How far this great political change in the most influential of kingdoms may be but the indication of a new course of Providence—how far it may be connected with those new and singular means and powers of nature and of mechanism which, in our time, have been assigned to man—how far it may be, in politics, a corresponding phase to the railroad, the electric telegraph, and the discoveries of gold in the ends of the earth—can be only a matter of conjecture; but while we are convinced that Providence does nothing without system, and does nothing in vain, we cannot altogether suppress the feeling, that an Era of Revelations in government, science, and society, has begun.
But it must be acknowledged that the monarchs of the last century bore their honours well. They were all bold, brave, and intelligent. Whether in the right or the wrong, they showed decision—the first qualification for the government of kingdoms. Some were of remarkable intellectual power, and none, with slight exceptions, were inferior to the weight of the diadem. The age which reckoned among its sovereigns, Frederic II. of Prussia, Maria Theresa of Germany, the Emperor Joseph, the Czarina Catherine, and, in its earlier portion, Louis XIV. and William III., could not be regarded as destitute of minds equal to the conduct of affairs in perhaps the most complicated, struggling, and difficult period of Europe before the French Revolution.
The reign of George II. formed a strong contrast to those of the Continental sovereigns: their difficulties arose from war—his from peace; their combats in the field were scarcely less anxious than his in the cabinet. The conclusion was different; the successes and failure of the foreign monarch equally wasted the blood and treasure of Europe; the struggles of the British king issued in larger accessions to liberty, and to the power of that body which is politically called the people.
George II. was a stern and stubborn man, possessed of considerable ability, but unpopular in its application; unimpassioned, but ambitious of fame; longing to figure in war, but compelled by the nation to peace; uneasy in England, and never happy but in Hanover, from which he imported his prejudices and his favourites, his politics and his household; fond of power, but capable of complying with the public will; and retaining all the feelings of a German Elector, yet respectful to the laws of a limited monarchy. Whatever were the morals of the court, he never sought to make them the fashion in England; and whatever might be his own sense of decorum, he governed his people with dignity, dying at the age of seventy-seven; and, after a reign of thirty-four years, he was, if not loved, regretted by the empire.
The volumes which have recalled us to this subject consist of the correspondence of George Grenville, Lord Temple, and their chief contemporaries—among the rest, the celebrated Earl of Chatham. It extends from 1742 to the tenth year of George III., and is peculiarly important in its references to the last seventeen years of that period.
It has long been the custom of the leading English families in public life to preserve the documents connected with their career. This habit exists, perhaps, to a greater extent in England than in any other country, from the superior nature of public character, from the frequency of public investigation, from the severity of public judgment, and, as the general result, from the importance of having a ready defence of the statesman's reputation against the casual charge as well as the studied libel.
The history of the present deposit may be briefly told. Earl Temple's papers were always kept at Stowe, the well-known and superb mansion of the Buckingham family. A considerable portion of Mr Grenville's correspondence, preserved at Wotton, was brought to Stowe, and arranged with that of Earl Temple, and the remainder was discovered by the editor, in a large chest at Buckingham House, which had remained unopened since it was brought there. The whole of these papers were rearranged by the late Duke, with the assistance of the editor, (then librarian at Stowe,) but with the ducal wish that they should not be published before the death of his uncle, the Right Hon. Thomas Grenville. The latter, however, surviving the Duke seven years, the publication was retarded till, by the present Duke, it was committed to the hands of the editor, in conformity with the intention of his father.
In England in the last century there were castes as marked as in India: there was a military caste, a class of society in which the generality of the military commissions, and all the leading employments of the court, went; there was also a political caste, a class in which all the great offices of administration went, as regularly as the night succeeded the day, and in which any deviation from the routine, any appointment of any individual not in the muster-roll of the aristocracy, would probably have been considered as a deviation from the law of nature. In this condition of things, men of other classes had no imaginable chance of prominent office on their own account. Their only hope must be in attaching themselves to some of those "Dii majorum gentium"—those sons of fortune, those hereditary possessors of high positions, those natural rulers of the powers and the privileges of political high life. The government, in consequence, was an Oligarchy under the name of a monarchy, and the authority of the Crown was merged in the actual authority of the political connection.
The monarch had, undoubtedly, the right to choose, but it was the right to choose between submitting to the captain of the ship and going over the side. He might appoint his cabinet, but he must appoint it from the men whom the political class offered; he could not stray into the world for a better selection; he could not follow the man of talents, or the man of integrity, into the less nobly born and less dexterously combined orders of society: there stood the aristocratic recruits for his government, and unless he took them as they were, he was a general without an army. The advantages and disadvantages of this system were equally conspicuous. On the one view, ministers were not the creatures of place; they had personal characters to lose, their principles were publicly known, they were not dependent on the emoluments of office, nor thus had grown up through a succession of minor employments into places of distinction, the most ill-omened education for public men; they were not adventurers, they brought with them an accession of family influence, which raised them beyond the great temptation of new men—that of courting the populace; and as the natural result of their birth, connections, and intercourse with men of a high class of society, they acted under a higher sense of dignity, and their public acts were more generally marked with a fearless, open, and generous stamp.
On the other hand, the evils were of some moment in the monopoly of power in turning the State into a corporation, in the restriction on the rising ability of the humbler conditions of life, to the loss of doubtless much vigorous and original aid to the public councils, in the jealousy which that restriction naturally created in men who felt their talents, and in the consequent difficulties produced by the direction of those talents to party, as the only means of claiming justice for themselves. This was continually felt in the political tumults of England for the last fifty years of the century, and it was eminently experienced in Ireland, where every rising barrister instantly took the side of Opposition, and where even his attainment of office was felt as a stimulant and a bribe for new assaults on the Government: like buying off an invasion, the purchase was only a proclamation for a new march against the cabinet.