[CHAPTER XII.]
The Author’s motives for continuing his Work in the year 1754—Flattery the vice of Historians—The Author’s apprehensions for the Constitution—His political principles—Embarrassments caused by the death of Mr. Pelham—Difficulties in the way of choosing his successor—Appointment and disappointment of Mr. Fox—His audience with the King—Duke of Newcastle sole Minister—New appointments—Character of Sir Thomas Robinson—Affairs in Ireland—New Parliament—Origin of the War in America—Defeat of Major Washington—Law-suit about Richmond New Park—Debates on the Address—Prince of Hesse turns Papist—Disturbances in the New Parliament—Debates on the Army Estimates—Breach between Sir George Lyttelton and Mr. Pitt—State of parties—Projected changes—Deaths of Lords Gower and Albemarle.
Having never proposed to write a regular history, but to throw together some anecdotes and characters which might cast a light on the times in which I have lived, and might lead some future and more assiduous historian to an intimate knowledge of the men whose counsels or actions he shall record, I had determined to lay down my pen at the death of that Minister, whose fortune, situation, and genius had superinduced a very new complexion over his country, and who had composed a system of lethargic acquiescence, in which the spirit of Britain, agitated for so many centuries, seemed willingly to repose. But as the numbness of that enchantment has been dispelled by the evanition of the talisman, though so many of its mischievous principles survive, I shall once again endeavour to trace the stream of events to their secret source, though with a pen more unequal than ever to the task. A Monkish writer may be qualified to record an age of barbarity and ignorance; Sallust alone was worthy to snatch the rapid episode of Catiline from oblivion; Tacitus, to paint monsters whose lives surpassed caricatura; Livy, to embrace whole ages of patriots and heroes. Though no Catiline, I trust, will rise in my pages, to deform his country by his horrid glory; though our present minister,[240] notwithstanding he has the monkey disposition of Heliogabalus, is happily without his youth or lusts, and by the character of the age that disposition is systematized into little mischiefs and unbloody treacheries; though we have no succession of incorrupt senators; yet the times beginning to wear in some lights a more respectable face, it will require a steadier hand, and more dignified conceptions, than served to seize and to sketch out the littlenesses and trifles that had characterized the foregoing period.
The style, therefore, of the following sheets will perhaps wear a more serious aspect than I have used before: yet shall I not check a smile now and then at transient follies; nor, as much appropriated as gravity is to an historian, can I conceive how history can always be faithful, if always solemn. Is a palace a perpetual shrine of virtue, or incessantly a tribunal of severity? do not follies predominate in mankind over either virtues or vices? and whoever has been conversant in a Court, does he not know how strongly the cast of it verges towards ridiculous? Besides, I am no historian: I write casual Memoirs; I draw characters; I preserve anecdotes, which my superiors, the historians of Britain, may enchase into their weighty annals, or pass over at their pleasure. In one point I shall not vary from the style I have assumed, but shall honestly continue to relate the blemishes of material personages as they enter upon the scene: and whoever knows the interior of affairs, must be sensible to how many more events the faults of statesmen give birth, than are produced by their good intentions.
If I do not forbid myself censure, at least I shall shun that frequent poison of histories, flattery. How has it preponderated in most writers! My Lord Bacon was almost as profuse of his incense on the memory of dead Kings, as he was infamous for clouding the living with it. In the reign of Henry the Seventh, the whole strain of his panegyric (and it is more justly to be called so than Pliny’s, whose patron was really a good Prince), is to erect that sordid Monarch’s tyranny into prudence, nay, his very knavery into policy! Comines, a honester writer, though I fear by the masters whom he pleased, not a much less servile Courtier, says, that the virtues of Louis the Eleventh preponderated over his vices! Even Voltaire, who feels for Liberty more than almost ever any Frenchman did, has in a manner purified the dross of adulation, which cotemporary authors had squandered on Louis the Fourteenth, by adopting and refining it after the tyrant was dead. In his war of 1741, he paints that phantom of Royalty, the present King, extinguishing at Metz, with as much energy of concern, as if he was describing the death-bed of a Titus or an Antonine.
But how unpardonable is a flattering history!—if anything can shock one of those mortal divinities (and they must be shocked before they will be corrected), it would be to find that the truth will be related of them at last. Nay, is it not cruel to them to hallow their bad memories? one is sure they will never hear truth; shall they not even have a chance of reading it?
It may be wondered that I, who know and have drawn the emptiness of present Royalty, should, in the exordium to a new period, in which surely the effulgence of Majesty has not been displayed with any new lustre, detain the reader with reflections on a pageant which has so little operation on the reality of the drama. But I must be pardoned: though I now behold only a withering King, good, as far as acquiescing to whatever is the emergent humour of his people, and by no means the object of jealousy to his subjects, yet I am sensible that, from the prostitution of patriotism, from the art of Ministers who have had the address to exalt the semblance while they depressed the reality of Royalty, and from the bent of the education of the young Nobility, which verges to French maxims and to a military spirit, nay, from the ascendant which the Nobility itself acquires each day in this country, from all these reflections, I am sensible, that prerogative and power have been exceedingly fortified of late within the circle of the Palace; and though fluctuating Ministries by turns exercise the deposit, yet there it is; and whenever a Prince of design and spirit shall sit in the Regal Chair, he will find a bank, a hoard of power, which he may play off most fatally against this constitution. That evil I dread—the steps to that authority, that torrent which I should in vain extend a feeble arm to stem, those steps I mean to follow and record.
My reflections led me early towards, I cannot quite say Republicanism, but to most limited Monarchy; a principle as much ridiculed ever since I came into the world, as the profligacy of false patriots has made patriotism—and from much the same cause. Republicans professed to be saints, and from successful sainthood became usurpers: yet Republicanism, as it tends to promote Liberty, and Patriotism as far as it tends to preserve or restore it, are still godlike principles. A Republican who should be mad, should be execrable enough to endeavour to imbrue his country in blood merely to remove the name of a Monarch, deserves to excite horror; a quiet Republican, who does not dislike to see the shadow of Monarchy, like Banquo’s ghost, fill the empty chair of state, that the ambitious, the murderer, the tyrant, may not aspire to it; in short, who approves the name of a King, when it excludes the essence; a man of such principles, I hope, may be a good man and an honest; and if he is that, what matters if he is ridiculous? A Republican, who sees monarchy realizing, who observes all orders of men tending to exalt higher, what all orders had concurred to depress; who has found that the attempts of the greatest men to divert the torrent, have been turned afterwards to swell it; who knows the inefficacy of all endeavours to thwart the bent of a nation, and who is but too sensible how unequal his own capacity and virtue would be to so heroic a character; such a man may be pardoned, I hope, if he contents himself with the silent suffrage and wishes of his heart, though he has not the parade of martyrs, nor the courage of a Roman, in as un-Roman—(why should it be beneath the dignity of history to say?) in as un-British an age as ever was.