A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume III Part 9

Goldsmith lived in London and he died in London, and he lies buried in the precincts of the Temple. The noise, and rattle, and roar of London rave daily about his grave. Around it rolls the awful music of a great city that has grown and swollen and extended its limits and multiplied its population out of all resemblance to that little London where Goldsmith lived and starved and made merry, and was loved, and dunned, and sorrowed for. The body that first drew breath among the pleasant Longford meadows, which seem to stretch in all directions to touch the sky, lies at rest within the humming, jostling, liberties of the Temple. It is perhaps fitting that the grave of one who all his life loved men and rejoiced so much in companions.h.i.+p should be laid in a place where the foot of man is almost always busy, where silence, when it comes at all, comes only with the night.

There is not a s.p.a.ce in the scope of this history to deal, otherwise than incidentally, with the literature of England in the eighteenth century. The whole Georgian era, from its dawn to its dusk, is rich in splendid names in {172} letters as in art. The great inheritance from the Augustan age of Anne, the anguish of Grub Street, the evolution of the novel, the eloquence of the pulpit and the bar, the triumphs of science, the controversies of scholars, the fortunes of the drama, the speculations of philosophy, the vacillations of the pamphleteer, the judgments of the critics, the achievements of historians--these are themes whose intimate consideration is outside the range of this work's purpose. All that is possible is here and there to linger a little in the company of some dear and famous figure--a Swift, a Johnson, a Goldsmith, a Sheridan--who stands above his fellows in the world's renown or in our individual affection, who played while he lived his conspicuous part on the great stage of public life, or who helped conspicuously to influence public thought. The selection is, within these limitations, inevitably arbitrary, and is given frankly as such.

Certain names a.s.sert themselves masterfully, and of these Goldsmith's is one of the most masterful. He added images to daily life and common thought as Bunyan did or Shakespeare. There is no more need to explain Dr. Primrose than there is to explain Mr. Facing-both-ways, and if Beau Tibbs is only less familiar as Osric, Tony Lumpkin is to the full as familiar as Falstaff. Goldsmith himself is the lovable type of a cla.s.s that was often unlovely in the eighteenth century, the needy man of letters. If he has his lodging in the Grub Street of Dreams, his presence there brings sunlight into the squalid place, and an infinite humor, an infinite charity compensate royally for a little finite folly and finite vanity. In the great art he served and the great age he adorned Goldsmith stands, not alone, but apart, with the very human demiG.o.ds.

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CHAPTER LIV.

YANKEE DOODLE.

[Sidenote: 1775--The Philadelphia Congress]

An English ministry and an English king were convinced that everything necessary to do for the suppression of the mutinous spirit in a turbulent but unwarlike people had been done. The existence of Boston as a trading port had been abolished; Carthage had been blotted out; there was an English army within the walls of Boston; there was an English fleet in the Charles River. Who could doubt that the cowardly farmers whom Sandwich derided, and their leaders, the voluble lawyers whom Sandwich despised, would be cowed now into quiescence, only thankful that things were no worse? The best and wisest in England were among those who did doubt, but they were like Benedict in the play--n.o.body marked them, or at least n.o.body responsible for any control over the conduct of affairs. Official confidence was suddenly and rudely shaken. The lawyers proved to be men of deeds as well as of words. The disdained farmers showed that the descendants of the men who had fought with beasts and with Indians after the manner of Endicott and Standish had not degenerated in the course of a few generations. Over the Atlantic came news which made the Boston Ma.s.sacre, the burning of the "Gaspee," and the Boston Tea-party, seem trivial and insignificant events. An astounded Ministry learned that a formal Congress of Representatives of the different colonies had been convened and had met in Philadelphia, and had drawn up a Declaration of Rights. Chatham admired and applauded their work. To the King and the King's ministers it was meaningless when it was not offensive. But the colonists showed that they could do more than meet in Congresses and draw up {174} splendid State Papers. The next news was of acts of war.

Gage schemed a raid upon the stores of powder and arms acc.u.mulated by the disaffected colonists in Concord. Warning of his plan was carried at night by a patriotic engraver named Paul Revere to every hamlet within reach of a horse's ride. There was a skirmish at Lexington on the road to Concord between the King's troops and a body of minute-men, which resulted in the killing and wounding of many of the latter and the dispersal of their force. An expedition that began with what might in irony be termed a victory for the British arms ended in a disaster as tragic as it was complete. Concord forewarned had nothing to yield to the English soldiers who invaded her quiet streets; but the surrounding country, equally forewarned, answered the invasion by sending bodies of armed farmers and minute-men from every point of the compa.s.s to the common centre of Concord. There was a sharp, short fight on Concord Bridge, which ended in the repulse of the royal troops and the death of brave men on both sides. Then the British officer decided to retreat from Concord. It proved one of the most memorable retreats in history. From behind every tree, every bowlder, every wall, every hedge, enemies trained in the warfare of the wilderness poured their fire upon the retiring troops. It seemed to one of the officers engaged in that memorable fight as if the skies rained down foes upon them, unseen foes only made known by the accuracy of their marksmans.h.i.+p and the pertinacity of their veiled pursuit. All the way from Concord the retiring troops fought in vain with an enemy that was seldom seen, but whose presence was everywhere manifested by the precision of his aim and the tale of victims that followed each volley.

The retreat was becoming a rout when reinforcements sent out from Boston under the command of Lord Percy stayed an actual stampede. But it could not stay the retreat nor avert defeat. Lord Percy, who had marched out with his bands playing "Yankee Doodle," in mockery of the Americans, had to retreat in his turn with no mocking music, carrying with him the remnant of the invaders of Concord. He {175} and his force did not get within touch of Boston and the protection of the guns of the fleet a moment too soon. Had a large body of insurgents, who came hurrying in to help their brethren, arrived on the field a little earlier, Lord Percy and his command must inevitably have been made prisoners of war. As it was, this one day's business had given success and the confidence that comes of success to the raw colonists, and had inflicted a crus.h.i.+ng defeat upon a body of soldiers who had been led to believe that the sight of their scarlet coats would act like a charm to tame their untutored opponents.

[Sidenote: 1776--Military success of the colonists]

Gage only recovered from the shock of this disaster to realize that Boston was invested by an insurgent army. The victors of the fight and flight from Concord were rapidly reinforced by bodies of men from all parts of the country; their ranks were hourly swelled by levies roughly armed but stubbornly resolved. Unpleasant facts forced themselves thick and fast upon Gage's notice. But yesterday, as it were, he had imagined that the mere presence of the forces under his command was sufficient to overawe the colonists and settle any show of insubordination forever; to-day he had to swallow in shame and anger a staggering defeat. Still Gage did nothing and his enemies acc.u.mulated.

Royal reinforcements arrived under Burgoyne, Clinton, and Howe, to do nothing in their turn. But the peasants they despised were not idle and would not allow them to be idle. The English general woke up one morning to find that under cover of night an important point of vantage overlooking the town of Boston had been occupied and roughly fortified by the rebels. The citizen soldiers who had gathered together to defend their liberties had stolen a march upon the English general.

They had occupied the rising ground of Breed Hill, below Bunker's Hill, on the Charlestown side of the Charles River, and had hurriedly intrenched themselves there behind rude but efficient earthworks. Gage was resolved that the rebels should not remain long in their new position. Chance might have allotted them a scratch victory over a small body of men taken unawares in unfamiliar country {176} and by unfamiliar methods of fighting. But here was a business familiar to the British soldier; here was work that he did well and that he loved to do. If the colonists really believed that they could hold Breed Hill against troops with whom the taking by storm of strong positions was a tradition, so much the worse for them. The order was given that the rebels must be cleared away from Breed Hill at once, and the welcome task was given to Lord Howe, in command of the flower of the forces in Boston. It is probable that Howe felt some pity for the rash and foolhardy men whose hopes it was his duty and his determination to destroy. Confident that the enterprise would be as brief as it must be decisive, Howe prepared to a.s.sault, and the battle of Breed Hill began.

[Sidenote: 1775--The Battle of Breed Hill]

The Breed Hill battle is one of the strangest and one of the bravest fights ever fought by men. On the one side were some hundreds of simple citizens, civilians, skilled as individuals in the use of the gun, and accustomed as volunteers, militia, and minute-men to something that might pa.s.s for drill and manoeuvre, officered and generalled by men who, like Warren and Greene, knew warfare only by the bookish theoric, or by men who, like Putnam and Pomeroy, had taken their baptism of fire and blood in frontier struggles with wild beast and wilder Indian. On the other side were some thousands of the finest troops in the world, in whose ranks victory was a custom, on whose banners the names of famous battles blazed. They were well trained, well armed, well equipped. They moved at the word of command with the monotonous precision and perfection of a machine. They were led by officers whose temper had been tested again and again in the sharp experiences of war, men to whom the thought of defeat was as unfamiliar as the thought of fear. The contrast between the two opposing forces was vividly striking in the very habiliments of the opponents. The men who were ma.s.sed behind the breastworks of Breed Hill were innocent of uniform, of the bright attire that makes the soldier's life alluring, innocent even of any distinction between officer and private, or, if the words seem too formal {177} for so raw a force, between the men who were in command and the men who were commanded. The soldiers who were ma.s.sed below, the force whose duty it was to march up the hill and sweep away the handful in hodden gray and black broadcloth who held it, glittered with all the bravery of color dear to the British army.

Splendid in scarlet and white and gold, every buckle s.h.i.+ning, every belt and bandolier as brightly clean as pipeclay could make it, the little army under Howe's command would have done credit to a parade in the Park or a field day at Windsor. The one side was as sad and sombre as a Puritan prayer-meeting; the other glowed with all the color and warmth of a military pageant. The holders of the hill had come from their farms and their fields in the homely working clothes they wore as they followed the plough or tended their cattle; the townsmen among them came in the decent civic suits they wore behind their desks or counters. Few men's weapons were fellows in that roughly armed array.

Each militant citizen carried his own gun, some favorite weapon, familiar from long practice in fowling, or from frequent service further afield against the bear, the panther, and the wolf. Some of the flint-locks were enormously long; many of them would have seemed extremely old-fas.h.i.+oned to an ordnance officer. But every gun was like an additional limb to those practised marksmen, who knew little of firing in platoons, but everything of the patient accuracy which gives the backwoodsman his unerring aim. The a.s.sailants carried the latest weapons approved of by the War Office, and manipulated them with the faultless unison and unswerving harmony that would have compelled the compliments of a commander-in-chief at a review. At the top of the hill were some sixteen hundred men, a mob of undisciplined sharpshooters, few of whom had ever fired a shot in organized warfare.

At the bottom of the hill were some four thousand of the finest troops in the world, stiffened with all the strength that prestige and practice could give them. It did not seem on the face of it a very equal combat; it did not seem to the English generals that it ought to take very long to {178} march from the bottom to the top of the hill and make short work of the mutinous peasants on its summit. The best indeed that the mutinous peasants could hope for when the British were upon them was to be shot or bayoneted as quickly as possible, for the terms of Gage's proclamation directly threatened with the gallows every rebel taken with arms in his hands.

But at Breed Hill, as at Concord, the unexpected came to pa.s.s. The British troops were unable to endure the destructive fire of the colonists. Again and again they advanced over the incline as calmly as if on parade; again and again they reeled backward with shattered ranks, leaving grim piles of dead upon the fire-swept slope. The execution was terrible; regiments that marched up the hill as if to certain victory fell back from it a mere remnant of themselves, leaving most of their men and almost all their officers behind. For awhile the fight was a succession of catastrophes to the force under Howe's command. It looked as if Breed Hill would never be taken. But there came a time when the men who held it could hold it no longer. Their supply of powder began to run out, and with their means of keeping up their fire their power of holding their position came to an end. Then came a last charge of Howe's rallied forces, this time in the lightest of marching array, a last volley from behind the earth-works, and Breed Hill was in the hands of the British. It was captured at the last without much bloodshed, without much loss to its garrison. The smoke hung so thick about the enclosure where the rebels had held their own so long and so well that it was not easy for the bayonets of the conquerors to do much execution, and the defenders of Breed Hill slipped away for the most part under cover of the mist they themselves had made. Indeed, there was little inclination for pursuit on the part of the victors. They had done what they had been set to do, but they had done it at a cost which for the time made it impossible for them to attempt to pursue an advantage so dearly bought. They did not, could not know the strength of their enemy; they were content to hold the ground which had been won {179} with such a fearful waste of British blood. Breed Hill was a nominal victory for the King; it was a real victory for the rebels, who had shown what an undisciplined force, composed of farmers, trappers, lawyers, shopkeepers, and divines, could do against the finest troops in the world.

[Sidenote: 1775--The Continental Army]

Already insurgent America had an army, and an army of investment. The rebels, whom Gage affected to despise almost as much as he was himself despised by General Burgoyne, were ma.s.sed in numbers unknown to the loyalists before Boston, and the English soldiers were cooped up in the city they had crossed the seas to command. The colonial army was rude and rough, but earnest and resolute, and it had evolved generals of its own making, rough and rude as itself, but able, daring, and fearless.

Israel Putnam, who killed a wolf once with his own hands in his wild youth, gripping it by the throat till he had choked its life out, had come to fight against the flag beneath which he had fought so well in the French wars. Nathaniel Greene had flung down his military books and caught up the sword, had abandoned the theory for the practice, and was beginning to make a name. Benedict Arnold, after a life as varied, as shady, and as adventurous as that of any picaroon in a Spanish story, leaped into fame as a daring spirit by the way in which he and Ethan Allen, at the head of a mixed force of Vermonters and New Englanders, had taken Fort Ticonderoga, on the great lakes, by surprise, and had endowed the dawning army with its captured cannon.

Prescott, the hero of Breed Hill, was now a veteran soldier; and the names of Artemas Ward, of Schuyler, of Pomeroy, Heath and Thomas, Sullivan and Montgomery, Wooster and Spencer were becoming more than mere names to Englishmen in Boston and in London. Two Englishmen held rank as generals in the crude colonial army--the adventurer Charles Lee, whom some foolish people believed to be the real Junius, and Horatio Gates. There were few thoroughly worthless men in the young army, but it is painful to record that Lee and Gates were eminent among them. These were the generals of what was now to be called the {180} Continental Army. Happy in most of them, happy in much, it was happiest of all in this: that it had for its commander-in-chief the n.o.blest man, who was to prove the greatest soldier, then living in the world.

[Sidenote: 1775--George Was.h.i.+ngton]

When Braddock died, the hero of a hopeless fight and the martyr of his own folly, the funeral service was read over his body by the young Virginian soldier who had fought by his side and had warned him against his rashness. To men in later years there seemed to be something prophetic, with the blended irony and pathos of prophecy, in the picture of that dead Englishman, his scarlet coat torn and b.l.o.o.d.y with so many wounds, lying in his grave while his American lieutenant read over him the words that committed so much wasted courage to the earth.

At the time and hour the thing signified no more than the price of a petty victory of allied French and Indians, which the Virginian soldier was soon to avenge. After planting the banner of King George on the ruins of Fort Duquesne, Captain Was.h.i.+ngton sheathed his sword and retired from military into civil life, with as little likelihood as desire of ever carrying arms again. All he asked and all he antic.i.p.ated was to live the tranquil life of a comfortable colonial gentleman. After a youth that had been vexed by many experiences of the pa.s.sion of love he had married happily and wisely, and had settled down to a gracious rural life at Mount Vernon, on the banks of the Potomac River. He wished no better than to be a country gentleman, with a country gentleman's pleasures and pursuits--farming, hunting, fis.h.i.+ng--with a country gentleman's friends.h.i.+ps for neighbors like himself. He was a dutiful servant of his State; he was a member of the Virginia Houses of Burgesses for fifteen years after the fall of Fort Duquesne, and though he seldom played any part in debate he commanded the confidence and the esteem of his colleagues and of his fellow-citizens. He lived and enjoyed a peaceful, honorable, useful, uneventful life, and might have lived it to its end in dignified obscurity if a rash and headstrong sovereign over-seas had not found ministers too servile or too foolish to say him nay.

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The Continental Congress, conscious of Was.h.i.+ngton's ability, offered him the command of its improvised army. Was.h.i.+ngton accepted the duty, well aware of its gravity, its danger, its awful responsibility. He refused any pay beyond his actual expenses, and he entered upon a struggle whose difficulties were not all or nearly all due to the enemy in the sternest and n.o.blest sense of duty to his countrymen and to the principles of liberty. At first, in his own words, he loathed the idea of independence. He only took up arms to defend cherished rights; the day was not yet, though the day was not far off, when the Virginian soldier would renounce his allegiance to the King whose commission he had carried and to the country from which his race stemmed.

Was.h.i.+ngton's military genius soon showed itself in the use he made of the loose, incoherent, disorganized ma.s.s of men which was called the Continental Army. It was fortunate for the Continental cause that the English generals, penned up within the walls of Boston, had little idea of the obstacles Was.h.i.+ngton had to overcome, the opposition he had to encounter, the sore straits to which the want of everything essential to a besieging army drove him. But his indomitable courage, his unfailing coolness, his unconquerable resource overcame a sea of troubles that might well have swept even a strong man and a brave soldier off his feet. With regiment after regiment quietly disbanding as their term of service expired; with a plentiful lack of powder, of arms, of provisions, of uniforms; with a force that at moments threatened to dissolve into nothingness and leave him with a handful of generals alone beneath his insurgent flag, Was.h.i.+ngton never allowed the enemy, and seldom allowed a friend, to guess how near at times he came to despair. He raised troops somehow; he got provisions somehow; somehow he managed to obtain powder; somehow he managed to obtain arms.

The want of weapons was so great that many bodies of men were only provided with pikes, and that Franklin was driven to suggest, and partly in a spirit of humanity, that American farmers fighting for their liberty should be armed with the bows and arrows of the red {182} men, and should strive to renew upon the fields of Ma.s.sachusetts the successes of their ancestors, the yeomen of Agincourt, with their clothyard shafts.

The generals shut up in Boston knew nothing of the cares that hara.s.sed the mind of Was.h.i.+ngton. All they knew was that they were closely beleaguered; that they were cooped up in Boston by a large if irregular army, and that they could not get out. They affected, of course, to despise their enemy. At the private theatricals which were given to divert the enforced leisure of Lord Howe an actor who came on as a caricature of Was.h.i.+ngton, attired like a military scarecrow, never failed to please. Burgoyne was confident that sooner or later he could find that "elbow-room" the ungratified desire for which has served to immortalize his name. But neither Howe nor Burgoyne nor any one else could dissipate the ragged regiments that invested Boston, nor baffle the plans of the great soldier who commanded them. For nearly a year the world saw with wonder the spectacle of an English army confined in Boston, and an English fleet riding idly in the Charles River. Then the end came. Was.h.i.+ngton, closing in, offered Lord Howe, the English general then in command, the choice of evacuation or bombardment. The English general chose the former. The royal troops withdrew from Boston, taking with them the loyalist families who had thrown in their lot with the King's cause. The English s.h.i.+ps that sailed from Boston were terribly overcrowded with the number of refugees who preferred flight, with all its attendant sorrows, to remaining in a rebellious country. The English fleet sailed away from Boston and the Continental Army marched in. So far the cause of King George was going very badly indeed; so far the rebellious colonists had failed to justify the confident prophecies of Lord Sandwich. With any other king and with any other ministers one such year's work would have been enough at least to induce them to reconsider their position. But the King was George the Third, and his ministers were what they were, and it was resolved that the war must go on.

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[Sidenote: 1775-81--The Declaration of Independence]

The war did go on. It lasted for five years more, in spite of the protests of every truly patriotic Englishman, in spite of proof after proof that nothing could break the spirit or crush the courage of the colonists. While in England Fox arrayed himself in the blue and buff that composed the uniform of the Continental Army, while the Duke of Richmond made it a point to speak, and with excellent reason, of the Continental Army as "our army," while the eloquence of Chatham and the eloquence of Burke were launched in vain against campaigns as idle as they were infamous, the war went stubbornly on. The King and his ministers proposed new measures of repression and expended vast sums in the purchase of Hessian regiments to dragoon the defiant colonists.

Soon all pretence of loyalty had to be abandoned by the Americans. The statue of King George was dragged from its place of honor in Bowling Green, New York, and run into bullets to be used against his German levies. In the summer that followed the evacuation of Boston the rebellious colonies proclaimed their independence in the most memorable declaration of a people's right ever made by men. This was in 1776.

The disastrous war had still five years to run.

The fortunes of the war varied. The early victories of the Americans were followed by a series of defeats which left Philadelphia in the hands of the British, and which would have broken the heart of any man of less heroic mould than Was.h.i.+ngton. Hope revived with a series of Continental victories. Aid came to America from abroad. France, Germany, Poland sent stout soldiers to fight for freedom--Lafayette, Von Steuben, Kosciusko. The English general Burgoyne surrendered with all his army at Saratoga. After the winter of 1777, when Was.h.i.+ngton and his army suffered all the rigors of Valley Forge, France acknowledged the independence of America, the British evacuated Philadelphia, and Paul Jones made himself forever famous by the way in which he and his s.h.i.+p "Le Bonhomme Richard," carried the American war to the coast of England. Again came colonial reverses. A {184} steady succession of English successes scarcely struck so hard a blow at the Continental cause as the treason of Benedict Arnold, who entered into negotiations with the British to betray his command. Was.h.i.+ngton had trusted and loved Arnold like a brother. "Whom can I trust now?" he asked in momentary despair when the capture of an English officer.

Major Andre, and the flight of Benedict Arnold to the British lines revealed to him an undreamed-of treason which had threatened to undermine the colonial cause. But Benedict Arnold's crime had for its only result the death of a better man than himself, of Major Andre, who had by the laws of war to suffer death as a spy. There were other traitors and semi-traitors in the American army: Lee was certainly the first; Gates was almost, if not quite, the second. But Lee and Gates failed to do the mischief to which their base jealousy of Was.h.i.+ngton prompted them. The right cause triumphed. In 1781 another British army surrendered, the army of Cornwallis, at Yorktown. Even North was forced to recognize that this crus.h.i.+ng disaster to the royal hopes and the royal arms practically ended the war. It was suspended in the following year, and in 1783, after much negotiation, which at times threatened to come to nothing, a treaty of peace was signed in France, and the American Republic took its place among the nations of the earth. It was for these negotiations that Franklin, as we have said, brought out from its obscurity that gala suit which he had worn for the last time when he stood at the bar of the House of Commons and listened to the brutal and foolish a.s.saults of Wedderburn. Many days had pa.s.sed since that day.

So ended one of the most unjust and one of the most foolish wars ever waged by England. It must never be forgotten that the war was in no sense an English war. The English people as a whole had then no voice to express itself one way or the other. Of those Englishmen whose voices had to be heard, the best and the wisest were as angry in their denunciations of the crime of the King and the King's ministers, and as cordial in their {185} admiration of Was.h.i.+ngton and his companions, as if they had been members of that Continental Congress which first in Philadelphia proclaimed the existence of a new nation.

[Sidenote: 1778--Death of the Earl of Chatham]

The fatal war which had cost the English King the loss of his greatest colonies, which had spilt a vast amount of blood and wasted a vast amount of treasure in order to call into being a strong and naturally resentful rival to the power of England, must be said also to have cost the life of the greatest English statesman of the century. The genius of Chatham had never been more n.o.bly employed than in protesting with all the splendor of its eloquence against the unjust war upon the Americans and the unjust deeds which had heralded the war. But time, that had only swelled the ranks of the wise and sane who thought as Chatham had thought and found their own utterance from the fire of his words, had wrought a change in the att.i.tude of a great statesman.

Hara.s.sed by the disease that racked his body, the mind of Chatham had altered. The n.o.ble views that he had maintained in defiance of a headstrong king and a corrupt ministry had changed in the face of the succession of calamities that had fallen upon his country. The success that he had desired for the insurgent arms had been accorded, and he came to despair at the consequence of that success. He had been granted his heart's desire in full measure, and the gratification choked him. When it came to be a question of conceding to the colonists that formal recognition of an independence which they had already won, the intellect of Chatham revolted against the policy himself had fostered. He forgot or he forswore the principles which animated Burke, which animated Fox, which guided the course of Rockingham and inspired the utterances of Richmond. All he could see was an England humiliated by many defeats, an England threatened by many terrible alliances, and in the face of humiliation and of menace he forgot that both alike were the inevitable, the well-deserved fruit of injustice. Remembering that he had helped to make England great, he refused to remember that England would have been still greater if she had {186} followed the honorable course his wisdom had made plain to her. His proud, unhappy spirit could not consent to her dismemberment, a dismemberment which seemed to his fading intellect to be the equivalent to her ruin. He came from his sick bed, a ghastly image of decay, to offer the desperate protest of a dying man against surrender to the mutiny his own eloquence had fanned. "Come the four quarters of the world in arms and we will shock them." The spirit of Faulconbridge was strong in the ruined body of the statesman who was carried to his seat in the House of Lords by the son who bore his name and by the Lord Mahon who had married his daughter. His eagle face was turned against the men who had been his colleagues. His trembling hand pointed at them in condemnation. He gasped out a few sentences, almost inarticulate, almost inaudible, before he reeled in a fit upon the arms of those about him. He was carried from the House; he was carried to Hayes, and at Hayes a few weeks later the great career came to an end.

His last battle was at least heroic. If his stroke was struck on the wrong side and for a cause his prime had done so much to baffle, it is not necessary to attribute his perversion entirely to the insidious ravages of the malady that had clouded his whole life. He could not bear to see the country that was in so eminent and so intimate a sense his country yield even to claims that were conspicuously right and just at the command of a league between England's rebellious children and England's enemy, France. There broke his mighty heart. In Chatham England lost one of the greatest of her statesmen, one of the most splendid of her sons. His life was pa.s.sionately devoted to his country, his career one long struggle against a peculiarly bigoted, stubborn, and unwise King. Always hated by his enemies, often misunderstood by his friends, he showed while he lived a steadfast front alike against the enemies of England abroad and those worse enemies of England at home who filled the throne and the places about the throne. He was buried with great pomp and honor at Westminster, leaving behind him not merely the memory of an ill.u.s.trious name, {187} but a name that the second generation was still to make ill.u.s.trious.

[Sidenote: 1781--England and her lost colonies]

The folly of the King and the servility of his ministers resulted in what seemed to be almost an irredeemable catastrophe for England. Even those Englishmen who most sympathized with the struggle for American independence could not but feel a regret that men who might have been among the most glorious citizens of a great and united empire should be thus recklessly forced into an enmity that had deprived England of its most splendid possessions. The enemies of England, many and eager, believed her day was done, that her sun was setting, that neither her power nor her prestige would ever recover from the succession of disasters that began at Lexington and that ended in Paris. But the vitality of the country was too great to be seriously impaired even by the loss of the American colonies. From a blow that might well have been little less than fatal the country recovered with a readiness and a rapidity that was amazing. Men who in their youth heard their elders speak with despair of the calamity that had befallen their country lived to old age to learn that the wound was not incurable, and that England was greater, richer, prouder, and more powerful than she had ever been before. If she had lost the American colonies she had learned a lesson in the loss. The blow that might have stunned only served to rouse her to a greater sense of her danger and a livelier consciousness of her duty. If she had suffered much from rashness she was not going to suffer more from inaction, and it seemed as if every source of strength in the kingdom knit itself together in the common purpose of showing to the world that England still was England, although a part of her empire had pa.s.sed away from her forever. There was no glory to be got for England out of the American war; it was wrong from first to last, wrong, unjust, and foolish, but when it ended it did not find her crippled, nor did it leave her permanently enfeebled in temper or in strength.

We may gather some idea of what risk wise men felt they were running from a famous speech of Edmund {188} Burke. He was striving to stay the determination of the Ministry to declare war upon the American colonies. He wished his hearers to appreciate the progress that America had made within living memory. He called imagination to his aid. He spoke of a statesman then living in the late evening of an honorable life. He pictured that statesman in the promise of his early dawn, saluted by the angel of his auspicious youth, and given the power to see into the future, so far as to the hour when Burke was speaking.

"What," said Burke, "if while he was gazing with admiration on the then commercial grandeur of England the genius should point out to him a little speck, scarce visible in the ma.s.s of the nation's interest, and should tell him, 'Young man, there is America, which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners, yet before you taste of death will show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.

Whatever England has been growing to by a progressive increase of improvement, brought in by varieties of people, by succession of civilizing conquests and civilizing settlements in a series of seventeen hundred years, you shall see as much added to her by America in the course of a single life!' If this state of his country had been foretold to him, would it not require all the sanguine credulity of youth and all the fervid glow of enthusiasm to make him believe it?

Fortunate man, he has lived to see it." If the genius of prophecy could have stood by Burke's shoulder then, and illuminated his n.o.ble soul with the knowledge that is the common possession of mankind to-day, would it not have required all the sanguine credulity, all the divine enthusiasm of genius to make him believe it?

[Sidenote: 1732-99--The death of Was.h.i.+ngton]

The war that gave the world a new nation and a republic greater than Rome added one of the greatest names, and perhaps the n.o.blest name, to the roll-call of the great captains of the earth. No soldier of all those that the eyes of Dante discerned in the first circle, not even "Caesar, all armored with gerfalcon eyes," adorns the annals of antiquity more than George Was.h.i.+ngton illuminates the {189} last quarter of the eighteenth century. His splendid strength, his sweet austerity, his proud patience are hardly to be rivalled in the previous history of humanity, and have perhaps only been rivalled since his day by children of the same continent and of the same southern soil, who sacrificed qualities much akin to his own on a cause that, unlike his, was not the cause of freedom. "First in peace, first in war, and first in the hearts of his country-men." The phrase of Lee has been worn threadbare with iteration since it was first uttered, but it always rings true of the high-minded, unfaltering soldier and honorable, simple gentleman whose genius in war and whose modesty in peace made the republic of America an enduring fact in history. Long after the great soldier and good man had been laid to rest an English poet did him justice, and no more than justice, by writing that "the first, the last, the best, the Cincinnatus of the West, whom envy dared not hate, bequeathed the name of Was.h.i.+ngton to make man blush there was but one."

Was.h.i.+ngton was made the first President of the American Republic in 1789, after resolutely resisting all suggestions to make himself king of the new commonwealth. He served for two terms of four years each, and then retired into private life, unembittered by the cruel and stupid ingrat.i.tude of the few and unspoiled by the reasoned and grateful homage of the many. He died in 1799 in his quiet home in Mount Vernon, while the King who still regarded him as a rebel had many years of his unquiet reign to live.

{190}

CHAPTER LV.

THE GORDON RIOTS.

[Sidenote: 1778-80--Sir George Savile's Catholic Relief Bill]

In the year 1778 Sir George Savile earned for himself an honorable distinction by pa.s.sing his measure for the relief of Roman Catholics.