A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

But the Ministry had so far triumphed that for four years Wilkes remained away from England, drifting from one foreign capital to another, making friends and winning admirers everywhere, and employing his enforced leisure in attempting great feats of literary enterprise. A scheme for a Constitutional History of England was succeeded by a no less difficult and, as it proved, no less impracticable scheme. During Wilkes's exile he lost the most famous of his enemies and the most famous of his friends. On October 26, 1764, Hogarth died. It was commonly said, and generally credited, that he died of a broken heart {69} in consequence of the furious attacks which had followed upon his unhappy quarrel with Wilkes. It was a pity that the closing hours of Hogarth's life should have been occupied with so petty and so regrettable a squabble. Hogarth was entirely in the wrong. Hogarth began the quarrel; and if Hogarth was eager to give hard knocks he should have been ready to take hard knocks in return. But the world at large may very well be glad that Hogarth did lurk in the court by Justice Pratt and did make his memorable sketch of Wilkes. The sketch serves to show us if not what Wilkes exactly was, at least what Wilkes seemed to be to a great many of his countrymen. The caricaturist is a priceless commentator. If Hogarth indeed indirectly shortened his life by his portrait of Wilkes, he gave, as if by transfusion of blood, an increased and abiding vitality to certain of the most interesting pages of history.

Within a few days of Hogarth, Churchill died. His devotion to Wilkes prompted him to join him in his Continental banishment. He got as far as Boulogne, where Wilkes met him, and at Boulogne he died of a fever, after formally naming Wilkes as his literary executor. Wilkes, who was always prompted by generous impulses, immediately resolved that he would edit a collected edition of Churchill's works, and for a time he buried himself in seclusion in Naples with the firm intention of carrying out this purpose. But the task was too great both for the man and for the conditions under which he was compelled to work. In the first place, annotations of such poems as Churchill's required constant reference to and minute acquaintance with home affairs, such as it was well-nigh impossible for an exile to command. In the second place, it was not an easy task for a man even with a very high opinion of himself to play the part of editor and annotator of poems a great part of which had him for hero. In a very short time the work was abandoned, and Wilkes emerged from his literary retreat.

Wilkes has been very bitterly and, as it would appear, very unjustly upbraided for his seeming neglect of his dead friend's wishes, of his dead defender's fame. In spite of {70} those whose zeal for the memory of Churchill drives them into antagonism with the memory of Wilkes, it may be believed that the task was not one "for which Wilkes could, with the greatest ease, have procured all the necessary materials; and to which he was called not by the sacred duties of friendship only, but by the plainest considerations of even the commonest gratitude." Even if Wilkes had been, which Wilkes was not, the kind of a man to make a good editor, a good annotator, the difficulties that lay in the way of the execution of his task were too many. The fact that the poems were so largely about himself gave a sufficient if not an almost imperative reason why he should leave the task alone. But in any case he must have felt conscious of what events proved, that there was other work for him to do in the world than the editing of other men's satires.

Not, indeed, that the genius of Churchill needed any tribute that Wilkes or any one else could bestow. His monument is in his own verses, in the story of his life. If indeed the lines from "The Candidate" which are inscribed on Churchill's tombstone tell the truth, if indeed his life was "to the last enjoyed," part of that enjoyment may well have come from the certainty that the revolutions of time would never quite efface his name or obscure his memory. The immortality of the satirist must almost inevitably be an immortality rather historical than artistic; it is rather what he says than how he says it which is accounted unto him for good. As there are passages of great poetic beauty in the satires of Juvenal, so there are passages of poetic beauty in the satires of Churchill. But they are both remembered, the great Roman and the great Englishman, less for what beauty their work permitted than for the themes on which they exercised their wit. The study of Churchill is as essential to a knowledge of the eighteenth century in London as the study of Juvenal is essential to a knowledge of the Rome of his time. That fame Churchill had secured for himself; to that fame nothing that Wilkes or any one else might do could add.

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CHAPTER XLVI.

THE AMERICAN COLONIES.

[Sidenote: 1765—Grenville as Bute's successor]

Wilkes in exile had ceased to exist in the minds of the King's Ministry. In Naples or in Paris he was as little to be feared as Churchill in his grave. An insolent subject had presumed directly to attack the King's advisers and indirectly the King himself, and the insolent subject was a fugitive, a broken, powerless man. The young King might well be pleased with the success of his policy. In pursuance of that policy he had reduced the great fabric of the Whig party to a ruin, and had driven the factious demagogue who opposed him into an ignominious obscurity. To a temper flushed by two such triumphs opposition of any kind was well-nigh welcome for the pleasure of crushing it, and was never less likely to be encountered in a spirit of conciliation. Yet the King was destined in the very glow of his success to find himself face to face with an opposition which he was not able to crush, and on which any attempt at conciliation was but so much waste of time. The King's new and formidable opponent was his own chief minister.

When Bute, perhaps in fear for his life, perhaps in despair at his unpopularity, resigned the office he filled so ill, he hoped to find in his successor Grenville a supple and responsive creature, through whom Bute would still be as powerful as before. Bute had to taste a bitter disappointment. Grenville's gloomy spirit and narrow mind unfitted him, indeed, for the office he was called upon to hold, but they afforded him a stubbornness which declined to recognize either the authority of the favorite or the authority of the favorite's master. By the time that Grenville had been two years in office the King hated him as {72} bitterly as he had ever hated Pitt. If Bute was impotently furious to find himself discarded and despised by his intended tool, the King was still more exasperated to find that the King's servant proposed to be the King's master. Grenville was a good lawyer and a good man of business, but he was extremely dull and extremely tactless, and he was at as much pains to offend the King as if he intended offence. He was overbearing in manner to a monarch who was himself overbearing; he badgered him with long rambling discourses upon his royal duty; he deliberately wounded him in his two warmest affections, his love for his mother and his regard for Bute. Grenville was right enough in his objection to the undue influence of Bute, but his animadversions came with a bad grace from the man who was to do as much harm to England as Bute had ever done. As Grenville had triumphed over Bute and driven him into the background, so he wished to triumph over the Princess Dowager and deprive her of power. In 1765 the King fell ill for the first time of that malady from which he was to suffer so often and so heavily. As soon as he was restored to health he proposed the introduction of a Regency Bill to settle satisfactorily the difficulties that might very well arise if the heir to the throne were to succeed before the age of eighteen.