The remarks in the memoir on this daring enterprise seem to be imperfect. The first is, that if England was to have been invaded at all, the effort should have been made before the army could be brought from Flanders. The second is, that the retreat from Derby should have been exchanged for a march on London. But the former would have required a totally different plan of operations. The Prince should have landed in Kent, if his object was to take London by surprise. But, as his only troops must be the clans, he must look for them in the North; and it would have been impossible to march an army from the Highlands to the metropolis in less than a fortnight. On the second point, the retreat from Derby was obviously necessary. The clans were already diminishing—every step must be fought for—they were but half armed—and the King’s troops were increasing day by day.
In one remark we agree, that the Chevalier should never have attempted more than the possession of Scotland. He should have remained in Holyrood House. There he had a majority of the nation in his favour,—the heads of the clans, and the old romantic recollections of his ancestral kings, all tending to support his throne. A French force might have been easily summoned to his assistance, and for a while he might have maintained a separate sovereignty. It is, on the other hand, not improbable that the Scottish nation might have looked on the sovereignty of a son of James, the persecutor, with jealousy; Protestantism would have dreaded a French alliance; and the expulsion of the Chevalier would have been effected in Scotland on the model of the English expulsion of James. Still, the experiment was feasible for the claimant of a crown; and the success of the adventure might have continued long enough to produce great evil to both countries.
We have found these volumes highly interesting, not merely from the importance of their period, but from their containing events so curiously parallel to those of our own time. Among the rest was the appointment to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. A letter from Charles Yorke thus says:—“The Archbishop of Canterbury died suddenly on Saturday. The Bishop of London has declined the offer of succeeding. It is now offered to the Bishop of Salisbury, who has not yet returned an answer. If he refuses, which some say he will, the Archbishop of York will be the man.”
The reasons for these refusals were probably the reluctance to change, at the advanced age of these bishops,—Sherlock, of Salisbury, being seventy, and Gibson probably about the same age. The fees for possession are also immense, and we have heard them rated at little short of £20,000.
The Lord Chancellor announced the offer to the Archbishop of York, who returned the following remarkable answer:—“I am honoured with your Lordship’s of the 13th inst., which I embrace with all my heart, as a new instance of that friendship and affection for me which for so many years have been the support, and credit, and comfort of my life.
“I have considered the thing, my best friend and my most honoured Lord, with all deliberation and compass of thought that I am master of, and am come to a very firm and most resolved determination not to quit the See of York on any account or on any consideration.... I am really poor; I am not ambitious of being rich, but have too much pride, with, I hope, a small mixture of honesty, to bear being in debt. I am now out of it, and in possession of a clear independency of that sort. I must not go back, and begin the world again at fifty-five.
“The honour of Canterbury is a thing of glare and splendour, and the hopes of it a proper incentive to schoolboys to industry. But I have considered all its inward parts, and examined all its duties, and if I should quit my present station to take it, I will not answer for it that in less than a twelvemonth I did not sink and die with regret and envy at the man who should succeed me here, and quit the place in my possession, as I ought to do, to one better and wiser than myself.”
This language might have been received with some suspicion in other instances; but Herring was a straightforward as well as a very able man, and there can be no doubt that he spoke what he thought. But he seems to have mistaken the position of the Primate as one of splendour, for we certainly have seen instances in which it displayed any thing but splendour, and in which the great body of the clergy knew no more of the halls of Lambeth, shared no more of its due hospitality, and enjoyed no more of the natural and becoming intercourse with their metropolitan, than if he had been a hermit. This grievous error, which has the necessary effect of repelling and ultimately offending and alienating the whole body of the inferior clergy, a body who constitute the active strength of the Establishment, we must hope to see henceforth totally changed. In the higher view of the case, an Archbishop of Canterbury possesses every advantage for giving an honourable and meritorious popularity to the Church. By his rank, entitled to associate with the highest personages of the empire, he may more powerfully influence them by the manliness and intelligence of his opinions: a peer of parliament, he should be a leader of council, the spokesman of the prelacy, the guide of the peers on all ecclesiastical questions, and the courageous protector of the Establishment committed to his charge. In his more private course, he ought to cultivate the association of the learned, the vigorous, and the active minds of the country. He ought especially to be kind to his clergy, not merely by opening his palace and his hospitalities to them all, but by personal intercourse, by visiting their churches, by preaching from time to time in their pulpits, by making himself known to them in the general civilities of private friendliness, and by the easy attentions which, more than all the formalities of official condescension, sink into the hearts of men. It is absurd and untrue to say that an archbishop has no time for all these things. These things are of the simplest facility to any man whose heart is in the right place; and if, instead of locking himself up with two or three dreary effigies of man, in the shape of chaplains, and freezing all the soul within him by a rigid and repulsive routine, he shall “do as he would be done unto” if he had remained a country curate, an Archbishop of Canterbury might be the most beloved, popular, and for all the best purposes, the most influential man in the kingdom.
Old age was now coming on Lord Hardwicke, and with it the painful accompaniment of the loss of his old and intimate associates through public and private life; his own public career, too, was come to its close. In 1756 the Newcastle ministry was succeeded by that of the celebrated William Pitt, (Lord Chatham,) and Lord Hardwicke resigned the Great Seal. The note in his private journal states, “19th November 1756, resigned the Great Seal voluntarily into his Majesty’s hands at St James’s, after I had held it nineteen years, eight months, and ten days.”
All authorities since his day appear to have agreed in giving the highest tribute to this distinguished man. His character in the Annual Register says, “In judicature, his firmness and dignity were evidently derived from his consummate knowledge and talents; and the mildness and humanity which tempered it from the best heart.... His extraordinary despatch of the business of the court, increased as it was in his time beyond what had been known in any former, on account of his established reputation there, and the extension of the commerce and riches of the nation, was an advantage to the suitor, inferior only to that arising from the acknowledged equity, perspicuity, and precision of his decrees.... The manner in which he presided in the House of Lords added order and dignity to that assembly.” Lord Campbell, in his late “Lives of the Chancellors,” characterises Lord Hardwicke as “the man universally and deservedly considered the most consummate judge who ever sat in the Court of Chancery.”