[7] A story of the private intrigues of the Duke of Newcastle with Lord Carteret, during Sir Robert Walpole’s Administration, is told by Lord Orford in his Common Place Book. When Lord Hervey was to be made Privy Seal (in 1740), the Duke of Newcastle, to prevent the appointment, obtained Lord Carteret’s consent to accept the office, and moved at Council, that it should be offered to him. Sir Robert said he did not know whether Lord Carteret (who was then in Opposition) would take the place. The Duke said he would answer for him. Sir Robert replied, “I always suspected you had been dabbling there, now I know it; but if you make such bargains, I don’t think myself obliged to keep them.” Lord Hervey had the office.
[8] Correspondence, April 25, 1746.
[9] Letter to Mr. Conway, October 13, 1764.
THE AUTHOR’S
POSTSCRIPT[10]
TO THESE MEMOIRS.
The reader has now seen these Memoirs; and though some who know mankind, and the various follies, faults and virtues, that are blended in our imperfect natures, may smile with me at this free relation of what I have seen and known, yet I am aware that more will be offended at the liberty I have taken in painting men as they are; and that many, from private connexions of party and family, will dislike meeting such unflattered portraits of their heroes or their relations. Yet this, I fear, must always be the case in any history written impartially by an eye witness: and eye witnesses have been generally allowed the properest historians. Indeed, the editor of Chalon’s History of France was of a different opinion, and lamented that Thuanus, who has obliged the world with so complete and so ample a history of his own times, should have confined himself to write nothing but what passed in his own time, and comme sous ses propres yeux.[11]
Thus much I shall premise: if I had intended a romance, I would not have chosen real personages for the actors in it; few men can sit for patterns of perfect virtue. If I had intended a satire, I would not have amassed so many facts, which, if not true, would only tend to discredit the Author, not those he may censure. Yet councils and transactions, not persons, are what I anywhere mean[12] to blame. The celebrated Bayle has indeed offered a notable excuse for all who may offend on the severer side. “The perfection of a history,” says he,[13] “is, when it displeases all sects and all nations, this being a proof that the author neither flatters nor spares any of them, and tells the truth to all parties.” A latitude this, in which I am not at all desirous of being comprehended; nor very reconcileable with a notion of history which he has laid down in another place.[14] There he says, “As the sacred history was not the work of a particular person, but of a set of men, who had received from God a special commission to write; in like manner, civil history ought to be drawn up by none but persons appointed by the State for that purpose.”
Unless State writers could be inspired, too, I fear history would become the most useless of all studies. One knows pretty well what sort of directions, what sort of information would be given from a Secretary’s office; how much veracity would be found, even if the highest in the historical commission were a Bishop Sprat. It is not easy to conceive how Bayle, who thought it his duty to collect and publish every scandalous anecdote from the most obsolete libels, should at last have prescribed a method of writing history, which reduces it to the very essence of a gazette; a kind of authorized composition which the most partial bigots to a Court have piqued themselves upon exposing. Roger North, the voluminous squabbler in defence of the most unjustifiable excesses of Charles the Second’s Administration, has drawn[15] the following picture of State Historians. “It was hard to varnish over the unaccountable advancement of this noble Lord without aid of the Gazetteer—but the historian has made sure of a lofty character of his Lordship, by taking it from the Court. We may observe in his book in most years a catalogue of preferments, with dates and remarks, which latter, by the secretarian touches, show out of what shop he had them; and certainly the most unfit for history of any, because they are for the most part not intended for truth but flourish; and what have Court compliments to do with history?” Here I beg leave to rest this part of my apology; and proceed to answer other objections, which I foresee will be made to me.