England, in short, was governed not by the king but by the Whig Ministers. But their power was doubled by the steady support of the very kings they displaced. The first two sovereigns of the House of Hanover believed they owed their throne to the Whigs, and looked on the support of the Whigs as the true basis of their monarchy. The new monarchs had no longer to dread the spectre of republicanism which had haunted the Stuarts and even Anne, whenever a Whig domination threatened her; for republicanism was dead. Nor was there the older anxiety as to the prerogative to sever the monarchy from the Whigs, for the bounds of the prerogative were now defined by law, and the Whigs were as zealous as any Tory could be in preserving what remained. From the accession of George the First therefore to the death of George the Second the whole influence of the Crown was thrown into the Whig scale; and if its direct power was gone, its indirect influence was still powerful. It was indeed the more powerful that the Revolution had put an end to the dread that its influence could be used in any struggle against liberty. "The generality of the world here," said the new Whig Chancellor, Lord Cowper, to King George, "is so much in love with the advantages a king of Great Britain has to bestow without the least exceeding the bounds of law, that 'tis wholly in your majesty's power, by showing your power in good time to one or other of them, to give which party you please a clear majority in all succeeding parliaments."
The Whigs and Parliament.
It was no wonder therefore that in the first of the new king's parliaments an overwhelming majority appeared in support of the Whigs. But the continuance of that majority for more than thirty years was not wholly due to the unswerving support which the Crown gave its Ministers or to the secession of the Tories. In some measure it was due to the excellent organization of the Whig party. While their adversaries were divided by differences of principle and without leaders of real eminence, the Whigs stood as one man on the principles of the Revolution and produced great leaders who carried them into effect. They submitted with admirable discipline to the guidance of a knot of great nobles, to the houses of Bentinck, Manners, Campbell, and Cavendish, to the Fitzroys and Lennoxes, the Russells and Grenvilles, families whose resistance to the Stuarts, whose share in the Revolution, whose energy in setting the line of Hanover on the throne, gave them a claim to power. It was due yet more largely to the activity with which the Whigs devoted themselves to the gaining and preserving an ascendency in the House of Commons. The support of the commercial classes and of the great towns was secured not only by a resolute maintenance of public credit, but by the special attention which each ministry paid to questions of trade and finance. Peace and the reduction of the land-tax conciliated the farmers and the landowners, while the Jacobite sympathies of the bulk of the squires, and their consequent withdrawal from all share in politics, threw even the representation of the shires for a time into Whig hands. Of the county members, who formed the less numerous but the weightier part of the lower House, nine-tenths were for some years relatives and dependents of the great Whig families. Nor were coarser means of controlling Parliament neglected. The wealth of the Whig houses was lavishly spent in securing a monopoly of the small and corrupt constituencies which made up a large part of the borough representation. It was spent yet more unscrupulously in parliamentary bribery. Corruption was older than Walpole or the Whig Ministers, for it sprang out of the very transfer of power to the House of Commons which had begun with the Restoration. The transfer was complete, and the House was supreme in the State; but while freeing itself from the control of the Crown, it was as yet imperfectly responsible to the people. It was only at election time that a member felt the pressure of public opinion. The secrecy of parliamentary proceedings, which had been needful as a safeguard against royal interference with debate, served as a safeguard against interference on the part of constituencies. This strange union of immense power with absolute freedom from responsibility brought about its natural results in the bulk of members. A vote was too valuable to be given without recompense, and parliamentary support had to be bought by places, pensions, and bribes in hard cash.
But dexterous as was their management, and compact as was their organization, it was to nobler qualities than these that the Whigs owed their long rule over England. Factious and selfish as much of their conduct proved, they were true to their principles, and their principles were those for which England had been struggling through two hundred years. The right to free government, to freedom of conscience, and to freedom of speech, had been declared indeed in the Revolution of 1688. But these rights owe their definite establishment as the recognized basis of national life and national action to the age of the Georges. It was the long and unbroken fidelity to free principles with which the Whig administration was conducted that made constitutional government a part of the very life of Englishmen. It was their government of England year after year on the principles of the Revolution that converted these principles into national habits. Before their long rule was over Englishmen had forgotten that it was possible to persecute for difference of opinion, or to put down the liberty of the press, or to tamper with the administration of justice, or to rule without a Parliament.
Robert Walpole.
That this policy was so firmly grasped and so steadily carried out was due above all to the genius of Robert Walpole. Walpole was born in 1676; and he had entered Parliament two years before the death of William of Orange as a young Norfolk landowner of fair fortune, with the tastes and air of the class from which he sprang. His big, square figure, his vulgar good-humoured face were those of a common country squire. And in Walpole the squire underlay the statesman to the last. He was ignorant of books, he "loved neither writing nor reading," and if he had a taste for art, his real love was for the table, the bottle, and the chase. He rode as hard as he drank. Even in moments of political peril, the first despatch he would open was the letter from his gamekeeper. There was the temper of the Norfolk fox-hunter in the "doggedness" which Marlborough noted as his characteristic, in the burly self-confidence which declared "If I had not been Prime Minister I should have been Archbishop of Canterbury," in the stubborn courage which conquered the awkwardness of his earlier efforts to speak or met single-handed at the last the bitter attacks of a host of enemies. There was the same temper in the genial good-humour which became with him a new force in politics. No man was ever more fiercely attacked by speakers and writers, but he brought in no "gagging Act" for the press; and though the lives of most of his assailants were in his hands through their intrigues with the Pretender, he made little use of his power over them.
His policy.
Where his country breeding showed itself most, however, was in the shrewd, narrow, honest character of his mind. Though he saw very clearly, he could not see far, and he would not believe what he could not see. His prosaic good sense turned sceptically away from the poetic and passionate sides of human feeling. Appeals to the loftier or purer motives of action he laughed at as "schoolboy nights." For young members who talked of public virtue or patriotism he had one good-natured answer: "You will soon come off that and grow wiser." But he was thoroughly straightforward and true to his own convictions, so far as they went. "Robin and I are two honest men," the Jacobite Shippen owned in later years, when contrasting him with his factious opponents: "he is for King George and I am for King James, but those men with long cravats only desire place either under King George or King James." What marked him off from his fellow-Whigs however was not so much the clearness with which Walpole saw the value of the political results which the Revolution had won, or the fidelity with which he carried out his "Revolution principles"; it was the sagacity with which he grasped the conditions on which alone England could be brought to a quiet acceptance of both of them. He never hid from himself that, weakened and broken as it was, Toryism, lived on in the bulk of the nation as a spirit of sullen opposition, an opposition that could not rise into active revolt so long as the Pretender remained a Catholic, but which fed itself with hopes of a Stuart who would at last befriend English religion and English liberty, and which in the meanwhile lay ready to give force and virulence to any outbreak of strife at home. On a temper such as this argument was wasted. The only agency that could deal with it was the agency of time, the slow wearing away of prejudice, the slow upgrowth of new ideas, the gradual conviction that a Stuart restoration was hopeless, the as gradual recognition of the benefits which had been won by the Revolution, and which were secured by the maintenance of the House of Hanover upon the throne.
The Townshend Ministry.
Such a transition would be hindered or delayed by every outbreak of political or religious controversy that changes or reforms, however wise in themselves, must necessarily bring with them; and Walpole held that no reform was as important to the country at large as a national reunion and settlement. Not less keen and steady was his sense of the necessity of external peace. To provoke or to suffer new struggles on the Continent was not only to rouse fresh resentment in a people who still longed to withdraw from all part in foreign wars; it was to give fresh force to the Pretender by forcing France to use him as a tool against England, and to give fresh life to Jacobitism by stirring fresh hopes of the Pretender's return. It was for this reason that Walpole clung steadily to a policy of peace. But it was not at once that he could force such a policy either on the Whig party or on the king. Though his vigour in the cause of his party had earned him the bitter hostility of the Tories in the later years of Anne, and a trumped-up charge of peculation had served in 1712 as a pretext for expelling him from the House and committing him to the Tower, at the accession of George the First Walpole was far from holding the commanding position he was soon to assume. The stage indeed was partly cleared for him by the jealousy with which the new sovereign regarded the men who had till now served as chiefs of the Whigs. Though the first Hanoverian Ministry was drawn wholly from the Whig party, its leaders and Marlborough found themselves alike set aside. But even had they regained their old power, time must soon have removed them; for Wharton and Halifax died in 1715, and 1716 saw the death of Somers and the imbecility of Marlborough. The man to whom the king entrusted the direction of affairs was the new Secretary of State, Lord Townshend. His merit with George the First lay in his having negotiated a Barrier Treaty with Holland in 1709 by which the Dutch were secured in the possession of a greater number of fortresses in the Netherlands than they had garrisoned before the war, on condition of their guaranteeing the succession of the House of Hanover. The king had always looked on this treaty as the great support of his cause, and on its negotiation as representing that union of Holland, Hanover, and the Whigs, to which he owed his throne. Townshend's fellow Secretary was General Stanhope, who had won fame both as a soldier and a politician, and who was now raised to the peerage. It was as Townshend's brother-in-law, rather than from a sense of his actual ability, that Walpole successively occupied the posts of Paymaster of the Forces, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and First Lord of the Treasury, in the new administration.
