The habits of George I. were Continental—a phrase which implies all of laxity that is consistent with the etiquette of a court. His personal reign was anxious, troubled, and toilsome; but the nation prospered, and the era had evidently arrived when the character of the sitter on the throne had ceased to attract the interest, or influence the conduct of the nation. The King had no taste for the fine arts: he had no knowledge of literature. He had served in the army, like all the German princes, but had served without distinction. He loved Hanoverian life, and he was incapable of enjoying the life of England. He lived long enough to be easily forgotten, and died of apoplexy on his way to Hanover!
George II., the chief object of these Memoirs, only son of George I. and Sophia Dorothea, was forty-four at his accession. In 1705 he had married Caroline, daughter of the Margrave of Brandenburg Anspach.
The reign of George II. was the era of another revolution—the supremacy of ministers. A succession of ambitious and able men governed the country by parties. The King was intelligent and active, yet they controlled him, until he found his chief task to be limited to obedience. He was singularly fond of power, and openly jealous of authority, but his successive ministers were the virtual masters of the crown. His chief vexations arose from their struggles for office; and his only compensation to his injured feelings was, in dismissing one cabinet, to find himself shackled by another. He seems to have lived in a state of constant ebullition with the world—speaking sarcastically of every leading person of his own society, and on harsh terms with his family. His personal habits were incapable of being praised, even by flattery, and the names of the Walmodens, the Deloraines, and the Howards, still startle the graver sensibilities of our time.
But his public conduct forms a striking contrast to those painful scenes. He was bold in conception and diligent in business. He felt the honour of being an English king; and though he wasted time and popularity in his childish habit of making his escape to Hanover whenever he could, he offered no wilful offence to the feelings of the people. His letters on public affairs exhibit strong sense, and he had the wisdom to leave his finance in the hands of Walpole, and the manliness to suffer himself to be afterwards eclipsed by the lustre of Chatham. His reign, which had begun in difficulties, and was carried on in perils, closed in triumph.—The French navy was swept from the ocean; the battle of the Heights of Abraham gave him Canada; the battle of Plassy gave him India; and at his death, in 1760, at the age of seventy-seven, he left England in a blaze of glory.
The death of George I. had brought Walpole forward as the minister of his son. The story of Sir Spencer Compton has been often told, but never so well as in these Memoirs. The King died on the 11th of June 1727 at Osnaburg. The news reached Walpole on the 14th, at his villa in Chelsea. He immediately went to Richmond to acquaint the Prince of Wales with this momentous intelligence. The Prince was asleep after dinner, according to his custom; but he was awakened for the intelligence, which he appeared to receive with surprise. Yet, neither the sense of his being raised to a throne, nor the natural feelings of such an occasion, prevented the exhibition of his dislike to Walpole. On being asked, when it was his pleasure that the Council should be summoned, the King’s abrupt answer was, “Go to Chiswick, and take your directions from Sir Spencer Compton.” Sir Robert bore this ill-usage with his habitual philosophy, and went to Compton at once. There he acted with his usual address; told him that he was minister, and requested his protection; declaring that he had no desire for power or business, but wished to have one of the “white sticks,” as a mark that he was still under the shelter of the crown.
Lord Hervey delights in portraiture, and his portraits generally have a bitter reality, which at once proves the truth of the likeness and the severity of the artist. He daguerreotypes all his generation. He thus describes Sir Spencer: “He was a plodding, heavy fellow, with great application but no talents; with vast complaisance for a court; always more concerned for the manner of the thing than for the thing itself; fitter for a clerk to a minister than for a minister to a prince. His only pleasures were money and eating; his only knowledge forms and precedents; and his only insinuation bows and smiles.” Walpole and he went together to the Duke of Devonshire, President of the Council, but laid up with the gout. Lord Hervey’s sketch of him is certainly not flattering—but such is the price paid by personal feebleness for public station—“He was more able as a virtuoso than a statesman, and a much better jockey than a politician.”
At the council Sir Spencer took Walpole aside, and begged of him, as a speech would be necessary for the King in Council, that, as Sir Robert was more accustomed to that sort of composition than himself, he should go into another room, and make a draft of the speech. Sir Robert retired to draw up his paper, and Sir Spencer went to Leicester Fields, where the King and Queen were already, followed by all who had any thing to ask, or any thing to hope—a definition which seems to have included the whole of what, in later parlance, are called the fashionable world. Whether the present sincerity of court life is purer than of old may be doubtful, but the older manners were certainly the more barefaced. When the new premier was returning to his coach he walked through a lane of “bowers,” all shouldering each other to pay adoration to the new idol.
During the four days of the King’s remaining in town, Leicester House, which used to be a desert, was “thronged from morning till night, like the ‘Change at noon.’” But Walpole walked through those rooms “as if they had been empty.” The same people who were officiously, a-week before, crowding the way to flatter his prosperity, were now getting out of it to avoid sharing his disgrace. Horace Walpole says, that his mother could not make her way to pay her respects to the King and Queen between the scornful backs and elbows of her late devotees, nor could approach nearer to the Queen than the third or fourth row, until the Queen cried out,—“There, I am sure I see a friend.” The torrent then divided, and shrank to either side. In short, Walpole, with his brother Horace, ambassador to France, the Duke of Newcastle and Lord Townshend, the two Secretaries of State, were all conceived to be as much undone, as a pasha on the arrival of the janizary with the bowstring.
The evidences, it must be owned, seemed remarkably strong. The King had openly, and more than once, called Walpole “rogue and rascal;” he had called the ambassador “a scoundrel and a fool;” he had declared his utter contempt for the Duke, and his determination never to forgive him. Townshend fared still worse. The King looked on him to be no more an honest man than an able minister, and attributed all the confusion in foreign affairs to the heat of his temper and his scanty genius, to the strength of his passions and the weakness of his understanding. There can be no doubt that a minister of foreign affairs, with those qualities, might become a very mischievous animal.
On Compton’s receiving the speech drawn up by Walpole, he carried it, in his own handwriting, to the King. The King objected to a paragraph, which Sir Spencer Compton was either unwilling or unable to amend; and not being satisfied of his own powers of persuasion, he actually solicited Walpole to go to the King, and persuade him to leave it as it was! The Queen, who was the friend of Walpole, instantly took advantage of this singular acknowledgment of inferiority, and advised the King to retain the man whom his intended successor so clearly acknowledged to be his superior.