The whole work is a picture gallery. Doddington, whose "Diary" has placed him among those authors whose happiest fate would have been to have been prohibited the use of pen, ink, and paper, is sketched to the life in a few keen and graphic lines.
"This man, with great knowledge of business and much wit, had, by mere absurdity of judgment and a disposition to finesse, thrown himself out of all estimation, and out of all the views which his large fortune and abilities could not have failed to promote, if he had preserved but the least shadow of steadiness. He had two or three times gone all lengths of flattery, alternately with Sir Robert Walpole and the prince. The latter keenly said, 'that they had met again, at last, in a necessary connexion, for no party would have any thing to do with either.'"
Why has not some biographer, curious in the dissection of human vanity, written the real life of Doddington? There could be no richer subject for a pen contemptuous of the follies of high life and capable of dissecting that compound of worldly passion and infirm principle which, in nine instances out of ten, figures in the front ranks of mankind.
Doddington had begun public life with higher advantages than most men of his time. He had figure, fortune, and fashion; he was employed early in Spain, with Sir Paul Methuen, our ambassador; where he signed the treaty of Madrid. He then clung to Walpole, whom he panegyrised in verse and adulated in prose. But Walpole thwarted his longing for a peerage, and the refusal produced his revolt. He then went over to the Opposition, and flattered the prince. But the prince had a favourite already; and Doddington failed again. He then returned to Walpole, who made him a lord of the treasury. But Walpole himself was soon to feel the chances of power; and Doddington, who was never inclined to prop a sinking cause, crossed the House again. There he was left for a while, to suffer the penalties of a placeman's purgatory, but without being purified; and, after some continuance in opposition, a state for which he was as unfitted as a shark upon the sea-shore, he crossed over again to the court, and was made treasurer of the navy. But he was now rapidly falling into ridicule; and, determining to obtain power at all risks, he bowed down before the prince. At this mimic court he obtained a mimic office, was endured without respect, and consulted without confidence. Even there he had not secured a final refuge.
The prince suddenly died; and Doddington's hopes, though not his follies, were extinguished in his grave. Such was the fate of a man of ability, of indefatigable labour, of affluent means, and confessedly accomplished in all the habits and knowledge of public life. He wanted, as Walpole observes, "nothing for power but constancy." Under a foreign government he might have been minister for life. But in the free spirit and restless parties of an English legislature, though such a man might float, he must be at the mercy of every wave.
We then have the most extraordinary man in England in his day, under review, the well-known Duke of Newcastle, minister, or possessing ministerial influence, for nearly a quarter of a century! Of all the public characters of his time, or perhaps of any other, the Duke of Newcastle was the most ridiculed. Every act of his life, every speech which he uttered, nay, almost every look and gesture, became instantly food for burlesque. All the scribblers of the empire, with some of the higher class, as Smollett, were pecking at him day by day; yet, in a Parliament where Chatham, with his powerful eloquence, Bedford with his subtle argument, Townshend with his wit, and the elder Fox with his indefatigable intrigue, were all contending for the mastery; this man, who seemed sometimes half-frenzied, and at other times half-idiotic, retained power, as if it belonged to him by right, and resigned it, as if he had given it away.
Walpole thus describes his appearance. "A constant hurry in his walk, a restlessness of place, a borrowed importance, gave him the perpetual air of a solicitor. His habit of never finishing, which proceeded from his beginning every thing twenty times over, gave rise to the famous bon-mot of Lord Wilmington: 'The Duke of Newcastle always loses half an hour in the morning, which he is running after for the rest of the day.' But he began the world with advantages:—an estate of £30,000 a-year, great borough and county interest, the heirship of his uncle, the old Duke of Newcastle, and a new creation of the title in his person." Walpole curiously describes the temperament of this singular man. "The Duke of Newcastle had no pride, though infinite self-love. He always caressed his enemies, to enlist them against his friends. There was no service that he would not do for either, till either was above being served by him.
"There was no expense to which he was not addicted, but generosity. His houses, gardens, table, and equipage, swallowed immense treasures. The sums which he owed were exceeded only by those which he wasted. He loved business immoderately, yet was always only doing it, never did it. His speeches in council and parliament were copious of words, but unmeaning. He aimed at every thing, yet endeavoured nothing. A ridiculous fear was predominant in him; he would venture the overthrow of the government, rather than dare to open a letter that might discover a plot. He was a secretary of state without intelligence, a man of infinite intrigue without secrecy or policy, and a minister despised and hated by his master, by all parties and ministers, without being turned out by any." This faculty of retaining office is evidently the chief problem in Walpole's eyes, and was as evidently the chief source of wrath, in the eyes of his crowd of clever opponents.
But the duke must have had some qualities, for which his caricaturists will not give him credit. He must have been shrewd, with all his oddity, and well acquainted with the science of the world, with all his trifling. He must have known the art of pulling the strings of parliament, before he could have managed the puppet show of power with such unfailing success. He must also have been dexterous in dealing with wayward tempers, while he had to manage the suspicious spirit, stubborn prejudices, and arrogant obstinacy of George II. It may be admitted that he had great assistance in the skill and subtlety of his brother Pelham; but there were so many occasions on which he must have trusted to himself alone, that it may well be doubted, whether to be, constantly successful, he must not have been singularly skilful, and that the personal dexterity of the minister was the true secret of his prolonged power.
We now come to Walpole's summary of the career of the two most celebrated men of his early life—his father and Bolingbroke.