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

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

[Sidenote: 1763—The retirement of Bute]

With Bute retired two of his followers, Dashwood and Fox. Dashwood went to the Upper House as Lord Le Despencer; Fox accompanied him as Lord Holland. The disappearance of Dashwood from the Commons was a matter of little importance. The disappearance of Fox marked the conclusion of what had been a remarkable, of what might have been a great career. From this time Fox ceased to take any real part in public business, and if his presence lent no lustre to the Lords, his absence made the character of the Commons more honorable. Fox, with all his faults, and they were many and grave, had in him the gifts of the politician and the capacity of the statesman. Dashwood was a vulgar fool, who, as Horace Walpole said, with the familiarity and phrase of a fishwife, introduced the humors of Wapping behind the veil of the Treasury. But Fox was a very different type of man. Had he been as keen for his own honor as he was eager in the acquisition of money, had he been as successful in building up a record of great deeds as he was successful in building up an enormous fortune, he might have left behind him one of the greatest names in the history of his age. But he carried with him to the Upper House the rare abilities which he had put to such unworthy uses, and he lives in memory chiefly as the father of his son. In having such a son he rendered the world a good service, which he himself labored with infinite pains to make into an evil service.

A young, inexperienced, and headstrong King found himself suddenly the central figure of perhaps as singular a set of men as ever were gathered together for the purpose of directing the destinies of a nation. A famous caricature of the period represents the front of a marionette-show, through an aperture of which the hand of Bute pulls the wires that make the political puppets work, while Bute himself peeps round the corner of the show to observe their antics. No stranger dolls ever danced around a royal figure to the manipulation of a favorite's fingers. At {34} a time when political parties as they are now familiar to us did not exist, when Whiggism was so dominant that Opposition in the modern sense was unknown, when the pleasures and the gains of administration were almost entirely reserved for a privileged caste, and when self-interest was the rarely disavowed spur of all individual action, it is scarcely surprising to find that the vast majority of the statesmen of the day were as unadmirable in their private as they were unheroic in their public life. For then and long after, the political atmosphere, bad at its best, was infamous at its worst, and by an unhappy chance the disposition of the King led him to favor in their public life the very men whose private life would have filled him with loathing, and to detest, where it was impossible to despise, the men who came to the service of their country with characters that were clean from a privacy that was honorable. Many, if not most, of the leading figures of that hour would have been more appropriately situated as the members of a brotherhood of thieves and the parasites of a brothel than as the holders of high office and the caretakers of a royal conscience. There were men upon the highway, rogues with a bit of crape across their foreheads and a pair of pistols in their holsters, haunting the Portsmouth Road or Hounslow Heath, with the words "Stand and deliver" ever ready on their lips, who seem relatively to be men of honor and probity compared with a man like the first Lord Holland or like Rigby. There were poor slaves of the stews, wretched servants of the bagnios, whose lives seem sweet and decorous when compared with those of a Sandwich or a Dashwood or a Duke of Grafton. Yet these men, whose companionship might be rejected by Jack Sheppard, and whose example might be avoided by Pompey Bum, are the men whose names are ceaselessly prominent in the early story of the reign, and to whose power and influence much of its calamities are directly due.

[Sidenote: 1763—The Duke of Grafton]

It is not easy to accord a primacy of dishonor to any one of the many statesmen whose names degrade the age. Possibly the laurels of shame, possibly the palms of infamy {35} may be proffered to Augustus Henry Fitzroy, third Duke of Grafton. When George the Third came to the throne the Duke of Grafton was only twenty-five years old, and had been three years in the House of Lords, after having passed about twice as many months in the House of Commons. Destined to live for more than half a century after the accession, and to die while the sovereign had still many melancholy years to live, the Duke of Grafton enjoyed a long career, that was unadorned by either public or private virtue. There is no need to judge Grafton on the indictment of the satirist who in a later day made the name of Junius more terrible to the advisers of King George than ever was the name of Pietro Aretino to the princes whom he scourged. The coldest chronicle of the Duke's careers, the baldest narrative of his life, proves him to have been no less dangerous to the public weal as a statesman than he was noxious to human society as an individual. He had not even the redeeming grace that the charm of beauty of person lent to some of his companions in public incompetency and private profligacy. His face and presence were as unattractive as his manners were stiff and repellent. His grandfather, the first Duke, was an illegitimate son of Charles the Second by the Duchess of Cleveland, and the Duke's severest critic declared that he blended the characteristics of the two Charles Stuarts. Sullen and severe without religion, and profligate without gayety, he lived like Charles the Second, without being an amiable companion, and might die as his father did, without the reputation of a martyr.

Grafton did not die the death of his royal ancestor. He lived through seventy-six years, of which less than half were passed in the fierce light of a disgraceful notoriety, and more than half in a retirement which should be styled obscure rather than decent. The only conspicuously creditable act of that long career was the patronage he extended to the poet Bloomfield, a patronage that seems to have been prompted rather by the fact that the writer was born near Grafton's country residence than by any intelligent appreciation of literature. His curious want of taste {36} and feeling allowed him to parade his mistress, Nancy Parsons, in the presence of the Queen, at the Opera House, and to marry, when he married the second time, a first cousin of the man with whom his first wife had eloped, John, Earl of Upper Ossory. If his example as a father was not admirable, at least he showed it to a numerous offspring, for by his two marriages he was the parent of no fewer than sixteen children.

[Sidenote: 1763—Rigby and the Duke of Bedford]

Perhaps the prize for sheer political ruffianism, for the frank audacity of the freebooter, unshadowed by the darker vices of his better-born associates, may be awarded to Rigby. Not that Rigby redeemed by many private virtues the unblushing effrontery of his public career. It was given to few men to be as bad as Dashwood, and Rigby was not one of the few. But his gross and brutal disregard of all decency in his acts of public plunder—for even peculation may be done with distinction—was accompanied by a gross and brutal disregard of all decency in his tastes and pleasures with his intimate associates. Richard Rigby sprang from the trading class. He was the son of a linen-draper who was sufficiently lucky to make a fortune as a factor to the South Sea Company, and who was, in consequence, able to afford his son the opportunity of a good education, and to launch him on the grand tour of Europe with every aptitude for the costly vices that men in those days seemed to think it the chief object of travel to cultivate, and with plenty of money in his pocket to gratify all his inclinations. Rigby did not take much advantage of his educational opportunities. His Latinity laid him open to derision in the House of Commons, and there were times when his spelling would have reflected little credit upon a seamstress. But he was quite capable of learning abroad all the evil that the great school of evil was able to teach a willing student. He returned to England, and began his life there with three pronounced tastes: for gambling, for wine, and for the baser uses of politics. His ambitions prompted him to adhere to the party of the Prince of Wales, and his ready purse won him a welcome among the courtiers of Leicester House. The Prince of {37} Wales did little to gratify his hopes, and Rigby would have found it difficult to escape from the straits into which his debts had carried him if his gift of pleasing had not procured for him a powerful patron. The Duke of Bedford had been attracted by the remarkable convivial powers of Rigby, powers remarkable in an age when to be conspicuous for conviviality demanded very unusual capacity both of head and of stomach. To be admired by Bedford was in itself a patent of dishonor, but it was a profitable patent to Rigby. The Duke, who was accused at times of a shameful parsimony, was generous to profusion towards the bloated buffoon who was able and willing to divert him, and from that hour Rigby's pockets never wanted their supply of public money.

There were few redeeming features in Rigby's character. It was his peculiar privilege to be false to his old friends and to corrupt his young ones. In an age when sobriety was scorned or ignored he had the honor to be famous for his insobriety. A sycophant to those who could serve him and a bully to those who could not, Rigby added the meanness of the social parvenu to the malignity of the political bravo. At a time when men of birth and rank came to the House of Commons in the negligence of morning dress, Rigby was conspicuous for the splendor of his attire, and illuminated the green benches by a costume whose glow of color only faintly attenuated the glowing color of his face. There were baser and darker spirits ready for the service of the King; there was no one more unlovely.

Rigby's patron was as unadmirable as Rigby himself. He was fifty years old when George the Third came to the throne, and he had lived his half a century in the occupation of many offices and through many opportunities for distinction without distinguishing himself. He had still eleven years to live without adding anything of honor or credit to his name, or earning any other reputation than that of a corrupt politician whose private life was passed chiefly in the society of gamblers, jockeys, and buffoons. He had been Governor-General of Ireland, and had {38} governed it as well as Verres had governed Sicily. He had been publicly horsewhipped by a county attorney on the racecourse at Lichfield. His career, always unimportant, was ignominious when it was not incapable, and it was generally both the one and the other.