attitude impossible. Vigorously as he had
struggled against the Acts, Franklin had seen no other course for the
Colonies, when they were passed, but that of submission. But submission
was the last thing the colonists dreamed of. Everywhere through New
England riots broke out on the news of the arrival of the stamped paper;
and the frightened collectors resigned their posts. Northern and
Southern States were drawn together by the new danger. "Virginia," it
was proudly said afterwards, "rang the alarm bell"; its assembly was the
first to formally deny the right of the British Parliament to meddle
with internal taxation, and to demand the repeal of the Acts.
Massachusetts not only adopted the denial and the demand as its own, but
proposed a Congress of delegates from all the colonial assemblies to
provide for common and united action; and in October 1765 this Congress
met to repeat the protest and petition of Virginia.
[Sidenote: Pitt and America.]
The Congress was the beginning of American union. "There ought to be no
New Englandman, no New Yorker known on this continent," said one of its
members, "but all of us Americans." The news of its assembly reached
England at the end of the year and perplexed the ministry, two of whose
members now declared themselves in favour of repealing the Acts. But
Rockingham would promise at most no more than suspension; and when the
Houses met in the spring of 1766 no voice but Shelburne's was raised in
the Peers for repeal. In the Commons however the news at once called
Pitt to the front. As a minister he had long since rejected a similar
scheme for taxing the Colonies. He had been ill and absent from
Parliament when the Stamp Act was passed. But he adopted to the full the
constitutional claim of America. He gloried in a resistance, which was
denounced in Parliament as rebellion. "In my opinion," he said, "this
kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the Colonies.... America is
obstinate! America is almost in open rebellion! Sir, I rejoice that
America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the
feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have
been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest." "He spoke," said a
looker-on, "like a man inspired," and he ended by a demand for the
absolute, total, and immediate repeal of the Acts. It is from this
moment that the bitter hatred of George the Third to Pitt may be dated.
In an outburst of resentment the king called him a trumpet of sedition,
and openly wished for his death. But the general desire that he should
return to office was quickened by the sense of power which spoke in his
words, and now that the first bitterness of finding himself alone had
passed away, Pitt was willing to join the Whigs. Negotiations were
opened for this purpose; but they at once broke down. Weak as they felt
themselves, Rockingham and his colleagues now shrank from Pitt, as on
the formation of their ministry Pitt had shrunk from them. Personal
feeling no doubt played its part; for in any united administration Pitt
must necessarily take the lead, and Rockingham was in no mood to give up
his supremacy. But graver political reasons, as we have seen,
co-operated with this jealousy and distrust; and the blind sense which
the Whigs had long had of a radical difference between their policy and
that of Pitt was now defined for them by the keenest political thinker
of the day.
[Sidenote: Edmund Burke.]
At this moment Rockingham was in great measure guided by the counsels of
his secretary, Edmund Burke. Burke had come to London in 1750 as a poor
and unknown Irish adventurer. But the learning which at once won him the
friendship of Johnson, and the imaginative power which enabled him to
give his learning a living shape, soon promised him a philosophical and
literary career. Instinct however drew Burke not to literature but to
politics. He became secretary to Lord Rockingham, and in 1765 entered
Parliament under his patronage. His speech on the repeal of the Stamp
Acts at once lifted him into fame. The heavy Quaker-like figure, the
scratch wig, the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll of paper which
loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a great orator and less of
the characteristics of his oratory--its passionate ardour, its poetic
fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources; the dazzling succession in
which irony, pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant
word-pictures, the coolest argument followed each other. It was an
eloquence indeed of a wholly new order in English experience. Walpole's
clearness of statement, Pitt's appeals to emotion, were exchanged for
the impassioned expression of a distinct philosophy of politics. "I have
learned more from him than from all the books I ever read," Fox cried at
a later time, with a burst of generous admiration. The philosophical
cast of Burke's reasoning was unaccompanied by any philosophical
coldness of tone or phrase. The groundwork indeed of his nature was
poetic. His ideas, if conceived by the reason, took shape and colour
from the splendour and fire of his imagination. A nation was to him a
great living society, so complex in its relations, and whose
institutions were so interwoven with glorious events in the past, that
to touch it rudely was a sacrilege. Its constitution was no artificial
scheme of government, but an exquisite balance of social forces which
was in itself a natural outcome of its history and developement. His
temper was in this way conservative, but his conservatism sprang not
from a love of inaction but from a sense of the value of social order,
and from an imaginative reverence for all that existed. Every
institution was hallowed to him by the clear insight with which he
discerned its relations to the past and its subtle connexion with the
social fabric around it. To touch even an anomaly seemed to Burke to be
risking the ruin of a complex structure of national order which it had
cost centuries to build up. "The equilibrium of the constitution," he
said, "has something so delicate about it, that the least displacement
may destroy it." "It is a difficult and dangerous matter even to touch
so complicated a machine."
[Sidenote: Burke and politics.]
Perhaps the readiest refutation of such a theory was to be found in its
influence on Burke's practical dealing with politics. In the great
question indeed which fronted him as he entered Parliament, it served
him well. No man has ever seen with deeper insight the working of those
natural forces which build up communities, or which group communities
into empires; and in the actual state of the American Colonies, in their
actual relation to the mother country, he saw a result of such forces
which only madmen and pedants would disturb. To enter upon "grounds of
Government," to remodel this great structure of empire on a theoretical
basis, seemed to him a work for "metaphysicians," and not for
statesmen. What statesmen had to do was to take this structure as it
was, and by cautious and delicate adjustment to accommodate from time to
time its general shape and the relations of its various parts to the
varying circumstances of their natural developement. Nothing, in other
words, could be truer than Burke's political philosophy when the actual
state of things was good in itself, and its preservation a recognition
of the harmony of political institutions with political facts. But
nothing could be more unwise than his philosophy when he applied it to a
state of things which in itself was evil, and which was in fact a
defiance of the natural growth and adjustment of political power. It was
thus that he applied it to politics at home. He looked on the Revolution
of 1688 as the final establishment of English institutions. His aim was
to keep England as the Revolution had left it, and under the rule of the
great nobles who were faithful to the Revolution. Such a conviction left
him hostile to all movement whatever. He gave his passionate adhesion to
the inaction of the Whigs. He made an idol of Lord Rockingham, an honest
man, but the weakest of party leaders. He strove to check the corruption
of Parliament by a bill for civil retrenchment, but he took the lead in
defeating all plans for its reform. Though he was one of the few men in
England who understood the value of free industry, he struggled bitterly
against all proposals to give freedom to Irish trade, and against the
Commercial Treaty which the younger Pitt concluded with France. His work
seemed to be that of investing with a gorgeous poetry the policy of
timid content which the Whigs believed they inherited from Sir Robert
Walpole; and the very intensity of his trust in the natural developement
of a people rendered him incapable of understanding the good that might
come from particular or from special reforms.
It was this temper of Burke's mind which estranged him from Pitt. His
political sagacity had discerned that the true basis of the Whig party
must henceforth be formed in a combination of that "power drawn from
popularity" which was embodied in Pitt with the power which the Whig
families drew from political "connexion." But with Pitt's popular
tendencies Burke had no real sympathy. He looked on his eloquence as
mere rant; he believed his character to be hollow, selfish, and
insincere. Above all he saw in him with a true foreboding the
representative of forces before which the actual method of government
must go down. The popularity of Pitt in face of his Parliamentary
isolation was a sign that the House of Commons was no real
representative of the English people. Burke foresaw that Pitt was
drifting inevitably to a demand for a reform of the House which should
make it representative in fact as in name. The full issues of such a
reform, the changes which it would bring with it, the displacement of
political power which it would involve, Burke alone of the men of his
day understood. But he understood them only to shrink from them with
horror, and to shrink with almost as great a horror from the man who was
leading England on in the path of change.
[Sidenote: Repeal of the Stamp Act.]
At this crisis then the temper of Burke squared with the temper of the
Whig party and of Rockingham; and the difference between Pitt's
tendencies and their own came to the front on the question of dealing
with the troubles in America. Pitt was not only for a repeal of the
Stamp Acts, but for an open and ungrudging acknowledgement of the claim
to a partial independence which had been made by the colonists. His
genius saw that, whatever were the legal rights of the mother country,
the time had come when the union between England and its children across
the Atlantic must rest rather on sentiment than on law. Such a view was
wholly unintelligible to the mass of the Whigs or the ministry. They
were willing, rather than heighten American discontent, to repeal the
Stamp Acts; but they looked on the supremacy of England and of the
English Parliament over all English dependencies as a principle
absolutely beyond question. From the union, therefore, which Pitt
offered Rockingham and his fellow-ministers stood aloof. They were
driven, whether they would or no, to a practical acknowledgement of the
policy which he demanded; but they resolved that the repeal of the Stamp
Acts should be accompanied by a formal repudiation of the principles of
colonial freedom which Pitt had laid down. A declaratory act was first
brought in, which asserted the supreme power of Parliament over the
Colonies "in all cases whatsoever." The declaration was intended no
doubt to reassure the followers of the ministry as well as their
opponents, for in the assertion of the omnipotence of the two Houses to
which they belonged Whig and Tory were at one. But it served also as a
public declaration of the difference which severed the Whigs from the
Great Commoner. In a full house Pitt found but two supporters in his
fierce attack upon the declaratory bill, which was supported by Burke in
a speech which at once gave him rank as an orator; while Pitt's
lieutenant, Shelburne, found but four supporters in a similar attack in
the Lords. The passing of the declaratory act was followed by the
introduction of a bill for the repeal of the Stamp Acts; and in spite of
the resistance of the king's friends, a resistance instigated by George
himself, the bill was carried in February 1766 by a large majority.
[Sidenote: The Chatham Ministry.]
As the members left the House of Commons, George Grenville, whose
resistance had been fierce and dogged, was hooted by the crowd which
waited to learn the issue without. Before Pitt the multitude reverently
uncovered their heads and followed him home with blessings. It was the
noblest hour of his life. For the moment indeed he had "saved England"
more truly than even at the crisis of the Seven Years' War. His voice
had forced on the ministry and the king a measure which averted, though
but for a while, the fatal struggle between England and her Colonies.
Lonely as he was, the ministry which had rejected his offers of aid
found itself unable to stand against the general sense that the first
man in the country should be its ruler; and bitter as was the king's
hatred of him, Rockingham's resignation in the summer of 1766 forced
George to call Pitt into office. His acceptance of the king's call and
the measures which he took to construct a ministry showed a new resolve
in the great statesman. He had determined to break finally with the
political tradition which hampered him, and to set aside even the dread
of Parliamentary weakness which had fettered him three years before.
Temple's refusal of aid, save on terms of equality which were wholly
inadmissible, was passed by, though it left Pitt without a party in the
House of Commons. In the same temper he set at defiance the merely
Parliamentary organization of the Whigs by excluding Newcastle, while he
showed his wish to unite the party as a whole by his offer of posts to
nearly all the members of the late administration. Though Rockingham
stood coldly aside, some of his fellow-ministers accepted Pitt's
offers, and they were reinforced by Lords Shelburne and Camden, the
young Duke of Grafton, and the few friends who still clung to the Great
Commoner. Such a ministry however rested for power not on Parliament but
on public opinion. It was in effect an appeal from Parliament to the
people; and it was an appeal which made such a reform in Parliament as
would bring it into unison with public opinion a mere question of time.
Whatever may have been Pitt's ultimate designs, however, no word of such
a reform was uttered by any one. On the contrary, Pitt stooped to
strengthen his Parliamentary support by admitting some even of the
"king's friends" to a share in the administration. But its life lay
really in Pitt himself, in his immense popularity, and in the command
which his eloquence gave him over the House of Commons. His popularity
indeed was soon roughly shaken; for the ministry was hardly formed when
it was announced that its leader had accepted the earldom of Chatham.
The step removed him to the House of Lords, and for a while ruined the
public confidence which his reputation for unselfishness had aided him
to win. But it was from no vulgar ambition that Pitt laid down his title
of the Great Commoner. The nervous disorganization which had shown
itself three years before in his despair upon Temple's desertion had
never ceased to hang around him, and it had been only at rare intervals
that he had forced himself from his retirement to appear in the House of
Commons. It was the consciousness of coming weakness that made him shun
the storms of debate. But in the Cabinet he showed all his old energy.
The most jealous of his fellow-ministers owned his supremacy. At the
close of one of his earliest councils Charles Townshend acknowledged to
a colleague "Lord Chatham has just shown to us what inferior animals we
are!" Plans were at once set on foot for the better government of
Ireland, for the transfer of India from the Company to the Crown, and
for the formation of an alliance with Prussia and Russia to balance the
Family Compact of the House of Bourbon. The alliance was foiled for the
moment by the coldness of Frederick of Prussia. The first steps towards
Indian reform were only taken by the ministry under severe pressure from
Pitt. Petty jealousies, too, brought about the withdrawal of some of the
Whigs, and the hostility of Rockingham was shown by the fierce attacks
of Burke in the House of Commons. But secession and invective had little
effect on the ministry. "The session," wrote Horace Walpole to a friend
at the close of 1766, "has ended triumphantly for the Great Earl"; and
when Chatham withdrew to Bath to mature his plans for the coming year
his power remained unshaken.
END OF VOL. VII.
* * * * * *
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
Variations in spelling have been left as in the original. Examples
include the following:
council Councils Councillor Councillors
counsel counsels counselled counsellor counsellors
ascendant ascendency
burdens burthens
Luxembourg Luxemburg
recognised recognized
Variations in hyphenation have been left as in the original. Examples
include the following:
arm-chair armchair
re-organization reorganization
The following corrections have been made to the text:
Page 35: success or defeat must be{original has by} equally
fatal
Page 155: or dependents{original has dependants} wringing
bread