A History of the Four Georges, Volume II

by Justin McCarthy

So far, therefore, Walpole had things his own way. He was very glad to be rid of the Opposition for the time. He might well have addressed them in words like those which a modern American humorist says were called out with enthusiasm to him when he was taking leave of his friends and about to sail for Europe: "Don't hurry back—stay away forever if you like."

But war was to come all the same. Walpole was not strong enough to prevent that. The incessant attacks made in both Houses of Parliament had inflamed the people of Spain into a passion as great as that which in England was driving Walpole before it. The Spanish Government would not pay the amount arranged for in the convention. They put forward as their justification the fact, or alleged fact, that the South Sea Company had failed to discharge its obligations to Spain. The British squadron had been sent to the Mediterranean, and the Spaniards declared that this was a threat and an insult to the King of Spain. The claim to the right of search was asserted more loudly and vehemently than ever. Near to the close of the session there was a passionate debate in the House of Lords on the whole subject. The Opposition insisted that the honor of England would not admit of further delay, and that the sword must be unsheathed at once. The Duke of Newcastle could only appeal to the House on the part of the Government not to pass a resolution calling upon the King to declare war, but to leave it to the King to choose his own opportunity. Newcastle feebly pleaded that to pass a resolution would be to give untimely warning to England's enemies, and reminded the House that England was likely to have to {178} encounter an enemy stronger and more formidable than Spain. Lord Hardwicke and Lord Scarborough could only urge on the House the prudence and propriety of leaving the time and manner of action in the hands of the Ministry, in the full assurance that the ministers would do all that the nation desired. In other words, the ministers were already pledged to war. The session was brought to an end on June 14th, and on October 19th England declared war against Spain. The proclamation was greeted with the wildest outburst of popular enthusiasm; an enthusiasm which at the time seemed to run through all orders and classes. Joy-bells rang out their inspiring chimes from every church. Exulting crowds shouted in a stentorian chorus of delight. Cities flamed with illuminations at night. The Prince of Wales and some of the leaders of the Opposition took part in the public demonstration. The Prince stopped at the door of a tavern in Fleet Street, as if he were another Prince Hal carousing with his mates, and called for a goblet of wine, which he drank to the toast of coming victory. The bitter words of Walpole have indeed been often quoted, but they cannot be omitted here: "They may ring their bells now; before long they will be wringing their hands." Walpole was thinking, no doubt, of the Family Compact, and of "the King over the Water."

Parliament met in November, 1739, and the seceders were all in their places again. They had been growing heartily sick of secession and inactivity, and they insisted on regarding the declaration of war against Spain as a justification of their return to parliamentary life. Pulteney made himself their spokesman in the debate on the Address. "Our step," he said, meaning their secession, "is so fully justified by the declaration of war, so universally approved, that any further vindication of it would be superfluous." They seceded when they felt that their opposition was ineffectual, and that their presence was only made use of to give the appearance of a fair debate to that which had already been ratified. "The {179} state of affairs is now changed; the measures of the ministers are altered; and the same regard for the honor and welfare of their country that determined these gentlemen to withdraw has now brought them hither once more, to give their advice and assistance in those measures which they then pointed out as the only means of asserting and retrieving them." Walpole's reply was a little ungracious. It was, in effect, that he thought the country could have done very well without the services of the honorable members; that they never would have been missed; and that the nation was generally wide-awake to the fact that the many useful and popular measures passed towards the close of the last session owed their passing to the happy absence from Parliament of Pulteney and his friends. One might well excuse Walpole if he became sometimes a little impatient of the attitudinizing and the vaporing of the Patriots.

[Sidenote: 1739-1740—Death of Wyndham]

One of the Patriots was not long to trouble Walpole. On July 17, 1740, Sir William Wyndham died. Wyndham was a man of honor and a man of intellect. We have already in this history described his abilities and his character, his political purity, his personal consistency. He had always been in poor health; his incessant parliamentary work certainly could not have tended to improve his physical condition; and he was but fifty-three years old when he died. Had he lived yet a little longer he must have taken high office in a new administration, and he might have proved himself a statesman as well as a party leader and a parliamentary orator. Perhaps, on the whole, it is better for his fame that he should have been spared the test. It proved too much for Carteret. We may give Bolingbroke credit for sincerity when he poured out, in letter after letter, his lament for Wyndham's death. There is something, however, characteristic of the age and the man in Bolingbroke's instant assumption that Walpole must regard the death as a fine stroke of good-luck for himself. "What a star has our Minister," Bolingbroke wrote to a friend—"Wyndham dead!" It seems strange {180} that Bolingbroke should not even then have been able to see that the star of the great minister was about to set. The death of Wyndham brought Walpole no profit; gave him no security. But Wyndham's premature end withdrew a picturesque and a chivalric figure from the life of the House of Commons. He was one of the few, the very few, really unselfish and high-minded men who then occupied a prominent position in Parliament. He was not fighting for his own hand. He was not a mere partisan. He had enough of the statesman in him to be able to accept established facts, and not to argue with the inexorable. He was not a scholar like Carteret, or an orator like Bolingbroke; he was not an ascetic; but he had stainless political integrity, and was a true friend to his friends.

[Sidenote: 1740—Walpole's fatal mistake]

Walpole committed the great error of his life when he consented to accept the war policy which his enemies had proclaimed, and which he had so long resisted. Even if we consider his conduct not as a question of principle, but only as one of mere expediency, it must still be condemned. No statesman is likely to be able to conduct a great war whose heart is all the time filled only with a longing for peace. Walpole was perhaps less likely than any other statesman to make a war minister. He could not throw his heart into the work. He went to it because he was driven to it. It was simply a choice between declaring war and resigning office, and he merely preferred to declare war. This is not the temper, these are not the conditions, for carrying out a policy of war. But, as a question of principle, Walpole's conduct admits of no defence. His plain duty was to refuse to administer a policy of which he did not approve, and to leave the responsibility of the war to those who did approve of it. It is said that he tendered his resignation to the King; that the King implored Walpole to stand by him—not to desert him in that hour of need—and that Walpole at last consented to remain in office. This may possibly be true; some such form may have been gone through. But it does not alter the historical judgment about Walpole's {181} action. Walpole ought not to have gone through any forms at such a time. He hated the war policy; he knew that he was not a war minister; he ought to have refused to administer such a policy, and have stood by his refusal. It is said that, in his conversation with the King, Walpole pointed out that to the minister would be attributed every disaster that might occur during a war, his opposition to which would always be considered a crime. But would there be anything very unfair or unreasonable in that? When a statesman who has fought hard against a war policy suddenly yields to it, and consents to put it into action, would it be unreasonable, if disaster should occur, that his enemies should say, "This comes of trying to conduct a war in which you have no heart or spirit?" Burke passes severe censure even on Walpole's manner of carrying on his opposition to the war party. "Walpole," says Burke, "never manfully put forward the strength of his cause; he temporized; he managed; and, adopting very nearly the sentiments of his adversaries, he opposed their inferences. This, for a political commander, is the choice of a weak post. His adversaries had the best of the argument as he handled it; not as the reason and justice of his cause enabled him to manage it." Then Burke adds this emphatic sentence: "I say this after having seen, and with some care examined, the original documents concerning certain important transactions of those times; they perfectly satisfied me of the extreme injustice of that war, and of the falsehood of the colors which, to his own ruin, and guided by a mistaken policy, he suffered to be daubed over that measure." To his own ruin? Yes, truly. The consequence of Walpole's surrender was to himself and his political career fatal—irretrievable. His wrong-doing brought its heavy punishment along with it. He has yet to struggle for a short while against fate and his own fault; he has still to receive a few successive humiliations before the great and final fall. But the day of his destiny is over. For all real work his career may be said to have closed on the day when he consented to remain in {182} office and become the instrument of his enemies. With that day he passed out of the real world and life of politics, and became as a shadow among shadows.

We need not trouble ourselves much about the war with Spain. On neither side of the struggle was anything done which calls for grave historical notice. Every little naval success one of our admirals accomplished in the American seas, as they were then called, was glorified as if it had been an anticipated Trafalgar; and our admirals accomplished blunders and failures as well as petty victories. The quarrel very soon became swallowed up in the great war which broke out on the death of Charles the Sixth of Spain, and the occupation of Silesia by Frederick of Prussia. England lent a helping hand in the great war, but its tale does not belong to English history. Two predictions of Walpole's were very quickly realized. France almost immediately took part with Spain, in accordance with the terms of the Family Compact. In 1740 an organization was got up in Scotland by a number of Jacobite noblemen and other gentlemen, pledging themselves to stake fortune and life on the Stuart cause whenever its standard, supported by foreign auxiliaries, should be raised in Great Britain. This was the shadow cast before by the coming events of "forty-five"—events which Walpole was not destined to see.

[Sidenote: 1743—George at Dettingen]

One link of personal interest connects England with the war. George sent a body of British and Hanoverian troops into the field to support Maria Theresa of Hungary. The troops were under the command of Lord Stair, the veteran soldier and diplomatist, whose brilliant career has been already described in this history. George himself joined Lord Stair and fought at the battle of Dettingen, where the French were completely defeated; one of the few creditable events of the war, so far as English arms were concerned. George behaved with great courage and spirit. If the poor, stupid, puffy, plucky little man did but know what a strange, picturesque, memorable figure he was as he stood up against the enemy at that battle of Dettingen! {183} The last king of England who ever appeared with his army in the battle-field! There, as he gets down off his unruly horse, determined to trust to his own stout legs—because, as he says, they will not run away—there is the last successor of the Williams, and the Edwards, and the Henrys; the last successor of the Conquerer, and Edward the First, and the Black Prince, and Henry the Fourth, and Henry of Agincourt, and William of Nassau; the last English king who faces a foe in battle. With him went out, in this country, the last tradition of the old and original duty and right of royalty—the duty and the right to march with the national army in war. A king in older days owed his kingship to his capacity for the brave squares of war. In other countries the tradition lingers still. A continental sovereign, even if he have not really the generalship to lead an army, must appear on the field of battle, and at least seem to lead it, and he must take his share of danger with the rest. But in England the very idea has died out, never in all probability to come back to life again. If one were to follow some of the examples set us in classical imaginings, we might fancy the darkening clouds on the west, where the sun has sunk over the battlefield, to be the phantom shapes of the great English kings who led their people and their armies in the wars. Unkingly, indeed unheroic, little of kin with them they might well have thought that panting George; and yet they might have looked on him with interest as the last of their proud race.