In these passionate words the wary and unemotional Orford allowed his apprehension to overflow. He saw the work of his life, the keeping out of the Stuarts, compromised and endangered by the unpopularity of the throne, and the blunders of jobbing mediocrity. He perceived the danger which he had so long warded off now instant and imminent. The House was deeply moved. Newcastle with obvious mortification acknowledged his lapse, and the Chancellor hurriedly drafted an address. Even the Prince of Wales, whose hatred of Walpole was perhaps the deepest feeling of which his shallow nature was capable, was so stirred, that he rose and shook hands with the veteran Minister. Nay, as we are told by a chronicler blissfully unconscious of bathos, 'he revoked the prohibition which prevented the family of Lord Orford from attending his levee.' It was a dramatic occasion, worthy of being the last public appearance of Orford. The hard-bitten old statesman who had been baited for near a quarter of a century, and had always given his opponents as good as he had got, disappeared from the stage with a burst of passionate patriotism.
1744.
The end is so near that we may follow him thither. This speech was on the last day of February, and he was soon afterwards seized with a painful and mortal complaint; but in July he could not resist returning to Houghton for a final visit. There he remained till November, beset by anxious solicitations both from the King and from the Ministry, for he was the guide and stay of both. At last, though tortured with the stone, he consented to return to London at the urgent solicitation of his sovereign, then engaged in a desperate struggle to retain Carteret as Secretary of State. Even Carteret, his old enemy, in the stress of self-preservation sought his aid. Orford set out on November 19, and in four slow days of an agony which wrung even the practised nerves of Ranby, the surgeon (and it is difficult even now to read Ranby's narrative without emotion), he reached London. The crisis then was over, for he had put an end to it on his journey. A message despatched by the Pelhams had met him on the road and placed him in possession of the facts of the situation. He had at once written to advise the King to part with Carteret, and the King had instantly submitted.
This was Walpole's last act of power, but he remained in London to die. For four months he lingered under the hands of the surgeons, sometimes under opium, sometimes suffering tortures with equanimity and good humour. But even so his shrewd and cynical common sense did not desert him. Consulted by the Duke of Cumberland as to a marriage projected for him by the King, but repugnant to the Duke, the dying statesman advised him to consent to the marriage on condition of an ample and immediate establishment. 'Believe me,' he added, 'the marriage will not be pressed.' Walpole's knowledge of mankind left him only with his death.
His constancy, his courage, his temper, his unfailing resource, his love of peace, his gifts of management and debate, his long reign of prosperity will always maintain Walpole in the highest rank of English statesmen. Distinguished even in death, he rests under the bare and rustic pavement of Houghton Church, in face of the palace that he had reared and cherished, without so much as an initial to mark his grave. This is the blank end of so much honour, adulation, power, and renown. For a century and a half unconscious hobnails and pattens have ground the nameless stones above him, while mediocrities in marble have thronged our public haunts. His monument, unvoted, unsubscribed, but supreme, was the void left by his death, the helpless bewilderment of King and Government, the unwilling homage and retractation offered by his foes, the twenty years of peace and plenty represented by his name.
And here another illustrious name cannot but suggest itself, though it may seem difficult to bring into anything like a parallel the two great Sir Roberts, Walpole and Peel. Both were distinguished by the same cautious and pacific sagacity. But they differed by the whole width of human nature in temperament. Walpole belonged to the school of the cold blood, and Peel to that of the warm. This, perhaps, constitutes the most important touchstone in the characters of statesmen, and success usually lies with the colder temperament. Of this principle, Fox, who was warm blooded, presents the most remarkable illustration, and Gladstone, who was not less so, the most signal exception. Peel's conscience, moreover, was as notably sensitive as Walpole's was notoriously the reverse. But though thus essentially apart, there is one capital point which the careers of Walpole and Pitt bear an almost exact resemblance to each other. Neither of them, strangely enough, reached his full height until his fall; neither acquired the full confidence of the country until he had lost that of Parliament; after having exercised almost paramount power as Ministers, neither ever reached his truest supremacy until he had left office for ever. Then, after a great catastrophe which had seemed to demolish them, it was perceived that they had soared above the mist into a higher air, clear of passion and interest; whence, though with scarce a following and without the remotest idea of a return to office, they spoke with an authority which they had never possessed when their word was law to an obedient majority in the Commons; an authority derived from experience and wisdom, without any lingering suspicion of self-interest. They lived in reserve, and only broke their self-imposed silence when the highest interests of the country seemed to forbid them to maintain it. Walpole, it is true, had to do his work mainly behind the scenes, while Peel did it conspicuously in Parliament; but the position was the same. If their eulogist had to choose the supreme period in the lives of both Walpole and Peel, he would select, not the epoch of their party triumphs, but the few exalted judicial years which elapsed between their final resignation and their death. It may seem a strain of language to use the word 'judicial,' for Walpole remained the oracle and stay of Whiggery, while Peel extended his consistent protection to the weak ministry of Lord John Russell. But Peel's protection of Russell was given in defiance of party to secure the Free Trade which he deemed vital, and Walpole's guidance of Whiggery was in disinterested support of men he disliked and despised because he deemed Whiggery, or at least opposition to Jacobitism, not less vital. Free Trade and Whiggery were, in the opinion of the two statesmen, essential to avert the revolutions which the opposite systems would have involved.
This seems a digression, but at this time Pitt and Walpole were not far apart; they secretly acknowledged each other's power and merit. Pitt had already begun to appreciate the solid sagacity of Walpole, and to repent of some random invective. Walpole saw the rhetorical boy developing into the man of the future, and was more and more anxious to enlist him. 'Sir Robert Walpole,' said Pitt in Parliament at a later period, 'thought well of me, and died at peace with me. He was a truly English minister.'[158]