A History of the Four Georges, Volume II

by Justin McCarthy

[Sidenote: 1742—"The thanes fly from me!">[

The Duke of Newcastle had notoriously turned traitor to Walpole. Lord Wilmington, whose "evaporation" as Sir Spencer Compton marked Walpole's first great success under George the Second, was approached by some of Walpole's enemies, and besought to employ his influence with the King to get Walpole dismissed. It is said that even Lord Hervey now began to hold aloof from him. It was only a mere question of time and the hour. Walpole's enemies were already going about proclaiming their determination not to be satisfied with merely turning him out of office; he must be impeached and brought to condign punishment. Walpole's friends—those of them who were left—made this another reason for imploring him to resign. They pleaded that by a timely resignation he might at least save himself from the peril of an impeachment. Walpole showed a determination which had much that was pitiable and something that was heroic about it. He would not fly—bear-like, he would fight the course.

The final course soon came. The battle was on a petition from the defeated candidates for Chippenham, who claimed the seats on the ground of an undue election and return. Election petitions were then heard and decided by the House of Commons itself, and not by a committee of the House, as in more recent days. The decision of the House was always simply a question of party; and no one had ever insisted more strongly than Walpole himself that it must be a question of party. The Government desired the Chippenham petition to succeed. On some disputed {190} point the Opposition prevailed over the Government by a majority of one. It is always said that Walpole then at once made up his mind to resign; and that the knowledge of his intention put such heart into those who were falling away from him as to bring about the marked increase which was presently to take place in the majority against him. We are inclined to think that he even still hesitated, and that his hesitation caused the increase in the hostile majority. He must go—he has to go—people said; and the sooner we make this clear to him the better. Anyhow, the end was near. The Chippenham election was carried against him by a majority of sixteen—241 votes against 225. A note at the bottom of the page of the Parliamentary Debates for that day says: "The Chippenham election being thus carried in favor of the sitting members, it was reported that Sir Robert Walpole publicly declared he would never enter the House of Commons more." This was on February 2, 1742. Next day the Lord Chancellor signified the pleasure of the King that both Houses of Parliament should adjourn until the eighteenth of the month. Everybody knew what had happened. The long administration of twenty years was over; the great minister had fallen, never to lift his head again. The Parliamentary record thus tells us what had happened: "The same evening the Right Honorable Sir Robert Walpole resigned his place of First Commissioner of the Treasury and Chancellor and Under-Treasurer of the Exchequer, which he had held ever since April 4, 1721, in the former of which he succeeded the Earl of Sunderland, and in the latter Mr. Aislabie."

That, however, was not the deepest depth of the fall. The same record announces that "three days afterwards his Majesty was pleased to create him Earl of Orford, Viscount Walpole, and Baron of Houghton." "Posterity," says Macaulay, "has obstinately refused to degrade Francis Bacon into Viscount St. Albans." Posterity has in like manner obstinately refused to degrade Robert Walpole into the Earl of Orford. He will be known {191} as Robert Walpole so long as English history itself is known.

[Sidenote: 1742—The new Administration]

Walpole, then, was on the ground—down in the dust—never to rise again. Surely it would seem the close of his career as a Prime-minister must be the opening of that of his rival and conqueror. Any one now—supposing there could be some one entirely ignorant of what did really happen—would assume, as a matter of course, that Pulteney would at once become Prime-minister and proceed to form an administration. This was naturally in Pulteney's power. But Pulteney suddenly remembered having said long ago that he would accept no office, and he declared that he would positively hold to his word. At a moment of excitement, it would seem, and stung by some imputation of self-seeking, Pulteney had adopted the high Roman fashion, and announced that he would prove his political disinterestedness by refusing to accept any office in any administration. The King consulted Walpole during all these arrangements, and Walpole strongly recommended him to offer the position of Prime-minister to Lord Wilmington. Time had come round indeed—this was the Sir Spencer Compton for whom King George at his accession had endeavored to thrust away Walpole, but whom Walpole had quietly thrust away. He was an utterly incapable man. Walpole probably thought that it would ruin the new administration in the end if it were to have such a man as Compton, now Lord Wilmington, at its head. Lord Wilmington accepted the position. Lord Carteret had desired the post for himself, but Pulteney would not hear of it. The office of Secretary of State—of the Secretary of State who had to do with foreign affairs—was the proper place, he insisted, for a man like Carteret. The secretaries then divided their functions into a Northern department and a Southern department. The Northern department was concerned with the charge of Russia, Prussia, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Poland, and Saxony; the Southern department looked after France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey, {192} and the States along the southern shore of the Mediterranean. So Carteret became one secretary, and the grotesque Duke of Newcastle remained the other. The duke's brother, Henry Pelham, remained in his place as Paymaster, Lord Hardwicke retained his office as Lord Chancellor, and Mr. Samuel Sandys, who had moved the resolution calling for Walpole's dismissal, took Walpole's place as Chancellor of the Exchequer. There seems some humor in the appointment of such a man as successor to Robert Walpole.

[Sidenote: 1742—The combined four]

Then Pulteney's career as a great Prime-minister is not beginning? No—not beginning—never to begin. By one of the strangest strokes of fate the events which closed the career of Walpole closed the career of Pulteney too. Yet but a few months, and Pulteney ceases as completely as Walpole has done to move the world of politics. The battle is over and the rival leaders have both fallen. One monument might suffice for both, like that for Wolfe and Montcalm at Quebec. Pulteney was offered a peerage, an offer which he had contemptuously rejected twice before. He accepted it now. It will probably never be fully and certainly known why he committed this act of political suicide. Walpole appears to have been under the impression that it was by his cleverness the King had been prevailed upon to drive Pulteney into the House of Lords. Walpole, indeed, very probably made the suggestion to the King, and no doubt had as his sole motive in making it the desire to consign Pulteney to obscurity; but it does not seem as if his was the influence which accomplished the object. Lord Carteret and the Duke of Newcastle both hated Pulteney, who as cordially hated them. Newcastle was jealous of Pulteney because of his immense influence in the House of Commons, which he fancied must be in some sort of way an injury to himself and his brother; and, stupid as he was, he felt certain that if Pulteney consented to enter the House of Lords the popularity and the influence would vanish. Carteret's was a more reasonable if not a more noble jealousy. He was determined to come {193} to the head of affairs himself—to be Prime-minister in fact if not in name; and he feared that he never could be this so long as Pulteney remained, what some one had called him, the Tribune of the Commons. Once get him into the House of Lords and there was an end to the tribune and the tribune's career. As for himself, Carteret, he would then be able to domineer over both Houses by his commanding knowledge of foreign affairs, now of such paramount importance to the State, and by his entire sympathy with the views of the King. The King hated Pulteney—had never forgiven him his championship of the Prince of Wales—and would be delighted to see him reduced to nothingness by a removal to the House of Lords. But if it was plain alike to such men of intellect as Walpole and Carteret, and to such stupid men as King George and the Duke of Newcastle, that removal to the House of Lords would mean political extinction for Pulteney, how is it that no thought of the kind seems to have entered into the mind of Pulteney himself? Even as a question of the purest patriotism, such a man as Pulteney, believing his own policy to be for the public good, ought to have sternly refused to allow himself to be forced into any position in which his public influence must be diminished or destroyed. As regarded his personal interests and his fame, Pulteney must have had every motive to induce him to remain in the House where his eloquence and his debating power had won him such a place. It is impossible to believe that he could have been allured just then, at the height of his position and his renown, by the bauble of a coronet which he had twice before refused—contemptuously refused. Probably the real explanation may be found in the fact that Pulteney, for all his fighting capacity, was not a strong but a weak man. Probably he was, like Goethe's Egmont, brilliant in battle but weak in council. All unknown to himself, four men, each man possessed of an overmastering power of will, were combined against him for a single purpose—to drive him into the House of Lords—that is, to drive him out of the {194} House of Commons. His enemies prevailed against him. As Lord Chesterfield put it, he "shrank into insignificance and an earldom." We are far from saying that a man might not be a good minister and a statesman of influence after having accepted a seat in the House of Lords. But it was beginning to be found, even in Pulteney's time, that the place of a great Prime-minister is in the House of Commons; and certainly the place of a tribune of the people can hardly be the House of Lords. Pulteney was born for the House of Commons: transplantation meant death to a genius like his. When the news of his "promotion" became public, a wild outcry of anger and despair broke from his population of admirers. He was denounced as having committed an act of perfidy and of treason. He had accepted a peerage, it was said, as a bribe to induce him to consent to let Robert Walpole go unimpeached and unpunished. The outcry was quite unjust, but was certainly not unnatural. People wanted some sort of explanation of an act which no ordinary reasoning could possibly explain. Pulteney's conduct bitterly disappointed the Tory section of the Opposition as well as the populace of his former adorers out-of-doors. Bolingbroke, who had hurried back to England, found that all his dreams of a genuine Coalition Ministry, representing fairly both wings of the forces of Opposition, had vanished with the morning light. Except for the removal of Walpole, hardly any change was made in the composition of recent English administration. The Tories and Jacobites, who had helped so signally in the fight, were left out of the spoils of victory. Bolingbroke found that he was no nearer to power than he would have been if Walpole still were at the head of affairs. Nothing was changed for him; only a stupid man had taken the place of a statesman. Pulteney appears to have acted very generously towards his immediate political colleagues, and to have remained in the House of Commons, where he now had all the power, until he had got for them the places they desired. Then he was gazetted as Earl of Bath; and we {195} have all heard the famous anecdote of the first meeting in the House of Lords between the man who had been Robert Walpole and the man who had been William Pulteney, and the greeting given by the new Lord Orford to the new Lord Bath; "Here we are, my lord, the two most insignificant fellows in England." With these words the first great leader of Opposition in the House of Commons, the man who may almost be said to have created the parliamentary part of leader of Opposition, may be allowed to pass out of the political history of his time.

Many attempts were made to impeach Walpole, as we still must call him. Secret committees of inquiry were moved for. Horace Walpole, the Horace Walpole, Sir Robert's youngest son, made his first speech in the House of Commons, in defence of his father, against such a motion. A secret committee was at last obtained, but it did not succeed, although composed almost altogether of Walpole's enemies, in bringing out anything very startling against him. Public money had been spent, no doubt, here and there very freely for purely partisan work. There could be no question that some of it had gone in political corruption. But everybody had already felt sure that this had been done by all ministries and parties. The report of the committee, when it came at last, was received with cold indifference or unconcealed contempt.

[Sidenote: 1742-1745—Death of Walpole]