Walpole was thunderstruck; but he still relied upon his fortune. His friends crowded round him with entreaties that he would abandon the measure. But his argument was the argument of infatuation—the old absurdity of exposing himself to immediate ruin, through fear of being ruined at some future time, which might never arrive. In fact, his flexibility, which often saves a minister, was suddenly exchanged for the stubbornness which is the ministerial road to ruin. At last the memorable day came, March 14, 1743, when the bill was to be presented to parliament. It was reported that thousands of the people would block up the House, and there was a general order for constables, peace-officers, and the Guards to be in readiness. The mob, however, were neither so numerous nor so unruly as was expected. The debate was long, and the question was carried for the excise scheme by a majority of 61—the numbers being 204 and 265. The King was so anxious on the subject, that he made Lord Hervey write to him from the House at five o’clock; and, when the debate broke up at one in the morning, and Lord Hervey came to St James’s to mention the result, the King carried him into the Queen’s bedchamber, and kept him there till three in the morning, (without having dined;) asking him ten thousand questions, not merely about the speeches, but the very looks of the speakers.
The memoirs of persons in high life have a certain use for those who will draw the true moral from them; which is, that the highest rank is by no means the happiest. The exterior glitters to the eye, and doubtless there are few pedestrians who would not rejoice to drive in a gilt coach, with a squadron of hussars prancing round them. But the Memoirs of George II. and his Queen, altogether independently of private character, give formidable evidence of the cares which haunt even thrones. Yet, perhaps, there was no more palmy state of public affairs than that which saw George and Caroline on the throne. The country was in profound peace, commerce was flourishing, there was no impediment to the wheels of society—neither famine nor pestilence, nor rebellion; and yet distress, vexation, and perplexity seem to be as frequent inmates of the palace as they could have been of the workhouse. Even the great minister himself, though the head and front of the whole immediate disturbance, and likely to suffer more severely than all the rest, bore the crisis with more equanimity than either of their majesties.
“This evening,” says Lord Hervey, “Sir Robert Walpole saw the King in the Queen’s apartment, and the final resolution was then taken to drop the bill; but as there was a petition to come from the city of London against it the next day, it was resolved that the bill should not be dropped till that petition was rejected, lest it should be thought to be done by the weight and power of the city.” Walpole, on coming from this conference, called on Lord Hervey to let him know what had passed. Sir Robert was extremely disconcerted. Lord Hervey told him that he had been twice that afternoon sent for by the King; but, not knowing in what strain to talk to him, as he was ignorant whether Sir Robert intended to go forward or retreat, and expecting that he should be asked millions of questions relating to what he saw, and what he heard, and what he thought; to avoid the difficulties which this catechism would lay him under, he kept out of the way.
In the mean time, Sir Robert had gone to the Queen, and told her, that the clamour had grown so great, that there were but two ways of trying to appease it, one by dropping the project, and the other by dropping the projector. The Queen chid him extremely “for thinking it possible she could act so cowardly a part.” When Lord Hervey went up to the drawing-room, he saw that her Majesty had been weeping very plentifully, and found her so little able to disguise what she felt, that she was forced to pretend headach and vapours, and break up her quadrille party sooner than the usual hour. When the drawing-room was over, the King called Lord Hervey into the Queen’s bedchamber, and began with great eagerness to ask him where he had been all day, whom he had seen, what he had heard, and how both friends and foes looked? To some of the replies, referring to the Opposition, the King said with great warmth, “It is a lie; those rascals in the Opposition are the greatest liars that ever spoke.” The city petition was presented the next morning, and attended by a train of coaches reaching from Temple Bar to Westminster. The prayer of the petition was, that they might be heard by counsel against the bill. After a debate till midnight the petition was rejected, but only by a majority of seventeen—214 to 197. Walpole was never more deeply smitten than by this defeat, for so small a majority was a virtual defeat. He stood for some time after the House was up, leaning against the table, with his hat pulled over his eyes, and some few friends, with melancholy countenances, round him. As soon as the whole was over, Pelham went to the King, and Hervey to the Queen, to acquaint them with what had passed. When Hervey, at his first coming into the room, shook his head and told her the numbers, the tears ran down her cheeks, and for some time she could not utter a word. At last she said, “It is over—we must give way; but pray tell me a little how it passed.”
On the next day, Walpole proposed the postponement of the tobacco bill for two months. On coming out of the House, the mob, who had increased in numbers, continued to insult the members. Walpole, though warned of the reception which he was likely to get, determined to face the mob, as he boldly said, “there was no end of flying from their menaces, and that meeting dangers of this kind was the only way to put an end to them.” With some friends, and to a certain degree protected by the constables, who made a passage for the members to go out, he at last worked his way through the mob; though there was a great deal of jostling, and the constables were obliged to make large use of their staves. Three of his friends (among whom was Lord Hervey) were hurt. The city had been filled with illuminations and bonfires the night before, when Sir Robert Walpole, with a fat woman, (meant for the Queen,) was burnt in effigy. It is singular that this triumph was carried as far as Oxford, where for three nights together, round the bonfires in the streets, the healths of Ormond, Bolingbroke, and James III. were publicly drunk!
Lord Hervey’s sketches of character are among the best specimens of his writing, and the most interesting portions of his book. They are always acute and forcible, natural though epigrammatic, and remorseless though polished. As the lives of Chancellors have been, of late, so frequently brought before the public, we give his sketch of Lord Chancellor King. Speaking of King as having risen from obscurity to the woolsack, without an obstruction in his career, and with the general approbation of all judges of legal merit, he observes that, from the moment of his presiding in Chancery, his reputation began to sink. But this is explained, not by any newly discovered deficiency of talent, but by deficiency of decision. “Expedition,” says Lord Hervey, “was never reckoned among the merits of the Court of Chancery; but while Lord King presided there, its delays became insupportable. He had such a diffidence of himself, that he dared not do right for fear of doing wrong. Decrees were always extorted from him; and, had he been left alone, he would never have given any suitor his due, for fear of giving him what was not so; never reflecting that the suspension of justice was almost as bad as the total privation of it. His understanding was of that balancing irregular kind, which gives people just light enough to see difficulties and form doubts, yet not enough to surmount the one, or remove the other. This sort of understanding, which was of use to him as a pleader, was a trouble to him as a judge, and made him make a great figure at the bar, but an indifferent one upon the bench. The Queen once said of him, very truly, as well as agreeably, that ‘he was just in the law, what he had formerly been in the gospel—making creeds of the one, without any steady belief, and judgments in the other, without any settled opinion. But the misfortune,’ said she, ‘for the public is, that though they can reject his silly creeds, they are forced to submit to his silly judgments.’” (Lord King had dabbled in divinity, and published a history of the Apostles’ Creed.) Complaints soon arose, that all the equity of the nation was at a stand. He afterwards nearly lost his senses by repeated attacks of apoplexy. He was at last induced to retire on a pension of £3000. He died in the next year, “little regretted by any body, but least of all by his Majesty, who saved £3000 a-year by it.”
The condition of the court seems to have been perpetual conflict. The King’s personal conduct was inexcusable; the Queen’s great object was the possession of power; and the Prince was an object of suspicion to both, as both were objects of vexation to the Prince. His case in short was this: “He had a father that abhorred him, a mother that despised him, sisters that betrayed him, a brother set up against him, and a set of servants that neglected him, and were neither of use to him, nor capable of being of use, nor desirous of being of use.”
The Opposition were in pretty much the same condition: they, too, were in a state of civil war. Lord Carteret and Bolingbroke had no correspondence at all; Pulteney and Bolingbroke hated each other; Carteret and Pulteney were jealous of each other; Sir William Wyndham and Pulteney the same; while Chesterfield had a little correspondence with them all, but was confided in by none.
The Princess’s marriage to the Prince of Orange had long engrossed the consideration of the court. The Princess was not ill-looking, but her figure was short, and inclined to be fat. She seems to have resembled both the King and the Queen in their better, and in their worst, qualities. She was quick, intelligent, and passionate; yet could be cool, callous, and ready to sacrifice every thing to power. The Prince of Orange was poor, having but £12,000 a-year, and he was deformed, having a humpback, and altogether exhibiting the least attractive object possible in the eyes of a princess as haughty as any in Christendom. The marriage was solemnised at seven in the evening: the chapel was splendidly fitted up; but the Queen and the Princesses exhibited so much undisguised concern, that the procession to the chapel, and the aspect of matters there, looked more like a sacrifice than a marriage. We cannot go any further into details which, however suitable to foreign manners, can only disgust the fortunate delicacy of the English mind. But Lord Hervey’s manner of consoling the philosophic Queen in her disdain and disgust, is capital, as a specimen at once of the man of the world and of the courtier.
His answer was, “Madam, in half a year all persons are alike; and the figure one is married to, like the prospect of the place one lives at, grows so familiar to one’s eyes, that we look at it mechanically, without regarding either the beauties or deformities that strike a stranger.” The Queen’s answer was clever: “One may, and I believe one does, grow blind at last; but you must allow, my dear Lord Hervey, that there is a great difference, as long as one sees, in the manner of one’s growing blind.” The sisters spoke much in the same style as the mother, with horror at his figure, and commiseration for his wife. The Princess Emily said, “nothing on earth should have induced her to marry the monster.” The Princess Caroline, in her soft sensible way, spoke truth and said, “She must own it was very bad, but that, in her sister’s situation, all things considered, she believed she should have come to the same resolution.”