“N.B.—To believe every Thing and Nothing is much the same.”
After his marriage, the Duke paid a visit to his master at Rome, but he “could not keep himself within the bounds of the Italian gravity,” and the Chevalier ordered him and his wife to return to Spain. There he volunteered to serve with the Spanish army in the siege of Gibraltar. Hitherto there had been some suspicion of his courage, but that slur he now wiped off by exposing his person freely; indeed, the story goes that one day he walked from the Spanish camp to the very walls of Gibraltar, and, when challenged, declared his identity, and sauntered back leisurely, the soldiers, unwilling to kill a great nobleman of their own nationality, holding their fire.
After the siege, the Duke returned to Madrid, where he was given the rank of Colonel-Aggregate to the Irish regiment, Hibernia, in the Spanish service, commanded by the Marquis de Castelar; and then proposed to settle for a while at the Pretender’s Court. That royal personage, however, had by this time realised that his adherent’s gifts were so handicapped by various undesirable qualities that he showed very plainly that he wished any intimate connection should cease: he did, indeed, consent to grant a last interview at Parma, but he neutralised the effect of this favour by taking the opportunity to refuse to allow the Duke to reside at his Court.
The Duke took the rebuff in good part, wrote to the Chevalier reiterating his great and enduring devotion to the Jacobite cause, and, journeying with his wife to Paris, in that city at once made overtures to Horace Walpole, the British Ambassador. “I am coming to Paris, to put myself entirely under your Excellency’s protection, and hope that Sir Robert Walpole’s good nature will prompt him to save a family, which his generosity induced him to spare,” he wrote in May 1728. “If your Excellency would permit me to wait upon you for an hour, I am certain you would be convinced of the sincerity of my repentance for my former madness; would become an advocate with his Majesty to grant me his most gracious pardon, which it is my comfort I shall never be required to purchase by any step unworthy of a man of honour. I do not intend, in the case of the king’s allowing me to pass the evening of my days under the shadow of his royal protection, to see England for some years, but shall remain in France or Germany, as my friends shall advise, and enjoy country sports till all former stories are buried in oblivion. I beg of your Excellency to let me receive your orders at Paris, which I will send to your hotel to receive. The Duchess of Wharton, who is with me, desires leave to wait on Mrs Walpole, if you think proper.”
Horace Walpole received him, listened to his assurances of future loyalty, and conveyed his protestations of good behaviour to the Duke of Newcastle, who replied on 12th July:
“Having laid before the King your Excellency’s letter, giving an account of a visit you had received from the Duke of Wharton, and enclosing a copy of a letter he wrote to you afterwards upon the same occasion, I am commanded to let you know that his Majesty approves of what you said to the Duke, and your behaviour towards him; but that the Duke of Wharton has conducted himself in so extraordinary a manner since he left England, and has so openly declared his disaffection to the King and his government, by joining with and serving under his Majesty’s professed enemies, that his Majesty does not think fit to receive any application from him.”
It is unnecessary to give in detail the subsequent actions of the Duke: how, incensed by the King’s refusal, he printed in Mist’s Journal a bitter satirical attack on George II. and his ministers; how he was tried for high treason for having taken up arms against his country, found guilty, outlawed, and deprived of his property; how at the eleventh hour unofficial overtures were made to him from England, which he refused to entertain unless unconditional pardon was granted him; how he stayed awhile in a monastery, a fervent devotee, and after a few weeks returned to the world to plunge into greater excesses; how he publicly proclaimed his attachment to the Pretender and the Catholic religion.
His estates being sequestrated, he was now penniless, and reduced to most miserable straits. “Notwithstanding what my Brother Madman has done to undo himself, and everybody who was so unlucky as to have the least concern with him,” wrote a friend who journeyed with him from Paris to Orleans at the beginning of June 1729, “I could not help being sensibly moved at so extraordinary a vicissitude of fortune, to see a great man fallen from that shining light, in which I have beheld him in the House of Lords, to such a degree of obscurity, that I have observed the meanest commoner decline his company; and the Jew he would sometimes fasten on, grow tired of it; for you know he is but a bad orator in his cups, and of late he has been but seldom sober.” Eventually, after overcoming great difficulties, the Duke arrived in Spain, where he joined his regiment, and endeavoured to live upon his pay of eighteen pistoles a month, and sums of money sent to him by the Pretender. He devoted his leisure to reading and to the composition of a play based on the tragic story of Mary Queen of Scots, and, after an illness of some months, he died on 31st May 1731, at the age of thirty-two, in the shelter of the Franciscan monastery of Poblet.
Such is the story of the life of Philip, Duke of Wharton, which, surely, arouses feelings of pity rather than anger. “Like Buckingham and Rochester,” says Horace Walpole, “he comforted all the grave and dull by throwing away the brightest profusion of parts on witty fooleries, debaucheries, and scrapes, which may mix graces with a great character, but can never compose one.” He had, indeed, genius, wit, humour, eloquence, rank, wealth and good looks, but because he lacked stability and principles, all his great talents went for nothing. Never was there a character more fitted to point a moral, and if the writers of Sunday school prize-books have not taken him as their text, this can only be because they are unacquainted with his history. “The great abilities of the Duke of Wharton are past dispute,” Atterbury wrote to the Pretender, in September 1736; “it is he alone who could render them less useful than they might have been.” And this was kindly put, for Atterbury might well have said that as an adherent to any cause so unreliable and faithless a person was an open danger.
For every man some excuse can be found, but while excuses for the Duke of Wharton there must be, it is, indeed, not easy to find them. His early training may have been unsuitable for a character so mercurial, and the early death of his mother and father probably removed any change of controlling him. That he was mad is a theory practical enough, for this would explain many sudden changes of opinion, and many instances of unfaithfulness, which had not even self-interest to explain them; and it seems certain that he was intoxicated with vanity. This last assumption is supported by the testimony of Pope, who has for all time put on record a character sketch of the Duke, which, in spite of the poet’s bias, must unfortunately be accepted as a portrait all too true: