Lord Chatham, His Early Life and Connections

by Earl of Archibald Philip Primrose Rosebery

For behind all these strange scenes Walpole pulled the strings. His main object was to avoid his own impeachment, and this, in spite of the determination of the hostile majority which called for his head, he achieved; a feat little less than miraculous. The Tory candidates for office were rejected by the King, and as for the not less bitter Whigs, as

'... bees, on flowers alighting, cease to hum,
So, settling upon places, Whigs grow dumb.'

They were dumb in spite of themselves. The nation, which had been excited by the hope of seeing corruption extinguished, and the advent of a new era of virtue and public spirit, was again disappointed. People saw this sublime struggle result in a jobbing distribution of such places as were vacated to the same sort of people as had vacated them, with precisely the same system. It was much the same ministry without the one great minister. Fooled once more, as so often before and since, people shrugged their shoulders, and turned their attention to other things, more honest and more practical than party politics.

With the fall of Walpole this narrative is not otherwise concerned, for his successors found no post for Pitt. Two members of the Prince of Wales's household, Lords Baltimore and Archibald Hamilton, had found acceptance as members of the new administration; the King probably could not stomach more, certainly not Pitt. For long years afterwards he could not endure contact with the orator who sneered at him and at Hanover, and who even insinuated with factious injustice doubts of his personal courage. It must also be remembered that Pitt was not merely attached to the party of the Prince but to the group of Cobham. That veteran accepted for a short time a seat in the Cabinet and the command of a regiment. But his animosity against Carteret was second only to his animosity against Walpole. Carteret was a powerful, and aimed at being the controlling member of the new Government. He therefore succeeded to the position of target for the barbed arrows of Pitt and his friends which had been vacated by Walpole's retirement. Carteret, the new object of philippic, had striven hard for the succession to Walpole when Pulteney stood aside, but had been foiled by Walpole acting through the King. Lord Wilmington, whom Horace Walpole describes as a solemn debauchee and Hervey as fond only of money and eating, but who was the favourite nonentity of George II., had been fobbed off upon the party as First Minister; and the choice had its advantages. For, always incapable, he was now moribund; and so as a feeble and transient barrier to ambition was the least unacceptable to Walpole's expectant heirs. A figurehead, moreover, was the favourite expedient of the century for skirting the fierce conflict of personalities.

So Wilmington reigned, and Carteret governed for a while in Walpole's stead. The shadowy form of the First Minister could not veil for a moment the bold outline of the Secretary of State, for Carteret, though scarcely attaining real greatness, remains one of the most brilliant and striking figures in the eighteenth century. It is almost enough to say that in all but disregard of money he was the exact antipodes of Newcastle. No man of his time was so splendidly equipped for the highest public service as Carteret. He was sprung from an ancient Norman family settled in Jersey, eight of whom, the father and seven sons, were knighted in one day by Edward III.[131] To a person of commanding beauty and an open and engaging demeanour, he united superb qualities of intellect developed by ardent study. He was a scholar of signal excellence at a time when scholarship was in the atmosphere of English statesmanship, the best Grecian of his day, with the great classics always in his mind and at command. Did any one of the like taste come to him on business, Carteret would at once turn from business to some Homeric discussion. Moreover he knew the whole Greek Testament by heart; an unusual and unsuspected accomplishment.[132] But he was also versed in modern languages, then a rare and never a common faculty in this island, and alone among his compeers spoke German fluently, a priceless advantage under a sovereign whose heart and mind were in Hanover. He was the only person who was in favour both with the King and with the Prince of Wales.[133] He abounded in a wit at once genial and penetrating. He was a puissant orator. His comprehensive grasp of European statecraft, his capacity for taking broad and high views, his soaring politics, his intrepid spirit and his high ambition, marked him out among the meaner men by whom he was surrounded. His contempt of money amounted to recklessness. His scorn of all pettiness made him disdain jobbery, and even the subtler arts of parliamentary manipulation. There was much that was sublime in him, and more that was impracticable. In a greater degree than any other minister of his time, if we except Chatham, with whom he had many qualities in common, does he seem to partake of the mystery of genius. Unfortunately, his energy came in gusts, he could scarcely bring himself to bend, and he was incapable of that self-contained patience, amounting to long-suffering, which is a necessary condition of the highest success in official life. All, indeed, was marred by an extravagance of conduct which was in reality the result of his nature running riot and of his good qualities carried to excess. He played his political chess with the big pieces alone, and neglected the pawns. He disregarded not merely the soldiers and most of the officers, but all the arts and equipment of the parliamentary army, heedless of the fact that parliamentary support is the vital necessity of a British minister. Disdainful of public opinion or party connections, he attempted to play the great game in Europe with no resource but his own abilities and the confidence of his sovereign, whose antipathy to France he shared, and whose policy and prejudices he could discuss in the King's native language. And yet over the bottle, which he loved at least as much as literature or politics, he would laugh at the whole business and the men with whom he was engaged. 'What is it to me,' he would say, 'who is a judge or who is a bishop? It is my business to make Kings and Emperors'; and he would have to be reminded that those who wanted offices or honours would follow and support those who did deal in those commodities. One can hear his jolly laugh. His policy he embodied in one striking sentence: 'I want to instil a nobler ambition into you, to make you knock the heads of the Kings of Europe together, and jumble something out of it which may be of service to this country.' As a matter of fact though he did undoubtedly knock together the heads of some kings, no material advantage resulted to the country. He was, however, a patriot, a single-minded, able, jovial, reckless patriot, but out of touch with the politicians, unsuited to parliamentary government, and so almost ineffectual. And thus we see him at his best on his deathbed, where he quotes to the under-secretary who brought him the Treaty of Paris for approval the speech of Sarpedon with melancholy emphasis. 'Friend of my soul, were we to escape from this war, and then live for ever without old age or death, I should not fight myself among the foremost, nor would I send thee into the glorifying battle; but a thousand fates of death stand over us, which mortal man may not flee from and avoid; then let us on.' These last words he repeated with calm and determined resignation, and after a pause of some minutes desired the preliminary articles of the Peace of Paris to be read to him. After hearing these at length he desired that, to use own words, the approbation of a dying statesman might be declared to the most glorious war and the most honourable peace that this nation ever saw.[134] The news of his extremity had reached Chesterfield. 'When he dies,' wrote this shrewdest judge and observer of mankind in England, who had in his factious days called Carteret 'a wild and drunken minister,'[135] 'the ablest head in England dies too, take it for all in all.'[136]

Pitt soon had an opportunity of showing that the selection of ministers from the Prince's household had left out the one priceless force. For now there came raining into Parliament imperative demands for the impeachment of the fallen Minister. These representations from the various constituencies to their several members are well worth consideration, for they emphasise identical demands with a unanimity suggestive of much later forms of political organization. They denounce Standing Armies, and Septennial Parliaments, asking that Triennial Parliaments, 'at least,' may be restored; they require that placemen largely, and pensioners entirely, shall be excluded from the House of Commons; and that laws shall be passed for the security and encouragement of the linen trade. In an even more sanguine spirit they stipulate for the extirpation of those party distractions 'which, though their foundations have long ceased to exist, were yet so industriously fomented among us, in order to serve the mischievous purposes of a ministerial tyranny.' But first and last, and above all, they insist on the punishment of Walpole, bringing him and his colleagues, which of course meant him, to 'condign punishment.' 'Nothing but the most rigorous justice ought to avenge an injured people ... justice is a duty we owe to posterity.' 'We have a right to speak plainly to you, and we must tell you, Sir, that if the man that ruined our trade, disgraced our arms, plundered our treasure, negotiated away our interests, impoverished the land—in a word, the author of all the disgraces and calamities of twenty years should (while the whole nation is calling out for justice against him) triumph in impunity, we shall be apt to think our constitution is lost.' 'Lenity to him would be cruelty to the nation.'[137] Our ancestors, it will be seen, did not wage their political warfare with the sweetmeats or roses of a carnival contest.

It seems unnecessary to remark that of these various injunctions the only one to which the members of Parliament paid any heed was that for the prosecution or persecution of Walpole. Even here there was no result. The new officials were sated and at ease, the hungry remnant was insufficient or inept. But the constituencies were in deadly earnest, if their members were not. They had been goaded by their leaders to a state bordering on frenzy, and their demands, vindictive as they may appear to us, only embodied the declamation of the Opposition throughout half at least of Walpole's ministry. More than ten years before, Pulteney had publicly declared that 'the Opposition had come to a determined resolution not to listen to any treaty whatsoever, or from whomsoever it may come, in which the first and principal condition should not be to deliver him (Walpole) up to the justice of the country.' But now the Opposition was in power, and Pulteney was in a chastened and moderate mood. His star, indeed, was already on the wane; he was on the high road to the earldom of Bath and extinction. At the first meeting indeed with the King's envoys he had declared in a famous phrase that he could not screen Walpole if he would, for 'the heads of parties are like the heads of snakes, which are carried on by their tails.' But at a later conference he said, with reference to the same topic, that he was not a man of blood, and that in all his expressions importing a resolution to pursue the Minister to destruction he meant only the destruction of his power, not his person. He would consult with his friends, yet must confess that so many years of maladministration deserved some parliamentary censure.

Accordingly Lord Limerick moved on March 9 (1742) for a select committee of inquiry into the administration of the late Sir Robert Walpole during the last twenty years; but Pulteney did not at first countenance this moderate measure. He was absent, on a reasonable excuse no doubt, and in his absence his friends intimated that it would not be disagreeable to him were the motion rejected.

This was, it seems, untrue, but it gave Pitt the first great opportunity of his life. When others were silenced by office or honours, he stood forth as the mouthpiece of the people and as the consistent, incorruptible maintainer of the policy and declarations of his party. It was an opportunity of which he availed himself with terrible effect. It is now, we think, that he first appealed to the imagination and confidence of the nation, as distinguished from the appreciation of Parliament, though that also was sufficiently marked. 'Pitt grows the most popular speaker in the House of Commons, and is at the head of his party,' writes Philip to Joseph Yorke.[138]