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

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

[Sidenote: 1818—Death of Hastings]

The eve of Hastings's life was as peaceful as its noon and day had been stormy. The proconsul became a country squire; the ruler of an empire, the autocrat of kings, soothed his old age very much after the fashion of Diocletian and of Candide, in the planting of cabbages. For three-and-twenty years he dwelt at Daylesford, happy in his wife, happy in his friends, happy in his health, in his rustic tastes, in his simple pleasures, in his tranquil occupation. He and his wife often visited London, but Hastings seems to have been always happiest in the country, and he gradually declined into extreme old age with all the grace and dignity of a Roman gentleman, loved by his {289} friends, dearly loved by those who were young. Once in those long quiet years, after the death of Pitt, Hastings, to please his wife, pleaded for public reparation of the wrong which he believed had been done him. Grenville professed every willingness to grant him a peerage, but refused to entertain the idea of inducing the Commons to reverse their former judgment. On those terms Hastings declined the peerage. The nearest approach to anything like public consolation for his sorrows came to him in 1813, when, at the age of eighty, he came once more to the Bar of the House of Commons, this time to give evidence on the question of renewing the Charter of the East India Company. By both Houses, Commons and Lords alike, the old man was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm, saluted with rapturous applause on his arrival, with reverential salutations on his departure. In 1818 the health which he had preserved so well till then broke, and he died after some severe suffering on August 22 in that year, and was laid in the earth that he had always loved so well.

One of the latest acts of his life was to appeal to the Court of Directors to make some provision for his wife, by extending to her the annuity that had been accorded to him. They gave, says his most devoted biographer, no more heed to his dying entreaties than they would have given to the whine of a self-convicted beggar. Yet surely Hastings had deserved well of the East India Company. His faults had been committed in their service and had given them, not himself, wealth and power. But England is not always grateful to her servants. It is not wonderful, says Sir Alfred Lyall, that Hastings's application failed entirely, "remembering that even Lord Nelson's last testamentary appeal on behalf of a woman—'the only favor I ask of my King and my country at the moment when I am going to fight their battle'—had been rejected and utterly disregarded." Mrs. Hastings survived her husband for some years, and was over ninety years of age when she died.

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CHAPTER LX.

THE CHANGE OF THINGS.

[Sidenote: 1789—The political condition of France]

The establishment of the American republic meant something more for England than the loss of her fairest colonies, and meant much more for Europe than the establishment of a new form of government in the New World. While the United States were acclaiming Washington as their first President and rejoicing over the excellence of their carefully framed Constitution, the principles which had elected the one and had created the other were working elsewhere to unexpected and mighty issues. French gentlemen of rank and fortune, fired by a philosophic admiration for liberty, had fought and fought well for the American colonists. When the revolt had become a revolution, and the revolution a triumph, the French gentlemen went back to France with their hearts full of love and their lips loud in praise for the young republic and its simple, splendid citizens. The doctrines of liberty and equality, which had been so dear to the Philosophers and the Encyclopaedists, were now being practically applied across the Atlantic, and the growth of their success was watched by the eager eyes of the wisest and the unwisest thinkers in France. Within five years from the time when the American army was disbanded French political philosophy found itself making astonishing strides towards the realization of its cherished ideals. It had long felt the need of some change in the system of government that had prevailed in France, but its desires had seemed dim as dreams until the success of a handful of rebellious colonists in a distant country had made the spirit of democracy an immediate force in the life and the thought of the world. Undoubtedly the condition of France was bad. {291} The feudal system, or what was left of the feudal system, worn out, degraded, and corrupt, was rapidly reducing France to financial, physical, and political ruin. It is no part of the business of this history to dwell upon the conditions prevailing in France towards the close of the eighteenth century, conditions which prevailed in varying degree over the most part of Europe. Great French financiers like Turgot, great French thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau and the company of the "Encyclopaedia," had been keenly conscious of the corroding evils in the whole system of French political and social life, and had labored directly and indirectly to diminish them. Keen-eyed observers from abroad, men of the world like Chesterfield, philosophers like Arthur Young, had at different epochs observed the symptoms of social disease and prognosticated the nature of its progress. The France of that day has been likened to a pyramid with the sovereign for its apex, with the nobility, a remnant of antique feudalism, for its next tier, with the wealthy and influential Church for the next, and below these the vast unrecognized bulk of the pyramid, the unprivileged masses who were the people of France. In the hands of the few who had the happiness to be "born," or who otherwise belonged to the privileged orders, lay all the power, all the authority which for the most part they misused or abused. It has been said with truth that the man who did not belong to the privileged orders had scarcely any more influence upon the laws which bound him and which ground him than if he lived in Mars or Saturn instead of in Picardy or Franche Comté. Such a system of government, which could only have been found tolerable if it had been swayed by a brotherhood of saints and sages, was, as a matter of fact, worked in the worst manner possible and for the worst purposes. The conditions under which the vast mass of the French people lived, struggled, suffered, and died were so cruel that it is hard indeed to believe them compatible with the high degree of civilization which, in other respects, France had reached. A merciless and most comprehensive process of taxation squeezed life and hope out of the French nation {292} for the benefit of a nobility whose corruption was only rivalled by its worthlessness and an ecclesiasticism that had forgotten the Sermon on the Mount and the way to Calvary.

But if the condition of France was bad it contained the germs of improvement. A greater freedom of thought, a greater freedom of speech were beginning, very gradually, to assert themselves and to make their influence felt. Philosophical speculation on sorrow and suffering turned the minds of men to thoughts of how that sorrow might be stanched and that suffering abated. The slowly rising tide of thought was blown into an angry sea by a wind from the west, and in a little while a scarcely suspected storm became a hurricane that swept into a common ruin everything that opposed its fury. England had long been looked up to by French reformers as the pattern for the changes they desired to see brought about in their own country. The moderation and equality of its laws, as compared with those of France, the facilities of utterance afforded to the popular voice, made it seem a veritable Utopia to eyes dimmed by the mist of French feudality. But now another and a greater England had arisen in the New World. Across the Atlantic the descendants of the men who had overthrown a dynasty and beheaded a king had shaken themselves free from forms of oppression that seemed mild indeed to Frenchmen, and had proclaimed themselves the champions of theories of social liberty and political freedom which had been dreamed of by French philosophers but had never yet been put into practice. Rebellious America had fired the enthusiasm of gallant French adventurers; successful, independent America animated the hopes and spurred the imaginations of those whose eyes turned in longing admiration from the seasoned constitution of monarchical England to the as yet green constitution of republican America.

[Sidenote: 1789—Revival of the States-General in France]