A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume III Part 12

[Sidenote: 1783--Legislation of the Coalition Ministry]

Pitt's proposal was not very magnificent. He asked the House to declare that measures were highly necessary to be taken for the future prevention of bribery and expense at elections. He urged that for the future, when the majority of voters for any borough should be convicted of gross and notorious corruption before a select committee of the House appointed to try the merits of any election, such borough should be disfranchised and the minority of voters not so convicted should be ent.i.tled to vote for the county in which such borough should be situated. He suggested that an addition of knights of the s.h.i.+re and of the representatives of the metropolis should be made to the state of the representation. He left the number to the discussion and consideration of the House, but for his own part he stated that he should propose an addition of one hundred representatives. Pitt's scheme was scarcely a splendid measure of reform; but at least it was a measure of reform, and it met with small mercy at the hands of the coalition, being defeated by a majority of 293 to 149. This was not an auspicious beginning for the new Ministry, and it was scarcely surprising that many of Fox's adherents in the country should resent his employment of the swollen forces that were practically if not technically under his command to compa.s.s the defeat of a bill which, however inadequate, did at least endeavor to bring about a much-needed improvement.

{230}

The great adventure of the Coalition Ministry, the deed by which it hoped to justify its existence, and by which indeed it has earned its only honorable t.i.tle to remembrance, was the bill which is known to the world as Fox's India Bill. If the extending influence of England in India was a source of pride to the English people, it was also a source of grave responsibility. The conditions under which that influence was exercised, the weaknesses and inadequacies of the system by which the East India Company exercised its semi-regal authority, were becoming more apparent with every succeeding year to the small but steadily increasing number of persons who took a serious and intelligent interest in Indian affairs. A series of events, to be referred to later, had served to force into a special prominence the difficulties and the dangers of the existing state of affairs and to fasten the attention of thinkers upon the evils that had resulted, and the evils that must yet result from its continuance.

To mitigate those evils in the present, and to minimize them in the future, Fox, inspired and aided by Burke's splendid knowledge of Indian affairs, worked out a measure which was confidently expected to subst.i.tute order for disorder and reason for unreason. In the November of 1783, Pitt addressed a challenge to the Ministry calling upon them to bring forward some measure securing and improving the advantages to be derived from England's Eastern possessions, some measure not of temporary palliation and timorous expedients, but vigorous and effectual, suited to the magnitude, the importance, and the alarming exigencies of the case.

Fox answered this challenge by asking leave to bring in a bill "for vesting the affairs of the East India Company in the hands of certain commissioners for the benefit of the proprietors and the public." At the same time Fox asked leave to bring in another bill "for the better government of the territorial possessions and dependencies in India."

These two bills, supplementing each other, formed, in the opinion of those who framed and who advocated them, a simple, efficient, and responsible plan for the better administration of England's Indian {231} dependencies. However tentative and incomplete they may now appear as a means of dealing with a problem of such vast importance and such far-reaching consequences, they certainly were measures the adoption of which must have proved a gain to the country governing and to the country governed.

[Sidenote: 1783--Fox and the affairs of India]

The measures, which, it is probable, were originally planned out by Burke, but to which it is certain that Fox devoted all the strength of his intellect and all the enthusiasm of his nature, were of a daring and comprehensive character. The first proposed to make a clean sweep of the existing state of things in India by the appointment of a Board composed of seven commissioners to whom absolute authority over the East India Company's property, and over the appointment or removal of holders of offices in India, was to be intrusted for a term of four years. This term of four years was not to be affected by any changes of administration that might occur in England during the time. The commerce of the Company was to be managed by a council of directors, who were themselves entirely under the control of the seven commissioners. The commissioners and the directors were required to lay their accounts before the proprietors every six months, and before both Houses at the beginning of every session. The commissioners were in the first instance to be appointed by Parliament, that is to say, by the Ministry headed by Fox and North; at the end of the four years they were to be appointed by the Crown. The Court of Proprietors was to fill up the vacancies in the council of directors. The second and less important measure dealt with the powers of the Governor-General and Council and the conduct to be observed towards the princes and natives of India.

The first measure was the measure of paramount importance, the measure from which Fox and his friends hoped so much, the measure which aroused in a very peculiar degree the anger of the King and of the King's followers. They saw in a moment the enormous influence that the pa.s.sing of the measure would place in the hands of Fox. The names of the commissioners were left blank {232} in the bill, but when their time came to be filled up in committee they were all filled with the names of followers of Fox. It was argued that were the bill to become law a set of persons extremely obnoxious to the King would have in their hands for a solid term of years the entire administration of India and the control of an amount of patronage, estimated at not less than three hundred thousand a year. This would enable them to oppose to the royal prerogative of patronage an influence of like nature that brought with it scarcely less than royal power. It is scarcely surprising that Pitt should have employed all his eloquence and all his energy against what he described as "the boldest and most unconst.i.tutional measure ever attempted, transferring at one stroke, in spite of all charters and compacts, the immense patronage and influence of the East to Charles Fox in or out of office."

[Sidenote: 1783--Henry Dundas and James Sayer]

If Pitt was the most conspicuous opponent of the India Bills, only less conspicuous was a man who, though much Pitt's senior, was still young, and who had already made himself prominent in the House of Commons, not merely as a politician of general ability, but as one who took a special interest in the affairs of India. Henry Dundas had been a characteristic ornament of the Scottish bar, at once a skilful lawyer and an attractive man of the world when, eight years before the existence of the Coalition Ministry, he had come to St. Stephen's as Lord Advocate. An ambition to s.h.i.+ne as a statesman and an extraordinary power of application had equipped him with the varied information that enabled him to a.s.sert himself as an authority in many departments of national business. He had early recognized the importance of India as a field for the powers of a rising politician, and he had devoted to India and to Indian affairs that tireless a.s.siduity which permitted him at once to appear a convivial spirit with the temperament and leisure of a man of pleasure, and a master of profound and intricate subjects, the secret of which was only known to those who were acquainted with his habit of early rising and his indefatigable capacity for work in the time that he allotted to work.

When the public attention was {233} directed to India, towards the close of the American war, and when a very general sense of indignation was aroused by the mismanagement that lessened and that threatened to destroy British influence in the East, Dundas came forward with the confident air of one who was intimately acquainted with the complicated problem and who believed himself perfectly competent to set all difficulties right. He was the chairman of the select committee of the House of Commons appointed to inquire into the causes of the war in the Carnatic, and he impressed himself upon the House as an authority upon India of no mean order, both in the report from that committee and in a bill which he himself introduced for the purpose of dealing with the Indian question.

He did not succeed in carrying his measure, but he took care that his knowledge of his subject increased in proportion to its growing importance in the public view, and his ready eloquence and specious show of information made him a very valuable ally for Pitt and a fairly formidable opponent to Fox in the heady debates over the measures to which the political honor of the dishonorable coalition was pledged.

The India Bill had a more serious enemy than Dundas, a more serious enemy than Pitt so far as the immediate effect of enmity upon public opinion is to be estimated. There was an attorney in London named James Sayer whose private means enabled him to neglect his profession and devote himself to the production of political caricatures and squibs. Sayer was one of the many who believed in the rising star of Pitt, and he proved his belief by the publication of a caricature which Fox himself is said to have admitted gave the India Bill its severest blow in public estimation.

This caricature was called "Carlo Khan's Triumphal Entry into Leadenhall Street." It represented Fox in the grotesque attire of a theatrical Oriental potentate, and with a smile of conquest upon his black-haired face, perched upon an elephant with the staring countenance of Lord North, that was led by Burke, whose spectacled acridity was swollen with the blowing of a trumpet from which depended a map of India. The {234} caricature was ingenious, timely, and extraordinarily efficacious in harming the measure and its champions. It had an enormous sale; it was imitated and pirated far and wide. It carried to all parts of the kingdom the conviction that Fox was aiming at nothing less than a dictators.h.i.+p of India, and it intensified the general animosity towards the measures and the men of the Coalition Ministry more effectively than any amount of speeches in Westminster could have done. But it had no more power to weaken the solid majority of the Ministry in the House of Commons than the hurried erudition of Dundas, or than what Walpole called the "Bristol stone" of Pitt's eloquence as contrasted with the "diamond reason" of Fox's solid sense. Neither political caricature nor popular disapproval, neither the indignation of the King nor the opulence of the fearful and furious East India Company, could prevent Fox from carrying his measures in the House of Commons by means of the sheer force of numbers that he had obtained by his unhallowed compact with North.

But the power of the new Ministry was vulnerable in another place where the most unconst.i.tutional weapons were employed against it. The King was eager to avenge the affront that had, as he conceived, been put upon him by the compulsion that had forced him to accept ministers so little to his taste. He was prepared to stick at little in order to retaliate upon his enemies, as he always conceived those men to be who ventured to cross his purposes. Nothing could be done effectively to change the political composition of the Lower House; something could be essayed with the reasonable hope of modifying the composition of the Upper House. Lord Temple, a second-rate statesman, whose position gave him almost first-rate importance, was the instrument by which the King was able to bring very effective pressure upon the peers. George wrote a letter to Lord Temple in which he declared that he should deem those who should vote for Fox's measure as "not only not his friends, but his enemies;"

and he added that if Lord Temple could put this in stronger words "he had full authority to do so." With this amazing doc.u.ment in his {235} possession Lord Temple went from one n.o.ble lord to another, pointing out the unwisdom of each in pursuing a course which would const.i.tute him an avowed enemy of the King, and insisting upon the advantages that must follow from the taking of the very broad hint of the royal pleasure thus conveyed. Temple's arguments, backed by and founded upon the King's letter, had the most satisfactory result from the King's point of view.

Peer after peer fell away from the doomed Ministry; peer after peer hastened to prove himself one of the elect, to a.s.sert himself as a King's friend by recording his vote against the obnoxious measure.

[Sidenote: 1783--Fall of the Coalition Ministry]

The course of action inspired by the King and acted upon by Lord Temple was flagrantly unconst.i.tutional even in an age which permitted to the sovereign so much liberty of personal intervention in affairs. It was, however, attended with complete success. The India Bills were rejected in the House of Lords by a majority of nineteen, and this defeat, which would not have been regarded in more recent times as fatal to a Ministry, however fatal for the time being to the measure thus condemned, was instantly used by the King as a pretext for ridding himself of the advisers whose advice he detested. The King resolved to dismiss the ministers, and to dismiss them with every circ.u.mstance of indignity that should render their dismissal the more contemptuous. On the midnight of the day following the final defeat of the measure in the House of Lords a messenger delivered to the two Secretaries of State, Fox and North, a message from the King stating that it was his Majesty's will and pleasure that they should deliver to him the seals of their respective offices, and that they should send them by the Under-Secretaries, Mr. Frazer and Mr. Nepean, as a personal interview on the occasion would be disagreeable to the King. The seals were immediately sent to Buckingham House and were promptly handed over by the King to Lord Temple, who on the following day sent letters of dismissal to the other members of the Cabinet Council.

When the House of Commons met, under conditions of {236} keen excitement, Fox and North took their seats on the Front Opposition Bench with their vast majority behind them eager to retaliate upon the King, who had defied their voices and insulted their leaders. A young member, Mr.

Richard Pepper Arden, rose in his place and moved a new writ for the borough of Appleby, in the room of the Right Honorable William Pitt, who had accepted the office of First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. We are told that this motion was received with loud and general laughter by the Opposition, who regarded Pitt's conduct as a piece of foolhardy presumption. And indeed at first Pitt's position seemed difficult in the extreme. It was hard to form a Government in the face of a hostile majority in the Commons, and in the Lords Pitt's perplexity was increased by Lord Temple's sudden and sullen resignation of the office to which he had been so newly appointed. Various reasons have been given for Temple's mysterious and petulant behavior. Some have thought that he resigned because he was in favor of an immediate dissolution, while Pitt was opposed to such a step. Others believe that he was eager for some high mark of royal favor, possibly a dukedom, which was refused by the King and not warmly advocated by Pitt. In spite of all obstacles, however, Pitt succeeded in forming a Ministry, the best he could manage under the conditions. To Shelburne he offered nothing, and this omission adds a mystery greater than that of Temple's resignation to Pitt's administration. It must have surprised Shelburne, as it surprised every observer then and since. Pitt has been accused of ingrat.i.tude to the man who had been his father's friend and to whom he himself had owed so short a time before the leaders.h.i.+p of the House of Commons. But Pitt was not ungrateful. He was merely astute. He read Shelburne as perhaps no other of his contemporaries was able to read him, and he gauged him at his true value or want of value. Shelburne's glittering unreality, his showy unreliability, were to have no place in Pitt's scheme of things.

Abandoned by Temple, abandoning Shelburne, Pitt went his own way, doing the best he could in the face {237} of tremendous odds and doing it very well. One of his first acts of office was to bring in an India Bill of his own, which was decisively defeated in the Commons. For some months Pitt fought his hard and thankless fight as a minister with a minority behind him. At last, in the end of March, he saw his opportunity for a dissolution and resolved to take it. A singular episode threatened to delay his purpose. [Sidenote: 1784--The disappearance of the Great Seal]

The Great Seal of England was stolen from the house of the Lord Chancellor in Great Ormond Street, and was never recovered. It may have been purloined by some political partisan who believed, as James the Second believed, that by making away with the Great Seal he could effectively embarra.s.s his opponents. But this "curious manoeuvre," as Pitt himself called it, was nullified by the prompt.i.tude with which another Great Seal was made.

The result of the dissolution was as gratifying to Pitt as it was disastrous to Fox. More than one hundred and sixty of Fox's friends lost their seats and earned instead the sobriquet of Fox's Martyrs, and Fox himself had very great difficulty in getting elected for the new Parliament. So ended the unfortunate episode of the Coalition Ministry.

Much as Fox had suffered from the sins of youth, he was destined to suffer even more from this error of his manhood. For the rest of his life, save for a few months towards its close, he was destined to remain out of office, conscious of the great deeds he would have done and denied the power to do them, while his antagonist Pitt lived through long years of office, long years that were as eventful as any years and more eventful than most years in the history of the country. Fox had run up a great debt for a little power. He had paltered with his honor, with his principles, with his public utterances; he had staked more than he had a right to stake on success, and he had lost, utterly and hopelessly. If every error in life has to be paid for sooner or later, the price due from Fox for his apostasy was very promptly demanded and was very heavy.

It is to be regretted that Pitt began his long period of authority by an attempt as stubborn as it was ungenerous to keep his great rival out of public life. The election for {238} Fox's const.i.tuency of Westminster was one of the fiercest conflicts in English history. Every effort was made to drive Fox out, every effort to put him in. Beautiful women--whom Pitt described as "women of the people," in parody of the name they gave to Fox of "the man of the people"--bribed voters with kisses, while the friends of Pitt rallied every man they could muster to the polling booths. Fox was returned, but the unconst.i.tutional conduct of the High Bailiff in granting the request of the defeated candidate, Sir Cecil Wray, for a scrutiny, and in refusing to make a return till the scrutiny was effected, might have deprived Westminster for a season of any Parliamentary representation, and would have kept Fox out of Parliament altogether if he had not been returned for the Kirkwall Borough through the friends.h.i.+p of Sir Thomas Dundas. Pitt unfortunately backed up the action of the High Bailiff with a vehemence of zeal that suggested rancor, and that failed of its purpose. Fox was in the Commons to defend himself and his cause, and he did defend himself with an eloquence that even he never surpa.s.sed, and that gave its additional glory to its ultimate success.

[Sidenote: 1784--Pitt as a financier]

However the generosity or the taste of Pitt's conduct towards Fox in this instance might be questioned, there could be no question as to the rare ability he soon made proof of as a statesman and as a financier. During his few and troubled months of office before the dissolution, he had introduced an India Bill to take the place of that of Fox, which the King and the Lords had shattered. This Bill had been defeated by a majority of eight. He now introduced what was practically the same measure, and carried it triumphantly by a majority of more than two hundred. It established that Board of Control and that double system of government which existed, with some modifications, until the Act of 1858, following upon the Indian Mutiny, effected a radical revolution in the administration of India. The enemies of Pitt's measure declared that its abuse of patronage was as flagrant as and more enduring than that proposed by Fox, and for a long time public discontent {239} expressed itself loudly against the extreme favor that was shown to Scotchmen in the filling up of appointments.

The financial affairs of the country called for a bold hand and found it.

Lord North had muddled the finances of England almost as completely and almost as hopelessly as contemporary French financiers were muddling the finances of France. Pitt faced something that was not altogether unlike financial chaos with a courage which was well and with a genius which was better. The picturesque inst.i.tution of smuggling, capitalized by wealth and rank in London, and profitably employing some forty thousand adventurous spirits, withered before the spell of Pitt's dexterous manipulations. A window tax compensated for a lightened tea duty that made smuggling merely a ridiculous waste of time, and its most sinister effect may still be noticed here and there in England in the hideous imitations of windows painted on to the walls of houses to support a grotesque idea of harmony, without incurring the expense of an actual aperture for light and air. Pitt raised the loans necessary to meet the yawning deficit and to minimize the floating debt, and he astonished his world by introducing the amazing elements of absolute honesty and admirable publicity into the transaction. The principle of patronage that had made previous loans a scandalous source of corruption was gallantly thrown overboard; and the new minister announced to the general amazement that the new loans would be contracted for with those who offered the lowest terms in public compet.i.tion. A glittering variety of new taxes, handled with the dexterity of a conjuror, and extracting sources of revenue from sources untaxed and very justifiably taxable, rounded off a series of financial proposals that inaugurated brilliantly his administration, and that had their abiding effect upon the welfare of the country. The crown of his financial fame was his plan for the redemption of the National Debt introduced in 1786. His plan was based on the comparatively familiar idea of a sinking fund. Up to the time of Pitt's proposal, however, such sinking fund as might exist in a time of peace was always liable to be taken over and {240} made use of by the Government in a time of war. Pitt's plan was to form a sinking fund which should be made inalienable by an Act of Parliament until the Act creating it should be repealed by another Act of Parliament. For this purpose Pitt created a Board of Commissioners consisting of the Speaker, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Master of the Rolls, the Accountant-General, and the Governor and Deputy-Governor of the Bank of England. To this independent and distinguished body of men the sum of one million sterling was to be handed over annually for the gradual redemption of the existing debt by the purchase of stock.

The story of Pitt's early administration was not all a record of success.

For the last time, and unsuccessfully, he attempted to bring about a Parliamentary reform. For the first time, and no less unsuccessfully, he tried to bring about that better understanding between England and Ireland which it was his merit always to desire, and his misfortune never to accomplish. In spite of his genius, his eloquence, and his popularity, his position in the House of Commons was in a sense precarious. It was not merely that he had the bad luck to be opposed by such a galaxy of ability as has perhaps never before or since dazzled from the benches of Opposition the eyes of any minister of Pitt's intellectual power. To be fought against relentlessly, tirelessly, by a Sheridan, a Burke, and a Fox would have been bad enough for a statesman at the head of a large and reliable majority and enjoying the uncheckered confidence of his sovereign. But Pitt did not enjoy the uncheckered confidence of the King, and Pitt's majority was not reliable. Lord Rosebery quotes an a.n.a.lysis of the House of Commons dated May 1, 1788, recently discovered among the papers of one of Pitt's private secretaries, which serves to show how uncertain Pitt's position was, and how fluctuating the elements upon which he had to depend for his political existence. In this doc.u.ment the "Party of the Crown"--an ominous term--is set down as consisting of 185 members, including "all those who would probably support his Majesty's Government under any minister not {241} peculiarly unpopular." No less than 108 members are set down as "independent or unconnected;" the party ascribed to Fox musters 138, while that of Pitt is only estimated at 52, with the minimizing comment that "of this party, were there a new Parliament, and Mr. P. no longer to continue minister, not above twenty would be returned." In the face of difficulties like these Pitt stood practically alone. His was no Ministry "of All the Talents;" the ranks of the Ministry did not represent, even in a lesser degree, the rich variety of ability that made the Opposition so formidable.

[Sidenote: 1788--Prince George Augustus Frederick]

If the King was at best but a lukewarm supporter of his splendid minister, the heir to the throne was the minister's very warm and persistent enemy. When Pitt came to power the Prince of Wales was, and had been for some time, a conspicuous figure in society, a fitful element in political life, and a subject of considerable scandal to the public mind. George the Third was not the kind of man to be happy with or to bring happiness to his children. Possessed of many of those virtues which are supposed to make for domestic peace, he nevertheless failed signally to attach to himself the affection of his children. One and all, they left him as soon as they could, came back to him as seldom as they could. The King's idea of firmness was always a more or less aggravated form of tyranny, and he reaped in loneliness the harvest of his early harshness. Between his eldest son and himself there soon arose and long continued that feud between the reigning sovereign and his heir which seemed traditional in the House of Hanover.

George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, has many claims to be regarded as perhaps the worst, and as certainly the most worthless, prince of his House. Something was to be excused in the son of such a father; some wild oats were surely to be sown in the soil of a childhood so dully and so sourly cultivated. But no severity of early surroundings will explain or palliate the unlovely mixture of folly and of falseness, of debauchery, vulgarity, profligacy, and baseness, which were the most conspicuous {242} characteristics of the Prince's nature. The malignant enemy of his unhappy father, the treacherous lover, the perjured friend, a heartless fop, a soulless sot, the most ungentlemanly First Gentleman of Europe, his memory baffles the efforts of the sycophant and paralyzes the anger of the satirist. Genius has wasted itself again and again in the attempt fittingly to describe him. To Byron he became "the fourth of the fools and oppressors called George." Moore immortalized his "nothingness" as a "sick epicure's dream, incoherent and gross." Leigh Hunt went to prison for calling him a "fat Adonis of fifty." Landor, in an epigram on himself and his royal namesakes as bitter as four biting lines could be, could find nothing more bitter than to record his descent from earth, and thankfulness to Heaven that with him the Georges had come to an end. Thackeray abandoned in despair the task of doing justice to his existence. "I own I once used to think it would be good sport to pursue him, fasten on him, and pull him down. But now I am ashamed to mount and lay good dogs on, to summon a full field, and then to hunt the poor game."

When Pitt became Prime Minister the Prince of Wales was in Opposition, because he was opposed to his father. He imagined himself to be the friend of Fox, of Sheridan, of Burke, because Fox and Sheridan and Burke were unpopular with the King. His career had been one of debt and drunkenness, of mean amours and degrading pleasures, when the son of Chatham pa.s.sed from his studious youth to the control of the destinies of England. Pitt was called upon and refused to consent to a Parliamentary appeal to the King for the payment of the Prince's debts. Pitt could feel no courtier's sympathy for the unnatural son, for the faithless Florizel of foolish Perdita Robinson, for the perjured husband of Mrs.

Fitzherbert. There can be no doubt that in the December of 1785 the Prince of Wales went through a ceremony of marriage, which could not under the conditions const.i.tute a legal marriage, with Mrs. Fitzherbert, a beautiful young woman of a little more than twenty-nine years of age, who had twice been widowed {243} and was a member of the Roman Catholic faith. The town soon rang with gossip, and what was gossip in the drawing-rooms threatened to become a matter for "delicate investigation"

in the House of Commons. The denial given by Fox in Parliament on the authority of the Prince of Wales practically ended any attempt at public inquiry, and almost broke the heart of Mrs. Fitzherbert. To her the Prince of course promptly disavowed Fox, with whom she immediately broke off all friends.h.i.+p. Fox himself, indignant at the Prince's falsehood and at the base use which had been made of his voice, shunned the Prince's society for a long time, which might very well have been longer. The scandal slowly ebbed; a compromise was arrived at between the King and his son; the King made an appeal to Parliament; and a sum of money was voted to deal with the Prince's debts in consideration of his promises of reform in the future.

[Sidenote: 1788--Talk of a Regency]

The Prince of Wales did not forget Pitt's att.i.tude towards him, and the time soon arrived in which the minister came near to feeling the force of the Prince's anger. The health of the King was suddenly and seriously affected. Soon after his reign began he had been afflicted by a temporary loss of reason. The same misfortune now fell upon him in the autumn of 1788. It became necessary to make arrangements for the appointment of a regent, and the necessity was the cause of a fierce Parliamentary controversy. Fox rashly insisted that the Prince of Wales had as much right to a.s.sume the reins of government as he would have had in the case of the death of the monarch. Pitt maintained the more const.i.tutional opinion that it was the privilege of Parliament to appoint a regent and to decide what powers should be intrusted to him. However little the knowledge may have influenced his action, Pitt knew very well that with the appointment of the Prince of Wales as regent his own hold of power would, for a time, come to an end. The whole question, however, was suddenly set on one side by the unexpected recovery of the King. The King's restoration to reason was well for the minister, and undoubtedly well for the {244} kingdom. If Burke and Sheridan and Fox were avowedly the Prince's friends in Parliament, his most intimate friends, those who would be likely to prove influential in his mimic Court, were men of a very different kind. These were such men as George Hanger, the half-mad soldier, the "Paragon of Debauchery," as the caricaturists labelled the Prince's "confidential friend," who having been almost everything from captain of Hessians to coal merchant, and from recruiter for the East India Company to inmate of a debtor's prison, ended his long and unlovely career by declining to a.s.sume the t.i.tle of Lord Coleraine, to which he became ent.i.tled in 1814, ten years before his death. These were such men as Charles Morris, the amiable Anacreon of Carlton House, who made better punch and rhymed better ballads than his fellows of that convivial age, and who had the grace to expiate the ign.o.ble noonday of his existence by an honorable evening. These were such men as the queer gang of blackguards, ruffians, and rowdies who haunted Brighthelmstone, the bad and brutal Richard Barry, the "h.e.l.lgate" Lord Barrymore; the Jockey of Norfolk, with his hair grown gray in iniquities; Sir John Lade, whose wife had been the mistress of a highwayman; and the worst and basest spirit of the gang, the Duke of Queensberry. Such were the men whom the Prince delighted to make his companions; such were the men who, if the King's madness had persisted, would have hailed with satisfaction the overthrow of Mr. Pitt.

It were needless to dwell further for the present upon the adventures of the Prince of Wales, his amours, his debts, his friends.h.i.+ps, his fantastic pavilion at Brighton, or his unhappy marriage in April, 1795, to his cousin, the Princess Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick.

Twenty years were to pa.s.s away before the recurrence of the King's malady was to give his eldest son the show of power, and in those twenty years the two political rivals--one of whom was the greatest of his allies, and the other the greatest of his adversaries--had pa.s.sed away.

{245}

CHAPTER LVIII.

WARREN HASTINGS.

[Sidenote: 1732--The birth of Warren Hastings]

In the days when Clive was first winning his way to fame in India there was another young Englishman serving John Company, whose ability attracted the notice and gained the esteem of the conqueror of Dupleix.

It is one of the privileges of genius to discern the genius of others.

But even Clive, when he noted a young volunteer at Falta, who seemed destined for better things than the handling of a musket, cannot have dreamed that he was giving an opportunity to a man whose name was to take as high a rank in the history of India as his own, whose deeds were to be no less fiercely battled over, whose part in the creation of a great Indian Empire was to be as ill.u.s.trious. All that India had been to Clive--a refuge, a battleground, a theatre of great deeds, and unfortunately also of great offences, the cause of almost unbearable triumph and almost intolerable humiliation, all that in as great a degree India was to be to Warren Hastings.

Warren Hastings was born in the December of 1732, in Churchill, Oxfords.h.i.+re, near Daylesford in Worcesters.h.i.+re. His family had been a good as it was an old family. But it had come down in the world. It had grown poorer and poorer as the generations rolled on, and that manor of Daylesford which had been in the family in the days of the second Henry had pa.s.sed in the year of Sheriffmuir into the hands of a Gloucester merchant. When Warren Hastings was born, the fortunes of the house had come to a very low ebb indeed. Pynaston Hastings, Warren Hastings's father, was, perhaps, as imbecile a man as ever yet was the means of bringing an ill.u.s.trious son into the world. He seems to have been weak, foolish, s.h.i.+ftless, as {246} worthless as a man well could be who was not actually a criminal. He had married very young, before he was sixteen; his wife had died shortly after giving birth to Warren Hastings. Pynaston married again, entered the Church, when he was old enough to take holy orders, and drifted away into the West Indies into outer darkness and oblivion, leaving children entirely dependent upon the charity of relatives. That charity did not fail, though at first it could be but meagrely extended. Warren Hastings's grandfather was desperately poor. All he could do for his deserted grandchild was to place him at the charity school of the village. There, habited almost like a beggar, taught as a beggar, the companion of clowns and playfellow of rustics, the future peer of kings and ruler of rajahs, the coming pro-consul who was yet to make the state of England as imperial as the state of Rome, received his earliest lessons in the facts of life, and dreamed his earliest dreams. His were strange dreams. In sleep, says a Persian poet with whom young Hastings was afterwards doubtless acquainted, the beggar and the king are equal. If Warren Hastings slept as a beggar, he certainly dreamed as a king. We know, on his own statement, that when he was but a child of seven he cherished that wild ambition which was to lead him through so many glories and so many crimes. We are familiar with the picture of the boy leaning over the stream on that summer day, and looking at the old dwelling of his race, and swearing to himself his oath of Hannibal that some day he would, if the stars were propitious, win back his inheritance.

[Sidenote: 1750--Warren Hastings's early life]

Somewhere about a year after this oath of Hannibal the fortunes of the lad took a turn for the better. An uncle, Howard Hastings, who had a place in the Customs, was willing to give a helping hand to the son of his graceless brother. He brought Warren Hastings to London. In London Warren Hastings was first sent to school at Newington, where his mind was better nourished than his body. In after life he used to declare that his meagre proportions and stunted form were due to the hard living of his Newington days. But the Newington days came to {247} an end. When he was some twelve years of age, his uncle sent him to Westminster School, where his name is still inscribed in letters of gold, and where his memory adds its l.u.s.tre to the historic a.s.sociations of a place that is richly blessed with historic a.s.sociations. Warren Hastings distinguished himself in the great school of Westminster, as he had already distinguished himself in the little village school of Daylesford. With his oath of Hannibal burning in his mind, he seems to have determined to seek success in all that he attempted, and to gain it by his indomitable energy and will. If he was brilliant as a scholar, he was not, therefore, backward in those other arts which school-boys prize beyond scholars.h.i.+p. He was as famous on the river for his swimming and his boating as he was famous in the cla.s.sroom for his application and his ability. His masters predicted for him a brilliant University career, and it is possible that Hastings may have seen Daylesford Manor awaiting him at the end of such a career, and have welcomed the prospect. But the life of Warren Hastings was not fated to pa.s.s in the cloistered greenness of a university or in the still air of delightful studies. Howard Hastings died and left his nephew to the care of a connection, a Mr. Chiswick, who happened to be a member of the East India Company. Perhaps Mr. Chiswick resented the obligation thus laid upon him; perhaps, as a member of the East India Company, he honestly believed that to enter its service was the proudest privilege that a young man could enjoy. Whatever were his reasons, he resolutely refused to sanction his charge's career at the university, insisted upon his being placed for a season at a commercial school to learn arithmetic and book-keeping, and then s.h.i.+pped him off out of hand to Bengal as an addition to the ranks of the Calcutta clerks. Thus it came to pa.s.s that Warren Hastings, like Clive, was sent to India by persons in England who were anxious to get rid of a troublesome charge. There were a good many persons in the years to come who were very ready to curse the obstinacy of the elder Clive and the asperity of Mr. Chiswick for sending two such terrible adventurers forth to {248} the great battle-field of India. The history of our Indian Empire would certainly have been a very different story if only Mr. Clive had been more attached to his ne'er-do-well son, and if only Mr. Chiswick had been better affected towards his industrious charge.

In the January of 1750 Warren Hastings said farewell to his dreams of a scholar's garland in England and sailed for India. In the October of the same year he landed in Bengal and altered the history of the world.

Gentlemen adventurers who went out to India in the last century in the service of John Company seldom knew much, or indeed cared much, about the condition of the country which they were invading. They dreamed mostly of large fortunes, fortunes to be swiftly made and then brought home and expended splendidly to the amazement of less fortunate stay-at-homes. For the past history of India they did not care a penny piece. What to them were the mythical deeds of Rama and of Krishna; what to them the marches of Semiramis and Sesostris, or the conquests of Alexander, or the fate and fortunes of the ancient kingdoms of the Deccan and Hindostan? They cared nothing for the spread of Mahommedan influence and authority, the glories of the Mogul Empire, the fate of Tamerlane, the fame of Aurungzebe. For them the history of India began with the merchant adventurers of 1659 and the East India Company of 1600, with the grant of Bombay to England as part of the dower which the Princess of Portugal brought to Charles the Second. Nor were they moved by imperial ambitions. It did not enter into their heads to conceive or to desire the addition of a vast Indian empire to the appanages of the English crown. They cared little for the conflicting creeds of India, for Brahmanism and Buddhism and Jainism and Hinduism and the sects of Islam. They knew little of the differing tongues talked over that vast continent, more than five hundred in number, from the Hindi of one hundred million men to the most restricted dialects of the mountains of a.s.sam and Nepaul. India for them meant the little s.p.a.ce of earth where the English had a trading interest, {249} and the regions of the shadowy potentates beyond from whom in some way or other money might be got.

[Sidenote: 1750--Suraj ud Dowlah]

When Warren Hastings landed in India the relations of England and of Englishmen to India were just upon the turn. The star of Clive's fortunes was mounting towards its zenith; the fiery planet of Dupleix had begun to fail and pale and fade. The policy which Dupleix had adopted, that policy of intrigue with the native princes of India, the English East India Company had been forced in self-defence and very reluctantly to adopt. Having adopted it, the men of the English East India Company proved themselves to be better players at the game than Dupleix. Warren Hastings, driving his pen at a desk in Calcutta, or looking after silk-spinning in the factory of Kazim Bazar near Murs.h.i.+dabad on the Ganges, was able to watch almost from its beginning the great political drama in which he was destined in his time to play so great a part, and which was to end in giving England a great Asiatic empire. When Suraj ud Dowlah declared war against the English his first move was to fall upon the Kazim Bazar settlement. Warren Hastings and the other English residents were made prisoners and sent to Murs.h.i.+dabad, where, through the intervention of the Dutch Company, they were humanely treated. Then came the madman's march on Calcutta, the horror of the Black Hole, and the flight of the Governor and the Company's servants to the little fort at Falta in the Hughli below Calcutta. Communications were entered upon between Governor Drake in Falta Island and Hastings at Murs.h.i.+dabad with a view to coming to terms with Suraj ud Dowlah. Warren Hastings was already, however, developing that genius for Oriental diplomacy which afterwards so characterized his career. He was made aware of the treason that was hatching against Suraj ud Dowlah in his own court and among his own friends, and he was quite ready to play his part and find his account in that treason.

Treason is a risky game for a political prisoner at a court like that of Suraj ud Dowlah. Warren Hastings was quick-witted enough to see that the sooner he got away from that {250} court the better for himself. He succeeded accordingly in making his escape and joining the fugitives at Falta. Here two things of moment happened to him. He met the woman who was to be his first wife, and he met the great man who was to give him his first chance for fame. Among the refugees from Calcutta was the widow of a Captain Campbell. Warren Hastings fell in love with her, and afterwards in an hour of greater security he married her. He seem to have been very fond of her, to have been very happy with her, but she died very soon after the marriage, and the two children she bore him both died young, and so that episode came to an end. The more momentous meeting was with Clive. When the Madras expedition appeared in the Hughli, Warren Hastings volunteered to serve in the ranks, shouldered his gun, and took his part in the fighting round Calcutta. But Clive's keen eyes discerned stuff for better things than the sieging of Indian forts in the young volunteer. When Suraj ud Dowlah's defeat ended in Suraj ud Dowlah's death, and the traitorous Mir Jaffier sat on the throne in his stead, Warren Hastings was sent to the court of the new prince at Murs.h.i.+dabad, originally as second to the Company's representative, Mr. Scratton, and afterwards as sole representative.