Dec. 10, 1755.
Two days later, again the treaties were discussed in both Houses.
The debate in the Lords does not concern us. It was spirited and bitter. Temple raised the storm, while the future George III. sate and took notes. In the Commons there was a new feature. Newcastle, doubtful of the zeal of Fox and Murray on his behalf, had retained for his defence Hume Campbell, the brother of Marchmont; with the Paymastership as a retaining fee, had not Fox, who always had his eye on this lucrative place, vetoed the appointment.[315] Walpole describes the new gladiator as eloquent, acute, abusive, corrupt, insatiable. To this accumulation of epithets we need and can add nothing. He had been in opposition with Pitt, and had had a brush with him already, but had almost given up attendance in Parliament.
Hume Campbell, raised to this bad eminence, seems to have acquitted himself ably in his opening attack, and to have delivered a masterly speech. He could see no reason, he said, why gentlemen were suffered to come every day to the House merely to threaten and arraign the conduct of their superiors. Such behaviour was unparliamentary and unprecedented. 'Let the House punish,' he said, 'these eternal invectives.' Pitt angrily called him to order for so describing the debates of that House. Horace Walpole, the elder, said, with some reason, that Pitt ought to be the last man in the House to complain of irregularity. Pitt declared that Campbell's words struck directly at the liberty of debate; that he had a mind to move to have the words taken down, but would refrain till the orator had explained himself. Campbell then proceeded with his discourse. He was followed by other speakers, Murray delivering a fine argument in defence of the treaties. Pitt, meanwhile, contrary to his habit, possessed himself in silence, collecting all his powers for his reply. When he arose he delivered one that was memorable and overwhelming. 'You never heard such a philippic as Pitt returned. Hume Campbell was annihilated. Pitt, like an angry wasp, seems to have left his sting in the wound, and has since assumed a style of delicate ridicule and repartee. But think how charming a ridicule must be that lasts and rises, flash after flash, for an hour and a half! Some day perhaps you will see some of the glittering splinters that I gathered up.'
So wrote Horace Walpole in the first enthusiasm produced by this effort. But the more deliberate record in his memoirs reveals few of the flashing splinters that he thought to have garnered. Luckily, Sir William Meredith has left a very brief account[316] of the tilt between Campbell and Pitt, which we can collate with Walpole's.
So slight had been the defence, said Pitt, that he did not know how to deal with it; only little shifts or evasions worthy of a pie-poudre court, but not of Parliament. As for Hume Campbell, he had him in his power, he could bring him to his knees at the bar of the House as a delinquent for such an assault on the privileges of Parliament. If members were to be threatened for speaking with freedom of Ministers, all liberty of debate would be at an end. As he revered the profession of the law, so he grieved to hear it dishonoured by language that fixed an indelible blot on him that spoke it. 'Superior' was a word that he disdained. That hon. gentleman might indeed have his superiors. But he knew that when sitting, speaking, and voting in his legislative capacity the King himself was not his superior. And he could assure the hon. gentleman that such freedom in speaking of ministers was neither unparliamentary nor unprecedented. For even in the profligate prerogative reign of James I., when a great duke, as now, monopolised power, the House of Commons possessed an honest member who dared to call that duke stellionatus, a beast of most hideous deformity, covered with blurs and blotches and filth, an ideal monster, fouler than exists in nature. Yet a grave and venerable member of parliament thought this no unfit comparison for that great duke, who no doubt had his slaves all about him who called him Superior, yet durst not bring such language into the House of Commons. And we had then a wretched King who would have been glad of the assistance of a great lawyer, could he have one to have threatened a member of parliament for exposing the arbitrary and pernicious designs that he was carrying on by his ministers against his people. Thank God! we had no such King. If we had, he would not want a slavish lawyer to abet the worst measures that can be devised to ruin and enslave this country.
'But I will not dress up this image under a third person,' he exclaimed, turning full round and facing Hume Campbell, 'I apply it to him; his is the servile doctrine; he is the slave; and the shame of his doctrine will stick to him as long as his gown sticks to his back. After all, his trade is words; they were not provoked by me, but they have no terrors for me, they provoke only my ridicule and contempt.'
Then turning to Murray, he denounced the treaties as a violation of the Act of Settlement. The article to which, it may be presumed, he referred was as follows:
'That in case the Crown and Imperial Dignity of this realm shall hereafter come to any person, not being a native of this Kingdom of England, this nation be not obliged to engage in any war for the defence of any dominions or territories which do not belong to the Crown of England without the consent of Parliament.'