Bermuda became for a while the fashion in the marvellous medley of London society over which the first of the Georges reigned. People talked Bermuda, thought Bermuda, wrote Bermuda. He was indeed a remarkable man whose missionary zeal and eloquence could make Bermuda popular in London with the voice of religion. He was indeed a remarkable man who could impress for a moment the cynical nature of Bolingbroke with something of the fire of his own enthusiasm; who could induce Walpole to swell from his own pocket the subscription-list that was raised to further Berkeley's schemes; {295} who actually succeeded in touching the callous organism which the Elector of Hanover and King of England called a heart; and whose one joy on hearing of the Vanessa legacy was at the aid it afforded to his voyage and his pure, unselfish aspirations. Bermuda ever remained a vision for him; but in 1728 he set sail for Rhode Island in the company of his young wife, Miss Anne Forster, whom, as he quaintly tells us, he chose "for her qualities of mind and her unaffected inclination to books." For more than three years he dwelt in America a simple, happy, earnest life. But the mission was a failure. To Robert Walpole, Berkeley's plans and hopes would naturally seem about as deserving of the attention and aid of practical men as the ambitions of Don Quixote. The grant promised by the Government was never sent out, and in 1731 Berkeley came back to England. How many of those who are familiar with the line, "Westward the course of empire takes its way," which has been accepted as the motto for one of the best and best-known frescos that adorn the Capitol in Washington, know that it comes from the last verse of a poem which Berkeley wrote as he was striving to realize a New Atlantis in Rhode Island?
"Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The first four acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time's noblest offspring is the last."
Two years of literary and philosophic life in London succeeded to the Rhode Island idyl. In 1734 he returned to Ireland for the last time, and dwelt for eighteen years in his bishopric of Cloyne in studious seclusion with his family, wandering among the myrtle-hedges his own hand planted, reading Plato and Hooker, teaching his cherished daughter, suffering from domestic losses, and proclaiming to an astounded world that tar-water was a panacea for all human ills. Berkeley's genius and his eloquent prose made tar-water as popular as both had {296} made Bermuda some twenty years earlier. The later years of his life at Cloyne are tinged with melancholy. His mind began to be agitated anew with the dream of an academic retreat by other streams than the Blackwater and the Leo, and in 1752 he journeyed again to England and set up his tent for the last time beneath the shadow of the Oxford spires. It was mellow autumn when he came to the City of Scholars. In the chill January weather of the following year he died suddenly and peacefully in the midst of his family. He was a great and a good man. The serene purity of his life, his lofty purposes, his nobility of nature, cause him to stand out very conspicuously in the strange, cynical, cruel world of English life and English thought during the first half of the eighteenth century. He was in that world, but he was never of it. His friends were either noble of life and mind, or else he saw in them only their nobler qualities, and took no thought of or no harm from the rest. He seems to have been most happy—and the fact is characteristic of the man—in the society of the sweet, simple, and studious woman who made him a loving wife, and of the children whom he loved with an affection for the excess of which he sometimes reproached himself. All his contemporaries, says Sir James Mackintosh, agreed with Pope in ascribing
"To Berkeley every virtue under heaven."
In 1754 Henry Pelham died. The important consequence of his death was the fact that it gave Pitt at last an opportunity of coming to the front. The Duke of Newcastle, Henry Pelham's brother, became leader of the administration, with Henry Fox for Secretary at War, Pitt for Paymaster-general of the Forces, and Murray, afterwards to be famous as Lord Mansfield, for Attorney-general. There was some difficulty about the leadership of the House of Commons. Pitt was still too much disliked by the King to be available for the position. Fox for a while refused to accept it, and Murray was unwilling {297} to do anything which might be likely to withdraw him from the professional path along which he was to move to such distinction. An attempt was made to get on with a Sir Thomas Robinson, a man of no capacity for such a position, and the attempt was soon an evident failure. Then Fox consented to take the position on Newcastle's own terms, which were those of absolute submission to the dictates of Newcastle. Later still he was content to descend to a subordinate office which did not even give him a place in the Cabinet. Fox never recovered the damage which his reputation and his influence suffered by this amazing act; the only explanation for which was found in the fact that he loved money better than anything in the world, and that the office of Paymaster-general gave almost limitless opportunities to a rapacious and unscrupulous man.
[Sidenote: 1757—Admiral Byng]
The Duke of Newcastle's Ministry soon fell. Newcastle was not a man who had the slightest capacity for controlling or directing a policy of war; and the great struggle known as the Seven Years' War had now broken out. One lamentable event in the war has to be recorded, although it was but of minor importance. This was the capture of Minorca by the French under the romantic, gallant, and profligate Duc de Richelieu. The event is memorable chiefly, or only, because it was followed by the trial and execution of the unfortunate Admiral Byng. Admiral Byng, the son of a famous sailor, was sent in command of a small and a very poorly furnished squadron to the Mediterranean to relieve Minorca. When he readied Gibraltar he found that a French fleet much superior in numbers to his own was blockading the island he was sent to relieve. Byng called a council of war, and the council decided that, as they had no instructions from home how to act in the event of their finding themselves face to face with a superior force, they had better not interfere with the doings of the enemy. Still Byng made for Minorca, and tried unsuccessfully to open communications with the garrison. He had a slight engagement {298} with the French, and then he brought his squadron away. The news created such an outburst of passion in England that the Duke of Newcastle made up his mind at once to sacrifice Byng to the popular fury. Byng was tried at Spithead, found guilty of having failed in his duty, and shot on March 14, 1757. He died like a brave man. It went heavily against Newcastle in later days that he was believed to have promised the sacrifice of Byng before the trial had even begun. No one now believes that Byng was a coward; and nothing but a miracle could have enabled him with such a force to save Minorca. But he failed sadly in his duty, whether from stupidity or irresolution, and probably he would not have cared to outlive his degradation. The punishment was stern and harsh indeed, but it was a time to excuse sternness on the part of a government on whom had fallen the conduct of a great war. Pitt did his best to induce the King to mitigate the penalty in accordance with the unanimous recommendation of the court-martial; but George was inflexible, and reminded Pitt that he had himself taught the Sovereign to seek outside the House of Commons for the judgment of the English people. It was to the execution of Byng that Voltaire applied the famous epigram, "In England it is thought necessary to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others"—"pour encourager les autres." Voltaire tried hard to save Byng, and even induced the Duc de Richelieu to write a letter bearing his personal testimony to the unfortunate admiral's courage.
The Duke of Newcastle resigned office, and for a short time the Duke of Devonshire was at the head of a coalition Ministry which included Pitt. The King, however, did not stand this long, and one day suddenly turned them all out of office. Then a coalition of another kind was formed, which included Newcastle and Pitt, with Henry Fox in the subordinate position of paymaster. Pitt now for the first time had it all his own way. He ruled everything in the House of Commons. He flung himself with passionate and patriotic energy into the {299} alliance with that great Frederick whose genius and daring were like his own. Pitt was a heaven-born war-minister. His courage and his resources changed the whole fortunes of the war. He seemed a statesman to organize victory. He stirred up the languishing patriotism of the hour, and filled it with new and noble inspiration. It was true what George had said to him—that he had taught, or tried to teach, the Sovereign to seek outside the House of Commons for the voice of the English people. But this was to the honor of Pitt, and not to his discredit. Pitt saw that a legislature returned on such a representation could be no spokesman of the English people. He knew that intelligence and education were beginning to spread with increased wealth through large unrepresented classes, and even communities. While he had the people behind him he cared little for the Sovereign, and still less for the House of Commons. His pride was as great as his patriotism; he might be broken, but he could not bend. At last he had found his true place—at the head of a great nation and during a grand national crisis.
[Sidenote: 1757—Sterne]
The closing years of George's reign were honored by some literary triumphs in which George himself could have taken but little interest. In 1755 appeared, in two volumes folio, the English Dictionary by Samuel Johnson. We shall meet with Samuel Johnson a good deal in the future course of this history, and have now only to mention as a fact the publication of the work on which he himself believed his fame was to rest. Another work of a very different kind and by a very different sort of man appeared in 1759—the first and second volume of "Tristram Shandy," by Laurence Sterne.