“Whence had that voice such magic to control?
’Twas but the echo of a well-tuned soul;
Through life his morals and his music ran
In symphony, and spoke the virtuous man.
... Go, gentle harmonist! our hopes approve,
To meet and hear thy sacred songs above;
When taught by thee, the stage of life well trod,
We rise to raptures round the throne of God.”
Beard, excellent both in oratorios and serious and comic operas, became part proprietor of Covent Garden Theatre, and died in 1791.
The Duke of Newcastle’s crowded levées were his pleasure and his triumph. He generally made people of business wait two or three hours in the ante-chamber while he trifled with insignificant favourites in his closet. When at last he entered the levée room, he accosted, hugged, embraced, and promised everything to everybody with an assumed cordiality and a degrading familiarity.[716]
“Long” Sir Thomas Robertson was a great intruder on the duke’s time; if told that he was out, he would come in to look at the clock or play with the monkey, in hopes of the great man relenting. The servants, at last tired out with Sir Thomas, concocted a formula of repulses, and the next time he came the porter, without waiting for his question, began—“Sir, his grace is gone out, the fire has gone out, the clock stands, and the monkey is dead.”[717]
Sir Timothy Waldo, on his way from the duke’s dinner-table to his own carriage, once gave the cook, who was waiting in the hall, a crown. The rogue returned it, saying he did not take silver. “Oh, don’t you, indeed?” said Sir Timothy, coolly replacing it in his pocket; “then I don’t give gold.” Jonas Hanway, the great opponent of tea-drinking, published eight letters to the duke on this subject,[718] and the custom began from that time to decline. But Hogarth had already condemned the exaction.
The duke was very profuse in his promises, and a good story is told of the result of his insincerity. At a Cornish election, the duke had obtained the turning vote for his candidate by his usual assurances. The elector, wishing to secure something definite, had asked for a supervisorship of excise for his son-in-law on the present holder’s death. “The moment he dies,” said the premier, “set out post-haste for London; drive directly to my house in the Fields: night or day, sleeping or waking, dead or alive, thunder at the door; the porter will show you upstairs directly; and the place is yours.” A few months after the old supervisor died, and up to London rushed the Cornish elector.
Now that very night the duke had been expecting news of the death of the King of Spain, and had left orders before he went to bed to have the courier sent up directly he arrived. The Cornish man, mistaken for this important messenger, was instantly, to his great delight, shown up to the duke’s bedroom. “Is he dead?—is he dead?” cried the duke. “Yes, my lord, yes,” answered the aspirant, promptly. “When did he die?” “The day before yesterday, at half-past one o’clock, after three weeks in his bed, and taking a power of doctor’s stuff; and I hope your grace will be as good as your word, and let my son-in-law succeed him.” “Succeed him!” shouted the duke; “is the man drunk or mad? Where are your despatches?” he exclaimed, tearing back the bed-curtains; and there, to his vexation, stood the blundering elector, hat in hand, his stupid red face beaming with smiles as he kept bowing like a joss. The duke sank back in a violent fit of laughter, which, like the electric fluid, was in a moment communicated to his attendants.[719] It is not stated whether the Cornish man obtained his petition.
There is an agreement in all the stories of the duke, who was thirty years Secretary of State, and nearly ten years First Lord of the Treasury, “whether told,” says Macaulay, “by people who were perpetually seeing him in Parliament and attending his levées in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, or by Grub Street writers, who had never more than a glimpse of his star through the windows of his gilded coach.”[720] Smollett and Walpole mixed in different society, yet they both sketch the duke with the same colours. Smollett’s Newcastle runs out of his dressing-room with his face covered with soapsuds to embrace the Moorish envoy. Walpole’s Newcastle pushes his way into the Duke of Grafton’s sick-room to kiss the old nobleman’s plaisters. “He was a living, moving, talking caricature. His gait was a shuffling trot, his utterance a rapid stutter. He was always in a hurry—he was never in time; he abounded in fulsome caresses and in hysterical tears. His oratory resembled that of Justice Shallow—it was nonsense effervescent with animal spirits and impertinence. ‘Oh yes, yes, to be sure—Annapolis must be defended; troops must be sent to Annapolis. Pray, where is Annapolis?’—‘Cape Breton an island! Wonderful! Show it me on the map. So it is, sure enough. My dear sir, you always bring us good news. I must go and tell the king that Cape Breton is an island.’ His success is a proof of what may be done by a man who devotes his whole heart and soul to one object. His love of power was so intense a passion, that it almost supplied the place of talent. He was jealous even of his own brother. Under the guise of levity, he was false beyond all example.” “All the able men of his time ridiculed him as a dunce, a driveller, a child, who never knew his own mind for an hour together, and yet he overreached them all round.” If the country had remained at peace, this man might have been at the head of affairs till a new king came with fresh favourites and a strong will; “but the inauspicious commencement of the Seven Years’ War brought on a crisis to which Newcastle was altogether unequal. After a calm of fifteen years, the spirit of the nation was again stirred to its inmost depths.”
This is strongly etched, but Macaulay was too fond of caricature for a real lover of truth. Walpole, recounting this greedy imbecile’s disgrace, reviews his career much more forcibly, for in a few words he shows us how great had been the power which this chatterer’s fixed purpose had attained. The memoir-writer describes the duke as the man “who had begun the world by heading mobs against the ministers of Queen Anne; who had braved the heir-apparent, afterwards George I., and forced himself upon him as godfather to his son; who had recovered that prince’s favour, and preserved power under him, at the expense of every minister whom that prince preferred; who had been a rival of another Prince of Wales for the chancellorship of Cambridge; and who was now buffeted from a fourth court by a very suitable competitor (Lord Bute), and reduced in his tottery old age to have recourse to those mobs and that popularity which had raised him fifty years before.”
Lord Bute was mean enough to compliment the old duke on his retirement. The duke replied, with a spirit that showed the vitality of his ambition: “Yes, yes, my lord, I am an old man, but yesterday was my birthday, and I recollected that Cardinal Fleury began to be prime-minister of France just at my age.”[721]