Letters, sentences and maxims

by Earl of Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield

I.

Philip Dormer Stanhope did not experience in his youth either of those influences which are so important in the lives of most of us. His mother died before he could know her, and his father was one of those living nonentities whom his biographer sums up in saying that “We know little more of him than that he was an Earl of Chesterfield.” Indeed, what influence there may have been was of a negative kind, for he had, if anything, an avowed dislike for his son. Naturally under these conditions he had to endure the slings and arrows of fortune alone and uncounselled. One domestic influence was allowed him in the mother of his mother, whose face still looks out at us from the pages of Dr. Maty, engraved by Bartolozzi from the original of Sir Peter Lely—a face sweet, intellectual, open—over the title of Gertrude Savile, Marchioness of Halifax. She it was who undertook, at any rate to some small degree, the rearing of her daughter’s child. Lord Chesterfield is rather a Savile than a Stanhope.

He heard French from a Normandy nurse in his cradle, and he received, when he grew a little older, “such a general idea of the sciences as it is a disgrace to a gentleman not to possess.” But it is not till he gets to Cambridge at the age of eighteen that we hear anything definite. He writes to his tutor of former days, whom he seems to have made a real friend, from Trinity Hall:

“I find the college where I am infinitely the best in the university; for it is the smallest, and filled with lawyers who have lived in the world, and know how to behave. Whatever may be said to the contrary, there is certainly very little debauchery in the university, especially amongst people of fashion, for a man must have the inclinations of a porter to endure it here.”

Thirty-six years later he draws for his son this picture of his college-life:

“As I make no difficulty of confessing my past errors, where I think the confession may be of use to you, I will own that, when I first went to the university, I drank and smoked, notwithstanding the aversion I had to wine and tobacco, only because I thought it genteel, and that it made me look a man.”

This touch of nature it is interesting to find in one who gave so much to the Graces. But to get at what he really did we may take the following:

“It is now, Sir, I have a great deal of business upon my hands; for I spend an hour every day in studying civil law, and as much in philosophy; and next week the blind man [Dr. Sanderson] begins his lectures upon the mathematics; so that I am now fully employed. Would you believe, too, that I read Lucian and Xenophon in Greek, which is made easy to me; for I do not take the pains to learn the grammatical rules; but the gentleman who is with me, and who is a living grammar, teaches me them all as I go along. I reserve time for playing at tennis, for I wish to have the corpus sanum as well as the mens sana: I think the one is not good for much without the other. As for anatomy, I shall not have an opportunity of learning it; for though a poor man has been hanged, the surgeon who used to perform those operations would not this year give any lectures, because, he says, ... the scholars will not come.

“Methinks our affairs are in a very bad way, but as I cannot mend them, I meddle very little in politics; only I take a pleasure in going sometimes to the coffee house to see the pitched battles that are fought between the heroes of each party with inconceivable bravery, and are usually terminated by the total defeat of a few tea-cups on both sides.”[2]

He only stayed in Cambridge two years, and then travelled abroad to Flanders and Holland. He had just left The Hague when the news reached him across the water which only then was not stale—Queen Anne was dead.

It was the turning point of his career, for his great-uncle, who had influence and position at the court, obtained for him from George I. the post of Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales. At the same time he obtained a pocket-borough in Cornwall, and appeared in the House of Commons. He was not yet of age, of which fact a friend in the opposition politely and quietly informed him after he had made his first speech. He was, therefore, not only debarred from voting, but liable to a fine of £500. He made a low bow, left the House, and posted straightway to Paris.

He was not there long. Advancing months soon removed the objection of age, and we find him again frequently in the House. His position on the Schism and Occasional Conformity Bills was one which he himself in after years regretted. He was still, however, swimming with the stream, and the stream led on to fortune. In 1723 he was made Captain of the Yeomen of the Guards, and two years later, when the Order of the Bath was revived, was offered by the King the red ribbon. But this he refused; and not contented with so much discourtesy, objected to others accepting it. He wrote a ballad on Sir William Morgan, who had received the same offer. The ballad came to the ears of the King; and for this, or for other reasons, Stanhope the courtier lost his place.

At this juncture two changes took place, to him of equal importance. George I. died and brought Stanhope’s former master to the throne; and Lord Chesterfield died, leaving his son his title. The latter event raised him to the House of Lords—the Hospital for Incurables, as Lord Chesterfield calls it. The former should have raised him to higher office still; but that policy of scheming for which Lord Chesterfield has become almost as famous as Macchiavelli in this case played him false. Believing that where marriage begins, love, as a necessary consequence, ends, he had paid all his attentions to the new King’s mistress, while he was still Prince of Wales, and none to his queen. And Caroline of Anspach took precaution that when George II. came to the throne the courtier’s negligence should be treated as it deserved. Thus at the age of thirty-three, while still a young man, Chesterfield was cut off from the Court: and he was already in opposition to Walpole. The King as a subterfuge offered him the post of Ambassador to Holland, and the offended courtier was thus removed. But political events were moving rapidly, and in two years’ time it was rumored that Chesterfield would be reinstated in favor. The King, however, was still obdurate, and instead of Secretary of State he was made High Steward of the Household. Chesterfield remained in Holland, gambling and watching events. “I find treating with two hundred sovereigns of different tempers and professions,” he writes, “is as laborious as treating with one fine woman, who is at least of two hundred minds in one day.”

The game went on for a year more. Then he was by his own wish recalled. On the 2d of May of this same year he was presented with a son by Mme. Du Bouchet. “A beautiful young lady at The Hague,” says one writer, “set her wits against his and suffered the usual penalty; she fell, and this son was the result.” This son was the object of all Lord Chesterfield’s care and affection. It was to him that his now famous letters were written. The father, we find, on his return to England, in the House talking indefatigably as ever. It was the year of Walpole’s Excise Bill which was to have freed the country by changing the system of taxation from direct to indirect methods. It was a good measure and a just one. Every part of Walpole’s scheme has been since carried into effect. But then there was a general cry raised against it. The liberties of the people, it was said, were being attacked. Chesterfield, with the rest of the Patriots, and with the country behind them, fought hard, and the Bill was dropped (11th April, 1731). Two days afterward, going up the steps of St. James’ Palace, he was stopped by a servant in the livery of the Duke of Grafton, who told him that his master must see him immediately. He drove off at once in the Duke’s carriage, and found that he was to surrender the White Staff. He demanded an audience at Court, obtained it, and was snubbed. Of course he left it immediately.

We could have wished perhaps that Lord Chesterfield’s affection and character had prevented him from falling—especially so soon after the affair at The Hague—into so unpraiseworthy an undertaking as a mariage de convenance. Yet whether it was to spite his royal enemy, or because in financial difficulties he remembered the existence of the will of George I.—or even from love; at any rate in the following year he married, in lawful wedlock, Melusina de Schulenberg, whom, though merely the “niece” of the Duchess of Kendale, George the First had thought fit to create Lady Walsingham and the possessor by his will of £20,000. Scandal or truth has been very busy about the relationship of Lady Walsingham and her aunt. Posterity openly declares her to have been the daughter of that lady by a royal sire. But good Dr. Maty, as though by the quantity of his information, wishing to override its quality, tells us that her father was none other than one “Frederick Achatz de Schulenburg, privy counsellor to the Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburg, Lord of Stehler, Bezendorff, Angern,” etc. But we may well remember Lord Chesterfield’s own words here: “It is a happy phrase that a lady has presented her husband with a son, for this does not admit anything of its parentage.” Anyhow Lord Chesterfield lost the money, for George the Second, on being shown his father’s will by the Archbishop of Canterbury, put it in his pocket and walked hastily out of the room. It never was seen again.

But to have quarrelled with George II. had one recommendation. It made him a friend of the Prince of Wales. No sooner was Lord Chesterfield married than the Prince and Princess sent round their cards, and the rest of their Court, of course, followed them. It seems to have been Lord Chesterfield’s fate to be opposed to the reigning power. His opposition now, however, was quite spontaneous.

We need not follow him through all the political entanglements of the time. Smollet said of him that he was the only man of genius employed under Walpole, and though history has hardly justified such praise, yet it certainly illustrates a truth. We may take his speech in 1737 against the Playhouse Bill as a sample of his oratory. I borrow from Lord Mahon:

“[The speech] contains many eloquent predictions, that, should the Bill be enacted, the ruin of liberty and the introduction of despotism would inevitably follow. Yet even Chesterfield owns that ‘he has observed of late a remarkable licentiousness in the stage. In one play very lately acted (Pasquin[3]) the author thought fit to represent the three great professions, religion, physic, and law as inconsistent with common sense; in another (King Charles the First[4]), a most tragical story was brought upon the stage—a catastrophe too recent, too melancholy, and of too solemn a nature, to be heard of anywhere but from the pulpit. How these pieces came to pass unpunished, I do not know.... The Bill, my Lords, may seem to be designed only against the stage; but to me it plainly appears to point somewhere else. It is an arrow that does but glance upon the stage: the mortal wound seems designed against the liberty of the press. By this Bill you prevent a play’s being acted, but you do not prevent it being printed. Therefore if a license should be refused for its being acted, we may depend upon it the play will be printed. It will be printed and published, my Lords, with the refusal, in capital letters, upon the title-page. People are always fond of what is forbidden. Libri prohibiti are, in all countries, diligently and generally sought after. It will be much easier to procure a refusal than it ever was to procure a good house or a good sale; therefore we may expect that plays will be wrote on purpose to have a refusal; this will certainly procure a good house or a good sale. Thus will satires be spread and dispersed through the whole nation; and thus every man in the kingdom may, and probably will, read for sixpence what a few only could have seen acted for half a crown. We shall then be told, What! will you allow an infamous libel to be printed and dispersed, which you will not allow to be acted? If we agree to the Bill now before us, we must, perhaps, next session, agree to a Bill for preventing any plays being printed without a license. Then satires will be wrote by way of novels, secret histories, dialogues, or under some such title; and thereupon we shall be told, What! will you allow an infamous libel to be printed and dispersed, only because it does not bear the title of a play? Thus, my Lords, from the precedent now before us, we shall be induced, nay, we can find no reason for refusing, to lay the press under a general license, and then we may bid adieu to the liberties of Great Britain.’”[5] Of course it is impossible from single passages, even perhaps from single speeches, to infer that he was ever a great orator, but Horace Walpole has declared one of his speeches the finest that he had ever listened to, and, as Lord Mahon justly observes, “Horace Walpole had heard his own father; had heard Pitt; had heard Pulteney; had heard Windham; had heard Carteret; yet he declares in 1743 that the finest speech he had ever listened to was one from Lord Chesterfield.”

He was, with the other “Patriots,” in clamoring for war with Spain, pursuing Walpole with an opposition which has been characterized as “more factious and unprincipled than any that had ever disgraced English politics” (Green). In 1739, it will be remembered, Walpole bowed to the storm. The following extract from An Ode to a Number of Great Men, published in 1742, will show underneath its virulence who were expected to take the lead:

“But first to C[arteret] fain you’d sing,

Indeed he’s nearest to the king,

Yet careless how to use him,

Give him, I beg, no labor’d lays,

He will but promise if you praise,

And laugh if you abuse him.

“Then (but there’s a vast space betwixt)

The new-made E[arl] of B[ath] comes next,

Stiff in his popular pride:

His step, his gait describe the man,

They paint him better than I can,

Wabbling from side to side.

“Each hour a different face he wears,

Now in a fury, now in tears,

Now laughing, now in sorrow,

Now he’ll command, and now obey,

Bellows for liberty to-day,

And roars for power to-morrow.

“At noon the Tories had him tight,

With staunchest Whigs he supped at night,

Each party thought to have won him:

But he himself did so divide,

Shuffled and cut from side to side,

That now both parties shun him.

“More changes, better times this isle

Demands, oh! Chesterfield, Argyll,

To bleeding Britain bring ’em;

Unite all hearts, appease each storm,

’Tis yours such actions to perform,

My pride shall be to sing ’em.”

Affairs in Holland again compelled him to seek that Court, and it is thence that he was summoned to Ireland in 1744. “Make Chenevix an Irish Bishop,” he had written. “We cannot,” was the reply, “but any other condition.” “Then make me Lord-Lieutenant,” he wrote back. They took him at his word, and Chenevix soon obtained his place.

Chesterfield had always looked forward to the post with longing. “I would rather be called the Irish Lord-Lieutenant,” he had said, “than go down to Posterity as the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland.” It was, as has been truly observed, the most brilliant and useful part of his career. I shall be pardoned for quoting again from Mahon. “It was he who first, since the revolution, had made that office a post of active exertion. Only a few years before the Earl of Shrewsbury had given as a reason for accepting it, that it was a place where a man had business enough to hinder him from falling asleep, and not enough to keep him awake. Chesterfield, on the contrary, left nothing undone nor for others to do.... [He] was the first to introduce in Dublin the principle of impartial justice. It is very easy, as was formerly the case, to choose the great Protestant families as managers; to see only through their eyes, and to hear only through their ears; it is very easy, according to the modern fashion, to become the tool and the champion of Roman Catholic agitators; but to hold the balance even between both; to protect the Establishment, yet never wound religious liberty; to repress the lawlessness, yet not chill the affection of that turbulent but warm-hearted people; to be the arbiter, not the slave of parties; this is the true object worthy that a statesman should strive for, and fit only for the ablest to attain! ‘I came determined,’ writes Chesterfield many years afterward, ‘to proscribe no set of persons whatever; and determined to be governed by none. Had the Papists made any attempt to put themselves above the law, I should have taken good care to have quelled them again. It was said that my lenity to the Papists had wrought no alteration, either in their religion or political sentiments. I did not expect that it would; but surely there was no reason of cruelty toward them.’... So able were the measures of Chesterfield; so clearly did he impress upon the public mind that his moderation was not weakness, nor his clemency cowardice, but that, to quote his own words, ‘his hand should be as heavy as Cromwell’s upon them if they once forced him to raise it.’ So well did he know how to scare the timid, while conciliating the generous, that this alarming period [1745] passed over with a degree of tranquillity such as Ireland has not often displayed even in orderly and settled times. This just and wise—wise because just—administration has not failed to reward him with its meed of fame; his authority has, I find, been appealed to even by those who, as I conceive, depart most widely from his maxims; and his name, I am assured, lives in the honored remembrance of the Irish people, as perhaps, next to Ormond, the best and worthiest in their long Viceregal line.”

We know that it was a complete success, so far as it went. But he held the post only for four years. He had held the highest offices, he had attained his highest wishes; yet his membership in the Cabinet had been made nominal rather than real, and his power was ever controlled by the hand of the King. Nowhere, in whatever direction he might care to turn his eyes along the political landscape, could he see anything but what was rotten and revolting. In 1748 he retired.

We cannot call his political career an unsuccessful one. It was probably as brilliant as it was possible for a man of his parts to enjoy. He was a good talker and an incomparable ambassador. His action in Holland had permanent influence on the politics of Europe. But indeed, if he had been freed from the opposition of a profligate Court and all that it entailed; if, as has been implied by some, he would have been a greater man had not the death of his father driven him into the House of Lords; if he would then have risen to be anything greater than a second-rate Minister: this we may doubt. Yet we are not entitled to draw an estimate of his character before we have studied its other side.

Chesterfield did not entirely give up attendance or even speaking at the House, but his energies henceforward were devoted to literary rather than political matters. One further act he performed before he left for good; he carried out three years later the reform of the English Calendar, an account of which he gives in one of his letters, and I cannot equal his words.[6] This was the last important public event in his life. Next year he was attacked with deafness, which incapacitated him of necessity from affairs. It does not seem that he was ever sorry to leave them. Ever and anon the old political fire breaks out, and we find him keeping an observant eye on the course of events. But he was thoroughly despondent of the prestige and ascendancy of England by the time of the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. “Nation!” he had cried, “we are no longer a nation.” We find him sympathizing with Wilkes, and to the end on the side of Pitt. But about 1765 his letters begin to bear the mark of decrepitude, and his brains to be unable to cope with the situations that arose.

“I see and hear these storms from shore, suave mari magno, &c. I enjoy my own security and tranquillity, together with better health than I have reason to expect at my age and with my constitution: however, I feel a gradual decay, though a gentle one; and I think I shall not tumble, but slide gently to the bottom of the hill of life. When that will be I neither know nor care, for I am very weary.”

And in the following August, anticipating alike the autumn of his life and of the year, he writes:

“I feel this beginning of the autumn, which is already very cold; the leaves are withered, fall apace, and seem to intimate that I must follow them, which I shall do without reluctance, being extremely weary of this silly world.”—(Letter CCCLV.)

Yet even a year later we find him giving dinner parties to the Duke of Brunswick, and wishing that he had both the monarchs of Austria and Prussia, that they should, “together with some of their allies, take Lorraine and Alsace from France.” (Letter CCCLXIV.) For a few more years he lingered on, gardening, reading, and writing, and then in 1773, almost alone, he parted with “this silly world.”