The next incident of the time connected with Jacobitism is the celebrated interview between the king and Dr. Johnson. In that celebrated audience which the old Tory had of the king, in February, 1767, in the library of Buckingham Palace, sovereign and subject acquitted themselves equally well. Mr. Barnard, the librarian, had settled Johnson, and left him, by the library fireside. The Doctor was deep in a volume when the king and Barnard entered quietly by a private door, and the librarian, going up to Johnson, whispered in his ear, ‘Sir, here is the king.’ George III. was ‘courteously easy.’ Johnson was self-possessed and equally at his ease, as he stood in the king’s presence.
With little exception, the conversation was purely literary: the characteristics of the Oxford and Cambridge libraries; the publications of the University presses; the labours of Johnson himself; the controversy between Warburton and Lowth; Lord Lyttelton as a historian; the merits of the universal Dr. Hill; the quality of home and foreign periodicals; and so on. When Lyttelton was named, Johnson said he had blamed Henry II. over much. The king thought historians seldom did such things by halves. ‘No, Sir,’ said Johnson, ‘not to kings;’ but he added: ‘That for those who spoke worse of kings than they deserved, he could find no excuse; but he could more easily conceive how some might speak better of them than they deserved, without any ill intention; for as kings had much in their power to give, those who were favoured by them would frequently, from gratitude, exaggerate their praises; and as this proceeded from a good motive, it was certainly excusable—as far as error was excusable.’
JOHNSON, ON GEORGE III.
When Johnson submitted that he himself had done his part as a writer, ‘I should have thought so, too,’ said the king, ‘if you had not written so well.’ Johnson spoke of this to Boswell in these words: ‘No man could have paid a handsomer compliment, and it was fit for a king to pay: it was decisive.’ On another occasion, Johnson being asked if he made any reply to this high compliment, he answered: ‘No, Sir. When the king had said it, it was to be so. It was not for me to bandy civilities with my sovereign.’ Later still he said, ‘I find it does a man good to be talked to by his sovereign;’ and for some time subsequently he continued to speak of the king as he had spoken of him to Mr. Barnard, after the interview: ‘Sir, they may talk of the king as they will, but he is the finest gentleman I have ever seen;’ and later, ‘still harping on my daughter,’ he said at Langton’s: ‘Sir, his manners are those of as fine a gentleman as we may suppose Louis XIV. or Charles II.’
Assuredly, the fine-gentleman manners of either king were not now to be found in the Charles Edward who aspired to the throne which Charles II. had occupied. A passage in an autograph letter, addressed in May, 1767, by Cardinal York to a friend of the family in London (where it was offered for sale three or four years ago), shows the condition of the prince, and shadows forth the lingering hopes of the family. The Cardinal, after stating that the Pope had presented Charles Edward with ‘a pair of beads,’ adds: ‘They are of such a kind as are only given to Sovrains, and could wee but gett the better of the nasty Bottle, which every now and then comes on by spurts, I would hope a greet deal of ouer gaining a good deal as to other things.’
JOHNSON’S PENSION OPPOSED.
Four years later (that is, in 1771), the pensioning of Jacobite Johnson was brought before the notice of the House of Commons. In parliament, his Jacobitism was made use of as a weapon against himself. Townshend’s charge against the Ministry was based on the alleged fact that Johnson was a pensioner, and was expected to earn his pension. ‘I consider him,’ said Townshend, ‘a man of some talent, but no temper. The principle he upholds I shall ever detest. This man, a Jacobite by principle, has been encouraged, fostered, pensioned, because he is a Jacobite.’ Wedderburn denied it, and aptly asked, ‘If a papist, or a theoretical admirer of a republican form of government, should be a great mathematician or a great poet, doing honour to his country and his age, and should fall into destitution, is he to be excluded from the royal bounty?’ The answer is patent; but it is not a matter for gratulation that Johnson wrote, as Lord Campbell remarks, ‘out of gratitude, “The False Alarm,” and “Taxation no Tyranny,” the proof sheets of which were revised at the Treasury.’ Johnson himself did not prove that his withers were unwrung by the vaunting remark to Davies: ‘I wish my pension, Sir, were twice as large, that they might make twice as much noise.’
A 30TH OF JANUARY SERMON.
In 1772, Jacobitism was again under parliamentary notice. At this time, although the Nonjurors kept true in their allegiance to the hereditary right of the Stuarts, the Tories were as opposite as could be to those of the old turbulent era of ‘High Church and Ormond!’ On the 30th of January, Dr. Nowell (Principal of St. Mary, Oxford) preached before the House of Commons a sermon that Sacheverel might have preached. That is to say, he vindicated Charles I.; he also drew a parallel between him and George III., and indulged in very high Tory sentiments. As usual, the preacher was thanked, and he was requested to print his discourse, which was done accordingly. At this juncture the younger Townshend moved in the House to have the sermon burnt by the common hangman; but, says Walpole (in his ‘Last Journals’), ‘as the Houses had, according to custom, thanked the parson for his sermon, without hearing or reading it, they could not censure it now without exposing themselves to great ridicule.’ They did censure it, nevertheless. DEBATE ON THE SERMON. Captain Walsingham Boyle, R.N., proposed, and Major-General Irwin seconded, the motion that the vote of thanks should be expunged. This was opposed by Sir William Dolben and Sir Roger Newdegate, who had proposed the vote of thanks. ‘Sir Roger,’ says Walpole, as above, ‘was stupidly hot, and spoke with all the flame of stupid bigotry, declaring that he would maintain all the doctrines in the sermon were constitutional.’ T. Townshend, jun., showed how repugnant they were to the constitution, and it was carried by 152 to 41, to expunge the thanks. General Keppel, Colonel Fitzroy (Vice-Chamberlain to the king), and Charles Fox, all descendants of Charles I., voted against the sermon, as did even Dyson and many courtiers. The 41 were rank Tories, all but Rigby, who had retired behind the chair; but, being made to vote, voted as he thought the king would like, to whom he paid the greatest court, expecting to be Chancellor of the Exchequer if Lord Guilford should die and Lord North go into the House of Lords. This proper severity on the sermon,’ as Walpole now calls it, ‘was a great blow to the Court, as clergymen would fear to be too forward with their servility, when the censure of Parliament might make it unadvisable for the king to prefer them.’ Boswell thought that ‘Dr. Nowell will ever have the honour which is due to a lofty friend of our monarchical constitution.’ ‘Sir,’ said Johnson, ‘the Court will be very much to blame if he is not promoted.’ A dozen years later, Johnson, Boswell, and ‘very agreeable company at Dr. Nowell’s, drank Church and King after dinner with true Tory cordiality.’ The toast had a different personal application in former days.
MARRIAGE OF CHARLES EDWARD.