[78] A living.
[79] Dean Swift to Mrs. Howard, Dublin, 21st November, 1730. Suffolk Correspondence.
[80] Dr. Arbuthnot to Swift, 19th March, 1729.
[81] In his Memoirs Lord Hervey makes no mention of his quarrel with Pope or his duel with Pulteney, and slips over the years 1730–1733 without a line of comment. This seems to show that he was not proud of either of these achievements.
[82] Sir Richard Steele to Mrs. Clayton, May, 1724.
[83] Dr. Alured Clarke to Mrs. Clayton, Winchester, 18th August, 1730.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE EXCISE SCHEME. 1732–3.
In May, 1732, the King made his second visit to Hanover, and was absent from England four months. He invested the Queen with full powers of Queen-Regent as before. George the Second’s visit to Hanover was again exceedingly unpopular with the nation, but he was determined to go, and it was useless to thwart him. This, Caroline’s second regency, was uneventful, though in it she managed to do something to advance the cause of prison reform. Knowing the injustices and anomalies of the criminal law, the Queen’s influence was all on the side of mercy. She showed a particular distaste to signing death warrants in her capacity as Regent, and whenever she could possibly do so she pardoned the criminals. For instance, we read: “On Tuesday the report of the four criminals who received sentence of death at the late Sessions at the Old Bailey was made to her Majesty in Council by Mr. Sergeant Raby, and her Majesty was graciously pleased to show mercy and pardon them”. In the reform of the prison system the Queen took a direct interest. She was always anxious, when it was in her power, to release prisoners, and to make penalties easier for debtors and other offenders,[84] and she was determined that something should be done to remedy the deplorable condition of the public prisons.[85] She had taken up this question the year after the King’s accession to the throne, and during her regency an inquiry was instituted, which laid bare a frightful system of abuses; gaolers and warders connived at the escape of rich prisoners, and subjected poor ones, who could not pay their extortionate demands, to every sort of cruelty, insult and oppression.
The reports of the Select Committees of the House of Commons teem with such cases. One report stated that “The Committee saw in the women’s sick ward many miserable objects lying, without beds, on the floor, perishing with extreme want; and in the men’s sick ward yet much worse.... On the giving of food to these poor wretches (though it was done with the utmost caution, they being only allowed at first the smallest quantities, and that of liquid nourishment) one died; the vessels of his stomach were so disordered and contracted, for want of use, that they were totally incapable of performing their office, and the unhappy creature perished about the time of digestion. Upon his body a coroner’s inquest sat (a thing which, though required by law to be always done, hath for many years been scandalously omitted in this gaol), and the jury found that he died of want. Those who were not so far gone, on proper nourishment being given them, recovered, so that not above nine have died since the 25th March last, the day the Committee first met there, though, before, a day seldom passed without a death; and upon the advancing of the spring not less than eight or ten usually died every twenty-four hours.”[86] The prison referred to was a London prison, but in the provinces matters were no better. There was, for example, a petition to the House of Commons, 1725, from insolvent debtors in Liverpool gaol, stating that they were “reduced to a starving condition, having only straw and water at the courtesy of the sergeant”.[87] The Queen was horrified and indignant at these revelations, and she repeatedly urged on Walpole the reformation of the prison system, and the revision of the criminal code. But Walpole was averse to any legislation unless it was demanded by political exigencies, and the utmost the Queen achieved was a more vigorous inspection of prisons and the punishment of gaolers detected in cruelty.
In September the King returned from Hanover and took over the reins of government, an easy task, for Walpole and the Queen had managed so well that this was a period of peace abroad and prosperity at home.