The end of the summer of 1721 found Berkeley still in London. England was in the social agitation and misery consequent upon the failure of the South Sea Company, a gigantic commercial speculation connected with British trade in America. A new inspiration took possession of him. He thought he saw in this catastrophe signs of a decline in public morals worse than that which followed the Restoration. “Political corruption”, “decay of religion,” “growth of atheism,” were descriptive words used by the [pg xlvii] thoughtful. Berkeley's eager imagination was apt to exaggerate the evil. He became inspired by social idealism, and found vent for his fervour in An Essay towards preventing the Ruin of Great Britain, which, as well as the De Motu, made its appearance in 1721. This Essay is a significant factor in his career. It was the Cassandra wail of a sorrowful and indignant prophet, prepared to shake the dust from his feet, and to transfer his eye of hope to other regions, in which a nearer approach to Utopia might be realised. The true personality of the individual is unrealisable in selfish isolation. His favourite non sibi, sed toti mundo was henceforward more than ever the ruling maxim of his life.
II. Middle Life (1722-34).
In October, 1721, Berkeley was in Dublin. The register of the College shews that “on November 14, 1721, Mr. Berkeley had the grace of the House for the Degree of Bachelor and Doctor of Divinity.” There is no ground for the report that he returned to Ireland at this time as Chaplain to the Duke of Grafton, the Lord Lieutenant[12]. But preferment in the Church seemed within his reach. “I had no sooner set foot on shore,” he wrote to Percival in that October, “than I heard that the Deanery of Dromore was vacant.” Percival used his influence with the Lord Lieutenant, and in February, 1722, Berkeley's patent was [pg xlviii] “passing the Seals for the Deanery of Dromore.” But the Bishop of Dromore claimed the patronage, and this led to a protracted and ineffectual lawsuit, which took Berkeley to London in the following winter, “to see friends and inform himself of points of law,” and he tells that “on the way he was nearly drowned in crossing to Holyhead[13].”
Berkeley's interest in church preferment was not personal. He saw in it only means to an end. In March, 1723, he surprised Lord Percival by announcing, in a letter from London, a project which it seems for some time had occupied his thoughts. “It is now about ten months,” he says, “since I have determined to spend the residue of my days in Bermuda, where I trust in Providence I may be the mean instrument of doing great good to mankind. Whatever happens, go I am resolved, if I live. Half a dozen of the most ingenious and agreeable men in our College are with me in this project, and since I came hither I have got together about a dozen Englishmen of quality, who intend to retire to those islands.” He then explains the project, opening a vision of Christian civilisation radiating from those fair islands of the West, whose idyllic bliss poets had sung, diffused over the New World, with its magnificent possibilities in the future history of mankind.
I find no further record of the origin of this bright vision. As it had become a practical determination “ten months” before March, 1723, one is carried back to the first months after his return to Dublin and to the Essay that was called forth by the South Sea catastrophe. One may conjecture that despair of England and the Old World—“such as Europe breeds in her decay”—led him to look westward for the hopeful future of mankind, moved, perhaps, by the connexion of the catastrophe with America. His active imagination pictured a better Republic than Plato's, and a grander Utopia than More's, [pg xlix] emanating from a College in the isles of which Waller had sung.
In the meantime a curious fortune unexpectedly favoured him. Swift's unhappy Vanessa, associated with Bury Street in 1713, had settled on her property at Marley Abbey near Dublin; and Swift had privately married Stella, as she confessed to Vanessa, who thereafter revoked the bequest of her fortune to Swift, and left it to be divided between Berkeley and Marshal, afterwards an Irish judge. Vanessa died in May, 1723. A few days after Berkeley wrote thus to Lord Percival: “Here is something that will surprise your lordship as it doth me. Mrs. Hester Vanhomrigh, a lady to whom I was a perfect stranger, having never in the whole course of my life exchanged a word with her, died on Sunday. Yesterday her Will was opened, by which it appears that I am constituted executor, the advantage whereof is computed by those who understand her affairs to be worth £3000.... My Bermuda scheme is now stronger in my mind than ever; this providential event having made many things easy which were otherwise before.” Lord Percival in reply concludes that he would “persist more than ever in that noble scheme, which may in some time exalt your name beyond that of St. Xavier and the most famous missionaries abroad.” But he warns him that, “without the protection of Government,” he would encounter insurmountable difficulties. The Vanessa legacy, and the obstructions in the way of the Deanery of Dromore, were the subjects of a tedious correspondence with his friend and business factotum, “Tom Prior,” in 1724 and the three following years. In the end, the debts of Vanessa absorbed most of the legacy. And as to the Deanery of Dromore, he tells Percival, on September 19, 1723: “I despair of seeing it end to my advantage. The truth is, my fixed purpose of going to Bermuda sets me above soliciting anything with earnestness in this part [pg l] of the world. It can be of no use to me, but as it may enable me the better to prosecute that design; and it must be owned that the present possession of something in the Church would make my application for an establishment in those islands more considered.”
Nevertheless, he got a Deanery at last. In May, 1724, he informs Lord Percival from Trinity College: “Yesterday I received my patent for the best Deanery in the kingdom, that of Derry. It is said to be worth £1500 per annum. But as I do not consider it with an eye to enriching myself, so I shall be perfectly contented if it facilitates and recommends my scheme of Bermuda, which I am in hopes will meet with a better reception if it comes from one possessed of so great a Deanery.” In September he is on his way, not to Derry, but to London, “to raise funds and obtain a Charter for the Bermuda College from George the First,” fortified by a remarkable letter from Swift to Lord Carteret, the new Lord Lieutenant, who was then in Bath[14]. As Swift predicted in this letter, Berkeley's conquests spread far and fast in England, where he organised his resources during the four following years. Nothing shews more signally the magic of his personality than the story of his life in London in those years of negotiation and endeavour. The proposal met with a response wonderful in a generation represented by Walpole. The subscriptions soon reached five thousand pounds, and Walpole was among the subscribers. The Scriblerus Club, meeting at Lord Bathurst's, agreed to rally Berkeley, who was among them, on his Bermuda scheme. He asked to be heard in defence, and presented the case with such force of enthusiasm that the company “were struck dumb, and after a pause simultaneously rose and asked leave to accompany him.” Bermuda for a time inspired London.
Berkeley was not satisfied with this. He remembered what Lord Percival had said about failure without help from Government. Accordingly he obtained a Charter from George the First early in 1726, and after canvassing the House of Commons, secured a grant of £20,000, with only two dissentient votes, in May of that year. This was the beginning of his difficulties. Payment was indefinitely delayed, and he was kept negotiating; besides, with the help of Prior, he was unravelling legal perplexities in which the Vanessa legacy was involved. It was in these years that he was seen at the receptions of Caroline at Leicester Fields, when she was Princess of Wales, and afterwards at St. James's or at Kensington, when she became Queen in 1727; not, he says, because he loved Courts, but because he loved America. Clarke was still rector of St. James's, and Butler had not yet migrated to his parsonage at Stanhope; so their society was open to him. The Queen liked to listen to a philosophical discussion. Ten years before, as Princess of Wales, she had been a royal go-between in the famous correspondence between Clarke and Leibniz. And now, Berkeley being in London, he too was asked to her weekly reunions, when she loved to hear Clarke arguing with Berkeley, or Berkeley arguing with Hoadley. Also in 1726 Voltaire made his lengthened visit to England, a familiar figure in the circle of Pope's friends, attracted to the philosophy of Locke and Newton; and Voltaire mentions that he met “the discoverer of the true theory of vision” during his stay in London.
From the summer of 1727 until the spring of 1728 there is no extant correspondence either with Percival or “Tom Prior” to throw light on his movements. In February, 1728, he was still in London, but he “hoped to set out for Dublin in March, and to America in May.” There is a mystery about this visit to Dublin. “I propose to set out for Dublin about a month hence,” he writes to “dear [pg lii] Tom,” “but of this you must not give the least intimation to anybody. It is of all things my earnest desire (and for very good reasons) not to have it known that I am in Dublin. Speak not, therefore, one syllable of it to any mortal whatsoever. When I formerly desired you to take a place for me near the town, you gave out that you were looking for a retired lodging for a friend of yours; upon which everybody surmised me to be the person. I must beg you not to act in the like manner now, but to take for me an entire house in your own name, and as for yourself; for, all things considered, I am determined upon a whole house, with no mortal in it but a maid of your own putting, who is to look on herself as your servant. Let there be two bed-chambers: one for you, another for me; and, as you like, you may ever and anon lie there. I would have the house, with necessary furniture, taken by the month (or otherwise, as you can), for I propose staying not beyond that time; and yet perhaps I may. Take it as soon as possible.... Let me entreat you to say nothing of this to anybody, but to do the thing directly.... I would of all things ... have a proper place in a retired situation, where I may have access to fields and sweet air provided against the moment I arrive. I am inclined to think one may be better concealed in the outermost skirt of the suburbs, than in the country or within the town.... A house quite detached in the country I should have no objection to, provided you judge that I shall not be liable to discovery in it. The place called Bermuda I am utterly against. Dear Tom, do this matter cleanly and cleverly, without waiting for further advice.... To the person from whom you hire it (whom alone I would have you speak of it to) it will not seem strange you should at this time of the year be desirous, for your own convenience or health, to have a place in a free and open air.” This mysterious letter was written in April. From April till September Berkeley again disappears. There is in all [pg liii] this a curious secretiveness of which one has repeated examples in his life. Whether he went to Dublin in that spring, or why he wanted to go, does not appear.
But in September he emerges unexpectedly at Gravesend, newly married, and ready to sail for Rhode Island, “in a ship of 250 tons which he had hired.” The marriage, according to Stock, took place on August 1, whether in Ireland or in England I cannot tell. The lady was Anne, daughter of John Forster, late Chief Justice, and then Speaker of the Irish House of Commons. She shared his fortune when he was about to engage in the most romantic, and ideally the grandest, Christian mission of the eighteenth century. According to tradition she was a devoutly religious mystic: Fénelon and Madame Guyon were among her favourites. “I chose her,” he tells Lord Percival, “for her qualities of mind and her unaffected inclination to books. She goes with great thankfulness, to live a plain farmer's life, and wear stuff of her own spinning. I have presented her with a spinning-wheel.” A letter to Prior, dated “Gravesend September 5, 1728,” thus describes the little party on the eve of their departure:—“To-morrow, with God's blessing, I set sail for Rhode Island, with my wife and a friend of hers, my Lady Handcock's daughter, who bears us company. I am married since I saw you to Miss Forster, whose humour and turn of mind pleases me beyond anything that I know in her whole sex. Mr. James[15], Mr. Dalton, and Mr. Smibert[16] go with us on this voyage. We are now all together at Gravesend, and are engaged in one view.” We are further told[17] that they carried stores and goods to a great value, and that the Dean “embarked 20,000 books, besides what the two gentlemen carried. They [pg liv] sailed in September for Rhode Island, where the Dean intends to winter, and to purchase an estate, in order to settle a correspondence and trade between that island and Bermudas.” Berkeley was in his forty-fourth year, when, full of glowing visions of Christian Empire in the West, “Time's noblest offspring,” he left England, on his way to Bermuda, with the promise of Sir Robert Walpole that he should receive the promised grant after he had made an investment. He bought land in America, but he never reached Bermuda.