The Queen grew uneasy, and, to avoid Townshend’s replying, only laughed, and turned the conversation.
An anecdote is told of the Duchess of Queensberry’s being forbid the court; which belongs to the literary history of the cleverest opera in our own or any other language—Gay’s famous production. Walpole, justly regarding himself as caricatured in the “Beggar’s Opera,” obtained the Duke of Grafton’s authority as Lord Chamberlain to suppress the representation of his next opera, “Polly.” Gay resolved to publish it by subscription, and his patroness, the Duchess of Queensberry, put herself at the head of the undertaking, and solicited every person she met, to subscribe. As the Duchess was handsome, a wit, and of the first fashion, she obtained guineas in all directions, even from those who dreaded to encourage this act of defiance. The Duchess’s zeal, however, increased with her success; and she even came to the drawing-room, and under the very eye of majesty solicited subscriptions for a play which the monarch had forbidden to be acted. When the King came into the drawing-room, seeing the Duchess very busy in a corner with three or four persons, he asked her what she was doing. She answered, “What must be agreeable, she was sure, to any body so humane as his Majesty, for it was an act of charity; and a charity to which she did not despair of bringing his Majesty to contribute.” This proceeding was so much resented, that Mr Stanhope, vice-chamberlain to the King, was sent in form to the Duchess to forbid her coming to court. The message was verbal; but she desired to send a written answer—wrote it on the spot—and thus furnished a document, whose style certainly exhibited more sincerity than courtiership.
“That the Duchess of Queensberry is surprised and well pleased that the King has given her so agreeable a command as to stay from court, where she never came for diversion, but to bestow a great civility on the King and Queen. She hopes that, by such an unprecedented order as this, the King will see as few as he wishes at his court, particularly such as dare to think or speak truth. I dare not do otherwise, and ought not, nor could have imagined that it would not have been the very highest compliment I could possibly pay the King, to endeavour to support truth and innocence in his house—particularly when the King and Queen both told me that they had not read Mr Gay’s play. I have certainly done right, then, to stand by my own words rather than his Grace of Grafton’s, who hath neither made use of truth, judgment, nor honour, through this whole affair, either for himself or his friends.
“C. Queensberry.”
When her Grace had finished this paper, drawn up, as Lord Hervey observes, “with more spirit than accuracy,” Stanhope requested of her to think again, and give him a more courtly message to deliver. The Duchess took her pen and wrote another, but it was so much more disrespectful, that he asked for the former one and delivered it.
There was, of course, a prodigious quantity of court gossip on this occasion: and, doubtless, though some pretended to be shocked, many were pleased at the sting of royalty, and many more were amused at the dashing oddity of the Duchess. But public opinion, on the whole, blamed the court. It certainly was infinitely childish in the King, to have inquired into what the Duchess was doing among her acquaintances in the drawing-room; it was equally beneath the natural notions of royal dignity that the King should put himself in a state of hostility with a subject, and in so trifling a matter as the subscription to an unpublished play; and it was equally impolitic, for the world was sure to range itself on the side of the woman, especially when that woman was handsome, eccentric, and rich. It produced some inconvenience, however, to the lady’s husband, as he, in consequence, gave up the office of Admiral of Scotland.
The history of the “Beggar’s Opera” is still one of those mysticisms which perplex the chroniclers of the stage. It has been attributed to the joint conception of Swift, Pope, and Gay. The original idea probably belonged to Swift, who, in that fondness for contrasts, and contempt of romance, which belonged to him in every thing, had observed, “What a pretty thing a Newgate pastoral would make!” Pope may have given hints for the epigrammatic pungency of the dialogue; while the general workmanship may have been left to Gay. It is scarcely possible to doubt the sharp and worldly hand of Swift in some of the scenes and songs. Pope may have polished the dialogue, or nerved some of the songs, otherwise it is difficult to account for the total failure of all those characters of sternness, sharpness, and knowledge of the world, in Gay’s subsequent and unassisted drama, “Polly.” For, as the note on the subject observes, nothing can be more dull and less sarcastic, or, in fact, less applicable to either public characters or public events than the latter opera, against which a prime minister levelled the hostilities of the Lord Chamberlain, and engaged the indignation of the King.
Gay had been a dependant on Mrs Howard,—a matter which, in the scandalous laxity of the time, was by no means disgraceful. He had been solicitor for some place under the court, and had been disappointed. But the “Beggar’s Opera” had been written before his disappointment. Of course, it is unlikely that he should have then thought of burlesquing the minister. His disappointment, however, may have given him new intentions, and a few touches from Swift’s powerful hand might have transformed Macheath, Peachum, and Lockit into the fac-similes of the premier and his cabinet. It is remarkable that Gay had never attempted any thing of the kind before, nor after. His solitary muse was the very emblem of feebleness, his ambition never soared beyond a salary, and his best authorship was fables.
As ours is the day when rioting is popular, and rebels in every country are modellers of government, it may be amusing to remember how those matters were managed in the last century. The history of the famous Excise scheme, which in its day convulsed England, and finally shook the most powerful of all ministers out of the most powerful of all cabinets, is amongst the curious anecdotes of a time full of eccentricity. Walpole was no more superior to the effects of prosperity than honester men. Long success had confirmed him in a belief of its perpetual power; and the idea that, with a court wholly at his disposal, with a Queen for his agent, a King almost for his subject, the peerage waiting his nod, and the commons in his pay, he could be cast down and shattered like a plaster image, seems never to have entered into his dreams. But in this plenitude of power, whether to exercise his supremacy, or for the mere want of something to do, it occurred to him to relieve the country gentlemen by reducing the land-tax to a shilling in the pound, turning the duty on tobacco and wine, then payable on importation, into inland duties,—that is, changing customs on those two commodities into excise. By which scheme, and the continuation of the salt-duty, he proposed to improve the revenue half a million a-year, so as to supply the abatement of the shilling in the pound. The plan seemed feasible, and it also appeared likely to attract popularity among the country gentlemen, who had frequently complained of the pressure of the land-tax—two shillings in the pound.
The result, however, showed that a man may govern a court who is unequal to govern a people. The very mention of excise raised a universal storm,—all kinds of exaggerations flew through the land. The subject, at no time popular, was converted into a source of frantic indignation. The orators alleged, that if excise was once to be made a substitute for the land-tax, it might be made a substitute for every tax; that if it was laid on wine and tobacco, it would soon be laid on corn and clothing; that every man’s house would be at the mercy of excise-officers, whose numbers would amount to a standing army, and of the most obnoxious kind, an army of tax-gatherers; that liberty must perish; Magna Charta be not worth its own parchment; parliament be voted useless; and the monarch, who could extract every shilling from the pockets of his subjects under the pretext of an excise, might soon ride roughshod over the liberties of England. Petition on petition, of course, showered into parliament; the boroughs angrily advised their representatives to vote against the measure; and the towns and cities haughtily commanded their parliamentary delegates to resist all extension of the excise, however qualified, corrected, or modelled by the minister.