[Sidenote: 1743—"The drunken Administration">[
Yet a little, and poor, harmless, useless Wilmington was dead. He died in July, 1743. Then came the troubling question, who is to be Prime-minister? The Ministerialists were broken into utter schism. The Pelhams, who had for some time been secretly backed up by Walpole's influence with the King, were struggling hard for power against Carteret, and against such strength as Pulteney, Earl of Bath, still possessed. Carteret had made himself impossible by the way in which he had conducted himself in the administration of foreign affairs. He had gone recklessly in for a thoroughly Hanoverian policy. He had made English interests entirely subservient to the interests of Hanover; or rather, indeed, to the King's personal ideas as to the interests of Hanover. Carteret had the weakness of many highly cultured and highly gifted men; he believed far too much in the supremacy of intellect and culture. The great rising wave of popular opinion was unnoticed by him. He did not see that {241} the transfer of power from the hereditary to the representative assembly must inevitably come to mean the transfer of power from the representatives to the represented. Carteret in his heart despised the people and all popular movements. Fancy being dictated to by persons who did not know Greek, who did not know German, who did not even know Latin and French! He was fully convinced for a while that with his gifts he could govern the people through the House of Commons and the House of Commons through the King. He was not really a man of much personal ambition, unless of such personal ambition as consists in the desire to make the most brilliant use of one's intellectual gifts. The effort to govern the House of Commons through the King interested him, and called all his dearest faculties into play. He scorned the ordinary crafts of party management. If he thought a man stupid he let the man know it. He was rude and overbearing to his colleagues; insulting to people, however well recommended, who came to him to solicit office or pension. All that sort of thing he despised, and he bluntly said as much. "Ego et rex meus" was his motto, as we may say it was the motto of Wolsey. Not Wolsey himself made a more complete failure. The King fought hard for Carteret; but the stars in their courses were fighting harder against him.
Carteret's term of office was familiarly known as "the drunken Administration." The nickname was doubtless due in part to Carteret's love of wine, which made him remarkable even in that day of wine-drinking statesmen. But the phrase had reference also to the intoxication of intellectual recklessness with which Carteret rushed at and rushed through his work. It was the intoxication of too confident and too self-conscious genius. Carteret was drunk with high spirits, and with the conviction that he could manage foreign affairs as nobody else could manage them. No doubt he knew far more about continental affairs than any of his English contemporaries; but he made the fatal mistake which other brilliant foreign {242} secretaries have made in their foreign policy: he took too little account of the English people and of prosaic public opinion at home. In happy intoxication of this kind he reeled and revelled along his political career like a man delighting in a wild ride after an exciting midnight orgy. He did not note the coming of the cold gray dawn, and of the day when his goings-on would become the wonder of respectable and commonplace observers.
The cold gray dawn came, however, and the day. The public opinion of the country could not be kept from observing and pronouncing on the doings of Carteret. Carteret felt sure that he was safe in the favor and the support of the King. He did not remember that the return of every cold gray dawn was telling more and more against him. The King, who, with all his vagaries and brutalities, had a considerable fund of common-sense, was beginning to see that, much as he liked Carteret personally, the time was fast approaching when Carteret would have to be thrown overboard. The day when the King could rule without the House of Commons was gone. The day when the House of Commons could rule without the Sovereign had not come.
In truth, the Patriots were now put at a sad disadvantage. It is a great triumph to overthrow a great Ministry, but the triumph often carries with it a responsibility which is too much for the victors to bear, and which turns them into the vanquished before long. So it fared with the Patriots. While they were in opposition they had promised, as Sallust says Catiline and his friends did, seas and mountains. Now the time had come to show what they really could do; and, behold, they could do nothing. An opposition has a safe time of it which, being directly adverse on some distinct question, principle, or policy to the party in power, it is able to say, "Let us come into office and we will do the very opposite; we will try to undo all that the present ministers have been doing," and is able to carry out the pledge. But the opposition to Walpole had lived and flourished by finding {243} fault with everything he did merely because it was he who did it, and with his way of doing everything merely because it was his way. Nothing can be easier than for a group of clever and unscrupulous men to make it hot for even the strongest minister if they will only adopt such a plan of action. This was the plan of action of the Patriots, and they carried it out boldly, thoroughly, brilliantly, and successfully. But now that they had come into office they found that they had not come into power. The claim to power had still to be earned for them by the success of their administration; and what was there for them to do? Nothing—positively nothing—but just what their defeated opponents had been trying to do. Hanoverian policy, Hanoverian subsidies, foreign soldiers, standing armies—these were the crimes for which Walpole's administration had been unsparingly assailed. But now came Carteret, and Carteret was on the whole rather more Hanoverian than the King himself. Pulteney? Why, such influence as Pulteney still had left was given to support Newcastle and Pelham, Walpole's own pupils and followers, in carrying out Carteret's Hanoverian policy.
[Sidenote: 1743—An irreparable mistake]
Carteret set up Lord Bath as leader of the Administration. The two Pelhams—the Duke of Newcastle and his brother, Henry Pelham—were tremendously strong in family influence, in money, in retainers, led-captains, and hangers-on of all kinds. Pulteney, who had always held a seat nominally in the Cabinet, although he had hitherto clung to his determination not to take office, now suddenly thought fit to change his mind. Probably he already regretted deeply the fatal mistake which had made him refuse to accept any office on the fall of Walpole. Perhaps he had fancied that the country and the Government never could get on without him, and that he would have been literally forced to withdraw his petulant self-denying ordinance. But the mistake was fatal, irreparable. The country did not insist on having him back at any price; the country did not seem to have been thinking about him at all. Now, when there seemed to be {244} something like a new opportunity opening for him on the death of Lord Wilmington, he had the weakness to consent to be put up as a candidate for the position of Prime-minister. The effort proved a failure. The Pelhams were not only powerful in themselves, but they were powerful also in the support of Walpole. Walpole still had great influence over the King, and he naturally threw all that influence into the scale of the men who represented his own policy, and not into the scale of those who represented the policy of his enemies. Walpole and the Pelhams carried the day; Henry Pelham became Prime-minister, and from that time the power of Carteret was gone. This was in 1743—we are now going back a little to take up threads which had to be dropped in order to deal with the events springing out of the continental war, and especially the rebellion in Scotland—and in November, 1744, Carteret was driven to resign his office. He had just become Earl Granville by the death of his mother, and was exiled to the House of Lords.
The King, however, still kept up his desire to get back Lord Granville and to get rid of the Pelhams. George had sense enough to despise the two brothers, and sense enough also to see when he could not do without them. During the February of 1746, while the Stuart rebellion was still aflame, a ministerial crisis came on. The Pelhams wished to bring Pitt into the Ministry; the King blankly refused. But the King did more than that: he began to negotiate privately with Lord Granville and Lord Bath. The Pelhams knew their strength. They at once threw up their offices; the whole Ministry resigned in a body. The King found that Carteret could not possibly form an administration which would have any support worth a moment's consideration in either House of Parliament. The fortunes of Charles Stuart were still looking bright in the north, and the King found himself without a Ministry. There was no course open to him but one, and that was to recognize the strength of the Pelhams and their followers, and to take back Newcastle and his {245} brother on any terms the conquerors might be pleased to dictate. The Pelhams came back to what might almost be called absolute power. The King was not likely soon again to trouble them with any hostile intervention. Thus these two men, one stupid beyond sounding, the other of only fair abilities, rising a little above mediocrity, had gone into battle with some of the greatest statesmen and orators of the age, and had come out victorious.
[Sidenote: 1743-1746—The "Broad-bottomed Ministry">[
Henry Pelham's administration was known by the slang nickname of the "Broad-bottomed Ministry." It is known by that nickname in history still; will doubtless always keep the title. The great overmastering passion of the Pelhams was the desire to keep office and power in their hands at any price. Of the two brothers Henry Pelham was by far the abler man. His idea was to get around him all the really capable administrators and debaters of every party, and thus make up a Ministry which should be all-powerful, and of which all the power should be in his hands. Like his brother, the Duke of Newcastle, he had a sort of half good-natured cynicism which never allowed him to doubt that if the offices were offered to the men, the men would on any conditions accept the offices. The events that he had lately seen had not induced him in any way to modify his opinion. He had heard Pitt thundering away against Carteret in exactly the same strain as Pitt and Carteret used to thunder against Walpole. He had heard Pitt denounce Carteret as "an execrable, a sole minister, who had ruined the British nation, and seemed to have drunk of the potion described in poetic fiction which made men forget their country." He had seen the policy of Walpole quietly carried out by the very men who had bellowed against Walpole, and had succeeded at last in driving him from office forever. He knew that no one now among those who used to call themselves "the Patriots" cared one straw whether Spain did or did not withdraw her claim to the Right of Search. His idea, therefore, was to get all the capable men of the various parties together, form them {246} into an administration, and leave them to enjoy their dignity and their emoluments while the King and he governed the country. It was in this spirit and with this purpose that he set himself to form the "Broad-bottomed Ministry." He was not, like his royal master, tormented or even embarrassed by personal dislikes; he would take into his Ministry any one who could be of the slightest use to him. He would have kept Lord Carteret if Carteret had not made himself impossible.