A History of the Four Georges, Volume I

by Justin McCarthy

Death had been busy among eminent men for some few years. The Duke of Shrewsbury, the "king of hearts," the statesman whose appointment as Lord Treasurer secured the throne of Great Britain for the Hanoverian family, died on February 18, 1717. William Penn, the founder of the great American State of Pennyslvania, closed his long active and fruitful life in 1718. We have here only to record his death; the history of his deeds belongs to an earlier time. Controversy has now quite ceased to busy itself about his noble character, and his life of splendid unostentatious beneficence. His name, which without his consent and against his wishes was {180} made part of the name of the State which he founded, will be remembered in connection with its history while the Delaware and the Schuylkill flow. Of his famous treaty with the Indians nothing, perhaps, was ever better said than the comment of Voltaire, that it was the only league between savages and white men which was never sworn to and never broken. Addison died, still comparatively young, on June 17, 1719. He had reached the highest point of his political career but a short time before, when, on one of the changes of office between Stanhope and Sunderland, he became one of the principal secretaries of State. His health, however, was breaking down, and he never had indeed the slightest gift or taste for political life. "Pity," said Mrs. Manley, the authoress of "The New Atlantis," speaking of Addison, "that politics and sordid interest should have carried him out of the road of Helicon and snatched him from the embraces of the Muses." But it seems quite unjust to ascribe Addison's divergence into political ways to any sordid interest. He had political friends who loved him, and he went with them into politics as he might have travelled in company with them, and for the sake of their company, although caring nothing for travel himself. No man was better aware of his incapacity for the real business of public life. Addison had himself pointed out all the objections to his political advancement before that advancement was pressed upon him. He was not a statesman; he was not an administrator; he could not do any genuine service as head of a department; he was not even a good clerk; he was a wretched speaker; he was consumed by a morbid shyness, almost as oppressive as that of the poet Cowper in a later day, or of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American novelist, later still. His whole public career was at best but a harmless mistake. It has done no harm to his literary fame. The world has almost forgotten it. Even lovers of Addison might have to be reminded now that the creator of Sir Roger de Coverley was once a diplomatic agent and a secretary of State, {181} and a member of the House of Commons. Some of the essays which Addison contributed to the Spectator are like enough to outlive the system of government by party, and perhaps even the whole system of representative government. Sir Roger de Coverley will not be forgotten until men forget Parson Adams and Robinson Crusoe and Gil Blas, and for that matter, Sir John Falstaff and Don Quixote.

[Sidenote: 1720—The King and the Prince reconciled]

For some time things were looking well at home and abroad. The policy of the Government appeared to have been completely successful on the Continent. The confederations that had been threatening England were dissolved or broken up; the Jacobite conspiracies seemed to have been made hopeless and powerless. The friendship established between England and the Regent of France had to all seeming robbed the Stuarts of their last chance. James the Chevalier had no longer a home on French soil. Paris could not any more be the head-quarters of his organization and the scene of his mock Court. The Regent had kept his promises to the English Government. It was well known that, so far from encouraging or permitting the designs of the exiled family against England, he would do all in his power to frustrate them; as, indeed, he had an opportunity of doing not long after. Never before, perhaps never since, was there so cordial an understanding between England and France. Never could there have been a time when such an understanding was of greater importance to England.

At home the prospect seemed equally bright. Walpole had contrived to ingratiate himself more and more with the Prince of Wales, and had become his confidential adviser. Acting on his counsel, the Prince made his submission to the King; and acting on Stanhope's counsel, the King accepted it. The Sovereign and his heir had a meeting and were reconciled; for the time, at least. Walpole consented to join the administration, content for the present to fill the humble place of paymaster to the forces, without a seat in the Cabinet. He returned, in {182} fact, to the ministerial position which he had first occupied, and from which he had been promoted, and must have seemed to himself somewhat in the position of a boy who, after having got high in his class, has got down very low again, and is well content to mount up a step or two from the humblest position. Walpole knew what he was doing, and must have been quite satisfied in his own mind that he was not likely to remain very long paymaster to the forces, although he could not, by any possibility, have anticipated the strange succession of events by which he was destined soon to be left without a rival. For the present he was in the administration, but he took little part in its actual work. He did not even appear to have any real concern in it. He spent as much of his time as he could at Houghton, his pleasant country-seat in Norfolk. Townshend, too, had been induced to join the administration. To him was assigned the position of president of the council.

Thus there appeared to be a truce to quarrels, and to enmities abroad and at home. There was no dispute with any of the great Continental powers; there was no dread of the Stuarts. Ministerial rivalries had been reduced to concordance and quiet; the traditional quarrel between the Sovereign and the heir-apparent had been composed. It might have been thought that a time of peace and national prosperity had been assured. In the history of nations, however, we commonly find that nothing more certainly bodes unsettlement than a general conviction that everything is settled forever.

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CHAPTER XI.

"THE EARTH HATH BUBBLES."

[Sidenote: 1718-1719—The Mississippi Scheme]

One of the comedies of Ben Jonson gives some vivid and humorous illustrations of the mania for projects, speculations, patents, and monopolies that at his time had taken possession of the minds of Englishmen. There is an enterprising person who declares that he can coin money out of cobwebs, raise wool upon egg-shells, and make grass grow out of marrow-bones. He has a project "for the recovery of drowned land," a scheme for a new patent for the dressing of dog-skins for gloves, a plan for the bottling of ale, a device for making wine out of blackberries, and various other schemes cut and dry for what would now be called floating companies to make money. The civilized world is visited with this epidemic of project and speculation from time to time. In the reign of George the First such a mania attacked England much more fiercely than it had done even in the days of Ben Jonson. It came to us this time from France. The close of a great war is always a tempting and a favorable time for such enterprises. Finances are out of order; a season of spurious commercial activity has come to an end; new resources are to be sought for somehow; and man must change to be other than he is when he wholly ceases to believe in financial miracle-working. There is an air of plausibility about most of the new projects; and, indeed, like the scheme told of in Ben Jonson for the recovery of drowned lands, the enterprise is usually something within human power to accomplish, if only human skill could make it pay. The exchequer of France had been brought into a condition of something very like {184} bankruptcy by the long and wasting war; and a projector was found who promised to supply the deficiency as boldly and as liberally as Mephistopheles does in the second part of "Faust." John Law, a Scotchman, and unquestionably a man of great ability and financial skill, had settled in France in consequence of having fought a duel and killed his man in his own country. [Sidenote: 1710-1720—The South Sea Company] Law set up a company which was to have a monopoly of the trade of the whole Mississippi region in North America, and on condition of the monopoly was to pay off the national debt of France. A scheme of the kind within due limitations would have been reasonable enough, so far as the working of the Mississippi region was concerned; but Law went on extending and extending the scope of its supposed operations, until it might almost as well have attempted to fold in the orb of the earth. The shares in his company went up with a sudden bound. He had the patronage of the Regent and of all the Court circle. Gambling in shares became the fashion, the passion of Paris, and, indeed, of all France. Shares bought one day were sold at an immense advance the next, or even the same day. Men and women nearly bankrupt in purse before, suddenly found themselves in possession of large sums of money, for which they had to all appearance run no risk and made no sacrifice whatever. Princes and tradesmen, duchesses and seamstresses and harlots, clamored, intrigued, and battled for shares. The offices in the Rue Quincampoix, a street then inhabited by bankers, stock-brokers, and exchange agents, were besieged all day long with crowds of eager competitors for shares. The street was choked with fine equipages, until it was found absolutely necessary to close it against all horses and carriages. All the rank and fashion of Paris flung itself into this game of speculation. Every one has heard the story of the hunchback who made a little fortune by the letting of his hump as a desk on which impatient speculators might scribble their applications for shares. A French novelist, M. Paul Feval, has made good use of {185} this story, and London still remembers to what a brilliant dramatic account it was turned by Mr. Fechter. Law was the most powerful and the most courted man of his day. In his youth he had been a gallant and a free liver, a man of dress and fashion and intrigue, who delighted in scandalous entanglements with women. The fashion and beauty of Paris was for the hour at his feet. Think of a brilliant gallant who could make one rich in a moment! The mother of the Regent described in a coarse and pungent sentence the sort of homage which Parisian ladies would have been willing to pay to Law if he had so desired. St. Simon, the mere littérateur and diplomatist, kept his head almost alone, and was not to be dazzled. Since the fable of Midas, he said, he had not heard of any one having the power to turn all he touched into gold, and he did not believe that virtue was given to M. Law. There is no doubt that Law was a man of great ability as a financier, and that his scheme in the beginning had promise in it. It was, as Burke has said of the scheme and its author, the public enthusiasm, and not Law himself, which chose to build on the base of his scheme a structure which it could not bear. It does not seem by any means certain that a project quite as wild might not be launched in London or Paris at the present day, and find almost as great a temporary success, and blaze, like Law's, the comet of a season. While the season lasted the comet blazed with a light that filled the social sky.