A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume III Part 3

The article was not intemperate and it certainly was not unjust. But when it appeared the King was still new flushed with his idea of his own personal authority in the State, and the slightest censure of his policy goaded him into a kind of frenzy. Had Wilkes endeavored with his own hand to kill the King in his palace of St. James's he could hardly have made the monarch more furious. He had long hated and his ministers had long dreaded the outspoken journalist. King and ministers now felt that the time had arrived when they could strike, and strike effectively. The King commanded the law officers of the Crown to read the article and give their opinion upon it. The law officers did the work that they knew the King expected from them. They found that the paper was an infamous and seditious libel tending to incite the people to insurrection. They declared that the offence was one punishable in due course of law as a misdemeanor. Upon this hint the ministers acted, rapidly and rashly. A general warrant was issued for the apprehension of the authors, printers, and publishers of the _North Briton_. The printer {59} and the publisher were arrested and brought before Lord Halifax and Lord Egremont, to whom they gave up the names of John Wilkes and Charles Churchill as the authors of the _North Briton_. The next step was to arrest Wilkes himself.

[Sidenote: 1763--Arrest of Wilkes]

The King's messengers came upon Wilkes in his house in Great George Street, Westminster. It is honorably characteristic of the man that in the moment of his own danger he felt more concern for the danger of another. While he was arguing with the officials that they had no power to arrest him, as he was a member of Parliament and therefore privileged against arrest, Churchill came into the room on a visit to Wilkes. Churchill, Wilkes knew, was as certain to be arrested as he was. Churchill could plead no privilege. It was probable that the messengers were unfamiliar with Churchill's face. Wilkes, with happy good-nature and happy audacity, immediately hailed Churchill as Mr.

Thompson, clasped his hand and inquired affectionately how Mrs.

Thompson did and if she was going to dine in the country. If Wilkes was clever in his suggestion Churchill was no less clever in taking the hint. He thanked Wilkes, declared that Mrs. Thompson was at that moment waiting for him, and that he had merely called in to inquire after the health of Wilkes. Saying which, Churchill swiftly bowed himself out, hurried home, secured all his papers, and disappeared into the country. The King's messengers, who were promptly at his lodgings, were never able to discover his whereabouts.

The flight to which Wilkes so ingeniously a.s.sisted him is not the brightest part of Churchill's career. He carried with him into his retreat a young girl, a Miss Carr, the daughter of a Westminster stonecutter, whom the charms of Churchill's manners had induced to leave her father's house. He could not marry the girl, as he was married already, and, to do him justice, he appears soon to have repented the wrong he had done her. But after an unsuccessful attempt on the girl's part to live again with her own people she returned to her lover, and she lived with her lover to the end. Churchill seems to have been sincerely {60} attached to her. If he had been a free man, if his life had not been blighted by his early unhappy marriage, their union might have been a very happy one. At his death he left annuities to both women, to the woman he had married and the woman he had loved, the wife's annuity being the larger of the two.

While Churchill was making his way as quickly as possible out of a town that his services to his friend had rendered too hot to hold him, Wilkes was immediately hurried before Lord Halifax and Lord Egremont at Whitehall. He carried himself very composedly in the presence of his enemies. He persistently a.s.serted his privilege, as a member of Parliament, against arrest. He refused to answer any questions or to acknowledge the authors.h.i.+p of No. 45 of the _North Briton_. He professed with equal enthusiasm his loyalty to the King and his loathing of the King's advisers, and he announced his intention of bringing the matter before Parliament the moment that the session began. Egremont and Halifax retaliated by sending Wilkes to the Tower and causing his house to be searched and all his papers to be seized.

The high-handed folly of the King's friends had for their chief effect the conversion of men who had little sympathy for Wilkes into, if not his advocates, at least his allies against the illegal methods which were employed to crush him.

Wilkes, through his friends, immediately applied to the Court of Common Pleas for a writ of _habeas corpus_. This was at once obtained, and was served upon the messengers of the Secretary of State. But Wilkes was no longer in their custody, and Wilkes was detained in the Tower for a whole week, part of the time, as he declared, in solitary confinement, before he was brought into court. Judge Pratt immediately ordered his discharge on the ground of his claim to immunity from arrest as a member of Parliament, without prejudice to any later action against him.

[Sidenote: 1763--Hogarth's caricature of Wilkes]

It was while Wilkes was before Pratt at Westminster that, if we may accept the authority of Churchill, one of Wilkes's keenest enemies seized an opportunity for a cruel {61} revenge. Hogarth hated both Wilkes and Churchill. He had begun the quarrel by attacking the _North Briton_ and the _Monitor_ in his cartoon "The Times," executed for the greater glorification of the painter's patron, Lord Bute. The _North Briton_ replied to this attack with a vigor which infuriated Hogarth, who had his full share of the irritable vanity which the world always attributes to the artist. In Wilkes's difficulty Hogarth saw his opportunity. Lurking behind a screen in the Court of Common Pleas, the painter sought and found an opportunity for making a sketch of Wilkes.

While Justice Pratt, with what Wilkes called "the eloquence and courage of old Rome," was laying down the law upon the prisoner's plea preparatory to setting him at liberty, Hogarth's busy pencil was engaged upon the first sketch for that caricature which has helped to make Wilkes's features famous and infamous throughout the world. The print was promptly published at a s.h.i.+lling, and commanded an enormous sale. Nearly four thousand copies, it is said, were sold within a few weeks. The envenomed skill of Hogarth has made the appearance of Wilkes almost as familiar to us as to the men of his own time. The sneering, satyr face, the sinister squint, the thrust-out chin and protruding lower jaw belong to a face severely visited by Nature, even when liberal allowance is made for the animosity that prompted the hand of the caricaturist. The caricature was a savage stroke; to Wilkes's friends it seemed to be a traitor's stroke. Wilkes appears to have taken it, as he took most things, with composure. "I know," he wrote later, "but one short apology to be made for the person of Mr. Wilkes; it is that he did not make himself, and that he never was solicitous about the case of his soul (as Shakespeare calls it) only so far as to keep it clean and in health. I never once heard that he hung over the gla.s.sy stream, like another Narcissus, admiring the image in it, nor that he ever stole an amorous look at his counterfeit in a side mirror.

His form, such as it is, ought to give him no pain while it is capable of giving so much pleasure to others. I believe he finds himself tolerably happy in the clay {62} cottage to which he is a tenant for life, because he has learned to keep it in pretty good order; while the share of health and animal spirits which Heaven has given him shall hold out, I can scarcely imagine he will be one moment peevish about the outside of so precarious, so temporary a habitation, or will ever be brought to own 'Ingenium Galbae male habitat:' 'Monsieur est mal loge.'" Good-humored at the time, his good-humor persevered, and in later life he was wont to say jestingly that he found he was growing more and more like his famous portrait every day. But if it was becoming of Wilkes to bear the attack in so serene and even so jocular a spirit, it was not unbecoming, as it was not ungenerous, of his friends to fail to imitate the coolness of their leader. It is not quite easy to understand why, in an age of caricature, an age when all men of any notoriety were caricatured, the friends of Wilkes were so sensitive to the satire of Hogarth. Public men, and the friends of public men, have grown less sensitive. However, Wilkes's friends were, and showed themselves to be, as angry as Wilkes was, or showed himself to be, indifferent, and the hottest and angriest of them all was Churchill. Churchill could retaliate, and Churchill did retaliate with a ferocity that equalled and more than equalled Hogarth's.

[Sidenote: 1763--Churchill's denunciation of Hogarth]

With a rage that was prompted by friends.h.i.+p, yet with a coolness that the importance of the cause he championed called for, Churchill aimed blow after blow upon the offending painter. The skill of a practised executioner directed every stroke to a fresh spot, and with every stroke brought blood. The satirist called upon Hogarth by his name, to stand forth and be tried "in that great court where conscience must preside," bade him review his life from his earliest youth, and say if he could recall a single instance in which

Thou with an equal eye didst genius view And give to merit what was merit's duet Genius and merit are a sure offence, And thy soul sickens at the name of sense.

The poet goes on to say that "when Wilkes our countryman, {63} our common friend arose, his King, his country to defend," Malice

Had killed thee, tottering on life's utmost verge, Had Wilkes and Liberty escaped thy scourge.

And then, in some two hundred lines of strenuous rage, Churchill denounced Hogarth with a denunciation that was the more effective because it was accompanied by a frank and full recognition of Hogarth's great gifts and deserved t.i.tle to fame. Hogarth retaliated by his famous caricature of Churchill as a canonical bear with a pot of porter in one paw and a huge cudgel in the other, the knots on the cudgel being numbered as Lie 1, Lie 2, and so forth. Instantly the great caricaturist was attacked by others eager to strike at one who had struck so hard in his day. The hatred of Bute was extended to the painter who condescended to accept Bute's patronage, and who labored to please his patron. Hogarth was derided as "The Butyfier," in mockery of his "a.n.a.lysis of Beauty." It would have been as lucky for Hogarth as it would have been lucky for Bute to let Wilkes alone.

If Wilkes's release filled his supporters throughout the country with delight, it only spurred on his enemies to fresh attempts and fresh blunders. Had they left the matter where it stood, even though it stood at a defeat to them, they would have spared themselves much ignominy. But the fury of the King inspired a fiercer fury in the ministers and those who followed the ministers. Every weapon at their command was immediately levelled at Wilkes, even, it may not be unfairly a.s.serted, the a.s.sa.s.sin's weapon. Wilkes carried himself gallantly, defiantly, even insolently. His att.i.tude was not one to tempt angry opponents to forbearance. His letters from the Tower and after his release to Lord Halifax were couched in the most contemptuous language. He brought an action against Lord Halifax. He brought an action against Mr. Wood, the Under-Secretary of State, and was awarded 1,000 pounds damages. When Lord Egremont died, in the August of 1763, Wilkes declared that he had "been gathered {64} to the dull of ancient days." He republished the numbers of the _North Briton_ in a single volume with notes, to prove that the King's speech could const.i.tutionally be only regarded as the utterance of the King's ministers. There must have been a splendid stubbornness in the man which enabled him to face so daringly, so aggressively, the desperate odds against him.

[Sidenote: 1763--Wilkes and his accusers]

Every man who wished to curry favor with the King and the King's ministers was ready to strike his blow at Wilkes. There was not a bully among the hangers-on of the King and ministers who was not eager to cross swords with Wilkes or level pistol at him. Insult after insult, injury after injury, were offered to the obnoxious politician.

The King dismissed him from the colonelcy of the Buckinghams.h.i.+re Militia. Lord Temple was the Lord-Lieutenant of the county of Buckinghams.h.i.+re, and as Lord-Lieutenant it was his duty to convey to Wilkes the news of his disgrace. Never was such news so conveyed.

Temple told Wilkes of his dismissal in a letter of warm enthusiasm, of warm personal praise. The King immediately retaliated by removing Temple from the Lord-Lieutenancy and striking his name off the list of privy councillors. The enmity was not confined to the King and to the parasites who sought to please the King. Dr. Johnson declared that if he were the monarch he would have sent half a dozen footmen to duck Wilkes for daring to censure his royal master or his royal master's ministers. In the House of Commons the hostility was at its height.

When Parliament met Wilkes sought to call the attention of the House to his case, but was antic.i.p.ated by Grenville, who read a royal message directed at Wilkes, the result of which was that the House voted that the number Forty-five of the _North Briton_ was a seditious libel, and ordered it to be burned by the common hangman.

The basest part of the attack upon Wilkes was the use that his enemies made of his private papers, the way in which they a.s.sociated his political conduct with an offence that was wholly unpolitical. It had amused Wilkes to set up a private printing-press at his own house. At this {65} press certain productions were printed which were no doubt indecent, which were no doubt blasphemous, but which were furthermore so foolish as to make both their indecency and their blasphemy of very little effect. One was the "Essay on Woman," written as a parody of Pope's "Essay on Man;" the other was an imitation of the "Veni Creator." Neither of these pieces of gross buffoonery bore any author's name. Very few copies of them had been printed, and these few solely for circulation among private friends with a taste for foul literature. No offence had been committed, no offence had been intended, against public morality. It is certain, as far as any literary puzzle can be regarded as certain, that Wilkes's share in the dirty business was chiefly, if not entirely, limited to the printing of the pages. The "Essay on Woman," as those who have had the misfortune to read it know, is a dreary writer's piece of schoolboy obscenity, if entirely disgusting, no less entirely dull. The text of the "Essay"

was composed in great part, if not altogether, by Potter, the unworthy son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and worthy member of the Medmenham brotherhood. When Wilkes's papers were seized, or by some other means, the Government got possession of the proof sheets of the "Essay on Woman." They immediately resolved, in defiance of public decency, of political morality, to use it as a weapon against their enemy. It shows the shallowness of their pretence at justification that they put the weapon into the hands of the worst and basest of Wilkes's former friends and allies in profligacy, into the hands of Lord Sandwich. On the first night of the session Lord Sandwich rose in the House of Lords, and proceeded to denounce Wilkes and the "Essay on Woman" with a vehemence of false austerity that impressed the a.s.sembly and infinitely delighted Lord Le Despencer, who had been the common friend, the brother sinner of accuser and accused, and who now expressed much entertainment at hearing the devil preach. The spurious virtue of Sandwich was followed by the spurious indignation of Warburton. The "Essay on Woman" contained certain notes written in parody of Warburton's notes {66} to the "Essay on Man," just as the verses themselves were a parody on Pope's poem. Warburton chose to regard this as a broach of privilege, and he a.s.sailed Wilkes with even greater fury than Sandwich had done, winding up by apologizing to the devil for even comparing Wilkes to him. An admiring House immediately voted the poems obscene, libellous, and a breach of privilege. Two days afterwards an address from the Lords called upon the King to prosecute Wilkes for blasphemy.

[Sidenote: 1763--Wilkes as a champion of popular liberty]

Wilkes was unable to face this new attack. He had already fallen a victim to an attack of another and no less malignant nature. While the creatures of the Government in the Upper House were trying to destroy his character, one of their creatures in the Lower House was doing his best to take Wilkes's life. This was a man named Martin, who had been attacked in the _North Briton_ some eight months earlier. Martin seemed to have resolved upon revenge, and to have set about obtaining it after the fas.h.i.+on not of the gentleman, but of the bravo. Day by day, week by week, month by month he practised himself in pistol shooting, until he considered that his skill was sufficient to enable him to take the dastard's hazard in a duel. He seized the opportunity of the debate on November 15th to describe the writer in the _North Briton_ as a "coward and a malignant scoundrel." When Wilkes, on the following day, avowed the authors.h.i.+p of the paper, Martin sent him a challenge. The challenge was in all respects a strange one. It was treacherous, because it came at the heels of deliberate preparation.

It was peremptory, for it called upon Wilkes to meet his enemy in Hyde Park within an hour. It contravened the laws of the duello, because Martin, who was the challenger, himself insisted on the use of the weapons with which he had made himself so murderously skilful. Wilkes accepted the duel with characteristic courage, with characteristic rashness. He met Martin in Hyde Park, and the amateur bravo shot Wilkes through the body. It is a further characteristic of the many elements of good that went to Wilkes's strange composition that, as he lay on the gra.s.s bleeding fast and {67} apparently mortally wounded, his first care was not for himself and his hurt, but for the safety of his adversary, of an adversary who deserved chivalrous treatment as little as if he had taken Wilkes unawares and shot him in the back.

While Wilkes was lying on what threatened to be his death-bed the feeling on both sides only increased in intensity. The Ministry were indifferent to the helplessness of their enemy. Wilkes was expelled from the House of Commons. He was expelled from the Militia. The common hangman was ordered publicly to burn the _North Briton_, but the hangman was not suffered to obey the order. An angry mob set upon him and upon the sheriffs who were a.s.sisting at the ceremony, rescued the _North Briton_ from its persecutors, and in rude retaliation burned instead the joint emblems of the popular disdain--a boot and a petticoat. The people's blood was up; the symptoms were significant enough for any save such a King and such ministers to understand.

While the Ministry, with a refinement of cruelty, were sending daily the King's surgeons to watch Wilkes's health and proclaim the moment when he might again be attacked, the Corporation of Dublin was setting an example that was soon followed by the Corporation of London and by other corporations in presenting him with the freedom of its city.

While Wilkes was slowly journeying towards Paris, where his daughter was, and pa.s.sing, as he wrote, "the most unhappy days he had known," an angry mob gibbeted the effigy of Bute at one of the gates of Exeter, and kept the image swinging there in derision for a fortnight in defiance of the authorities. While Wilkes was languis.h.i.+ng in foreign exile to save his liberty and his very life from the malignity of his enemies, his portrait, painted by Reynolds, was placed in the Guildhall with an inscription in honor of the jealous a.s.sertor of English liberty by law.

Wilkes was well advised in keeping out of England. He had done his part. The decisions of Pratt in the Court of Common Pleas, the decisions in the Guildhall, had conferred a permanent benefit upon the English citizen. But {68} Wilkes was not bound to put himself into the power of his enemies in order to establish the authors.h.i.+p of the "Essay on Woman." His enemies took as much advantage as they could of his absence. He was found guilty by the Court of King's Bench of having reprinted the number Forty-five and of having written the "Essay on Woman." As he did not appear to receive his sentence, he was promptly outlawed for contumacy. Thus a Ministry wise in their own conceit believed that they had got rid of Wilkes for good and all. They did not note, or if they noted did not heed, that the favorite sign of ale-houses throughout the country was the head of Wilkes. They were indifferent to the fact that Wilkes had come to be regarded in all directions as the champion of popular liberty. All they knew, all that they cared to know, was that Wilkes was in exile, and was like enough to die in exile. Even the success of "The Beggar's Opera" taught them nothing, and yet the success of "The Beggar's Opera" was a significant lesson. "The Beggar's Opera" was revived at Covent Garden while the excitement about Wilkes was at its height, and its audiences were as ready to read in political allusions between the lines as they had been at the time of its first production. The line "That Jemmy Twitcher should peach on me I own rather surprises me" was converted at once into an innuendo at the expense of Lord Sandwich, to whom the name Jemmy Twitcher was immediately applied by the public at large, almost to the disuse, so Horace Walpole tells us, of his own t.i.tle.

[Sidenote: 1764--Death of Hogarth and Churchill]

But the Ministry had so far triumphed that for four years Wilkes remained away from England, drifting from one foreign capital to another, making friends and winning admirers everywhere, and employing his enforced leisure in attempting great feats of literary enterprise.

A scheme for a Const.i.tutional History of England was succeeded by a no less difficult and, as it proved, no less impracticable scheme. During Wilkes's exile he lost the most famous of his enemies and the most famous of his friends. On October 26, 1764, Hogarth died. It was commonly said, and generally credited, that he died of a broken heart {69} in consequence of the furious attacks which had followed upon his unhappy quarrel with Wilkes. It was a pity that the closing hours of Hogarth's life should have been occupied with so petty and so regrettable a squabble. Hogarth was entirely in the wrong. Hogarth began the quarrel; and if Hogarth was eager to give hard knocks he should have been ready to take hard knocks in return. But the world at large may very well be glad that Hogarth did lurk in the court by Justice Pratt and did make his memorable sketch of Wilkes. The sketch serves to show us if not what Wilkes exactly was, at least what Wilkes seemed to be to a great many of his countrymen. The caricaturist is a priceless commentator. If Hogarth indeed indirectly shortened his life by his portrait of Wilkes, he gave, as if by transfusion of blood, an increased and abiding vitality to certain of the most interesting pages of history.

Within a few days of Hogarth, Churchill died. His devotion to Wilkes prompted him to join him in his Continental banishment. He got as far as Boulogne, where Wilkes met him, and at Boulogne he died of a fever, after formally naming Wilkes as his literary executor. Wilkes, who was always prompted by generous impulses, immediately resolved that he would edit a collected edition of Churchill's works, and for a time he buried himself in seclusion in Naples with the firm intention of carrying out this purpose. But the task was too great both for the man and for the conditions under which he was compelled to work. In the first place, annotations of such poems as Churchill's required constant reference to and minute acquaintance with home affairs, such as it was well-nigh impossible for an exile to command. In the second place, it was not an easy task for a man even with a very high opinion of himself to play the part of editor and annotator of poems a great part of which had him for hero. In a very short time the work was abandoned, and Wilkes emerged from his literary retreat.

Wilkes has been very bitterly and, as it would appear, very unjustly upbraided for his seeming neglect of his dead friend's wishes, of his dead defender's fame. In spite of {70} those whose zeal for the memory of Churchill drives them into antagonism with the memory of Wilkes, it may be believed that the task was not one "for which Wilkes could, with the greatest ease, have procured all the necessary materials; and to which he was called not by the sacred duties of friends.h.i.+p only, but by the plainest considerations of even the commonest grat.i.tude." Even if Wilkes had been, which Wilkes was not, the kind of a man to make a good editor, a good annotator, the difficulties that lay in the way of the execution of his task were too many. The fact that the poems were so largely about himself gave a sufficient if not an almost imperative reason why he should leave the task alone. But in any case he must have felt conscious of what events proved, that there was other work for him to do in the world than the editing of other men's satires.

Not, indeed, that the genius of Churchill needed any tribute that Wilkes or any one else could bestow. His monument is in his own verses, in the story of his life. If indeed the lines from "The Candidate" which are inscribed on Churchill's tombstone tell the truth, if indeed his life was "to the last enjoyed," part of that enjoyment may well have come from the certainty that the revolutions of time would never quite efface his name or obscure his memory. The immortality of the satirist must almost inevitably be an immortality rather historical than artistic; it is rather what he says than how he says it which is accounted unto him for good. As there are pa.s.sages of great poetic beauty in the satires of Juvenal, so there are pa.s.sages of poetic beauty in the satires of Churchill. But they are both remembered, the great Roman and the great Englishman, less for what beauty their work permitted than for the themes on which they exercised their wit. The study of Churchill is as essential to a knowledge of the eighteenth century in London as the study of Juvenal is essential to a knowledge of the Rome of his time. That fame Churchill had secured for himself; to that fame nothing that Wilkes or any one else might do could add.

{71}

CHAPTER XLVI.

THE AMERICAN COLONIES.

[Sidenote: 1765--Grenville as Bute's successor]

Wilkes in exile had ceased to exist in the minds of the King's Ministry. In Naples or in Paris he was as little to be feared as Churchill in his grave. An insolent subject had presumed directly to attack the King's advisers and indirectly the King himself, and the insolent subject was a fugitive, a broken, powerless man. The young King might well be pleased with the success of his policy. In pursuance of that policy he had reduced the great fabric of the Whig party to a ruin, and had driven the factious demagogue who opposed him into an ignominious obscurity. To a temper flushed by two such triumphs opposition of any kind was well-nigh welcome for the pleasure of crus.h.i.+ng it, and was never less likely to be encountered in a spirit of conciliation. Yet the King was destined in the very glow of his success to find himself face to face with an opposition which he was not able to crush, and on which any attempt at conciliation was but so much waste of time. The King's new and formidable opponent was his own chief minister.

When Bute, perhaps in fear for his life, perhaps in despair at his unpopularity, resigned the office he filled so ill, he hoped to find in his successor Grenville a supple and responsive creature, through whom Bute would still be as powerful as before. Bute had to taste a bitter disappointment. Grenville's gloomy spirit and narrow mind unfitted him, indeed, for the office he was called upon to hold, but they afforded him a stubbornness which declined to recognize either the authority of the favorite or the authority of the favorite's master.

By the time that Grenville had been two years in office the King hated him as {72} bitterly as he had ever hated Pitt. If Bute was impotently furious to find himself discarded and despised by his intended tool, the King was still more exasperated to find that the King's servant proposed to be the King's master. Grenville was a good lawyer and a good man of business, but he was extremely dull and extremely tactless, and he was at as much pains to offend the King as if he intended offence. He was overbearing in manner to a monarch who was himself overbearing; he badgered him with long rambling discourses upon his royal duty; he deliberately wounded him in his two warmest affections, his love for his mother and his regard for Bute. Grenville was right enough in his objection to the undue influence of Bute, but his animadversions came with a bad grace from the man who was to do as much harm to England as Bute had ever done. As Grenville had triumphed over Bute and driven him into the background, so he wished to triumph over the Princess Dowager and deprive her of power. In 1765 the King fell ill for the first time of that malady from which he was to suffer so often and so heavily. As soon as he was restored to health he proposed the introduction of a Regency Bill to settle satisfactorily the difficulties that might very well arise if the heir to the throne were to succeed before the age of eighteen.

[Sidenote: 1765--The King seeks to remove Grenville]

Grenville acted in the matter of the Regency Bill as if the dearest wish of his heart were to flout the King's wishes and to wound his feelings. The King wished, lest he should again be stricken with illness while the heir-apparent was still an infant, to be given the right to name a regent by will. Grenville and Grenville's colleagues, who were now as jealous of the authority of Bute as any subscriber to the _North Briton_, saw or professed to see in the King's proposal an insidious scheme for placing little less than royal power within the reach of the favorite. They made it impossible for the King to name Bute by limiting his choice to the members of the royal family. But they went further than this in affronting the King. They limited his choice of a regent to members of the royal family, but they also limited the number of {73} members of the royal family from whom he might make his choice. They insisted that the name of the King's mother, of the Princess Dowager, should not be included in the Bill.

It is difficult to understand how the King could ever have been induced to consent to this peculiarly galling insult. It seems that Grenville a.s.sured him, on entirely false premises, that if her name were mentioned in the Bill the House of Commons would be certain to strike it out. Preferring the private to the public affront, George surrendered to his minister, only to find that his minister was flagrantly misinformed. The friends of the Princess in the House of Commons moved that her name should be written into the Bill, and they carried their point in Grenville's teeth. Grenville had played the tyrant and George had accepted the humiliation for nothing. George tried at once to overthrow Grenville. In those days a king who disliked a minister had a very simple and easy way of showing and of gratifying his dislike. He could dismiss his minister without ceremony and without question. Nowadays a minister depends for his power and tenure of office upon the majority in the House of Commons, and a sovereign would not think of dismissing a minister, or of doing anything else than accepting formally the decision of the House of Commons. But when George the Third was king the only check upon the royal power of dismissing a minister lay in the possible difficulty of finding another to take his place. This was the check George now met.

He wanted with all his heart to dismiss Grenville. He turned to c.u.mberland of Culloden, and implored him to bring back Pitt and enable him to get rid of Grenville. c.u.mberland tried and c.u.mberland failed.

Pitt was in one of those paroxysms of illness which seem to have completely overmastered him. He was almost entirely under the influence of Temple. Temple's detestation of Bute reconciled him to Grenville's policy when he found that Grenville seemed to share that detestation. Temple persuaded Pitt to refuse. c.u.mberland came back to the King to tell of his failure. There was nothing to be done.

Grenville had to be kept on. If the enforced a.s.sociation {74} did not make the sovereign and his minister better friends, if both smarted under a sense of humiliation and defeat, it is scarcely surprising that the stubbornness of both was intensified in cases where their stubbornness was pitted not against each other, but against a common obstacle. Such a case was then in existence.

[Sidenote: 1765--The American colonies]

Three thousand miles away the wealth and power of England was represented by a number of settlements occupying a comparatively narrow strip of territory on the Atlantic seaboard of the North American continent. The American colonies were the proudest possessions of the British Empire. Through generation after generation, for more than two centuries, English daring and English courage had built up those colonies, reclaiming them from the wilderness and the swamp, wresting them from wild man and wild beast, fighting for them with European power after European power. They were a source of wealth, a source of honor, and a source of strength to England. They were cheaply bought with the brave lives that had been given for them. It is hard to realize that any sovereign, that any statesman could fail to see how precious a possession they were, or how unwise any course of action must be which could tend in any way to lessen their affection or to alienate their support. Yet such a sovereign was upon the throne and such a minister was by his side.

Mr. Willett, senior, in "Barnaby Rudge," explains to his friends that his absent son Joe is away in "the Salwanners in America, where the war is." Mr. Willett's knowledge and appreciation of the American colonies represents pretty well for profundity and accuracy the knowledge and appreciation of the majority of the English people in the times contemporary with, and indeed long subsequent to, the quarrels between the old country and the new. To the bulk of the British people America was a vague and shadowy region, a sort of no-man's land, peopled for the most part with black men and red men, and dimly a.s.sociated with sugar-planting and the tobacco trade. Its distance alone made it seem sufficiently unreal to those whose way of life was not drawn by business or {75} by politics into a.s.sociation with its inhabitants.

The voyage to America was a grimly serious adventure, calling for fort.i.tude and triple bra.s.s. The man was indeed lucky who could make the pa.s.sage from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e in six weeks of stormy sea, and the journey generally took a much longer time, and under the same conditions of discomfort and of danger that attended on the voyage of the "Mayflower." The vast majority of Englishmen concerned themselves as little with America as they concerned themselves with Hindostan.

Both were British possessions, and as such important, but both were too far away to a.s.sume any very substantial reality in the consciousness of the bulk of the English people. Of the minority who did possess anything that can be called knowledge of the American colonies, the majority imbibed its information from official sources, from the reports of governors of provinces and official servants of the Crown.

These reports were for the most part as reliable for a basis on which to build an intelligent appreciation as the legends of the Algonquins or the myths of the Six Nations.