I
With the accession of George I, there ensued an era of unexampled calm in English politics, which lasted until the expulsion of Walpole from power in 1742. No vital questions were debated, nor did problems of principle force themselves into view; and if the Jacobites remained in the background as an element invincibly hostile to absorption, the failure of their effort in 1715 showed how feeble was their hold on English opinion. Not, indeed, that the new dynasty was popular. It had nothing of that romantic glamour of a lost cause so imperishably recorded in Scott's pages. The first Georges were heavy and foreign and meagre-souled; but at least they were Protestant, and, until the reign of George III, they were amenable to management. In the result, an opposition in the classic sense was hardly needed; for the only question to be considered was the personalities who were to share in power. The dominating temper of Walpole decided that issue; and he gave thereby to the political struggle the outlines in which it was encased for a generation.
It is a dull period, but complacent; for it was not an unprosperous time. Agriculture and commerce both were abundant; and the increasing development of towns shows us that the Industrial Revolution loomed in the near distance. The eager continuance of the deistic controversy suggests that there was something of novelty beneath the calm; for Tindal and Woolston and Chubb struck at the root of religious belief, and Shaftesbury's exaltation of Hellenism not only contributed to the Aufklarung in Scotland, but suggested that Christian ideals were not to go unchallenged. But the literature of the time is summarized in Pope; and the easy neatness of his verses is quaintly representative of the Georgian peace. Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and the latter had withdrawn to Ireland to die like a rat in a hole. Bishop Berkeley, indeed, was convinced of the decadence of England; but his Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721) shows rather the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political thought. Certainly no one in that generation was likely to regard with seriousness proposals for the endowment of motherhood and a tax upon the estate of bachelors. The cynical sophistries of Mandeville were, despite the indignation they aroused, more suited to the age that Walpole governed. It is, in fact, the character of the minister which sets the keynote of the time. An able speaker, without being a great orator, a superb administrator, eager rather for power than for good, rating men low by instinct and corrupting them by intelligence, Walpole was not the man, either in type of mind or of temperament, to bring great questions to the foreground of debate. He was content to maintain his hold over the respect of the Crown, and to punish able rivals by exclusion from office. One by one, the younger men of talent, Carteret, Pulteney, Chesterfield, Pitt, were driven into hostility. He maintained himself in office by a corruption as efficiently administered as it was cynically conceived. An opposition developed less on principle than on the belief that spoils are matter rather for distribution than for concentration. The party so formed had, indeed, little ground save personal animosity upon which to fight; and its ablest exertions could only seize upon a doubtful insult to a braggart sea-captain as the pretext of the war it was Walpole's ambition no less than policy to avoid. From 1726 until 1735 the guiding spirit of the party was Bolingbroke; but in the latter year he quarrelled with Pulteney, nominally its leader, and retired in high dudgeon to France. But in the years of his leadership he had evolved a theory of politics than which nothing so clearly displays the intellectual bankruptcy of the time.
To understand the argument of Bolingbroke it is necessary to remember the peculiar character of his career. He had attained to the highest office under Anne at an exceptionally early age; and his period of power had been distinguished by the vehemence with which he pursued the ideal of a strict division of parties and the expulsion of all alien elements from the government. But he had staked all his fortunes upon a scheme he had neither the resolution to plan nor the courage to execute; and his flight to France, on the Hanoverian accession, had been followed by his proscription. Walpole soon succeeded alike to his reputation and place; and through an enormous bribe to the bottomless pocket of the King's mistress St. John was enabled to return from exile, though not to political place. His restless mind was dissatisfied with exclusion from power, and he occupied himself with creating an alliance between the Tories and malcontent Whigs for Walpole's overthrow. The alliance succeeded, though too late for Bolingbroke to enjoy the fruits of success; but in effecting the purgation of the Tory party from its taint of Jacobitism he rendered no inconsiderable service. His foundation, moreover, of the Craftsman—the first official journal of a political party in England—showed his appreciation of the technique of political controversy. Most of it is dead now, and, indeed, no small part of its contemporary success is due to the making of comment in terms of the immediate situation, as also by its consistent use of a personal reference which has, save in the mass, no meaning for today. Though, doubtless, the idea of its inception was derived from journals like Defoe's Review and Leslie's Rehearsal, which had won success, its intimate connection with the party leadership was a novel element; and it may therein claim a special relation to the official periodicals of a later generation.
The reputation of Bolingbroke as a political philosopher is something that our age can hardly understand. "A solemn trifler," Lord Morley has called him; and it is difficult to know why his easy declamation was so long mistaken for profound thought. Much, doubtless, is due to that personal fascination which made him the inspiration of men so different as Pope and Voltaire; and the man who could supply ideas to Chatham and Disraeli cannot be wholly devoid of merit. Certainly he wrote well, in that easy elegance of style which was the delight of the eighteenth century; and he is consistently happy in his choice of adjectives. But his work is at every point embellished with that affectation of classical learning which was the curse of his age. He sought no general truths, and he is free from the accusation of sincerity. Nor has he any enthusiasm save that of bitter partisanship. He hated Walpole, and his political writings are, at bottom, no more than an attempt to generalize his animosity. The Dissertation on Parties (1734) and the Idea of a Patriot King (1738) might have betrayed us, taken alone, into regarding their author as a disinterested observer watching with regret the development of a fatal system; but taken in conjunction with the Letter to Sir W. Windham (1717), which was not published until after his death, and is written with an acrid cynicism fatal to his claim to honesty, they reveal the opinions as no more than a mask for ambition born of hate.
The whole, of course, must have some sort of background; and the Letters on the Study of History (1735) was doubtless intended to supply it. Experience is to be the test of truth, since history is philosophy teaching by example. But Bolingbroke's own argument supplies its refutation. His history is an arbitrary selection of instances intended to illustrate the particular ideas which happened to be uppermost in his mind. The Roman consuls were chosen by annual election; whence it is clear that England should have, if not an annual, at least a triennial parliament. He acknowledges that the past in some degree unknown determines the present. He has some not unhappy remarks upon the evils of an attitude which fails to look upon events from a larger aspect than their immediate environment. But his history is intended less to illustrate the working of principle than to collect cases worthy of citation. Time and space do not exist as categories; he is as content with a Roman anecdote as with a Stuart illustration. He is willing, indeed, to look for the causes of the Revolution as far back as the reign of James I; though he shows his lack of true perception when he ascribes the true inwardness of the Reformation to the greed of the monarch for the spoils of the clergy. At bottom what mainly impresses him is the immense influence of personal accident upon events. Intrigue, a sudden dislike, some backstairs piece of gossip, here is the real root of great changes. And when he expresses a "thorough contempt" for the kind of work scholars such as Scaliger and Petavius had achieved, he shows his entire ignorance of the method whereby alone a knowledge of general principle can be attained.
A clear vision, of course, he has, and he was not beguiled by high notions of prerogative or the like. The divine right of kings is too stupid to be worth the trouble of refutation; all that makes a king important is the authority he exerts. So, too, with the Church; for Bolingbroke, as a professed deist, has no trouble with such matters as the apostolic succession. He makes great show of his love of liberty, which is the true end of government; and we are informed with a vast solemnity of the "perpetual danger" in which it always stands. So that the chief end of patriotism is its maintenance; though we are never told what liberty is, nor how it is to be maintained. The social compact seems to win his approbation and we learn that the secret of the British constitution is the balance of powers and their mutual independency. But what the powers are, and how their independence is preserved we do not learn, save by an insistence that the safety of Europe is to be found in playing off the ambitions of France and Austria against each other; an analogy the rejection of which has been the secret of English constitutional success. We learn of the evil of standing armies and the danger of Septennial Parliaments. We are told that parties are mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and vast patronage; and a great enough show is made of his hatred for corruption as to convince at least some critics of distinction of his sincerity. The parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no difference save that of interest; and herein, at least, he shows us how completely the principles of the Revolution had become exhausted. He wants severe penalties upon electoral corruption. He would have disfranchised the rotten boroughs and excluded placemen from Parliament. The press was to be free; and there is at least a degree of generous insight in his plea for a wider commercial freedom in colonial matters. Yet what, after all, does this mean save that he is fighting a man with the patronage at his disposal and a majority upon the committee for the settlement of disputed elections? And what else can we see in his desire for liberty of the press save a desire to fight Walpole in the open, without fear of the penalties his former treason had incurred?
His value can be tested in another way. His Idea of a Patriot King is the remedy for the ills he has depicted. He was sixty years old when it appeared, and he had then been in active politics for thirty-five years, so that we are entitled to regard it as the fruit of his mature experience. He was too convinced that the constitution was "in the strictest sense a bargain, a conditional contract between the prince and the people" to attempt again the erection of a system of prerogative. Yet it is about the person of the monarch that the theory hinges. He is to have no powers inconsistent with the liberties of the people; for such restraints will not shackle his virtues while they limit the evil propensities of a bad king. What is needed is a patriot king who will destroy corruption and awaken the spirit of liberty. His effective government will synchronize with the commencement of his reign; and he will at once dismiss the old and cunning ministers, to replace them by servants who are wise. He will not stand upon party, but upon the State. He will unite the forces of good counsel into a single scheme. Complaints will be answered, the evildoers punished. Commerce will flow on with uninterrupted prosperity, and the navy of England receive its due meed of attention. His conduct must be dignified, and he must acquire his influence not apart from, but on account of, the affection of his people. "Concord," says Bolingbroke in rhapsodical prospection, "will appear breeding peace and prosperity on every hand"; though he prudently hopes also that men will look back with affection upon one "who desired life for nothing so much as to see a King of Great Britain the most powerful man in the country, and a patriot King at the head of a united people."
Bolingbroke himself has admitted that such a monarch would be a "sort of standing miracle," and perhaps no other comment upon his system is required. A smile in Plato at the sight of his philosopher-King in such strange company might well be pardoned. It is only necessary to point out that the person whom Bolingbroke designates for this high function was Frederick, Prince of Wales, to us the most meagre of a meagre generation, but to Bolingbroke, by whose grace he was captivated, "the greatest and most glorious of human beings." This exaltation of the monarch came at a time when a variety of circumstances had combined to show the decrease of monarchical sentiment. It bears upon its every page the marks of a personal antagonism. It is too obviously the programme of a party to be capable of serious interpretation as a system. The minister who is to be impeached, the wise servants who are to gain office, the attack on corruption, the spirited foreign policy—all these have the earmarks of a platform rather than of a philosophy. Attacks on corruption hardly read well in the mouth of a dissolute gambler; and the one solid evidence of deep feeling is the remark on the danger of finance in politics. For none of the Tories save Barnard, who owed his party influence thereto, understood the financial schemes of Walpole; and since they were his schemes obviously they represented the triumph of devilish ingenuity. The return of landed men to power would mean the return of simplicity to politics; and one can imagine the country squires, the last resort of enthusiasm for Church and King, feeling that Bolingbroke had here emphasized the dangers of a régime which already faintly foreshadowed their exclusion from power. The pamphlet was the cornerstone in the education of Frederick's son; and when George III came to the throne he proceeded to give such heed to his master as the circumstances permitted. It is perhaps, as Mr. A.L. Smith has argued, unfair to visit Bolingbroke with George's version of his ideal; yet they are sufficiently connected for the one to give the meaning to the other. Chatham, indeed, was later intrigued by this ideal of a national party; and before Disraeli discovered that England does not love coalitions he expended much rhetoric upon the beauties of a patriotic king. But Chatham was a wayward genius who had nothing of that instinct for common counsel which is of the essence of party government; while it is necessary to draw a firm line between Disraeli's genial declamation and his practice when in office. It is sufficient to say that the one effort founded upon the principles of Bolingbroke ended in disaster; and that his own last reflections express a bitter disillusion at the result of the event which he looked to as the inauguration of the golden age.