CHAPTER IV.
(1741 to 1744.)
t the time when to be discovered carrying on a treasonable correspondence with the Chevalier might cost a man his life, Walpole made such a discovery in the person of a friend of honest Shippen who, himself, kept up such correspondence, but was successful in keeping it concealed. Shippen went to the minister with an urgent entreaty not to bring down destruction on his friend. Mercy was a card it suited the minister to play; he granted the prayer of his great political opponent. But he suggested a stipulation. ‘I do not ask you,’ said Sir Robert, ‘to vote against your principles; but if questions should arise in the House, personal to myself, do not then forget what I have done for you to-day.’
A great personal question did arise,—this year. Lord Carteret in the Lords, and Mr. Sandys, with his long cravat of Queen Anne’s days, in the Commons, moved, on the same day and in precisely the same words, that the king should be requested to dismiss Walpole from his service and counsels for ever. The debate was hot in each House, and the object of the movers was unsuccessful in both. In the Commons, this incident occurred. The impetuous Jacobite Shippen rose to speak. He certainly astonished the House. The motion, he said, was merely made to put out one minister, and to put in another. For his part, he did not care who was in or who was out. He would not vote at all. Shippen walked out of the House, and he was followed by thirty-four friends who had yielded to his persuasions. He thus proved to Walpole the gratefulness of his memory.
INCIDENTS IN PARLIAMENT.
This was not the only incident of the debate. Mr. Edward Harley, uncle of the Earl of Oxford, was one of the speakers. Walpole had borne hardly against the earl as an enemy to the Protestant Succession, for being which the peer had stood in some peril of his life, and had temporarily lost his liberty. Mr. Harley said, he would refrain from acting as unjustly to Walpole, (against whom there was no specific charge, only a general accusation, without any proofs,) as Walpole had acted against his nephew on mere suspicion;—and Mr. Harley walked out of the House, without voting.
PARTY CHARACTERISTICS.
Walpole said of members of Parliament,—he would not declare who was corrupt, but that Shippen was incorruptible. Coxe, in his Life of the Minister, does not describe Shippen as a ‘Hanover Tory,’ running with the hare and holding with the hounds, of whom there were many, but as an uncompromising Jacobite, one who repeated among his Whig friends that there would be neither peace nor content till the Stuarts were restored; and who confessed to his confidants, that there were occasions on which he never voted in the House till he had received orders from Rome;—that is, not from Innocent, Benedict, or Clement, but from King James III. Shippen used to say of Walpole and himself, ‘Robin and I understand each other. He is for King George, I am for King James; but those men with the long cravats, Sandys, Rushout, Gybbon, and others, only want places, and they do not care under which King they hold them.’ This corresponds with John, Lord Harvey’s, account of parties under George II. The Whigs were divided into patriots and courtiers, or Whigs out, and Whigs in; the Tories into Jacobites and Hanover Tories,—the first ‘thorough,’ the second joining with their opponents when there was a promise of profit, personal or political. But their prayer was something like that of the half-starved Highland chieftain: ‘Lord, turn the world upside down, that honest men may make bread of it!’
At this time, there was much reiteration of the assurance of Jacobitism being either dead or in despair. As a proof of the contrary, on May 19th, the London ‘Champion’ referred to movements in the Chevalier’s court at Rome. He had held several meetings with Ecclesiastics, and also with laymen, ‘well-wishers to his interests.’ The ‘Champion’ could not explain the meaning of these two extraordinary assemblies, but attributed them to letters received from London.