Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 362, December 1845

by Various

The death of Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury, excites a few touches of

Walpole's sarcastic pen. He says, "that his early life had shown his versatility, his latter his ambition. But hypocrisy not being parts, he rose in the church without ever making a figure in the state." So much for antithesis. There is no reason why a clergyman should make a figure in the state under any circumstances; and the less figure he made in the state, as it was then constituted, the more likely he was to be fitted for the church. But the true censure on Secker would have been, that he rose, without making a figure in any thing; that he had never produced any work worthy of notice as a divine; that he had neither eloquence in the pulpit, nor vigour with the pen; that he seems to have been at all times a man of extreme mediocrity; that his qualifications with the ministry were, his being a neutral on all the great questions of the day; and his merits with posterity were, that he possessed power without giving offence. A hundred such men might have held the highest positions of the church, without producing the slightest effect on the public mind; or might have been left in the lowest, without being entitled to accuse the injustice of fortune. His successor was Cornwallis, Bishop of Lichfield, raised to the primacy by the Duke of Grafton, who, as Walpole says, "had a friendship for the bishop's nephew, Earl Cornwallis." This seems not altogether the most sufficient reason for placing a man at the head of the Church of England, but we must take the reason such as we find it. Walpole adds, that the nomination had, however, the merit of disappointing a more unsuitable candidate, Ternet of London, whom he describes as "the most time-serving of the clergy, and sorely chagrined at missing the archiepiscopal mitre."

It was rather unlucky for the public estimate of royalty, that, at this moment of popular irritation, the young King of Denmark should have arrived in England. He had married the King's youngest sister, and making a sort of tour of Europe, he determined to visit the family of his wife. His proposal was waived by the King, who excused himself by the national confusions. But the young Dane, scarcely more than a giddy boy, and singularly self-willed, was not to be repelled; and he came. Nothing could be colder than his reception; not a royal carriage, not an officer of the court, was sent to meet him. He arrived at St James's even in a hired carriage. Neither King nor Queen was there. The only mark of attention paid to him was giving him an apartment, and supplying him and his suite with a table. Walpole observes, that this sullen treatment was as impolitic as it was inhospitable; that the Dane was then actually a pensioner of France, and, of course, it would have been wise to win him out of its hands. But the Danish king seems to have been little better than a fool; and between his frolics and his follies, he finally produced a species of revolution in his own country. All power fell into the hands of his queen, who, though of a bolder nature, seems to have been scarcely less frantic than himself. On the visit of her mother, the Princess of Wales, to Denmark, the Queen met her, at the head of a regiment, dressed in full uniform, and wearing buckskin breeches. She must have been an extraordinary figure altogether, for she had grown immensely corpulent. Court favouritism was the fashion in Denmark, and the King and Queen were equally ruled by favourites. But, in a short period, a young physician of the household managed both, obtaining peculiarly the confidence of the Queen. Scandal was not idle on this occasion, and Germany and England rang with stories of the court of Denmark. The physician was soon created a noble, and figured for a while as the prime minister, or rather sovereign of the kingdom, by the well-known title of Count Struensee. A party was formed against him by the Queen-mother, at the head of some of the nobility. The Queen was made prisoner, and died in prison. Struensee was tried as traitor, and beheaded. The King was finally incapacitated from reigning, and his son was raised to the regency. This melancholy transaction formed one of the tragedies of Europe; but it had the additional misfortune of occurring at a time when royalty had begun to sink under the incessant attacks of the revolutionists, and France,

the leader of public opinion on the Continent, was filled with opinions contemptuous of all thrones.

The year 1768 exhibited France in her most humiliating position before Europe. The Duc de Choiseul was the minister—a man of wit, elegance, and accomplishment; but too frivolous to follow, if he had not been too ignorant to discover, the true sources of national greatness. His foreign policy was intrigue, and his domestic policy the favouritism of the court by administering to its vices. He raised a war between the Russians and Turks, and had the mortification of seeing his protégé the Turk trampled by the armies of his rival the Czarina. Even the Corsicans had degraded the military name of France. But he had a new peril at home. Old Marshal Richelieu—who, as Walpole sarcastically observes, "had retained none of his faculties, but that last talent of a decayed Frenchman, a spirit of back-stairs intrigue"—had provided old Louis XV. with a new mistress. Of all the persons of this character who had made French royal life scandalous in the eyes of Europe, this connexion was the most scandalous. It scandalized even France. This mistress was the famous Countess du Barri—a wretched creature, originally of the very lowest condition; whose vices would have stained the very highest; and who, in the convulsions of the reign that followed, was butchered by the guillotine.

In November of this year died the Duke of Newcastle, at the age of seventy-five. He had been struck with palsy some months before, and then for the first time withdrew from public life. Walpole observes, that his life had been a proof that, "even in a free country, great abilities are not necessary to govern it." Industry, perseverance, and intrigue, gave him that duration of power "which shining talents, and the favour of the crown, could not secure to Lord Granville, nor the first rank in eloquence, or the most brilliant services, to Lord Chatham. Rashness overset Lord Granville's parts, and presumptuous impracticability Lord Chatham; while adventitious cunning repaired Newcastle's folly." Such is the explanation of one of the most curious phenomena of the time, by one of its most ingenious lookers-on. But the explanation is not sufficient. It is impossible to conceive, how mere cunning could have sustained any man for a quarter of a century in the highest ministerial rank; while that rank was contested from day to day by men of every order of ability. Since the days of Bolingbroke, there have been no examples of ministerial talent, equal to those exhibited, in both Houses, in the day of the Duke of Newcastle. Chatham was as ambitious as any man that ever lived, and full of the faculties that make ambition successful. The Butes, the Bedfords, the Hollands, the Shelburnes, exhibited every shape and shade of cabinet dexterity, of court cabal, of popular influence, and of political knowledge and reckless intrigue. Yet the Duke of Newcastle, with remarkable personal disadvantages—a ridiculous manner, an ungainly address, speech without the slightest pretension to eloquence, and the character of extreme ignorance on general subjects—preserved his power almost to the extreme verge of life; and to the last was regarded as playing a most important part in the counsels of the country. Unless we believe in magic, we must believe that this man, with all his oddity of manner, possessed some remarkable faculty, by which he saw his way clearly through difficulties impervious to more showy minds. He must have deeply discovered the means of attaching the monarch, of acting upon the legislature, and of controlling the captiousness of the people. He must have had practical qualities of a remarkable kind; and his is not the first instance, in which such qualities, in the struggles of government, bear away the prize. Thus, in later times, we have seen Lord Liverpool minister for eleven years, and holding power with a firm, yet quiet grasp to the last; with the whole strength of Lord Grey and the Whigs struggling for it in front, and George Canning, a still more dangerous enemy, watching for it in the rear.

In one of the Notes referring to the appointment of Earl Cornwallis to the vice-treasuryship of Ireland, the

editor makes a remark which ought not to pass without strong reprehension. Earl Cornwallis, towards the close of the Irish rebellion in 1798, had been made chief governor of Ireland, at the head of a large army, for the purpose of extinguishing the remnants of the rebellion, and restoring the country to the habits of peace. The task was no longer difficult, but he performed his part with dignity and moderation. He had been sent expressly for the purpose of pacifying the country, an object which would have been altogether inconsistent with measures of violence; but the editor, in telling us that his conduct exhibited sagacity and benevolence, hazards the extraordinary assertion, that "he was one of the few statesmen who inculcated the necessity of forbearance and concession in the misgoverned country!" Nothing can be more erroneous than this statement in point of principle, or more ignorant in point of fact. For the last hundred years and upwards, dating from the cessation of the war with James II., Ireland had been the object of perpetual concessions, and, if misgoverned at all, it has been such by the excess of those concessions. It is to be remembered, that in the reign of William I. the Roman Catholics were in actual alliance with France, and in actual arms against England. They were next beaten in the field, and it was the business of the conquerors to prevent their taking arms again. From this arose the penal laws. To those laws we are not friendly; because we are not friendly to any attempt at the suppression even of religious error by the force of the state. It was a political blunder, and an offence to Christian principle, at the same time; but the Papist is the last man in the world who has a right to object to penal laws; for he is the very man who would have enacted them himself against the Protestant—who always enacts them where he has the power—and, from the spirit of whose laws, the British legislature were in fact only borrowing at the moment. Yet from the time when James II. and his family began to sink into insignificance, the legislature began to relax the penal laws. Within the course of half a century, they had wholly disappeared; and thus the editor's flippant assertion, that Earl Cornwallis was one of the few statesmen who inculcated the necessity of forbearance and concession, exhibits nothing but his Whiggish ignorance on the subject. The misgovernment of Ireland, if such existed, was to be laid to the charge of neither the English minister nor the English people. The editor probably forgets, that during that whole period she was governed by her own parliament; while her progress during the second half of the 18th century was memorably rapid, and prosperous in the highest degree, through the bounties, privileges, and encouragements of every kind, which were constantly held out to her by the British government. And that so early as the year 1780, she was rich enough to raise, equip, and support a volunteer army of nearly a hundred thousand men—a measure unexampled in Europe, and which would probably task the strength of some of the most powerful kingdoms even at this day. And all this was previous to the existence of what is called the "patriot constitution."

Walpole has the art of painting historic characters to the life; but he sadly extinguishes the romance with which our fancy so often enrobes them. We have been in the habit of hearing Pascal Paoli, the chief of the Corsicans, described as the model of a republican hero; and there can be no question, that the early resistance of the Corsicans cost the French a serious expenditure of men and money. But Walpole charges Paoli with want of military skill, and even with want of that personal intrepidity so essential to a national leader. At length, Corsican resistance being overpowered by the constant accumulation of French force, Paoli gave way, and, as Walpole classically observes, "not having fallen like Leonidas, did not despair like Cato." Paoli had been so panegyrized by Boswell's work, that he was received with almost romantic applause. The Opposition adopted him for the sake of popularity, but ministers took him out of their hands by a pension of £1000 a-year. "I saw him," says Walpole, "soon after his arrival, dangling at court. He was a man of decent deportment, and

so void of any thing remarkable in his aspect, that, being asked if I knew who he was, I judged him a Scotch officer—for he was sandy complexioned and in regimentals—who was cautiously awaiting the moment of promotion." All this is in Walpole's style of fashionable impertinence; but there can be no doubt that Paoli was a brave man, and an able commander. He gave the French several severe defeats, but the contest was soon too unequal, and Paoli withdrew to this country; which was so soon after to be a shelter to the aristocracy of the country which had stained his mountains with blood.