Mrs. Macaulay, whose principles were more sound and more fixed than Burke’s, and whose reasoning was more simple and more exact, published a short tract in answer, censuring the work as compiled solely to serve the partial interests of an aristocratic faction.[88] It was a still stronger proof of its demerit, that the Court did not answer it at all. Though some parts of it were very offensive, yet the indemnity it bestowed on Lord Bute, and the scandal it would give to the nation and to every other faction, were so agreeable to the reigning junto, that they wisely took no exception to their own share, and left the rest to diffuse animosities on every side. The work, as Mrs. Macaulay said, avowed its patrons as an aristocratic faction; and what was worse, confessed that they adhered to men not measures: incredible as this folly was, it may be seen in the book in so many words. It insinuated the influence of the Princess, took no notice of Lord Chatham, Lord Temple, Lord Camden, or Mr. Grenville; disgusted the popular party by dereliction of Wilkes, by disclaiming triennial Parliaments and place-bills,[89] and encouraged no denomination of men to unite with them, as it declared in terms that should Lord Rockingham and his friends come into place, they should do little more than turn out those whom the book called the King’s men, who called themselves the King’s friends, and who, notwithstanding, the book declared were never admitted to the King’s confidence.
But the most absurd part of all, was Burke’s discharging Lord Bute of all present influence,—a fact not only improbable, as had lately appeared by the influence of his brother Mackenzie—by Lord North’s taking Sir James Lowther’s steward for his secretary, and by Sir James’s late hostilities to the Duke of Grafton who had but half supported him, and by his co-operation with Lord North—by another clerk, whom Jenkinson had placed in Lord North’s service, and who grew to govern him;[90] and by the homage which all succeeding ministers were obliged to pay to the Bute-standard[91], or to risk their power: but it was extremely unwise in a politic light, for while the book thus removed from the people’s attention an odious and ostensible object, it presented them with nothing but a vague idea, which it called a Double Cabinet. Did Burke flatter himself that the Princess was so very sentimental, as to forgive a personal attack on herself in consideration of his tenderness to her favourite? Would their tools be content to be proscribed, to save their patron’s head? And who instructed, who disciplined, Lord Bute’s creatures, but himself? If the Princess was the intermediate agent between them and the King, who conveyed his commands or their advice from her to them, and vice versâ, but Lord Bute, Lady Bute, or Mr. Mackenzie? The exculpation of Lord Bute was therefore silly and impotent flattery, or sillier credulity instilled into Burke by Lord Holland, who always held that language.
Whether it proceeded from ignorance or partiality I do not know, but in fathoming the grounds of the reigning discontents, Mr. Burke was as defective in not going back far enough, as he was in the inefficiency of his remedies. Though his book contained many melancholy truths, it was far from probing to the bottom of the sore. The canker had begun in the Administration of the Pelhams and Lord Hardwicke, who, at the head of a proud aristocracy of Whig Lords, had thought of nothing but establishing their own power; and who, as it suited their occasional purposes, now depressed and insulted the Crown and Royal Family, and now raised the prerogative. Their factious usurpations and insolence were even some excuse for the maxim taken up by Frederic Prince of Wales, by the Princess Dowager, and the reigning King, of breaking that overbearing combination; and so blinded were the Pelhams by their own ambition, that they furnished the Princess with men whose principles and abilities were best suited to inspire arbitrary notions into her son, and to instruct him how to get rid of his tyrants, and establish a despotism that may end in tyranny in his descendants. Though the Princess and Lord Bute gave rashly in to those views, their passions, folly, and cowardice oftener defeated the plan than promoted it; and it was in this light only that Lord Bute ought to be acquitted of raising the prerogative. He rendered it contemptible; while Stone and Murray were the real sources of those discontents, which Burke sought, but never discovered. As I have said so much in the first part of these Memoirs on these heads, it is unnecessary to retail them here. A few facts will evince that the Pelhams, Hardwicke, and their friends, were an aristocratic faction; that they insulted and provoked the Crown and Royal Family, and raised disgusts in them against the Whig party, at the same time planting the rankest Tories about the successor and his mother, and forcing them to throw themselves into the arms of even Jacobites.
1. When the late King intended to restore Lord Granville, the Minister of his own election, the Pelhams, leaguing with the great Lords and principal Whigs, deserted him in the very heat of the rebellion, and obliged him to surrender at discretion. What a lesson was that to the late Prince!—no wonder it laid him open to the wiles of Lord Bolingbroke!
2. Newcastle had long lain in the bosom of that dark and suspected friend of the Stuarts, Andrew Stone. The darling friend of the latter was that bright ornament of the age, that luminary of the law, that second hero of Pope and first disciple of Bolingbroke, William Murray, brother of the Pretender’s Prime Minister, the titular Earl of Dunbar. The fickle Duke and his timid brother, of whom the elder loved nothing so much as a new friend in a reconciled enemy, as the younger with still less sincerity courted every man whose parts he dreaded, were easily persuaded to give themselves up to so useful an assistant, whose walk interfered with the ambition of neither. From that hour every measure was coloured with a tincture of prerogative; and a foundation was laid for that structure against which the disciples of the Pelhams have so much declaimed since.
3. While that dangerous man[92] was infusing his poison into the Court of the King, his friend Lord Bolingbroke was sowing the same seeds at Leicester House. Seemingly attached to different factions, St. John and Murray were carrying on the same plan at both Courts. The death of the Prince, that threatened destruction to the scheme, facilitated its success. In truth had the advice of a man who has since been no enemy to the plan been followed, the principles instilled into a young mind might not have been so early and so deeply laid. Mr. Fox,[93] the very next morning after the death of the Prince of Wales, advised Mr. Pelham to make sure of the successor by sending for him to St. James’s, and keeping him there separate from his mother. The Princess, indeed, might not have secured the same influence over him as she did; but from the persons employed in the education of the young Prince, there is little reason to think that exactly the same care would not have been taken of initiating him in proper principles. All Fox’s subsequent merits in the cause—even the gracious promises made to him by the young King, and broken, could not expiate that offence.[94]
4. The persons employed, the books put into his hands, the disgrace of the first governor and preceptor of the young Prince, the interference of Lord Mansfield, and the ensuing history of Fawcett’s deposition of the Jacobitism of Stone and Murray, the secrecy first exercised to stifle his evidence, and the mock declaration of the Cabinet Councillors when the affair got into the House of Lords, where, instead of any examination, that ordeal of an aristocracy, their word of honour, was only made use of,—all these circumstances concurred in the formation of those evils whose source Mr. Burke so ingeniously missed.
5. The ignorance, blunders, and want of spirit in Newcastle, Lord Anson, and Lord Hardwicke[95] at the beginning of the war, made way for the predominant genius of Mr. Pitt: but though the osier-like nature of Newcastle stooped to act with the latter again, the gloomy and revengeful temper of Hardwicke waited for an opportunity of repaying the disgrace Pitt had inflicted on their cabal. The disgrace of his country was meditated, at least effected, by Lord Hardwicke as revenge on Mr. Pitt. The profusion of the German war (for which Mr. Pitt only demanded supplies, but which he certainly did not direct the Duke of Newcastle to suffer to be plundered and perverted, though Pitt himself was too ostentatiously or too carelessly profuse in his demands) was laid solely to the account of the vigorous Minister, as if it was more criminal in him to dare, than in the other to dissipate our treasure without daring. Even before the death of the late King, was published the celebrated pamphlet called “Considerations on the German War,” written under the patronage and revisal of Lord Hardwicke. That Lord Hardwicke and Lord Bute agreed about that time, at least in their measures, for the destruction of Mr. Pitt, was evident by a place being, immediately on the King’s accession, bestowed by Lord Bute on Mauduit, author of that pamphlet.
6. Nor were these the sole instances of that aristocratic spirit I have mentioned. The Duke of Newcastle who in the very dawn of the Hanoverian succession had forced himself, as godfather to his son, upon the then Prince of Wales, in the next reign set himself up as candidate for the Chancellorship of Cambridge against the next Prince of Wales, Frederic; and even caused the King to prohibit the University to elect his son. Such were the ideas a Whig aristocracy forced the Royal Family to entertain of that party; as if the revolution had been calculated to confirm the power of the nobility, rather than to secure the constitution and the liberty of the people.
7. The marriage act, schemed, drawn, and imposed by Lord Hardwicke, repugnant to the principles of a commercial country, and intended solely to guard the wealth of the nobility from being dispersed among their fellow citizens; the extension of the Habeas Corpus prevented by Lord Mansfield; and the murder of Admiral Byng[96] to palliate the loss of Minorca, which had been sacrificed by the negligence of Lord Anson and by the Duke of Newcastle’s panic of an invasion, were all fruits of the same spirit. Was it possible to review these facts, and affirm that the principles of arbitrary power were not sown till the present reign? The Crown, indeed, got rid of the first authors of the mischief; but then made advantage of the doctrines they had established: for though a predominant nobility often struggle with the Crown, the contest is only which shall oppress the people, and they as often abet the Crown in encroachments on liberty. The number of members in the House of Commons named by great Lords, and the consequential dependence of the Lower on the Upper House, facilitated those views; and when once the resentment and interest of the Court taught them to break the Cabal, they made use of the power of those whom they had interest or art enough to detach from the faction.