But his submission, whether accompanied or not by a feigned resignation, availed him nothing; his unpopularity seemed rather to increase than diminish. The nation suspected his good faith. The legion of able and brilliant men whom he had alienated were in no ways appeased, but more ruthless in their determination to hunt him to the death; the multitude effervesced in mobs. Soon they were all in full cry. There was another general election in 1741, when the Prince of Wales with lavish subsidies entered actively into the strife. Parliament, dissolved in April, met in December, thirsty for Walpole's political blood.
The inglorious course of the war in the meantime, its delays and disasters, forms no part of Pitt's life. One may wonder in passing at the callous wickedness that sent out raw boys and decrepit pensioners to die of fever and exhaustion, or at the strange fortune by which those who prepare such expeditions, ministers, commissaries, contractors, and the like, escape the gallows. Walpole at any rate did not escape the particular fate that he deserved. A year of glowing and successful war might yet have saved him; a year of failure and calamity fixed his doom.
He had held on to the last possible moment, and so fell with little of grace or dignity. An inevitable political catastrophe only becomes more overwhelming by delay; each day that a minister remains in power against the will of the nation adds force to the torrent against him. Moreover, he affronted public opinion by receiving unusual favours from the King when he had become the object of popular execration. Here the coarse fibre which had stood him in such good stead during a hundred fights did him disservice, for it hindered his perception of the fact that it is unwise to be conspicuously decorated at a moment when the nation is calling for your head. He held on, with failing health but unfailing courage, though the war had furnished him with a reasonable door of departure at the critical moment when honour permitted and indeed required him to go, and though his friends had implored him to resign. The motives for his obstinacy were obvious enough. His was a doughty soul, and did not yield without agony. But there was a more practical reason. He believed that, as had long been threatened, his fall would be followed by his impeachment. As soon as he resigned, his brother Horace hurried off to burn his papers. Walpole himself took a similar precaution. This shows their sense of the imminence of the danger which had always impended over him, and which was first in their thoughts when the protection of office was about to be withdrawn.
The final scene in the House of Commons was dramatic enough, and must have been in the mind of Disraeli when he penned his description of the fall of Peel. As the fatal division on the Chippenham election was proceeding, the Minister sate and watched the hostile procession with unfailing and imperturbable humour. He beckoned to his side Bayntun Rolt, the Chippenham candidate supported by the Opposition, and so their nominal champion, and gave him a reasoned catalogue of many of the members voting against him, detailing their ingratitude and treachery, as well as the exact favours that he had heaped on them. 'Young man, I will tell you the history of all your friends as they come in; that fellow I saved from the gallows, and that from starvation; this other one's sons I promoted,' and so forth;[125] then passing on through this bitter recital to his scornful conclusion, he declared that never again would he set foot in that House.[126]
He fell with the skill and presence of mind which never deserted him, for in everything except office he remained victorious. All parties had combined to destroy Walpole, and in their triumph all not unnaturally expected to see every vestige of the detested administration swept away in his defeat. Vast was their disappointment. Newcastle, the oldest of the old gang, to use the vivid expression of modern politics, had long scented the approaching catastrophe of his chief, and had been preparing to lessen the shock to himself and his friends, so far as was possible, by judicious conference with the Opposition.
Newcastle has long been a byeword; he was so all through his protracted public life; and he has remained in history a synonym for a certain jobbing and fussing incapacity. Justice has, perhaps, been scarcely done to his laborious life; his disinterestedness about money, rare in any age, especially in that; above all to his unequalled capacity for remaining in office, a virtue not unappreciated by the great mass of politicians. Nor was he a fool, though he was something of a coward. A man who could hold the seals of Secretary of State for thirty continuous years of stress and intrigue, who filled high office for forty-five years in succession, could not be without invaluable qualities for steering with persistence and astuteness through intricacies of parliamentary navigation. His ambition, such as it was, had indeed an elastic but stubborn tenacity; the ties of blood, friendship, or principle availed nothing against it. His industry, such as it was, is attested by his long tenure of office and the vast mass of his correspondence. His disinterestedness, such as it was, is proved by his leaving public life 300,000l. poorer than he entered it, and by his nevertheless refusing a pension offered him by George III. on his retirement, a circumstance almost unique in the annals of the century. In nothing else was he disinterested. His only taste in private life seems to have been for the pleasures of the table and the consequent art of the physician. On his resignation in 1756 he attempted indeed to assume the air of a retired country squire. Guns and gaiters were procured, but getting his feet wet he hurriedly abandoned the sports of the field and with them the appearance of rural absorption. This illustrates his crowning defect. In all that he did he was supremely ridiculous.
'Behind him close behold Newcastle's Grace,
Haste in his step and absence in his face;
Tho' void of honesty, of sense, of art,
A foolish head and a perfidious heart,
Yet riches, honours, power he shall enjoy.'[127]
Foote and Smollett have left vivid caricatures of his ludicrous personality. The story of his conference with Pitt when Pitt was in bed with the gout, and of his getting into a vacant bed and discoursing from thence to his colleague, is one of the choicest pictures of his absurdity that survive. The two leading Ministers were found storming at each other from adjacent couches, disputing as to whether Hawke's fleet should put to sea or not.[128] Pitt fortunately prevailed. Newcastle's grotesqueness was part of his temperament, for all through his life his jealousy and suspicion kept him in a perpetual froth of nervous excitement. His jealousy was of power, his suspicion of those who aimed at it. And by power he meant patronage. Throughout his long life his god or goddess was patronage. Indeed his voluminous correspondence rather resembles the letter-bag of an agency for necessitous persons of social position than the papers of a Prime Minister or Secretary of State. To hold a crowded levee of placehunters, ecclesiastical and temporal, to thread his way about it coaxing, fawning, and slobbering, embracing and even kissing, promising and paying all with the base coin of cozenage, this was Newcastle's paradise. But it answered. It made him necessary to his party, and therefore necessary to those who would govern the country; for government was restricted to his party. So all statesmen in turn scorned and employed him. 'His name,' said Walpole, 'is perfidy.' But perfidy paid, and Walpole kept him to the end, fully aware that he was always ready for betrayal if expediency dictated it, and that in the closing months he was in fact busy at the work. At last, indeed, Walpole himself, under the name of the King, commissioned him to intrigue officially. Hardwicke, perhaps the greatest of our Chancellors, who furnished the brains for Newcastle, and condescended to act as his mentor and instrument, was joined with him to make terms with the enemy, and offer the reversion of the Treasury on condition of immunity for Walpole.
Pulteney was the enemy, or its chief; for he led the Opposition, and guided the Court of the Heir Apparent, as he had that of the father when Prince of Wales, though then without fruit and result. He was also the idol of the nation. For long years he had made the people believe that Walpole was a Goliath of corruption, and that he was the incorruptible David. Moreover, his vast wealth, his ability, his eloquence, and his social qualities gave him a personal ascendancy apart from his political position. 'He was, by all accounts,' writes Shelburne, 'the greatest House of Commons orator that had ever appeared,'[129] surpassing even the legendary reputation of Bolingbroke; he was also a scholar, a wit, and a potent pamphleteer. In conversation he excelled; when the wits were gathered at Stowe, the pre-eminence of Pulteney was acknowledged.[130] At this moment he was supreme, 'in the greatest point of view,' writes Chesterfield, 'that I ever saw any subject in.... the arbiter between the Crown and the people; the former imploring his protection, the latter his support;' 'possessing,' says Glover, 'a degree of popularity and power which no subject before him was ever possessed of.' All eyes were raised to him with expectant adoration as he stood on this pinnacle, and as they gazed they saw him slowly totter, and then fall headlong. For the two Ministers had succeeded in compromising him. He refused, indeed, amnesty for Walpole or office for himself; but adulterated these refusals by watering his expressions of hostility to the Minister, and by asking on his own behalf for an earldom and a seat in the Cabinet. When his followers found that he and Carteret were engaged in secret negotiation with Ministers, their indignation was unbounded. They held a public meeting to disown him. His popularity disappeared in an instant and for ever. He afterwards averred that he had lost his head, that there was no comprehending or describing the confusion that prevailed, and that he was obliged to go out of town for three or four days to keep his senses. This is not impossible or even improbable. A political crisis bursts like a tornado, and bewilders the strongest characters. Both rare and happy are the men who can on such occasions take counsel with themselves, and meet the storm with presence of mind. Pulteney had, perhaps, become enervated with a long period of merely negative opposition. Glover also asserts that his hand was forced by Lyttelton who was secretly offering terms to Walpole, and that these, though tendered by the Prince of Wales's Secretary, Walpole treated with disdain. Glover was an ill-conditioned wasp, and his story refutes itself. For the one person whom Walpole was anxious to gain was Frederick, even offering to add 50,000l. to his income. That he should then have spurned an overture from the Prince's right-hand man is out of the question; he would have met it more than half-way. Whatever the cause, Pulteney, having committed himself, could not retrace his steps; an iron grip constrained him. In vain did he seek to recall his patent and escape his peerage. Walpole held him fast. Pulteney had finally conquered in the long struggle of twenty years, and overthrown Sir Robert; but the prostrate Minister had from the dust worked Pulteney like a marionette.