A History of the Four Georges, Volume I

by Justin McCarthy

CHAPTER X.

HOME AFFAIRS.

[Sidenote: 1717—Oxford's impeachment]

Meanwhile the public seemed to have forgotten all about Lord Oxford. "Harley, the nation's great support," as Swift had called him, had been nearly two years in the Tower, and the nation did not seem to miss its great support, or to care anything about him. In May, 1717, Lord Oxford sent a petition to the House of Lords, complaining of the hardship and injustice of this unaccountable delay in his impeachment, and the House of Lords began at last to put on an appearance of activity. The Commons, too, revived and enlarged their secret committee, of which it will be remembered that Walpole was the chairman. Times, however, had changed. Walpole was not in the administration, and felt no anxiety to assist the ministry in any way. He purposely absented himself from the sittings, and a new chairman had to be chosen. Probably Walpole had always known well enough that there was not evidence to sustain a charge of high-treason against his former rival; perhaps, now that the rival was down in the dust, never to rise again, he did not care to press for his punishment. At all events, he made it clear that he felt no interest in the impeachment of Lord Oxford. The friends of the ruined minister had recourse to an ingenious artifice. June 24, 1717, had been appointed for the opening of the proceedings. Westminster Hall, lately the scene of the impeachment of Somers, and soon to be the scene of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, was of course the place where Oxford had to come forward and meet his accusers. The King, the Prince and the Princess of Wales were seated in the {169} Hall; most of the foreign ambassadors and ministers were spectators. The imposing formalities and artificial terrors of such a ceremonial were kept up. Lord Oxford had been brought from the Tower to Westminster by water. He was now led bareheaded up to the bar by the Deputy Lieutenant of the Tower, having the axe borne before him, its edge turned away from him as yet, symbolic of the doom that might await the prisoner, but to which he had not yet been declared responsible. When the reading of the articles of impeachment and other opening passages of the trial had been gone through, Lord Harcourt, Oxford's friend, interposed, and announced that he had a motion to make. In order to hear his motion, the Peers had to withdraw to their own House. There Lord Harcourt moved that the House should dispose of the two articles of impeachment for high-treason before going into any of the evidence to support the charges for high crimes and misdemeanors. The argument for this course of proceeding was plausible. If Oxford were convicted of high-treason he would have to forfeit his life; and in such case, where would be the use of convicting him of a minor offence? The plan on which the Commons proposed to act, that of taking all the evidence in order of time, no matter to which charge it had reference, before coming to any conclusion, might, as Lord Harcourt put it, "draw the trial into prodigious length," and absolutely to no purpose. Should the accused be found guilty of high-treason he must suffer death, and there would be an end of the whole business. Should he be acquitted of the graver charge, he might then be impeached on the lighter accusation; and what harm would have been done or time lost? The motion was carried by a majority of eighty-eight to fifty-six.

Now it is hardly possible to suppose that the Peers who voted in the majority did not know very well that the Commons would not, and could not, submit to have their mode of conducting an impeachment, which it was their business to manage, thus altered at the sudden {170} dictation of the other chamber. The House of Commons was growing in importance every day; the House of Lords was proportionately losing its influence. The Commons determined that they would conduct the impeachment in their own way or not at all. Doubtless some of them, most of them, were glad to be well out of the whole affair. July 1st was fixed for the renewal of the proceedings. Some fruitless conferences between Lords and Commons wasted two days, and on the evening of July 3d the Lords sat in Westminster Hall, and invited by proclamation the accusers of Oxford to appear. No manager came forward to conduct the impeachment on the part of the Commons. The Peers sat for a quarter of an hour, as if waiting for a prosecutor, well knowing that none was coming. A solemn farce was played. The Peers went back to their chamber, and there a motion was made acquitting "Robert, Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer," on the ground that no charge had been maintained against him. A crowd without hailed the adoption of the motion with cheers. Oxford was released from the Tower, and nothing more was ever heard of his impeachment. The Duke of Marlborough was furious with rage at Oxford's escape, and the duchess is described as "almost distracted that she could not obtain her revenge." Magnanimity was not a characteristic virtue of the early days of the Georges.

[Sidenote: 1718—Disabilities of dissenters]

This was what has sometimes been called the honorable acquittal of Oxford. An English judge once spoke humorously of a prisoner having been "honorably acquitted on a flaw in the indictment." Harley's was like this: it was not an acquittal, and it was not honorable to the man impeached, the House that forebore to press the impeachment, or the House that contrived his escape from trial. Oxford had been committed to the Tower and impeached for reasons that had little to do with his guilt or innocence, or with true public policy; he was released from prison and relieved from further proceedings in just the same way. There was not evidence against {171} him on which he could be convicted of high-treason, and this was well known to his enemies when they first consigned him to the Tower. But there could not be the slightest moral doubt on the mind of any man that Oxford had intrigued with the Stuarts, and had endeavored to procure their restoration, and that he had done this even since his committal to the Tower. His guilt, whatever it was, had been increased by him, and not diminished, since the beginning of the proceedings taken against him. But he had only done what most other statesmen of that day had been doing, or would have done if they had seen advantage in it. He was not more guilty than some of his bitterest opponents, the Duke of Marlborough among others. All but the very bitterest opponents were glad to be done with the whole business. It must have come to a more or less farcical end sooner or later, and sensible men were of opinion that the sooner the better. Of Harley, "Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer," as his titles ran, we shall not hear any more; we have already foreshadowed the remainder of his life and his death. This short account of his sham impeachment is introduced here merely as a part of the historic continuity of the narrative. History has few characters less interesting than that of Oxford. He held a position of greatness without being great; he fell, and even his fall could not invest him with tragic dignity.

On December 13, 1718, Lord Stanhope, who had been raised to the peerage, first as Viscount and then as Earl Stanhope, introduced into the House of Lords a measure ingeniously entitled "A Bill for Strengthening the Protestant Interest in these Kingdoms." The title of the Bill was strictly appropriate according to our present ideas, and according to the ideas of enlightened men in Stanhope's days also; but it must at first have misled some of Stanhope's audience. Most Churchmen are now ready to admit that the interests of the Church of England are strengthened by every measure which tends to secure religious equality; but most Churchmen were not quite so {172} sure of this in the reign of George the First. The Bill brought in by Stanhope was really a measure intended to relieve Dissenters from some of the penalties and disabilities imposed on them in the reign of Queen Anne.

[Sidenote: 1719—Catholic emancipation foreshadowed]

The second reading of the Bill was the occasion of a long and animated debate. Several noble lords appealed to the opinion of the bishops, and the bishops spoke in answer to the appeal. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, the Bishop of London, the Bishop of Bristol, the Bishop of Rochester (Atterbury), the Bishop of Chester, and other prelates, spoke against the Bill. The Bishop of Bangor, the Bishop of Gloucester, the Bishop of Lincoln, the Bishop of Norwich, and the Bishop of Peterborough spoke in its favor. The Bishop of Peterborough's was a strenuous and an eloquent argument in favor of the principle of the Bill. "The words 'Church' and 'Church's danger,'" said the Bishop of Peterborough, "had often been made use of to carry on sinister designs; and then these words made a mighty noise in the mouth of silly women and children;" but in his opinion the Church, which he defined to be a scriptural institution upon a legal establishment, was founded upon a rock, and "could not be in danger as long as we enjoyed the light of the Gospel and our excellent constitution." The argument would have been perfect if the eloquent bishop had only left out the proviso about "our excellent constitution;" for the opponents of the measure were contending, as was but natural, that the Bill, if passed into law, would not leave to the Church the constitutional protection which it had previously enjoyed.