A History of the Four Georges, Volume I

by Justin McCarthy

[Sidenote: 1714—Walpole]

Another man, fifteen years younger than Harley, a school-fellow at Eton of Bolingbroke, was rising slowly, surely, into prominence and power. All the great part of his career is yet to come; but even already, while men were talking of Marlborough and Bolingbroke, they found themselves compelled to give a place in their thoughts to Robert Walpole. If Bolingbroke was the first, and perhaps the most brilliant, of the great line of parliamentary debaters who have made debate a moving power in English history, Walpole was the first of that line of statesmen who, sprung from the class of the "Commoner," have become leaders of the English Parliament. In position and in influence, although not in personal character or accomplishments, Walpole may be described as the direct predecessor of Peel and Gladstone. Just two years before the death of William the Third, Walpole entered Parliament for the first time. He married, entered Parliament, and succeeded to his father's estates in the same year, 1700. Walpole was only twenty-four years of age when he took his seat in the House of Commons as member for Castle Rising in Norfolk. He was a young country squire of considerable fortune, and a thorough supporter of the Whig party. Walpole came into Parliament at that happy time for men of his position when the change was already taking place which marked the representative assembly as the controlling power in the State. The Government as a direct ruling power was beginning to grow less and less effective, and the House of Commons beginning to grow more and more strong. This change had begun to set in during the Restoration, and by the time Walpole came to be known in Parliament it was becoming more and more evident that the Ministers of State were in the future only to be men intrusted with the duty of carrying out the will of the majority in the House of Commons. Before that majority every other power in the State was ultimately to bend. The man, therefore, {33} who could by eloquence, genuine statesmanship, and force of character, or even by mere tact, secure the adhesion of that majority, had become virtually the ruler of the State. But as will easily be seen, his rule even then was something very different indeed from the rule of an arbitrary minister. He would have to satisfy, to convince, to conciliate the majority. A single false step, an hour's weakness of purpose, nay, even a failure for which he was not himself accountable in home or foreign policy, might deprive him of his influence over the majority, and might reduce him to comparative insignificance. Therefore, the controlling power which a great minister acquired was held by virtue of the most constant watchfulness, the most unsparing labor, energy, and devotion, and also in a great measure by the favor of fortune and of opportunity.

Walpole was a man eminently qualified to obtain influence over the House of Commons, and to keep it up when he had once obtained it. No man could have promised less in the beginning. That was an acute observer who divined the genius of Cromwell under Cromwell's homely exterior when he first came up to Parliament. Almost as much acuteness would have been needed to enable any one to see the future Prime-minister of England and master of the House of Commons in the plain, unpromising form, the homely, almost stolid countenance, the ungainly movements and gestures of Walpole. Walpole was as much of a rustic as Lord Althorp in times nearer to our own acknowledged himself to be. Althorp said he ought to have been a grazier, and that it was an odd chance which made him Prime-minister. But the difference was great. Walpole had the gifts which make a man prime-minister, despite his country gentleman or grazier-like qualities. It was not chance, but Walpole himself which raised him to the position he came to hold. Walpole knew nothing and cared nothing about literature and art. His great passion was for hunting; his next love was for wine, and his third for his dinner. Without any natural gift of eloquence he became a great debater. {34} Nature, which seemed to have lavished all her most luxurious gifts on Bolingbroke, appeared to have pinched and starved Walpole. Where Bolingbroke was richest Walpole was poorest; Bolingbroke's genius required a frequent rein; Walpole's intellect needed the perpetual spur. Yet Walpole, with his lack of imagination, of eloquence, of wit, of humor, and of culture, went farther and did more than the brilliant Bolingbroke. It was the old fable of the hare and the tortoise over again; perhaps it should rather be called a new version of the old fable. The farther the hare goes in the wrong way the more she goes astray, and thus many of Bolingbroke's most rapid movements only helped the tortoise to get to the goal before him. In 1708 Walpole, now recognized as an able debater, a clever tactician, and, above all things, an excellent man of business, was appointed Secretary at War. He became at the same time leader of the House of Commons. He was one of the managers in the unfortunate impeachment of the empty-headed High-Church preacher, Dr. Sacheverell. He resigned office with the other Whig ministers in 1710. Harley coming into power offered him a place in the new administration, which Walpole declined to accept. The Tories, reckless and ruthless in their majority, expelled Walpole from the House in 1712 and imprisoned him in the Tower. The charge against him was one of corruption, a charge easily made in those days against any minister, and which, if high moral principles were to prevail, might probably have been as easily sustained as it was made. Walpole, however, was not worse than his contemporaries; nor, even if he had been, would the contemporaries have been inclined to treat his offences very seriously so long as they were not inspired to act against him by partisan motives. At the end of the session he was released, and now, in the closing days of Anne's reign, all eyes turned to him as a rising man and a certain bulwark of the new dynasty.

[Sidenote: 1714—The Dean of St. Patrick's]

It would be impossible not to regard Jonathan Swift as one of the politicians, one of the statesmen, of this age. {35} Swift was a politician in the highest sense, although he had seen little of the one great political arena in which the battles of English parties were fought out. He has left it on record that he never heard either Bolingbroke or Harley speak in Parliament or anywhere in public. He was at this time about forty-seven years of age, and had not yet reached his highest point in politics or in literature. The "Tale of a Tub" had been written, but not "Gulliver's Travels;" the tract on "The Conduct of the Allies," but not the "Drapier's Letters." Even at this time he was a power in political life; his was an influence with which statesmen and even sovereigns had to reckon. No pen ever served a cause better than his had served, and was yet to serve, the interests of the Tory party. He was probably the greatest English pamphleteer at a time when the pamphlet had to do all the work of the leading article and most of the work of the platform. His churchmen's gown sat uneasily on him; he was like one of the fighting bishops of the Middle Ages, with whom armor was the more congenial wear. He had a fierce and domineering temper, and indeed out of his strangely bright blue eyes there was already beginning to shine only too ominously the wild light of that saeva indignatio which the inscription drawn up by his own hand for his tomb described as lacerating his heart. The ominous light at last broke out into the fire of insanity. We shall meet Swift again; just now we only stop to note him as a political influence. At this time he is Dean of St. Patrick's in Ireland; he has been lately in London trying, and without success, to bring about a reconciliation between Bolingbroke and Harley; and, finding his efforts ineffectual, and seeing that troubled times were near at hand, he has quietly withdrawn to Berkshire. Before leaving London he wrote the letter to Lord Peterborough containing the remarkable words with which we have opened this volume. It is curious that Swift himself afterwards ascribed to Harley the saying about the Queen's health and the heedless {36} behavior of statesmen. In his "Enquiry into the Behaviour of the Queen's Last Ministry," dated June, 1715, he tells us that "about Christmas, 1713," the Treasurer said to him "whenever anything ails the Queen these people are out of their wits; and yet they are so thoughtless that as soon as she is well they act as if she were immortal." To which Swift adds the following significant comment: "I had sufficient reason, both before and since, to allow his observation to be true, and that some share of it might with justice be applied to himself." It was at the house of a clergyman at Upper Letcomb, near Wantage, in Berkshire, that Swift stayed for some time before returning to his Irish home. From Letcomb the reader will perhaps note with some painful interest that Swift wrote to Miss Esther Vanhomrigh, whom all generations will know as Vanessa, a letter, in which he describes his somewhat melancholy mode of life just then, tells her "this is the first syllable I have wrote to anybody since you saw me," and adds that "if this place were ten times worse, nothing shall make me return to town while things are in the situation I left them."

[Sidenote: 1714—Addison]

Swift, in his heart, trusted neither Bolingbroke nor Harley. It seems clear that Lady Masham was under the impression that she had Swift as her accomplice in the intrigue which finally turned Harley out of office. She writes to him while he is at Letcomb a letter which could not have been written if she were not in that full conviction; and he does not reply until the whole week's crisis is past and a new condition of things arisen; and in the reply he commits himself to nothing. If he distrusted Bolingbroke he could not help admiring him. Bolingbroke was the only man then near the court whose genius must not have been rebuked by Swift. But Swift must, for all his lavish praises of Harley, have sometimes secretly despised the hesitating, time-serving statesman, with whom indecision was a substitute for prudence, and to be puzzled was to seem to deliberate. That Harley should have had the playing of a great political game {37} while Swift could only look on, is one of the anomalies of history which Swift's sardonic humor must have appreciated to the full. Swift took his revenge when he could by bullying his great official friends now and then in the roughest fashion. He knew that they feared him, and flattered him because they feared him, and he was glad of it, and hugged himself in the knowledge. He knew even that at one time they were uncertain of his fidelity, and took much pains by their praises and their promises to keep him close at their side; and this, too, amused him. He was amused as a tyrant might be at the obvious efforts of those around him to keep him in good-humor, or as a man conscious of incipient madness might find malign delight in the anxiety of his friends to fall in with all his moods and not to cross him in anything he was pleased to say.

Joseph Addison had a political position and influence on the other side of the controversy which entitle him to be ranked among the statesmen of the day. Only in the year before his tragedy of "Cato" had been brought out, and it had created an altogether peculiar sensation. Each of the two great political parties seized upon the opportunity given by Gate's pompous political virtue, and claimed him as the spokesman of their cause. The Whigs, of course, had the author's authority to appropriate the applause of Cato, and the Whigs had endeavored to pack the House in order to secure their claim. But the Tories were equal to the occasion. They appeared in great numbers, Bolingbroke, then Secretary of State, at their head. When Cato lamented the extinguished freedom of his country the Whigs were vociferous in their cheers, and glared fiercely at the Tories; but when the austere Roman was made to denounce Caesar and a perpetual dictatorship, the Tories professed to regard this as a denunciation of Marlborough, and his demand to be made commander-in-chief for life, and they gave back the cheering with redoubled vehemence. At last Bolingbroke's own genius suggested a master-stroke. He sent for the actor who played Cato's part, thanked him in face of the {38} public, and presented him with a purse of gold because of the service he had done in sustaining the cause of liberty against the tyranny of a perpetual dictator.

Addison held many high political offices. He was Secretary to a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland more than once; he was made Secretary to the "Regents," as they were called—the commissioners intrusted by George the First with the task of administration previous to his arrival in England. He sat in Parliament; he was appointed Under-secretary of State, and was soon to be for a while one of the principal Secretaries of State. The last number of his Spectator was published at the close of 1714. This was indeed still a time when literary men might hold high political office. The deadening influence of the Georges had not yet quite prevailed against letters and art. Matthew Prior, about whose poetry the present age troubles itself but little, sat in Parliament, was employed in many of the most important diplomatic negotiations of the day, and had not long before this time held the office of Plenipotentiary in Paris. Richard Steele not merely sat in the House of Commons, but was considered of sufficient importance to deserve the distinction of a formal expulsion from the House because of certain political diatribes for which he was held responsible and which the Commons chose to vote libellous. At the time we are now describing he had re-entered Parliament, and was still a brilliant penman on the side of the Whigs. His career as politician, literary man, and practical dramatist combined, seems in some sort a foreshadowing of that of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Gay was appointed Secretary to Lord Clarendon on a diplomatic mission to Hanover. Nicholas Rowe, the author of the "Fair Penitent" and the translator of Lucan's "Pharsalia," was at one time an Under-Secretary of State. Rowe's dramatic work is not yet absolutely forgotten by the world. We still hear of the "gallant gay Lothario," although many of those who are glib with the words do not know that they come from the "Fair Penitent," and would not care even if they did know.

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