1769.
Thus ended the year 1769, leaving a prospect of very gloomy scenes at hand. In the last reign the House of Lords had acquired a great ascendant in the legislature; at the beginning of the present, the Crown had aimed at, and well nigh attained, an increase of the prerogative. The people were now grown formidable both to the King and Lords, and openly attacked the House of Commons, their best real support. Against all the branches of the legislature the contest was certainly unequal, but the vibrations of the balance proved how nicely the constitution was poised. Yet so tremulous an equilibrium made it the more to be feared that one or other of the scales might preponderate. The union of all three against the people, by the Lords and Commons being sold to the King, was still more formidable. I shall conclude the history of the year with what relates to foreign politics.
The tide was turned in favour of the Russians. The victorious Grand Vizir, who had checked their success, was removed by an intrigue of the Seraglio; and his successor rashly venturing to give battle, was defeated with great loss: Choczim was taken, and Prince Gallitzin, who had been recalled on a notion of having failed, destroyed the Turkish army before he received the news of his disgrace. France and Spain were tempted to molest the Russian fleet as it should pass through the Mediterranean; and, as it was received and favoured in our ports, it was not improbable but the three powers would be drawn into the vortex of the war. We had actually subsisting with France a quarrel that disposition to a rupture would easily have blown up into very serious discussion. A French ship had come into one of our ports, but refused to lower her pendant. On being fired at, the French captain continued to refuse striking the pendant, but declared himself our prize. France presented a strong memorial, and threatened reprisals. A parallel case had happened in Sir Robert Walpole’s time, who had yielded the point by breaking the captain for one day, and promoting him the next. At this time a vigorous answer was returned, and in harsher terms than Mr. Conway thought necessary, who asking Lord Weymouth at Council if he had looked into the former case, he replied, No—and sent away the memorial without examining it. Lord Weymouth, as will appear hereafter, was not apt to avoid hostile measures.[1] Two thousand sailors were ordered to be raised: but so inattentive were the Ministers to any system, and so impossible was it for naval commanders, or West Indian governors to obtain the shortest moments of audience, that this fervour of flippant resolution seemed a mere tribute to national clamour, not the consequence of any methodical determination.
The situation of the Duc de Choiseul dispelled those clouds. Prone as he was to attack us, and impatiently as he wished for occasions of signalizing his ambitious genius, his master’s pacific and indolent humanity, the embarrassed state of the French finances, and the storm ready to burst on his own head, left Choiseul neither means nor power of embroiling Europe farther. Their funds were deficient, their army not paid, and the Prime Minister was too extravagant and too volatile to attend to details of economy, or to strike out any considerable plans of frugality. He could neither find resources, nor men who could find any. D’Invau,[2] an honest man, whom he had made Comptroller-General, fairly abandoned the trial in less than a year. It was a strange succedaneum on which the Duke pitched, and which in a man less mercurial would have spoken despair. He refused to select a new Comptroller, and told the King that the Chancellor ought to choose one,—thus screening himself from blame if the successor should fail, as was most probable; but at the same time certain, that a man placed by his enemy would not, if successful, prove a friend to one that had not recommended him. Maupeou, the Chancellor, was a very able man, as false as Choiseul was indiscreetly frank, and had long been that Duke’s most shameless flatterer.[3] The Duke’s true friends had warned him against raising Maupeou from the post of Vice-Chancellor to that of Chancellor. Choiseul did not deny that there was danger in it, but said, no other man was fit for the post. Choiseul presumed on maintaining ascendant enough to control him. Maupeou, too, did not want confidence, but his was backed by art and method. Choiseul despised his enemies—Maupeou despised nothing but principles.
The Duc de Choiseul, denying all hostile intentions in his Court, offered to allow us to send a person to Toulon to see that no preparations for war were carrying on there; and before the end of the year, the Comte du Châtelet returned to England to confirm the pacific assurances that had been given.
As the interior of the Court of France is scarce known in this country, a short account of the intrigues at the time I am describing, may be a present not unacceptable to posterity. I passed many months at Paris in four different years, had very intimate connections there with persons of the first rank, and of various factions; and I spent five evenings in a week with the Duchesse de Choiseul and her select friends in the summer of 1769. The Duke was often of the party; and his levity and her anxiety on his account let me into many secrets, and explained enough of the rest to make me sufficiently master of the critical situation of the Minister at that time. I must take up his story a little farther back to make it perfectly intelligible.
Madame de Pompadour, who to the end of her life governed Louis XV. by habit, by which he was always governed, had established the Duc de Choiseul in the Ministry, and left him in possession of the chief share of power. Cardinal de Fleury and she had been successively absolute: but the King had never resigned himself entirely to anybody else. The Duc de Choiseul had quick parts, and dispatched business with the same rapidity that he conceived it. His ambition was boundless, his insolence ungoverned,[4] his discretion unrestrained, his love of pleasure and dissipation predominant even over his ambition. He was both an open enemy and a generous one, and had more joy in attacking his foes than in punishing them. Whether from gaiety or presumption, he never was dismayed. His vanity made him always depend on the success of his plans; and his spirits made him soon forget the miscarriage of them. He had no idea of national or domestic economy, which being a quality of prudence and providence, could not enter into so audacious a mind. He would project and determine the ruin of a country, but could not meditate a little mischief, or a narrow benefit. In private his sallies and good humour were pleasing, and would have been more pleasing if his manner had not been overbearing and self-sufficient. The latter created him enemies; the former, friends.[5] Among the first were the Maréchal de Richelieu and the Duc d’Aiguillon. To the impertinence of a fashionable old beau,[6] Richelieu added all the little intrigues and treacheries of a Court, having tried every method but merit to raise himself to the first post. At past seventy he still flattered himself with the vision of pleasing women[7] and governing the King, because the King at near sixty had not done being pleased with women. The Duc d’Aiguillon[8] was universally abhorred. His abominable tyranny and villany in his Government of Bretagne had made him dreaded; and his ambition being much superior to his abilities, he had betrayed the badness of his heart before he had reached the object to which he aspired.[9] The Duc de Choiseul despised Richelieu, and had kept down d’Aiguillon. They were connected before; their resentments and views united them more intimately, but it was the contemptible one that shook their antagonist’s power.
There was a Comte du Barry, said to be of a noble family.[10] It was much more certain that he was a sharper and a pimp, nominally to the Maréchal, frequently so to the young English that resorted to Paris, where he furnished them with opera girls, and drew them into gaming. Two years before he was known for loftier intrigues, the Lieutenant de Police civilly warned some English lords not to haunt Du Barry’s house, lest he should find them there when, as he expected, he should be forced to visit a place so scandalous. Du Barry, in quest of a more plentiful harvest, came to London, and exercised his vocation at taverns. In his Parisian seraglio, was a well-made girl of the town, not remarkably pretty, called Mademoiselle L’Ange. After passing through every scene of prostitution, this nymph was pitched upon by the Cabal for overturning the ascendant of Choiseul. To ensure her attachment to them, and to qualify her for the post she was to occupy in the State,[11] they began with marrying her to the brother of her pander, Du Barry. The next step was to prevail on Belle, the King’s first valet de chambre, and first minister of his private hours, to introduce her to the Monarch. After such a succession of beauties as he had known, and no stranger to the most dissolute, too, the King was caught with such moderate charms, which had not even the merit of coming to his arms in their first bloom.
At first a sort of mystery was observed. But the fair one gained ground rapidly, and Solomon soon began to chant the perfections of his beloved. The Court was shocked to hear to what an idol of clay they were to address their homage. They were accustomed to bow down before a mistress—but took it into their heads that the disgrace consisted in her being a common girl of the town. The King’s daughters, who had borne the ascendant of Madame de Pompadour in their mother’s life, grew outrageous, though she was dead, at the new favourite, for being of the lowest class of her profession; and instead of regarding this amour as only ridiculous, treated it with a serious air of disobedience, that would have offended any man but so indulgent and weak a father, or a very wise one. The poor King blushed, and by turns hesitated and exalted his mistress. In private the scene was childish: his aged Majesty and his indelicate concubine romped, pelted one another with sugarplums, and were much oftener silly than amorous. The Faction did not sleep: the next point was that Madame du Barry should be presented publicly. The King promised: her clothes and liveries were made.
Instead of attempting to remove or buy the new mistress, the Duc de Choiseul’s conduct was as imprudent and rash as the King’s was pitiful. He spoke of Madame du Barry publicly, without decency or management; which being quickly carried to her, and she complaining of it, he said at his own table, before a large company:—“Madame du Barry est très mal informée; on ne parle pas de catins chez moi.” The King’s irresolution and the Minister’s insolence, suspended the abjection of the courtiers. Even the men avoided the mistress; and when the King proposed to carry any of them to her, they excused themselves, slipped away, or were silent. Had they never been mean, such conduct had been noble.