A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume I Part 5

to hold up Marlborough and Marlborough's wife to ridicule and to hatred. He depicted the great soldier as a low and roguish attorney, who was deluding his clients into the carrying on of a long and costly lawsuit for the mere sake of putting money into his own pocket. He lampooned England's allies as well as England's great general; he described the Dutch, whom the Tory ministers had shamefully betrayed, as self-seeking and perfidious traitors, for whose protection we were sacrificing all, until we found out that they were secretly juggling with our enemies for our destruction. No stronger argument could be found to condemn the conduct of the Tory ministers than the mere fact that Swift and Arbuthnot failed to secure their acquittal at the bar of public opinion. All the attacks on Marlborough were inspired by Bolingbroke, and it has only to be added that Marlborough had been Bolingbroke's first and best benefactor.

The King appointed Lord Townshend his Secretary of State. The office was then regarded as that of First Lord of the Treasury is now; it carried with it the authority of Prime-minister. James Stanhope was Second Secretary. Walpole was at first put in the subordinate office of Paymaster-general, without a seat in the Cabinet; a place in Administration which at a later period was a.s.signed to no less a man than Edmund Burke. Walpole's political capacity soon, however, made it evident that he was fitted for higher office, and we shall find that he does not remain long at the post of Paymaster-general. The Duke of Shrewsbury had resigned both his offices: that of Lord Treasurer, and that of Viceroy of Ireland. Lord Sunderland accepted the Irish Viceroyalty, and the Lord Treasurers.h.i.+p was put into commission, and from that time was heard of no more. Next to Walpole himself, the most notable man in the administration--the man, that is to say, who became best known to the world afterwards--was {98} Pulteney, now Walpole's devoted friend, before long to be his bitter and unrelenting enemy.

Pulteney, just now, is still a very young man, only in his thirty-third year; but he is the hereditary representative of good Whig principles, and has already distinguished himself in the House of Commons as a skilful and fearless advocate of his political faith; he is a keen and clever pamphleteer; in later days, if he had lived then, he would doubtless have been a writer of leading articles in newspapers. His style is polished and penetrating, like that of an epigrammatist. He has travelled much for that time, and is what was then called an elegant scholar. The eloquent and silver-tongued Lord Cowper was restored to the office of Lord Chancellor, which he had already held under Queen Anne, and by virtue of which he had presided at the impeachment of Sacheverell. When Cowper was made Lord Keeper of the Great Seal by Anne in 1705, he was in the forty-first year of his age, but looked very much younger. He wore his own hair at that time, an unusual thing in Anne's days, and this added to his juvenile appearance. The Queen insisted that he must have his hair cut off and must wear a heavy wig; otherwise, she said, the world would think she had given the seals to a boy. Cowper was a prudent, cautious, clever man, whose abilities made a considerable impression upon his own time, but have carried his memory only in a faint and feeble way on to ours.

He was a fine speaker, so far as style and manner went, and he had a charming voice. Chesterfield said of him that the ears and the eyes gave him up the hearts and understandings of the audience. The Duke of Argyll became Commander-in-chief for Scotland. In Ireland, Sir Constantine Phipps was removed from the office of Chancellor, on the ground of his Jacobite opinions; and it is a curious fact, worth noting as a sign of the times, that the University of Oxford unanimously agreed to confer on him an honorary degree almost immediately after--on the day, in fact, of the King's coronation.

{99}

[Sidenote: 1714--Lord Townshend]

Lord Townshend, the Prime-minister, as we may call him, was not a man of any conspicuous ability. He belonged to that cla.s.s of competent, capable, trustworthy Englishmen who discharge satisfactorily the duties of any office to which they are called in the ordinary course of their lives. Such a man as Townshend would have made a respectable Lord Mayor or a satisfactory Chairman of Quarter Sessions, if fortune had appointed him to no higher functions. He might have changed places probably with an average Lord Mayor or Chairman of Quarter Sessions without any particular effect being wrought on English history. Men of this stamp have nothing but official rank in common with the statesmen Prime-ministers--the Walpoles and Peels and Palmerstons; or with the men of genius--the Pitts and Disraelis and Gladstones. Lord Townshend had performed the regular functions of a statesman in training at that time. He had been an Envoy Extraordinary, and had made treaties. He was a brother-in-law of Walpole. Just now Walpole and he are friends as well as connections; the time came when Walpole and he were destined to quarrel; and then Townshend conducted himself with remarkable forbearance, self-restraint, and dignity. He was an honest and respectable man, blunt of speech, and of rugged, homespun intelligence, about whom, since his day, the world is little concerned. Such name as he had is almost absorbed in the more brilliant reputation of his grandson--the spoiled child of the House of Commons, as Burke called him--that Charles Townshend of the famous "Champagne Speech;" the Chancellor of the Exchequer, of whom we shall hear a good deal later on, and who, by the sheer force of animal spirits, feather-headed talents, and ignorance, became, in a certain perverted sense, the father of American Independence.

The Second Secretary of State, James, afterwards Earl, Stanhope, was a man of very different mould. Stanhope was one of the few Englishmen who have held high position in arms and politics. He had been a brilliant {100} soldier; had fought in Flanders and Spain; had distinguished himself at Barcelona, even under a commander like Peterborough, whose daring spirit rendered it hard for any subaltern to s.h.i.+ne in rivalry; had been himself raised to command, and kept on winning victories until his military genius found itself overcrowed by that of the great French captain, the Duke de Vendome. His soldier's career came to a premature close, as indeed his whole mortal career did not very long after the time at which we have now arrived. Stanhope was a man of scholarly education, almost a scholar; he had abilities above the common; he had indomitable energy, and was as daring and resolute in the council as in the field. He had a domineering mind, was outspoken and haughty, trampling over other men's opinions as a charge of cavalry treads down the gra.s.ses of the field it traverses.

He made enemies, and did not heed their enmity. He was single-minded, and, what was not very common in that day, he was free from any love of money or taint of personal greed. He does not rank high either among statesmen or soldiers, but as statesman and soldier together he has made for himself a distinct and a peculiar place. His career will always be remembered without effort by the readers of English history.

[Sidenote: 1714--Coronation of the King]

A new Privy Council was formed which included the name of Marlborough.

The d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough urged her husband not to accept this office of barren honor. It is said that the one only occasion on which Marlborough had ventured to act against the dictation of his wife was when he thus placed himself again at the disposal of the King. He never ceased to regret that he had not followed her advice in this instance as in others. His proud heart soon burned within him when he found that he was appreciated, understood, and put aside; mocked with a semblance of power, humiliated under the pretext of doing him honor.

Much more humiliating, much more ominous, however, was the reception awaiting Oxford and Bolingbroke. From the moment of his arrival, the King showed himself {101} determined to take no friendly notice of the great Tories. Oxford found it most difficult even to get audience of his Majesty. The morning after the King's arrival, Oxford was allowed, after much pressure and many entreaties, to wait upon the Sovereign, and to kiss his hand. He was received in chilling silence. Truly, it was not likely that much conversation would take place, seeing that George spoke no English and Oxford spoke no German. But there was something in the King's demeanor towards him, as well as in the mere fact that no words were exchanged, which must have told Oxford that his enemies were in triumph over him, and were determined to bring about his doom. Even before George had landed in England he had sent directions that Bolingbroke should be removed from his place of Secretary of State. On the last day of August this order was executed in a manner which made it seem especially premature, and even ignominious. The Privy Council, as it stood, was then dissolved, and the new Council appointed, which consisted of only thirty-three members. Somers was one of this new Council, but in name alone; his growing years, his increasing infirmities, and the flickering decay of his once great intellect, allowed him but little chance of ever again taking an active part in the affairs of the State. Marlborough was named a member of it, as we have seen. The Lords Justices ordered that all despatches addressed to the Secretary of State should be brought to them. Bolingbroke himself had to wait at the door of the Council Chamber with his despatch-box, to receive the commands of his new masters.

France, tired of war, recognized the new King of England. The coronation of the King took place on October 20th; Bolingbroke and Oxford were both present. We learn from some of the journals of the day that it had rained on the previous afternoon, and that many of the Jacobites promised themselves that the rain would continue to the next day, and so r.e.t.a.r.d, if only for a few hours, the hateful ceremony. But their hopes of foul weather {102} were disappointed. The rain did not keep on, and the coronation took place successfully in London; not, however, without some Jacobite disturbances in Bristol, Birmingham, Norwich, and other places.

[Sidenote: 1714--Flight of Bolingbroke]

The Government soon after issued a proclamation dissolving the existing Parliament, and another summoning a new one. The latter called on all the electors of the kingdom, in consequence of the evil designs of men disaffected to the King, "to have a particular regard to such as showed a firmness to the Protestant Succession when it was in danger." The appeal was clearly unconst.i.tutional, according to our ideas, but it was made, probably, in answer to James Stuart's manifesto a few weeks before, in which the Pretender rea.s.serted his claims to the throne, and declared that he had only waited until the death "of the Princess, our sister, of whose good intentions towards us we could not for some time past well doubt."

The general elections showed an overwhelming majority for the Whigs.

The not unnatural fluctuations of public opinion at such a time are effectively ill.u.s.trated by the sudden and complete manner in which the majority was transferred, now to this side, now to that. Just at this moment, and indeed for long after, the Whigs had it all their own way.

Only a few years ago their fortunes had seemed to have sunk to zero, and now they had mounted again to the zenith. The King opened Parliament in person; the Speech was read for him by the Lord Chancellor, for the very good reason that George could not p.r.o.nounce English. That Speech declared that the established Const.i.tution, Church and State, should be the rule of his Government. The debate on the Address was remarkable. In the House of Lords the Address contained the words, "To recover the reputation of this kingdom."

Bolingbroke made his last speech in Parliament. He objected to these words, and proposed an amendment, with an eloquence and an energy worthy of his best days, and with a front as seemingly fearless as though his fortunes were at the full. He contended that to talk of {103} "recovering" the reputation of the kingdom was to cast a stigma on the glory of the late reign. He proposed to subst.i.tute the word "maintain" for the word "recover." His amendment was defeated by sixty-six votes to thirty-three: exactly two to one. In the House of Commons the Address, which was moved by Walpole, contained words still more significant. The Address spoke of the Pretender's attempts "to stir up your Majesty's subjects to rebellion," declared that his hopes "were built upon the measures that had been taken for some time past in Great Britain," and added: "It shall be our business to trace out those measures whereon he placed his hopes, and to bring the authors of them to condign punishment." These words were the first distinct intimation given by the Ministers that they intended to call their predecessors to account. Stanhope stated their resolve still more explicitly in the course of the debate. Bolingbroke sat and heard it announced that he and his late colleague were to be impeached for high-treason. He put on an appearance of serenity and philosophic boldness for a time, but in his heart he had already taken fright. For a few days he went about in public, showing himself ostentatiously, with all the manner of a man who is happy in his unwonted ease, and is only anxious for relaxation and amus.e.m.e.nt. He professed to be rejoiced by his release from office, and those of his friends who wished to please him offered him their formal congratulations on his promotion to a retirement that placed him above the petty struggles and cares of political life. He visited Drury Lane Theatre on March 26, 1715, went about among his friends, chatted, flirted, paid compliments, received compliments, arranged to attend another performance at the same theatre the following evening.

That same night he disguised himself as a serving-man, slipped quietly down to Dover, escaped from thence to Calais, and went hurriedly on to Paris, ready to place himself and his talents and his influence--such as it might be--at the service of the Stuarts.

There seems good reason to believe that the Duke of {104} Marlborough, by a master-stroke of treachery, avenged himself on Bolingbroke at this crisis in Bolingbroke's fortunes, and decided the flight to Paris.

Bolingbroke sought out Marlborough, and appealing to the memories of their old friends.h.i.+p, begged for advice and a.s.sistance. Marlborough professed the utmost concern for Bolingbroke, and gave him to understand that it was agreed upon between the Ministers of the Crown and the Dutch Government that Bolingbroke was to be brought to the scaffold. Marlborough pretended to have certain knowledge of this, and he told Bolingbroke that his only chance was in flight. Bolingbroke fled, and thereby seemed to admit in advance all the accusations of his enemies and to abandon his friends to their mercy. One of Bolingbroke's biographers appears to consider that on the whole this was well done by Marlborough, and that it was only a fair retaliation on Bolingbroke. In any case, it is clear that Bolingbroke acted in strict consistency with the principles on which he had moulded his public and private life; he consulted for himself first of all. It may have been necessary for his own safety that he should fly from the threatening storm, It is certain that he had bitter and unrelenting enemies. These would not have spared him if they could have made out a case against him. No one but Bolingbroke himself could know to the full how much of a case there was against him. But his flight, if it saved himself, might have been fatal to those who were in league with him for the return of the Stuarts. If he had stood firm, it is probable that his enemies would not have been able to prevail any further against him than they were able to prevail in his absence against Harley, whom his flight so seriously compromised. n.o.body needs to be told that the one last hope for conspirators whose plans are being discovered is for all in the plot to stand together or all to fly together. Bolingbroke does not seem to have given his a.s.sociates any chance of considering the position and making up their minds.

[Sidenote: 1715--The Committee of Secrecy]

A committee of secrecy was struck. It was composed {105} of twenty-one members, and the hearts of Bolingbroke's friends may well have sunk within them as they studied the names upon its roll. Many of its members were conscientious Whigs--Whigs of conviction, eaten up with the zeal of their house, like James Stanhope himself, and Spencer Cowper and Lord Coningsby and young Lord Finch and Pulteney, now in his period of full devotion to Walpole. There were Whig lawyers, like Lechmere; there were steady, obtuse Whigs, like Edward Wortley Montagu, husband of the brilliant and beautiful woman whom Pope first loved and then hated. There was Aislabie, then Treasurer of the Navy, afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer, who came to disgrace at the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, and who would at any time have elected to go with the strongest, and loved to tread the path lighted by his own impressions as to his own interests. Thomas Pitt, grandfather to the great Chatham, the "Governor Pitt" of Madras, whose diamonds were objects of admiration to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was a member of the committee; and so was Sir Richard Onslow, afterwards speaker of the House of Commons, and uncle of the much more celebrated "Speaker Onslow." From none of these men could Bolingbroke have much favor to expect. Those who were honest and unselfish would be ill-disposed towards him because of their honesty and unselfishness; those who were not exactly honest and certainly not unselfish, would, by reason of their character, probably be only too anxious to help the winning party to get rid of him. But the names that must have showed most formidable in the eyes of Bolingbroke and his friends were those of Robert Walpole and Richard Hampden. Two years before this time the persistent enmity of Bolingbroke had sent Walpole to the Tower, branded with the charge of corruption and expelled from the House of Commons. Now things are changed indeed. Walpole is chairman of the committee, and "Hast thou found me, oh, mine enemy?" St. John had threatened Hampden, who was a lineal descendant of the {106} Hampden of the Civil War, with the Tower, for daring to censure the Ministry of the day, and was only deterred from carrying out his threat by prudent counsellors, who showed him that Hampden would be only too proud to share Walpole's imprisonment. These were men not likely to forget or to forgive such injuries.

At first the Tories seem scarcely to have believed that the Whigs would push their policy to extremities. The eccentric Jacobite s.h.i.+ppen publicly scoffed at the committee, and declared in the Mouse of Commons that its investigations would vanish into smoke. Such confidence was quickly and rudely shattered. June 9th saw a memorable scene. On that day Robert Walpole, as chairman of the Committee of Secrecy, rose and told the House of Commons that he had to present a report, but that he was commanded by the committee to move in the first instance that a warrant be issued by the Speaker to apprehend several persons who should be named by him, and that meantime no member be permitted to leave the House. Thereupon the lobbies were cleared of all strangers, and the Sergeant-at-arms stood at the door in order to prevent any member from going out. Then Walpole named Mr. Matthew Prior, Mr.

Thomas Harley, and other persons, and the Speaker issued his warrant for their arrest. Mr. Prior was arrested at once; Mr. Harley a few hours afterwards.

[Sidenote: 1715--"Most contagious treason"]

Prior was the poet, the friend and correspondent of Bolingbroke. He had been much engaged in the negotiations for the Treaty of Utrecht, and had at one time actually held the rank of English Envoy. He had but lately returned from Paris; had arrived in London just before Bolingbroke's flight. Thomas Harley, cousin of Lord Oxford, had also been concerned in the negotiations in a less formal and more underhand sort of way. When the arrests had been ordered, Walpole informed the House that the Committee of Secrecy had agreed upon their report, and had commanded him to submit it to the House of Commons. The report, which Walpole himself, as {107} chairman of the committee, had drawn up, was a doc.u.ment of great length; it occupied many hours in the reading. But the time could not have seemed tedious to those who listened. The report was an indictment and a State paper combined. It arrayed with the utmost skill all the evidences and arguments, all the facts and all the pa.s.sages of correspondence, necessary to make out a case against the accused statesmen. It carried with it, beyond question, the complete historical condemnation of Oxford and Bolingbroke in all that related to the Treaty of Utrecht. Never was it more conclusively established for the historian that Ministers of State had used the basest means to bring about the basest objects. It was made clear as light that the national interests and the national honor had been sacrificed for partisan and for personal purposes. Objects in themselves criminal for statesmen to aim at had been sought by means which would have been shameful even if employed for justifiable ends.

Had Bolingbroke and Oxford been endeavoring to save the State by the arts which they employed to sacrifice it, their conduct would have called for the condemnation of all honest men. But as regards the transactions with James Stuart there was ample ground shown for suspicion, there was good reason to conjecture or to infer, but there was no positive evidence of intended treason. A historian reading over the report would in all probability come to the conclusion that Oxford and Bolingbroke had been plotting with James Stuart, but he would not see in it satisfactory grounds for an impeachment. No jury would convict on such evidence; no jury probably would even leave the box for the purpose of considering their verdict. In the course of the events that were soon to follow it was placed beyond any doubt that Bolingbroke and Oxford had all along been trying to arrange for the return of the Stuarts. They were not driven to throw themselves in despair into the Stuart cause by reason of harsh proceedings taken against them by their enemies in England; they had been "pipe-laying,"

to use an expressive {108} American word, for the Stuart restoration during all the closing years of Queen Anne's reign. The reader must decide for himself as to the degree of moral or political guilt involved in such transactions. It has to be remembered that nearly half--some still say more than half--of the population of these countries was in favor of such a restoration, and that Anne herself unquestionably leaned to the same view. What is certain is that Oxford and Bolingbroke were planning for it. But what seems equally clear is that the report of the Secret Committee did not contain satisfactory evidence on which to sustain a charge of treason. Swift is not a trustworthy witness on these subjects, but he is quite right when he says that the allegations were "more proper materials to furnish out a pamphlet than an impeachment."

[Sidenote: 1715--"An intricate impeach is this!"]

Bolingbroke's friends must have felt deeply grieved at his flight when they heard the statement of the case against him. Even as regards the Treaty of Utrecht, it seems questionable whether the historical conviction a.s.suredly obtained against him by the contents of the report would, in the existing condition of politics and parties, have been followed by any sort of judicial conviction, whether in a court of law or a trial by Parliament.

The day after the reading of the report gave Walpole his long-desired revenge; he impeached Bolingbroke of high-treason. There was a dead silence in the House when he had finished. Then two of Bolingbroke's friends, Mr. Hungerford and General Ross, mustered up courage to speak a few words for their lost leader. The star of the morning, the Tory Lucifer, had fallen indeed! Lord Coningsby got up and made a clever little set speech. Walpole had impeached the hand, and Lord Coningsby impeached the head; Walpole had impeached the clerk, and Coningsby impeached the justice; Walpole had impeached the scholar, and Coningsby impeached the master. This head, this justice, this master, was, of course, the Lord Oxford. As a piece of dramatic declamation {109} Coningsby's impeachment was telling enough; as a historical presentation of the case against the two men it was absurd. Through all Anne's later years Oxford had been nothing and Bolingbroke everything. On the very eve of the Queen's death Bolingbroke had secured his triumph over his former friend by driving Oxford out of all office. Had Oxford been first impeached, and the speech of Lord Coningsby been aimed at Bolingbroke, it would have been strikingly appropriate; as it was, it became meaningless rhetoric. Next day Oxford went to the House of Lords, and tried to appear cool and unconcerned, but, according to a contemporary account, "finding that most members avoided sitting near him, and that even the Earl Powlet was shy of exchanging a few words with him, he was dashed out of countenance, and retired out of the House."

Impeachments were now the order of the day. The loyal Whigs of the Commons were incessantly pa.s.sing between the Upper House and the Lower with articles of impeachment, and still further articles when the first were not found to be strong enough for the purpose. Stanhope impeached the Duke of Ormond; Aislabie impeached Lord Strafford--not of high-treason, but of high crimes and misdemeanors; Strafford was accused of being not only "the tool of a Frenchified ministry," but the adviser of most pernicious measures. Strafford's part in the negotiations had not been one of any considerable importance. He had been sent as English Plenipotentiary to the Congress at Utrecht.

a.s.sociated with him as Second Plenipotentiary was Dr. John Robinson, then Bishop of Bristol, and more lately made Bishop of London, the churchman on whom the office of the Privy Seal had been conferred by Harley, to the great anger of the Whigs. It was said that Strafford, in his high and mighty way, had refused flatly to accept a mere poet like Prior for his official colleague. Strafford had, in reality, little or nothing to do with the making of the Treaty. The negotiations were carried on between Bolingbroke and {110} the Marquis de Torcy, French Secretary of State and nephew of the great Colbert; and when these wanted agents they employed men more clever and less pompous than Strafford. Aislabie, in bringing on his motion, drew a curious distinction between Strafford and Strafford's official colleague. "The good and pious Prelate," he said, had been only a cipher, and "seemed to have been put at the head of that negotiation only to palliate the iniquity of it under the sacredness of his character." He was glad, therefore, that nothing could be charged upon the Bishop, and complacently observed that the course taken with regard to Dr. Robinson, who was not to be impeached, "ought to convince the world that the Church was not in danger." There was some wisdom as well as wit in a remark made thereupon by a member of the House in opposing the motion--"the Bishop, it seems, is to have the benefit of clergy."

[Sidenote: 1715--Ormond's hesitation]

The motions for the impeachment of Bolingbroke and Oxford were carried without a division. This fact, however, would be little indication as to the result of an impeachment after a long trial, and after the minds of men had cooled down on both sides; when Whigs had grown less pa.s.sionate in their hate, and Tories had recovered their courage to sustain their friends. Even at the moment the impeachment of the Duke of Ormond was a matter of far greater difficulty. Ormond had many friends, even among the most genuine supporters of the Hanoverian succession. He was the idol of the High-Church party; at all events, of the High-Church mob. Had he acted with anything like a steady resolve he would, in all probability, have escaped even impeachment.

To some of the most serious charges against him, his refusal, for instance, to attack the French while the secret negotiations for the Treaty of Utrecht were going on, he could fairly have pleaded that he had acted only as a soldier taking positive instructions and carrying them out. His clear and obvious policy would have been to take the quiet stand of a man conscious of innocence, and {111} therefore not afraid of the scrutiny of any committee or the judgment of any tribunal.

But Ormond hesitated. Ormond was always hesitating. Many of his influential supporters urged him to seek an audience of the King at once, and to profess to George his unfailing and incorruptible loyalty.

Had he taken such a course it is not at all unlikely that the King might have caused the measures against him to be abandoned. Ormond's friends, indeed, were full of hope that they could, in any case, induce the Ministry not to persevere in the proceedings against him. On the other hand, he was urged to join in an insurrection in the West of England, towards which, beyond doubt, he had already himself taken some steps. The less cautious of his friends a.s.sured him that his appearance in the West would be welcomed with open arms, and would bring a vast number of adherents round him, and that a powerful blow could be struck at once against the Hanoverian succession. Ormond, however, took neither the one course nor the other. To do him justice, he was far too honorable for the utter perfidy of the first course, and it is doing him no injustice to say that he was too feeble for the daring enterprise of the second. It is believed that Ormond had an interview with Oxford before his flight, and that he urged Oxford to attempt an escape in terms not unlike those with which William the Silent, in Goethe's play, endeavors to persuade Egmont not to remain in the power of Philip the Second. Then Ormond himself fled to France.

He lived there for thirty years after. He led a pleasant, easy, harmless life, and was completely forgotten in England for years and years before his death. More than twenty years after his flight he is described by vivacious Mary Wortley Montagu as "one who seems to have forgotten every part of his past life, and to be of no party." He was a weak man, with only a very faint outline of a character; but he was more honorable and consistent than was common with the men of his time.

When he had once taken up a cause or a principle he held to it. {112} He was the very opposite to Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke was genius and force without principle. Ormond had principle without genius or force.

[Sidenote: 1715--Oxford committed to the Tower]

Two, then, of the great accused peers were beyond the reach of the House of Lords. Oxford alone remained. On July 9, 1715, articles of impeachment were brought up against him. The impeachment does not seem to have been very substantial in its character. The great majority of its articles referred to the conduct of Oxford with regard to the Treaty of Utrecht. One article accused him of having abused his influence over her Majesty by prevailing upon her to exercise "in the most unprecedented and dangerous manner" her prerogative by the creation of twelve Peers in December, 1711. A motion that Oxford be committed to the Tower was made, and on this motion he spoke a few words which were at once ingenious and dignified. He a.s.serted his innocence of any treasonable practice or thought, and declared that what he had done was done in obedience to the positive orders of the Queen. He asked the House what might not happen if Ministers of State, acting on the immediate commands of their sovereign, were afterwards to be made accountable for their proceedings. Then in a few words he commended his cause to the justice of his brother peers, and took leave of the House of Lords, as he put it, "perhaps forever." Such an impeachment would have been impossible in more recent days. If Oxford had been accused of treasonable dealings with the Stuarts, and if evidence could have been brought home to him, there indeed might have been a reasonable ground for impeachment. But there was no sufficient evidence for any such purpose, and to impeach a statesman simply because he had taken a political course which was afterwards disapproved by the nation, and which was discredited by results, was simply to say that any failure in the policy of a Minister of the Crown might make him liable to impeachment when his enemies came into power.

The Peace of Utrecht, bad as it was, had been condoned, or rather {113} approved of, by two successive Parliaments. Shrewsbury, who was now in high favor, had been actively concerned in its promotion. It was a question of compromise altogether, on which politicians were ent.i.tled to form the strongest opinions. No doubt the enemies of the Tory party had ample ground for condemning and denouncing the Peace. But the part which a statesman had taken in bringing about the Peace could not, according to our modern ideas, form any just ground of ministerial impeachment. Much more reasonably might the statesmen of a later day have been impeached who, by their blundering and obstinacy, brought about the armed resistance and the final independence of the North American colonies. It is curious, in our eyes, to find Oxford defending his conduct on the ground that he had simply obeyed the positive orders of his sovereign. The minister would run more risk of impeachment, in our days, who declared that he had acted in some great public crisis simply in obedience to his sovereign's orders, than if he were to stand accountable for the greatest errors, the grossest blunders, committed on the judgment and on the responsibility of himself and his colleagues.

Oxford was committed to the Tower, whither he went escorted by an immense popular procession of his admirers, who cheered vociferously for him and for High-Church together. He may now be said to drop out of our history altogether. He was destined to linger in long confinement, almost like one forgotten by friends and enemies. We shall have to tell afterwards how he pet.i.tioned for a trial, and was brought to trial, and in what fas.h.i.+on he came to be acquitted by his peers. The remainder of his life he pa.s.sed in happy quietude among his books and curious ma.n.u.scripts; the books and ma.n.u.scripts which formed the original stock of the Harleian Library, afterwards completed by his son. Harley lived until 1724, and was not an old man even then--only sixty-three. It is not necessary that in this work we should concern ourselves much more about him. Despite all the {114} praises of his friends, some of them men of the highest intellectual gifts, like Swift and Pope, there does not seem to have been any great quality, intellectual or moral, in Harley. He had a narrow and feeble mind; he was incapable of taking a large view of anything; he was selfish and deceitful; although it has to be said that sometimes that which men called deceit in him was but a lack of the capacity to look straight before him and make up his mind. He often led astray those who acted with him merely because his own confusion of intellect and want of defined purpose were leading himself astray. Perhaps the most dignified pa.s.sage in his life was that which showed him calmly awaiting the worst in London, when men like Bolingbroke and Ormond had chosen to seek safety in flight. Yet even the course which he took in this instance seems to have been rather the result of indecision than of independent self-sufficing courage and resolve. He does not appear to have been able to decide upon anything until the time had pa.s.sed when movement of any kind would have availed, and so he remained where he was. Many a man has gained credit for courage, and has seemed to surround himself with dignity, because at a moment of alarm, when others did this or that, he was unable quite to make up his mind as to what he ought to do, and so did nothing, and let the world go by.

[Sidenote: 1715--Sir Henry St. John]

On September 17, Norroy, King at Arms, came solemnly down to the House of Lords and razed the names of Ormond and of Bolingbroke from the roll of peers. Bolingbroke had some consolation of a sham kind. He had wished and schemed to be Earl of Bolingbroke before his fall, and now his new king, James of St. Germains, had given him the patent of enhanced n.o.bility. If he ceased to be a viscount in the eyes of English peers and of English heralds, he was still an earl in the Pretender's court. Bolingbroke had too keen a sense of humor not to be painfully aware of the irony of the situation. Nor was he likely to find much satisfaction in the peerage {115} which the Government had just conferred upon his father, Sir Henry St. John, by creating him Baron of Battersea and Viscount St. John. Sir Henry St. John was an idle, careless _roue_, a haunter of St. James's coffee-houses, living in the manner and in the memories of the Restoration, listlessly indifferent to all parties, leaning, perhaps, a little to the Whigs.

He had no manner of sympathy with his son or appreciation of his genius. When the son was made a peer the father only said, "Well, Harry, I thought thee would be hanged, but now I see thee wilt be beheaded." The father himself was once very near being hanged. In his wild youth he had killed a man in a quarrel, and was tried for murder and condemned to death, and then pardoned by the King, Charles II., in consideration, it is said, of a liberal money-payment to the merry monarch and his yet more merry mistresses.

{116}

CHAPTER VII.

THE WHITE c.o.c.kADE.

[Sidenote: 1715--Bolingbroke at St. Germains]

When Bolingbroke got to Paris he did not immediately attach himself to the service of James. Even then and there he still appears to have been undecided. In the modern American phrase, he "sat on the fence"

for a while. Probably, if he had seen even then a chance of returning with safety to England, if the impeachments had not been going on, and if any manner of overture had been made to him from London, he would forthwith have dropped the Jacobite cause, and returned to profess his loyalty to the reigning English sovereign. After a while, however, seeing that there was no chance for him at home, he went openly into the cause of the Stuarts, and accepted the office of Secretary of State to James. It must have been a trying position for a man of Bolingbroke's genius and ambition when he found himself thus compelled to put up with an empty office at a sham court. Bolingbroke's desire was to play on a great stage, with a vast admiring audience. He loved the heat and pa.s.sion of debate; he enjoyed his own rhetorical triumphs.

He must have been chilled and cramped indeed in a situation which allowed him no opportunity of displaying his most splendid and genuine qualities, while it constantly called on him for the exercise of the very qualities which he had least at hand. Nature had never meant him for a conspirator, or even for a subtle political intriguer; nor, indeed, had Nature ever intended him to be the adherent of a lost cause. All that could have made a position like his tolerable to a man of his peculiar capacity would have been faith in the cause--that faith which would have {117} prevented him from seeing any but its n.o.ble and exalted qualities, and would have made him forget himself in its hopes, its perils, its triumphs, and its disasters. On the contrary, it would seem that Bolingbroke found it difficult to take the Stuart cause seriously, even when he was himself playing the part of its leading statesman. A critical observer writes from Paris in the early part of the year 1716, saying that he believed Bolingbroke's chief fault was "that he could not play his part with a grave enough face; he could not help laughing now and then at such kings and queens." Meantime, Bolingbroke amused himself in his moments of recreation after his old fas.h.i.+on, he indulged in amour after amour, intrigue after intrigue.

Lord Chesterfield said of him, that "though n.o.body spoke and wrote better upon philosophy than Lord Bolingbroke, no man in the world had less share of philosophy than himself. The least trifle, such as the overroasting of a leg of mutton, would strangely disturb and ruffle his temper." On the other hand, a glance from a pretty woman, or a glimpse of her ankle, would send all Bolingbroke's political combinations and philosophical speculations flying into the air, and convert him in a moment from the statesman or the philosopher into the merest _pet.i.t maitre_, macaroni, and gallant.

Louis the Fourteenth refused to give open a.s.sistance to the cause of the Stuarts, but he was willing enough to lend any help that he could in private to Bolingbroke and to them. His death was the first severe blow to the cause which Bolingbroke now represented. Louis the Fourteenth was, according to Bolingbroke himself, the best friend James then had. "When I engaged," says Bolingbroke, "in this business, my princ.i.p.al dependence was on his personal character; my hopes sank as he declined, and died when he expired." The Regent, Duke of Orleans, was a man who, with all his coa.r.s.e and unrestricted dissipation, had some political capacity and even statesmans.h.i.+p. He saw that the Stuart was a sinking, the Hanoverian a rising cause. Even when the two seemed {118} most nearly balanced it yet appeared to Orleans, if we may quote a phrase more often used in our days than in his, that the one cause was only half alive, but the other was half dead. Orleans, moreover, had a good deal of that feeling which was more strongly marked still in a Duke of Orleans of a later day. He had a liking for England and for English ways; he was, indeed, rather inclined to affect the political manners of an English statesman. He therefore leaned to the side of the Government established in England; and, at the urgent request of the English Amba.s.sador in Paris, he acted with some energy in preventing the sailing of vessels intended for the uses of an expedition to the English coast.

[Sidenote: 1715--"Mischief, thou art afoot."]