It is time we entered better society than we have been in for the last few lectures. Of course much depends on the meaning of the word “better.” I do not think we need attach any moral significance to it. Let me at once admit that by better, I mean more select, or, perhaps, “exclusive” is the right term. For most people in the time of which I am about to treat it was necessary to be born to good society in order to obtain an entrance to it. Yet there were exceptions. Whilst there were men like Brougham whose genius compelled recognition, though they were made to feel that they neither were nor could be members of the inner circle; there were others, without even his social qualifications, who took their place therein and made themselves felt and even feared by the highest in the land. Such a man was the author of the papers from which I shall borrow so much to-day; nor can we forget that the rival in ton to the Prince Regent himself, the first gentleman in Europe, was Brummell, the tradesman’s son.
The subject of my remarks to-day will be at first mainly political, not that I have any desire to raise controversial questions; but one is bound to do so, when speaking of English life during the great war with Napoleon, which bears so striking an analogy to the present. There is a marked tendency to-day to say that the conduct of our statesmen and of society in general contrasts unfavourably with that of men of a century ago; and I think I shall be able to prove conclusively that, under very different conditions the passions of men are much the same as formerly, and that, if the advantage is on either side, it is with the present rather than with the past.
I feel I have set myself a very difficult task in attempting to define a Whig in the later years of George III.
The strength of the party was the new aristocracy created by Henry VIII with the spoils of the monasteries, of which the Cavendishs, Russells, and other houses were the leaders.[25] They were naturally strongly Protestant: and their immense power dates from the Revolution in 1688. Their rivals, the Tories, were in opposition till the accession of George III; and, as their sympathies were all on the side of the exiled Roman Catholic Stuarts, they had little or no influence. When, however, George III, a prince born in England, ascended the throne, the Tories, who bore him no grudge for his treatment of the exiled royal family, rallied to the young monarch, who was resolved not to submit, as his grandfather had done, to the tyranny of the Whig oligarchy. Henceforward the Tories were on the side of the Crown, whilst their opponents resisted its encroachments. The revolt of the American colonies, provoked by Mr. Grenville’s Stamp Act, made the Whigs oppose the King, who was determined to coerce his disaffected subjects. When the French Revolution broke out, this party sympathised with the republicans; and were opposed to the war which began in 1792. Their following consisted of the dissenters and intellectuals: the former drawing their strength from the commercial classes, and the latter consisting of young men, enamoured with the cult of reason and extremely susceptible to new ideas. The bulk of the nation, however, the Church, the country gentry, the farmers, profiting by war prices, and even the lower orders, was Tory. The non-aristocratic members of the Whig party were often great sufferers. They were exposed to mob violence, as in the case of Dr. Priestley, to social ostracism, and to vindictive prosecutions by the government. But the great houses maintained their position and were too strongly entrenched in it to be seriously disturbed.
Thus we have the spectacle of liberal ideas being championed by a coterie of great families, haughty, withdrawn from common folk, and so exclusive that it was almost impossible to gain admission to their circle. Hereditary exercise of power extending over fully a century made them skilled politicians; and when they recruited talent from the middle classes, the Whigs made their allies feel their dependence upon the ruling caste. Neither the philosophy of Edmund Burke in one generation, nor the versatility of Henry Brougham in another, prevented either from the sense of being in a state of dependence on their patrons.
One man, however, without the advantages of birth or wealth, enjoyed the privilege of moving freely in this charmed circle, in the person of Mr. Creevey, whose memoirs only appeared in 1903. His editor, Sir Herbert Maxwell, describes his abilities as hardly of the second order, but I must confess that, considering the position he occupied in the party, I cannot share his opinion. Married to a Mrs. Orde and apparently living on his wife’s moderate fortune, sitting for Thetford, a close borough of the Duke of Norfolk’s, and after his wife’s death subsisting on an income of £200 ($1000) a year, he never stooped to flatter, gave his advice without fear or favour, and, when the Duke put him out of his seat in the House of Commons, wrote the head of the English peerage a letter which shewed that he looked on his patron as an equal who had treated him very shabbily. From the Duke’s reply to “My dear Creevey” it is easy to see that his Grace recognised that he had offended, not a humble dependant, but a man of great political and social influence.
I am now going to select a few passages dating from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens in 1803 and onwards, shewing how England was rent by faction, even in the most perilous days of the war with Napoleon. Remember that often the country was fighting alone against perhaps the greatest genius the world has ever seen, and that her position at times appeared to be almost hopeless.
In 1804, when Buonaparte’s camp was established at Boulogne ready for the invasion of England, party feeling ran extraordinarily high. Pitt was becoming impatient of the incompetence of his friend Addington; and, as a party manœuvre, he moved for an inquiry into the conduct of Admiral Lord St. Vincent and was supported by Fox. Creevey writes that he is convinced that the accused is innocent; but still he felt bound to vote with Fox. “I am,” he says, “more passionately attached every day to party. I am certain that without it nothing can be done.” A month later the King’s madness was coming on, and Creevey hopes that this attack will make an end of him as a ruler. “I hope that the Monarch is done and can no longer make ministers.” Later on, the prospect of disaffection in Ireland fills Creevey with hopes that Pitt’s position may become impossible; he says, “The country engaged in a new war unnecessarily undertaken and ungraciously entered upon, the Catholics discontented, and the Opposition unbroken. If such a combination of circumstances does not shake the Treasury bench, what can?” The next year, 1805 (Trafalgar), brings to Mr. Creevey and his friends the hope that Mr. Pitt may be exposed for lending Government money to a firm which had recently gone bankrupt. In 1808, when Sir Arthur Wellesley began his work in the Peninsula, the convention of Cintra made him most unpopular; and the nation was, says Sir Herbert Maxwell, “almost unanimous in demanding his degradation if not his death.” Mr. Whitbred writes to Mr. Creevey, “I grieve for the opportunity which has been lost of acquiring national glory, but I am not sorry to see the Wellesley pride a little lowered.” The next year witnessed the lamentable failure of the Walcheren Expedition, and Wellesley’s victory of Talavera. Captain Graham Moore, brother to Sir John Moore, writes to Creevey: “The Cannings are in a damned dilemma with this expedition and the victory of Talavera. They mean, I understand, to saddle poor Lord Chatham with the first, but who can they saddle the victory with? They cannot attack the Wellesleys as they did my poor brother. What a cursed set you (politicians) are.” The passage of the Douro by Wellesley led to Mr. Whitbred addressing the General in most complimentary terms; but the war occupied people’s thoughts but little, the main interest being centred in the exposure of the scandalous sale of commissions in the army by Mrs. Clarke, a friend of the Duke of York’s. Two years later, in 1811, Creevey takes encouragement from the number of sick in the army of Portugal and hopes it may bring about peace, and when the war in Spain was nearing its victorious conclusion a friend writes to him, abusing Wellington.
These remarks are indeed the mild utterances of leaders of a party more interested in disparaging their political opponents than in the progress of the war. When we turn to the extreme wing of the party we find Napoleon a hero and his defeat a calamity:
“But even with such mighty odds against him the towering and gigantic genius of Napoleon would have defied them all, if English money had not bribed some of his generals. It was this, and this only, that completed his downfall. To talk of the Duke of Wellington as the conqueror of Napoleon is an insult to the understanding of any intelligent man; and for Lord Castlereagh to have boasted of having subdued him as his lordship was wont to do, was pitiful, was wondrous pitiful.” So wrote Lady Ann Hamilton; in the same strain also at an earlier period spoke Mr. Fox of the virtues of his country’s greatest and most determined enemy. It is thus that history repeats itself in the wars my country has waged in her long history.