General Abercrombie was sent to command in America; a man who signalized himself neither before nor after his advancement. Five new Brigadier-Generals and three Colonels, with rank only in our colonies, were appointed to serve under him. Amherst had a separate command, with Wolfe for second. These officers were all selected by Pitt, who contented himself with always speaking of the affair of Rochfort as res intentata, and with keeping the commanders on that expedition unemployed; though Conway, in the most earnest terms, and by every interest he could use, begged to serve in any quality, and in any part of the world. He was refused: and even when the English staff was carried in to the King by Ligonier, his Majesty struck out the names of Mordaunt, Conway, and Cornwallis. Ligonier represented Conway’s eagerness for employment, and that his case was different from Mordaunt’s—he had tried to do something. “Yes,” said the King, “après diné la moutarde.” However, he said he would think of Conway, though not then.
In Ireland, affairs grew to a crisis. The Opposition were inflamed with resentment at the Secret Committee set up by the Duke of Bedford, the management of which they had wrested from him. As the season, too, approached for the departure of the Lord Lieutenant, the Primate had no time to lose for recovering his place in the Regency. Every reason of policy and decency made it more eligible to him to obtain that situation by gentle means than by violence. He and Ponsonby offered terms to the Duke of Bedford, who, though confessing their superiority in the House of Commons, refused to unite with them. In truth, he had involved himself so much with Lord Kildare, and was so unwilling to disoblige Fox by disobliging that Lord, that he knew not how to extricate himself. If Kildare would have softened towards the Primate, the accommodation would soon have been completed; but he would not desert himself; and he knew his party would desert him if once reconciled to the Prelate. More, the Black Rod, was dispatched to England to consult Mr. Fox; the Duke hoping in the meantime to be able to govern independently of either party.
The first step he took towards the system only tended to make it more impracticable. A Judge’s place falling vacant, the Lord Lieutenant, to demonstrate his impartiality, offered the nomination to the Chancellor, who recommended Malone’s greatest enemy, a creature of the Primate, and one formerly employed by Lord George Sackville to write pamphlets on their side. His preferment, thus obtained, was no obligation to the Primate: Malone resented it strongly, and soon took an opportunity of exerting his resentment. The Secret Committee got enlarged powers, intending to turn them against the Duke of Bedford’s Treasury; and the party in general hurried to hostilities.
The Lord Lieutenant’s secretary was a place of great profit, if in the hands of an intelligent and interested man. He had fees from every new commission in the army; and his selling regiments and subordinate ranks had long passed as a matter scarce to be disavowed. If he had great power over his patron, and none over himself, Bishoprics and every other preferment in the gift or at the recommendation of the Lord Lieutenant were marketable at the secretary’s apartments in the Castle. But it was on the death of a King that the secretaryship was largely lucrative. He touched for every renewal of commission and patent. With some of these advantages, Mr. Conway had been a sufferer by the employment. The table and equipage are very expensive for the year of the Lord Lieutenant’s residence in Ireland. It is the second, the fallow[16] year, that indemnifies both the master and the servant; and the Duke of Devonshire quitted before their second year.
Mr. Conway had disdained the least gratification for his interest; and as often as the Duke of Devonshire offered him the nomination of regiments and commissions, he constantly recommended neglected officers, who deserved the station, and were too indigent to reward the service, for which Conway scorned to be rewarded. The great age of the King, joined to the other inducements I have mentioned, had been the principal object that had shone in Rigby’s eyes when he carried the Duke of Bedford to Ireland; but that prospect the Opposition now cut off; and while their patriotism was only sharpened by popularity, it happily served to disburthen poor officers from so heavy a tribute. They proposed a question, which, by the ill-humour of Malone, was carried without a negative, that the Lord Lieutenant’s secretary ought to have no fees for commissions; that the loss ought to be made up to him in some other way. The King, when this resolution came to England, ordered the secretary’s salary to be 2500l. a year. The blow was heavy, and had its effect.
The Primate, having demonstrated his power, showed he was not implacable. Lord Fane, of whose integrity the Duke of Bedford had the greatest opinion—and with some reason, for it was like his own, founded on a partial degree of sense, and easily misled to very contrary purposes—was then in Ireland. To him the Primate sent Lord Hilsborough’s uncle, Mr. Hill, with new offers of accommodation. Lord Fane carried them; but at first the Duke of Bedford was deaf. Lord Fane went again; the Duchess and Rigby were present, and to disguise their inclinations to the treaty, affected to receive him with the same coldness as the Duke did; by which stale art the Duke thought them of his opinion, till they had time to make him of theirs; and then the negotiation was easily carried on, and the Primate restored to his usual power in the Government, where, when once reinstated, he became the sole arbiter of affairs. He avoided interfering with Rigby’s traffic; he assured the Duchess of the homage of her subjects, and secured her return to them; and he had too much insinuation not to charm the Duke himself, who departed to England, smiling and self-satisfied, though sold by one[17] man and vanquished by another! Offers were made to Lord Kildare of being included in this treaty, which he refused, quitting his part of the Regency, but professing to avoid future hostilities. The Primate and the Speaker were left Lords Justices; the third place, Lord Kildare’s [one must have lived in England and seen the abandoned behaviour of our patriots before one could believe it], was filled by Lord Shannon; that very Mr. Boyle, for whom Lord Kildare had commenced all these disturbances, and whose opposition to the Primate had first introduced virtue, and consequently prostitution, into Ireland. Malone, too, kept his place, and Sir Richard Cox[18] was made a Commissioner of the Revenue.
Before I quit the affairs of that country, I must mention a spiritual business that made some noise there. Dr. Clayton, Bishop of Clogher, had already distinguished himself as a man of parts and a freethinker. His Essay on Spirit, which seemed to accord with Clarke’s esoteric doctrine, had more the address of an heresiarch than the plain-dealing simplicity of a Christian pastor. He now published a vindication of the Testament, which seemed calculated for doing anything with the Testament rather than supporting it. Yet the man was believed sincere in his opinions—and so a man ought to be who thinks it worth his while to expose himself by exploding any common prejudices. He even aspired to sufferings for his zeal in propagating counterband metaphysics among illiterate Irish. But the Bishops, his brethren, taking the alarm, and intending a meeting with their orthodox Primate, in order to prepare an application to the Crown for a royal visitation, Clayton died suddenly of a panic, though possessed of a good private estate, and ambitious of martyrdom!
This little flame was soon extinguished; in fact, there were no religious combustibles in the temper of the times. Popery and Protestantism seemed at a stand. The modes of Christianity were exhausted, and could not furnish novelty enough to fix attention. Linzendorffe plied his Moravians with nudities, yet made few enthusiasts. Whitfield and the Methodists made more money than disturbances; his largest crop of proselytes lay among servant-maids; and his warmest devotees went to Bedlam without going to war. Bower, whom some thought they had detected as a Jesuit, and who at most was but detected as an impostor, had laid open the practices of the Catholics, and detailed the establishments of the Jesuits in the very heart of London, without occasioning either alarm or murmur against those fathers. His History of the Popes, one of the ablest performances we have, was decried, because, to recommend a work of truth and utility, he had embroidered his own story with some marvellous legends. Yet, uninflammable as the times were, they carried a great mixture of superstition. Masquerades had been abolished, because there had been an earthquake at Lisbon; and when the last jubilee-masquerade was exhibited at Ranelagh, the ale-houses and roads to Chelsea were crowded with drunken people, who assembled to denounce the judgments of God on persons of fashion, whose greatest sin was dressing themselves ridiculously.
A more inconvenient reformation, and not a more sensible one, was set on foot by societies of tradesmen, who denounced to the magistrate all bakers that baked or sold bread on Sundays. Alum, and the variety of spurious ingredients with which bread, and indeed all wares, were adulterated all the week round, gave not half so much offence as the vent of the chief necessary of life on the seventh day. Indecent prints were prohibited: the Chief-Justice Mansfield caused to be seized at an auction a well-known tale, called “The Woman of Pleasure,” a work that simplified novels to their original intention. Some of the elders, too, of our own Church, seeing what harvests were brought into the tabernacles of Whitfield and Wesley by familiarizing God’s word to the vulgar, and by elevating vulgar language, had the discretion to apply the same call to their own lost sheep, and tinkled back their old women by sounding the brass of the Methodists. One Ashton, a quaint and fashionable preacher of the Orthodox, talked to the people in a phrase compounded of cant and politics: he reproved them for not coming to church, where “God keeps a day, but sees little company;” and informed them that “our ancestors loved powder and ball, and so did our Generals; but the latter loved them for their hair and hands.” Yet to do justice to better principles, the age had made some estimable improvements. Prize-fighting, in which we had horribly resembled the most barbarous and most polite nations, was suppressed by the Legislature. Hogarth had undertaken the cause of humanity, and painted satires on all species of cruelty. From France and Italy, we had adopted hospitals for foundlings; and from the dictates of nature, all manner of hospitals. Our stage grew chaste; indecency dared not to show its face in a modern comedy, though it still remained in possession of the old ones; and what is remarkable, having been tolerated when women went to the theatre in masks, preserved its hold, now they went without them.