CHAPTER XVIII
GEORGE I.
With George the First the Whigs came into power, and soon after the new King’s accession, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and the former Lord Treasurer, was sent to the Tower on the charge of having advised the French King as to the best means for capturing the town of Tournai. Harley had resigned his Treasurer’s staff three days before Queen Anne’s death, and on the 10th of June 1715, he was impeached by the Commons, of whom only a short time before he had been the idol, and committed to the Tower. His courage never wavered, although he was left to languish for two years in the fortress, and at length, on petitioning to be tried, he was acquitted in July 1717. He died seven years later, aged sixty-two. Lord Powis and Sir William Wyndham soon followed Lord Oxford to the Tower, but the latter was very shortly after set at liberty without even undergoing a trial. Wyndham was member for the county of Somerset from 1708 until his death in 1740; he had been Secretary of State for War and Chancellor of the Exchequer to Queen Anne, as well as Master of the Buckhounds. His talents and his eloquence made him one of the foremost men of that brilliant age, and Pope sang his praises:
“How can I Pult’ney, Chesterfield forget,
While Roman spirit charms, and Attic wit;
Or Wyndham, just to freedom and the throne,
The Master of his passions and our own?”
Another distinguished prisoner at this time in the Tower was George Granville, Lord Lansdowne of Bideford. Descended from that race of heroes, the Grenvilles of the West, of whom Admiral Sir Richard of the Revenge was the most famous, and grandson of Sir Bevil Grenville, killed at the Battle of Lansdowne, George Granville belonged by race and conviction to the party of the Stuarts, and, too proud to seek safety in flight, as did so many of his contemporaries at the accession of the House of Hanover, he remained in England, and even protested from his place in the House of Lords against the Bill for attainting Ormonde and Bolingbroke. Strongly suspected of favouring the cause of James Stuart, Lansdowne was accused of having taken part in a plot for raising an insurrection in the West Country, where his name was a pillar of strength, “being possessed,” as Lord Bolingbroke said, “now with the same political phrenzy for the Pretender as he had in his youth for his father.” The plot was discovered, and at the close of September 1715, Lansdowne and his wife were committed to the Tower and kept there in close confinement until all danger of insurrection had passed away, and until the rising in the North had been crushed. In Queen Anne’s time, Lansdowne had been sung as
“Trevanion and Granville as sound as a bell
For the Queen and the Church and Sacheverell.”