A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume I Part 8

Alberoni, however, was somewhat too vain and impatient. He had brought over Sweden to his side, partly because he found Charles the Twelfth in a bad humor on account of the cession to Hanover of certain Swedish territories by the King of Denmark, who had clutched them while the warlike Charles was away in Turkey. The cession of those places brought Hanover to the sea, and was of importance thus to Hanover and to England alike. George the Elector was in his petty way an ambitious Hanoverian prince, however little interest he had in English affairs.

He had always been anxious to get possession of the districts of Bremen and Verden, which had been handed over to Sweden at the Peace of Westphalia. Reckless enterprise had carried Charles the Twelfth--"Swedish Charles," with "a frame of adamant, a soul of fire,"

whom no dangers frighted, and no labors tired, the "unconquered lord of pleasure and of pain"--too far in the rush of his chivalrous madness.

His vaulting ambition had overleaped itself, and fallen on the other side; and after his defeat at Pultowa, all his enemies, some of whom he had scared into inaction before, turned upon him as the nations of Europe turned upon Napoleon the First after Moscow. Charles had gone into Turkey and taken refuge there, and it seemed as if he had fallen never to rise again. In his absence the King of Denmark {161} seized Schleswig-Holstein, Bremen, and Verden. At the close of 1714 Charles suddenly roused himself from depression and appeared at the town of Stralsund, almost as much to the alarm of Europe as Napoleon had caused when he left Elba and landed on the southern sh.o.r.e of France. The King of Denmark shuddered at the prospect of a struggle with Charles, and in order to secure some part of his spoils he entered into a treaty with the Elector of Hanover, by virtue of which he handed over Bremen and Verden to George, on condition that George should pay him a handsome sum of money, and join him in resisting Sweden.

Nothing could be less justifiable, or indeed more nefarious, than these arrangements. They were discreditable to George the First, and they were disgraceful to the King of Denmark. Yet the general policy of that time seems to have approved of the whole transaction, and regarded it merely as a good stroke of business for Hanover and for England.

Alberoni, having secured the help of Sweden, got together great forces both by sea and by land, and prepared for a reconquest of the lost Italian provinces. He occupied Sardinia, and made an attempt on Sicily. But this was going a little too far and too fast. Alberoni frightened the great States of Europe into activity against him.

England, France, and Holland formed a triple alliance, the basis of which was that the House of Hanover should be guaranteed in England, and the House of Orleans in France, should the young King, Louis the Fifteenth, die without issue. Not long after, the triple alliance was expanded into a quadruple alliance, the Emperor of Germany becoming one of its members. An English fleet appeared in the Straits of Messina, and a sea-fight took place in which the Spaniards lost almost all their vessels. Alberoni tried to get up another fleet under the Duke of Ormond for the purpose of making a landing in Scotland, with a view to a great Jacobite rising. But the seas and skies seem always to have been fatal to Spanish projects against England, and {162} the expedition under Ormond was as much of a failure as the far greater expedition under Alexander of Parma. The fleet was wrecked in the Bay of Biscay. The French were invading the northern provinces of Spain, and the King of Spain was compelled not only to get rid of Alberoni, but to renounce once more any claim to the French throne, and to abandon his attempts on Sardinia and Sicily. Another danger was removed from England by the death of Charles the Twelfth. "A petty fortress and a dubious hand" brought about the end of him who had, "like the wind's blast, never-resting, homeless," stormed so long across war-convulsed Europe, and "left that name at which the world grew pale to point a moral or adorn a tale." Charles the Twelfth had just entered into an alliance with Peter the Great for an enterprise to destroy the House of Hanover and restore the Stuarts, when the memorable bullet at the siege of Frederickshald, in Norway, brought his strange career to a close in December, 1718. A junction between such men as Charles the Twelfth and Peter the Great might indeed have had matter in it. Peter was probably the greatest sovereign born to a throne in modern Europe. An alliance between Peter's profound sagacity and indomitable perseverance, and Charles's unbounded courage and military skill, might have been ominous for any cause against which it was aimed. The good-fortune which from first to last seems on the whole to have attended the House of Hanover, and followed it even in spite of itself, was with it when the bullet from an unknown hand struck down Charles the Twelfth.

[Sidenote: 1715-1718--Futility of the Triple Alliance]

These international arrangements have for us now very little real interest. They were entirely artificial and temporary. Nothing came of them that could long endure or make any real change in the relations of the European States. They had hardly anything to do with the interests of the various peoples over whose heads and without whose knowledge or concern they were made. It was still firmly believed that two or three diplomatists, meeting in {163} a half-clandestine way in a minister's closet or a lady's drawing-room, could come to agreements which would bind down nations and rule political movements. The first real upheaving of any genuine force, national or personal, in European life tore through all their meshes in a moment. Frederick the Great, soon after, is to compel Europe to reconstruct her scheme of political arrangements; later yet, the French Revolution is to clear the ground more thoroughly and violently still. The triple alliance, concocted by the Regent and Stanhope and Dubois, had not the slightest permanent effect on the general condition of Europe. It was a clever and an original idea of the Regent to think of bringing England and France, these old hereditary enemies, into a permanent alliance, and it was right of Stanhope to enter into the spirit of the enterprise; but the actual conditions of England and France, did not allow of an abiding friends.h.i.+p. The national interest, as it was then understood, of the one State was in antagonism to the national interest of the other. Nor could France and England combined have kept down the growth of other European States then rising into importance and beginning to cast their shadows far in front of them. It seems only amusing to us now to read of King George's directions to his minister--"To crush the Czar immediately, to secure his s.h.i.+ps, and even to seize his person." The courageous and dull old King had not the faintest perception of the part which either the Czar or the Czar's country was destined to play in the history of Europe. At present we are all inclined, and with some reason, to think that French statesmen, as a rule, are wanting in a knowledge of foreign politics--in an appreciation of the relative proportions of one force and another in the affairs of Europe outside France. But in the days of George the First French statesmen were much more accomplished in the knowledge of foreign politics than the statesmen of England. There was not, probably, in George's administration any man who had anything like the knowledge of the {164} affairs of foreign countries which was possessed by Dubois. But it had not yet occurred to the mind of Dubois, or the Regent, or anybody else, that the relations of one State to another, or one people to another, are anything more than the arrangements which various sets of diplomatic agents think fit to make among themselves and to consign to the formality of a treaty.

[Sidenote: 1717--Walpole bides his time]

The interest we have now in all these "understandings," engagements, and so-called alliances is personal rather than national. So far as England is concerned, they led to a squabble and a split in George's administration. It would hardly be worth while to go into a minute history of the quarrel between Townshend and Stanhope, Sunderland and Walpole. Sunderland, a man of great ability and ambition, had never been satisfied with the place he held in the King's administration, and the disputes which sprang up out of the negotiations for the triple alliance gave him an opportunity of exerting his influence against some of his colleagues. Fresh occasion for intrigue, jealousy, and anger was given by the desire of the King to remain during the winter in Hanover, and his fear, on the other hand, that his son--the Prince who was at the head of affairs in his absence--was forming a party against him, and was caballing with some of the members of the Government.

Sunderland acted on the King's narrow and petty fears. He distinctly accused Townshend and Walpole of a secret understanding with the Prince and the Duke of Argyll against the Sovereign's interests. The result of all this was that the King dismissed Lord Townshend, and that Walpole insisted on resigning office. The King, to do him justice, would gladly have kept Walpole in his service, but Walpole would not stay. It is clear that Walpole was glad of the opportunity of getting out of the ministry. He professed to be deeply touched by the earnestness of the King's remonstrances. He was moved, it is stated, to tears. At all events, he got very successfully through the ceremony of tear-shedding. But although he wept, he did not {165} soften. His purpose remained fixed. He went out of office, and, to all intents and purposes, pa.s.sed straightway into opposition. Stanhope became First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

For a long time it must have been apparent to every one that Walpole was the coming minister. Walpole himself must have felt satisfied on the point; but he was probably well content to admit to himself that his time had not yet come. Walpole was not a great man. He wanted the moral qualities which are indispensable to greatness. He was almost as much wanting in them as Bolingbroke himself. But if his genius was far less brilliant than that of Bolingbroke, he was amply furnished with patience and steadiness. He could wait. He did not devise half a dozen plans for one particular object, and fly from one to the other when the moment for action was approaching, and end by rejecting them all when the moment for action had arrived. He made up his mind to a certain course, and he held to it; if its chance did not come to-day, it might come to-morrow. He had no belief in men's sincerity--or women's either. There seems reason to believe that the famous saying ascribed to him, about every man having his price, was not used by him in that unlimited sense; that he only spoke of "these men"--of certain men--and said that every one of them had his price. But he always acted as if the description he gave of "these men" might safely be extended to all men. He had a coa.r.s.e, licentious nature. He enjoyed the company of loose women. He loved obscene talk; not merely did he love it, but he indulged in and encouraged it for practical purposes of his own; he thought it useful at men's dinner-parties, because it gave even the dullest man a subject on which he could find something to say.

One could not call Walpole a patriot in the higher sense; he wanted altogether that fine fibre in his nature, that exalted, half-poetic feeling, that faculty of imagination which quickens practical and prosaic objects with the spirit of the ideal, and which are {166} needed to make a man a patriot in the n.o.blest meaning of the word. But he loved his country in his own heavy, practical, matter-of-fact sort of way, and that was just the sort of way which at the time happened to be most useful to England. Let it be said, too, in justice to Walpole, that the most poetic and lyrical nature would have found little subject for enthusiasm in the England of Walpole's earlier political career.

It was not exactly the age for a Philip Sidney or for a Milton.

England's home and foreign policy had for years been singularly ign.o.ble. At home it had been a conflict of mean intrigues; abroad, a policy of selfish alliances and base compromises and surrenders. The splendid military genius of Marlborough only shone as it did as if to throw into more cruel light the infamy of the intrigues and plots to which it was often sacrificed. No man could be enthusiastic about Queen Anne or George the First. The statesmen who professed the utmost ardor for the Stuart cause were ready to sell it at a moment's notice, to secure their own personal position; most of those who grovelled before King George were known to have been in treaty, up to the last, with his rival. [Sidenote: 1717--Economist statesmen] We may excuse Walpole if, under such conditions, he took a prosaic view of the state of things, and made his patriotism a very practical sort of service to his country. It was, as we have said, precisely the sort of service England just then stood most in need of. Walpole applied himself to secure for his country peace and retrenchment. He did not, indeed, maintain a sacred principle of peace; he had no sacred principle about anything. We shall see more lately that he did not scruple, for party reasons, to lend himself to a wanton and useless war, well knowing it was wanton and useless; but his general policy was one of peace, and so long as he had his own way there would have been no waste of England's resources on foreign battle-fields. He despised war, and the trade of war, in his heart. To him war showed only in its vulgar, practical, and repulsive features; the soldier was a man who got paid for the {167} trade of killing. Walpole might be likened to a shrewd and sensible steward who is sincerely anxious to manage his master's estate with order and economy, and who, for that very reason, is willing to indulge his master's vices and to sanction his prodigalities to a certain extent, knowing that if he attempts to draw the purse-strings too closely an open rupture will be the result, and then some steward will come in who has no taste for saving, and who will let everything go to rack and ruin. He was the first of the long line of English ministers who professed to regard economy as one of the great objects of statesmans.h.i.+p. He established securely the principle that to make the two ends meet was one of the first duties of patriotism. He founded, if we may use such an expression, the dynasty of statesmen to which Pitt and Peel and Gladstone belong. The change in our const.i.tutional ways which set up that new dynasty was of infinitely greater importance to England than the change which settled the Brunswicks in the place of the Stuarts.

{168}

CHAPTER X.

HOME AFFAIRS.

[Sidenote: 1717--Oxford's impeachment]

Meanwhile the public seemed to have forgotten all about Lord Oxford.

"Harley, the nation's great support," as Swift had called him, had been nearly two years in the Tower, and the nation did not seem to miss its great support, or to care anything about him. In May, 1717, Lord Oxford sent a pet.i.tion to the House of Lords, complaining of the hards.h.i.+p and injustice of this unaccountable delay in his impeachment, and the House of Lords began at last to put on an appearance of activity. The Commons, too, revived and enlarged their secret committee, of which it will be remembered that Walpole was the chairman. Times, however, had changed. Walpole was not in the administration, and felt no anxiety to a.s.sist the ministry in any way.

He purposely absented himself from the sittings, and a new chairman had to be chosen. Probably Walpole had always known well enough that there was not evidence to sustain a charge of high-treason against his former rival; perhaps, now that the rival was down in the dust, never to rise again, he did not care to press for his punishment. At all events, he made it clear that he felt no interest in the impeachment of Lord Oxford. The friends of the ruined minister had recourse to an ingenious artifice. June 24, 1717, had been appointed for the opening of the proceedings. Westminster Hall, lately the scene of the impeachment of Somers, and soon to be the scene of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, was of course the place where Oxford had to come forward and meet his accusers. The King, the Prince and the Princess of Wales were seated in the {169} Hall; most of the foreign amba.s.sadors and ministers were spectators. The imposing formalities and artificial terrors of such a ceremonial were kept up. Lord Oxford had been brought from the Tower to Westminster by water. He was now led bareheaded up to the bar by the Deputy Lieutenant of the Tower, having the axe borne before him, its edge turned away from him as yet, symbolic of the doom that might await the prisoner, but to which he had not yet been declared responsible. When the reading of the articles of impeachment and other opening pa.s.sages of the trial had been gone through, Lord Harcourt, Oxford's friend, interposed, and announced that he had a motion to make. In order to hear his motion, the Peers had to withdraw to their own House. There Lord Harcourt moved that the House should dispose of the two articles of impeachment for high-treason before going into any of the evidence to support the charges for high crimes and misdemeanors. The argument for this course of proceeding was plausible. If Oxford were convicted of high-treason he would have to forfeit his life; and in such case, where would be the use of convicting him of a minor offence? The plan on which the Commons proposed to act, that of taking all the evidence in order of time, no matter to which charge it had reference, before coming to any conclusion, might, as Lord Harcourt put it, "draw the trial into prodigious length," and absolutely to no purpose. Should the accused be found guilty of high-treason he must suffer death, and there would be an end of the whole business. Should he be acquitted of the graver charge, he might then be impeached on the lighter accusation; and what harm would have been done or time lost? The motion was carried by a majority of eighty-eight to fifty-six.

Now it is hardly possible to suppose that the Peers who voted in the majority did not know very well that the Commons would not, and could not, submit to have their mode of conducting an impeachment, which it was their business to manage, thus altered at the sudden {170} dictation of the other chamber. The House of Commons was growing in importance every day; the House of Lords was proportionately losing its influence. The Commons determined that they would conduct the impeachment in their own way or not at all. Doubtless some of them, most of them, were glad to be well out of the whole affair. July 1st was fixed for the renewal of the proceedings. Some fruitless conferences between Lords and Commons wasted two days, and on the evening of July 3d the Lords sat in Westminster Hall, and invited by proclamation the accusers of Oxford to appear. No manager came forward to conduct the impeachment on the part of the Commons. The Peers sat for a quarter of an hour, as if waiting for a prosecutor, well knowing that none was coming. A solemn farce was played. The Peers went back to their chamber, and there a motion was made acquitting "Robert, Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer," on the ground that no charge had been maintained against him. A crowd without hailed the adoption of the motion with cheers. Oxford was released from the Tower, and nothing more was ever heard of his impeachment. The Duke of Marlborough was furious with rage at Oxford's escape, and the d.u.c.h.ess is described as "almost distracted that she could not obtain her revenge." Magnanimity was not a characteristic virtue of the early days of the Georges.

[Sidenote: 1718--Disabilities of dissenters]

This was what has sometimes been called the honorable acquittal of Oxford. An English judge once spoke humorously of a prisoner having been "honorably acquitted on a flaw in the indictment." Harley's was like this: it was not an acquittal, and it was not honorable to the man impeached, the House that forebore to press the impeachment, or the House that contrived his escape from trial. Oxford had been committed to the Tower and impeached for reasons that had little to do with his guilt or innocence, or with true public policy; he was released from prison and relieved from further proceedings in just the same way.

There was not evidence against {171} him on which he could be convicted of high-treason, and this was well known to his enemies when they first consigned him to the Tower. But there could not be the slightest moral doubt on the mind of any man that Oxford had intrigued with the Stuarts, and had endeavored to procure their restoration, and that he had done this even since his committal to the Tower. His guilt, whatever it was, had been increased by him, and not diminished, since the beginning of the proceedings taken against him. But he had only done what most other statesmen of that day had been doing, or would have done if they had seen advantage in it. He was not more guilty than some of his bitterest opponents, the Duke of Marlborough among others. All but the very bitterest opponents were glad to be done with the whole business. It must have come to a more or less farcical end sooner or later, and sensible men were of opinion that the sooner the better. Of Harley, "Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer," as his t.i.tles ran, we shall not hear any more; we have already foreshadowed the remainder of his life and his death. This short account of his sham impeachment is introduced here merely as a part of the historic continuity of the narrative. History has few characters less interesting than that of Oxford. He held a position of greatness without being great; he fell, and even his fall could not invest him with tragic dignity.

On December 13, 1718, Lord Stanhope, who had been raised to the peerage, first as Viscount and then as Earl Stanhope, introduced into the House of Lords a measure ingeniously ent.i.tled "A Bill for Strengthening the Protestant Interest in these Kingdoms." The t.i.tle of the Bill was strictly appropriate according to our present ideas, and according to the ideas of enlightened men in Stanhope's days also; but it must at first have misled some of Stanhope's audience. Most Churchmen are now ready to admit that the interests of the Church of England are strengthened by every measure which tends to secure religious equality; but most Churchmen were not quite so {172} sure of this in the reign of George the First. The Bill brought in by Stanhope was really a measure intended to relieve Dissenters from some of the penalties and disabilities imposed on them in the reign of Queen Anne.

[Sidenote: 1719--Catholic emanc.i.p.ation foreshadowed]

The second reading of the Bill was the occasion of a long and animated debate. Several n.o.ble lords appealed to the opinion of the bishops, and the bishops spoke in answer to the appeal. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, the Bishop of London, the Bishop of Bristol, the Bishop of Rochester (Atterbury), the Bishop of Chester, and other prelates, spoke against the Bill. The Bishop of Bangor, the Bishop of Gloucester, the Bishop of Lincoln, the Bishop of Norwich, and the Bishop of Peterborough spoke in its favor. The Bishop of Peterborough's was a strenuous and an eloquent argument in favor of the principle of the Bill. "The words 'Church' and 'Church's danger,'"

said the Bishop of Peterborough, "had often been made use of to carry on sinister designs; and then these words made a mighty noise in the mouth of silly women and children;" but in his opinion the Church, which he defined to be a scriptural inst.i.tution upon a legal establishment, was founded upon a rock, and "could not be in danger as long as we enjoyed the light of the Gospel and our excellent const.i.tution." The argument would have been perfect if the eloquent bishop had only left out the proviso about "our excellent const.i.tution;" for the opponents of the measure were contending, as was but natural, that the Bill, if pa.s.sed into law, would not leave to the Church the const.i.tutional protection which it had previously enjoyed.

The Bill pa.s.sed the House of Lords on December 23d, and was sent down to the Commons next day. It was read there a first time at once, was read a second time after a debate of some nine hours, and was pa.s.sed without amendment by a majority of 221 against 170 on January 10, 1719.

The test majority, however, by which the Bill had been decisively carried, on the motion to go into committee, was but small--243 against 202--and this {173} majority was mainly due to the vote of the Scottish members. Stanhope, it is well known, would have made the measure more liberal than it was, and was dissuaded from this intention by Sunderland, who insisted that if it were too liberal it would not pa.s.s the House of Commons. The result seems to prove that Sunderland was right. Walpole spoke against the Bill, limited as its concessions were. It would be interesting to know what sort of argument a man of Walpole's principles could have offered against a measure embodying the very spirit and sense of Whig policy. Unfortunately we have no means of knowing. The galleries of the House of Commons were rigidly closed against strangers on the day of the debate, and all we are allowed to hear concerning Walpole's part in the discussion is that "Mr. Robert Walpole made a warm speech, chiefly levelled against a great man in the present administration." There is something characteristic of Walpole in this. He was never very particular about principle, or even about seeming consistency; but still, when opposing a measure which he might have been expected to support, he would have probably found it more expedient, as well as more agreeable, to confine himself chiefly to the task of attacking some "great man in the present administration."

It ought to be said of Stanhope that he was distinctly in advance of his age as regarded the recognition of the principle of religious equality. He was not only anxious to put the Protestant Dissenters as much as possible on a level with Churchmen in all the privileges of citizens.h.i.+p, but he was even strongly in favor of mitigating the severity of the laws against the Roman Catholics. In his "History of England, from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles," Lord Stanhope, the descendant of the minister whose career and character have done so much honor to a name and a family, claims for him the credit of having put on paper a scheme "not undeserving of attention as the earliest germ of Roman Catholic emanc.i.p.ation." Stanhope's life was too soon and too {174} suddenly cut short to allow him to push forward his scheme to anything like a practical position, and it is not probable that he could in any case have done much with it at such a time. Still, though fate cut short the life, it ought not to cut short the praise.

[Sidenote: 1719--The Peerage Bill]

The Peerage Bill raised a question of some const.i.tutional importance.

The princ.i.p.al object of this measure, which was introduced on February 28, 1719, in the House of Lords, by the Duke of Somerset, and was believed to have Lord Sunderland for its actual author, was to limit the prerogative of the Crown in the creation of English peerages to a number not exceeding six, in addition to those already existing.

According to the provisions of the Bill, the Crown might still create new Peers on the extinction of old t.i.tles for want of male heirs; but with this exception the power of adding new peerages would be limited to the number of six. It was also proposed that, instead of the sixteen elective Peers from Scotland, twenty-five hereditary Peers should be created. This part of the Bill was that which at the time gave rise to most of the debate, in the House of Lords at least; but the really important const.i.tutional question was that which involved the limitation of the privilege of the Sovereign. The Sovereign himself sent a special message to the House of Lords, informing them that "he has so much at heart the settling the Peerage of the whole kingdom upon such a foundation as may secure the freedom and const.i.tution of Parliament in all future ages, that he is willing that his prerogative stand not in the way of so great and necessary a work."

The ostensible motive for the proposed legislation was to get rid of difficulties caused by the over-increase of the numbers of the peerage since the union of England and Scotland; the real object was to guard against such a _coup-d'etat_ as that accomplished in Anne's later days by the creation of the twelve Peers, of whom Mrs. Masham's husband was one. Nothing could be more generous and liberal, it might have been thought, than the expressed willingness of the {175} King to surrender a part of his prerogative. This very readiness, however, expressed as it was by antic.i.p.ation, and before the measure had yet made any progress, set a great many persons in and out of Parliament thinking.

A vehement dispute soon sprang up, in which the pamphleteer, as usual, bore an important part. Addison, in one of his latest political and literary efforts, defended the proposed change. He described his pamphlet as the work of an "Old Whig." It was written as a reply to a pamphlet by Steele condemning the Bill, and signed "A Plebeian."

Reply, retort, and rejoinder followed in more and more heated and personal style. The excitement created caused the measure to be dropped for the session, but it was brought in again in the session following, and it pa.s.sed through all its stages in the Lords without trouble and with much rapidity.

When it came down to the House of Commons, however, a very different fate awaited it. Walpole a.s.sailed it with powerful eloquence and with unanswerable argument. The true nature of the scheme now came out. It would have simply rendered the representative chamber powerless against a majority of the chamber which did not represent. This will be readily apparent to any one who considers the subject for a moment by the light of our more modern experience. A majority of the House of Commons, representing, it may be, a vast majority of the people, agree to a certain measure. It goes up to the House of Lords, and is rejected there. What means in the end have the Commons, who represent the nation, of giving effect to the wishes of the nation? They have none but the privilege of the Crown to create, under the advice of ministers, a sufficient number of new Peers to outvote the opponents of the measure. No alternative but revolution and civil war would be left if this were taken away. It is true that the power might be again abused by the Sovereign, as it was abused in Anne's days on the advice of the Tories; but we know that, as a matter of fact, it is hardly ever abused--hardly ever even used. {176} Why is it hardly ever used? For the good reason that all men know it is existing, and can be used should the need arise. Even were it to be misused, the misuse would happen under responsible ministers, who could be challenged to answer for it, and who would have to make good their defence. But if the House of Lords were made supreme over the House of Commons in every instance, by abolis.h.i.+ng the unlimited prerogative which alone keeps it in check, who could then be held responsible for abuse--and before whom? Who could call the House of Lords to account? Before what tribunal could it be summoned to answer? The Peers are now independent of the people, and would then be also independent of the Crown. There is hardly a great political reform known to modern England which, if the Peerage Bill had become law, would not have been absolutely rejected or else carried by a popular revolution.

[Sidenote: 1720--The Irish House of Lords]

Walpole attacked the Bill on every side. Such legislation, he insisted, "would in time bring back the Commons into the state of servile dependency they were in when they wore the badges of the Lords." It would, he contended, take away "one of the most powerful incentives to virtue, . . . since there would be no coming to honor but through the winding-sheet of an old decrepit lord and the grave of an extinct n.o.ble family." Walpole knew well his public and his time. He dwelt most strongly on this last consideration--that the Bill if pa.s.sed into law would shut the gates of the Peerage against deserving Commoners. He asked indignantly how the House of Lords could expect the Commons to give their concurrence to a measure "by which they and their posterities are to be excluded from the Peerage." The commoner who, after this way of putting the matter, a.s.sented to the Bill, must either have been an unambitious bachelor, or have been blessed in a singularly unambitious wife. Steele, who, as we have seen, had fought gallantly against the Bill with his pen, now made a very effective speech against it. He showed that the {177} measure would, alter the whole const.i.tutional position of the House of Lords, whether as a legislative chamber or a court of appeal. "The restraint of the Peers to a certain number will make the most powerful of them have all the rest under their direction, . . . and judges so made by the blind order of birth will be capable of no other way of decision." The prerogative, as Steele put it very clearly, "can do no hurt when ministers do their duty; but a settled number of Peers may abuse their power when no man is answerable for them, or can call them to account for their encroachments." The Bill was rejected by a majority of 269 votes against 177.

In March, 1720, was pa.s.sed an Act with a pompous and even portentous t.i.tle: it was called "An Act for the better securing the Dependency of the Kingdom of Ireland upon the Crown of Great Britain." The preamble recited that "attempts have been lately made to shake off the subjection of Ireland unto and dependence upon the Imperial Crown of this realm, which will be of dangerous consequence to Great Britain and Ireland." The reader would naturally a.s.sume that some fresh designs of the Stuarts had been discovered, having for their theatre the Catholic provinces of Ireland. Was James Stuart about to land at Kinsale? Had Alberoni got hold of the Irish Catholics? Was Atterbury plotting with Swift for an armed insurrection in Munster and Connaught? No; nothing of the kind was expected. The preamble of the alarming Act went on to set forth that the House of Lords in Ireland had lately, "against law, a.s.sumed to themselves a power and jurisdiction to examine, correct, and amend the judgments and decrees of the courts of justice in the kingdom of Ireland;" and this alleged trespa.s.s of the Irish House of Lords was the whole cause of the new measure. The Act declared that the Irish House of Lords had no jurisdiction "to judge of, affirm, or reverse any judgment, sentence, or decree given or made in any court within the said kingdom." This was an enactment of the most serious {178} moment in a const.i.tutional sense. It made the Parliament of Ireland subordinate to the Parliament of England; it reduced the Irish House of Lords from a position in Ireland equal to that of the House of Lords in England, down to the level of a mere provincial a.s.sembly. The occasion of the pa.s.sing of this Act was the decision given by the Irish House of Lords in the celebrated cause of Sherlock against Annesley. It is not necessary for us to go into the story of the case at any length. It was a question of disputed property. The defendant had obtained a decree in the Irish Court of Exchequer, which decree was reversed on an appeal to the Irish House of Lords. The defendant appealed to the English House of Lords, who confirmed the judgment of the Irish Court of Exchequer, and ordered him to be put in possession of the disputed property. The Irish House of Lords stood by their authority, and actually ordered the Irish Barons of Exchequer to be taken into custody by Black Rod for having offended against the privileges of the Peers and the rights and liberties of Ireland. The Act was pa.s.sed to settle the question and reduce the Irish House of Lords to submission and subordinate rank. It was settled merely, of course, by the strength of a majority in the English Parliament. The Duke of Leeds recorded a sensible and a manly protest against the vote of the majority of his brother Peers. One or two of the reasons he gives for his protest are worth reading even now. The eleventh reason is, "Because it is the glory of the English laws and the blessing attending Englishmen, that they have justice administered at their doors, and not to be drawn, as formerly, to Rome by appeals;" "and by this order the people of Ireland must be drawn from Ireland hither whensoever they receive any injustice from the Chancery there, by which means poor men must be trampled on, as not being able to come over to seek for justice." The thirteenth reason is still more concise: "Because this taking away the jurisdiction of the Lords' House in Ireland may be a means to {179} disquiet the Lords there and disappoint the King's affairs."

[Sidenote: 1718--Death of William Penn]

The protest, it need hardly be said, received little or no attention.

More than sixty years after, when England was perplexed in foreign and colonial troubles, the spirit of the protest walked abroad and animated Grattan and the Irish Volunteers. But in 1720 the Parliament at Westminster was free to do as it pleased with the Parliament in Dublin.

To the vast majority of the Irish people it might have been a matter of absolute indifference which Parliament reigned supreme; they had as little to expect from Dublin as from Westminster. The Irish Parliament was quite as ready to promote legislation for the further persecution of Catholics as any English Parliament could be. The Parliament in Dublin was merely an a.s.sembly of English and Protestant colonists. Yet it is worthy of remark, that, then and after, the sympathies of the people, when they had any means of showing them, went with the Irish Parliament simply because of the name it bore. It was, at all events, the so-called Parliament of Ireland; it represented, at least in name, the authority of the Irish people. So long as it existed there was some recognition of the fact that Ireland was something more than a merely conquered country, held by the t.i.tle of the sword, and governed by arbitrary proclamation, secret warrant, and drum-head court-martial.

Death had been busy among eminent men for some few years. The Duke of Shrewsbury, the "king of hearts," the statesman whose appointment as Lord Treasurer secured the throne of Great Britain for the Hanoverian family, died on February 18, 1717. William Penn, the founder of the great American State of Pennyslvania, closed his long active and fruitful life in 1718. We have here only to record his death; the history of his deeds belongs to an earlier time. Controversy has now quite ceased to busy itself about his n.o.ble character, and his life of splendid unostentatious beneficence. His name, which without his consent and against his wishes was {180} made part of the name of the State which he founded, will be remembered in connection with its history while the Delaware and the Schuylkill flow. Of his famous treaty with the Indians nothing, perhaps, was ever better said than the comment of Voltaire, that it was the only league between savages and white men which was never sworn to and never broken. Addison died, still comparatively young, on June 17, 1719. He had reached the highest point of his political career but a short time before, when, on one of the changes of office between Stanhope and Sunderland, he became one of the princ.i.p.al secretaries of State. His health, however, was breaking down, and he never had indeed the slightest gift or taste for political life. "Pity," said Mrs. Manley, the auth.o.r.ess of "The New Atlantis," speaking of Addison, "that politics and sordid interest should have carried him out of the road of Helicon and s.n.a.t.c.hed him from the embraces of the Muses." But it seems quite unjust to ascribe Addison's divergence into political ways to any sordid interest. He had political friends who loved him, and he went with them into politics as he might have travelled in company with them, and for the sake of their company, although caring nothing for travel himself. No man was better aware of his incapacity for the real business of public life. Addison had himself pointed out all the objections to his political advancement before that advancement was pressed upon him. He was not a statesman; he was not an administrator; he could not do any genuine service as head of a department; he was not even a good clerk; he was a wretched speaker; he was consumed by a morbid shyness, almost as oppressive as that of the poet Cowper in a later day, or of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American novelist, later still. His whole public career was at best but a harmless mistake. It has done no harm to his literary fame. The world has almost forgotten it. Even lovers of Addison might have to be reminded now that the creator of Sir Roger de Coverley was once a diplomatic agent and a secretary of State, {181} and a member of the House of Commons. Some of the essays which Addison contributed to the _Spectator_ are like enough to outlive the system of government by party, and perhaps even the whole system of representative government. Sir Roger de Coverley will not be forgotten until men forget Parson Adams and Robinson Crusoe and Gil Blas, and for that matter, Sir John Falstaff and Don Quixote.

[Sidenote: 1720--The King and the Prince reconciled]

For some time things were looking well at home and abroad. The policy of the Government appeared to have been completely successful on the Continent. The confederations that had been threatening England were dissolved or broken up; the Jacobite conspiracies seemed to have been made hopeless and powerless. The friends.h.i.+p established between England and the Regent of France had to all seeming robbed the Stuarts of their last chance. James the Chevalier had no longer a home on French soil. Paris could not any more be the head-quarters of his organization and the scene of his mock Court. The Regent had kept his promises to the English Government. It was well known that, so far from encouraging or permitting the designs of the exiled family against England, he would do all in his power to frustrate them; as, indeed, he had an opportunity of doing not long after. Never before, perhaps never since, was there so cordial an understanding between England and France. Never could there have been a time when such an understanding was of greater importance to England.

At home the prospect seemed equally bright. Walpole had contrived to ingratiate himself more and more with the Prince of Wales, and had become his confidential adviser. Acting on his counsel, the Prince made his submission to the King; and acting on Stanhope's counsel, the King accepted it. The Sovereign and his heir had a meeting and were reconciled; for the time, at least. Walpole consented to join the administration, content for the present to fill the humble place of paymaster to the forces, without a seat in the Cabinet. He returned, in {182} fact, to the ministerial position which he had first occupied, and from which he had been promoted, and must have seemed to himself somewhat in the position of a boy who, after having got high in his cla.s.s, has got down very low again, and is well content to mount up a step or two from the humblest position. Walpole knew what he was doing, and must have been quite satisfied in his own mind that he was not likely to remain very long paymaster to the forces, although he could not, by any possibility, have antic.i.p.ated the strange succession of events by which he was destined soon to be left without a rival.

For the present he was in the administration, but he took little part in its actual work. He did not even appear to have any real concern in it. He spent as much of his time as he could at Houghton, his pleasant country-seat in Norfolk. Townshend, too, had been induced to join the administration. To him was a.s.signed the position of president of the council.

Thus there appeared to be a truce to quarrels, and to enmities abroad and at home. There was no dispute with any of the great Continental powers; there was no dread of the Stuarts. Ministerial rivalries had been reduced to concordance and quiet; the traditional quarrel between the Sovereign and the heir-apparent had been composed. It might have been thought that a time of peace and national prosperity had been a.s.sured. In the history of nations, however, we commonly find that nothing more certainly bodes unsettlement than a general conviction that everything is settled forever.

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CHAPTER XI.

"THE EARTH HATH BUBBLES."