,UC-NRLF 
 
 $B 5fc,T Tqa 
 
r 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/footprintsofstatOOesherich 
 
Footprints of Statesmen 
 
Footprints of Statesmen 
 
 DURING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 IN ENGLAND 
 
 BY 
 
 REGINALD BALIOL BRETT , /^ ^c o x^ wt £ s k « v-. 
 
 (j)d^yiML Kot avefibev (ppdyrifia 
 Kal dcTTVvdfiovs opycLS eStSd^aro. 
 
 Soph. Antig. 
 
 " He taught himself utterance and airy thought, 
 And heartstrains that sway the town." 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 1892 
 
 All rights reserved 
 

E.S. 
 
 COLLEGII REGALIS B. MARIAE DE ETONA 
 
 ALUMNO 
 
 AET. XV. 
 
 HOC OPUSCULUM 
 
 D. D. 
 
 R. B. B. 
 
 252337 
 
ADVERTISEMENT 
 
 The following pages do not profess to 
 contain anything new, nor do they make 
 an attempt to rise to the dignity of 
 history. 
 
 They were written for the entertain- 
 ment of a friend, in the hope that they 
 might stimulate, not satisfy, curiosity. 
 
 They record some few impressions, 
 which a long and fond contemplation of 
 the eighteenth century, in relation to 
 the days in which we live, has left on 
 the mind of the writer. 
 
 25M August 1892. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 1. The Foundations of Modern 
 Government in England . 
 
 II. The End of Personal Rule . 
 
 III. The Authors of Party Govern- 
 
 ment .... 
 
 IV. The Powder of the Press 
 
 V. The Invention of Cabinet Respon 
 SIBILITY .... 
 
 I 
 
 44 
 63 
 
 86 
 
 VI. The Establishment of Government 
 BY Majority of the House of 
 Commons . . . . .111 
 
 VII. The Appeal to Popular Opinion . 137 
 
 VIII. The Birth of the Liberal Party . 162 
 
 Appendix . . . . . • 195 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN GOVERN- 
 MENT IN ENGLAND 
 
 The uses of history may not be immedi- 
 ately apparent to the mind of a youth 
 accustomed to hear judgments delivered 
 by older men upon the muhitudinous 
 topics of the day, altogether without re- 
 ference to the past experiences of man- 
 kind. Towards the end of the nine- 
 teenth century, we live quickly and 
 luxuriously. The saving of labour has 
 been exalted into a science. For the 
 convenience of the majority, thinking is 
 done by deputy. Still in a rough way, 
 jostling through life as he does, the 
 ordinary man, taking his ideas and 
 opinions from his morning newspaper, 
 has some vague standard in his mind 
 
2 FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN i 
 
 by which he reckons the importance of 
 current events and the value of current 
 opinions. This standard is to a great 
 extent fixed by his knowledge of what 
 has happened to his countrymen in 
 former times, and its accuracy is largely 
 dependent upon the grasp he has ob- 
 tained of the experiences of others in 
 critical moments of English history. 
 It is not to be supposed that history 
 in relation to politics has attained to the 
 dignity of a science. Politics, depend- 
 ent as they are upon passion and 
 caprice, are subject to the most un- 
 scientific variation. The art of politics, 
 largely dependent on history, is in 
 practice liable to unforeseen cataclysm, 
 the result of infinite and sometimes 
 subtle causes. But, nevertheless, no 
 elementary comprehension of the art of 
 ruling is possible without a knowledge 
 of previous events, and without some 
 care to unravel their causes and con- 
 sequences. 
 
 The statesman whose business it is to 
 rule ; the citizen whose function it is to 
 control and criticise the acts of his rulers ; 
 both are forced to turn for assistance 
 
I GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND 3 
 
 to the student who collects and tabu- 
 lates the actions of men and the se- 
 quence of events. No less are they 
 indebted to the dreamer, the artist in 
 words, who draws inferences from facts, 
 and who fills in the canvas with light 
 and shadow, and places the personages 
 and their deeds in proper perspective. 
 
 It would be an error to imagine, as 
 the young often do, that the visions 
 of the political dreamer are vain and 
 fatuous. They give to the practical 
 politician that guidance which the 
 pillar of fire gave to the Israelites in 
 their wanderings by night. 
 
 The functions, however, of the dreamer 
 of political dreams, and those of the 
 statesman should be kept distinct. The 
 statesman has to do with matters within 
 what is called the range of practical 
 politics. Sometimes it is said that no 
 politician is an accurate judge of range ; 
 because a few hours may bring into the 
 fierce melee of practical politics matters 
 which have lain concealed from practical 
 eyes. If the frequent failures to foresee 
 new combinations of circumstances em- 
 phasise the objection to an active poli- 
 
4 FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN i 
 
 tician's searching through dreamland for 
 possibilities which may never occur, at 
 the same time, political instinct of the 
 useful kind is incomplete unless supple- 
 mented by the imaginative faculty. This 
 faculty of imagination, so essential in the 
 practice of the arts, is based very largely 
 upon acquaintance with what has already 
 been done in the domain in which its 
 exercise is required. Without a con- 
 ception of the wealth, the learning, the 
 arts and culture of the Roman Empire, 
 sunk in the slough of the Middle Ages, 
 and without having realised that North 
 Africa was once covered with great cities 
 in a high degree of civilisation, it is 
 difficult to imagine Western Europe, 
 including England, again submerged in 
 semi - barbarous darkness. Who can 
 assert that what the barbaric forces of 
 nature have once effected, they may not 
 again effect } 
 
 To assume the impossibility of this, 
 is to live in a fool's paradise. Where 
 Goths and Saracens have trodden, their 
 antitypes from the purlieus of great cities 
 may yet find foothold. It is doubtless 
 difficult for an Englishman standing on 
 
I GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND 5 
 
 the steps of the Exchange to conceive 
 the total destruction of England as a 
 State, and the annihilation of the great 
 Empire governed by his countrymen ; 
 but when his thoughts turn to Babylon 
 with its 48 miles of circumference, and 
 to Carthage with its 700,000 inhabitants, 
 the idea assumes a more tangible shape, 
 and the decay of the world's mart in 
 which he stands appears far less unreal 
 to him than to a Roman of the Antonine 
 era would have seemed a forecast of the 
 Rome of Gregory the Sixth. A careful 
 examination of the careers of great men 
 suffices to convince us that when a hero 
 or a statesman dies, it nearly always hap- 
 pens that his arc of usefulness is com- 
 plete. The feelings naturally resent this 
 doctrine, for a keen sense of personal loss 
 blinds us to true results ; but on maturer 
 reflection, it is consoling to arrive at 
 the conviction that death is rarely the 
 precursor of an unfulfilled mission. 
 What is true of the individual man, 
 may be true of nations ; although, just as 
 a man is a poor critic of his own life's 
 work, and consequently is wise always 
 to assume himself in mid career, the 
 
6 FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN i 
 
 true patriot should regard his country's 
 mission but half fulfilled, and not ven- 
 ture to relax his efforts in her service. 
 A brave and healthy man clings to hope 
 for himself, as well as for the race to 
 which he belongs. In 1839 ^^e Duke 
 of Wellington, walking in the garden at 
 Walmer, lamented the " decline of the 
 British Empire." In point of fact the 
 British Empire, as we know it half a 
 century later, was then still in swaddling 
 clothes. The territories of the East India 
 Company, ruled at that time by Lord 
 EUenborough, are hardly recognisable in 
 the Indian Empire of the Empress-Queen 
 Victoria. Scind and the Punjab, Tan- 
 jore, Oudh, the two Burmahs, have all 
 passed into British possession since that 
 time. In that very year Aden became 
 an English outpost. Two years later 
 Hong-Kong passed away from Chinese 
 dominion ; and within fifty years, ship- 
 ping to a greater amount of tonnage 
 entered the British port of Hong-Kong 
 than entered London in 1 840. Victoria 
 and Queensland, indeed Australia itself, 
 came into existence after the first half 
 of this century had passed away. '' The 
 
I GOFERNMENT IN ENGLAND 7 
 
 Dominion of Canada" Is the work of 
 Ministers of Queen Victoria. In south- 
 ern and eastern Africa, upon foundations 
 laid by English hands, the structure of a 
 new dominion is rapidly rising; while 
 over Egypt, a land coveted by her most 
 ancient rival, England has quite within 
 recent years established her sway. The 
 Duke of Wellington's mistake was, how- 
 ever, excusable in him. Marlborough 
 might have used similar language in the 
 garden of Blenheim, after the fall of 
 Godolphin and during the negotiations 
 at Utrecht. Elderly men, even the 
 ablest, are apt to misinterpret the bear- 
 ing of every departure from the customs 
 and conditions of their youth. An era 
 of government by parliamentary majority, 
 ushered in by the Peace of Utrecht, must 
 to Marlborough have seemed incompat- 
 ible with the maintenance of British 
 authority in European councils. He 
 could no more foresee the victorious 
 campaign in the Peninsula under Wel- 
 lington, and the final overthrow of 
 French ambition at Waterloo, than the 
 Duke of Wellington could realise that 
 fifty years after the Reform Bill of 1832 
 
8 FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN i 
 
 the population of these islands would 
 have doubled, and that the expansion of 
 the English Empire would include conti- 
 nents hardly known to him by name. 
 
 If it is true that the progress of a 
 nation depends largely upon the innate 
 qualities of its people, the conditions of 
 the external world must also be taken 
 into account. The energies of a race 
 receive from these conditions their bent. 
 Mr. Pitt called England the temperate 
 zone of Europe. This description has 
 been truer at some periods than others. 
 To use a different image, England since 
 the reign of Elizabeth has been one 
 of the main arteries of European life. 
 Every beat of the heart of Europe has 
 been felt in these islands, and the blood 
 has coursed through them into the veins 
 of English people scattered over the face 
 of the world. 
 
 From time to time the nation's mood 
 has changed. Supineness, vehemence, 
 enterprise, and indifference succeeded 
 one another by turns. King William 
 found England inclined once more to 
 "shrink into her narrow self" under 
 the indolent and corrupt dynasty of the 
 
I GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND 9 
 
 Stuarts. He endeavoured to make her 
 the " arbitress of Europe " and the 
 "tutelary angel of the human race." 
 Marlborough succeeded in giving effect 
 to William's aspirations. The cam- 
 paigns which opened with the victory 
 of Blenheim, and closed with the carnage 
 at Malplaquet, placed England at the 
 head of that Great Alliance which had 
 for its object the overthrow of the plans 
 of Louis the Fourteenth. 
 
 For more than a hundred years the 
 principles of King William's policy 
 were destined to guide English states- 
 men. Resistance to the ambition of 
 France became the watchword of English 
 patriotism. 
 
 The great Chatham maintained the 
 tradition, and his son lived long enough 
 to boast that " England having saved 
 herself by her exertions" would con- 
 tinue, as in truth she did, to "save 
 Europe by her example." 
 
 These were the days of storm. They 
 tested the fibre of the English people. 
 
 Throughout the sixteenth century, 
 when the struggle for intellectual free- 
 dom raged fitfully in Western Europe, 
 
10 FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN i 
 
 the part played by England was not 
 inconsiderable. The Tudor family, with 
 the exception of Mary, favoured religious 
 liberty, and showed marked hostility to 
 the Church of Rome. Thanks to the 
 vigour of her rulers, England was not 
 subjected to the horrors of civil war. 
 She made headway against external foes ; 
 and in 1588, under Elizabeth, her efforts 
 culminated in the defeat of the Spanish 
 Armada. This secured peace for a 
 while. But after the death of Elizabeth, 
 and after the irresolute and treacherous 
 Stuarts had succeeded the Tudors on 
 the throne, internal dissensions broke 
 out afresh, inducing men to take sides, 
 until the country was divided into two 
 hostile camps. The quarrel, whatever it 
 is represented to be, was in reality a 
 continuance of the religious strife between 
 those who were for authority in religion 
 and those who were for religious in- 
 dependence. Monarchy gravitated to- 
 wards the Church. Parliaments were 
 Protestant. Henceforward the contest 
 became more clearly defined. Monarchy 
 and Catholicism against parliaments and 
 the Protestant faith. The dictatorship 
 
I GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND ii 
 
 of Cromwell was an interlude. The 
 strife was renewed from time to time, 
 and the tide of success ebbed and flowed. 
 Exactly one hundred years after the 
 attempt of Philip of Spain to force the 
 Roman dogma upon England had failed, 
 William of Orange succeeded by the aid 
 of a Protestant revolution in establishing 
 the Protestant Church upon a firm basis. 
 In 1688 the centenary of the defeat of 
 the Armada was observed by English- 
 men in suitable fashion. They drove 
 James the Second, the last Catholic 
 sovereign who reigned in England, 
 across the seas. By taking refuge in 
 France, James indicated unwittingly the 
 transference of the struggle from England 
 to the continent of Europe, from civil 
 war between Englishmen to a European 
 war in which England was to take the 
 lead on one side and France on the 
 other. There were intervals of truce. 
 But the struggle was destined to be 
 maintained for another century. And 
 with curious coincidence 1788 proved 
 to be the last year which beheld on the 
 throne of France a successor to Louis 
 the Fourteenth unshorn of the authority 
 
12 FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN i 
 
 of the Grand Monarch. In the following 
 year, the labour of the great eighteenth 
 century ended, and there came about 
 that birth of mighty events, known as the 
 French Revolution, which was destined 
 to change the face of the world. 
 
 The part taken by England in the 
 vast intellectual and political movements 
 of the nineteenth century is so important 
 that their origin is worth noting. In 
 the last four years of Queen Anne's 
 reign may be found the germs of the 
 government of the British Empire in 
 the later years of Queen Victoria. The 
 fall of Marlborough represented the 
 overthrow of personal government. 
 
 In subsequent times, the parliamentary 
 majority, the majority of members of the 
 House of Commons, was to govern the 
 country. The favour of a sovereign was 
 no longer to be the primary object of an 
 ambitious politician's attention. Regard 
 must in future be had to party organisa- 
 tion, and even to popular opinion. The 
 ephemeral administration of Harley and 
 Bolingbroke was the first attempt at 
 government based on parliamentary 
 management. Without the support of 
 
I GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND 13 
 
 the Queen, at this early stage, these 
 Ministers could not have retained office. 
 A few years only passed away, and 
 Walpole proved that a Minister could, 
 by means of parliamentary influence, 
 constrain an unfriendly sovereign to 
 accept him and his adherents as the 
 King's servants ; while in his fall he 
 bore witness to the new force which had 
 arisen in England from the ashes of the 
 regal authority of the Stuarts. For in 
 the plenitude of his power, Walpole 
 fell before the unrepresented forces of 
 the people and their parliamentary 
 champion, the elder Pitt. 
 
 The machinery of party government 
 had been already set moving under the 
 guidance of Bolingbroke. The arts of 
 the rhetorician were already appreciated. 
 The wire-puller was already at work. 
 Slowly the power of the press was grow- 
 ing in the hands of Swift and Bolingbroke 
 on the one side, and Addison and Steele 
 on the other. 
 
 A politician who desired to overthrow 
 his rival, or a Minister who wished to 
 trip up his colleague, had no longer 
 mainly an eye to the whims of a sove- 
 
14 FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN i 
 
 reign, or a sovereign's favourite. Other 
 forces had to be considered, and other 
 powers had to be courted. Intrigue, 
 corruption, flattery were still the instru- 
 ments chiefly in use ; but they were no 
 longer directed to the throne. A new 
 system of toadyism, a new method of 
 flattery, a new type of courtier, came 
 into existence suitable to the new Power 
 which had arisen. For the rule of the 
 King, that of a new sovereign had been 
 substituted. Doubtless the weakness 
 and vices of humanity are constant and 
 predominant factors. To them it has 
 ever been found simplest and easiest to 
 appeal by those men who are ambitious of 
 ruling. It began, however, to be noticed 
 that these instruments were no longer 
 supreme. Wisdom and virtue in public 
 men were to command somewhat greater 
 attention than heretofore. During the 
 next half century a system of govern- 
 ment was established in England which 
 became the model of two hemispheres, 
 and of one-half of civilised mankind. 
 
 This has mainly been the work of 
 that political combination which goes by 
 the name of the Liberal Party, and which 
 
I GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND 15 
 
 rose out of the ruins of the great Whig 
 Party destroyed by the faults of Charles 
 Fox and by the genius of Mr. Pitt. 
 
 If a young man of average abilities 
 desires to know something of the growth 
 of the institutions under which he lives 
 to-day, and of the Empire in which his 
 lot is cast, at what point should he take 
 up the story } 
 
 Modern England begins with the 
 reign of Queen Anne. If the soul of 
 Bolingbroke were to revisit his old home 
 at Ealing, and were to take up a copy of 
 the Times newspaper, or a volume of 
 Lothair^ it might without superhuman 
 effort bridge the valley which lies be- 
 tween the St. John of that time and the 
 Disraeli of this. To Marlborough the 
 campaigns of Moltke, though surprising, 
 would not appear unreal. While the 
 ranging imagination of Swift would feel 
 no overwhelming astonishment at the 
 inventions of Edison, or the satire of a 
 weekly Society Journal. 
 
 It is not essential, although it may be 
 desirable, that an ordinary English lad 
 should know that England existed before 
 Queen Anne ascended the throne. 
 
i6 FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN i 
 
 Bacon, as a politician, stands as far 
 removed from his countrymen at the 
 end of the nineteenth century as Thomas 
 a Beckett ; and the methods and aims of 
 Cromwell or William the Third are as 
 foreign to ours as those of Julius Caesar 
 or Alfred the Great. 
 
 It curiously happens that those cus- 
 toms and habits which are of chief 
 interest to men at the present time 
 originate in the reign of the last 
 Queen who reigned in England before 
 Victoria. Although Sunderland may 
 have whispered the secret in the ear 
 of William, yet Bolingbroke, Harley, 
 and Walpole were the statesmen 
 who, in point of fact, founded Govern- 
 ment by Party, and invented the 
 curious executive authority which we 
 call the Cabinet. 
 
 To Swift and Addison the great 
 ephemeral writers of to-day may look 
 as the prototypes of their kind. While 
 round Marlborough appeared to centre 
 the struggle of eighteenth century Europe 
 against the domination of France under 
 Louis the Fourteenth, much as in the 
 nineteenth century that self-same struggle 
 
I GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND ij 
 
 against Napoleon centred round Wel- 
 lington. 
 
 Analogies such as these are unscientific 
 perhaps, but they are suggestive, and more 
 important to the practical utilities of life 
 than much of what is called science. For 
 the purposes of statesmanship, the useful 
 historian is not the man of encyclopaedic 
 mind, who can array vast masses of facts 
 in proper order and sequence, but he 
 who is able to open a lattice in the closed 
 door of the past and let a ray of light 
 strike upon and illumine some problem 
 or some character of to-day. 
 
 From the fall of the Coalition Govern- 
 ment of Lord North and Mr. Fox, and the 
 formation of Mr. Pitt's Administration, 
 dates the rise of the Liberal party. 
 
 The writings of Burke^ the doctrines 
 of Adam Smith, the speeches of Mr. 
 Pitt in favour of Electoral Reform, cover 
 the whole ground of modern politics. 
 Religious freedom, political freedom, 
 liberty of the press, widening of the 
 political franchise, infusion of new blood 
 into the House of Lords, Free Trade, 
 the improvement of Irish government, 
 and resistance to foreign oppression, are 
 c 
 
i8 GOVERNMENT IN ENGLJND i 
 
 the planks of which Liberal platforms 
 have been for a century constructed, 
 since Mr. Canning handed on the tradi- 
 tion of his friend and leader. 
 
 In 1815, when the great war ended, 
 Englishmen had at last leisure in which 
 to face those problems of internal govern- 
 ment all consideration of which had been, 
 of necessity, suspended during the aggres- 
 sive career of Napoleon. 
 
 From that moment the lists were 
 arrayed in which the honest and hearty 
 struggle for political honours has since 
 been carried on. 
 
 As a preparation for the right under- 
 standing of the conditions of that conflict, 
 an English youth should pause for a 
 moment at the threshold, and by en- 
 deavouring to picture the England of 
 Anne and of the Georges, prepare his 
 mind for the vast conception of the 
 Empire of Victoria. 
 
II END OF PERSONAL RULE 19 
 
 II 
 
 THE END OF PERSONAL RULE 
 
 In order to appreciate the significance 
 of the reign of Queen Anne, it is 
 necessary to understand the influence 
 of three men — Marlborough, Boling- 
 broke, and Swift. 
 
 When Queen Anne ascended the 
 throne, the most notable Englishman 
 was undoubtedly Marlborough. 
 
 King William, as he lay dying, had 
 solemnly charged the Queen to take 
 chief counsel with the man to whom 
 he looked to carry on the struggle 
 against the domination of France. As 
 his health failed, William had begun to 
 lean on Marlborough. His unerring 
 judgment had disclosed to him the 
 power of the man. To this fascinating 
 military genius, whose moral delinquen- 
 cies he well knew, he desired to bequeath 
 
20 THE END OF ii 
 
 his mantle. Queen Anne was nothing 
 loth. Marlborough and his wife were 
 her personal friends. She eagerly ac- 
 cepted him as her Grand Vizier. To 
 her he was soon to stand in the relation 
 of a Bismarck and a Moltke. He was 
 her Imperial Chancellor and her Lord 
 General. And for ten years out of a 
 reign extending over twelve years only, 
 this man remained the most conspicuous 
 and most powerful Englishman both 
 within the Queen's dominions and on 
 the continent of Europe. 
 
 In 1702, when King William died, 
 Marlborough was no longer young. He 
 was born on the 24th May 1650, and 
 thus he was advanced in middle life 
 before his great opportunity arrived. 
 As a youth he won men's hearts, and 
 women's too, by his personal beauty, — 
 beauty possibly inherited from Elizabeth 
 Villiers, sister to the graceful Bucking- 
 ham. This, it may have been, which 
 first drew to him, in spite of his doubt- 
 fill reputation for loyalty and straight- 
 forward dealing, the attention of King 
 William, who was ever susceptible to 
 graces of the person. 
 
11 PERSONAL RULE 21 
 
 The Churchills traded upon their 
 personal attractions, and the relation 
 in which his sister, Arabella, stood to 
 the Duke of York, curiously resembled 
 that which Marlborough himself occupied 
 in the affections of Lady Castlemaine, the 
 mistress of Charles the Second. Through 
 the influence of his sister's friend, the 
 Duke of York, he obtained a " pair of 
 colours," and he was indebted to his 
 own friend. Lady Castlemaine, for the 
 means which enabled him to maintain 
 his military rank. 
 
 "Struck by his beautiful figure and 
 captivating manners," Lord Chesterfield 
 tells us, "she gave him five thousand 
 pounds, with which he bought an 
 annuity for his life of five hundred a 
 year, of my grandfather Halifax, which 
 was the foundation of his subsequent 
 fortune." 
 
 It was a curious stepping on to the 
 threshold of life, recalling rather the 
 later days of Imperial Rome than our 
 own country within ten years of the 
 austerities of the great Protectorate. 
 Whatever view may be taken of its 
 moral aspect, it is a fact that to his 
 
22 THE END OF ii 
 
 sister's personal charms and to his own, 
 Marlborough's early advancement was 
 due. What wonder that the morals 
 of the lad were loose, and that man- 
 hood should have brought with it no 
 abnormal gifts of high principle. Be- 
 sides personal beauty, young Churchill 
 possessed another attribute which has 
 often proved irresistible. He had a 
 perfect manner. His smile disarmed 
 anger. He never argued or contra- 
 dicted. " He caressed all men," said 
 Burnet, '^ with a soft and obliging 
 deportment." In moments of extreme 
 diplomatic difficulty his courtesy and 
 high breeding took the place of finesse. 
 He mollified one potentate by handing 
 him a napkin. He won the heart of 
 another, Charles the Twelfth, by the 
 tact he showed when by an awkward 
 accident he was brought face to face in 
 the King's closet with Stanislaus Lec- 
 zinsky, whom Charles had placed on 
 the throne of Poland, but who was 
 not acknowledged as sovereign by Eng- 
 land. '' The Duke," it is recorded, 
 " paid his respects to Stanislaus without 
 compromising the dignity of his own 
 
II PERSONAL RULE z3 
 
 Sovereign ; and the countenance and 
 manners of Charles showed the gratifi- 
 cation which he derived from this proof 
 of attention." 
 
 To Charles the Twelfth, to Frederick 
 the Great, to Augustus the Strong, to 
 Stanislaus, he was personally known. 
 By all of them he was personally liked. 
 He himself exhibited no preferences. 
 Fearing conflicting personal ambitions, 
 he maintained a severe and courteous 
 complacency. Yet, if he showed no 
 preference, he was not above feeling 
 that human weakness ; for we have, 
 in his own words, the remark when 
 writing of these four sovereigns, that 
 if he had to " make a choice it would 
 be the youngest, the King of Sweden." 
 
 His command over his temper was 
 absolute. Nothing could ruffle him. 
 A story is told of him that when at 
 the Hague he was riding with Com- 
 missary Maniot, and it having begun 
 to rain, and Maniot's cloak having been 
 at once put on by his servant, the Duke 
 called for his. With a clumsiness not 
 perhaps unusual, but none the less try- 
 ing, the attendant puzzled about the 
 
24 THE END OF ii 
 
 straps and buckles until the Duke called 
 again and again, but without result other 
 than a grumbling observation from the 
 servant that '' You must stay if it rains 
 cats and dogs till I can get at it " ; 
 the Duke only turned to Maniot, and 
 said, smiling, '' I would not be of that 
 man's temper for all the world." 
 
 If this was no very high trial, it must 
 be remembered that occasions for loss of 
 temper were not wanting to the husband 
 of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. De- 
 voted as he was to her, he was not spared 
 the trial of her vehement disposition and 
 moods of irrational violence. Among 
 her many charms, her long and beautiful 
 hair had always captivated him. After 
 some difference of opinion, on one occa- 
 sion wishing to annoy him, unable to 
 ruffle his equable demeanour, she con- 
 ceived the idea of cutting off her superb 
 locks, and placing them on a table in 
 his ante-chamber. Even this would not 
 induce him to abandon his annoying 
 pose of perfect equanimity. To her 
 infinite chagrin he passed and repassed 
 them, apparently without notice. " He 
 seemed," we are told, " neither angry 
 
II PERSONAL RULE 25 
 
 nor sorrowful," but unconscious both 
 of his crime and his punishment. 
 *' Concluding he must have overlooked 
 the hair, she ran to secure it. Lo ! it 
 had vanished." The Duke never alluded 
 to it, and nothing ever transpired upon 
 the subject till after his death, when she 
 found her beautiful ringlets laid by in a 
 cabinet, where he kept whatever he held 
 most precious. 
 
 His self-command was enough to try 
 the patience of a saint ; and Sarah, 
 Duchess of Marlborough, was never in 
 danger of canonisation. In point of 
 fact, if his temper was suave, if he was 
 languid, if he was what in recent years 
 has been called " ladylike " in his manner 
 to men, if in speech with him it was 
 noticed that he was gentle and always 
 ready to do good offices ; yet under- 
 neath this soft exterior was concealed 
 a spirit of cast -steel. To his officers 
 and soldiers this fact was well known. 
 Although at fifty-two he was still the 
 languid and courtly gentleman of the 
 court of James, yet at Blenheim, in the 
 press of battle, his demeanour was fault- 
 less, his temper serene, and his courage 
 
26 THE END OF ii 
 
 the admiration of the army. The pre- 
 vious night he passed in prayer, after 
 the manner of Cromwell or Ireton, and 
 towards morning he took the Sacrament. 
 Then he saw Prince Eugene, arranged 
 the final details of the battle, and made 
 plans for the succour of his wounded. 
 He exposed his life so recklessly that 
 when the story of Blenheim was known 
 in England he received remonstrances 
 from the Queen and from his friends 
 for having " exposed his precious life,'* 
 and for having '' condescended to take 
 his share as a common soldier." To 
 these he made no answer. But to his 
 wife he wrote : — 
 
 "My dearest Soul — I love you so 
 well, and have set my heart so entirely 
 on ending my days with you in quiet, 
 that you may be so far at ease as to be 
 assured that I never venture myself but 
 when I think the service of my Queen 
 and country requires it. Besides I am 
 now at an age when I find no heat in 
 my blood that gives me temptation to 
 expose myself out of vanity ; but as I 
 would deserve and keep the kindness of 
 
II PERSONAL RULE 27 
 
 the army, I must let them see that when 
 I expose them, I would not exempt 
 myself." 
 
 He was not cured, and his cool courage 
 was again at Ramillies the fear and ad- 
 miration of his troops. Like every great 
 commander, Marlborough was minutely 
 careful of the health and comfort of his 
 men. Although after Malplaquet one 
 of the accusations pressed by his political 
 foes was his reckless disregard of the 
 lives of his men, in reality he never 
 wasted his forces. He could sacrifice 
 an army for the sake of victory, as the 
 Germans did at Gravelotte; but his 
 forethought on the eve of battle and his 
 humanity afterwards were never called 
 in question. 
 
 In council, in negotiation, although 
 the difficulties which beset him were 
 stupendous, his success was remarkable. 
 He conquered often by the simple artifice 
 of appearing to surrender. Against a 
 plenipotentiary so pleasantly indifferent, 
 it seemed hardly worth while to stand 
 stiffly. Voltaire wrote of him that he 
 was equally qualified for the field and 
 
28 THE END OF n 
 
 the cabinet ; and did as much mischief 
 to France by the wisdom of his head as 
 by the force of his arm. The disputes 
 between his wife and the Queen of which 
 he bore the brunt, and to which ultimately 
 he was sacrificed, inured him to quarrels 
 and to bitter differences of opinion. 
 
 To the Duchess he wrote after a quarrel 
 with the Queen of unusual violence : 
 '' It has always been my observation in 
 disputes, especially in that of kindness 
 and friendship, that all reproaches, though 
 ever so reasonable, do serve to no other 
 end but making the breach wider." 
 The prudent self-control that marked his 
 conduct in small things never deserted 
 him in great affairs. His calm wisdom 
 guided him through the perilous quarrels 
 of the " Grand Alliance," and placed him 
 at the head of the great confederation 
 against the ambition of Louis the Four- 
 teenth. At such a time, amid such a 
 galaxy of brilliant rulers and commanders, 
 with Frederick of Prussia, Charles the 
 Twelfth of Sweden, Peter the Great, 
 Prince Eugene, all of them rivals and 
 contemporaries, Marlborough not only 
 held his own, but in the eyes of his 
 
II PERSONAL RULE 29 
 
 friends, and by the admission of his foes, 
 held the first place. His ascendency- 
 was never asserted with vulgar persist- 
 ence, and for that reason was accepted by 
 the princes and commanders who were 
 his allies. His tact was only equalled by 
 his good luck. No one with a spark of 
 ambition, except a spoilt child of fortune, 
 would have written : " Believe me, no- 
 thing is worth rowing for against wind and 
 tide ; at least you will think so when 
 you come to my age." His star was 
 constantly in the ascendant. On the 
 continent of Europe his good fortune 
 never forsook him. The god of battles 
 was ever on his side. One after another 
 he won great victories. If he besieged 
 a town, the siege was never known to be 
 raised. Even though, as at Malplaquet, 
 he lost an army, he never lost a battle. 
 And when finally he fell a victim to 
 intrigues in England, in Europe France 
 was at his mercy. 
 
 Although men liked Marlborough and 
 respected him, it does not appear that 
 he inspired or felt ardent friendship. 
 Prince Eugene's feeling for him of regard 
 and respect was the nearest approach to 
 
30 THE END OF u 
 
 sentiment that Marlborough inspired. 
 After his fall, when Prince Eugene came 
 to London and it was insinuated by 
 Drummond, a creature of Bolingbroke's, 
 that it would be well to ignore the Duke, 
 Prince Eugene was angry and mortified, 
 and declared very haughtily that he was 
 not come to England to give disturbance 
 to the Ministry, but it was inconsistent 
 with his honour and temper to be want- 
 ing in respect to a friend in his adverse 
 fortune for whom he had always 
 professed so much regard in the time 
 of his prosperity. Unlike Napoleon, but 
 like Wellington, Marlborough inspired 
 no deep enthusiasm. His adversaries, 
 however, were always treated by him with 
 respect, which they fully reciprocated. 
 To Villars, when opposed to him, he 
 sent occasional presents of wine and 
 game. On one occasion, with mediaeval 
 politeness, he apologised to him for not 
 offering him battle. Vendome, the great 
 grandson of Henry the Fourth, and 
 Gabrielle d'Estrees, who had much of 
 his father's pleasure-loving nature and 
 warlike gallantry, always spoke admir- 
 ingly of Marlborough. 
 
II PERSONAL RULE 31 
 
 Among the interesting personages who 
 fought under his command were the 
 Electoral Prince of Hanover, afterwards 
 George the Second, who fought well at 
 Oudenarde, and Maurice (afterwards 
 Marshal Saxe), the young son of 
 Augustus King of Poland, who although 
 only twelve years of age, had secretly left 
 Dresden, on foot, in order to be present 
 with Marlborough at the siege of Lille. 
 
 His domestic life was intermittent; 
 but what is known of it shows Marl- 
 borough at his best. Absence in 
 numerous campaigns may perhaps have 
 facilitated his relations with the Duchess ; 
 but there is no reason to suppose that 
 his often expressed regret that she was 
 not always at his side was other than 
 genuine. His wife was the idol of his 
 life, if we may judge from his letters. 
 
 At Blenheim, as the battle closed, 
 still on horseback, amid the smoke of 
 cannon still firing, it was to her that he 
 wrote the first message of victory. He 
 took from his pocket a tavern bill of 
 expenses, and with a black lead-pencil 
 wrote on the back : — 
 
32 THE END OF ii 
 
 ^^ August 13, 1704. 
 " I have not time to say more, but to 
 beg you will give my duty to the Queen, 
 and let her know her army has had a 
 glorious victory. M. Tallard and two 
 other generals are in my coach, and I am 
 following the rest. The bearer, my 
 aide-de-camp. Colonel Parker, will give 
 her an account of what passed. I shall 
 do it in a day or two by another more 
 large. Marlborough." 
 
 In 1702, when leaving for the 
 Continent, he wrote to the Duchess : — 
 
 "It is impossible to express with what 
 a heavy heart I parted with you when I 
 was at the water's side. I could have 
 given my life to have come back, though 
 I knew my own weakness so much that 
 I durst not ; for I knew I should expose 
 myself to the company. I did for a 
 great while, with a perspective glass, look 
 upon the cliffs, in hopes I might have 
 one sight of you." 
 
 And from the Hague he declares : — 
 " I do assure you, upon my soul, I 
 had much rather the whole world should 
 
II PERSONAL RULE 33 
 
 go wrong, than you should be uneasy ; 
 for the quiet of my life depends upon 
 your kindness, and I beg you to believe 
 that you are dearer to me than all things 
 in the world. My temper may make 
 you and myself sometimes uneasy ; but 
 when I am alone, and I find you kind, if 
 you knew the true quiet I have in mind, 
 you would then be convinced of my 
 being entirely yours, and that it is in no 
 other power in this world to make me 
 happy but yourself." 
 
 These, it is worth noticing, are not 
 the letters of a bridegroom, but were 
 written twenty years after his marriage 
 with the beautiful Sarah Jennings. 
 Burnet described her as a woman of little 
 knowledge, but of clear apprehension 
 and true judgment, a warm and hearty 
 friend, violent and sudden in her 
 resolutions and impetuous in her way of 
 speaking. She had an ascendant over 
 the Queen in everything. "She was 
 thought proud and insolent on her 
 favour, though she used none of the 
 common arts of a court to maintain it. 
 For she did not beset the Princess, nor 
 
34 THE END OF u 
 
 flatter her. She staid much at home, and 
 looked very carefully after the education 
 of her children." 
 
 Her ascendency over her husband's 
 heart was as complete as over the 
 Queen's. After the death at Cam- 
 bridge, in 1703, of their only son, Lord 
 Churchill, whose monument is in the 
 noble chapel at King's College, Marl- 
 borough writes : — 
 
 " I received this morning two of your 
 dear letters, which I read with all the 
 pleasure imaginable. They were so very 
 kind, that, if it be possible, you are 
 dearer to me ten thousand times than 
 ever you were. I am so entirely yours, 
 that if I might have all the world given 
 me, I could not be happy but in your 
 love." Of his boy he says : " Since it 
 has pleased God to take him I do wish 
 from my soul I could think less of 
 him." 
 
 As from Blenheim, the earliest of his 
 great battles, so from Malplaquet, the 
 latest of them, his first despatch was to 
 the woman round whom crystallised his 
 strongest affections : — 
 
 " I am so tired that I have but strength 
 
II PERSONAL RULE 35 
 
 enough to tell you that we have had this 
 day a very bloody battle ; the first part 
 of the day we beat their foot, and after- 
 wards their horse. God Almighty be 
 praised, it is now in our power to have 
 what peace we please, and I am pretty 
 well assured of never being in another 
 battle ; but that now nothing else in this 
 world can make me happy if you are not 
 kind." 
 
 " To the coolest head," said King 
 William, " he united the warmest heart " ; 
 and the eulogy does not appear mis- 
 placed. Nothing could have been cooler 
 and wiser than his advice to the Duchess 
 when the troubles with the Queen arose. 
 If his wife had possessed the self-restraint, 
 under provocation, of Marlborough, the 
 intrigues of Mrs. Masham and Harley 
 would have had little success. '' He 
 knew the arts of living in a court," said 
 Burnet, " beyond any man in it." 
 
 And there is no art of primer 
 necessity than to ignore the provoca- 
 tions and jealousies of courtiers. 
 
 The same observer noted in him that 
 " although without literature, he had a 
 
36 THE END OF ii 
 
 solid and clear understanding, with a 
 constant presence of mind." It was not 
 so with the Duchess, whose presence of 
 mind invariably forsook her under the 
 influence of temper. She scolded the 
 Queen like a naughty child, and the 
 Queen wearied of her. 
 
 Marlborough could remonstrate with 
 the Queen, but never on personal 
 grounds. When he saw her, as he 
 thought, treating her Whig Ministers 
 in what would now be considered a 
 thoroughly unconstitutional manner, by 
 secretly intriguing with their political 
 opponents, he wrote to her : " And as 
 you desire that I would speak freely, I 
 do protest in the presence of God 
 Almighty that I am persuaded that if 
 you continue in the mind that I think 
 you now are, and will not suifer those 
 that have the honour to serve you to 
 manage your affairs agreeably to the 
 circumstances of the times, your business 
 must inevitably run into confusion, and 
 consequently make it impossible for my 
 Lord Treasurer to serve ; for if he is 
 thought to have the power, when he 
 has not, both parties will be angry with 
 
II PERSONAL RULE 37 
 
 him, though both would admire him 
 and be his friends if he were out of the 
 service." 
 
 This passage is not only interesting as 
 an indication of Marlborough's relations 
 with the Queen ; but it is also curious 
 as an example of the form adopted in 
 communications between " one of the 
 Queen's servants " and the Sovereign, so 
 different from the curious mingling of the 
 third person and the second person now 
 in vogue.-^ Finally it is the first recorded 
 suggestion of" ministerial responsibility" 
 as now understood ; a conception then in 
 swaddling clothes, but destined to grow 
 rapidly in the years that followed. 
 
 Marlborough saw little of his children, 
 but he was tenderly attached to them. 
 One of his daughters married the son of 
 his friend and colleague the Treasurer 
 Godolphin, without whose financial skill 
 his campaigns would have been im- 
 possible. Another married Sunderland. 
 It was through the latter that his titles 
 and possessions were ultimately to 
 
 ^ In writing to the ^ueen, the Prime Minister would use 
 the following form : — " Mr. Gladstone presents his humble 
 duty to Your Majesty, and begs to inform Your Majesty that 
 he," etc. etc. 
 
38 THE END OF ii 
 
 descend. The later days of his life were 
 spent at Blenheim, at Holloway near St. 
 Albans, and at Windsor Lodge, of which 
 Park the Duchess was the Ranger. 
 
 It was at Windsor that he died. He 
 was always fond of, and he continued to 
 the end of his life to enjoy, the company 
 of his friends. His constant amusement 
 was to play ombre and commerce with 
 his grandchildren. But his favourite 
 game was whist. 
 
 The manor of Woodstock — since made 
 famous by Sir Walter Scott's romance to 
 thousands who have never connected it 
 with Blenheim Castle and the Duke of 
 Marlborough — had been presented to 
 him after his great victory over the 
 French. The Castle of Blenheim was 
 commenced in 1705, and although the 
 Queen intended to finish it, the building 
 took so long a time, that when it 
 approached completion Marlborough was 
 out of favour, and he had to pay the 
 final instalments himself. He has been 
 charged with avarice. It is certain, that 
 notwithstanding his expenditure, which 
 was necessarily great from the state he 
 was forced to maintain when abroad, his 
 
II PERSONAL RULE 39 
 
 emoluments and those of his wife enabled 
 him to acquire vast riches. He was 
 overwhelmed with gifts. Pictures from 
 the Netherlands, precious stones, silver 
 plate, gold memorials of all kinds were 
 showered upon him. He was careful and 
 unwastefiil. His wealth accumulated. 
 So much so, that at his death his private 
 income was said to have been ^70,000 a 
 year; and when the Duchess of Marl- 
 borough died — and she survived her 
 husband twenty-two years — her fortune 
 was reckoned at three millions sterling : 
 a huge sum in those days to have been 
 the property of a private person. 
 
 A monument at Blenheim, near Wood- 
 stock, is inscribed with a record of 
 Marlborough's achievements. 
 
 The Castle of Blenheim was founded by ^ueen Anne, 
 in the fourth year of her reign, 
 in the year of the Christian era, 1705. 
 A monument designed to perpetuate the memory of the 
 Signal Victory, 
 obtained over the French and Bavarians 
 near the village of Blenheim, 
 on the banks of the Danube, 
 by John Duke of Marlborough. 
 The hero not only of his Nation, but his age ; 
 Whose glory was equal in Council and in the field, 
 Who by Wisdom, Justice, Candour and Address 
 reconciled various and even opposite Interests 
 acquired an Influence, which no rank, no authority, can give 
 
40 THE END OF ii 
 
 nor any force but that of superior virtue. 
 
 Became the fixed important Centre 
 
 which united in one Common Cause 
 
 the principal States of Europe 
 
 Who by military knowledge and irresistible valour 
 
 in a long series of uninterrupted triumphs 
 
 broke the Power of France, 
 
 when raised the highest, when exerted the most j 
 
 rescued the Empire from Desolation ; 
 
 asserted and confirmed the Liberties of Europe. 
 
 These words form the preamble of a long 
 historical survey of the achievements of 
 Marlborough. A student anxious to 
 master the facts of Queen Anne's reign 
 might do worse than make the attempt 
 to justify, or criticise, this panegyric by 
 reference to authorities. The conclu- 
 sion, however, is irresistible, that King 
 William's insight was remarkably ac- 
 curate, and that Marlborough was the 
 one competent and effective man in 
 Europe able to compete with and pos- 
 sibly to vanquish Louis the Fourteenth. 
 A Captain General, who could keep Eng- 
 land at the head of the European con- 
 federacy, was required. He was the man 
 for the place. At the end of the seven- 
 teenth, as at the end of the eighteenth 
 century, the "Liberties of Europe" 
 required " asserting " and " confirming." 
 
II PERSONAL RULE 41 
 
 In the one case the work conceived and 
 only half accomplished, under unlucky 
 auspices, by Mr. Pitt, was gloriously 
 concluded by Wellington. In the former 
 instance King William was the architect 
 to plan the structure of European free- 
 dom consolidated later by the victories 
 of Marlborough. In both cases, the 
 French people under Louis the Four- 
 teenth, and subsequently under Napoleon, 
 were the aggressors, aiming at dominion. 
 In both cases Europe was saved by the 
 example and efforts of England. 
 
 The recuperative energy and aggres- 
 sive ambition of France are remarkable 
 and constant factors in modern European 
 history. It is curious to note the re- 
 curring combinations between France 
 and Spain — a combination so fatal to 
 France — which brought about the wars 
 of the Spanish succession culminating 
 in the victories of Marlborough ; the 
 Peninsular War which led to the humili- 
 ating abdication at Fontainebleau ; and 
 the Spanish intrigues of General Prim 
 which preceded the disaster at Sedan. 
 Of these perhaps the most dangerous to 
 Europe was the desire of Louis the 
 
42 THE END OF ii 
 
 Fourteenth to consolidate France and 
 Spain under a Bourbon king. The 
 defeat of this scheme was, as far as any 
 one man can claim the credit of it, due 
 to him whom Turenne in early days had 
 called " the handsome Englishman " ; 
 who was to live to utilise the lessons 
 learnt in the service of that great com- 
 mander against the armies of France. 
 Marlborough's faults were exposed during 
 his lifetime. They were exaggerated in 
 the bitter invective of Swift. Judged by 
 the standard of his day, they are venial. 
 Unlike his virtues, they are of no interest 
 or advantage when contemplated at a 
 distance of time. Bolingbroke, his 
 deadliest foe, said of him : '' He was so 
 great a man that I have forgotten his 
 vices." And if Bolingbroke could 
 forget them, they may well be left in 
 obscurity. 
 
 Such was the man whose name stands 
 last upon the long list of personal rulers 
 of England. His power was not so great 
 as Wolsey's, but it eclipsed that of any 
 commander, ecclesiastic, or statesman who 
 succeeded him. With him fell personal 
 rule, and thenceforth a new executive 
 
II PERSONAL RULE 43 
 
 authority was to take the place of the 
 King s Minister, and of the King himself. 
 The Cabinet of Harley which suc- 
 ceeded to Marlborough's authority had 
 not the unquestioned power of the 
 Cabinet of Lord Beaconsfield. But the 
 principle of that authority was recognised 
 by Parliament, by the more thoughtful 
 writers, and by the Sovereign herself. 
 Furthermore, it is now clear to us that 
 its foundations were then well and truly 
 laid, and that within a very few years the 
 novel structure was to assume visible 
 and tangible shape. 
 
44 THE AUTHORS OF 
 
 III 
 
 THE AUTHORS OF PARTY GOVERN- 
 MENT 
 
 Round the fall of Marlborough has 
 gathered the interest attaching to the 
 earliest political crisis at all resembling 
 those of quite recent times. 
 
 It is at this moment that Party Govern- 
 ment in the modern sense actually com- 
 menced. William the Third with 
 military instinct had always been re- 
 luctant to govern by means of a party. 
 Bound as he was, closely, to the Whigs, 
 he employed Tory Ministers. He dis- 
 liked extreme men ; Lord Wharton, for 
 example, whom for the confusion of 
 historians Burnet thought the completest 
 gentleman in England,;and whom Swift 
 called the most universal villain he ever 
 knew. Ministries under King William 
 
Ill PARTY GOVERNMENT 45 
 
 were not harmonious. The new idea of 
 a homogeneous government was working 
 itself into shape under the mild direction 
 of Lord Somers; but the form finally 
 taken under Sir Robert Walpole, which 
 has continued to the present time, was 
 as yet some way off. Marlborough's 
 notions were those of the late King. 
 Both abroad and at home he carried out 
 the policy of William. He refused to 
 rely wholly upon the Whigs, and the 
 extreme Tories were not given employ- 
 ment. The Ministry of Godolphin was 
 a composite administration, containing 
 at one time, in 1705, Tories like Harley 
 and St. John as well as Whigs such as 
 Sunderland and Halifax. In the passage 
 of that great act of domestic policy, the 
 Union with Scotland, Lord Somers, who 
 was described by Sunderland as the soul 
 of the Whig party, and who certainly 
 was its leader, although not in office, was 
 employed by the Government, to whom 
 according to modern notions he could 
 not have been z. persona grata ^ to conduct 
 the deliberations^ of the Commission 
 which settled the terms of the Bill. 
 This proposal for an Act of Union was 
 
46 THE AUTHORS OF m 
 
 one of the last measures laid by King 
 William before Parliament. It had been 
 sanctioned and initiated by him in the 
 few days which elapsed between his fall 
 from horseback on 21st February and 
 his death on the 8th of March 1702 ; 
 but it was not until 1707 that a final 
 settlement of the many difficulties was 
 arrived at under the guidance of Lord 
 Somers, and the Act of Union was 
 placed among the Statutes of the realm. 
 Lord Somers was a type of statesman 
 of a novel order at that time, but not so 
 strange to us who can look back upon 
 a list of Chancellors including Lord 
 Lyndhurst and Lord Eldon ; Lord 
 Brougham and Lord Cairns. In the 
 beginning of the eighteenth century it 
 was rare to find a man attaining the 
 highest political rank who was uncon- 
 nected by birth or training or marriage 
 with any of the great "governing 
 families," as they have been called. 
 Lord Somers was the son of a Worcester 
 attorney. He was born in the same 
 year as Marlborough, 1650, and at the 
 age of forty -seven he became, from 
 Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Keeper 
 
Ill PARTY GOVERNMENT 47 
 
 of the Conscience of William the Third, 
 and Chancellor. 
 
 He is said to have maintained to the 
 end of his life a severe and lofty 
 character, neither arrogant to his in- 
 feriors nor servile to the Sovereign. 
 Even Swift was obliged to admit that he 
 possessed all excellent qualifications ex- 
 cept that of being a Tory. Lord Somers 
 was a man of violent passions, but they 
 were under admirable control. Burnet 
 thought his fairness and gentleness almost 
 amounted to a fault. Historians have 
 gathered from contemporary authorities 
 the opinion that in our history no more 
 upright or unsullied character can be 
 found. It was fortunate for England 
 that Lord Somers should have been the 
 foremost man of the Whig party at the 
 time when constitutional government, 
 as we now call it, was in course of con- 
 struction. By his prudent counsel the 
 Whigs were guided through the difficult 
 years at the end of Queen Anne's reign ; 
 and from the ordeal of seeing their 
 rivals in power they certainly managed, 
 as a party, to emerge on the whole with 
 credit. 
 
48 THE AUTHORS OF m 
 
 Although he was not nominally their 
 leader, the paramount influence in the 
 Tory party was Bolingbroke's ; and that 
 the Tories suffered from the defects of 
 his great qualities, no unprejudiced critic 
 can doubt. 
 
 Between the two parties, and at the 
 head of the Treasury through the 
 earlier years of the reign, stood Godol- 
 phin, without whose masterly know- 
 ledge of finance and careful attention to 
 the details of administration Marl- 
 borough's policy would have been baffled 
 and his campaigns remained unfought. 
 To Godolphin, more than to any other 
 one man, is due the preponderance of the 
 Treasury control in public affairs. 
 
 It was his administration, during the 
 absence of Marlborough on the Con- 
 tinent, which created for the office of 
 Lord Treasurer its paramount import- 
 ance, and paved the way for Sir Robert 
 Walpole's government of England under 
 the title of First Lord of the Treasury — 
 an office destined to become synonymous 
 with that which is called by courtesy 
 Prime Minister. 
 
 After the accession of George I. and 
 
Ill PARTY GOFERNMENT 49 
 
 the fall of Bolingbroke, the office of Lord 
 Treasurer was not revived ; but later, 
 although the nomenclature differed, the 
 power of First Minister became again 
 associated with the command of the 
 Treasury ; and it is only recently, under 
 the second administration of Lord Salis- 
 bury, that the office of First Lord of the 
 Treasury, by becoming associated with 
 the leader of the House of Commons 
 and not with the head of the Government, 
 has ceased to be synonymous with that 
 of First Minister of the Crown. 
 
 Godolphin's personal appearance was 
 not in his favour. He was, not un- 
 appropriately, called Baconface. His 
 manners were cold and haughty, even to 
 the Queen. And yet his pride, which 
 was great, could not preserve him from 
 countenancing the unwise prosecution 
 of Dr. Sacheverell, and from indulging 
 his personal resentment against this un- 
 interesting divine, who had in a public 
 discourse applied to him an offensive 
 epithet. 
 
 He was a passionate man, and, unlike 
 Marlborough, his passions were not under 
 complete control. On his dismissal, the 
 
so THE JUTHORS OF in 
 
 Queen refused to see him, and, prompted 
 it was thought by Lady Masham, who 
 hoped for some exhibition of the sort, 
 requested him to break his staff of office 
 instead of handing it back to her. This 
 he did with a contemptuous gesture of 
 anger, flinging the pieces into the 
 fire — an act immediately reported to 
 Queen Anne, and serving further to 
 incense her against him. He was closely 
 allied to Marlborough by the marriage of 
 his son with the Duke's eldest daughter, 
 and the heiress to his titles and estates, 
 which however she was not destined to 
 transmit to posterity. Godolphin's 
 financial management was remarkable. 
 At the accession of Queen Anne the 
 National Debt amounted to ^^ 1 6,000,000, 
 upon which ;^ 1, 300,000 was paid by way 
 of interest. At the end of the war it 
 amounted to ^52,000,000, upon which 
 ^3,300,000 interest was paid. This was 
 a remarkable proof of financial capacity 
 on the part of the Minister, who was 
 responsible — not for the expenditure, 
 which was altogether beyond his control, 
 but for the credit of the country. The 
 loans were raised with singularly little 
 
Ill PARTY GOVERNMENT 51 
 
 difficulty and friction. Writing on 24th 
 September 1706, GodoJphin says that 
 England could borrow money easily at 
 four or five per cent. Whereas in 
 France, money could only be obtained 
 with difficulty at rates varying between 
 twenty and twenty-five per cent. 
 
 To a very large extent this was due 
 to his prudent administration of the 
 Treasury. No doubt the taxable area 
 was wider in England. There were no 
 privileged classes exempt from taxation, 
 as in France. The nobility in England 
 were as liable as the untitled gentry to pay 
 taxes imposed by Parliament. The clergy 
 since 1665 had ceased to be privileged. 
 By a little-noticed agreement in that year, 
 between Archbishop Sheldon and Lord 
 Clarendon, without an Act of Parliament, 
 the sacerdotal privilege of exemption had 
 been abandoned. As England was more 
 resourcefiil, so the task of Godolphin was 
 doubtless easier than that of Louis the 
 Fourteenth ; but notwithstanding this 
 advantage, Marlborough saw and always 
 admitted that his victories were due 
 in large measure to the financial skill 
 of Godolphin. To this statesman's 
 
52 THE AUTHORS OF m 
 
 lasting credit it must be remembered 
 that in a venal age, when the standards of 
 public honesty were so different from 
 those which now prevail, Godolphin died 
 a poor man. Two generations were to 
 pass away before Mr. Pitt, by an example 
 of pure and lofty disinterestedness, was to 
 set a fashion of personal scrupulousness, 
 which has since passed into the code of 
 public morals. Godolphin, in this respect, 
 was in advance of his age. 
 
 Bolingbroke, on the other hand, was 
 the offspring of his generation, the child 
 of the latter end of the seventeenth 
 century. As the ultimate expression of 
 a party, whose doctrines were those of 
 legitimacy for the throne and of faith 
 in the Christian religion, Bolingbroke, 
 the sceptic in everything and believer in 
 nothing, was as great a paradox as, a 
 century later, was Robespierre, the in- 
 carnation of a sanguinary Terror, with 
 his sentimental humanity and his aver- 
 sion to blood. 
 
 Bolingbroke represented to English- 
 men in England those forces against 
 which the majority of the nation had 
 revolted in 1688. Even when he became 
 
Ill PARTY GOVERNMENT 53 
 
 the servant of Queen Anne and took 
 office with Harley, even after the disgrace 
 of Harley, when he momentarily became 
 the head of the Administration, he was 
 always a Jacobite. To be a Jacobite was 
 not simply to be for King James. It 
 was to be a supporter of Louis the Four- 
 teenth in Europe and an opponent of 
 the Grand Alliance. It was to be for 
 monarchical and Catholic Europe, and 
 against parliamentary and Protestant 
 Europe. The success of the Jacobites 
 meant the reversal in Europe as well as 
 in England of the policy of William the 
 Third. 
 
 It is therefore hard to understand the 
 motives which prompted so shrewd a 
 man as Bolingbroke to remain a Jacobite. 
 He seems to have been, all his life, the 
 slave of the spirit of contradiction. 
 Unquestionably around him living, and 
 about him dead, controversy has raged. 
 His character, his motives, his actions, 
 and his professed principles, have all 
 formed the subject of differences of 
 opinion between scholars and politicians. 
 Like Alcibiades, whose extravagances he 
 was inclined to emulate, he loved 
 
54 THE JUTHORS OF iii 
 
 notoriety. He is not known to have cut 
 off the tail of a matchless hound ; but it 
 was remembered of him that in the hey- 
 day of his youth he ran through St. 
 James's Park naked. 
 
 His earliest days were spent among 
 all the dreary surroundings of Dissent, 
 in times when the Nonconformist con- 
 science was perhaps at its dreariest. No 
 wonder that the freedom of Eton, and its 
 extension at Oxford, produced violent 
 reaction. Dr. Manton's one hundred 
 and nineteen sermons on the 1 1 9th 
 Psalm, on which his young mind was 
 fed, did not prevent him while still a 
 boy from engaging as his mistress Miss 
 Gumley, the most notorious and 
 expensive courtesan about town. 
 
 Bolingbroke is specially interesting 
 to us as the first English statesman 
 whose political characteristics appear 
 modern. His oratorical powers, his 
 party spirit, his idea of utilising the 
 press, his literary manner, though possibly 
 not his style, suggest a politician who 
 might be a contemporary of Lord 
 Beaconsfield. 
 
 His start in life under the auspices of 
 
Ill PARTY GOVERNMENT 55 
 
 Marlborough, his combination of forces 
 with Harley, his severance from the 
 Whig party, his unscrupulous opposition, 
 all fit him for a place among nineteenth 
 century politicians. His acceptance of 
 office under Harley, his intrigues to 
 overturn him, his momentarily-obtained 
 and for - ever - lost leadership, almost 
 entitle him to rank as member for some 
 great metropolitan constituency, instead 
 of a pocket borough long since swept 
 away. 
 
 To his contemporaries he was a figure 
 full of interest. No man can fail to be 
 interesting whose passions are violent and 
 unrestrained. Passions, he once said, are 
 the gales of life. And certain it is that 
 they wafted him hither and thither at 
 will. He seems to have made no sue- 
 cessful attempt to beat up against them. 
 Lord Chesterfield deplored his wasted 
 energies, as a mortifying example of the 
 violence of human passions and the weak- 
 ness of the most exalted human reason. 
 At Eton the contrast between St. John and 
 Robert Walpole was noticed, and was sus- 
 tained with curious accuracy through life. 
 The one, licentious, gay, negligent, idle, 
 
56 THE AUTHORS OF in 
 
 endowed with marvellous memory and 
 quickness of apprehension ; the other 
 industrious, sober, diligent, steady, and 
 solid. Swift, writing intimately to Stella 
 in 171 1, described Mr. St. John as the 
 greatest young man he ever knew, " wit, 
 capacity, beauty, quickness of appre- 
 hension, good bearing and an excellent 
 taste; the best orator in the House of 
 Commons, admirable conversation, good 
 nature, good manners ; generous and a 
 despiser of money." 
 
 It is curious how large a space beauty 
 filled in the estimation of writers in the 
 eighteenth century. Burnet never omits 
 to notice the personal graces of his con- 
 temporaries. It was a fashion caught 
 from the memoir writers of France. But 
 the portraits on canvas of Bolingbroke 
 hardly bear out Swift's encomium. 
 
 Even upon points generally considered 
 matters of fact, controversy ever raged 
 round Bolingbroke. While Lord Orrery 
 — a scholar and somewhat of a philo- 
 sopher himself — noted in Bolingbroke 
 when an old man a sobering down of 
 the passions, a dignity, an ease in con- 
 versation worthy of Pliny, it was 
 
Ill PARTY GOVERNMENT 57 
 
 observed by Lord Chatham, then a very 
 gay young man, who visited him at 
 Battersea, that he was pedantic and 
 fretful, and unreasonably cross to his 
 wife. This view is corroborated by 
 Lord Chesterfield, who somewhere said 
 of him, that although no one wrote 
 better about philosophy than Lord 
 Bolingbroke, the over-roasting of a leg 
 of mutton strangely ruffled his temper. 
 He was not, however, a unique example 
 of this particular form of human weak- 
 ness ; since no manufacturer is more 
 loth to make private use of his own 
 wares than is a philosopher to act up 
 to his theories. Bolingbroke as an ex- 
 pounder of the philosophy of practical 
 politics wielded great influence. The 
 sceptical Toryism of Lord Beaconsfield 
 and his school had its origin in the 
 writings of Bolingbroke. Mr. Disraeli 
 in early life acknowledged the debt he 
 owed to his predecessor: and the poli- 
 ticians who to-day combine indifi^erence 
 about religion with a warm desire to 
 maintain the Church, and scepticism in 
 matters of authority with a regard for 
 monarchical institutions, represent the 
 
58 THE AUTHORS OF m 
 
 brilliant Tory whose adroit intrigues 
 overturned the Ministry of Godolphin 
 and destroyed the leadership of Harley. 
 "What is man?" asked Bolingbroke, and 
 then supplied from his own experience 
 the reply, '' polished, civilised, learned 
 man. A liberal education fits him for 
 slavery, and the pains he has taken give 
 him the noble pretension of dangling 
 away life in an ante -chamber, or of 
 employing real talents to serve those 
 who have none ; or, which is worse 
 than all the rest, of making his reason 
 and his knowledge serve all the purposes 
 of other men's follies and vices." 
 
 To no class of men does this satire 
 more aptly apply than politicians, the 
 most independent of whom rarely avoids 
 trimming his sails to catch the popular 
 breeze. Bolingbroke, to a great extent 
 the originator of government by party, 
 curiously enough embodied in his own 
 person the fully developed vices of the 
 party system. During the last four 
 years of the Queen's reign, when the 
 party to which he belonged was in the 
 ascendant, it is difficult to trace in him 
 a patriotic desire to direct the policy of 
 
Ill PARTY GOVERNMENT 59 
 
 England into channels of prosperity and 
 public virtue. 
 
 He was a man of supreme ability. 
 His knowledge of history, his retentive 
 memory, his keen vision, his habits of re- 
 flection, can have left little doubt in his 
 mind as to the benefits accruing to England 
 from the resistance to Louis the Four- 
 teenth and from the Protestant succession. 
 Yet he paltered with the great policy of 
 William the Third, and while making him- 
 self responsible for the Treaty of Utrecht, 
 he was only saved by the sudden death 
 of the Queen from the crime of attempt- 
 ing a Stuart restoration. Bolingbroke's 
 intention doubtless was to establish him- 
 self and his party permanently in office. 
 This was his view of the chief use to 
 which the system of government by party 
 could be put. Perhaps it does not differ, 
 except in point of method and cynical 
 admission, from modern conceptions. Of 
 course he failed, as we now know by ex- 
 perience he was sure to fail ; but the 
 platitudes of parliamentary government 
 were then constitutional secrets, undivined 
 by politicians. Bolingbroke is interesting 
 to us as the most striking figure among 
 
6o THE AUTHORS OF iii 
 
 the originators of the new parlia- 
 mentary system. With Marlborough 
 disappeared the type of Tudor states- 
 men modified by contact with the 
 Stuarts. He was the last of the 
 Imperial Chancellors. Bolingbroke and 
 his successor Walpole were the earlier 
 types of constitutional statesmen among 
 whom Mr. Pitt and, later, Mr. Glad- 
 stone stand pre-eminent. 
 
 To the charms of Bolingbroke in 
 private life the correspondence of Swift 
 and Pope testifies. Lord Chesterfield 
 found him a man "who could not be 
 resisted." It is not surprising when we 
 find him appreciating at their full the 
 qualities of sincerity, constancy, and 
 tenderness in friendship. 
 
 This appreciation he recognised as out 
 of tune with the time. In him it was 
 bred by classical learning and by early 
 associations ; but he writes to Swift that 
 the " truest reflection and at the same time 
 the bitterest satire which can be made 
 On the present age is this : that to think 
 as you think, will make a man pass as 
 romantick." No more damning criticism 
 of a man could then be thought of than 
 
Ill PARTY GOVERNMENT 6i 
 
 this : that he should be suspected of 
 romance. Romance was a relic of the 
 barbarous reign of Elizabeth ; and out 
 of date in that of Queen Anne. Yet 
 Bolingbroke was not afraid to say that 
 there was " more pleasure and more 
 merit too in cultivating friendships 
 than in taking care of the State. Fools 
 and knaves are generally best fitted 
 for the last, and none but men 
 of sense and virtue are capable of 
 the other." 
 
 This was the softer side of Boling- 
 broke. 
 
 He and his friends, opponents of 
 Marlborough, and contributors to his 
 fall, are interesting to us mainly as 
 furnishing the first examples of " Her 
 Majesty's Opposition," as the authors 
 of party government and the proto- 
 types of cabinet ministers of to-day. 
 Their ways of thought, their style of 
 speech and of writing, may be dissimilar 
 to those now in vogue, but they show 
 greater resemblance to those of modern 
 politicians than to those of the Ministers 
 of William or of the Stuarts. 
 
 Bolingbroke may have appeared a 
 
62 PARTY GOVERNMENT m 
 
 Strange product of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury to his contemporaries, but he would 
 not have appeared pecuharly misplaced 
 among the colleagues of Lord Randolph 
 Churchill or Mr. Chamberlain. 
 
IV THE POWER OF THE PRESS 63 
 
 IV 
 
 THE POWER OF THE PRESS 
 
 If we owe to the closing years of Queen 
 Anne's reign the inception of that parlia- 
 mentary system of government by Cabinet 
 and Party which, subsequently developed 
 by Walpole, obtains in assumed perfection 
 at the present time, so another political 
 engine now of enormous power finds 
 its origin in that period. Bolingbroke, 
 whose career must have seemed to his 
 contemporaries, judging him by the or- 
 dinary standards of success, so sad a 
 failure, has left a deeper mark upon 
 the history of his country than any of 
 his rivals save perhaps Walpole. 
 
 In politics he shaped, if he did not 
 invent, a new system; but this was a 
 trifling service compared with that which 
 he performed in the cause of letters. 
 He was the founder of a new style. 
 
64 THE POWER iv 
 
 To read Bolingbroke in the order of 
 literary productions of the eighteenth 
 century, gives a sensation of stepping 
 suddenly into the nineteenth. Among 
 the literary giants of that period of 
 renaissance in English prose, in point 
 of style Bolingbroke stands supreme. 
 And it is to Bolingbroke's example 
 and initiative that we owe the com- 
 plete revelation of the stormy genius of 
 Swift. 
 
 All the more combative and interest- 
 ing developments of modern journalism 
 find their origin in the writings of this 
 extraordinary man, whose ecclesiastical 
 position could not restrain him from the 
 use of any weapon however unclerical, 
 and whose instinctive knowledge where 
 and how to strike at an adversary has 
 never been surpassed by modern editors 
 with the experience of nearly two cen- 
 turies before them. 
 
 Swift could not have foreseen in the 
 embryonic newspapers of those days, the 
 Tatler or the Examiner^ the diurnal 
 literary miracle which emanates at an 
 early hour from Printing House Square. 
 Science, training, organisation, and capital 
 
IV OF THE PRESS 65 
 
 have placed in the hands of the editor of 
 the Times a machine, all the full uses of 
 which it is hard for us adequately to 
 appreciate. To what extent the Times 
 reflects or moulds public opinion, is a 
 controversial question, difficult to deter- 
 mine ; but no unbiassed observer denies 
 the enormous power and influence of 
 that journal ; while there is no politician, 
 or author, or artist, or malefactor, or 
 saint, who would not prefer to have a 
 good word rather than a bad from its 
 compilers, and who occasionally has not 
 sought or desired its kind offices. 
 
 In the latter days of Queen Anne, 
 although party journals already existed, 
 it was the political pamphlet that at- 
 tempted to eff^ect what the party news- 
 paper is supposed to eff^ect nowadays. 
 
 Whether from Grub Street then, or 
 Bouverie Street to-day, the same kind 
 of appeal went forth to the people, to 
 urge them to support the party that 
 was always in the right against the 
 party that ever was in the wrong. 
 But in those primitive times a states- 
 man was obliged to do his own pamph- 
 leteering, unless he could fortunately 
 
66 THE POWER iv 
 
 enlist the services of an Addison or a 
 Swift. 
 
 Walpole was the author of many 
 pamphlets. Pulteney edited the Crafts- 
 man, In the earlier days of the 
 century Steele's two newspapers, the 
 Tatler and the Spectator^ had enormous 
 success in London. This success was 
 largely due to Addison ; for when 
 later on, after the General Election 
 of 17 13, Steele having been elected 
 for Stockbridge, was fired with all 
 the political zeal of a new senator, 
 and started a paper called the English- 
 man^ without the collaboration of 
 Addison, it failed to produce any- 
 thing like the effect of his earlier ven- 
 tures. 
 
 The Spectator^ although published 
 daily to the no small astonishment of 
 the public of those days, was very 
 unlike the modern conception of a 
 readable daily newspaper. Addison's 
 essays differed in plan and in work- 
 manship from the ephemeral leading 
 articles of the Times. According to 
 our modern ideas, unbiassed by literary 
 superstition, they were decidedly dull, 
 
IV OF THE PRESS 67 
 
 and, In spite of their great literary 
 merit, would now be thought intoler- 
 able. 
 
 The knot of wits who were respon- 
 sible for the production of Steele's news- 
 papers were accustomed to meet daily 
 at Button's Coffee - House, and their 
 deliberations were conducted on much 
 the same lines as those of the editors 
 of Punch under the presidency of Mr. 
 Burnand. Pope christened them " Ad- 
 dison's Senate," and no doubt the Whig 
 pamphleteer enjoyed — as a shy man 
 would — his acknowledged supremacy 
 in a small coterie of intimate friends. 
 Steele, Thomas Tickell, and Ambrose 
 Philips were of the party. It was 
 into this society that a strange clergy- 
 man suddenly obtruded himself. Clearly 
 he knew none of those who frequented 
 the coffee-house. He spoke to no one ; 
 but he would lay his hat down on a 
 table, says Ambrose Phihps, and walk 
 backwards and forwards at a good pace 
 for half an hour or an hour, without 
 appearing to notice any one or anything 
 that was said or done. He then would 
 take up his hat, pay his money at the 
 
68 THE POWER iv 
 
 bar, and walk away without opening his 
 lips. He went by the name of the 
 " Mad Parson." As a disputant, as a 
 writer, as a pamphleteer, as a force in 
 politics, and as a literary star, the mad 
 parson eclipsed them all. Swift became, 
 though not for long, the friend of Addi- 
 son, of Steele, of Arbuthnot, of all the 
 wits from whose intercourse party feel- 
 ing and partisan bitterness were afterwards 
 to cut him off. With Addison in the 
 early days of their friendship he spent 
 hours. In a copy of Addison's Travels 
 presented by him to Swift, the following 
 inscription appears: — "To Jonathan 
 Swift, the most agreeable companion, 
 the truest friend, and the greatest genius 
 of his age, this book is presented by his 
 most humble servant, the author." The 
 language was not too strong for a man 
 whose steadfastness to his political friends 
 seems never to have wavered, and whose 
 genius was classed by so great a judge as 
 Voltaire, with cosmopolitan impartiality, 
 as superior to that of Rabelais. 
 
 Swift's place in politics was for a 
 while undetermined. His youth had 
 been spent with a remarkable man. In 
 
IV OF THE PRESS 69 
 
 the intimacy of Moor Park to live with 
 Sir WiUiam Temple was a political 
 education. 
 
 Swift's superiority to Dr. Johnson 
 in knowledge of practical politics was 
 emphasised by Macaulay. The differ- 
 ence, he said, between a political pamphlet 
 by Johnson and a political pamphlet by 
 Swift is as great as the difference between 
 an account of a battle by Southey and 
 the account of the same battle by William 
 Napier. This superiority of Swift, the 
 practical knowledge of the man really 
 versed in political affairs, and not merely 
 the knowledge of the arm-chair politician 
 or student, he attributes to the influence 
 of Temple, with whom Swift lived as 
 secretary for " board and twenty pounds 
 a year." 
 
 Conscious of transcendent powers. 
 Swift in his youth was forced to dine at 
 the second table, salaried at twenty pounds 
 a year, and found himself relegated to the 
 society of Lady Temple's waiting-maid. 
 It is not surprising that the iron went 
 deep into his soul. Literary gifts render 
 a man easily vain. Vanity in Swift 
 was inordinate ; pride '^immeasurable. 
 
70 THE POWER iv 
 
 These largely helped to determine his 
 place in political strife. In opinion he 
 halted between the two parties. Inclined 
 by his High Church sympathies to the 
 Tories, he nevertheless, from an innate 
 love of liberty and independence, gravi- 
 tated towards Somers and the Whigs. 
 His first appearance as a political writer 
 was in 1701, when Somers and Halifax 
 with others were impeached on account of 
 their share in what was called the partition 
 treaty. Swift published anonymously a 
 remonstrance founded on the analogy of 
 civil discords in Athens and Rome. " It 
 was then," he says, " that I first began 
 to trouble myself with the diiFerences 
 between the principles of Whig and 
 Tory; having formerly employed myself 
 in other, and I think much better specu- 
 lations." He told Lord Somers that his 
 familiarity with Greek and Latin authors 
 necessarily made him a lover of liberty, 
 and that he found himself inclined to be 
 a Whig in politics ; and besides, he did 
 not see how upon any other principle 
 it was possible to defend or submit to 
 the Revolution ; but as to religion, he 
 was a High Churchman, and he could 
 
IV OF THE PRESS 71 
 
 not conceive how any one who wore the 
 habit of a clergyman could be otherwise. 
 It is astonishing that the Tale of a 
 Tub^ known by many to be his handi- 
 work, and published in 1702, although 
 written with no direct poHtical, but 
 rather with an ecclesiastical object in 
 view, should not have opened the eyes 
 of Godolphin and his friends to the 
 value of Swift as an ally, and the danger 
 of neglecting him. Doubtless the tone 
 of that famous satire interfered with the 
 preferment of Swift to any place of 
 honour in the Church. It was con- 
 sidered in bad taste by some, almost 
 blasphemous by others. By sceptics 
 and scoffers at religion in England, by 
 Voltaire in France, it was hailed with 
 delight. 
 
 Like every satirist Swift was unable 
 to measure the full force of the missile 
 he had launched, or to gauge the direc- 
 tion of its recoil. What Somers and 
 Godolphin and the Whigs thought is 
 not known. That they abstained from 
 any cordial recognition of Swift's talents 
 is certain. 
 
 Steele, under the auspices and with 
 
72 THE POWER iv 
 
 the assistance of Swift, commenced the 
 Tatler^ the first of those famous periodi- 
 cals, the amazing developments of which 
 are among the many wonders of the 
 nineteenth century. Addison was not 
 in the secret, nor a party to the first 
 publications. 
 
 Swift's alliance with Addison and 
 Steele lasted but a short time. The 
 exigencies of party difference effected 
 a breach which literary sympathy could 
 not mend. After a year's absence in 
 Ireland, he returned to London in 1710. 
 He felt keenly the neglect of his Whig 
 friends. He had expected preferment. 
 He had obtained nothing. 
 
 The great Ministry of Godolphin and 
 Marlborough was tottering to its fall. 
 At such a moment the services of 
 Swift might have been invaluable ; but 
 Godolphin's proud temper would not 
 condescend to court the literary hack. 
 Genius could not redeem a profession 
 so debasing. "Did I not tell you of 
 a great man who received me very 
 coldly } " Swift writes. Lord Somers 
 attempted civilities, but they failed to 
 convince Swift of their sincerity in face 
 
IV OF THE PRESS 73 
 
 of the rudeness of the Lord Treasurer 
 and the professional neglect in which 
 he believed himself wilfully left. 
 
 Godolphin's angry reception of the 
 Queen's commands to deliver up the 
 staff of office gave Swift an occasion 
 which he did not miss for paying off 
 the score. His lampoon, " Sid Hamet's 
 Rod," was the first of his literary 
 ventures in the interests of the Tory 
 party. Three days after its publication 
 he was presented to Harley, and from 
 this time, although he still saw Addison, 
 all intercourse with the official Whigs 
 came to an end. His acquaintance 
 with Harley was followed immediately 
 by an introduction to St. John. 
 
 In his Journal to Stella he dwells on 
 friendly attentions which he received 
 from the leader of the new Government. 
 " I must tell you a great piece of refine- 
 ment in Harley. He charged me to 
 come and see him often ; I told him I 
 was loth to trouble him, in so much 
 business as he had, and desired I might 
 have leave to come at his levee ; which 
 he immediately refused, and said that 
 was no place for friends." 
 
74 THE POWER w 
 
 St. John exerted all his famous powers 
 of fascination to please him. vjo.. ^ 
 man of Swift's nature, in which vanity 
 ; "^So largely predominated, prototype as 
 he was of the great profession of 
 'journalists, these cajoleries were irre- 
 sistible. No one affected, and possibly 
 believed that he felt, a profounder con- 
 tempt for rank, and a stronger inclination 
 to parade it. Perhaps the inference 
 'ftrawn by Sir Walter Scott is not unjust, 
 that the advantages which he studiously 
 undervalued held in truth more than 
 their proper place in his estimation. 
 
 On one occasion, he writes to Stella, 
 " I called at Mr. Secretary's to see what 
 the devil ailed him on Sunday, and made 
 him a very proper speech, and warned 
 him never to appear cold to me, for I 
 would not be treated like a schoolboy." 
 
 That, he explained, in allusion to his 
 early life at Moor Park, was treatment 
 of which he had already had ample 
 experience, and he now expected every 
 great Minister who honoured him with 
 his acquaintance, if he heard or saw any- 
 thing to his disadvantage, to let him 
 know it in plain words, and not to put 
 
IV OF THE PRESS 75 
 
 him in pain to guess, by the change or 
 coldness of his countenance or behaviour. 
 " For it was what I would hardly bear 
 from a crowned head, and I thought no 
 subject's favour was worth it ; and I 
 designed to let my lord keeper and Mr. 
 Harley know the same thing, that they 
 might use me accordingly." This ex- 
 treme sensitiveness to the passing moods 
 of men was the secret of Swift's charac- 
 ter. Inordinate pride was the main- 
 spring of his actions in life ; and the 
 story of his political career, as well as 
 of his domestic trials, must be read by 
 the light of this ruling passion. 
 
 He chose to marry Stella secretly 
 rather than to introduce Lady Temple's 
 waiting -maid as his wife to his great 
 London friends. He plumed himself 
 upon never having asked a personal 
 favour of Oxford, — except permission 
 to attend him when the fallen Minister 
 was imprisoned in the Tower. Yet no 
 man ever had higher pretensions, or 
 took a loftier view of his own deserts. 
 That he earned by his great services 
 every mark of gratitude from his party, 
 no impartial critic of the time can doubt. 
 
76 THE POWER iv 
 
 That he obtained such slight reward 
 is a valuable commentary upon political 
 gratitude in general, and upon the par- 
 ticular danger of incurring personal 
 animosities even in the disinterested 
 furtherance of a great cause. 
 
 The Examiner was by no means the 
 only literary assistance that Swift fur- 
 nished to Harley and St. John. His 
 activity at this time was extraordinary. 
 Neither prose nor verse was spared, if a 
 weak place could be found in the armour 
 of the Whigs. Perhaps the most mas- 
 terly of these productions was the treatise 
 on the Conduct of the Allies^ which was 
 published in 1 7 1 1 while the question of 
 peace or war was being argued in Parlia- 
 ment. It became the text-book of the 
 Ministerialists ; and its four editions 
 contributed, in a degree now hard to 
 realise, to their successful defence of 
 their indefensible peace. 
 
 Swift's private life, his intimacy with 
 Vanessa, his intrigues with Stella, al- 
 though full of interest to the student 
 of character and manners, have no direct 
 bearing upon political or social events. 
 
 The temperament and talents of this 
 
IV OF THE PRESS 77 
 
 man, so singularly unsuited to his ecclesi- 
 astical profession in the reign of Anne, 
 would have raised him to the highest 
 offices of the Church a century earlier. 
 He was a Churchman of the Tudor 
 stamp ; and under the seventh or eighth 
 Henry his career might have rivalled 
 that of Wolsey. He was born too late 
 for his personal happiness and advantage, 
 although opportunely for mankind. 
 
 Instead of an archbishopric and the 
 Chancellor's Seal, he was destined to 
 hold no office superior to that of the 
 second-rate Deanery of St. Patrick, for- 
 merly obscure, but now for ever associated 
 with his strange and strong personality. 
 In the domain of politics his position 
 was that of a powerful party supporter^ 
 
 *^"and not that of a party leader. During 
 the eventful years which followed the 
 lali of the Whigs, Swift's assistance was 
 
 ^."consistently sought and heartily given. 
 
 ''"" When the quarrel between Oxford and 
 Bolingbroke came to a head, he laboured 
 hard to effect a reconciliation and to 
 patch up peace between them. He 
 loved Oxford as a man, but he as- 
 signed to him as a politician and col- 
 
78 THE POWER iv 
 
 league the chief blame for this unhappy 
 disruption of the Tory party. Whether 
 his view was correct matters little. Des- 
 perate efforts were made by Bolingbroke 
 to enlist Swift upon his side. To his 
 honour Swift remained staunch to the 
 man whom he had looked upon as his 
 friend, although he conceived him to be 
 in the wrong. He retired for a while to 
 the house of a friend in Berkshire. While 
 there he received maify flattering pro- 
 posals from Bolingbroke, who ofi^ered to 
 reconcile him with the Queen and ensure 
 him preferment. At the same moment, 
 however, Oxford, a disgraced Minister, 
 appealed to his comradeship. Swift, 
 with rare disinterestedness, at once 
 answered the call, and made the sacri- 
 fice of advancement on the altar of 
 friendship. ^^ I meddle not with his 
 faults," he wrote, " as he was a Minister 
 of State, but you know his personal 
 kindness to me was excessive ; he dis- 
 tinguished and chose me above all men 
 when he was great ; and his letter to me 
 the other day was the most moving 
 imaginable." 
 
 The death of the Queen swept away 
 
IV OF THE PRESS 79 
 
 all necessity for choice between the rival 
 statesmen, and all necessity for their 
 reconciliation, enveloping Bolingbroke 
 and Oxford and Swift in one common 
 proscription. For six years the Dean 
 lived peacefully in Ireland ; but in 1720 
 his political activity recommenced. 
 
 He appeared, however, in a new part. 
 No longer the most formidable scribe of 
 a political party, he stepped into the 
 political arena as the defender of the 
 supposed rights of his Irish compatriots. 
 To Swift, as much as to any one man, is 
 due the fatal distinction which has been 
 drawn between the native Irish and the 
 English settlers in Ireland. With all 
 the skill of which he was master, he 
 drove home this childish and unhealthy 
 delusion. 
 
 The Drapier Letters, famous for their 
 successful attack upon a project quite 
 Jndefensible both from the standpoint of 
 the time as well as from that of the 
 present day, nevertheless performed.^j.^ 
 sorry ^service for Ireland. They served 
 to. accentuate the lamentable differences 
 hetween the Irish people and the Execu- 
 tive Government as well as between the 
 
 •V><-!i»a(»5)r«f*Vi''**" 
 
8o THE POWER iv 
 
 men of^Jtish^ -a«d-ef English blood. 
 TEey helped to connect Irish " pat- 
 riotism/* as this false sentiment was 
 called, with a just resentment at high- 
 handed and impolite acts, and they went 
 far to bring about that state of feeling 
 and rank growth of ideas which, in these 
 "Hays, has rendered necessary a partial 
 abandonment of the great policy of Mr. 
 Pitt for the unity of Great Britain and 
 Ireland. 
 
 It is not part of the Irish nature to 
 forecast consequences, or the Drapier 
 Club, formed in honour of Swift, would 
 not have included men seriously anxious 
 for the welfare of their country. 
 
 To have obtained the surrender ot 
 Wood's patent, to have destroyed 
 " Wood's halfpence," which was the 
 immediate object of the Drapier Letters, 
 was to have earned, it was conceived, 
 immortal gratitude. But the boon was 
 obtained at a heavy price, the payment 
 of which extends even to these days. 
 
 Rancour, frothy demonstrations of ill- 
 will, wahTof confidence, false distinctions 
 3rawn between men of blood intermingled 
 for centuries, and of interests absolutely 
 
IV OF THE PRESS 8i 
 
 similar, are part of the legacy which Swift 
 left tbTiis countrymen in Ireland. Un- 
 fortnriately no statesmanship equal to 
 Chatham's, no genius comparable to Sir 
 Walter Scott's, have been found to re- 
 move the burden of misunderstanding 
 and prejudice which has broken down 
 the patience of the English people. 
 
 The Drapier's head, at the termina- 
 tion of his victorious struggle, became 
 a sign ; his portrait was engraved, woven 
 on handkerchiefs, struck upon medals, 
 and displayed everywhere as the liber- 
 ator of Ireland. In the highest and 
 most permanent interests of that dis- 
 tressful country, it would perhaps have 
 been better could it have been displayed 
 over Temple Bar. 
 
 In 1726, for the first time since the 
 Queen's death. Swift visited London. 
 His old friends rejoiced to see him. 
 They were a broken and disorganised 
 party. Bolingbroke had indeed returned 
 from exile, but his authority and in- 
 fluence in politics were lost. Swift now 
 sought to draw nearer to Pope. He 
 visited him at his villa near Twicken- 
 ham, and spent much time in his com- 
 
82 THE POWER iv 
 
 pany. Pope, though a political friend, 
 was before all things a man of letters. 
 Swift car ed nothing for literary excel- 
 lehce. In his view literature was but a 
 Itteans to a political end. Pope aroused 
 *nd jealousy in him. England had now 
 settled down quietly under the govern- 
 ment of Walpole. The practical sense 
 of Swift urged him to recognise this 
 state of facts, and his genuine desire to 
 secure benefits for Ireland assisting him, 
 he obtained through Lord Peterborough 
 an introduction to Walpole. 
 
 J.t was difficult for an English Minister 
 to overcome the natural prejudice of the 
 official mind against the author of the 
 Drapier Letters. The interview achieved 
 no result beyond rumours that Swift had 
 passed over to the Whigs. Pulteney 
 angled for his support. There was a 
 "chance of his being once more drawn 
 into the vortex of English political strife. 
 Pope, with the instincts of true friend- 
 ship, urged him not to commit himself, 
 to remain 
 
 Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri. 
 
 To this Swift replied that he need 
 
IV OF THE PRESS 83 
 
 have no fear ; that it was too late in 
 life for him to act otherwise than to 
 stand aloof from party struggles ; and 
 that the road of virtue was for him con- 
 sequently easy. Age but rarely dims the 
 passion of so strenuous a soul as that of 
 Swift, or hardens into indifference a mind 
 so sensitive as his, and Gulliver s Travels 
 was the last great contribution to political 
 satire of one who has no equal in the 
 calendar of English journalists. 
 
 It is unnecessary to follow Swift 
 through his long public career of twenty- 
 eight years. Still less important, except 
 to students of psychology, is the sad end 
 to this storm-tossed life. That Swift 
 was unfortunate in his choice of a pro- 
 fession no one ever doubted. That he 
 was unlucky to have been born under 
 the Whig constitution may be admitted. 
 Notwithstanding these drawbacks to 
 his personal success, his work for 
 English literature was valuable and solid. 
 He stands next to Bolingbroke as the 
 founder of modern style. Its character 
 has been said to be, that it consists of 
 proper words in proper places ; and no 
 higher praise could well be given. Its 
 
84 THE POWER iv 
 
 extreme simplicity was noted by Dr. 
 Johnson. " The rogue never hazards a 
 figure," he said, not disapprovingly. In 
 conceiving, as he did, the "Society of 
 Brothers," a band of men of first-rate 
 eminence and talent, selected it is true 
 fi*om the Tory party only, his primary 
 object was to limit and fix the English 
 tongue by a general standard, after the 
 manner of the French Academy. Per- 
 haps it is as well that he failed in his 
 immediate object ; but indirectly he did, 
 as he desired to do, " correct, improve, 
 and ascertain " the English tongue ; and 
 from the age of Queen Anne, of which 
 Swift was the principal literary star amid 
 a galaxy of talent, dates the renaissance 
 of English prose writing. 
 
 Of his work, that which he designed 
 to be ephemeral has outlasted in popular- 
 ity his more serious efforts. Gulliver s 
 Travels will live as long as the literature 
 of this country is preserved. His Journal 
 to Stella is an invaluable commentary 
 upon the time which it embraces. Among 
 the lighter prose pieces the Hints for 
 Conversation and his Advice to a young 
 Girl are charming examples of his cool 
 
IV OF THE PRESS 85 
 
 judgment and easy style. As a writer of 
 verse he was as skilful as Prior, more 
 witty than Gay, but lacked the smooth- 
 ness of Pope, his great contemporary and 
 friend at Twickenham. 
 
 The songs said to be contributed by 
 Swift to the Beggar s Opera compare 
 favourably with those by Gay himself. 
 It is, however, as a writer of simple prose, 
 in which he clothed ideas of singular 
 ingenuity, and reflections of curious and 
 manifold interest, that Swift will be re- 
 membered. Among ephemeral writers 
 upon controversial topics he is unsur- 
 passed. Not even Junius can be com- 
 pared with him. His place among men 
 of letters is especially interesting as the 
 founder in England of that great school 
 of journalism of which Voltaire and 
 Diderot were the origin in France, and 
 which has become part of the machinery 
 of government in both countries. 
 
S6 THE INFENTION OF 
 
 THE INVENTION OF CABINET 
 RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 A YOUNG Englishman reading of the 
 Restoration period, of its cosmopolitan 
 manners, its silks and satins, its polished 
 witticism, and its Anacreontic revels, 
 cannot recognise his fellow-countrymen. 
 Charles the Second himself was in 
 habits and ways of speech a Frenchman. 
 The change was rapid. With the acces- 
 sion of George the First, that is to say 
 after a lapse of time less than divides us 
 to-day from the birth of the Prince of 
 Wales, or even of younger children of 
 Queen Victoria, England had so altered, 
 that the figures on the political stage 
 seem to us perfectly familiar. 
 
 King George was a German of the 
 type to which we are now accustomed in 
 
V CABINET RESPONSIBILITT 87 
 
 the Royal House. His Minister, Sir 
 Robert Walpole, possessed all those 
 characteristics of the sporting squire, 
 fond of good living, and keen about 
 politics, with which English lads of this 
 day are familiar. He had had an Eton 
 education. He had shown himself fond 
 of all games and field sports, and yet 
 could be sober and diligent in his work. 
 After the fashion of his race, as a lad 
 and through life, his love of sport pre- 
 vailed over every passion. A letter 
 from his huntsman or his gamekeeper 
 would always have precedence over any 
 political despatch, however important. 
 To shrewd observers it was clear, when 
 the Queen's death destroyed the govern- 
 ment of Bolingbroke, that Walpole was 
 the rising man. At first under the new 
 reign little was heard of him. Until 
 the Elector of Hanover could be in- 
 formed that he had become King of 
 England, and could take possession of 
 his kingdom, the supreme authority was 
 vested in eighteen Lords Justices named 
 in a document long kept secret, and only 
 disclosed by the Hanoverian agent in 
 London on the death of Queen Anne. 
 
88 THE INFENTION OF v 
 
 From this document two things were 
 clear : — 
 
 First, that King George intended to 
 rely upon the Whigs. Secondly, that he 
 distrusted powerfiil party leaders. None 
 of these were included in the list of 
 Lords Justices ; not even Marlborough. 
 Presently, when George the First landed 
 in England, he chose for his Minister 
 Lord Townshend ; yet so afraid was the 
 King of a tyrannical Junto, that although 
 he had selected from among the Whigs 
 a Minister of little weight, he could not 
 bring himself to give him the Lord 
 Treasurer's staff. Townshend became 
 Secretary of State. Associated with him 
 was General Stanhope. The Treasury 
 was put into commission. King George 
 showed prudence and wisdom. He was 
 phlegmatic of temperament and not the 
 reverse of shrewd. He was a man of 
 fifty-four, with experience of govern- 
 ment and of the world. Quite conscious 
 of the fact that he was a foreigner in 
 England, aware of the inconvenience his 
 ignorance of the language must occasion 
 to him and to his Ministers, he determined 
 to proceed warily. 
 
V CJBINE7 RESPONSIBILITT 89 
 
 Although Townshend and Stanhope 
 led the new Government, to use modern 
 phraseology, in the House of Lords and 
 Commons, real authority was vested in 
 one who was not even included in the 
 Cabinet. The Paymaster of the Forces 
 was Walpole. Comparatively speaking it 
 was a humble office. But Walpole's influ- 
 ence over Townshend was very great ; 
 while his debating power was second only 
 to that of Bolingbroke. Such a position 
 would now be wholly false, and in those 
 days could not last under the novel con- 
 ditions of parliamentary life. It is no 
 matter of surprise therefore that in a 
 few months' time, October 171 5, Wal- 
 pole was promoted to the high office of 
 First Lord of the Treasury. 
 
 The new Parliament had met in the 
 month of March ; and its assembling 
 was remarkable for three events. The 
 King, though present at the opening, 
 was unable from his ignorance of English 
 to deliver the customary speech, which 
 was read in the King's presence by the 
 Chancellor. In the House of Lords, 
 Lord Bolingbroke delivered his last 
 oration in Parliament. In the Commons, 
 
90 THE INVENTION OF v 
 
 the address was moved by Walpole, 
 already in reality the leader of the 
 House, and soon to become its unques- 
 tioned master for a period of over a 
 quarter of a century. 
 
 The quiet and peaceful accession of 
 George the First was the final triumph 
 of the Revolution of 1688. With 
 Bolingbroke's fall all rational hope of 
 a Stuart restoration vanished. Hence- 
 forth the principle that the Crown 
 devolved not by hereditary right but 
 by an Act of Parliament, was firmly 
 established. 
 
 It was natural and proper that the 
 party favourable to the Protestant suc- 
 cession should carry on the Government 
 of the new King. The General Election 
 of 171 5 returned a Whig majority to 
 the House of Commons, reversing the 
 national judgment of two years back. 
 
 To Marlborough the command of the 
 army was given. 
 
 The Earl of Ormond, the Commander- 
 in-Chief, to whom the King announced 
 his removal and the name of his successor 
 almost immediately on his arrival at St. 
 James's, at once left London, and shortly 
 
V CABINET RESPONSIBILITT 91 
 
 left England for ever. Bolingbroke had 
 not neglected to adopt similar precau- 
 tions. 
 
 One of the King's first acts was to 
 reconstitute the Privy Council. The 
 numbers of this body were reduced to 
 thirty-three. All the Tory Ministers 
 of Queen Anne were excluded. Eight 
 of the new Privy Councillors formed the 
 Cabinet : Townshend and Stanhope, the 
 Chancellor Cowper, Sunderland, Notting- 
 ham, Halifax, Somers, and Marlborough. 
 Lord Somers' appointment was rather 
 complimentary than effective, for he was 
 very infirm. Marlborough's great name 
 was a source of strength and honour to 
 the Government, but he had no authority 
 or influence over his colleagues or over 
 the King. 
 
 Sunderland, as Lord - Lieutenant of 
 Ireland, was rarely present at the Cabinet 
 Council. Real power was vested in 
 Townshend, Stanhope, and Cowper. 
 The ablest of them was undoubtedly 
 the Chancellor, and on many difficult 
 questions his authority prevailed. Gen- 
 eral Stanhope had been selected for office 
 by the King himself without reference 
 
92 THE INVENTION OF v 
 
 to Townshend. The explanation of this 
 choice lay in the circumstance that of 
 all living Englishmen, except Marl- 
 borough, his reputation stood highest 
 on the Continent. He was a soldier, 
 a diplomatist, and a man of letters ; 
 and he had been thrown into intimate 
 relations with foreign statesmen. Town- 
 shend's influence, however, in the Cabinet 
 was in reality supreme. It was not that 
 he was a man of specially strong charac- 
 ter. On the contrary, vehement and 
 choleric by nature, he was somewhat 
 infirm of purpose ; but behind him stood 
 Walpole. On Walpole's judgment he 
 relied. He took on all important ques- 
 tions the advice of the Paymaster General ; 
 for he was shrewd enough to appreciate 
 that just as Walpole's judgment was 
 sound, so his authority over the House 
 of Commons was already dangerously 
 assured. 
 
 One great constitutional change had 
 quietly taken place. The Sovereign no 
 longer attended the deliberations of the 
 Cabinet. Queen Anne had presided at 
 her Council. Sometimes, in a fit of 
 spleen, after Lady Masham's influence 
 
V CABINET RESPONSIBILITT 93 
 
 had undermined Godolphin, the Queen 
 would sit silent at the Board for awhile, 
 and then suddenly, without a word of 
 explanation, rise and break up the 
 Council. It is curious to note that 
 the Council Board was the only table 
 at which Queen Anne was accustomed 
 to sit down with a subject. Her habit 
 was invariably to take her dinner alone. 
 Not even Prince George, her husband, 
 sat at dinner in her presence. Custom 
 in these matters, as in others, changed 
 rapidly ; for in a few years' time. Queen 
 Caroline dined in Walpole's house at 
 Chelsea. It is true that her host after 
 taking his place behind her chair and 
 handing her the first dish, dined with 
 her suite in an adjoining room. But 
 Lady Walpole sat at the Queen's table. 
 Queen Anne sat, however, with her 
 Ministers in Council. King George's 
 presence in the Council Chamber would 
 have been altogether superfluous, and 
 an inconvenience, for he neither spoke 
 nor understood English. He had never 
 cared to learn to do either. So the 
 Cabinet, owing to chance, glided into 
 a habit which has since become a great 
 
94 THE INDENTION OF v 
 
 constitutional usage. The Cabinet 
 Council had not at this time assumed, 
 if it has yet done so, a final shape. 
 Twenty years later it consisted of four- 
 teen members. These included the 
 great household officers. Even this 
 number is smaller than that to which 
 in quite recent times we have been ac- 
 customed. Walpole found so large a 
 body an unwieldy instrument. He con- 
 stituted gradually and unostentatiously 
 an inner Cabinet, consisting of the two 
 Secretaries of State, the Chancellor, and 
 himself; and the confidential business 
 was transacted by this select quartet. 
 
 The fiction that power resided in 
 the Cabinet as a whole was not disturbed. 
 So little, however, was it really the case, 
 that the Duke of Newcastle, with singular 
 tactlessness, on one occasion, when the 
 King's speech was under discussion, 
 having omitted a paragraph which 
 Walpole desired to suppress altogether, 
 instead of quietly dropping out the 
 obnoxious words without comment, 
 turned and whispered to Lord Hard- 
 wicke, the Chancellor, for some minutes, 
 and then adding, " You take me," passed 
 
V CABINET RESPONSIBILITT 95 
 
 on to the next paragraph. The Chancellor 
 said nothing, but took snufF and looked 
 wise, we are told, which under the cir- 
 cumstances was perhaps the simplest 
 course open to him. But the incident 
 gave offence then, as it would give 
 ofFence now, to the Minister's colleagues. 
 Indeed, a Minister could scarcely openly 
 exhibit want of confidence in his colleagues 
 in Cabinet to-day, however strong the 
 temptation. It has happened that, 
 for the effective carrying out of certain 
 acts of high policy, it was, in recent 
 years, still found necessary at times to 
 have an inner Cabinet within the Cabinet ; 
 and during Mr. Gladstone's administra- 
 tion from 1880 to 1885 it was found 
 that, without such an arrangement, no 
 difficult contentious business could be 
 transacted, when absolute secrecy was 
 essential to success. In many respects, 
 even to the detail of limiting refreshment 
 to plain biscuits and water. Cabinet 
 Councils under the presidency of Walpole 
 resembled those credibly believed to 
 be held in Downing Street in these 
 days. Time was wasted then, as now, 
 by garrulous Ministers; tempers were 
 
96 THE INFENTION OF v 
 
 tried by overbearing ones. Authority 
 exercised was in inverse ratio to talking 
 done. One advantage is enjoyed by 
 Ministers in the present day. Cabinet 
 Councils under George the First were 
 generally summoned in the cockpit at 
 Whitehall, about eight o'clock at night, 
 after dinner ; and there is no limit 
 to the possibilities of discursiveness after 
 dinner. 
 
 Queen Anne's Cabinets were held as 
 a rule on Sunday evenings at six, but 
 then the Queen's presence controlled the 
 natural flow of discussion. 
 
 It is not wonderful that Lord Hervey, 
 who left a few, unfortunately a very few, 
 notes in reference to these Councils, fre- 
 quently complains of waste of time. 
 Walpole, to judge from the description, 
 spoke little. The initiative seems to 
 have been taken, and the discussions 
 conducted, by the Duke of Newcastle, 
 who was Secretary of State. The Duke 
 went by the nickname of ^' hubble- 
 bubble." Nothing could convey to 
 us a better idea of the authority 
 of Walpole than his silence on these 
 occasions. When he thought fit to 
 
V CABINET RESPONSIBILITT 97 
 
 interfere, all the " mutes and starers," 
 as Hervey calls them, at once chimed in 
 with " to be sure, to be sure." 
 
 Walpole's position is well illustrated 
 by a scene which Lord Hervey describes. 
 The business was over, the Cabinet was 
 breaking up, and Walpole was on his 
 legs to go away, when Newcastle said : 
 " If you please, I would speak one word 
 to you before you go " ; to which Wal- 
 pole replied: " I do not please, my Lord ; 
 but if you will, you must." " Sir, I 
 shall not trouble you long." " Well, 
 my Lord, that's something ; but I had 
 rather not be troubled at all : won't it 
 keep cold till to-morrow V " Perhaps 
 not, sir." " Well, come then, let's have 
 it"; upon which encouraging prelude 
 they retired to a corner of the room, 
 where his Grace whispered very softly, 
 and Sir Robert answered nothing but 
 aloud, and said nothing aloud but every 
 now and then, " Pooh ! pshaw ! O Lord! 
 O Lord ! Pray be quiet. My God, can't 
 you see it is over ? " 
 
 The subject of the conversation matters 
 very little, but the scene throws light on 
 relations and manners between colleagues 
 
 H 
 
98 THE INVENTION OF v 
 
 which, in these days, would scarcely con- 
 duce to the maintenance of friendly 
 agreement in Council. 
 
 Walpole's greatest achievement, during 
 a long tenure of office, was his careful 
 tending of this institution of government 
 by a Cabinet, that is to say by a Com- 
 mittee of the Privy Council, at the 
 deliberations of which the Sovereign was 
 not present, nominally responsible to the 
 King, but in reality dependent on a 
 parliamentary majority. It was hard 
 work, and the means used, in a venal 
 age, were not pure according to modern 
 standards. 
 
 The Sovereign was still powerful 
 enough to embarrass and even tempo- 
 rarily to destroy a Minister. But the 
 King could not for long contend against 
 a Minister backed by Parliament. When 
 George the First went on a visit to 
 Hanover, accompanied by Stanhope and 
 Sunderland, he was induced by their 
 jealous representations to dismiss Town- 
 shend. Walpole at once resigned. It 
 so happened that this became Wal pole's 
 opportunity. He fully availed himself 
 of it. 
 
V CABINET RESPONSIBILITT 99 
 
 Owing to the wild speculations arising 
 out of the South-Sea Bubble, the finances 
 of the country had been thrown into 
 confusion. Walpole's sound business 
 capacity had never misled him as to the 
 inevitable result of Law's projects. He 
 had prophesied their failure. Meanwhile 
 in his private capacity he had availed 
 himself of the public madness to add to 
 his fortune by purchase and sale, at a 
 thousand per cent profit, of South-Sea 
 Stock. His contemporaries, whatever 
 view of such a transaction may now be 
 taken, admired his shrewd perspicacity. 
 In the eyes of the country Walpole was 
 the one strong capable man. The 
 Ministry was certainly not an impressive 
 one, and the Ministers carried individu- 
 ally little weight in public estimation. 
 When Stanhope was made a Viscount 
 in 1 7 17, and the lead of the House 
 of Commons thereupon devolved upon 
 Addison, Craggs, and Aislabie, they were 
 quite unable to hold their own against 
 Walpole. Addison, so eminent in letters, 
 was the feeblest of Ministers. As 
 Secretary of State his failure was painfial. 
 Craggs was called Lord Sunderland's 
 
loo THE INFENTION OF v 
 
 man — a fairly honest hard-working 
 obscure man. Aislabie, as Finance 
 Minister, had trafficked largely in South- 
 Sea Stock, and his reputation, unlike 
 Walpole's, had suffered. When the 
 Bubble burst, the popular fury was 
 concentrated upon these Ministers ; and 
 the eyes of all men turned to Walpole. 
 With patriotic shrewdness he showed 
 himself anxious to stand between the 
 King's Government and the popular 
 indignation. His task was facilitated in 
 a strange fashion. Lord Stanhope had 
 literally died of rage, occasioned by a 
 personal attack upon him in the House 
 of Lords by the young and dissolute 
 Duke of Wharton ; Craggs speedily 
 followed him, succumbing to an attack, 
 quite as deadly, of smallpox; while within 
 three weeks of the Elections, on the 
 19th of April 1722, Sunderland passed 
 away beyond the reach of parliamentary 
 censures and impeachments. It is 
 impossible at the same time to omit 
 to notice, although public events were 
 not affected thereby, the death, in the 
 month of June, of John Duke of 
 Marlborough. Aislabie was expelled 
 
V CABINET RESPONSIBILITT loi 
 
 from the House of Commons and sent 
 to the Tower. 
 
 Amid this murrain of leading politi- 
 cians, Walpole, as it can be well imagined, 
 remained master of the field. Fortune 
 had cleared his path of all competitors. 
 The Elections of March 1722 had 
 returned a large majority for the Whigs, 
 and the Jacobites and Tories recognised 
 that, except in conspiracy, their chances 
 were hopeless. 
 
 One of the first at length clearly to 
 understand the hopelessness of the Jacobite 
 cause was Bolingbroke. This conviction 
 on his part led to his giving explanations 
 which resulted in a pardon under the 
 Great Seal ; and in 1723, within a 
 year of Walpole's accession to office, 
 Bolingbroke returned to England. 
 
 The leader of the Tory party was then 
 Sir William Wyndham, a man of stainless 
 honour, who contrived to represent with 
 unblemished reputation a disreputable 
 cause. The other great Tory leader had 
 been Simon Harcourt ; but " Trimming 
 Harcourt," as Swift maliciously called 
 him, had recognised the power of Wal- 
 pole even before it occurred to Boling- 
 
I02 THE INDENTION OF v 
 
 broke. As months rolled on, Walpole's 
 path grew smoother. One serious 
 attempt by a really capable man was 
 made to overthrow him. This rival 
 was Carteret, afterwards Lord Granville, 
 a man of brilliant parts, a scholar, a 
 linguist, and a daring politician. But he 
 had grave moral defects. His ambition 
 was lofty but too fitful. His indifference 
 to the more tender relations of political 
 friendship was profound ; and in moments 
 of trial such indifference, felt and recipro- 
 cated, is fatal to leadership. He was 
 said to possess no feeling except that of 
 thirst ; for his love of wine was unusual 
 even in those wine-loving times. 
 
 Such a man, however great his abilities, 
 had no chance against the bluff joviality 
 and shrewd comradeship of Walpole. 
 Carteret took advantage, as had Sunder- 
 land on a previous occasion, of a journey 
 to Hanover with the King to try and 
 trip up the First Lord of the Treasury. 
 But Townshend, who had also accom- 
 panied the King, supported as usual by 
 the cool advice of Walpole, was too strong 
 an antagonist. King George had gained 
 experience. Wary he had ever been. 
 
V CABINET RESPONSIBILITT 103 
 
 Carteret's manoeuvre failed; and his 
 failure left Walpole complete master of 
 the Court, as he already was of the 
 Parliament. Henceforth, for five years, 
 about the full term of a modern Adminis- 
 tration, he and his colleagues quietly 
 ruled an uneventful England. Then 
 there occurred a crisis, which his enemies 
 hailed as a certain prelude to his final 
 disappearance from office. King George 
 died on his way to Hanover in 1727. 
 
 In point of fact casual observers and 
 superficial critics had not grasped the full 
 extent of the changes which government 
 by Cabinet, based on party organisation, 
 had brought about in political life. 
 
 The work of King George the First, 
 as Ranke points out, had been to keep 
 the Pretender at a distance, and to estab- 
 lish on a firm basis the Whig-Hanoverian, 
 government of England. This end was 
 gained. The weakness of character so 
 marked in the Pretender, and the firm 
 attitude of the Whigs, had contributed to 
 make the King's task easy. 
 
 Lady Cowper, wife of the Chancellor, 
 whose charming and interesting Journal 
 was for so long withheld from the world, 
 
104 'I'HE INFENTION OF v 
 
 relates how peevish the sense of their 
 complete discomfiture had rendered the 
 Jacobites. At the coronation of George I. 
 " My Lady Dorchester stood underneath 
 me, and when the Archbishop went 
 round the throne demanding the consent 
 of the people, she turned about to me 
 and said : ' Does the old Fool think that 
 anybody here will say No ! to his 
 question when there are so many drawn 
 swords ? ' " There was no remedy but 
 patience ; and so everybody was pleased 
 or pretended to be so. 
 
 A peevish sense of weakness on the 
 one side, a calm, orderly demeanour on 
 the other, and " so many drawn swords." 
 Such was the attitude of the two parties 
 into which England was divided. How 
 could the weaker have reasonable hope 
 of success ? When George II. succeeded 
 his father, the Jacobite cause was at a 
 still lower ebb. Bolingbroke had ac- 
 cepted a pardon from the Hanoverian 
 monarch. Lord Harcourt had thrown 
 in his lot with the enemy. The Jacobites 
 were left to the tender mercies of the wild 
 Duke of Wharton, and of Bishop Atter- 
 bury. Hope being altogether inde- 
 
V CABINET RESPONSIBILITT 105 
 
 pendent of reasonable probability, the 
 death of the King brought a gleam of 
 hope to the Jacobite cause. At any 
 rate for the Tory party, if not for the 
 exiled family, there was the chance of 
 Walpole's disgrace. 
 
 The Prince of Wales had quarrelled 
 much with the King, and had spoken in 
 harsh and bitter terms of Walpole. It 
 was certain that he would try to govern 
 by means of the discontented Whigs and 
 Ministers chosen from the Opposition. 
 Who could tell to what confusion such 
 an attempt might lead ? In this confusion 
 lay hope for the Jacobite cause. 
 
 It was soon discovered that the caprice 
 of a sovereign was no longer the domin- 
 ant force in politics ; and the personal 
 predilections of the King had to yield to 
 his necessities. These were not im- 
 mediately apparent ; but a very few weeks 
 served to bring them into strong relief, and 
 to strip the King's mind of all desire to be 
 rid of his father's Minister. It is curious 
 to find Walpole, quite in the old manner, 
 killing two horses in his ride from Chelsea 
 to Richmond in order to be the first to 
 convey to the Prince news of his father's 
 
io6 THE INDENTION OF v 
 
 death. When he asked for instructions, 
 the King told him harshly to go to Chis- 
 wick and take them from Sir Spencer 
 Compton. It was no surprise to Walpole. 
 Compton was a favourite with the new 
 King. For years he had held the office of 
 Treasurer to the Prince of Wales, and also 
 had been elected to the dignified office of 
 Speaker by the House of Commons. 
 It was not yet known that he was in- 
 competent in business : a '^ plodding 
 heavy fellow, with great application, but 
 no talents." 
 
 To him therefore all eyes turned for 
 a while. His house was besieged by 
 courtiers, and by the great herd of aspir- 
 ants to honours and to the smiles of 
 princes. Walpole was abandoned. At 
 Leicester House, the residence of the 
 King, Walpole and Lady Walpole met 
 not only with neglect but rudeness, until 
 a word from the Queen effected an in- 
 stantaneous change in the demeanour of 
 the mobile society of the Court. 
 
 Lady Walpole herself describes the 
 difficulty she experienced in paying her 
 respects to the King and Queen, unable 
 to make her way between the scornful 
 
V CABINET RESPONSIBILITY 107 
 
 backs and elbows of her late devotees, 
 or to approach nearer than the third or 
 fourth row of cringing courtiers ; but no 
 sooner was she descried by her Majesty, 
 than the Queen cried aloud, " There I am 
 sure I see a friend" ; the torrent thereupon 
 divided, and shrunk to either side ; and 
 " as I came away," exclaimed Lady 
 Walpole, "il might have walked over their 
 heads if I had pleased." The Queen's 
 notice of Lady Walpole did in fact in- 
 dicate the sure set of the tide in favour 
 of Walpole. 
 
 The constitutional battle in truth was 
 won. The Whig-Hanoverian tradition 
 was to be maintained; and that new 
 constitutional government of the country, 
 by Ministers responsible primarily to 
 Parliament, and only in a minor degree 
 to the King, was found to have taken 
 root in the habits of Englishmen. 
 
 George the Second had not the abilities 
 of his father. Fortunately for him, by 
 his side stood the Queen, Caroline of 
 Anspach, who showed through her life 
 that capacity for government which Eng- 
 land has been lucky enough to find in 
 female sovereigns. 
 
io8 THE INFENTION OF v 
 
 In reality Queen Caroline was sove- 
 reign. No longer young, she neverthe- 
 less retained traces of beauty. Her 
 influence over the King was absolute. 
 He, with the usual blindness of hus- 
 bands who are ruled or deceived by 
 their wives, flattered himself that he was 
 the most absolute of monarchs. It was 
 a favourite topic with him. Charles, he 
 used to say, had been ruled by his mis- 
 tresses ; William by his Dutchmen ; 
 Queen Anne by her favourites. " But 
 who, do they say, rules now ^ " he would 
 ask triumphantly, amid the smiles of his 
 Court. Walpole, with his usual shrewd- 
 ness, had long noticed the intellectual 
 and moral strength of the Princess. He 
 respected her understanding, and she 
 knew that he did so. She, on the other 
 hand, appreciated his power. She de- 
 termined that he should remain the 
 King's Minister. Another clear-sighted 
 observer. Cardinal Fleury, then controll- 
 ing the policy of France, foresaw that 
 in Walpole lay the chief hope of stability 
 in the internal government and foreign 
 policy of England. 
 
 Two superficial causes, based on Wal- 
 
V CABINET RESPONSIBILITT 109 
 
 pole's parliamentary position, which was 
 the determining factor of the whole 
 situation, decided the action of the 
 King. 
 
 Horace Walpole, brother of the First 
 Lord of the Treasury, was at that time 
 English Minister in Paris. He was sent 
 over by Cardinal Fleury to the King to 
 warn him against shattering an alliance 
 with the only power in Europe then 
 specially friendly to England. George 
 the Second was much impressed, and 
 the point was strongly urged by the 
 Queen, with her usual force and effect 
 upon her husband's mind. Secondly, the 
 King's Civil List had to be fixed by a 
 parliamentary vote. Sir Spencer Comp- 
 ton was appealed to, and a sum named. 
 Walpole, when approached, was more 
 generous. He could afford to be so. 
 It was doubtful whether Compton could 
 obtain from the House of Commons the 
 lesser sum. It was certain that Walpole 
 could obtain the greater. Pulteney, 
 anxious to trip up the Minister, it is 
 true, made ample promises. The Queen's 
 sagacity, uninfluenced by the showy pro- 
 testations of Pulteney, determined the 
 
no CABINET RESPONSIBILITT v 
 
 King to adhere to the man who could 
 undoubtedly secure for him an ample 
 income, and who was not obliged, as 
 was poor Sir Spencer Compton, to have 
 the Royal Messages to Parliament com- 
 posed by deputy. 
 
 So Walpole remained, where from the 
 beginning it was certain he would have 
 to remain, at the helm of State. His 
 position was now assured to him so long 
 as he could retain for himself by superior 
 weight in debate, and for his Cabinet by 
 adroit management in the lobbies, a 
 majority in the House of Commons. 
 An Opposition was to develop which 
 was later on to destroy his power ; but 
 this took fifteen years to accomplish 
 from the period when his authority was 
 recognised by Caroline of Anspach and 
 the King. 
 
VI GOVERNMENT BY MAJORITY i\\ 
 
 VI 
 
 THE ESTABLISHMENT OF GOVERNMENT 
 
 BY MAJORITY OF THE HOUSE OF 
 
 COMMONS 
 
 When the long administration of Wal- 
 pole came to an end, it was said that his 
 fall was owing to inordinate ambition, 
 and to his inability to brook a rival, or 
 to tolerate near himself lofty talent. 
 Possibly many of the troubles which 
 beset him towards the close of his life 
 he might have been spared had he 
 possessed the art of attaching to his 
 fortunes younger men at once ambitious 
 and able. This art unquestionably he 
 did not possess ; yet it is by no means 
 certain that the admission into his 
 government of Pulteney or Carteret, or 
 Cobham or Pitt, would have given him 
 a longer tenure of office. 
 
 Walpole never was more powerful than 
 
112 GOVERNMENT BT MJJORITT vi 
 
 after the quarrel with Townshend, when, 
 with the exception of Lord Hardwicke, 
 his Cabinet contained no one of first- 
 rate capacity. Arrayed against him in 
 heterogeneous confusion were all the 
 talents of Parliament. In subsequent 
 days the most powerful of his successors, 
 the younger Pitt, found himself in a 
 similar parliamentary position. On the 
 other hand, Ministries of " All the 
 Talents," "Broad -bottomed Adminis- 
 trations," to use the slang names of 
 Cabinets formed by Mr. Pelham, Lord 
 Grenville, and Lord Aberdeen, have 
 been notorious for their weakness, and 
 have ever been shortlived. 
 
 Walpole's instinct for government was 
 so remarkable, his command over his 
 passions so well assured, that if he 
 excluded brilliant talents, and chose 
 hard-working dull officials as his sub- 
 ordinates, it may reasonably be attributed 
 to calculation rather than to petty jealousy. 
 Facile criticism suggests that in 1741 his 
 position would have been stronger if he 
 had in 1727 remained friendly with 
 Carteret and Townshend, and had given 
 high office to William Pulteney. Ex- 
 
VI OF HOUSE OF COMMONS 113 
 
 perience of other Ministries raises reason- 
 able doubts whether such a combination 
 could have lasted one-third of that long 
 period of office. Walpole maintained 
 his power over the House of Commons, 
 and it was thus that he was able to rule 
 England for over twenty years : a longer 
 period than Napoleon the First or his 
 nephew ruled France, a longer period 
 than Prince Bismarck controlled the 
 destinies of Germany. It was a great 
 feat of politics, and wellnigh reduces 
 the critic to silence. Certainly it may 
 be admitted that Walpole recognised 
 and clearly asserted his superiority in 
 the Cabinet. For the quarrel with 
 Townshend numerous reasons have 
 been sought. It has even been sug- 
 gested that one of them was Town- 
 shend's jealousy of the great house at 
 Houghton which Walpole had rebuilt 
 at enormous cost, the hospitalities 
 of which eclipsed those of Lord 
 Townshend's neighbouring home at 
 Raynham. 
 
 Walpole's own account of the matter 
 has an air of greater probability. " So 
 long," he said, " as the firm was Town- 
 I 
 
114 GOVERNMENT BY MAJORITY vi 
 
 shend and Walpole, all went well; as 
 soon as it became Walpole and Town- 
 shend, things went wrong." It was the 
 clash of two somewhat arbitrary natures, 
 and the strife for mastery, that broke 
 up the firm. That some of Walpole's 
 methods, according to modern standards, 
 were arbitrary, cannot be questioned. 
 
 To dismiss William Pitt from the 
 Blues because of a violent parliamentary 
 harangue would not be approved now ; 
 but the definition of a placeman at that 
 time was not altogether clear, and even 
 in these days a Minister would not 
 tolerate a vituperative speech from a 
 groom-in-waiting. Much, too, has been 
 made of Walpole's suppression of the 
 supplementary portion of the Beggar s 
 Opera^ in which he was lampooned in 
 the character of the highwayman Mac- 
 heath. The irritation caused by this 
 play appears to us excessive. Gay, the 
 author, was naturally annoyed at the 
 treatment his play received. His friends 
 rallied to his support, notably the beauti- 
 ful and eccentric Duchess of Queens- 
 berry, granddaughter of the Chancellor 
 Lord Clarendon. In fighting the battle 
 
VI OF HOUSE OF COMMONS 115 
 
 of her literary friend, she presumed so 
 far as to incur the displeasure of the 
 King, and to find herself excluded from 
 Court. Her written reply to the verbal 
 intimation that her presence would not 
 in future be pleasing to the Sovereign, 
 was couched in a form that would create 
 astonishment even in these democratic 
 days : '' The Duchess of Queensberry 
 is surprised and well pleased that the 
 King hath given her so agreeable a 
 command as to stay fi-om Court, where 
 she never came for diversion, but to 
 bestow a great civility on the King and 
 Queen." 
 
 No one would have been more aston- 
 ished than the Duchess of Queensberry 
 could she have foreseen that a century 
 and a half later the Lord Chamberlain 
 would still retain and exercise the power 
 to suppress political caricature on the 
 stage. Arbitrary as Walpole's act of 
 rigid censorship appeared to his con- 
 temporaries, it should not cause surprise 
 in these days. 
 
 The novelty of Walpole's maxims of 
 government was fully recognised by 
 those among his contemporaries who 
 
ii6 GOVERNMENT BY MAJORITY vi 
 
 were interested in politics. When he 
 insisted on the dismissal of Lord Chester- 
 field and Lord Clinton from their house- 
 hold offices it excited little comment, as 
 no personal motive was attributed to him 
 by unprejudiced persons. It was plain 
 that he was carrying out a plan of 
 homogeneous government by a party of 
 men who should at any rate outwardly 
 appear to be loyal to one another ; and 
 it was generally recognised and admitted 
 that his plan deserved a fair trial. 
 
 Official mutiny he could not tolerate, 
 nor could he permit it to go unpunished. 
 This was a natural and inevitable de- 
 velopment of government by a Cabinet 
 responsible to Parliament. It was 
 immediately followed by another in- 
 novation, which since has obtained a 
 hold upon party life in England. Wal- 
 pole, finding himself in a parliamentary 
 difficulty, and suffering from slack 
 attendance of members, summoned a 
 private meeting of the Whig party, 
 and delivered a speech something be- 
 tween a lecture and what in the political 
 slang of recent times is called a mani- 
 festo. The effect of this proceeding 
 
VI OF HOUSE OF COMMONS 117 
 
 was then found to be that which, at the 
 present day, a similar step on the part 
 of a Prime Minister generally produces, 
 and for about a week after the meeting 
 there seemed to be "a resurrection of 
 that party spirit which had been so long 
 dormant, that most people imagined it 
 was quite extinct ; and the next day in 
 the House, where the industry of both 
 parties had contributed to bring up 
 above five hundred members (in the 
 appointment of a Committee on Excise), 
 the Court list was carried by a majority 
 of ninety, most of the lists on both sides 
 being entire." Innovations did not rest 
 here. About this time there commenced 
 a practice, which has since become a 
 constitutional privilege, although one 
 not altogether free from abuse, that of 
 putting questions in Parliament upon 
 matters of fact to Ministers. The first 
 recorded instance occurred in the House 
 of Lords, in a matter of no present 
 importance. Lord Cowper, the ex- 
 Chancellor, was the inquisitive member. 
 Rising in his place, he mentioned a 
 certain rumour as "being a matter in 
 which the public was highly concerned, 
 
ii8 GOFERNMENT BT MAJORITY vi 
 
 and desired those In the administration 
 to acquaint the House whether there 
 was any ground for that report." Lord 
 Sunderland replied very much as Lord 
 Salisbury might to-day reply to a similar 
 question. 
 
 Walpole seems to have possessed in- 
 stinctively the knowledge of parliament- 
 ary requirements which a century and a 
 half of public experience of party govern- 
 ment, sixty years of which maybe counted 
 as personal, has bestowed upon the '' oldest 
 parliamentary hand" of modern times. 
 No one, as was made plain before Wal- 
 pole's accession to office, could be more 
 violent, more unscrupulous in opposition 
 than he. Yet as a Minister, with full 
 responsibility upon him, anxious above 
 all things to retain office, no one could 
 be more averse from violent measures 
 of policy. It was said of Callistus 
 by a contemporary that he knew that 
 active steps and even violent enter- 
 prises are a means of acquiring power, 
 but that to keep it, palliatives, delays, 
 and gentle methods are safest. " Prioris 
 quoque regiae peritus, et potentiam 
 cautis quam acrioribus consiliis tutius 
 
VI OF HOUSE OF COMMONS 119 
 
 haberi." This invaluable knowledge was 
 also granted to Walpole. 
 
 " Quieta non movere " became his 
 official maxim. Of course he occasionally 
 blundered. His attempt to touch the Ex- 
 cise was a breach of his own maxim, and 
 involved him in difficulties which nearly- 
 destroyed his power. His skill in escap- 
 ing from an untenable position saved 
 him, but it was at the price of his 
 measure. Walpole was a peace Minister. 
 He has been somewhat extravagantly 
 praised on this account. After the 
 exhausting wars of William and Marl- 
 borough, England and her old enemy 
 France were disinclined for war. It 
 was as much a period of peaceful re- 
 action as the thirty years' peace after 
 Waterloo, or the same period of ex- 
 emption after Sedan. 
 
 It so happened that Walpole's adminis- 
 tration coincided with this period. He 
 got the praise, just as in later years Mr. 
 Pitt got the blame for a war he was 
 powerless to prevent. England presently 
 recovered her strength, and as the younger 
 generation which knew not war grew to 
 manhood, the innate warlike tendency 
 
I20 GOVERNMENT BT MAJORITY vi 
 
 of the race asserted Itself, and Walpole, 
 in spite of himself, was dragged into 
 European conflict. A more conscientious 
 statesman might have resigned rather 
 than give way. Walpole was eminently 
 practical, and never prided himself on 
 his conscience. He was an " old par- 
 liamentary hand " ; nothing more. 
 
 It has been since observed, that there 
 is no statesmanship which finds resistance 
 to useless, and expensive, and even im- 
 moral wars, so hopeless as that of the 
 peace-exalting old parliamentary hand. 
 Walpole grumbled, but he bowed his 
 head, and remained in office as a mark 
 for the flouts and jeers of the younger 
 members of the House of Commons. 
 
 Although he yielded to pressure rather 
 than lose office, he showed plenty of 
 courage as well as of resource in self- 
 defence. Lord Hervey was accustomed 
 frequently to give the King accounts of 
 the attacks made upon his Minister in 
 Parliament, and of what Sir Robert had 
 said in reply to bitter invective, when 
 the King would often cry out — with 
 colour flushing into his cheeks, with 
 tears starting to his eyes, and with the 
 
VI OF HOUSE OF COMMONS 121 
 
 accompaniment of a vehement oath — 
 '' He is a brave fellow ; he has more 
 spirit than any man I ever knew." 
 
 This trait in Walpole, his jovial 
 courage, was one of the secrets of his 
 power. The country gentlemen admired 
 the sportsmanlike pluck of the Minister 
 who would go at an opponent as reso- 
 lutely as he would at a fence out hunt- 
 ing. His temper was imperturbable. 
 He was the most good-natured man 
 living. Once he lost his temper at a 
 Council, and immediately broke up the 
 Council, saying no man was fit for 
 business with a ruffled temper. He 
 had nothing of the weakness which was 
 the ruin of Pulteney. He was untainted 
 with avarice. His expenditure was 
 lavish. If he spent the King's money 
 in securing his parliamentary majority, 
 he spent his own at Houghton in enter- 
 taining his friends and neighbours. The 
 appointment of his household was on a 
 scale befitting the magnificence of his 
 house and gardens. Three thousand a 
 year was the cost of his annual hunt 
 for the benefit of his Norfolk neigh- 
 bours. He had other tastes which did 
 
122 GOVERNMENT BY MAJORITY vi 
 
 him no harm in the eyes of his con- 
 temporaries. 
 
 Molly Skerret was famous for her 
 beauty and for the passion with which 
 she inspired Walpole. If he had paid 
 five thousand pounds as entrance money, 
 besides an annual allowance, to this pretty 
 daughter of a London merchant, she 
 repaid it by faithful attachment. She 
 may have been really fond of the Minister, 
 although to the Queen, who certainly 
 appreciated his political capacity, if not 
 his personal charms, the idea seemed 
 absurd. " She must be a clever gentle- 
 woman," was her Majesty's comment, 
 ''to have made him believe that she 
 cares for him on any other score than 
 his money ; and to show you what fools 
 we all are in some point or other, she 
 has certainly told him some fine story 
 or other of her love and her passion, 
 and that poor man, avec ce gros corps^ 
 ces jambes enflees^ et ce vilain ventre^ 
 believes her. Ah, what is human 
 nature ! " 
 
 Molly Skerret, as the Queen surmised, 
 v/as a very clever gentlewoman, for she 
 contrived to captivate Lady Mary Wortley 
 
VI OF HOUSE OF COMMONS 123 
 
 Montague, one of whose famous letters 
 was addressed to her, and Lady Stafford, 
 persons altogether outside her sphere of 
 life. 
 
 Her powers of fascination are in- 
 directly borne witness to by Lady Mary, 
 who writes : " I see everybody, but con- 
 verse with nobody but des amis choisis ; 
 in the first rank of these are Lady 
 Stafford and dear Molly Skerret/' 
 
 It was said of Walpole that he was 
 ill-bred, but no proof of his want of 
 manners, if he is judged by the standard 
 of the time, has been recorded. In 
 conversation with the Queen he used 
 coarse expressions, but they were not 
 coarser than those often in the mouth 
 of her Majesty. If his court to the 
 Queen was assiduous, his frankness to 
 her was that of a true friend. No 
 flattery is more bewitching than this. 
 Occasionally he was forced to tell her 
 what we should consider brutal truths, 
 but he seems always to have uttered 
 them in a manner which avoided offence. 
 Even when urging her to ask Madame 
 Walmoden, the King's German favourite, 
 to England, he gave the unpalatable 
 
124 GOVERNMENT BT MAJORITY vi 
 
 advice with such businesslike frankness, 
 that the Queen's wounded feelings as a 
 wife were salved by the flattery to the 
 soundness of her understanding as a 
 woman. In all his dealings with the 
 Queen, Walpole showed a dexterity 
 which the most profound courtier — 
 and this he certainly was not — might 
 have envied. In talk, he was certainly 
 not less broad than his contemporaries ; 
 but freedom of utterance was the fashion 
 of the day. Lord Hervey composed a 
 play for the amusement of the Queen, 
 in which his own imaginary death was 
 supposed to be under discussion at Court. 
 Speeches were put into the mouth of 
 the Queen and her ladies so coarse that 
 they have been suppressed in the pub- 
 lished copies of the play. Yet it was 
 shown to the Queen and to the Princesses, 
 and was thoroughly enjoyed by them. 
 In palliation of the Queen's taste, it 
 must not be forgotten that her conver- 
 sation was mainly carried on in French, 
 and that phrases in that elegant tongue 
 have quite a diff^erent sound when trans- 
 lated into our crude vernacular. 
 
 George the First was obliged to 
 
VI OF HOUSE OF COMMONS 125 
 
 correspond with his Chancellor, Lord 
 Cowper, in dog-Latin. It was their only 
 language in common. George the 
 Second spoke English correctly, but 
 not easily. He found it difficult to 
 pronounce the letters P and G. Two 
 of his noted sayings were, " I hate all 
 Boets and Bainters," and " I do love old 
 Brentford : it reminds me so much of 
 Yarmany." On the other hand, he 
 wrote and spoke French with perfect 
 facility and some elegance. At Court 
 the ordinary conversation was carried 
 on in that language. To some extent 
 this accounts for the loose talk that 
 habitually prevailed. Walpole was 
 never accused of possessing much re- 
 finement or perfect taste ; and just as 
 his bulk and awkwardness rendered it 
 difficult for him to kneel to the King, 
 so his brutal frankness urged him to 
 speak whatever passed through his mind 
 to the Queen. She respected him for 
 the defects of his qualities, and this 
 respect, thanks to her effi3rts, the King 
 himself came to feel for his Minister. 
 
 Walpole, though untainted by the 
 philosophic atheism of Bolingbroke, was 
 
126 GOVERNMENT BT MAJORITY vi 
 
 not more orthodox than the majority 
 of his contemporaries in political life. 
 The spirit of the age was not religious. 
 At the death of the Queen, some pious 
 people found fault that no person had 
 been sent for to pray with her, and 
 Walpole in the ante-room to the death- 
 chamber desired the Princess Emily to 
 represent to the King that it would be 
 well to summon the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury for that purpose. The 
 Princess having made some objection, 
 Walpole in the presence of a dozen 
 people, including some of those who had 
 suggested this respectable course, burst 
 out : " Pray, Madam, let this farce be 
 played : the Archbishop will act it very 
 well. You may bid him be as short as 
 you will. It will do the Queen no hurt, 
 no more than any good ; and it will 
 satisfy all the wise and good fools, who 
 will call us all atheists if we don't pre- 
 tend to be as great fools as they are.*' 
 
 Considering the occasion, the place, 
 and the audience, candour of the kind, 
 called franchise brutal^ could scarcely go 
 much further. 
 
 Walpole, as his official life approached 
 
VI OF HOUSE OF COMMONS 127 
 
 its termination, lost none of his political 
 skill. He kept his head at the crisis of 
 his fate, for fear lest he should lose it 
 altogether from off his shoulders. One 
 after another the men of talent had 
 dropped into opposition. 
 
 Among the younger politicians Lyttel- 
 ton and Pitt were pre-eminent for the 
 vehemence of their language. Pulteney 
 could be vehement too. He, a mal- 
 content Whig, was the real leader of 
 Opposition, notwithstanding the nominal 
 leadership of the Tory Wyndham. 
 Pulteney invariably sat on the Govern- 
 ment bench, and often in close proximity 
 to Sir Robert. Their intercourse was 
 not unfriendly. When the critical 
 division came, and Walpole, for the first 
 time for twenty years, found himself in 
 a minority, his habitual friendly chaff 
 with Pulteney was useful to him. 
 Warily the Minister planned his retire- 
 ment. Secret terms were made by him 
 with Pulteney and Carteret through the 
 agency of Newcastle. He was to be 
 unmolested out of office. There were 
 to be no impeachments or imprisonings. 
 In his fall he maintained the principles of 
 
128 GOVERNMENT BY MAJORITY vi 
 
 the new system of parliamentary govern- 
 ment. For the first time, a fallen 
 Minister was permitted to retire in 
 security. 
 
 Bolingbroke had fled abroad in 1715. 
 Harley in the same year had been sent to 
 the Tower. Walpole, on the other hand, 
 went quietly down to Houghton. No 
 doubt there had been established a differ- 
 ence between the case of Walpole and that 
 of his predecessors. Former Ministers 
 had been rulers primarily in the interests 
 of the King as well as in his name. 
 Walpole, on the other hand, had for over 
 twenty years governed with the assent 
 and approval of a parliamentary majority, 
 and primarily in the interests of a free 
 Parliament. It would have been ridi- 
 culous to impeach him for acts the 
 responsibility for which was shared by 
 the representatives of the people. Cer- 
 tainly, the incongruity of the proceeding 
 might not have preserved the fallen 
 Minister, had he not secured himself by 
 arrangement with the Opposition leaders 
 from the malevolence of his political 
 foes, inebriated as they were bound to 
 be by their long-deferred triumph. An 
 
VI OF HOUSE OF COMMONS 129 
 
 attempt was made, as a matter of course, 
 to obtain inquiry into his conduct with 
 a view to his impeachment. It was 
 supported by the more ardent spirits 
 among his opponents, especially by Pitt 
 and Cobham, whom he had dismissed 
 from employment, and whose private 
 advances he had rejected, in favour of 
 those of his older and more tried adver- 
 saries. Pulteney and Carteret were 
 staunch to their bargain, and Walpole was 
 allowed to retire unmolested. The 
 rump of his administration for a while 
 continued to hold office under another 
 name. Lord Wilmington, known as 
 the Spencer Compton of earlier failures, 
 became its nominal chief. Pelham and 
 Newcastle, the Chancellor Hardwicke, 
 and Harrington, remained in office. 
 Carteret became Secretary of State. 
 Pulteney, adhering to a declaration made 
 in a rash moment to the effect that he 
 would not accept office, became a member 
 of the Cabinet without a department. 
 Walpole favoured the appointment of 
 Lord Wilmington to the Treasury, and 
 his suggestion having been eagerly 
 adopted by the King, was agreed to by 
 
130 GOVERNMENT BY MAJORITY vi 
 
 Pulteney. The Broad-bottomed Adminis- 
 tration was in reality Walpole^s govern- 
 ment without Walpole. The real Oppo- 
 sition, Pitt, Lyttelton, and the four Gren- 
 villes, were excluded from the King's 
 service. Walpole's authority and in- 
 fluence with his master were unshaken. 
 Had he not accepted the title of Lord 
 Orford his authority in Parliament might 
 have survived the shock of defeat, and 
 might have revived under the reactionary 
 influences provoked by Lord Wilming- 
 ton's feebleness and Pulteney's perverse 
 indolence. Walpole was not content 
 with ensuring his safe retirement into 
 the dignified obscurity of the House of 
 Lords. At his secret instigation his old 
 rival Pulteney shortly followed him, and 
 became Earl of Bath. '' Here we are, the 
 two most insignificant fellows in Eng- 
 land," was the encouraging greeting 
 of Walpole on their first encounter 
 in the lobbies of the House of Lords. 
 The touch of public affairs kept by the 
 fallen Minister was remarkable, although 
 he was a great deal at Houghton, with 
 Molly Skerret, who had now become 
 his wife. 
 
VI OF HOUSE OF COMMONS 131 
 
 Once he broke the august silence of 
 the House of Lords, and delivered after 
 his old manner a speech worthy of the 
 great Minister who had governed Eng- 
 land for so long. His influence grew 
 afresh as months rolled on. The death 
 of Lord Wilmington in 1743 prepared 
 the way for Pelham, who was again the 
 nominee of Walpole. 
 
 Carteret's anger at being passed over 
 in favour of so insignificant a rival 
 provoked dissensions in the Cabinet 
 which severely strained the bond of 
 party government. Walpole came to 
 the rescue of his nominee. Under his 
 advice, constantly asked and given, the 
 Pelhams stood firm. Every one who 
 was in difficulty, from the Duke of 
 Cumberland downwards, had recourse to 
 the fallen Minister. It looked as if his 
 return to place as well as to power was 
 inevitable. The Fates decreed other- 
 wise ; and a cruel disease, painful and in 
 those days incurable, intervened in the 
 political struggle. On the i8th March 
 1745 at his house in Arlington Street, 
 now marked with a commemorative 
 tablet. Lord Orford died. Lord Shel- 
 
132 GOVERNMENT BY MAJORITY vi 
 
 burne said of him that he was, out of 
 sight, the ablest man of his time, 
 and the most capable. That he was a 
 great Minister has never been seriously 
 questioned. At a critical moment in 
 the domestic history of the nation, his 
 eminent practical qualities, characteristic 
 of the race to which he belonged, served 
 him and England in a manner which the 
 loftiest philosophy or the most profound 
 learning might have failed to do. 
 
 If the axiomata media^ the middle 
 generalisations of politics, are the essence 
 of high statesmanship, Walpole was a 
 great statesman as well as a great 
 Minister. "By this time," wrote his 
 son Horace to an intimate friend, " you 
 have heard of my Lord's death: I fear 
 it will have been a very great shock to 
 you. I hope your brother will write 
 you all the particulars ; for my part, 
 you can't expect I should enter into the 
 details of it. His enemies pay him the 
 compliment of saying, they do believe 
 now that he did not plunder the public, 
 as he was accused (as they accused him) 
 of doing, he having died in such cir- 
 cumstances. If he had no proofs of his 
 
VI OF HOUSE OF COMMONS 133 
 
 honesty but this, I don't think this would 
 be such indisputable authority : not leav- 
 ing immense riches would be scanty 
 evidence of his not having acquired 
 them, there happening to be such a 
 thing as spending them. It is certain, 
 he is dead very poor : his debts with 
 his legacies, which are trifling, amount 
 to fifty thousand pounds. His estate, a 
 nominal eight thousand a year, much 
 mortgaged. In short, his fondness for 
 Houghton has endangered Houghton. 
 If he had not so overdone it, he might 
 have left such an estate to his family as 
 might have secured the glory of the place 
 for many years : another such debt must 
 expose it for sale. If he had lived, his 
 unbounded generosity and contempt of 
 money would have run him into vast 
 difficulties. However irreparable his 
 personal loss may be to his fi*iends, he 
 certainly died critically well for himself : 
 he had lived to stand the rudest trials 
 with honour, to see his character univers- 
 ally cleared, his enemies brought to infamy 
 for their ignorance or villany, and the 
 world allowing him to be the only man 
 in England fit to be what he had been ; 
 
134 GOVERNMENT BY MAJORITY vi 
 
 and he died at a time when his age and 
 infirmities prevented his again under- 
 taking the support of a government 
 which engrossed his whole care, and 
 which he foresaw was falling into the 
 last confusion. In this I hope his judg- 
 ment failed ! His fortune attended him 
 to the last ; for he died of the most 
 painful of all distempers, with little or 
 no pain." 
 
 Though written with the bias of an 
 affectionate son, this panegyric is not 
 overstated. It has been said of Wal- 
 pole that he was not a reformer or a 
 successful war Minister, nor a profound 
 and original thinker, nor even a tactician 
 of great enterprise. Nor was he an 
 orator of extraordinary brilliancy. But 
 he possessed a power, which for practical 
 value is worth more than these gifts. 
 He was a politician of profound parlia- 
 mentary capacity. It is a talent which 
 never fails to obtain ascendency in the 
 House of Commons. Orators, such as 
 Charles Fox or Canning, Bolingbroke or 
 Pulteney, may fail to obtain a definite 
 hold over Parliament ; but men of the 
 stamp of Walpole are sure of success. 
 
VI OF HOUSE OF COMMONS 135 
 
 Walpole's claim to the gratitude of 
 his countrymen is this ; that in a homely 
 common-sense fashion he grasped the full 
 import of the revolutionary phase through 
 which England was passing, and by 
 moderation and good humour consoli- 
 dated a revolution without a terror. 
 
 The Hanoverian succession, carrying 
 with it the Protestant religion and par- 
 liamentary government, was but half 
 established. To Walpole, to his twenty 
 years of peaceful government, is due the 
 final triumph, easily enough obtained, in 
 1745 of the principles of the Revolu- 
 tion, and the final disappearance along 
 with Prince Charles Edward of Jacobite 
 hopes. 
 
 Government by a Committee of the 
 Privy Council, called a Cabinet, nomin- 
 ally the " King's Servants," really depend- 
 ent not on the King's will, but upon 
 maintaining a majority in the House of 
 Commons to support the decrees of 
 the Committee, had been conceived and 
 established. 
 
 A system of combining popular in- 
 fluence and trained skill in government 
 was the work of Walpole's official life. 
 
136 GOFERNMENT BT MAJORITY vi 
 
 A political philosopher or a patentee of 
 constitutions might have failed to carry 
 out so audacious an attempt. A jovial, 
 coarse-minded, good-tempered country 
 squire, lax in morals and devoid of prin- 
 ciple, but with all the practical sense and 
 everyday pluck of his race, succeeded, 
 and left his achievement as the basis of 
 the government of England to-day. 
 
POPULAR OPINION 137 
 
 VII 
 
 THE APPEAL TO POPULAR OPINION 
 
 Walpole's place in English politics was 
 not immediately filled. Even after his 
 death, his influence remained for a while 
 supreme. Queen Caroline's last expressed 
 wish was to the effect that the King 
 should be the special care of her favourite 
 Minister. Both the King and Walpole 
 had remembered the charge. Neither 
 had deserted the other. To George the 
 Second, a German by birth, training, and 
 temperament, who may be said accident- 
 ally to have been King of England, is due 
 from Englishmen a large measure of 
 gratitude. Judged by modern ethical 
 standards, as a man, he had faults ; but 
 as a sovereign he kept within the lines 
 of the Constitution, and with great 
 shrewdness he grasped and adhered to 
 
138 THE APPEAL TO vii 
 
 the Whig maxims of constitutional 
 government as understood by Walpole. 
 
 At the time of Walpole's death, the 
 King was prepared to put aside personal 
 predilections, and to abide by the plan 
 of governing through a majority of the 
 House of Commons, and by the Minister 
 who commanded that majority. Un- 
 doubtedly he preferred Carteret to all 
 competitors for office. Carteret was the 
 most accomplished, the most capable of 
 those who had served at one time or 
 another with Walpole ; just as Pulteney 
 was the most eloquent and brilliant of 
 the men looked upon as likely to com- 
 mand the confidence of the King. But 
 eloquence, and even capacity, were not 
 the main requisites in politicians desirous 
 to govern. The primary necessity was 
 now the confidence of the House of 
 Commons ; and there the Pelhams con- 
 tinued to hold their own. Henry 
 Pelham, though peevish and irritable, 
 possessed an inborn timidity and dread 
 of giving offence which rendered him 
 plausible in his dealings with men. He 
 was supported by the immense borough 
 influence of his elder brother, the Duke 
 
VII POPULAR OPINION 139 
 
 of Newcastle. All this contributed to 
 make his power in Parliament sufficient 
 to defeat a combination of Carteret, 
 Pulteney, and the Boy Patriots, the 
 name given to that small knot of 
 younger men which comprised in its 
 ranks Henry Fox and William Pitt. 
 Pelham's natural caution led him to be 
 careful of rousing combined opposition. 
 Acting on Walpole's advice he moved 
 slowly, he marked time, and entered 
 into no hasty engagements. With 
 some show of skill, he played off 
 against each other the rival ambitions of 
 the younger men of talent whose elo- 
 quence and energy he dreaded. He was 
 ready for any combination with the 
 Whigs ; but, acting on Walpole's advice, 
 he avoided all correspondence with the 
 Tories. "Whig it with all opponents 
 that will parley, but 'ware Tory," had 
 been the veteran statesman's warning to 
 his pupil. 
 
 The lines of party government were 
 to be strictly adhered to. An adminis- 
 tration on a " broad bottom " might be 
 safely formed, always provided that the 
 planks were sawn from the old Whig 
 
140 THE APPEAL TO vii 
 
 tree. There was to be no backsliding. 
 Walpole's scheme of governing by means 
 of a party majority in the House of 
 Commons was not to be endangered; 
 and events proved the plan had 
 taken hold of Walpole's countrymen. 
 Carteret's maxim, that '' Give any man 
 the Crown on his side and he can defy 
 everything," was already found to be 
 less than a half truth. The policy of 
 Walpole had made deeper progress than 
 was apparent to the most experienced 
 politician. The King undoubtedly pre- 
 ferred the man whose talents he respected 
 to the mediocrities whose influence in 
 Parliament, apart from borough-monger- 
 ing, seemed difficult to understand. A 
 struggle between Carteret and the Pel- 
 hams, strong as were the King's incli- 
 nations to the brilliant Secretary of State 
 who supported his Hanoverian policy, 
 ended as Walpole must have wished it 
 to end, in the triumph of party discip- 
 line and of the men who had the confi- 
 dence of Parliament. . Well might George 
 the Second exclaim to his Chancellor, 
 " Ministers are the king in this country." 
 It has been said that Carteret, now be- 
 
VII POPULAR OPINION 141 
 
 come Lord Granville, immeasurably 
 superior as he was in genius to the 
 Pelhams, sank down overpowered 
 beneath their active, consistent, and 
 decorous mediocrity. 
 
 If that is true, Lord Granville had no 
 one to blame but himself. He had 
 chances at least equal, if not superior, 
 to those which the Pelhams or even 
 Walpole had ever possessed; but the 
 faults of his character, and his mis- 
 calculation of the relative forces of the 
 Constitution, destroyed his chances. He 
 chose to base his power chiefly on his 
 influence over the mind of the King. 
 He yielded to the King's wishes in 
 foreign affairs. He was arrogant and 
 reckless in his treatment of others. He 
 showed himself unable to read the lesson 
 of Walpole's long administration. He 
 failed to comprehend the spirit of the 
 age ; and of all failures that is the most 
 dismally fatal to an aspiring politician. 
 
 Arrogance might be tolerated in a 
 Minister on certain conditions, but as 
 yet those conditions were undeveloped in 
 English political life, although the time 
 was approaching when Chatham was to 
 
142 THE APPEAL TO vii 
 
 show that they might have been foreseen 
 by a statesman of keener political insight. 
 From Walpole's death in 1745, when 
 the star of the Stuarts set for ever among 
 the clouds of Culloden, to 1754, when 
 Henry Pelham followed his old chief, 
 public life in England was singularly 
 calm and languid. The temperate and 
 peaceful disposition of the Minister 
 seemed to pervade Parliament. At his 
 death the King exclaimed : " Now I 
 shall have no more peace " ; and the 
 words proved to be prophetic. Both 
 in Parliament and in the country, as 
 well as beyond its shores, the elements 
 of discord were swiftly at war. Out of 
 conflicting ambitions and widely diver- 
 gent interests a new type of statesman, 
 very different from Walpole, or from 
 Bolingbroke, or from Pelham, or from 
 the " bubble - bubble Newcastle," was 
 destined to arise. And along with the 
 new statesman a new force, of which he 
 was in part the representative, in part 
 the creator, was to be introduced into 
 political life. This new force was the 
 unrepresented voice of the people. 
 The new statesman was an ex-cornet 
 
VII POPULAR OPINION 143 
 
 of horse, William Pitt, better known as 
 Lord Chatham. 
 
 The characteristics of William Pitt 
 which mainly influenced his career were 
 his ambition and his ill-health. Power, 
 and that conspicuous form of egotism 
 called personal glory, were the objects 
 of his life. He pursued them with all 
 the ardour of a strong-willed purpose; 
 but the flesh was in his case painfully 
 weak. Gout had declared itself his foe 
 while he was still an Eton boy. His 
 failures, and prolonged withdrawal at 
 intervals from public affairs, were due 
 to the inroads of this fatal enemy, from 
 whom he was destined to receive his 
 death-blow. 
 
 Walpole had not been slow to recog- 
 nise the quality of this '' terrible cornet 
 of horse," as he called him. Walpole was 
 no coward, and there is no indication 
 that he feared his criticism, powerful as 
 it was, as much as he mistrusted his 
 proffered assistance when the end was 
 at hand. 
 
 When it was a question of obtaining 
 immunity from prosecution, and secur- 
 ing upon a safe and reasonable basis 
 
144 1'HE APPEAL TO vii 
 
 the retirement of a fallen Minister, Wal- 
 pole turned away from William Pitt and 
 the " boy patriots " to Pulteney and 
 Carteret. 
 
 Of William Pitt's character he could 
 have known little. He knew him as a 
 rhetorician of extraordinary force, and 
 as a rhetorician he probably distrusted 
 him. Possibly he may have been right. 
 William Pitt had not then adopted clearly 
 the pose which, after the manner of 
 rhetoricians, he meant definitely to 
 assume. Later on this became manifest 
 to the world. He was largely influenced 
 in his choice of a part by the character 
 of his only possible rival, Henry Fox ; 
 a man as unscrupulous as he was talented. 
 In Fox to a love of intrigue was added 
 a passion for money. His ambition 
 was not so much to be powerful as to 
 be wealthy. William Pitt gauged at its 
 right value the newly awakening sense 
 of probity in the mind of parlia- 
 mentary majorities and of the men who, 
 if they did not themselves govern, in- 
 fluenced widely those to whom govern- 
 ment was entrusted. As Paymaster of 
 the Forces, one of the earliest offices held 
 
VII POPULAR OPINION 145 
 
 by him, he had ample opportunities for 
 amassing a fortune. 
 
 Henry Fox, who had held the same 
 office, did avail himself of them when 
 his opportunities arose. William Pitt, 
 with masterly shrewdness, refused to 
 supplement his salary by any sum, 
 whether offered as commission by foreign 
 princes receiving subsidies from Eng- 
 land, or obtained by way of interest 
 upon public monies for a while in his 
 hands. Both these methods had, up to 
 that time, been considered legitimate by 
 other holders of the office. 
 
 William Pitt was known to be a poor 
 man. His fortune consisted of little 
 beyond the ten thousand pounds which 
 the old Duchess of Marlborough, with 
 characteristic malignity, in appreciation 
 of his denunciations of Walpole, had 
 bequeathed to him. Money, however, 
 was not the object of the ex -cornet. 
 Poverty was no obstacle to his ambition. 
 That fact he recognised. He elected, 
 therefore, to remain poor, and utilised 
 his poverty as a stepping-stone to 
 power. There were other and greater 
 obstacles in his path. Prejudice on the 
 
 L 
 
146 THE APPEAL TO vii 
 
 part of the King he was aware had to 
 be overcome. He had rashly offended 
 George the Second by his outspoken 
 condemnation of what was called the 
 Hanoverian policy. This prejudice 
 might be grappled with, and he deter- 
 mined to overcome it; but loss of 
 reputation for public virtue of a stamp 
 superior to that of his contemporaries, 
 would have been to him a loss of one 
 of the chief weapons with which he re- 
 solved to fight his way. He gloried in 
 the name of patriot. With that facility 
 peculiar to rhetoricians of supreme 
 force, he had come to believe in his 
 own striking images, in his own grandi- 
 loquence ; so that it matters little to 
 us now whether or no, in the begin- 
 ning, William Pitt was animated by 
 singleminded love of his country. It 
 would be a labour of feminine super- 
 erogation to inquire whether he did 
 not, as life wore on, turn his back 
 upon many of the professions of his 
 youth ; whether, after stormily de- 
 nouncing the " Hanoverian policy," 
 he did not eventually out -Hanover 
 King George ; whether, a bitter 
 
VII POPULAR OPINION 147 
 
 opponent of standing armies in times 
 of peace, he was not responsible himself 
 for maintaining an army more powerful 
 than any which under similar circum- 
 stances had been allowed by Parliament. 
 
 William Pitt possessed not only that 
 most valuable gift in a politician, which 
 enabled him to persuade his hearers 
 of the justice of the cause he was advo- 
 cating at the moment, but also the self- 
 persuasiveness which made him credit 
 to the full his own argument, and that 
 magic ascendency of words which carried 
 to the conviction of his audience a sense 
 of the absolute integrity of the orator. 
 
 Although at given moments in a 
 nation's history — in 1757, for example, 
 when, through the agency of this very 
 statesman, England was raised from 
 humiliation to the loftiest pinnacle of 
 glory — such political gifts are of in- 
 estimable value to statesmanship, on 
 the whole it may be doubted whether 
 any nation is to be congratulated, whose 
 destinies are placed in the hands of a 
 master of the art of rhetoric. 
 
 William Pitt's splendour in the eyes 
 of his countrymen is the splendour of 
 
148 THE APPEAL TO yu 
 
 an antique torso, or of a fragment of 
 Sophocles. We have no glimpse of him 
 in all his glory. As an orator he was 
 supreme in his generation ; and if oratory is 
 to be judged by the effect produced upon 
 an audience, he stands among the greatest 
 masters of the art. But the reports of 
 his speeches are not only meagre ; they 
 are untrustworthy, and with the exception 
 of an image or a phrase here and there, 
 none of his speeches, as we read them, 
 are genuine. 
 
 As a statesman his work was also 
 fragmentary, if it is estimated by re- 
 sults tangible and visible at the present 
 time. His genius was mainly stimula- 
 tive and inspiring. He drew together 
 the hostile elements of Scottish and Eng- 
 lish character, facilitating the final 
 labour of Sir Walter Scott. He intro- 
 duced into England a new political role : 
 that of the popular courtier. It was an 
 inspiration. It is not much of an ex- 
 aggeration to say that he invented " the 
 people." On one occasion in a discus- 
 sion with the King he appealed to the 
 opinion of the House of Commons. 
 '' You have taught me," replied George 
 
VII POPULAR OPINION 149 
 
 the Second, " to look for the sense of my 
 people in other places than the House of 
 Commons." Pitt however did not con- 
 descend, as a weaker man might have done, 
 to flatter the sovereignty he had created. 
 His courtiership was more subtle, and at 
 the same time certainly more respectable. 
 
 He posed as the epitome of all the 
 virtues, private and public. Avaricious 
 he was not, but he went farther than 
 prudence enjoined in his public contempt 
 for money. Patriotic he certainly was ; 
 yet in early life, in the case of the Spanish 
 war, and in the case of the American 
 war towards the end of his career, his 
 reading of patriotism led him into 
 bombast which was distinctly harmful to 
 the nation. 
 
 He was aware that in order to lead 
 the " people " a man must rouse their 
 interest and if possible their curiosity 
 about himself. He neither cut off his 
 dog's tail like Alcibiades, nor ran naked 
 through the Park like Bolingbroke ; but 
 his odd habits of isolation, his haughty 
 demeanour with equals and superiors, 
 inflamed the imagination of those to 
 whom he was personally unknown. 
 
I50 THE APPEAL TO vn 
 
 Of friendship he was — like most 
 demagogues — altogether incapable. His 
 personal following was never large. He 
 appealed for support, he looked for power, 
 not to the devotion of adherents, nor to 
 the fidelity of friends, but to the masses 
 upon whose passions he was conscious 
 of being, by his gift of speech, able to 
 play. This power, for some years, he 
 believed himself to possess without limit. 
 In his attacks upon Walpole, in his 
 denunciations of Carteret, in his rivalry 
 with Fox, and in his attempts to destroy 
 Newcastle, he credited himself with the 
 possession of weapons which would 
 enable him to conquer all opponents, and 
 assist him to the highest offices of State. 
 
 For a while Pitt clearly believed, with 
 the faith of a young man in ideas, that 
 by means of popular favour he could 
 force himself into the councils of the 
 King. In this he was mistaken. He no 
 sooner discovered his error than with 
 shrewd sense he hastened to repair it. 
 He never allowed temper to stand in the 
 way of an object he had in view. His 
 great offence in the King's eyes was the 
 relation in which he stood to the heir to 
 
VII POPULAR OPINION 151 
 
 the throne. He gave up his place in the 
 household of Frederick, Prince of Wales, 
 and thus removed the chief source of his 
 oiFending. His language, rash and bitter 
 as it seemed to the King, he could not 
 with due regard to his self-respect with- 
 draw or recant ; but he could pay court 
 to Lady Yarmouth, the King's mistress, 
 and this simple expedient he did not 
 neglect to adopt. His claims, based on 
 the popular support which his adhesion 
 would bring to the Government, were 
 strongly urged upon George the Second 
 by Newcastle. 
 
 The year 1756 was disastrous to Eng- 
 land. In Europe the loss of Minorca, in 
 America the successes of Montcalm, and 
 in India the tragedy enacted at Calcutta 
 by Surajah Dowlah, had depressed and 
 exasperated the English people. To 
 the weakness and incompetence of the 
 Government these reverses were, as is 
 usually the case, attributed. 
 
 It was felt that a strong hand was 
 required at the helm. The eyes of all 
 men were directed towards Pitt. 
 
 When Henry Fox deserted the 
 Government, and when his desertion 
 
152 THE APPEAL TO vn 
 
 was followed by that of Murray, after- 
 wards Lord Mansfield, who insisted on 
 his right to the Chief Justiceship of 
 England, then become vacant^ Newcastle 
 became aware that his nominal majority 
 in the House of Commons could not 
 save him from giving way to the pressure 
 of public opinion outside Westminster. 
 His resignation followed, and the Duke 
 of Devonshire's short-lived government 
 was formed, with Pitt as Secretary of 
 State. But Pitt's old enemy, the gout, 
 intervened, and without his constant 
 support, nothing could save an adminis- 
 tration in all other respects so inherently 
 weak. In April 1757 the King's dislike 
 to Pitt and Temple, and the extensive 
 borough influence of Newcastle, were 
 fatal to the Duke of Devonshire. The 
 fortunes of England seemed at a low 
 ebb. Beset by foes in all quarters of 
 the world, the nation was torn by in- 
 ternal dissensions which made both the 
 maintenance of one set of Ministers, or 
 the choice of another, alike impossible. 
 It was not until June 1757 that the 
 Devonshire government, dismissed in 
 April, was replaced by a coalition, the 
 
VII POPULJR OPINION 153 
 
 fame of which, if glory counts as solid 
 fame, is for ever stamped with the name 
 of William Pitt. Of this coalition he 
 was the soul. At home and abroad he 
 was looked upon as the moving spirit 
 of the Administration. Newcastle was 
 its nominal head. His majority had 
 been " borrowed," as Pitt said, to carry 
 on the Government. Newcastle, on the 
 other hand, had " borrowed " the popu- 
 larity of Pitt with the nation at large, 
 to make government possible. Each 
 had come to learn the uses of the other. 
 Pitt, a younger man, took longer to 
 grasp the necessities of his position. 
 He had overrated the power of the 
 people, as yet unorganised, and had 
 undervalued both the long -established 
 authority of the Monarch and the weight 
 of territorial influence. Once the con- 
 ditions under which alone power could 
 be wielded were clear to him, he hesitated 
 no longer, and accepted the coalition with 
 Newcastle. 
 
 One of the drawbacks to exuberant 
 rhetorical gifts is that the orator invari- 
 ably yields to the temptation to lay down 
 general propositions and to enunciate 
 
154 ^^^^ APPEAL TO vii 
 
 principles which are beyond the im- 
 mediate practical necessities of politics, 
 and sometimes become seriously em- 
 barrassing in subsequent days. 
 
 Pitt was not free from this weakness. 
 His attacks upon Newcastle, his attempts 
 to drive him from power, based on reasons 
 altogether outside the acts of that Minister, 
 were now to recoil upon himself. His 
 denunciations of unnatural coalitions 
 in general, when he had in view merely 
 the particular coalition of Newcastle and 
 Fox, were now to be recalled in his 
 disfavour. Fortunately his haughty dis- 
 regard of the views of others rendered 
 him contemptuous of criticism. His 
 proud self-reliance, his intimate con- 
 viction that he only could save the 
 country, gave him the requisite force 
 which belief in his star gave Napoleon. 
 This strong conviction his rhetorical 
 gifts enabled him to extend to the 
 nation. Nothing was refused to the 
 new War Minister. The apparently 
 monstrous coalition between Newcastle 
 and his bitterest political opponent was 
 accepted by the people in face of their 
 emergency, just as the service of the 
 
VII POPULAR OPINION 155 
 
 man who had insulted him was accepted 
 by the King. 
 
 "Deserve my confidence and you 
 shall have it/' was the reply of George 
 the Second to his new Secretary of State 
 when the latter, with almost servile 
 deference, approached him for the first 
 time. The confidence of the nation he 
 already possessed. Oddly enough, the 
 most vehement denouncers of rank and 
 privilege can be humble courtiers in 
 the presence of royalty. It was noticed 
 of William Pitt that he could bend his 
 back abnormally low. So much so that 
 at the levee, when he bowed to the 
 Monarch, his hooked nose could be 
 seen between his legs. At a kind 
 word from George the Third, a mere 
 lad, the great commoner was noticed to 
 be visibly affected. These traits were 
 curious in a man so stiff and proud, that 
 his under -secretaries were never per- 
 mitted to sit in his presence. 
 
 In three years, by good management, 
 supplemented by good fortune, the posi- 
 tion of England was entirely changed. 
 Every morning news of a fresh victory 
 arrived. Pitt obtained the credit for 
 
IS6 THE APPEAL TO vii 
 
 every success won by British arms. He 
 deserved much of it. His imperious 
 will had overcome the great and per- 
 manent obstacles to British success in 
 war, the niggardliness and procrastina- 
 tion of officialism. 
 
 Like Napoleon, he understood the 
 vital importance of rapid military move- 
 ments. When Anson used the word 
 impossible in reply to an urgent demand 
 for ships, Pitt declared he would im- 
 peach the First Lord of the Admiralty 
 in Parliament, and proposed immediately 
 to lay the matter before the King. The 
 threat sufficed. Pitt, unlike his pre- 
 decessors and his successors, was aware 
 of the futility of attempting to conduct 
 a great war without free expenditure of 
 money. If a general asked for troops, 
 he gave him twice as many as he asked 
 for ; and he never allowed any con- 
 sideration of expense to stand in the 
 way of sending reinforcements or of 
 perfecting an expedition. 
 
 He boldly exaggerated rather than 
 minimised the cost of war. He pre- 
 tended to know nothing of finance. 
 He was responsible for the conduct of 
 
VII POPULAR OPINION 157 
 
 the war. If the Treasury raised difficult- 
 ies, he haughtily ignored them. Either 
 the money must be produced or he must 
 cease to be charged with the policy. 
 " He disdained/' says Horace Walpole, 
 *'to descend into the operations of an 
 office he did not fill ; he affected to 
 throw on the Treasury the execution 
 of measures he dictated. Secluded fi-om 
 all eyes his orders were received as 
 oracles." He never shrank from de- 
 fending his demands in Parliament. By 
 speeches of consummate power he ob- 
 tained the approbation of the House 
 of Commons for his policy, and for the 
 methods by which he enforced it. 
 
 The power he wielded was of a kind 
 most dangerous to the welfare of nations. 
 He appealed to the lust for military glory, 
 and there are few passions more fatal to 
 national wellbeing. His appeal was 
 made by means of unrivalled rhetoric, 
 an art than which none is more danger- 
 ous to national liberty. 
 
 Fortunately perhaps for England, 
 William Pitt lived before the govern- 
 ment of the country had ceased to be 
 aristocratic. In this fact lay the limita- 
 
158 THE APPEAL TO vii 
 
 tions of his influence. A rhetorician's 
 power, resting upon the people, has only 
 full scope under democratic forms of 
 government. It is idle speculation to 
 try and cast the horoscope of Pitt under 
 conditions more favourable to his do- 
 minion. As it was, his authority ceased 
 with the new reign in 1760, and although 
 his influence was exercised at times upon 
 public affairs, during the seventeen years 
 which elapsed between the accession of 
 George the Third and his own death, 
 the great commoner, become Earl of 
 Chatham, was merely a shadow of his 
 former self. 
 
 In 1760 his main work in the world 
 had been accomplished. In order to 
 redress the balance of political power he 
 had called into being public opinion in 
 England, and he had become the father 
 of a son to whom he gave his own name, 
 whose share of fame was to equal, if 
 not surpass his own. 
 
 It has been pointed out that the most 
 remarkable characteristic of his home 
 policy was the great prominence he gave 
 to the moral side of legislation, or, in 
 other words, the skill with which he 
 
VII POPULAR OPINION 159 
 
 acted on the higher enthusiasms of the 
 people. His example has been followed 
 by his successors in ambition. What 
 was then a novel and noble departure in 
 politics, has since become a commonplace 
 of political warfare. 
 
 Chatham's example has been exten- 
 sively imitated. That he did much to 
 raise what is called the moral tone of 
 political life no one can doubt. His 
 ostentatious purity in an age of cor- 
 ruption, his unimpeachable private char- 
 acter, his freedom from nepotism, his 
 appeals to the spirit of self-sacrifice in 
 his countrymen, his imperial conceptions, 
 all helped to elevate politics and political 
 character in the eyes of the people. 
 
 After the birth of his second son, and 
 his fall from power, his life was singularly 
 retired. Even when his second adminis- 
 tration was formed, his seclusion was 
 scarcely disturbed. Gout hardly left 
 him sane; but in the intervals of pain 
 and depression, his chief contribution to 
 the bettering of his country was the 
 education and training of his son. The 
 feebleness of the Grenvilles, the 
 American troubles, the struggle with 
 
i6o THE APPEAL TO vii 
 
 the revolted colonies, roused flashes of 
 the old spirit ; but they were a mere 
 flicker of the fiery soul that was slowly 
 passing away. Not even the responsi- 
 bilities of ofiice could rouse him. 
 His second administration contributed 
 nothing solid towards the progress or 
 glory of England. To the end how- 
 ever, to the hour when in the House 
 of Lords he fell back fainting into the 
 arms of the , young William Pitt, Lord 
 Chatham retained his large trust in the 
 people, and remained their special re- 
 presentative in the councils of the 
 nation. 
 
 His legacy to his country was rich. 
 He fashioned the mind of the lad who 
 was to stand with Chatham's unim- 
 peachable character, with Chatham's 
 purity from sordid interests, with 
 Chatham's proud and haughty disregard 
 of clamour, with Chatham's loyalty of 
 purpose and indomitable courage, if 
 without Chatham's good fortune, as 
 the defender of the liberties of England, 
 and the champion of the freedom of 
 Europe. 
 
 Chatham was no sooner laid in West- 
 
VII POPULAR OPINION i6i 
 
 minster Abbey than there arose on the 
 political horizon the charming figure 
 of his son, William Pitt, a mere boy 
 in appearance and years, but trained 
 in eloquence, in political resolution, and 
 in the craft of statesmanship by a master 
 hand ; and it seemed to those who had 
 admired and feared the father, quite 
 simple and reasonable that the fortunes 
 of England should be entrusted to the 
 son. 
 
 M 
 
1 62 THE BIRTH OF 
 
 VIII 
 
 THE BIRTH OF THE LIBERAL PARTY 
 
 For a hundred years with scarcely an 
 interlude the government of England 
 had been vested in the great Revolution 
 families which constituted the Whig 
 party. Their domination was at last to 
 come to an end. Chatham's appeals to 
 popular opinion, to the unrepresented 
 forces of the nation, had shaken the 
 monopoly of the Whigs. It began to 
 be felt that there were Englishmen, 
 educated, competent, with liberal ideas, 
 having a stake in the country, who 
 were not connected by blood or marriage 
 with the political hierarchy. The most 
 prominent and most famous of these 
 men who held Whig doctrines but were 
 not of the Whig party, was Edmund 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 163 
 
 Burke. The only Englishman who in 
 the last century rivalled Burke in know- 
 ledge and general powers of mind was 
 Dr. Johnson, and his Toryism was of 
 that unreasoning sort which alone made 
 Toryism possible to so shrewd an 
 observer. Edmund Burke, on the 
 other hand, laid the foundation in 
 political literature of the doctrines which 
 have since become the commonplaces of 
 Liberal writers and speakers. Burke as 
 private secretary to Lord Rockingham 
 was as curiously misplaced as was Swift 
 in a similar capacity to Lord Temple. 
 Excellent and worthy were the Rock- 
 ingham Whigs, but the far-reaching 
 mind of Burke was altogether beyond 
 their range. Place and power they 
 understood. For the good of the 
 country it seemed eminently right and 
 proper that they should be in office. The 
 contention appeared not unreasonable, 
 since for nearly a century the Whigs 
 had ruled England, carrying on a passive 
 warfare against the power of the Crown. 
 The Revolution of 1688 had finally 
 established the Protestant religion and 
 the dominion of the Whig oligarchy. As 
 
1 64 THE BIRTH OF viii 
 
 though some magic lay^ in the eighth 
 decade of the centuries, in 1784 a new- 
 power came into existence, and the Whig 
 dominion ended. This new power was 
 that of the Liberal party; a political 
 combination framed upon distinctly novel 
 lines, and based upon ideas which appeared 
 strange and new to the older Whigs. Of 
 this party the younger Pitt was the 
 parent. Its sponsor was Edmund Burke. 
 
 Two principal causes contributed to 
 the fall of the Whigs: — First, their 
 overbearing demeanour, which roused 
 the hostility of George the Third, 
 who from his early youth had re- 
 sented the strong curb which these 
 haughty oligarchs had used with no 
 light hand. The King chafed under 
 the rule of the old Revolution families, 
 who, it must be admitted, made no 
 attempt to conceal their consciousness 
 of dominion. 
 
 When discussing his iniquitous 
 coalition with Lord North, Mr. Fox 
 laid special stress on the necessity of not 
 suffering the King to be his own Minis- 
 ter ; for Lord North's easy-going nature 
 
 ^ See Note in Appendix. 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 165 
 
 had yielded too much to the royal will. 
 No one was better aware of the fact 
 than Lord North himself. " The King 
 ought to be treated with all sort of 
 respect and attention/' he said to Mr. 
 Fox, " but the appearance of power is 
 all that a king of this country can have." 
 The Whigs hardly cared to leave an 
 appearance of power to the King, and 
 their confidence in their own strength 
 emboldened them to neglect the sooth- 
 ing of royal susceptibilities. George the 
 Third became their implacable foe, and 
 his enmity, as experience showed, could 
 not be prudently incurred. When Lord 
 North fell from power Mr. Fox openly 
 treated the success of himself and his 
 friends as a victory over the King. The 
 list of the new Cabinet was submitted 
 to a meeting of the Whig party before 
 it was approved by the Sovereign — an 
 unmannerly proceeding, altogether in- 
 consistent with the maintenance of 
 respect to the monarchy. No oppor- 
 tunity was lost of bringing home to 
 George the Third the fact that the 
 Whigs had got him down and meant 
 to keep him under their control. 
 
i66 THE BIRTH OF vm 
 
 His threats to retire to Hanover 
 show the state of mind to which these 
 tactics had reduced him. His natural 
 shrewdness and the clever coolness of 
 his advisers triumphed over his dis- 
 play of temper. He remained to take 
 his revenge, to accept passively the 
 Rockingham Government which he ab- 
 horred, and to set its members by the 
 ears; to destroy the confidence of the 
 leaders of the party in each other, and 
 the confidence of the country in the 
 Whig party. 
 
 If during Lord Rockingham's fatal 
 illness George the Third never once 
 sent to inquire after his Prime Minister's 
 health, this neglect of the ordinary 
 decencies of society had no ulterior con- 
 sequences ; but the ill-feeling excited 
 and carefully fanned by the King be- 
 tween Mr. Fox and Lord Shelburne, 
 his open preference for the latter, and 
 his choice of him, rather than Mr. Fox, 
 for Lord Rockingham's successor, in- 
 directly gave the coup de grace to the 
 Whig party. 
 
 When Lord Shelburne became Min- 
 ister, he was deserted at once by Fox, 
 
VIII 7HE LIBERAL PARTY 167 
 
 Lord John Cavendish, Burke, and Sheri- 
 dan. This schism was fatal to the 
 schismatics and to their political con- 
 nection. Shelburne retained, however, 
 the support of the Duke of Richmond, 
 of Lord Keppel, and of General Con- 
 way. A more efficient ally than these 
 he obtained, by offering to the young 
 William Pitt, then only twenty-three 
 years of age, the high office of Chan- 
 cellor of the Exchequer and the leader- 
 ship of the House of Commons. The 
 offer was accepted, and Mr. Pitt took 
 at once that lofty position in the eyes 
 of his countrymen from which he was 
 never dislodged. 
 
 The second and final cause which 
 led to the overthrow of the Whig 
 party was the personal character of 
 its leader, Charles James Fox. From 
 early youth Charles Fox had been 
 spoilt. Adored by his father, he was 
 indulged in every whim and encouraged 
 in every extravagance. Henry Fox 
 was not only devoid of high principle, 
 but had evolved a code of ethics of 
 his own, with selections from which he 
 adorned his letters to his son. As a 
 
i68 THE BIRTH OF viii 
 
 boy at Eton, Charles Fox was incited 
 by his father to conduct which left 
 a mark upon the lad for life, and dis- 
 tinctly, it is recorded, changed the tone 
 of the school. Before he was of age 
 he had taken his seat in Parliament. 
 Before his twenty-first birthday was a 
 week old, he was already one of the 
 first of parliamentary debaters, and as 
 notorious a gambler as could be found 
 at Almack's. The young men who 
 attended that club, just then eclipsing 
 Brooks' and White's, lost ten or fifteen 
 thousand pounds of an evening. As 
 much as a hundred thousand pounds in 
 gold was at one time noted on the table. 
 Lord Stavordale, son of Stephen Fox, 
 lost ^ii,ooo, and having won it all 
 back in one great hand at hazard, ex- 
 claimed with an oath : "If I had been 
 playing ^eep I might have won millions." 
 This promising youth, cousin of Charles 
 Fox, was not yet of age. The debts 
 incurred by these young men were 
 enormous. Charles Fox owed a fortune 
 besides the losses which he had paid. 
 He borrowed from usurers and friends 
 alike. He never counted the cost to 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 169 
 
 himself or to them. He would sit all 
 night at a faro table, with a leather 
 apron over his knees, leather cuffs to 
 protect his ruffles, a frieze coat, turned 
 inside out for luck, a shade over his 
 eyes, and a high-crowned hat garlanded 
 with flowers on his head. Some of his 
 companions wore masks to conceal the 
 play of their features agitated by the 
 chances of " Quinze." 
 
 It was strange preparation for the 
 solid business of life. It was strange 
 training for one whose competitor in 
 the race was the son of Chatham, en- 
 dowed with not less than Chatham's 
 powers. 
 
 It was after such a night that Horace 
 Walpole heard the young orator for the 
 first time, having made a special ex- 
 pedition to the House of Commons for 
 the purpose, and came away amazed at 
 his common - sense, and his unrivalled 
 clearness and force in putting his case. 
 " How such talents make one laugh at 
 Tully's rules for an orator, and his in- 
 defatigable application. His laboured 
 orations are puerile, compared with this 
 boy's manly reason." It was after such 
 
170 THE BIRTH OF viii 
 
 a night that Gibbon noted, with a touch 
 of sarcasm, his eloquent periods in 
 defence of the Church of England, and 
 of enforced subscription to the Thirty- 
 nine Articles. It was after such a night 
 that years later a friend, calling on him 
 at his lodgings, found the ante-room full 
 of creditors, and Mr. Fox lying on the 
 hearthrug in his nightshirt, open at 
 the throat, reading Virgil, careless alike 
 of his own troubles and those of man- 
 kind. 
 
 His good temper, his good sense, his 
 kindness of heart, his warm friendship, 
 his love of children, his fine scholarship, 
 his brilliant gift: of utterance, were the 
 admiration of his contemporaries — 
 " Charles," as he was affectionately 
 called by his friends, by his opponents, 
 and by the mob, could excite no ani- 
 mosities. His virulent attacks upon 
 Lord North could never rouse that 
 Minister to anger. Mr. Fox lived and 
 died beloved by all who came within 
 the magic circle of his personality, and 
 admired by thousands who had never 
 heard his voice. After his death, even 
 to the present day, a somewhat idealised 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 171 
 
 picture of him, drawn by affectionate 
 hands, has been passed down from the 
 circle at Holland House, to a posterity- 
 still under the wand of the magician. 
 
 Yet in spite of all this love and 
 admiration, in spite of the halo about 
 his memory, Mr. Fox's character was 
 deeply corrupted by the habits of his 
 youth — habits which had stripped him 
 of moral sense, and had rendered him 
 callous to the stings of honourable obli- 
 gation and cold to the loftiest interests 
 of his country. He could be carelessly 
 generous, and just without an effort. He 
 could be roused to spasmodic indigna- 
 tion by the real or imaginary wrongs of 
 others. He could, with pitiless humour, 
 tear away the mask from cant or 
 hypocrisy. He could charm friend and 
 foe by his kindly smile. These virtues 
 came easy to him. At the crisis of his 
 career, however, his want of principle, 
 his loose easy-going habits of thought, 
 his indifference to public virtue, led him 
 to choose a path which destroyed his 
 influence for ever with his countrymen, 
 and rendered his whole political life 
 barren of results. More than any man 
 
172 THE BIRTH OF viii 
 
 he was responsible for destroying the 
 Government of Lord North. He was 
 pledged to the colleagues who served 
 with him under Lord Rockingham. At 
 the death of this nobleman he put for- 
 ward the ridiculous pretensions of the 
 Duke of Portland, as the man '' wanted 
 by the country " ; and on the pretext 
 that the King had overruled the public 
 wishes, by the selection of Lord Shel- 
 burne, he resigned office and carried 
 with him as many of his friends as he 
 could induce to follow him. Nothing 
 could have showed a more childish want 
 of a sense of responsibility. Had he 
 stood aloof then from other combinations 
 some defence might be made for his con- 
 duct, animated as he certainly was by 
 distrust, as well as by jealousy, of Shel- 
 burne. His alliance with Lord North, 
 whom he had denounced for years as a 
 politician, and whose policy he had 
 spent his life in opposing, makes defence 
 impossible ; and his coalition with that 
 statesman for the purpose of taking 
 office was rightly understood and never 
 forgiven by the nation he aspired to 
 govern. Mr. Pitt declared publicly 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 173 
 
 that he could not sit in a Cabinet with 
 Lord North, and he gave as his reason 
 his opinion that the one virtue of the 
 late Parliament was the vote by which 
 it had " put an end to Lord North's 
 Administration, and to the calamitous 
 and ruinous war which he had brought 
 upon the country/' 
 
 This opinion had always been that 
 expressed in vehement language by 
 Mr. Fox ; and it is impossible to ex- 
 plain adequately the grounds of his 
 decision to become the colleague of 
 Lord North. When Mr. Fox met that 
 Minister for the purpose of arranging 
 the terms of their union, he expressed a 
 hope that their administration would be 
 '' founded on mutual goodwill and con- 
 fidence" — words which certainly could 
 have meant very little, and should have 
 had no meaning whatever in the mouth 
 of one of these men addressing the other. 
 Mr. Fox, whose reasoning powers were 
 clear and vigorous beyond those of 
 ordinary men, would have been among 
 the first to see the incongruity of this 
 alliance had his moral standpoint re- 
 sembled that of Mr. Pitt. Over him the 
 
174 "^HE BIRTH OF viii 
 
 moral sense had ceased to exercise 
 control. 
 
 Whether the King was right or 
 wrong in believing, as he did, that Mr. 
 Fox had alienated the Prince of Wales' 
 ajffections from him, and corrupted his 
 principles, no justification can be offered 
 for the intimacy between the two men on 
 the footing upon which it was placed by 
 Mr. Fox. At the time of Lord Rock- 
 ingham's death when Fox was nominally 
 Secretary of State, and in reality the head 
 of the Government, the Prince of Wales 
 was only twenty years of age. His affec- 
 tion for Mr. Fox was not surprising. He 
 had yielded to the fascinations which had 
 conquered so many. Mr. Fox's oppor- 
 tunity was a great one. Under his hand 
 was the character of the youth who it 
 seemed before long must be invested 
 with all the responsibilities of kingship. 
 Without priggish interference, which 
 must have lost him a friend, he might 
 have used the confidence and warm heart 
 of the Prince to draw him into the paths 
 of reason, if not of virtue. It seems, 
 however, clear that Mr. Fox, if he did 
 not encourage, at least abetted the 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 175 
 
 Prince of Wales in all his follies and 
 extravagance ; and he certainly smiled 
 at his rebelliousness to his father and at 
 that disregard of all the decencies of life 
 which has left a stain upon the character 
 of George the Fourth. Had Mr. Fox 
 still retained a trace of principle, his 
 friendship with the Prince of Wales 
 would have been conducted on very 
 different lines, and would have borne 
 very different fruit. Against a man so 
 gifted it is just to score his sins of 
 omission as well as those of commission. 
 He was by many years the older man. 
 And if he could not appreciate to what 
 extent age is for youth a natural priest- 
 hood, Mr. Fox, in addition to the natural 
 claims upon him, was imbued with 
 classical literature, and perfectly familiar 
 with all the maxims with which it teems 
 relative to the duties, moral and political, 
 of friendship. In this case patriotism, 
 apart from all other sentiments, demanded 
 care and devotion in the development of 
 the character of the young man in 
 whose hands so much influence and 
 power was to rest. 
 
 Even though he could forget the 
 
176 THE BIRTH OF vm 
 
 majestas pueritiae which attaches to the 
 glory of the purple in every case, it is 
 incredible that a statesman, perspicuous 
 and experienced, should have failed to 
 appreciate the degree of ill service he 
 was rendering to his country by en- 
 couraging the vices of her future king, 
 as well as the load of difficulties he was 
 possibly helping to accumulate for him- 
 self, or for his ministerial successors. 
 No man ever had a fairer opportunity 
 of influencing another for good. Prince 
 George was in the heyday of his youth. 
 His beauty and perfect manners rendered 
 him more than attractive. His powers 
 of mind were not of a mean order. He 
 was completely charmed by the superior 
 powers of Mr. Fox. Yet the older man 
 could apparently take no loftier view of 
 friendship and of political opportunity 
 than to minister to the passions and 
 pander to the vices of the younger. 
 
 His favourite Virgil must frequently 
 have reminded him that there are higher 
 aims than these in affectionate inter- 
 course between man and man. Yet 
 there is no record that he was ever 
 haunted by remorse, or fearful of the 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 177 
 
 regrets which time would bring ; or that 
 for him — the politician, the statesman, 
 the professed patriot — a day might 
 come when he might vainly wish that 
 he had established an influence over 
 Prince George of a very different kind : 
 
 magno cum optaverit emptum 
 intactum Pallanta. 
 
 This may seem sufficiently condemna- 
 tory of Mr. Fox, but his moral weak- 
 ness took a more fatal shape in the 
 inability which he showed to grasp the 
 real nature of the struggle between this 
 country and Napoleon. He was blinded 
 by political dust to the true character of 
 Mr. Pitt's struggle, and he permitted 
 himself to be fascinated by the brilliant 
 figure of the First Consul. While it is 
 the failing of some minds to see too 
 clearly the merits of a political adversary, 
 and too dimly those of political . friends, 
 it is a crime to extend this liberality of 
 view to the enemies of your country and 
 your race. Fortunately there was no- 
 thing mean or petty about Mr. Fox. 
 Otherwise the sentiment which prompted 
 him to express his hope that failure would 
 
178 THE BIRTH OF vm 
 
 attend British troops engaged against 
 those of France, might have induced 
 him to contribute surreptitiously to their 
 defeat. He was not base enough to be 
 a traitor, although he " thought meanly " 
 of his countrymen at a time when they 
 were exhibiting those great qualities of 
 dogged resistance to tyranny which have 
 made England the home of freedom. 
 
 It was this moral blindness in Mr. 
 Fox which led to his destruction as a 
 political force. It lost him the friend- 
 ship and support of Edmund Burke ; 
 it alienated from him the clearer headed 
 Whigs; it reduced his following to the 
 occupants of one hackney coach ; it 
 contributed to the security of Mr. Pitt's 
 Government ; it sapped the last founda- 
 tions of Whig influence in the country; 
 and led to the final disruption of the 
 Whig party. 
 
 When Mr. Pepper Arden in 1783, on 
 the fall of the coalition, rose in his place 
 to move for a new writ for Appleby for 
 the election of a member in the place of 
 Mr. William Pitt, who had accepted the 
 office of Chancellor of the Exchequer and 
 First Lord of the Treasury, a shout of 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 179 
 
 derisive laughter went up from the 
 benches crowded with followers of Lord 
 North and Mr. Fox. Yet it was no 
 laughing matter. The " raw boy " about 
 to take office was to continue to hold it 
 for twenty years, and the party based on 
 his principles, reared by his policy, and 
 cemented by his example, was to guide 
 the destinies of England for a century. 
 
 Mr. Pitt's education and training had 
 been wholly different from those of Mr. 
 Fox, and their characters were quite as 
 dissimilar. George Selwyn compared 
 them to the two well-known apprentices 
 whose careers have formed the basis of 
 many a contrast. 
 
 Chatham, altogether at his best within 
 the domestic circle, would spend many 
 hours charmed and happy in the society 
 of the " young counsellor," as he called 
 his boy. At his father's knee Mr. Pitt 
 practised the rolling periods, and exer- 
 cised the wonderful memory, that from 
 the day he first spoke within its walls 
 dominated the House of Commons. The 
 lofty patriotism, the haughty disinter- 
 estedness, and the indomitable courage 
 of Chatham were transmitted to his son. 
 
i8o THE BIRTH OF viii 
 
 His father's fire Mr. Pitt never caught. 
 His manner was ever cold and serene. 
 To a lofty imagination there is an in- 
 describable charm in watching the first 
 soaring of youth, and in training its 
 early flights. Chatham delighted in 
 these exercises, as his letters to his son, 
 as well as to his nephew, amply show. 
 His careful pruning of the mind of Mr. 
 Pitt was his great legacy to his country. 
 When he fell back into his son's arms in 
 the House of Lords, on the occasion of 
 his last speech within those walls, he 
 typified, so to speak, the land he was 
 about to leave, and unwittingly desig- 
 nated the hands to which he committed 
 that great trust. Such confidence, if 
 indeed he felt it, was not misplaced ; for 
 Mr. Pitt possessed all the qualities then 
 needed in the ruler of England and in 
 the founder of a new school of statesmen. 
 His personal character was above re- 
 proach or even suspicion. Gambling, 
 after a short experience, he had quietly 
 abandoned after noting its fascinations. 
 His name was never coupled with that 
 of any woman. His virtue was a con- 
 stant source of raillery among the young 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY i8i 
 
 Macaronis of Brooks' and of White's. 
 Rarer at that time than these quahties 
 was his perfect disinterestedness with 
 regard to money. Like Pericles, Mr. 
 Pitt was poor ; and, like his great pro- 
 totype, his poverty never tempted him 
 to accept a lucrative sinecure, nor was 
 he ever suspected of a desire to profit 
 financially by the high offices which he 
 held. As Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 his duty appeared to him rigidly to 
 guard the public purse from encroach- 
 ment, and he was as close-fisted when 
 his own claims were considered as when 
 those of others were concerned. Not 
 the oldest and driest Treasury clerk in 
 these days could be more conscientiously 
 penurious with public funds. " Amid 
 the losses of the Empire the old corrupt 
 practices had flourished unchecked," if 
 they had not increased, under the in- 
 dolent and easy-going Lord North. 
 
 '' Mr. Pitt, with a vigorous hand, 
 pruned the luxuriance of prodigality, and 
 grafted on the ancient system the new 
 maxims he had learnt in the school of 
 Adam Smith." This view of Mr. Pitt's 
 financial administration, in the words of 
 
1 82 THE BIRTH OF yiu 
 
 a Liberal Prime Minister of later days, 
 justifies his claim to be the first of 
 English statesmen who made Retrench- 
 ment, as it is understood by us now, a 
 cardinal point of his policy. Mr. Pitt's 
 perfect education had made him familiar 
 with the writings of Adam Smith. Per- 
 haps alone among the members of the 
 House of Commons elected in 1784 he 
 was imbued with the commercial doc- 
 trines of the founder of Free Trade, which 
 had been given to the world, by the 
 publication of the Wealth of Nations^ 
 less than ten years before Mr. Pitt 
 entered Parliament. As a financier he 
 remained, throughout his life, a disciple 
 of Adam Smith. As a financier his 
 reputation stood as high above those 
 of his contemporaries as Mr. Gladstone's 
 stands above those of his. In finance 
 Mr. Pitt contemplated wider changes, 
 in the direction of absolute commercial 
 freedom, than have even now been 
 attained. He desired to abolish all 
 Custom Duties whatever, and limit the 
 public income to internal taxation. In 
 1792 he proposed his Sinking Fund 
 Scheme. It was the commencement of 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 183 
 
 a new era in finance. Unfortunately 
 the war which almost immediately broke 
 out made all reform impossible, and 
 postponed for half a century the realisa- 
 tion of Mr. Pitt's dreams. 
 
 That Mr. Pitt was a peace Minister, 
 and was drawn reluctantly into the great 
 war by the passions of his countrymen, 
 and by the real exigencies of the case, no 
 one free from prejudice has ever disputed. 
 
 It has often seemed the cruel fate of 
 Ministers really loving peace, or profess- 
 ing to love it, to attract the clouds of war. 
 As a war Minister, although his con- 
 stancy and courage are not to be measured 
 by his unsuccess, Mr. Pitt cannot stand 
 comparison with Chatham. As a war 
 Minister he was heavily weighed down 
 by his financial keenness. Chatham pre- 
 tended to know nothing of finance. He 
 was ostentatiously lavish in war. It is 
 the secret of success. Mr. Pitt tried 
 hard and conscientiously to make cheap 
 wars. Subsidies appealed to his Ex- 
 chequer mind. The amount of a sub- 
 sidy could be estimated, and its cost 
 provided for by anticipation. It fitted 
 well with the calculations so dear to the 
 
1 84 THE BIRTH OF viii 
 
 soul of a Chancellor of the Exchequer ; 
 whereas war, on a great scale, neces- 
 sarily opened incalculably the mouth of 
 the public purse. Mr. Pitt's preference 
 was natural, and his example has been a 
 temptation rather than a warning to his 
 successors. 
 
 First among English statesmen Mr. 
 Pitt showed zeal for parliamentary re- 
 form. One of his first acts in public 
 life was to endeavour to convince the 
 House of Commons that it was necessary 
 to enfranchise the great unrepresented 
 towns which had arisen in the centre of 
 England. As Prime Minister in 1785 
 he renewed his attempt, and the European 
 cataclysm alone prevented him from 
 continuing his struggle for reform. He 
 had all the hatred of revolution, and all 
 the love for reform, so characteristic of 
 the Liberal chiefs of 1830. 
 
 To Edmund Burke, as well as to Adam 
 Smith, he owed a large mental debt. He 
 attempted to grapple with Irish discon- 
 tent, and to draw Ireland and England 
 into closer harmony. Whatever opinion 
 may be held about the methods used, it 
 is fatuous to deny that Mr. Pitt's policy 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 185 
 
 was a great conception, based on the 
 noblest principle, and altogether in keep- 
 ing with the opinions and ideas of Liberal 
 statesmen who succeeded him. To unite 
 England and Ireland in one scheme of re- 
 presentative government, on a broad and 
 generous basis, and to combine with this 
 union freedom from religious disabilities, 
 by admitting Catholics to full citizenship, 
 was the great policy of Mr. Pitt. It was 
 defeated by the bigotry of English Pro- 
 testantism acting upon the narrow con- 
 science of the King. In conjunction 
 with his friend Wilberforce, Mr. Pitt 
 conceived and advocated another great 
 measure, the Abolition of Slavery in 
 British dominions, which was left to the 
 Liberal party ultimately to accomplish. 
 Under the trees at Holwood this noble 
 piece of work was first discussed by the 
 two friends, and the first plans of the 
 campaign organised. 
 
 Another innovation made by Mr. Pitt, 
 which has had a marked influence upon 
 English public life, was the infusion 
 into the House of Lords of democratic 
 blood. Up to the reign of George the 
 Third the House of Peers consisted of 
 
1 86 THE BIRTH OF viii 
 
 less than half its present numbers. 
 Occasionally a new peer was created ; 
 but he was generally a member of some 
 aristocratic family, and his peerage was a 
 mere step in nobility. Mr. Pitt con- 
 ceived the plan of strengthening the hold 
 of the hereditary house upon the country 
 by letting it be seen that every man 
 carried potentially a coronet under his 
 hat. It is difficult to estimate the import- 
 ance to the stability of English institu- 
 tions in their present form, of the novel 
 practice which has more than doubled 
 the numbers of the House of Lords. 
 
 Finally, Mr. Pitt, with the courage 
 and haughty indiiFerence of youthful 
 genius, broke away from the trammels 
 of old political ^' connections.'' He would 
 not stoop to traffic with boroughmongers 
 and political patrons. In the session of 
 1783 he stood alone in the House of 
 Commons. The "raw boy" of four- 
 and- twenty was Prime Minister and 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer, without 
 a single colleague of the rank of a 
 Cabinet Minister to support him in the 
 House of Commons, and with a large 
 hostile majority to face. He suffered 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 187 
 
 defeat after defeat, waiting patiently for 
 the turn of the tide, which he felt quietly 
 confident would come. What was the 
 tide for which he waited? It was the 
 flow of popular opinion, to which 
 Chatham had so often appealed, upon 
 which his son now relied, and upon 
 which he did not rely in vain. The 
 General Election of 1784 decided the 
 great issue raised by this lad — a boy in 
 years, but in intellectual training, and in 
 composure, and in dignity, more than a 
 match for the most experienced politicians. 
 For the remainder of his life, with the 
 exception of the three years during which 
 he tolerated and patronised the effete 
 administration of Addington, he was 
 Prime Minister. During the whole of 
 his career, to his death in 1806, he re- 
 mained the real ruler of England. 
 
 Education and training had made of 
 him a reformer : a zealous advocate of 
 Peace, of Retrenchment, of Reform. 
 Fatality made of him a warrior. In 
 the eyes of his countrymen, and in the 
 opinion of the whole world, he stood 
 upright among cringing statesmen and 
 toppling thrones as the defender of the 
 
1 88 THE BIRTH OF viii 
 
 integrity of England, and of the liberties 
 of Europe ; but in his youth — before the 
 great Revolution by its reactionary waves 
 had made war a necessity of self-defence, 
 and conservatism a necessity of temporary 
 security — Mr. Pitt had laid the foundations 
 of the Liberal party, and had struck the 
 keynote of a century of political progress. 
 
 Few English statesmen have been 
 tested so severely as Mr. Pitt by the 
 trials and temptations incidental to public 
 life. None have stood the test more 
 superbly well. To none is the debt of 
 gratitude due from Englishmen, living to- 
 day, so heavy. He exhibited to Europe 
 the spectacle of a nation ready to bear the 
 most terrible hardships, and to make the 
 most heroic sacrifices, rather than yield to 
 the dominion, or connive at the oppressive 
 schemes, of an ambitious military tyrant, 
 however formidable the one or however 
 specious the other. His character acted 
 like a tonic upon that of his countrymen ; 
 and the national fibre was strengthened 
 by contact with his firm will and in- 
 domitable courage. 
 
 In 1806, when death came to him, the 
 great struggle with Napoleon was un- 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 189 
 
 ended. He left his country, as he feared, 
 among the breakers. The pilot had gone 
 overboard, and the storm was far from 
 weathered. In point of fact the clouds 
 were about to hft. Three years after- 
 wards. Sir Arthur Wellesley commenced 
 his immortal defence of Portugal ; and 
 the tide of victory, for which Mr. Pitt 
 had so ardently longed, commenced to 
 flow from the heights of Torres Vedras, 
 and rapidly spreading over France itself, 
 swept Napoleon from the Imperial throne 
 of Europe. 
 
 Mr. Pitt's political rival soon followed 
 him to the grave. During his short spell 
 of power Mr. Fox found himself in the 
 humiliating position of having to carry 
 on the policy which for years he had 
 denounced. He was unable to make 
 peace with Bonaparte. The mantle, 
 however, of Mr. Pitt fell upon shoulders 
 competent to wear it. 
 
 The Duke of Wellington's personality 
 towered over that of the politicians who 
 hampered, though they could not thwart, 
 his dogged purpose and patient strategy. 
 
 After Waterloo, during the thirty years 
 of peace that followed, the threads dropped 
 
190 THE BIRTH OF vm 
 
 by Mr. Pitt were slowly gathered up. 
 Partly Mr. Canning, his friend and dis- 
 ciple, partly Lord Grey, who " wrought 
 in brave old age what youth had planned," 
 partly Sir Robert Peel, yielding to reason 
 based on Adam Smith's doctrines, managed 
 to carry out the schemes dear to Mr. Pitt 
 in the days when he was still free to con- 
 template, in a reforming spirit, domestic 
 abuses. 
 
 The Liberal party, the outcome of his 
 political conceptions and of the immortal 
 writings of Edmund Burke, began to take 
 advantage of the new system of govern- 
 ment which had sprung from that ele- 
 mentary type, invented by the statesmen 
 of Queen Anne and developed by the 
 statesmen of the Georges. 
 
 The Press became a vast, far-reaching 
 power, with wide-spreading influence over 
 opinion and events. The control exer- 
 cised by the popular voice over the 
 executive government was fast becoming 
 unquestioned. A young Sovereign, in- 
 experienced but singularly reasonable, 
 seemed determined to give fair play to 
 the system of Cabinet Government 
 initiated by Walpole, and since firmly 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 191 
 
 established. Aided by her marriage to 
 a Prince, himself educated with consum- 
 mate care, and endowed with rare capacity 
 and great prudence, she was enabled to 
 acquire statesmanlike qualities which have 
 guided her Ministers, and the State over 
 which she presides, through days perilous 
 to monarchy and to constitutional govern- 
 ment as established by English custom. 
 So that while constitution-mongers in 
 other lands have seen their projects de- 
 feated, and their pet schemes destroyed, 
 by passing gusts of popular passion ; 
 here, in Britain, as the people acquired 
 knowledge, and through knowledge 
 power, democratic government has been 
 grafted on to the old aristocratic stock, 
 with unpremeditated but supreme sense ; 
 and the form of government has been 
 moulded, by those primarily responsible, 
 into a shape suitable to the growing re- 
 quirements of the nation and to the wider 
 needs of the Victorian Empire. This has 
 been the work of the nineteenth century, 
 which opened for England with the 
 accession to power of Mr. Pitt in 1783, 
 and with the outbreak of the French 
 Revolution in 1789. 
 
192 THE BIRTH OF viii 
 
 In 1885, when the agricultural classes 
 were first admitted to the Franchise, the 
 twentieth century may be said to have 
 commenced. Possibly the work of the 
 Liberal party, as known to us, is at an 
 end. The teaching of Adam Smith and 
 of Burke may have had its day. New 
 conditions may require a reconsideration 
 of principles both commercial and ad- 
 ministrative, which our grandfathers be- 
 lieved to be essential and vital to every 
 form of government. Lord Beacons- 
 field's aphorism, Sanitas sanitatum omnia 
 sanitas^ may possibly cover the new 
 combinations and new ideas of the 
 coming century ; for he possessed the 
 curious gift of prophecy peculiar to his 
 race. Undoubtedly the social ferment 
 is great at the present time. The 
 patient labouring classes have become, 
 under the influences of education, articu- 
 late and restless. They have obtained a 
 share of political power, and they show 
 signs of using it. Properly used, it 
 should increase the sum of human happi- 
 ness. The new wine will probably 
 require new bottles. The break up of 
 the Liberal party in 1886 may prove, in 
 
VIII THE LIBERAL PARTY 193 
 
 spite of spasmodic revivals, to be as final 
 as the fall of the Whigs in 1783. When 
 new combinations come to be formed, and 
 new principles applied to government, it 
 will be interesting to note the fitness of 
 the Cabinet and parliamentary system 
 still in use for the new conditions of 
 things. The constitutional customs of 
 our fathers have hitherto proved so 
 elastic, and the habits of Englishmen 
 incline so happily to precedent and to 
 long -established usage, that while we 
 must expect new developments and 
 necessary changes, we may confidently 
 hope that the chain which binds the 
 England of to-day to the England of 
 our ancestors will remain unbroken. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 NOTE 
 
 1485 = Battle of Bosworth Field — End of Civil 
 Wars. 
 
 Rule of the Tudors. 
 
 1 588 = Spanish Armada — England freed from 
 foreign interference. 
 
 Rule of the Stuarts. 
 
 1688 = Revolution — Religious and political liberty 
 established. 
 
 Rule of the Whigs. 
 
 1784 = Mr. Pitt's Government — New ideas: 
 Retrenchment ; Reform ; Free Trade. 
 
 Rule of the Liberal party. 
 
 1886 = Break-up of the Liberals. New com- 
 binations and ideas. Labour Problems. 
 
 Sanitas sanitatum omnia sanitas. 
 
196 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 SCHEMES OF READING (No. i). 
 
 Seeley's Expansion of England. 
 
 Southey's Life of Nelson. 
 
 Mahan's Influence of Sea 
 Poiver in History. 
 
 I 
 
 Kingsley's Westivard Ho ! 
 
 I 
 
 Lord Dundonald's 
 Autobiography of a Seaman. 
 
 I 
 
 Froude's Oceana. 
 
 Portal's Mission to Abyssinia. 
 
 Johnstone's Kilimanjaro. 
 
 Dilke's Greater Britain. 
 
 Gordon's Letters from 
 Central Africa and 
 Khartoum Journals. 
 
 Kipling's Soldiers Three. 
 
 Life of John Laivrence. 
 
 Kaye's History of the 
 Indian Mutiny, vols. 
 i. and ii. 
 
 Kinglake's Crimea, vols, 
 i. and v. 
 
 Hooper's Waterloo. 
 
 Life of William Napier. 
 
 Macaulay's Essays on 
 Clive and Warren 
 Hastings. 
 
 Parker's Imperial Federation. 
 
 This scheme of reading is based on Professor Seeley's book 
 as a hit motif which may be said to run through the 
 whole of it. The enterprise, courage, endurance, and self- 
 sacrifice of Englishmen — qualities ennobling the race, and at 
 the foundation of Empire — are discovered in these volumes. 
 The suggestions may be thought fanciful and some of the 
 books trivial 5 but I hold no book to be trivial which has 
 moved men to tears or stirred a noble impulse. 
 
 The main difficulty has been to choose books which avoid 
 much detail, and yet convey clearly the lesson which Pro- 
 fessor Seeley has elevated into a principle. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 197 
 
 SCHEMES OF READING (No. 2). 
 
 Bagehot's English Constitution. 
 
 Disraeli's Sybil. 
 
 Dunckley's Lord Melbourne. 
 
 C. Bronte's Shirley. 
 
 Rosebery's Pitt. 
 
 I 
 
 Autobiography of Shelburne. 
 
 Macaulay's two Essays on 
 Chatham. 
 
 Sir G. Cornewall Lewis' 
 Administration of Great 
 Britain. 
 
 Thursfield's Peel. 
 
 I 
 George Eliot's Felix Holt. 
 
 Disraeli's Life of Lord 
 G. Bentinck, 
 
 Morley's Burke, 
 
 I 
 
 Lord Waldegrave's Journal. 
 
 I 
 
 Morley's Walpole. 
 
 I 
 JLord Hervey's Memoirs, 
 
 Here the hit motif \s Mr. Bagehot's unique little book. 
 
 The novels by Disraeli, C. Bronte, and George Eliot contain 
 true and invaluable pictures of England at important moments 
 while the modern Constitution was making. It has been 
 suggested to me on high authority that Alton Locke should 
 be substituted for Felix Holt j but, after careful consideration, 
 I adhere to George Eliot's novel. 
 
 Very interesting and important Memoirs have been omitted 
 owing to their length, and to the amount of knowledge pre- 
 supposed if they are to be altogether appreciated. 
 
 These two schemes do not aim at being exhaustive ; but 
 it is hoped that they may prove interesting to young 
 readers. 
 
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh 
 
MESSRS. MACMILLAN AND CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 Now Publishing. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. each. 
 
 TWELVE ENGLISH STATESMEN. 
 
 *4t* A Series of Short Biographies, not designed to be a complete roll of famous 
 Statesmen, but to present in historic order the lives and work of those leading actors 
 in our affairs who by their direct influence have left an abiding mark on the policy^ 
 the institutions, and the position of Great Britain am.ong States. 
 
 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. By Edward A. Freeman, 
 D.C.L., LL.D., Regius Professor of Modern History in the 
 University of Oxford. 
 TIMES :—^' Giw&s with great picturesqueness . . the dramatic incidents of a 
 
 memorable career far removed from our times and our manner of thinking." 
 
 HENRY II. By Mrs. J. R. Green. 
 
 TIMES :— " It is dehghtfuUy real and readable, and in spite of severe compression 
 has the charm of a mediaeval romance." 
 
 EDWARD I. By Professor Tout. {In Preparation. 
 
 HENRY VII. By James Gairdner. 
 
 A THENMUM:—'' The best account of Henry VII. that has yet appeared." 
 
 CARDINAL WOLSEY. By Bishop Creighton, D.D., late Dixie 
 Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Cambridge. 
 SA TURD A Y REVIEW:—'' Is exactly what one of a series of short biogra- 
 phies of English Statesmen ought to be." 
 
 ELIZABETH. By E. S. Beesly, M.A., Professor of Modern 
 History, University College, London. 
 
 OLIVER CROMWELL. By Frederic Harrison. 
 
 TIMES : — " Gives a wonderfully vivid picture of events." 
 
 ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE :—'' K model biography of its kind." 
 
 WILLIAM III. By H. D. Traill. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE REVIEW:— ''Mr. Traill has discharged a difficult task well, 
 and has thoroughly succeeded." 
 
 WALPOLE. By John Morley. 
 
 ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE :— " It deserves to be read, not only as the work of 
 one of the most prominent politicians of the day, but for its intrinsic merits. It is a 
 clever, thoughtful, and interesting biography." 
 
 WORLD : — " This admirable Uttle book is in style, arrangement, and proportion 
 the model of what history on such a scale should be." 
 
 CHATHAM. By John Morley. [Jn the Press. 
 
 PITT. By Lord Rosebery. 
 
 PEEL. By J. R. Thursfield, M. A., late Fellow of Jesus College, 
 Oxford. 
 DAIL Y NEWS : — "A model of what such a book should be. We can give it no 
 higher praise than to say that it is worthy to rank with Mr. John Morley 's Walpole 
 in the same series." 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. 
 
MESSRS. MACMILLAN AND CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 Crown 8vo, cloth. 2s. 6d. each. 
 
 ENGLISH MEN OF ACTION SERIES. 
 
 CAPTAIN COOK. By Mr. Walter Besant. 
 
 SCOTTISH LEADER :— " It is simply the best and most readable account of 
 the great navigator yet published." 
 
 CLIVE. By Colonel Sir Charles Wilson. 
 DAMPIER. By Mr. W. Clark Russell. 
 
 ATHEN^UM : — '* As a commentary on Dampier's voyages this little book is 
 among the best." 
 
 DRAKE. By Mr. Julian Corbett. 
 
 SCOTTISH LEADER ;— " Perhaps the most fascinating of all the fifteen that 
 have so far appeared." 
 
 GENERAL GORDON. By Colonel Sir William Butler. 
 
 SPECTATOR : — "This is beyond all question the best of the narratives of the 
 career of General Gordon that have yet been published." 
 
 HENRY V. By the Rev. A. J. Church. 
 LIVINGSTONE. By Mr. Thomas Hughes. 
 
 SPECTA TOR : — " An excellent instance of miniature biography. " 
 
 LORD LAWRENCE. By Sir Richard Temple. 
 
 LEEDS MERC l/RV:—" Lucid, temperate, and impressive." 
 
 MONK. By Mr. Julian Corbett. 
 
 MONTROSE. By Mr. Mowbray Morris. 
 
 PETERBOROUGH. By Mr. W. Stebbing. 
 
 SATURDA Y REVIEW:— '' Ku excellent piece of work." 
 
 RODNEY. By Mr. David Hannay. 
 
 SIR CHARLES NAPIER. By Colonel Sir William Butler. 
 SIR HENRY HAVELOCK. By Mr. Archibald Forbes. 
 STRAFFORD. By Mr. H. D. Traill. 
 
 ^r^^iV^t/Af;—" Clear and accurate." >^ , 
 
 WARREN HASTINGS. By Sir Alfred Lyall. 
 
 DAILY NEWS: — "The final and decisive verdict of history on the conduct 
 and career of Hastings." 
 
 WARWICK, THE KING-MAKER. By Mr. C. W. Oman. 
 
 ANTI-JACOBIN: — "It is beyond question the best book which has yet 
 appeared on the Wars of the Roses." 
 
 WELLINGTON. By Mr. George Hooper. 
 
 And the undermentioned are in the Press or in Preparation: — 
 
 MARLBOROUGH. By Colonel Sir William Butler. 
 
 [/w Preparation. 
 SIR JOHN MOORE. By Colonel Maurice. {In the Press. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. 
 
T-O-O A •D'vr 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 BERKELEY 
 
 Return to desk from which borrowed. 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 DEC 19 194? 
 
 icii m 
 
 ^w 
 
 JA/V131953L, 
 
 '■SV3 
 REC'D LD 
 
 Lu(18195I 
 
 LD 21-100m-9,'47(A5702sl6)476 
 
 REC'D LD 
 
 APR 3 lasii 
 
YB 08594 
 
 . ^G 
 
 352337