His father had trained him to history and antiquities; and he early suckled his own political genius with scribbling journals and pamphlets. Towards the decline of Sir Robert Walpole’s power, he had created himself a leader of the Independents, a contemptible knot of desperate tradesmen,[45] many of them converted to Jacobitism by being detected and fined at the Custom-house for contraband practices. By those people he was shoved into Parliament on the expulsion of Lord Sundon and Sir Charles Wager; but having written that masterly pamphlet called “Faction Detected,” in defence of Lord Bath’s political apostasy, the patron and champion mutually lost their popularity, and nothing was openly remembered of Lord Percival’s works, but a ridiculous history[46] of his own family, which he had collected and printed at an immense expense. Thus exploded, he was very willing to take sanctuary with his leader in the House of Lords; but the Ministry did not think his sting formidable enough to extract it by so dear an operation: how often since has Mr. Pelham wished him laid up in ermine!
At the beginning of this Parliament, rejected by Westminster, and countenanced nowhere, he bought the loss of an election at Weobley, for which place, however, on a petition, Mr. Fox procured him to be returned by Parliament, and had immediately the satisfaction of finding him declare against the Court, declared a Lord of the Bedchamber to the Prince, and, on the first occasion, the warmest antagonist of the Duke and the Mutiny Bill. On Lord Trentham’s being opposed at Westminster last year, Lord Egmont tried, by every art and industry, to expiate his offences in the eyes of his old electors, and was the great engine of the contest there. All the morning he passed at the hustings; then came to the House, where he was a principal actor; and all the evening he passed at hazard; not to mention the hours he spent in collecting materials for his speeches, or in furnishing them to his weekly mercenaries. With this variety of life, he was as ignorant of the world as a child, and knew nothing of mankind though he had acted every part in it. But it is time to continue the history of the Mutiny Bill, and to conclude with the conclusion of his Lordship’s memoirs of his family and himself—“let us here leave this young nobleman struggling for the dying liberties of his country!”
When the Duke had set himself to restore the discipline of the army, and bring it nearer to the standard of German severity, he found it necessary to reform the military code, that whatever despotism he had a mind to establish might be grounded in an appearance of law. The Secretary at War, with a few General Officers, was ordered to revise the Mutiny Bill, and (if one may judge by their execution of this commission) to double the rigour of it. The penalty of death came over as often as the curses in the Commination on Ash-Wednesday. Oaths of secrecy were imposed on Courts Martial; and even officers on half-pay were for the future to be subject to all the jurisdiction of military law. My Lord Anson, who governed at the Admiralty Board, was struck with so amiable a pattern, and would have chained down his tars to a like oar; but it raised such a ferment in that boisterous profession, that the Ministry were forced to drop several of the strongest articles, to quiet the tempest that this innovation had caused.
The Mutiny Bill was likely to pass with less noise; when Colonel Richard Lyttleton, intending mischief, though without seeing half way into the storm he was raising, took notice of the extraordinary novelties and severity of these modern regulations. He was a younger brother of the pious George Lyttelton, with less appearance of, but with not much more real integrity. He was grown a favourite of the Prince of Wales by a forwardness of flattery that had revolted even the Duke, at whose expense on some disobligations he was now paying court to the elder brother.
He was seconded by Colonel George Townshend, eldest son of my Lord Townshend, a very particular young man, who, with much oddness, some humour, no knowledge, great fickleness, greater want of judgment, and with still more disposition to ridicule, had once or twice promised to make a good speaker. He was governed by his mother, the famous Lady Townshend,[47] who having been neglected by the Duke, after some overtures of civility to him, had dipped into all the excess of Scotch Jacobitism, and employed all her wit and malice, the latter of which, without any derogation to the former, had vastly the ascendant, to propagate the Duke’s unpopularity. The Pelhams, who were very near as ill with her, had placed their nephew, Mr. Townshend, in the Duke’s family, to remove him from her influence; and the Duke had softened his haughtiness as much as possible to second their views. But my Lady Townshend’s resentments were not at all disappointed by this notable scheme, nor by the opportunities it gave her son of learning more of his commander’s temper, nor by the credit it gave to any reflections on him when authorized by, or coming directly from one of his own servants and a supposed favourite. The Duke has often said since, that he was never hurt but by the ingratitude[48] of Mr. Townshend and Lord Robert Sutton, whom he had made the greatest efforts to oblige.
This attack from two officers was artfully relieved by Lord Egmont, who had stickled so vehemently against the innovations, that one after another they were given up, or much softened one year after another, though not till many disagreeable instances had been publicly produced of his Royal Highness’s arbitrary control, and though they had been defended in a masterly manner by Mr. Fox, Lord George Sackville, and Colonel Henry “Seymour” Conway;[49] the latter a young officer, who having set out upon a plan of fashionable[50] virtue, had provoked the King and Duke by voting against the Army at the beginning of the war. He was soon after, by the interest of a near relation of his, placed in the Duke’s family, where he grew a chief favourite, not only by a steady defence of military measures on all occasions, but by most distinguished bravery in the battles of Fontenoy and Laffelt (in the latter of which he was taken prisoner), by a very superior understanding, and by being one of the most agreeable and solid speakers in Parliament, to which the beauty of his person, and the harmony of his voice, did remarkably contribute.
This year a new field was opened, during the discussion of the Mutiny Bill, by Sir Henry Erskine, another young officer, lately brought into Parliament by the Duke of Argyle. This man, with a face as sanguine as the disposition of the Commander-in-Chief, had a gentle plausibility in his manner, that was not entirely surprising in a Scotchman, and an inclination to poetry, which he had cultivated with little success either in his odes, or from the patrons to whom they were dedicated; one had been addressed to the Duke, and another to an old gentlewoman at Hanover, mother of my Lady Yarmouth. Of late he had turned his talent to rhetoric, and studied public speaking under the baker at the Oratorical Club[51] in Essex-street, from whence he brought so fluent, so theatrical, so specious, so declamatory a style and manner, as might have transported an age and audience not accustomed to the real eloquence and graces of Mr. Pitt.
It was on the second debate on the Mutiny Bill this year, that Sir Harry Erskine, complaining of the exorbitant power of General Officers on Courts Martial, instanced in his own case, and severely abused General Anstruther, who had treated him very rigorously some years before at Minorca. The charge was so strong, that Mr. Nugent said, if the General (who was not present) did not appear next day and justify himself, he would move for an inquiry into his conduct. This was so well received, that the Secretary at War thought proper to write to General Anstruther to acquaint him with the accusation. He appeared the next day, and spoke some time, but with so low a voice, and so strong a Scotch accent, that scarce ten people heard or understood him. He said “he had undergone a long persecution from his countrymen, who all hated him for having been the only Scot that, on Porteous’s affair, had voted for demolishing the Nether Bow at Edinburgh.” He produced and read an anonymous and bitter letter wrote against him to the late Duke of Argyle, with two letters to himself, one from the author to own the former, and to beg his pardon for it; the other from the council of war at Minorca to vindicate him to the General. He said he suspected Sir Harry Erskine of having been in the conspiracy against him, which he had not punished near so rigorously as it deserved: and he concluded with justifying his government, where, he affirmed, he had eased the people of all taxes imposed by former Governors.
Sir Harry Erskine, with all the false lustre of oratory, and all the falsehood of an orator, replied in an affected gesture of supplication; besought the House to proceed no further in this affair; said he had forgiven all the ill-usage, had mentioned nothing out of revenge, and now pardoned the General’s suspicions. This justification ill-heard, and this deprecation as ill-founded, concluded the affair for the present as awkwardly as it had been begun. The General’s charge against his countrymen was undoubtedly well-grounded, and that of tyranny against him, no less. Indeed, the Scotch would have overlooked his tyranny to the Minorchese, if they could have forgot his supporting the Government, when it was necessary to chastise the mutinous disposition of Scotland, where Captain Porteous had been murdered insolently and illegally by the mob.