Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 362, December 1845

We then have a character of a man embalmed in the contempt poured upon him by Junius – the Duke of Grafton. Though less bitter, it is equally scornful. "Hitherto," says Walpole, "he had passed for a man of much obstinacy and firmness, of strict honour, devoid of ambition, and, though reserved, more diffident than designing. He retained so much of this character, as to justify those who had mistaken the rest. If he precipitated himself into the most sudden and inextricable contradictions, at least he pursued the object of the moment with inflexible ardour. If he abandoned himself to total negligence of business, in pursuit of his sports and pleasures, the love of power never quitted him; and, when his will was disputed, no man was more imperiously arbitrary. If his designs were not deeply laid, at least they were conducted in profound silence. He rarely pardoned those who did not guess his inclination. It was necessary to guess, so rare was any instance of his unbosoming himself to either friends or confidants. Why his honour had been so highly rated I can less account, except that he had advertised it, and that obstinate young men are apt to have high notions, before they have practised the world, and essayed their own virtue."

At length, after a vast variety of intrigues, which threw the public life of those days into the most contemptible point of view, the King being made virtually a cipher, while the families of the Hertfords, Buckinghams, and Rockinghams trafficked the high offices of state as children would barter toys; an administration was tardily formed. Walpole, who seemed to take a sort of dilettante pleasure in constructing those intrigues, and making himself wretched at their failure, while nobody suffered him to take advantage of their success; now gave himself a holiday, and went to relax in Paris for six weeks – his relaxation consisting of gossip amongst the literary ladies of the capital. During his absence an event happened which, though it did not break up the ministry, yet must have had considerable effect in its influence on the House of Commons. This was the death of the celebrated Charles Townshend, on the 4th of September 1767, in the forty-second year of his age. The cause of his death was a neglected fever; if even this did not arise from his carelessness of health, and those habits which, if not amounting to intemperance, were certainly trespasses on his constitution. Walpole speaks of him with continual admiration of his genius, and continual contempt of his principles. He also thinks, that he had arrived at his highest fame, or, in his peculiar phrase, "that his genius could have received no accession of brightness, while his faults only promised multiplication." Walpole, with no pretence to rival, probably envied this singular personage; for, whenever he begins by panegyric, he uniformly ends with a sting. One of the Notes gives an extract on Sir George Colebrook's Memoirs, which perhaps places his faculties in a more favourable point of view than the high-coloured eulogium of Burke, or the polished insinuations of Walpole. Sir George tells us, that Townshend's object was to be prime minister, and that he would doubtless have attained that object had he lived to see the Duke of Grafton's resignation. Lord North succeeded him as chancellor of the exchequer, and Townshend would evidently have preceded him as prime minister. "As a private man, his friends were used to say, that they should not see his like again. Though they were often the butts of his wit, they always returned to his company with fresh delight, which they would not have done had there been either malice or rancour in what he said. He loved society, and in his choice of friends preferred those over whom he had a decided superiority of talent. He was satisfied when he had put the table in a roar, and he did not like to see it done by another. When Garrick and Foote were present, he took the lead, and hardly allowed them an opportunity of showing their talents for mimicry, because he could excel them in their own art. He shone particularly in taking off the principal members of the House of Commons. Among the few whom he feared was Mr Selwyn, and at a dinner at Lord Gower's they had a trial of skill, in which Mr Selwyn prevailed. When the company broke up, Mr Townshend, to show that he had no animosity, carried him in his carriage to White's; and, as they parted, Selwyn could not help saying – 'Remember, this is the first set-down you have given me to-day.'"

As Townshend lived at a considerable expense, and had little paternal fortune, he speculated occasionally in both the French and English funds. One of the incidents related by Sir George, and without a syllable of censure too, throws on him an imputation of trickery which, in our later day, would utterly destroy any public man. "When he was chancellor of the exchequer, he came in his nightgown to a dinner given by the Duke of Grafton to several of the principal men of the city to settle the loan. After dinner, when the terms were settled, and every body present wished to introduce some friend on the list of subscribers, he pretended to cast up the sums already admitted, said the loan was full, huddled up his papers, got into a chair, and returned home, reserving to himself by this manœuvre a large share of the loan." An act of this kind exhibits the honesty of the last age in a very equivocal point of view. If proud of nothing else, we may be proud of the public sense of responsibility; in our day, it may be presumed that such an act would be impossible, for it would inevitably involve the ruin of the perpetrator, followed by the ruin of any ministry which would dare to defend him.

At this period died a brother of the king, Edward Duke of York, a man devoted to pleasure, headstrong in his temper, and ignorant in his conceptions. "Immoderate travelling, followed by immoderate balls and entertainments," had long kept his blood in a peculiar state of accessibility to disease. He died of a putrid fever. Walpole makes a panegyric on the Duke of Gloucester, his brother; of which a part may be supposed due to the Duke's marriage with Lady Waldegrave, a marriage which provoked the indignation of the King, and which once threatened political evils of a formidable nature. Henry, the Duke of Cumberland, was also an unfortunate specimen of the blood royal. He is described as having the babbling loquacity of the Duke of York, without his talents; as at once arrogant and low; presuming on his rank as a prince, and degrading himself by an association with low company. Still, we are to remember Walpole's propensity to sarcasm, the enjoyment which he seems to have felt in shooting his brilliant missiles at all ranks superior to his own; and his especial hostility to George the Third, one of the honestest monarchs that ever sat upon a throne.

In those days the composition of ministries depended altogether upon the high families. – The peerage settled every thing amongst themselves. A few of their dependents were occasionally taken into office; but all the great places were distributed among a little clique, who thus constituted themselves the real masters of the empire. Walpole's work has its value, in letting us into the secrets of a conclave, which at once shows us the singular emptiness of its constituent parts, and the equally singular authority with which they seem to have disposed of both the king and the people. We give a scene from the Historian, which would make an admirable fragment of the Rehearsal, and which wanted only the genius of Sheridan to be an admirable pendant to Mr Puff's play in the Critic. "On the 20th a meeting was held at the Duke of Newcastle's, of Lord Rockingham, the Duke of Richmond, and of Dowdeswell, with Newcastle himself on one part, and of the Duke of Bedford, Lord Weymouth, and Rigby on the other. The Duke of Bedford had powers from Grenville to act for him; but did not seem to like Lord Buckingham's taking on himself to name to places. On the latter's asking what friends they wished to prefer, Rigby said, with his cavalier bluntness – Take the Court Calendar and give them one, two, three thousand pounds a-year! Bedford observed – They had said nothing on measures. Mr Grenville would insist on the sovereignty of this country over America being asserted. Lord Rockingham replied – He would never allow it to be a question whether he had given up this country – he never had. The Duke insisted on a declaration. The Duke of Richmond said – We may as well demand one from you, that you will never disturb that country again. Neither would yield. However, though they could not agree on measures; as the distribution of place was more the object of their thoughts and of their meeting, they reverted to that topic. Lord Rockingham named Mr Conway. Bedford started; said he had no notion of Conway; had thought he was to return to the military line. The Duke of Richmond said it was true, Mr Conway did not desire a civil place; did not know whether he would be persuaded to accept one; but they were so bound to him for his resignation, and thought him so able, they must insist. The Duke of Bedford said – Conway was an officer sans tache, but not a minister sans tache. Rigby said – Not one of the present cabinet should be saved. Dowdeswell asked – 'What! not one?' 'No.' 'What! not Charles Townshend.' 'Oh!' said Rigby, 'that is different. Besides, he has been in opposition.' 'So has Conway,' said Dowdeswell. 'He has voted twice against the court, Townshend but once.' 'But,' said Rigby, 'Conway is Bute's man.' 'Pray,' said Dowdeswell, 'is not Charles Townshend Bute's?' 'Ah! but Conway is governed by his brother Hertford, who is Bute's.' 'But Lady Ailesbury is a Scotchwoman.' 'So is Lady Dalkeith.' Those ladies had been widows and were now married, (the former to Conway, the latter to Townshend.) From this dialogue the assembly fell to wrangling, and broke up quarrelling. So high did the heats go, that the Conways ran about the town publishing the issue of the conference, and taxing the Bedfords with treachery."

Notwithstanding this collision, at once so significant, and so trifling – at once a burlesque on the gravity of public affairs, and a satire on the selfishness of public men – on the same evening, the Duke of Bedford sent to desire another interview, to which Lord Rockingham yielded, but the Duke of Bedford refused to be present. So much, however, were the minds on both sides ulcerated by former and recent disputes, and so incompatible were their views, that the second meeting broke up in a final quarrel, and Lord Rockingham released the other party from all their engagements. The Duke of Bedford desired they might still continue friends, or at least to agree to oppose together. Lord Rockingham said no, "they were broken for ever."

It was at this meeting that the Duke of Newcastle appeared for the last time in a political light. Age and feebleness had at length worn out that busy passion for intrigue, which power had not been able to satiate, nor disgrace correct. He languished above a year longer, but was heard of no more on the scene of affairs. (He died in November 1768.)

A remarkable circumstance in all those arrangements is, that we hear nothing of either the king or the people. The king is of course applied to to sign and seal, but simply as a head clerk. The people are occasionally mentioned at the end of every seven years; but in the interim all was settled in the parlours of the peerage! The scene which we have just given was absolutely puerile, if it were not scandalous; and, without laying ourselves open to the charge of superstition on such subjects, we might almost regard the preservation of the empire as directly miraculous, while power was in the hands of such men as the Butes and Newcastles, the Bedfords and Rockinghams, of the last century. It is not even difficult to trace to this intolerable system, alike the foreign calamities and the internal convulsions during this period. Whether America could, by any possibility of arrangement, have continued a British colony up to the present time, may be rationally doubted. A vast country, rapidly increasing in wealth and population, would have been an incumbrance, rather than an addition, to the power of England. If the patronage of her offices continued in the hands of ministers, it must have supplied them with the means of buying up every man who was to be bought in England. It would have been the largest fund of corruption ever known in the world. Or, if the connexion continued, with the population of America doubling in every five-and-twenty years, the question must in time have arisen, whether England or America ought to be the true seat of government. The probable consequence, however, would have been separation; and as this could scarcely be effected by amicable means, the result might have been a war of a much more extensive, wasteful, and formidable nature, than that which divided the two countries sixty-five years ago.

But all the blunders of the American war, nay the war itself, may be still almost directly traceable to the arrogance of the oligarchy. Too much accustomed to regard government as a natural appendage to their birth, they utterly forgot the true element of national power – the force of public opinion. Inflated with a sense of their personal superiority, they looked with easy indifference or studied contempt on every thing that was said or done by men whose genealogy was not registered in the red book. Of America – a nation of Englishmen – and of its proceedings, they talked, as a Russian lord might talk of his serfs. Some of them thought, that a Stamp act would frighten the sturdy free-holders of the Western World into submission! others talked of reducing them to obedience by laying a tax on their tea! others prescribed a regimen of writs and constables! evidently regarding the American farmers as they regarded the poachers and paupers on their own demesnes. All this arose from stupendous ignorance; but it was ignorance engendered by pride, by exclusiveness of rank, and by the arrogance of caste. So excessive was this exclusiveness, that Burke, though the most extraordinary man of his time, and one of the most memorable of any time, could never obtain a seat in the cabinet; where such triflers as Newcastle, such figures of patrician pedantry as Buckingham, such shallow intriguers as the Bedfords, and such notorious characters as the Sandwiches, played with power, like children with the cups and balls of their nursery. Lord North, with all his wit, his industry, and his eloquence, owed his admission into the cabinet, to his being the son of the Earl of Guilford. Charles Fox, though marked by nature, from his first entrance into public life, for the highest eminence of the senate, would never have been received into the government class, but for his casual connexion with the House of Richmond. Thus, they knew nothing of the real powers of that infinite multitude, which, however below the peerage, forms the country. They thought that a few frowns from Downing Street could extinguish the resistance of millions, three thousand miles off, with muskets in their hands, inflamed by a sense of wrong, whether fancied or true, and insensible to the gatherings of a brow however coroneted and antique.

This haughty exclusiveness equally accounts for the contests with Wilkes. They felt themselves affronted, much more than resisted; they were much more stung by the defiance of a private individual to themselves, than they were urged to the collision by any conceivable sense of hazard to the Monarchy. No man, out of bedlam, could conceive, that Wilkes had either the power or the intention to subvert the state. But Mr Wilkes, an obscure man, whose name was not known to the calendar of the government fabricators, had actually dared to call their privilege of power into question; had defied them in the courts of law; had rebuked them in the senate; had shaken their influence in the elections; and had, in fact, compelled them to know, what they were so reluctant to learn, that they were but human beings after all! The acquisition of this knowledge cost them half a dozen years of convulsions, the most ruinous to themselves, and the most hazardous to the constitution. Wilkes' profligacy alone, perhaps, saved the constitution from a shock, which might have changed the whole system of the empire. If he had not been sunk by his personal character, at the first moment when the populace grew cool, he might have availed himself of the temper of the times to commit mischiefs the most irreparable. If his personal character had been as free from public offence as his spirit was daring, he might have led the people much further than the government ever had the foresight to contemplate. The conduct of the successive cabinets had covered the King with unpopularity, not the less fierce, that it was wholly undeserved. Junius, the ablest political writer that England has ever seen, or probably ever will see, in the art of assailing a ministry, had pilloried every leading man of his time except Chatham, in the imperishable virulence of his page. The popular mind was furious with indignation at the conduct of all cabinets; in despair of all improvement in the system; irritated by the rash severity which alternated with the equally rash pusillanimity of ministers; and beginning to regard government less as a protection, than as an encroachment on the natural privileges of a nation of freemen.

They soon had a growing temptation before them in the successful revolt of America.

We do not now enter into that question; it is too long past. But we shall never allude to it without paying that homage to truth, which pronounces, that the American revolt was a rebellion, wholly unjustifiable by the provocation; utterly rejecting all explanation, or atonement for casual injuries; and made in the spirit of a determination to throw off the allegiance to the mother country. But, if Wilkes could have sustained his opposition but a few years longer, and with any character but one so shattered as his own, he might have carried it on through life, and even bequeathed it as a legacy to his party; until the French Revolution had joined flame to flame across the Channel, and England had rivalled even the frenzy of France in the rapidity and ruin of her Reform.

Fortunately, the empire was rescued from this most fatal of all catastrophes. A great English minister appeared, on whom were to devolve the defence of England and the restoration of Europe. The sagacity of Pitt saw where the evil lay; his intrepidity instantly struck at its source, and his unrivalled ability completed the saving operation. He broke down the cabinet monopoly. No man less humiliated himself to the populace, but no man better understood the people. No man paid more practical respect to the peerage, but no man more thoroughly extinguished their exclusive possession of power. He formed his cabinet from men of all ranks, in the peerage and out of the peerage. The great peers chiefly went over to the opposition. He resisted them there, with as much daring, and with as successful a result, as he had expelled them from the stronghold of government. He made new peers. He left his haughty antagonists to graze on the barren field of opposition for successive years; and finally saw almost the whole herd come over for shelter to the ministerial fold.

At this period a remarkable man was brought into public life – the celebrated Dunning, appointed solicitor-general. Walpole calls this "an extraordinary promotion," as Dunning was connected with Lord Shelburne. It was like every thing else, obviously an intrigue; and Dunning would have lost the appointment, but for his remarkable reputation in the courts; Wedderburne being the man of the Bedfords. Walpole's opinion of Dunning in the House, shows, how much even the highest abilities may be influenced by circumstances. He says, "that Dunning immediately and utterly lost character as a speaker, although he had acquired the very highest distinctions as a pleader;" so different, says he, is the oratory of the bar and of parliament. Mansfield and Camden retained an equal rank in both. Wedderburne was most successful in the House. Norton had at first disappointed the expectations that were conceived of him when he came into parliament; yet his strong sense, that glowed through all the coarseness of his language and brutality of his manner, recovered his weight, and he was much distinguished. While Sir Dudley Ryder, attorney-general in the preceding reign, the soundest lawyer, and Charles Yorke, one of the most distinguished pleaders, soon talked themselves out of all consideration in parliament; the former by laying too great a stress on every part of his diffusive knowledge, and the latter by the sterility of his intelligence.

An intelligent Note, however, vindicates the reputation of Dunning. It is observed, that Dunning's having been counsel for Wilkes, and the intimate of Lord Shelburne, it could not be expected that he should take a prominent part in any of the debates which were so largely occupied with Wilkes' misdemeanours. Lord North, too, was hostile to Dunning. Under such conditions it was impossible that any man should exhibit his powers to advantage; but at a later period, when he had got rid of those trammels, his singular abilities vindicated themselves. He became one of the leaders of the opposition, even when that honour was to be shared with Burke. We have heard, that such was the pungency of Dunning's expressions, and the happy dexterity of his conceptions, that when he spoke, (his voice being feeble, and unable to make itself heard at any great distance,) the members used to throng around the bench on which he spoke. Wraxall panegyrizes him, and yet with a tautology of terms, which must have been the very reverse of Dunning's style. Thus, he tells us that when Dunning spoke, "every murmur was hushed, and every ear attentive," two sentences which amount to the same thing. Hannah More is also introduced as one of the panegyrists; for poor Hannah seems to have been one of the most bustling persons possible; to have run every where, and to have given her opinion of every body, however much above her comprehension. She was one of the spectators on the Duchess of Kingston's trial, (a most extraordinary scene for the choice of such a purist;) but Hannah was not at that time quite so sublime as she became afterwards. Hannah describes Dunning's manner as "insufferably bad, coughing and spitting at every word; but his sense and expression pointed to the last degree." But the character which the annotator gives as a model of panegyric, pleases us least of all. It is by Sir William Jones, and consists of one long antithesis. It is a studied toil of language, expressing ideas, a commonplace succession, substituting words for thoughts, and at once leaving the ear palled, and the understanding dissatisfied. What, for instance, could be made of such a passage as this? Sir William is speaking of Dunning's wit. "This," says he, "relieved the weary, calmed the resentful, and animated the drowsy. This drew smiles even from such as were the object of it, and scattered flowers over a desert, and, like sunbeams sparkling on a lake, gave spirit and vivacity to the dullest and least interesting cause." And this mangling of metaphor is to teach us the qualities of a profound and practical mind. What follows, is the perfection of see-saw. "He was endued with an intellect sedate yet penetrating, clear yet profound, subtle yet strong. His knowledge, too, was equal to his imagination, and his memory to his knowledge." He might have equally added, that the capacity of his boots was equal to the size of his legs, and the length of his purse to the extent of his generosity. This reminds us of one of Sydney Smith's burlesques on the balancing of epithets by that most pedantic of pedants, the late Dr Parr – "profundity without obscurity, perspicuity without prolixity, ornament without glare, terseness without barrenness, penetration without subtlety, comprehensiveness without digression, and a great number of other things without a great number of other things."

Little tricks, or rather large ones, now and then diversify the narrative. On the same day that Conway resigned the seals, Lord Weymouth was declared secretary of state. At the same time, Lord Hilsborough kissed hands for the American department, but nominally retaining the post-office, the salary of which he paid to Lord Sandwich, till the elections should be over; there being so strict a disqualifying clause in the bill for prohibiting the postmasters for interfering in elections, which Sandwich was determined to do to the utmost, that he did not dare to accept the office in his own name, till he had incurred the guilt. Another trick of a very dishonourable nature, though ultimately defeated, may supply a moral for our share-trafficking days in high quarters. Lord Bottetort, one of the bedchamber, and a kind of second-hand favourite, had engaged in an adventure with a company of copper-workers at Warmley. They broke, and his lordship, in order to cover his estate from the creditors, begged a privy seal to incorporate the company, by which means private estates would not be answerable. The king ignorantly granted the request; but Lord Chatham, aware of the deception, refused to affix the seal to the patent, pleading that he was not able. Lord Bottetort, outrageous at the disappointment, threatened to petition the lords to remove Lord Chatham, on the ground of inability. The annotator justly observes, that the proposal was absolutely monstrous, being nothing but a gross fraud on his lordship's creditors. It, however, does not seem to have attracted the attention of the attorney-general, or the home-office; but, for some cause or other, the patent did not pass, the result being, that Lord Bottetort, unable to retrieve his losses, obtained the government of Virginia in the following summer, where he subsequently died.

A curious instance of parliamentary corruption next attracted the notice of the public. It came out, that the city of Oxford had offered their representation to two gentlemen, if they would pay £7500 towards the debts of the corporation. They refused the bargain, and Oxford sold itself to the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Abingdon. The matter was brought before the House, and the mayor of Oxford and ten of the corporation appeared at the bar, confessing their crime, and asking pardon. It ended with committing them to prison for five days. A note describes the whole affair as being treated with great ridicule, (there being probably not a few who looked upon things of this nature as a matter of course;) and the story being, that the aldermen completed their bargain with the Duke of Marlborough, during their imprisonment in Newgate.

On the 11th of March 1768, the parliament was dissolved. Walpole says, "that its only characteristic was servility to the government; while our ancestors, we presume, from the shamelessness of its servility, might have called it the Impudent Parliament."

After wearying himself in the dusty field of politics, Walpole retired, like Homer's gods from Troy, to rest in the more flowery region of literature. His habits led him to the enjoyment of bitter political poetry, which, in fact, is not poetry at all; while they evidently disqualified him from feeling the power and beauty of the imaginative, the only poetry that deserves the name. Thus, he describes Goldsmith as the "correct author of The Traveller," one of the most beautiful poems in the language; while he panegyrizes, with a whole catalogue of plaudits, Anstey's Bath Guide– a very scandalous, though undoubtedly a lively and ingenious, caricature of the habits of the time. An ultra-heavy poem by Bentley, the son of the critic, enjoys a similar panegyric. We give, as an evidence of its dulness, a fragment of its praise of Lord Bute: —

 
"Oh, if we seize with skill the coming hour,
And reinvest us with the robe of power;
Rule while we live, let future days transmute
To every merit all we've charged on Bute.
Let late posterity receive his name,
And swell its sails with every breath of fame —
Downwards as far as Time shall roll his tide,
With ev'ry pendant flying, let it glide."
 

The rest is equally intolerable.

But Bentley was lucky in his patrons, if not in his poetry; as, in addition to a Commissionership of Lotteries, he received a pension for the lives of himself and his wife of £500 a-year! Though thus undeservedly successful in attracting the notice of the government, his more honest efforts failed with the public. He wrote two plays, both of which failed. Walpole next describes Robertson the historian in these high-coloured terms, "as sagacious and penetrating as Tacitus, with a perspicuity of Livy: " qualities which every one else knows to be directly the reverse of those which characterize Robertson. That very impudent woman, Catharine Macaulay, seems also to have been one of the objects of his literary admiration. He describes her, as being as partial in the cause of liberty as bigots to the church and royalists to tyranny, and as exerting manly strength with the gravity of a philosopher.

But Walpole is aways amusing when he gives anecdotes of passing things. The famous Brentford election finds in him its most graphic historian. The most singular carelessness was exhibited by the government on this most perilous occasion – a carelessness obviously arising from that contempt which the higher ranks of the nobility in those days were weak enough to feel for the opinion of those below them. On the very verge of an election, within five miles of London, and which must bring to a point all the exasperation of years; Camden, the chancellor, went down to Bath, and the Duke of Grafton, the prime minister, who was a great horse-racer, drove off to Newmarket. Mansfield, whom Walpole seems to have hated, and whom he represents as at "once resentful, timorous, and subtle," the three worst qualities of the heart, the nerves, and the understanding, pretended that it was the office of the chancellor to bring the outlaw (Wilkes) to justice, and did nothing. The consequence was, that the multitude were left masters of the field.