Whether it is owing to the variations of our climate, or to the uncertainty and fluctuations of our Government; whether to the independence that our freedom suggests; or whatever else be the cause, it is certain that no other country produces so many singular and discriminate characters as England. And as the nature of our Government excludes no man from attaining a share in it; and as the licence of opposition and of the press suffers the most severe scrutiny even into the private life of all men in power, it is not surprising that there should be a greater variety in the actors, and a larger harvest of anecdotes relating to them than to the Ministers of other nations. Here, too, the character of the man influences his conduct. In monarchies, the temper and disposition of the prince gives the tone to his subjects and servants. When ministers and factions awe the sovereign, their passions, not his, prescribe their conduct. Never was this truth so elucidated as in the first years of George the Third. Having no predominant passion of his own, but hypocrisy enough to seem to approve whatever his Ministers for the time being willed, almost every year of his reign wore a different stamp. It began with popularity under Lord Bute, but veered as suddenly to Majesty at home. Lord Chatham, had he had time, would have dictated to Europe. Fox and Lord Holland established universal corruption and revenge. Grenville exercised rigour and economy. With Lord Rockingham entered redress and relaxation. Lord Chatham’s second Administration was an interregnum of inexplicable confusion. The Duke of Grafton did as little, without being out of his senses. The people almost seized the reins next, and the Ministers, to save themselves, were content to secure the doors of the Cabinet and of the House of Commons from being stormed, while both the King and the Parliament were vilified and insulted. His Majesty seemed almost as contented to let the populace brave him, as he had been to let Lord Bute, Lord Holland, and Grenville trample on them.
Among men of such various complexion, Lord Weymouth was not the least singular. He was tall, handsome, and, from a German education, solemn and formal in his outward deportment. His look spoke absence, and nothing in his ostensible appearance discovered a symptom of the quickness, cunning, and dissoluteness within. A perfect insensibility produced constant and facile good humour; yet his bent brow and constitutional pride indicated no pleasantry or social mirth. His parts were strong, his conception ready, his reasoning acute, his delivery short and perspicuous. His parts must have been very strong to be capable of emerging from his constant drunkenness and dissipation; for though he had been well instructed, had a retentive memory, and a head admirably turned to astronomy and mechanics, he abandoned all improvement so entirely, that it was wonderful how he had gleaned so much common knowledge of politics as embellished his short speeches, and for a quarter of an hour in every debate infused into him aptness and propriety. The becoming decency and dignity of his appearance was all the homage he paid to public opinion. He neither had nor affected any solid virtue. He was too proud to court the people, and too mean not to choose to owe his preferments to the favour of the Court or the cabals of faction. He wasted the whole night in drinking, and the morning in sleep, even when Secretary of State. No kind of principle entered into his plan or practice; nor shame for want of it. He ruined his tradesmen without remorse, and, if that was an excuse, without thought; and with equal indifference frequently saw bailiffs in his house: for pride is a constitutional stoicism, independent of circumstances. With as little sense of fashionable as of real honour, he had often received letters with demands of gaming debts, written in a style that even such gentlemen seldom endure without resentment. Taciturnity, except with his bacchanalian companions, was his favourite habit, because it harmonized with his prodigious indolence; and ambition, though his only passion, could not surmount his laziness,—though his vanity made him trust that his abilities, by making him necessary, could reconcile intrigue and inactivity. His timidity was womanish, and the only thing he did not fear was the ill opinion of mankind.[136]
The impropriety of such a character probably convinced Wood that a temporary retreat was necessary; and the confidence of the Bedford squadron in their own strength disposed them to acquiesce in it; for I cannot believe that, while their conduct harmonized with Weymouth’s, they were ignorant of his intentions. Lord Weymouth, Lord Gower, the Duke of Grafton, and Lord Sandwich, were more considerable in the House of Lords than any Speakers that would remain in the Ministry; so that if Lord North could carry through the peace, they might still command terms; or if Lord Chatham was forced upon the King, he must have been glad of their support. But Lord North had the sagacity to secure Lord Sandwich (between whom and Weymouth was much jealousy), by making him Secretary of State. The others escaped by having been less precipitate; and Lord Weymouth and Wood remained the sole victims of their own insidious artifices.
No man was more troubled at this sudden resignation than Monsieur Francés, the French Resident. As I was very intimate with him, he vented his lamentations to me in several visits. He said the Bedfords were des scélérats; that they might have made peace three months before; and that that very morning he himself had offered to Lord North to set out directly for Paris, and would pawn his head if he did not return with peace; that Lord North wanted courage, and was too jealous of Spain—that the King of Spain would easily have made peace at first if we would not have armed. I was far from agreeing that Lord North had been to blame in being prepared. Wood, said Francés, had nearly blown up a war with France the last year on the affair of the flag, having insisted on giving an answer to their memorial, though Francés, who had been forced to demand an answer in form, had begged Wood not to give one.[137] He imputed much of the delays in the negotiation to Wood’s stock-jobbing (in which, no doubt, no man was more capable of detecting another than Francés, who was deep in that mystery himself), and said he had sent to Lord Weymouth on the 14th to ask that he might make new propositions; but the other had refused to see him.
Though I knew how ill-disposed Francés was to this country, and that Monsieur du Châtelet was suspected of having incited the King to the seizure of the Falkland Islands, and that the Duc de Choiseul but waited for the means, and would then have found an opportunity of attacking us; yet I was and am persuaded, that Francés at that moment acted with sincerity. Nothing could be more opposite to Choiseul’s interest than a war between France and England at that juncture, in which he was vehemently pressed by the King of Spain to take a part. He had proved in council, to the confusion and confession of his enemies, that the finances of France could not possibly support a war; and his own master’s aversion to war would expose him to still greater dangers, as the mistress and her Cabal could not fail to avail themselves of the Monarch’s disgust to a Minister already tottering, should the least disadvantage attend their arms. The crisis, however, of Choiseul’s fate advanced so rapidly, that I am persuaded, however strong Choiseul’s instructions to Francés had been, he himself by this time had taken another resolution. He had found that his disgrace was determined; he had no support but the King of Spain, who pushed him to declare, and with whose Prime Minister, Grimaldi,[138] he was intimately leagued. Despair decided. Could he obtain his master’s consent to declare war, he himself might be necessary; and he secured the protection of Spain. He marched forty thousand men to the coast opposite to England, under the command of his brother Stainville; and by that rash step brought on his own fall. His enemies, gained by our Court, wrested from their temporising King, who abhorred change, the sentence of Choiseul’s banishment, and a deluge of blood was saved by his disgrace,—a merit which our Court soon effaced by planning a war on our American colonies, hoping to enslave them—and by treating them with as much arrogance and obduracy as they betrayed pusillanimity towards Spain and France, with whom, by such blundering policy, they drew on a war too; till, by misplacing haughtiness, and by a series of wretched measures, they lost at once our colonies in America, and the empire of the ocean everywhere.
I return to Lord Weymouth’s resignation, who, Lord Chatham’s friends asserted, had advised making reprisals on Spain: whether authorised or prompted by Wood, and whether to drive the resigner into opposition, I know not. Certain it is, that he had advised recalling Mr. Harris, our Minister, from Madrid. Francés told me, that when Lord Weymouth demanded restitution of the island, he had promised to negotiate on the title; but when Spain consented to the first point, Lord Weymouth affirmed, he had only said that then we should be en état de négocier. The Spanish Ambassador maintained that his Lordship had three times made the same promise to him as to Francés.
For once such duplicity imposed on nobody; nor did expected popularity follow. Could there be a greater farce than the Bedfords acting jealousy of national honour, when they knew our inability, and had concurred in sacrificing our glory and interest at the end of the most flourishing war? It was only ridiculous that the Duke of Bedford cried out for war, and opposed the land-tax that was to carry it on! With equal consistence, that faction celebrated Lord Weymouth for retiring unplaced and unpensioned,—him, who ruined his tradesmen, paid nobody, had sold a place that was not vacant, during only six weeks that he was Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and of which the purchaser could not recover a shilling; and who had now obtained the Postmaster’s place for his brother!—but could any good come out of Nazareth?
On the 22nd the Parliament was adjourned for the holidays; and on the 28th, a courier brought advice of the Duc de Choiseul’s fall, of which I am enabled to give some authentic anecdotes.
The Duke’s extreme indiscretion in keeping no measures with Madame du Barry, the new mistress, has already been mentioned. His folly was augmented by having had the fate of his predecessor, the Cardinal de Bernis,[139] before his eyes. The Cardinal, from a starving, sonnet-making Abbé, had been rewarded for his flatteries by Madame de Pompadour with the red hat, and by being made Prime Minister; both by her favour. He was no sooner at the height of his fortune, than he not only slighted her, but as an excuse for not visiting her, pleaded that his rank in the Church forbade his frequenting a woman of her character,—as if the back stairs to the apartment of a kept mistress were an honourable ascent for a priest, but her levée a disgrace! His ingratitude and her revenge were complete in about six weeks. The Duc de Choiseul, who certainly was not often troubled with scruples, and who had risen by the countenance of Madame de Pompadour, now influenced by two women[140] of characters as blemished as the mistress’s, affected delicacy about Madame du Barry, who though a common prostitute, at least had not the confidence to act scruples. Yet, though she was the instrument by which his ruin was effected, the crisis turned on an affair of a public nature.
The Duc d’Aiguillon, a man as ambitious as Choiseul, but of a nature as dark as the other was frank and too boldly unreserved, had long been an enemy of the Prime Minister. The Parliaments of France, partly from contempt of the King’s weakness, partly from the intrigues of Choiseul, who had played them and the clergy against each other; and yet more from that free spirit of thinking which they had contracted from applying to English literature and politics, and which Voltaire, Montesquieu, and their modern philosophers, had brought into vogue; the Parliaments, I say, had long given much trouble to the Crown, and none more than that of Bretagne, who, by the marriage of their Duchess Anne with the Kings Charles the Eighth and Louis the Twelfth, had obtained the strongest confirmations of their privileges. Over that province, Choiseul had set his competitor, D’Aiguillon, with a view, it was believed, of destroying him by the difficulty of managing that Parliament. D’Aiguillon’s arbitrary nature, and his observation of the aversion in which Choiseul was held by the Jesuits, whom he had crushed, naturally threw him into the arms of that society; but as the Parliament of Bretagne had led the way to their destruction, the presidents and councillors of that assembly could not brook the countenance shown by their governor to that odious society. At the head of the patriots was the Advocate-General, La Chalotais; a man of invincible spirit and intrepidity—of wonderful parts—of integrity perhaps more wonderful—of some vanity—and of no small indiscretion. Opposition soon commenced, and soon grew inveterate between two characters so dissimilar. The imprudences of La Chalotais were immediately transmitted to Court; and as his nature was unwary, his enemies thought that whatever wore that impress would appear natural; and accordingly there were no follies so outrageous and improbable with which they did not charge him. His business passed through the hands of the Comte de St. Florentin, afterwards Duc de la Vrillière, an ancient drudge of office hackneyed in prosecutions and punishments, and steeled to insensibility by a long series of personal prosperity, and by being as long conversant with the sufferings of others.[141] To passive insensibility he had learnt and added the tricks of treachery; and being now connected with D’Aiguillon, he easily circumvented the provincial credulity of La Chalotais, and drew all his secrets from him by a creature of his own, who acted the friend of the Advocate-General, and went so far as to leave (by a pretended mistake) an important letter he had received from La Chalotais in St. Florentin’s own room. The public did justice on the lower of these tools, one Calonne, by hissing him in the theatre. The King was so weak as to justify the wretch publicly—which did but serve to make his infamy more known; but on La Chalotais the storm burst. He was dragged from prison to prison with his son, and at last shut up with him, but in separate dungeons, in the Château du Taureau, a fort in the sea, to which there was access only at low water. It was in a most rigorous winter, and the son’s legs were on the point of mortifying. A daughter of La Chalotais was hurried to a convent, where she perished by continual alarms of her father’s and brother’s deaths or approaching executions. After repeated tyrannies and trials in various places, many other Parliaments took up the cause of the prisoners; the noble defences made by the father, his undaunted braving of both his persecutors, D’Aiguillon and La Vrillière, and above all his and his son’s innocence, were so incontestable, that Choiseul, struck with their virtues, or willing to mortify D’Aiguillon, persuaded the King to stop all proceedings. The victims escaped, though not acquitted; and were banished, though not condemned.[142]