A Few Words on Junius and Macaulay.
The “secret of Junius” has been kept until, like over-ripe wines, the subject has lost its flavour. Languid indeed is the disposition of mind in which any, except a few veterans who still prefer the old post-road to the modern railway, take up an essay or an article professing to throw new light on that wearisome mystery, or to add some hitherto unknown name to the ghostly crowd of candidates for that antiquated prize. And yet there is a deep interest about the inquiry, after all, to those who, from any special cause, are induced to overcome the feeling of satiety which it at first excites, and plunge into the controversy with the energy of their grandfathers. The real force and virulence of those powerful writings, unrivalled then, and scarcely equalled since, let critics say what they may; the strangeness of the fact that none of the quick-sighted, unscrupulous, revengeful men who surrounded Junius at the time of his writing, who brushed past him in the street, drank with him at dinner, sat opposite him in the office, could ever attain to even a probable conjecture of his identity; the irresistible character of the external evidence which fixes the authorship on Francis, contrasted with those startling internal improbabilities which make the Franciscan theory to this day the least popular, although the learned regard it as all but established—the eccentric, repulsive, “dour” character of Francis himself, and the kind of pertinacious longing which besets us to know the interior of a man who shuts himself up against his fellow-men in fixed disdain and silence:—these are powerful incentives, and produce an attraction, of which we are sometimes ourselves ashamed, towards the occupation of treading over and over again this often beaten ground of literary curiosity.
Never have I felt this more strongly, than when accident led me, a few years ago, into Leigh and Sotheby’s sale-room, when the library of Sir Philip Francis was on view previous to auction. I know not whether any reader will sympathize with me in what I am about to say: but to me there is a solemn and rather oppressive feeling, which attends these exposures of books for sale, where the death is recent, and where the owner and collector was a man of this world, taking an interest in the everyday literature which occupies myself and those around me. There stands his copy of a memoir of some one whom both he and I knew well—he had just had time to read it, as I see by the date, and with interest, as I judge by the pencil marks—in what mysteriously separate relation do he and I now respectively stand towards that common acquaintance? There is his copy of the latest volume of Travels—he had only accompanied the adventurer, I see, as far as the First Cataract—what matters now to him the problem of the Source of the Nile? There is his last unbound number of the Quarterly—he had studied it for many a year: at such a page, the paper-cutter rested from its work, the marginal notes ended, the influx of knowledge stopped, the chain of thought was snapped, the mental perceptions darkened. Can it be, that the active mind of our fellow-worker ceased then and there from that continuous exertion of so many years, and became that we wot not of—a living Intelligence, it may be, but removed into another sphere, with which its habitual region of labour—the cycle in which it moved and had its being—had no connection whatever? Must it be (as Charles Lamb so quaintly expresses it) that “knowledge now comes to him, if it comes at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?”
But I do not wish to dally, here and now, with fancies like these. I only introduced the subject, because Sir Philip Francis’ library was a good deal calculated to suggest this class of thoughts. He was a great marginal note-maker. He criticized all that came under his eye, and especially what related to political events, even to his latest hour. And—singular enough, yet in accordance with much that we know of him, and with all that we must suppose, if Junius he was—he had avoided keeping up, in this way, his connection with the time in which his sinister and anonymous fame was achieved. So far as I remember, his books of the Junian period were little noted. He seemed to have exercised his memory and judgment on the records of Warren Hastings’ trial, the French Revolution, the revolutionary war—not on those of Burke and Chatham.
This, however, is all by the way, and I must crave pardon for the digression. I lost myself, and wandered off, it seems, just when I was reminding the reader that the subsidiary features of the Junian controversy have now become much more interesting than the old question of authorship itself, and that it is an admirable exercise for the intellectual faculties to trace the way in which different lines of reasoning, wholly distinct and yet severally complete, converge towards the “Franciscan” conclusion. It was in this light, especially, that the subject appeared to captivate the mind of that great historical genius whom we have lost: whom we have just seen in the ample enjoyment of most rare faculties, the fulness of fame, and the height of fortune, committed to the soft arms of an euthanasia such as has rarely waited on man. The “Junian controversy” was with Macaulay an endless subject of ingenious talk. It suited certain peculiarities of his mind. As he was the very clearest of writers, so he was also, in a special sense and manner, the most acute of reasoners. In limited, close historical argument—in the power to infer a third proposition from a second, a second from a first—the power to expand a fact, either proved or assumed as a trifling postulate, into a series of facts, with undeniable cogency—I think we must go far to find his equal.
If you gave Cuvier a tarsal bone, he constructed you, with unerring certainty, a humming-bird or an elephant. If you gave Macaulay a casual passage from a letter, he would divine, with strange precision, the circumstances of that letter: the occasion of its writing, the reason of its publication or non-publication, the way in which the writer was connected with some great event of the time, and in which the letter bore on that event. But his judgment of the character of the man, or character of the event, was another matter altogether, and tasked a different order of faculties, with which we are not now concerned. If we were to seek a rival to Macaulay in this peculiar province of clear and cogent reasoning from fact A to fact X, imparting to conjecture the force of truth, we should probably find him rather among lawyers than writers. In truth, the historian always retained, and to his great advantage, many of the mental habits, as well as many of the tastes and joyous recollections of the bar. He was at once the most Paleyan and the most forensic of historical inquirers. When he entered the arena of controversy, you might doubt whether he had donned his armour in the Senate House of Cambridge or the Assize Court of Lancaster. We may assume (as Coke assumed, lamentingly, of Bacon) that had he only stuck to the law he would have made a great lawyer. But it is open to doubt whether, as a judge, he would have done more of service by the marvellous lucidity with which he would have drawn out a series of circumstantial evidence before a jury, or more of harm by his tendency to force the various considerations attending a complicated case into conformity with his own too complete and too vivid ideal of that case.
There is no better way towards appreciating the intensity of this peculiar faculty in Macaulay, than to study the various controversies into which his essays and his history led him: both the few in which he vouchsafed a reply, and the many more in which he rested contented with his first statement—his issues with Dixon, Paget, the High Churchmen, the Scotch, the Quakers, and the like—and to contrast his method with that of his antagonists. They all beat the bush, more or less, and flounder in every variety of historical fallacy. They beg the question, frame “vicious processes” from their premisses, “pole” themselves on self-created dilemmas, commit, in short, every error which logicians denounce in their fantastic terminology—in Macaulay’s reasoning, simply as such, you will never detect a flaw. His conclusion follows his premisses as surely and safely as “the night the day.” You may agree with his antagonist, and not with him; but you will find that what you consider to be his error lies quite in another direction, and consists, not in misusing his own facts, but in ignoring or neglecting true and material facts adduced by his opponents. And beware, O young and ardent Reader, too readily pleased with seeing a hole picked in a great man’s coat, lest the triumphant crow, with which these opponents invariably trumpet their supposed victory, seduce you into premature acquiescence. By-and-by, when cooler and steadier, you may be inclined to conjecture that Macaulay’s piercing instinct was right after all, and that the facts evoked against him are in reality either doubtful or immaterial to the argument.
It was, as I have said, this fondness and aptitude for following up with accuracy converging lines of evidence, which gave Macaulay so great an interest in the Junian controversy, and made him so ready to allude to it incidentally both in writing and conversation. He contributed, himself, two, at least, of the most remarkable collateral proofs which tend to fix the authorship on Francis—the curious error of the English War-office clerk about the rules of Irish pensions, in the correspondence with Sir William Draper—the personal hostility of the Francis family towards the Luttrells, which accounts for the savage treatment by Junius of such obscure offenders. And now, having used the great historian’s name, somewhat unfairly, by way of shoeing-horn, to draw on a fresh chapter on the old controversy, let me place before you another singular instance of this class of collateral proofs, which, I believe, has not been made public before, but which greatly excited the curiosity of Macaulay, and which he would have followed out—if ever he had taken up the question again—with all the force of his inductive mind.
In one of the early letters of Woodfall’s collection, under the signature “Bifrons” (April 23, 1768: vol. ii. p. 175, of Bohn’s Edition), the writer, after accusing the Duke of Grafton of being a ‘casuist,’ proceeds as follows:—
“I am not deeply read in authors of that professed title: but I remember seeing Busenbaum, Suares, Molina, and a score of other Jesuitical books, burnt at Paris, for their sound casuistry, by the hand of the common hangman.”
I shall assume at once that Bifrons was the same writer as Junius. The general reasons for the assumption are familiar to those versed in the controversy. And even were those general grounds of identity less strong than they are, every one would allow that to prove that Francis was Bifrons, would go a long way towards proving him Junius.
A passage so pregnant with suggestion has of course provoked abundant comment: but all of the loosest description. No one seems to have taken the pains to follow out for himself a hint pointing to conclusions of so much importance, both negative and affirmative.
Mr. W. H. Smith, the recent editor of the Grenville Papers, thus presses it into the service of his theory, attributing the authorship of Junius to Lord Temple:
“The ceremony here alluded to probably took place in or about the year 1732, when the disputes between the King of France and his parliaments, relative to the Jesuits, had arrived at the highest point of acrimony. Several burnings of obnoxious and prohibited books and writings are described by cotemporary authorities at this time; and as Lord Temple, then Richard Grenville, was in France, and chiefly at Paris, from the autumn of 1731 to the spring of 1733, he had, consequently, many opportunities of witnessing the ceremonies of the burning of ‘scores of Jesuitical books’ by the common hangman, as described by Junius.”—(Introductory notes relating to the authorship of Junius, p. cxliv.)
Mr. Smith is scarcely so familiar with the details of French as of English history. No doubt books were publicly burnt in Paris about the time he mentions: but the books were Jansenist, not Jesuit: the letters concerning the Miracles of M. de Paris, the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques, and the like—not the works of the Casuists. In 1732, the Jesuits were the executioners: their turn, as victims, came a generation later.
A writer, who endeavours to establish a claim for Lord Lyttelton, is nearer the mark: but, unluckily, just misses it:——
“We may assume,” says he, “that this burning took place in 1764, as it was in that year that Choiseul suppressed the Jesuits. Thomas Lyttelton was on the continent during the whole of 1764, and for part of the time resided at Paris.”
The burning of books, so accurately described by Bifrons, took place, beyond a doubt, as we shall presently see, on August the 7th, 1761. Now this date raises a curious question, which is indicated, but in a very careless manner, by Mr. Wade (in his notes to Junius, Bohn’s edition):——
“It may be doubted, indeed, whether Bifrons was an Englishman, or even an Irishman: he certainly could not have been a British subject in 1761, unless he was a prisoner of war: for in that year we were at war with France. But if a prisoner of war, how unlikely that he could be at Paris to witness an auto-da-fé of heretical works: he would have been confined in the interior of the kingdom, not left at large to indulge his curiosity in the capital.”
Now, assuming (as all these writers do), that Bifrons-Junius actually saw what he says he saw, how does the circumstance bear on the claims of the several candidates?
What was Lyttelton in August, 1761? An Eton boy, enjoying his holidays.
Where was Lord Temple? At Stowe (see the Grenville Letters) caballing with Pitt.
Where was Burke? At Battersea, preparing to join Gerard Hamilton in Ireland.
Where were Burke the younger, Lord George Sackville, and the rest of the illustrious persons implicated in some people’s suspicions? Not in Paris, we may safely answer, without pursuing our inquiry farther.
But it is undoubtedly possible that Bifrons-Junius, after all, did not himself see the auto-da-fé in question: he may have heard of it, or read of it, and may have described himself as a witness for effect, by way of a flourish, or even by way of false lure to throw inquirers off the scent.
It would then only remain to inquire, in what way, by what association of ideas, Bifrons-Junius came to give so circumstantial a description, and in so prominent a manner, of an occurrence which had passed in a time of war, almost unmarked by the English public, and which had excited in England but very little attention or interest since?
Now let us see how either supposition bears on the “Franciscan theory.”
Francis was a very young clerk in Mr. Pitt’s department (which answered to the Foreign Office of these days) in 1759. In that year he accompanied Lord Kinnoul on his special mission to Portugal. His lordship returned in November, 1760, with all his staff, and the youthful Francis (in all probability) returned to his desk at the same time.
He was certainly at work in the same office between October, 1761, and August 1768; for he says of himself (Parl. Debates, xxii. 97), that he “possessed Lord Egremont’s favour in the Secretary of State’s Office.” That nobleman came into office in October, 1761, and died in August, 1763. In the latter year Francis was removed to the War Office, where he remained until 1772.
Where was he in August, 1761?
According to all reasonable presumption, at work in Pitt’s department.
And yet Lady Francis, in that biographical account of her husband which was published by Lord Campbell—an account evidently incorrect in some details, yet authentic in striking particulars, as might be expected from a lady’s reminiscences of what she heard from an older man—says, “He was at the Court of France in Louis XV.’s time, when the Jesuits were driven out by Madame de Pompadour.”
This, it will be at once allowed, is a strange instance of coincidence between Bifrons and the lady. The more striking, because the particulars of disagreement show that the two stories do not come from the same source. But how can we account for either story? How came Francis to be in Paris—if in Paris he were—in time of war?
With a view to solve this question to my own satisfaction, I once consulted the State Paper Office. It happens that during the summer of 1761, Mr. Hans Stanley was in Paris, on a diplomatic mission, to negotiate terms of peace with Choiseul. He failed in that object—some folks thought Mr. Pitt never meant he should succeed—and returned home in September of that year. His correspondence with Pitt, as Secretary of State, is preserved in the office aforesaid. He seems to have had the ordinary staff of assistants from Pitt’s department: but I could not find any record of their names. His despatches are entirely confined to the subject of the negotiation on which he was engaged, with one exception. He seems, for some reason or other, to have taken much interest in the affair of the Jesuits. On August 10, he writes at length on the whole of that matter. To his despatch is annexed a careful précis, in Downing Street language, of the history of the Jesuits’ quarrel with the parliament: evidently drawn up by one of his subordinates. Enclosed in this précis is the original printed Arrêt de la Cour du Parlement, du 6 Août, 1761, condemning Molina, de Justitiâ et Jure; Suares, Defensio Fidei Catholicæ; Busenbaum, Theologia Moralis; and several other books of the same class, to be lacérés et brûlés en la cour du Palais. And a MS. note at the foot of the Arrêt states that the books were burnt on the 7th accordingly.
Thus much, therefore, is all but certain; some member of Mr. Stanley’s mission, or other confidential subordinate, was present in the Cour du Palais when that arrêt was executed, and reported it to his principal, who reported it to Mr. Pitt: and Francis was at that time a clerk in Pitt’s office, which was in constant communication with Stanley’s mission. We do not know the names of the individual clerks who were attached to that mission, or passed backwards and forwards between Paris and London in connection with it. But we do know that Francis had been twice employed in a similar way (to accompany General Bligh’s expedition to Cherbourg, and Lord Kinnoul’s mission to Portugal). Evidently, therefore, he was very likely to be thus employed again. He may then assuredly have witnessed with his own bodily eyes what no Englishman, unconnected with that mission, could well have witnessed: may have stood on the steps of the Palais de Justice, watched the absurd execution taking place in the courtyard below, and treasured up the details as food for his sarcastic spirit; or (to take the other supposition) he may have read at his desk in the office that curious despatch of Mr. Stanley’s; may have retained it in his tenacious memory; and, writing a few years afterwards, may have thought proper, for the sake of effect, to represent himself as an eye-witness of what he only knew by reading.
All this I once detailed to Macaulay, who, as I have said, was much interested by the argument, and took an eager part in discussing it. But one circumstance (I said) perplexed me, and seemed to interfere with the probabilities of the case. How came Junius, whose excessive fear of detection betrays itself throughout so much of his correspondence, and led him to employ all manner of shifts and devices for the sake of concealment, to give the public, as if in mere bravado, such a key to his identity as this little piece of autobiography affords?
The answer is plain, replied Macaulay on the instant, with one of those electric flashes of rapid perception which seemed in him to pass direct from the brain to the eye. The letter of Bifrons is one of Junius’s earliest productions—its date, half-a-year before the formidable signature of Junius was adopted at all. The first letter so signed is dated in November, 1768. In April, the writer had neither earned his fame, nor incurred his personal danger. A mere unknown scatterer of abuse, he could have little or no fear of directing inquiry towards himself.
But (he added) I much prefer your first supposition to your second. It is not only the most picturesque, but it is really the most probable. And unless the contrary can be shown, I shall believe in the actual presence of the writer at the burning of the books. Remember, this fact explains what otherwise seems inexplicable, Lady Francis’s imperfect story, that her husband “was at the court of France when Madame de Pompadour drove out the Jesuits.” Depend on it, you have caught Junius in the fact. Francis was there.