History of the English People Volume Vii Part 5

[Sidenote: England's intellectual influence.]

Nor was this closer political contact with Europe the only result of the new att.i.tude of England. Throughout the age of the Georges we find her for the first time exercising an intellectual and moral influence on the European world. Hitherto Italian and French impulses had told on English letters or on English thought, but neither our literature nor our philosophy had exercised any corresponding influence on the Continent.

It may be doubted whether a dozen Frenchmen or Italians had any notion that a literature existed in England at all, or that her inst.i.tutions were worthy of study by any social or political inquirer. But with the Revolution of 1688 this ignorance came to an end. William and Marlborough carried more than English arms across the Channel; they carried English ideas. The combination of material and military greatness with a freedom of thought and action hardly known elsewhere, which was revealed in the England that sprang from the Revolution of 1688, imposed on the imagination of men. For the first time in our history we find foreigners learning English, visiting England, seeking to understand English life and English opinion. The main curiosity that drew them was a political curiosity, but they carried back more than political conceptions. Religious and philosophical notions crossed the Channel with politics. The world learned that there was an English literature. It heard of Shakspere. It wept over Richardson. It bowed, even in wretched translations, before the genius of Swift. France, above all, was drawn to this study of a country so near to her, and yet so utterly unknown. If we regard its issues, the brutal outrage which drove Voltaire to England in 1726 was one of the most important events of the eighteenth century. With an intelligence singularly open to new impressions, he revelled in the freedom of social life he found about him, in its innumerable types of character, its eccentricities, its individualities. His "Philosophical Letters" revealed to Europe not only a country where utterance and opinion were unfettered, but a new literature and a new science; while his intercourse with Bolingbroke gave the first impulse to that scepticism which was to wage its destructive war with the faith of the Continent. From the visit of Voltaire to the outbreak of the French Revolution, this intercourse with England remained the chief motive power of French opinion, and told through it on the opinion of the world. In his investigations on the nature of government Montesquieu studied English inst.i.tutions as closely as he studied the inst.i.tutions of Rome. Buffon was led by English science into his attempt at a survey and cla.s.sification of the animal world. It was from the works of Locke that Rousseau drew the bulk of his ideas in politics and education.

[Sidenote: The general temper of Europe.]

Such an influence could hardly have been aroused by English letters had they not given expression to what was the general temper of Europe at the time. The cessation of religious wars, the upgrowth of great states with a new political and administrative organization, the rapid progress of intelligence, showed their effect everywhere in the same rationalizing temper, extending not only over theology but over each department of thought, the same interest in political and social speculation, the same drift towards physical inquiry, the same tendency to a diffusion and popularization of knowledge. Everywhere the tone of thought became secular, scientific, prosaic; everywhere men looked away from the past with a certain contempt; everywhere the social fusion which followed on the wreck of the Middle Ages was expressing itself in a vulgarization of ideas, in an appeal from the world of learning to the world of general intelligence, in a reliance on the "common sense" of mankind. Nor was it only a unity of spirit which pervaded the literature of the eighteenth century. Everywhere there was as striking an ident.i.ty of form. In poetry this showed itself in the death of the lyric, as in the universal popularity of the rhetorical ode, in the loss of all delight in variety of poetic measure, and in the growing restriction of verse to the single form of the ten-syllable line. Prose too dropped everywhere its grandeur with its obscurity; and became the same quick, clear instrument of thought in the hands of Addison as in those of Voltaire.

[Sidenote: Creation of a literary cla.s.s.]

How strongly this had become the bent of English letters was seen in the instance of Dryden. In the struggle of the Revolution he had struck fiercely on the losing side, and England had answered his blows by a change of masters which ruined and beggared him. But it was in these later years of his life that his influence over English literature became supreme. He is the first of the great English writers in whom letters a.s.serted an almost public importance. The reverence with which men touched in after-time the hand of Pope, or listened to the voice of Johnson, or wandered beside his lakes with Wordsworth, dates from the days when the wits of the Revolution cl.u.s.tered reverently round the old man who sate in his armchair at Will's discussing the last comedy, or recalling his visit to the blind poet of the "Paradise Lost." It was by no mere figure that the group called itself a republic of letters, and honoured in Dryden the chosen chief of their republic. He had done more than any man to create a literary cla.s.s. It was his resolve to live by his pen that first raised literature into a profession. In the stead of gentlemen amusing a curious leisure with works of fancy, or Dependants wringing bread by their genius from a patron's caprice, Dryden saw that the time had come for the author, trusting for support to the world of readers, and wielding a power over opinion which compensates for the smallness of his gains. But he was not only the first to create a literary cla.s.s; he was the first to impress the idea of literature on the English mind. Master as he was alike of poetry and of prose, covering the fields both of imagination and criticism, seizing for literary treatment all the more prominent topics of the society about him, Dryden realized in his own personality the existence of a new power which was thenceforth to tell steadily on the world.

[Sidenote: The new poetry.]

And to this power he gave for nearly a century its form and direction.

In its outer shape as in its inner spirit our literature obeyed the impulse he had given it from the beginning of the eighteenth century till near its close. His influence told especially on poetry. Dryden remained a poet; even in his most argumentative pieces his subject seizes him in a poetic way, and prosaic as much of his treatment may be, he is always ready to rise into sudden bursts of imagery and fancy. But he was a poet with a prosaic end; his aim was not simply to express beautiful things in the most beautiful way, but to invest rational things with such an amount of poetic expression as may make them at once rational and poetic, to use poetry as an exquisite form for argument, rhetoric, persuasion, to charm indeed, but primarily to convince. Poetry no longer held itself apart in the pure world of the imagination, no longer concerned itself simply with the beautiful in all things, or sought for its result in the sense of pleasure which an exquisite representation of what is beautiful in man or nature stirs in its reader. It narrowed its sphere, and attached itself to man. But from all that is deepest and n.o.blest in man it was shut off by the reaction from Puritanism, by the weariness of religious strife, by the disbelief that had sprung from religious controversy; and it limited itself rigidly to man's outer life, to his sensuous enjoyment, his toil and labour, his politics, his society. The limitation, no doubt, had its good sides; with it, if not of it, came a greater correctness and precision in the use of words and phrases, a clearer and more perspicuous style, a new sense of order, of just arrangement, of propriety, of good taste. But with it came a sense of uniformity, of monotony, of dulness. In Dryden indeed this was combated if not wholly beaten off by his amazing force; to the last there was an animal verve and swing about the man that conquered age. But around him and after him the dulness gathered fast.

[Sidenote: The new prose.]

Of hardly less moment than Dryden's work in poetry was his work in prose. In continuity and grandeur indeed, as in grace and music of phrase, the new prose of the Restoration fell far short of the prose of Hooker or Jeremy Taylor, but its clear nervous structure, its handiness and flexibility, its variety and ease, fitted it far better for the work of popularization on which literature was now to enter. It fitted it for the work of journalism, and every day journalism was playing a larger part in the political education of Englishmen. It fitted it to express the life of towns. With the general extension of prosperity and trade the town was coming into greater prominence as an element of national life; and London above all was drawing to it the wealth and culture which had till now been diffused through the people at large. It was natural that this tendency should be reflected in literature; from the age of the Restoration indeed literature had been more and more becoming an expression of the life of towns; and it was town-life which was now giving to it its character and form. As cities ceased to be regarded simply as centres of trade and money-getting, and became habitual homes for the richer and more cultured; as men woke to the pleasure and freedom of the new life which developed itself in the street and the mall, of its quicker movement, its greater ease, its abundance of social intercourse, its keener taste, its subtler and more delicate courtesy, its flow of conversation, the stately and somewhat tedious prose-writer of days gone by pa.s.sed into the briefer and nimbler essayist.

[Sidenote: The Essayists.]

What ruled writer and reader alike was the new-found pleasure of talk.

The use of coffee had only come in at the close of the civil wars; but already London and the bigger towns were crowded with coffee-houses. The popularity of the coffee-house sprang not from its coffee, but from the new pleasure which men found in their chat over the coffee-cup. And from the coffee-house sprang the Essay. The talk of Addison and Steele is the brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print: but its literary charm lies in this, that it is strictly talk. The essayist is a gentleman who chats to a world of gentlemen, and whose chat is shaped and coloured by a sense of what he owes to his company. He must interest and entertain, he may not bore them; and so his form must be short; essay or sketch, or tale or letter. So too his style must be simple, the sentences clear and quotable, good sense ready packed for carriage.

Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of imaginative excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of phrase. The deeper themes of the world or man were denied to him; if he touches them it is superficially, with a decorous dulness, or on their more humorous side with a gentle irony that shows how faint their hold is on him. In Addison's chat the war of churches shrinks into a puppet-show, and the strife of politics loses something of its fict.i.tious earnestness as the humourist views it from the standpoint of a lady's patches. It was equally impossible to deal with the fiercer pa.s.sions and subtler emotions of man. Shakspere's humour and sublimity, his fitful transitions from mood to mood, his wild bursts of laughter, his pa.s.sion of tears, Hamlet or Hamlet's gravedigger, Lear or Lear's fool, would have startled the readers of the "Spectator" as they would startle the group in a modern drawing-room.

[Sidenote: The urbanity of Literature.]

But if deeper and grander themes were denied him the essayist had still a world of his own. He felt little of the pressure of those spiritual problems that had weighed on the temper of his fathers, but the removal of the pressure left him a gay, light-hearted, good-humoured observer of the social life about him, amused and glad to be amused by it all, looking on with a leisurely and somewhat indolent interest, a quiet enjoyment, a quiet scepticism, a shy reserved consciousness of their beauty and poetry, at the lives of common men and common women. It is to the essayist that we owe our sense of the infinite variety and picturesqueness of the human world about us; it was he who for the first time made every street and every house teem with living people for us, who found a subtle interest in their bigotries and prejudice, their inconsistencies, their eccentricities, their oddities, who gave to their very dulness a charm. In a word it was he who first opened to men the world of modern fiction. Nor does English literature owe less to him in its form. Humour has always been an English quality, but with the essayist humour for the first time severed itself from farce; it was no longer forced, riotous, extravagant; it acquired taste, gentleness, adroitness, finesse, lightness of touch, a delicate colouring of playful fancy. It preserved indeed its old sympathy with pity, with pa.s.sion; but it learned how to pa.s.s with more ease into pathos, into love, into the reverence that touches us as we smile. And hand in hand with this new developement of humour went a moderation won from humour, whether in matters of religion, of politics, or society, a literary courtesy and reserve, a well-bred temperance and modesty of tone and phrase. It was in the hands of the town-bred essayist that our literature first became urbane.

[Sidenote: The brutality of Politics.]

It is strange to contrast this urbanity of literature with the savage ferocity which characterized political controversy in the England of the Revolution and the Georges. Never has the strife of warring parties been carried on with so utter an absence of truth or fairness; never has the language of political opponents stooped to such depths of coa.r.s.eness and scurrility. From the age of Bolingbroke to the age of Burke the gravest statesmen were not ashamed to revile one another with invective only worthy of the fish-market. And outside the legislature the tone of attack was even more brutal. Grub Street ransacked the whole vocabulary of abuse to find epithets for Walpole. Gay amidst general applause set the statesmen of his day on the public stage in the guise of highwaymen and pickpockets. "It is difficult to determine," said the witty playwright, "whether the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen." Much of this virulence sprang, no doubt, from a real contempt of the selfishness and corruption which disgraced the politics of the time, but it was far from being wholly due to this. In selfishness and corruption indeed the statesmen of the Georgian era were no worse than their predecessors; while in fidelity to principles and a desire for the public good they stood immeasurably above them. The standard of political action had risen with the Revolution. Cynic as was Walpole, jobber as was Newcastle, it would be absurd to compare their conception of public duty, their conduct of public affairs, with that of the Danbys and Sunderlands of the Restoration.

[Sidenote: Public opinion.]

What had really happened was a change not in the att.i.tude of statesmen towards the nation, but in the att.i.tude of the nation at large towards the cla.s.s that governed it. From the triumph of Puritanism in 1640 the supreme, irresistible force in English politics had been national opinion. It created the Long Parliament. It gave it its victory over the Church and the Crown. When a strange turn of events placed Puritanism in antagonism to it, it crushed Puritanism as easily as it had crushed Royalty. It was national opinion which restored the Stuarts; and no sooner did the Stuarts cross its will than it threatened their throne in the Popish Plot and swept them from the country in the Revolution. The stubborn purpose of William wrestled in vain with its turns of sentiment; even the genius of Marlborough proved helpless in a contest with it. It was indeed irresistible whenever it acted. But as yet it acted only by spurts. It had no wish to interfere with the general course of administration or policy; in the bulk of the nation indeed there was neither the political knowledge nor the sustained interest in politics which could have prompted such an interference. It was only at critical moments, when great interests were at stake, interests which it could understand and on which its mind was made up, that the nation roused itself and "shook its mighty mane." The reign of the Stuarts indeed did much to create a more general and continuous attention to public affairs. In the strife of the Exclusion Bill and in the Popish Plot Shaftesbury taught how to "agitate" opinion, how to rouse this lagging attention, this dormant energy of the people at large; and his opponents learned the art from him. The common statement that our two great modern parties, the Whig and the Tory, date from the Pet.i.tioners and Abhorrers of the Exclusion Bill is true only in this sense, that then for the first time the ma.s.ses of the people were stirred to a more prolonged and organized action in co-operation with the smaller groups of professed politicians than they had ever been stirred to before.

[Sidenote: Becomes powerless.]

The Revolution of 1688 was the crowning triumph of this public opinion.

But for the time it seemed a suicidal triumph. At the moment when the national will claimed to be omnipotent, the nation found itself helpless to carry out its will. In making the revolution it had meant to vindicate English freedom and English Protestantism from the attacks of the Crown. But it had never meant to bring about any radical change in the system under which the Crown had governed England or under which the Church had been supreme over English religion. The England of the Revolution was little less Tory in feeling than the England of the Restoration; it had no dislike whatever to a large exercise of administrative power by the sovereign, while it was stubbornly averse from Nonconformity or the toleration of Nonconformity. That the nation at large remained Tory in sentiment was seen from the fact that in every House of Commons elected after the Revolution the majority was commonly Tory; it was only indeed when their opposition to the war and the patriotic feeling which it aroused rendered a Tory majority impossible that the House became Whig. And even in the height of Whig rule and amidst the blaze of Whig victories, England rose in the Sacheverell riots, forced Tories again into power, and ended the Whig war by what it deemed a Tory peace. And yet every Englishman knew that from the moment of the Revolution the whole system of government had not been Tory but Whig. Pa.s.sionate as it was for peace and for withdrawal from all meddling in foreign affairs, England found itself involved abroad in ever-widening warfare and drawn into a guardians.h.i.+p of the whole state of Europe. At home it was drifting along a path that it hated even more.

Every year saw the Crown more helpless, and the Church becoming as helpless as the Crown. The country hated a standing army, and the standing army existed in spite of its hate; it revolted against debt and taxation, and taxes and debt grew heavier and heavier in the teeth of its revolt. Its prejudice against Nonconformists remained as fanatical as ever, and yet Nonconformists wors.h.i.+pped in their chapels and served as aldermen or mayors with perfect security. What made this the bitterer was the fact that neither a change of ministers nor of sovereign brought about any in the system of government. Under the Tory Anne the policy of England remained practically as Whig as under the Whig William.

Nottingham and Harley did as little to restore the monarchy or the Church as Somers or G.o.dolphin.

[Sidenote: Helplessness of the Tories.]

In driving James to a foreign land, indeed, in making him dependent on a foreign Court, the Revolution had effectually guarded itself from any undoing of its work. So long as a Stuart Pretender existed, so long as he remained a tool in the hands of France, every monarch that the Revolution placed on the English throne, and every servant of such a monarch, was forced to cling to the principles of the Revolution and to the men who were most certain to fight for them. With a Parliament of landed gentry and Churchmen behind him Harley could not be drawn into measures which would effectively alienate the merchant or the Dissenter; and if Bolingbroke's talk was more reckless, time was not given to show whether his designs were more than talk. There was in fact but one course open for the Tory who hated what the Revolution had done, and that was the recall of the Stuarts. Such a recall would have brought him much of what he wanted. But it would have brought him more that he did not want. Tory as he might be, he was in no humour to sacrifice English freedom and English religion to his Toryism, and to recall the Stuarts was to sacrifice both. None of the Stuart exiles would forsake their faith; and, promise what they might, England had learned too well what such pledges were worth to set another Catholic on the throne. The more earnest a Catholic he was indeed, and no one disputed the earnestness of the Stuarts, the more impossible was it for him to reign without striving to bring England over to Catholicism; and there was no means of even making such an attempt save by repeating the struggle of James the Second and by the overthrow of English liberty. It was the consciousness that a Stuart restoration was impossible that egged Bolingbroke to his desperate plans for forcing a Tory policy on the monarchs of the Revolution. And it was the same consciousness that at the crisis which followed the death of Anne made the Tory leaders deaf to the frantic appeals of Bishop Atterbury. To submit again to Whig rule was a bitter thing for them; but to accept a Catholic sovereign was an impossible thing. And yet every Tory felt that with the acceptance of the House of Hanover their struggle against the principles of the Revolution came practically to an end. Their intrigues with the Pretender, the strife which they had brought about between Anne and the Electress Sophia, their hesitation if not their refusal to frankly support the succession of her son, were known to have sown a deep distrust of the whole Tory party in the heart of the new sovereign; and though in the first ministry which he formed a few posts were offered to the more moderate of their leaders, the offer was so clearly a delusive one that they refused to take office.

[Sidenote: Withdrawal of the Tories.]

The refusal not only deepened the chasm between party and party; it placed the Tories in open opposition to the Hanoverian kings. It did even more, for it proclaimed a temper of despair which withdrew them as a whole from any further meddling with political affairs. "The Tory party," Bolingbroke wrote after Anne's death, "is gone." In the first House of Commons indeed which was called by the new king, the Tories hardly numbered fifty members; while a fatal division broke their strength in the country at large. In their despair the more vehement among them turned to the Pretender. Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormond fled from England to take office under the son of King James, James the Third, as he was called by his adherents. At home Sir William Wyndham seconded their efforts by building up a Jacobite faction out of the wreck of the Tory party. The Jacobite secession gave little help to the Pretender, while it dealt a fatal blow to the Tory cause. England was still averse from a return of the Stuarts; and the suspicion of Jacobite designs not only alienated the trading cla.s.ses, who shrank from the blow to public credit which a Jacobite repudiation of the debt would bring about, but deadened the zeal even of the parsons and squires. The bulk however of the Tory party were far from turning Jacobites, though they might play at disloyalty out of hatred of the House of Hanover, and solace themselves for the triumph of their opponents by pa.s.sing the decanter over the water-jug at the toast of "the King." What they did was to withdraw from public affairs altogether; to hunt and farm and appear at quarter-sessions, and to leave the work of government to the Whigs.

[Sidenote: The Whigs and the Church.]

While the Whigs were thus freed from any effective pressure from their political opponents they found one of their great difficulties becoming weaker with every year that pa.s.sed. Up to this time the main stumbling-block to the Whig party had been the influence of the Church.

But predominant as that influence seemed at the close of the Revolution, the Church was now sinking into political insignificance. In heart indeed England remained religious. In the middle cla.s.s the old Puritan spirit lived on unchanged, and it was from this cla.s.s that a religious revival burst forth at the close of Walpole's administration which changed after a time the whole tone of English society. But during the fifty years which preceded this outburst we see little save a revolt against religion and against churches in either the higher cla.s.ses or the poor. Among the wealthier and more educated Englishmen the progress of free inquiry, the aversion from theological strife which had been left behind them by the Civil Wars, the new political and material channels opened to human energy were producing a general indifference to all questions of religious speculation or religious life. In the higher circles "every one laughs," said Montesquieu on his visit to England, "if one talks of religion." Of the prominent statesmen of the time the greater part were unbelievers in any form of Christianity, and distinguished for the grossness and immorality of their lives.

Drunkenness and foul talk were thought no discredit to Walpole. A later prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, was in the habit of appearing with his mistress at the play. Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow were sneered out of fas.h.i.+on; and Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his son, instructs him in the art of seduction as part of a polite education.

[Sidenote: Sloth of the clergy.]

At the other end of the social scale lay the ma.s.ses of the poor. They were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive, for the increase of population which followed on the growth of towns and the developement of commerce had been met by no effort for their religious or educational improvement. Not a new parish had been created. Hardly a single new church had been built. Schools there were none, save the grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth. The rural peasantry, who were fast being reduced to pauperism by the abuse of the poor-laws, were left without much moral or religious training of any sort. "We saw but one Bible in the parish of Cheddar," said Hannah More at a far later time, "and that was used to prop a flower-pot." Within the towns things were worse. There was no effective police; and in great outbreaks the mob of London or Birmingham burnt houses, flung open prisons, and sacked and pillaged at their will. The criminal cla.s.s gathered boldness and numbers in the face of ruthless laws which only testified to the terror of society, laws which made it a capital crime to cut down a cherry tree, and which strung up twenty young thieves of a morning in front of Newgate; while the introduction of gin gave a new impetus to drunkenness. In the streets of London gin-shops at one time invited every pa.s.ser-by to get drunk for a penny, or dead drunk for twopence.

Much of this social degradation was due without doubt to the apathy and sloth of the priesthood. A shrewd, if prejudiced, observer, Bishop Burnet, brands the English clergy of his day as the most lifeless in Europe, "the most remiss of their labours in private and the least severe of their lives." A large number of prelates were mere Whig partizans with no higher aim than that of promotion. The levees of the Ministers were crowded with lawn sleeves. A Welsh bishop avowed that he had seen his diocese but once, and habitually resided at the lakes of Westmoreland. The system of pluralities which enabled a single clergyman to hold at the same time a number of livings turned the wealthier and more learned of the clergy into absentees, while the bulk of them were indolent, poor, and without social consideration.

[Sidenote: The clergy lose political power.]

Their religious inactivity told necessarily on their political influence; but what most weakened their influence was the severance between the bulk of the priesthood and its natural leaders. The bishops, who were now chosen exclusively from among the small number of Whig ecclesiastics, were left politically powerless by the estrangement and hatred of their clergy; while the clergy themselves, drawn by their secret tendencies to Jacobitism, stood sulkily apart from any active interference with public affairs. The prudence of the Whig statesmen aided to maintain this ecclesiastical immobility. The Sacheverell riots had taught them what terrible forces of bigotry and fanaticism lay slumbering under this thin crust of inaction, and they were careful to avoid all that could rouse these forces into life. When the Dissenters pressed for a repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Walpole openly avowed his dread of awaking the pa.s.sions of religious hate by such a measure, and satisfied them by an annual act of indemnity for any breach of these penal statutes. By a complete abstinence from all ecclesiastical questions no outlet was left for the bigotry of the people at large, while a suspension of the meetings of Convocation deprived the clergy of their natural centre of agitation and opposition.

[Sidenote: The Whigs and the Crown.]

And while the Church thus ceased to be a formidable enemy, the Crown became a friend. Under Anne the throne had regained much of the older influence which it lost through William's unpopularity; but under the two sovereigns who followed Anne the power of the Crown lay absolutely dormant. They were strangers, to whom loyalty in its personal sense was impossible; and their character as nearly approached insignificance as it is possible for human character to approach it. Both were honest and straightforward men, who frankly accepted the irksome position of const.i.tutional kings. But neither had any qualities which could make their honesty attractive to the people at large. The temper of George the First was that of a gentleman usher; and his one care was to get money for his favourites and himself. The temper of George the Second was that of a drill-sergeant, who believed himself master of his realm while he repeated the lessons he had learned from his wife, and which his wife had learned from the Minister. Their Court is familiar enough in the witty memoirs of the time; but as political figures the two Georges are almost absent from our history. William of Orange, while ruling in most home matters by the advice of his Ministers, had not only used the power of rejecting bills pa.s.sed by the two Houses, but had kept in his own hands the control of foreign affairs. Anne had never yielded even to Marlborough her exclusive right of dealing with Church preferment, and had presided to the last at the Cabinet Councils of her ministers. But with the accession of the Georges these reserves pa.s.sed away. No sovereign since Anne's death has appeared at a Cabinet Council, or has ventured to refuse his a.s.sent to an Act of Parliament. As Elector of Hanover indeed the king still dealt with Continental affairs: but his personal interference roused an increasing jealousy, while it affected in a very slight degree the foreign policy of his English counsellors.

England, in short, was governed not by the king but by the Whig Ministers. But their power was doubled by the steady support of the very kings they displaced. The first two sovereigns of the House of Hanover believed they owed their throne to the Whigs, and looked on the support of the Whigs as the true basis of their monarchy. The new monarchs had no longer to dread the spectre of republicanism which had haunted the Stuarts and even Anne, whenever a Whig domination threatened her; for republicanism was dead. Nor was there the older anxiety as to the prerogative to sever the monarchy from the Whigs, for the bounds of the prerogative were now defined by law, and the Whigs were as zealous as any Tory could be in preserving what remained. From the accession of George the First therefore to the death of George the Second the whole influence of the Crown was thrown into the Whig scale; and if its direct power was gone, its indirect influence was still powerful. It was indeed the more powerful that the Revolution had put an end to the dread that its influence could be used in any struggle against liberty. "The generality of the world here," said the new Whig Chancellor, Lord Cowper, to King George, "is so much in love with the advantages a king of Great Britain has to bestow without the least exceeding the bounds of law, that 'tis wholly in your majesty's power, by showing your power in good time to one or other of them, to give which party you please a clear majority in all succeeding parliaments."

[Sidenote: The Whigs and Parliament.]

It was no wonder therefore that in the first of the new king's parliaments an overwhelming majority appeared in support of the Whigs.

But the continuance of that majority for more than thirty years was not wholly due to the unswerving support which the Crown gave its Ministers or to the secession of the Tories. In some measure it was due to the excellent organization of the Whig party. While their adversaries were divided by differences of principle and without leaders of real eminence, the Whigs stood as one man on the principles of the Revolution and produced great leaders who carried them into effect. They submitted with admirable discipline to the guidance of a knot of great n.o.bles, to the houses of Bentinck, Manners, Campbell, and Cavendish, to the Fitzroys and Lennoxes, the Russells and Grenvilles, families whose resistance to the Stuarts, whose share in the Revolution, whose energy in setting the line of Hanover on the throne, gave them a claim to power. It was due yet more largely to the activity with which the Whigs devoted themselves to the gaining and preserving an ascendency in the House of Commons. The support of the commercial cla.s.ses and of the great towns was secured not only by a resolute maintenance of public credit, but by the special attention which each ministry paid to questions of trade and finance. Peace and the reduction of the land-tax conciliated the farmers and the landowners, while the Jacobite sympathies of the bulk of the squires, and their consequent withdrawal from all share in politics, threw even the representation of the s.h.i.+res for a time into Whig hands. Of the county members, who formed the less numerous but the weightier part of the lower House, nine-tenths were for some years relatives and dependents of the great Whig families. Nor were coa.r.s.er means of controlling Parliament neglected. The wealth of the Whig houses was lavishly spent in securing a monopoly of the small and corrupt const.i.tuencies which made up a large part of the borough representation.

It was spent yet more unscrupulously in parliamentary bribery.

Corruption was older than Walpole or the Whig Ministers, for it sprang out of the very transfer of power to the House of Commons which had begun with the Restoration. The transfer was complete, and the House was supreme in the State; but while freeing itself from the control of the Crown, it was as yet imperfectly responsible to the people. It was only at election time that a member felt the pressure of public opinion. The secrecy of parliamentary proceedings, which had been needful as a safeguard against royal interference with debate, served as a safeguard against interference on the part of const.i.tuencies. This strange union of immense power with absolute freedom from responsibility brought about its natural results in the bulk of members. A vote was too valuable to be given without recompense, and parliamentary support had to be bought by places, pensions, and bribes in hard cash.

But dexterous as was their management, and compact as was their organization, it was to n.o.bler qualities than these that the Whigs owed their long rule over England. Factious and selfish as much of their conduct proved, they were true to their principles, and their principles were those for which England had been struggling through two hundred years. The right to free government, to freedom of conscience, and to freedom of speech, had been declared indeed in the Revolution of 1688.

But these rights owe their definite establishment as the recognized basis of national life and national action to the age of the Georges. It was the long and unbroken fidelity to free principles with which the Whig administration was conducted that made const.i.tutional government a part of the very life of Englishmen. It was their government of England year after year on the principles of the Revolution that converted these principles into national habits. Before their long rule was over Englishmen had forgotten that it was possible to persecute for difference of opinion, or to put down the liberty of the press, or to tamper with the administration of justice, or to rule without a Parliament.

[Sidenote: Robert Walpole.]

That this policy was so firmly grasped and so steadily carried out was due above all to the genius of Robert Walpole. Walpole was born in 1676; and he had entered Parliament two years before the death of William of Orange as a young Norfolk landowner of fair fortune, with the tastes and air of the cla.s.s from which he sprang. His big, square figure, his vulgar good-humoured face were those of a common country squire. And in Walpole the squire underlay the statesman to the last. He was ignorant of books, he "loved neither writing nor reading," and if he had a taste for art, his real love was for the table, the bottle, and the chase. He rode as hard as he drank. Even in moments of political peril, the first despatch he would open was the letter from his gamekeeper. There was the temper of the Norfolk fox-hunter in the "doggedness" which Marlborough noted as his characteristic, in the burly self-confidence which declared "If I had not been Prime Minister I should have been Archbishop of Canterbury," in the stubborn courage which conquered the awkwardness of his earlier efforts to speak or met single-handed at the last the bitter attacks of a host of enemies. There was the same temper in the genial good-humour which became with him a new force in politics. No man was ever more fiercely attacked by speakers and writers, but he brought in no "gagging Act" for the press; and though the lives of most of his a.s.sailants were in his hands through their intrigues with the Pretender, he made little use of his power over them.

[Sidenote: His policy.]

Where his country breeding showed itself most, however, was in the shrewd, narrow, honest character of his mind. Though he saw very clearly, he could not see far, and he would not believe what he could not see. His prosaic good sense turned sceptically away from the poetic and pa.s.sionate sides of human feeling. Appeals to the loftier or purer motives of action he laughed at as "schoolboy nights." For young members who talked of public virtue or patriotism he had one good-natured answer: "You will soon come off that and grow wiser." But he was thoroughly straightforward and true to his own convictions, so far as they went. "Robin and I are two honest men," the Jacobite s.h.i.+ppen owned in later years, when contrasting him with his factious opponents: "he is for King George and I am for King James, but those men with long cravats only desire place either under King George or King James." What marked him off from his fellow-Whigs however was not so much the clearness with which Walpole saw the value of the political results which the Revolution had won, or the fidelity with which he carried out his "Revolution principles"; it was the sagacity with which he grasped the conditions on which alone England could be brought to a quiet acceptance of both of them. He never hid from himself that, weakened and broken as it was, Toryism, lived on in the bulk of the nation as a spirit of sullen opposition, an opposition that could not rise into active revolt so long as the Pretender remained a Catholic, but which fed itself with hopes of a Stuart who would at last befriend English religion and English liberty, and which in the meanwhile lay ready to give force and virulence to any outbreak of strife at home. On a temper such as this argument was wasted. The only agency that could deal with it was the agency of time, the slow wearing away of prejudice, the slow upgrowth of new ideas, the gradual conviction that a Stuart restoration was hopeless, the as gradual recognition of the benefits which had been won by the Revolution, and which were secured by the maintenance of the House of Hanover upon the throne.

[Sidenote: The Townshend Ministry.]

Such a transition would be hindered or delayed by every outbreak of political or religious controversy that changes or reforms, however wise in themselves, must necessarily bring with them; and Walpole held that no reform was as important to the country at large as a national reunion and settlement. Not less keen and steady was his sense of the necessity of external peace. To provoke or to suffer new struggles on the Continent was not only to rouse fresh resentment in a people who still longed to withdraw from all part in foreign wars; it was to give fresh force to the Pretender by forcing France to use him as a tool against England, and to give fresh life to Jacobitism by stirring fresh hopes of the Pretender's return. It was for this reason that Walpole clung steadily to a policy of peace. But it was not at once that he could force such a policy either on the Whig party or on the king.

Though his vigour in the cause of his party had earned him the bitter hostility of the Tories in the later years of Anne, and a trumped-up charge of peculation had served in 1712 as a pretext for expelling him from the House and committing him to the Tower, at the accession of George the First Walpole was far from holding the commanding position he was soon to a.s.sume. The stage indeed was partly cleared for him by the jealousy with which the new sovereign regarded the men who had till now served as chiefs of the Whigs. Though the first Hanoverian Ministry was drawn wholly from the Whig party, its leaders and Marlborough found themselves alike set aside. But even had they regained their old power, time must soon have removed them; for Wharton and Halifax died in 1715, and 1716 saw the death of Somers and the imbecility of Marlborough. The man to whom the king entrusted the direction of affairs was the new Secretary of State, Lord Townshend. His merit with George the First lay in his having negotiated a Barrier Treaty with Holland in 1709 by which the Dutch were secured in the possession of a greater number of fortresses in the Netherlands than they had garrisoned before the war, on condition of their guaranteeing the succession of the House of Hanover. The king had always looked on this treaty as the great support of his cause, and on its negotiation as representing that union of Holland, Hanover, and the Whigs, to which he owed his throne.

Townshend's fellow Secretary was General Stanhope, who had won fame both as a soldier and a politician, and who was now raised to the peerage. It was as Townshend's brother-in-law, rather than from a sense of his actual ability, that Walpole successively occupied the posts of Paymaster of the Forces, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and First Lord of the Treasury, in the new administration.