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Title: A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4)


Author: Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy



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Transcriber's note:

   Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in
   curly braces, e.g. {99}.  They have been located where page
   breaks occurred in the original book.  For its Index, a page
   number has been placed only at the start of that section.

   In the original volumes in this set, each even-numbered page
   had a header consisting of the page number, the volume title,
   and the chapter number.  The odd-numbered page header consisted
   of the year with which the page deals, a subject phrase, and
   the page number.  In this set of e-books, the odd-page year
   and subject phrase have been converted to sidenotes, usually
   positioned between the first two paragraphs of the even-odd
   page pair.  If such positioning was not possible for a given
   sidenote, it was positioned where it seemed most logical.

   In the original book set, consisting of four volumes, the
   master index was in Volume 4.  In this set of e-books, the
   index has been duplicated into each of the other volumes, with
   its first page re-numbered as necessary, and an Index item
   added to each volume's Table of Contents.





A HISTORY OF THE FOUR GEORGES AND OF WILLIAM IV.

by

JUSTIN MCCARTHY and JUSTIN HUNTLY MCCARTHY

In Four Volumes

VOL. III.







Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
1901

Copyright, 1901, by Harper & Brothers,
All rights reserved.




CONTENTS OF THE THIRD VOLUME.


CHAPTER                                                    PAGE

   XLII. "SUPREME IRONIC PROCESSION" . . . . . . . . . . .    1
  XLIII. GEORGE AND THE DRAGONS  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   22
   XLIV. THE "NORTH BRITON"  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   46
    XLV. NUMBER FORTY-FIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   87
   XLVI. THE AMERICAN COLONIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   71
  XLVII. EDMUND BURKE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   93
 XLVIII. THE STAMP ACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  102
   XLIX. WILKES REDIVIVUS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  115
      L. THE SPIRIT OF JUNIUS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  128
     LI. CHARLES JAMES FOX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  141
    LII. ON THE CHARLES RIVER  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  147
   LIII. THE "VICAR OF WAKEFIELD"  . . . . . . . . . . . .  167
    LIV. YANKEE DOODLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  178
     LV. THE GORDON RIOTS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  190
    LVI. TWO NEW MEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  211
   LVII. FOX AND PITT  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  238
  LVIII. WARREN HASTINGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  245
    LIX. THE GREAT IMPEACHMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  272
     LX. THE CHANGE OF THINGS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  290
    LXI. "NINETY-EIGHT"  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  306
   LXII. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  331
         INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  350




{1}

A HISTORY

OF

THE FOUR GEORGES.


CHAPTER XLII.

"SUPREME IRONIC PROCESSION."

For six and forty years England had been ruled by German princes.  One
Elector of Hanover named George had been succeeded by another Elector
of Hanover named George, and George the First and George the Second,
George the father and George the son, resembled each other in being by
nature German rather than English, and by inclination Electors of
Hanover rather than Kings of England.  Against each of them a Stuart
prince had raised a standard and an army.  George the First had his
James Francis Edward, who called himself James the Third, and whom his
opponents called the Pretender, by a translation which gave an
injurious signification to the French word "pretendant."  George the
Second had his Charles Edward, the Young Pretender who a generation
later led an invading army well into England before he had to turn and
fly for his life.  A very different condition of things awaited the
successor of George the Second.  George the Second's grandson was an
English prince and an Englishman.  He was born in England; his father
was born in England; his native tongue was the English tongue; and if
he was Elector of Hanover, that seemed an accident.

The title was as unimportant and trivial to the King of {2} England as
his title of King of France was unreal and theatrical.  The remnant of
the Jacobites could not with truth call the heir to the throne a
foreigner, and they could not in reason hope to make such a
demonstration in arms against him as they had made against his
grandfather and his great-grandfather.  The young King came to a much
safer throne under much more favorable auspices than either of the two
monarchs, his kinsmen and his namesakes, who had gone before him.

[Sidenote: 1760--Accession of George the Third]

The young King heard the first formal news of his accession to the
throne from the lips of no less stately a personage than the Great
Commoner himself--the foremost Englishman then alive.  George the
Third, as he then actually was, had received at Kew Palace some
messages which told him that his grandfather was sinking fast, that he
was dying, that he was dead.  George resolved to start for London.  On
his way, and not far from Kew, he was met by a coach and six, which,
from the blue and silver liveries, he knew to be that of Mr. Pitt.
George received the congratulations of his great minister--the great
Minister whom, as it was soon to appear, he understood so little and
esteemed so poorly.  Then Pitt, turning his horses' heads, followed his
sovereign into London.  Never perhaps in English history was a young
king welcomed on his accession by so great a minister.  Among the many
auspicious conditions which surrounded the early days of George the
Third's reign not the least auspicious was the presence of such a
bulwark to the throne and to the realm.  For the name of Pitt was now
feared and honored in every civilized country in the world.  It had
become synonymous with the triumphs and the greatness of England.  Pitt
was the greatest War Minister England had yet known.  He was the first
English statesman who illustrated in his own person the difference
between a War Minister and a Minister of War.

Truly this journey of the King and the Prime Minister from Kew to
London was what George Meredith calls a "supreme ironic procession,
with laughter of gods in the background."  The ignorant, unwise young
King led the {3} way, the greatest living statesman in England followed
after.  One can hardly imagine a procession more supremely ironic.
Almost all the whole range of human intellect was stretched out and
exhausted by the living contrast between the King who went first and
the Minister who meekly went second.  Pitt had made for young George
the Third a great empire, which it was the work of George the Third not
long after to destroy, so far as its destruction could be compassed by
the stupidity of a man.  Pitt had made the name of England a power all
over the civilized world.  Rome at her greatest, Spain at her greatest,
could hardly have surpassed the strength and the fame of England as
Pitt had re-made it.  George, from the very first, felt a sort of
coldness towards his superb Minister.  He had all the vague pervading
jealousy which dulness naturally shows to genius.  It was a displeasure
to him from the first that Pitt should have made England so great,
because the work was the inspiration of the subject and not of the
sovereign.  No one can know for certain what thoughts were filling the
mind of George as he rode to London that day in front of William Pitt.
But it may fairly be assumed that he was not particularly sorry for the
death of his grandfather, and that he was pleasing his spirit with the
idea that he would soon emancipate himself from Mr. Pitt.  "Be a king,
George," his mother used to say to him.  The unsifted youth was
determined, if he could, to be a king.

At the time of his accession George was in his twenty-third year.  He
was a decidedly personable young Prince.  He had the large regular
features of his race, the warm complexion of good health, and a
vigorous constitution, keen attractive eyes, and a firm, full mouth.
He was tall and strongly made, and carried himself with a carriage that
was dignified or stiff according to the interpretation of those who
observed it.  Many of the courtly ladies thought him extremely
handsome, were eagerly gracious to him, did their best to thrust
themselves upon his attention, and received, it would seem, very little
notice in return for their pains.  If George showed himself {4}
indifferent and even ungallant to his enthusiastic admirers, his
brother Edward was of a different disposition.  But though Edward, like
his brother, was an agreeable-looking youth, and keen to win favor in
women's eyes, he found himself like Benedict: nobody marked him because
he was not the heir to the throne.

In some illustrated histories of the reign two portraits of George the
Third are placed in immediate and pathetic contrast.  The one portrait
represents George as he showed in the first year of his reign--alert,
young, smiling, with short-cut powdered hair, a rich flowered coat, and
the star and ribbon of the Garter on his breast.  So might a young king
look called in the flower of his age to the control of a great country,
pleased, confident, and courageous.  The other picture shows how the
King looked in the sixtieth year of his reign.  The face is old and
wrinkled and weary; the straggling white locks escape from beneath a
fur-trimmed cap; the bowed body is wrapped in a fur-trimmed robe.  The
time of two generations of men lay between the young king and the old;
the longest reign then known to English history, the longest and the
most eventful.

[Sidenote: 1760--George's qualifications for King]

George the Third started with many advantages over his predecessors of
the same name.  He was an Englishman.  He spoke the English language.
It was his sincere wish to be above all things English.  He honestly
loved English ways.  He had not the faintest desire to start a seraglio
in England.  He had no German mistresses.  He did not care about fat
women.  He was devoted to his mother--perhaps a good deal too devoted,
but even the excess of devotion might have been pardonable in the
public opinion of England; certainly it was only his own weakness and
perversity that made it for a while not pardonable.  He was of the
country squire's order of mind; his tastes were wholly those of the
stolid, well-intentioned, bucolic country squire.  He would probably
have been a very respectable and successful sovereign if only he had
not been plagued by the ambition to be a king.

It is curious to remember that the accession of George {5} the Third
was generally and joyfully welcomed.  A hopeful people, having endured
with increasing dislike two sovereigns of the House of Hanover, were
quite prepared to believe that a third prince was rich in all regal
qualities; in all public and private virtues.  It would, perhaps, have
been unreasonable on the part of any dispassionate observer of public
affairs to anticipate that a third George would make a worse monarch
than his namesakes and immediate predecessors.  The dispassionate
observer might have maintained that there were limits to kingly
misgovernment in a kingdom endowed with a Constitution and blessed with
a measure of Parliamentary representation, and that those limits had
been fairly reached by the two German princes who ruled reluctantly
enough over the fortunes of England.  This same dispassionate observer
might reasonably, assuming him to possess familiar knowledge of certain
facts, have hazarded the prediction that George the Third would be a
better king than his grandfather and his great-grandfather.  He was
certainly a better man.  There was so much of a basis whereupon to
build a hope of better things.  The profligacy of his ancestors had not
apparently vitiated his blood and judgment.  His young life had been a
pure life.  He was in that way a pattern to princes.  He had been,
which was rare with his race, a good son.  He was to be--and there was
no more rare quality in one of his stock--a good husband, a good
father.  He was in his way a good friend to his friends.  He was
sincerely desirous to prove himself a good king to his people.

The youth of George the Third had passed under somewhat agitated
conditions.  George the Second's straight-forward hatred for his son's
wife opened a great gulf between the Court and Leicester House, which
no true courtier made any effort to bridge.  While the young Prince
knew, in consequence, little or nothing of the atmosphere of St.
James's or the temper of those who breathed that atmosphere, attempts
were not wanting to sunder him from the influence of his mother.  Some
of the noblemen and clergymen to whom the early instruction of the
young {6} Prince was entrusted labored with a persistency which would
have been admirable in some other cause to sever him not merely from
all his father's friends but even from his father's wife.  There was
indeed a time when their efforts almost succeeded in alienating the
young Prince from his mother.  The wildest charges of Jacobitism were
brought against the immediate servants of the Princess, charges which
those who made them wholly failed to substantiate.  The endeavor to
remove the Prince from the tutelage of his mother was abandoned.  The
education of the Prince was committed to more sympathetic care.  The
change had its advantage in keeping George in the wholesome atmosphere
of Leicester House instead of exposing him to the temptations of a
profligate Court.  It had its disadvantages in leaving him entirely
under the influence of a man to whose guidance, counsel, and authority
the Princess Dowager absolutely submitted herself.

[Sidenote: 1760--Lord Bute]

Observers of the lighter sort are pleased to insist upon the trifles
which have the most momentous influence upon the fortunes of peoples
and the fates of empires.  A famous and facile French playwright
derived the downfall of a favorite and of a political revolution from
the spilling of a glass of water.  There are times when the temptation
to pursue this thread of fancy is very great.  Suppose, for instance,
it had not chanced to rain on a certain day at Clifden, when a cricket
match was being played in which Frederick, Prince of Wales, happened to
be interested.  A fretted Prince would not have had to retire to his
tent like Achilles, would not have insisted on a game of whist to cheer
his humor.  There would have been no difficulty in forming a rubber.
There would have been no need to seek for a fourth hand.  No wistful
gentleman-in-attendance seeking the desirable would have had to ask the
aid of a strange nobleman perched in an apothecary's chariot.  Had this
strange nobleman not been so sought and found, had the apothecary not
been wealthy enough to keep a chariot, and friendly enough to offer a
poor Scotch gentleman a seat in it, it is possible that the {7}
American Colonies might yet form portion and parcel of the British
Empire, that Chatham's splendid dreams might have become still more
splendid realities, that the name of Wilkes might never have emerged
from an obscurity of debauch to association with the name of liberty.
For the nobleman who made the fourth hand in the Prince of Wales's
rubber was unfortunately a man of agreeable address and engaging
manners, manners that pleased infinitely the Prince of Wales, and
cemented a friendship most disastrous in its consequences to England,
to the English people, and to an English king.  The name of the
engaging nobleman was Lord Bute.

At the time of this memorable game of whist Lord Bute was thirty-six
years old.  He was well educated, well read, tall of body, pleasing of
countenance, quick in intelligence, and curious in disposition.  These
qualities won the heart of the Prince of Wales, and lifted the young
Scotch nobleman from poverty and obscurity to prominence and favor.
The Prince appointed Bute a Lord of the Bedchamber and welcomed him to
his most intimate friendship.  The death of the Prince of Wales two
years later had no disastrous effect upon the rising fortunes of the
favorite.  The influence which Bute had exercised over the mind of
Frederick he exercised over the mind of Frederick's wife and over the
mind of Frederick's heir.  Scandal whispered, asserted, insisted then
and has insisted ever since, that the influence which Lord Bute
exercised over the Princess of Wales was not merely a mental influence.
How far scandal was right or wrong there is no means, there probably
never will be any means, of knowing.  Lord Bute's defenders point to
his conspicuous affection for his wife, Edward Wortley Montagu's only
daughter, in contravention of the scandal.  Undoubtedly Bute was a good
husband and a good father.  Whether the scandal was justified or not,
the fact that it existed, that it was widely blown abroad and very
generally believed, was enough.  As far as the popularity of the
Princess was concerned it might as well have been justified.  For years
no caricature was so popular as that which displayed the Boot and the
{8} Petticoat, the ironic popular symbols of Lord Bute and the Princess.

By whatever means Lord Bute gained his influence over the Princess of
Wales, he undoubtedly possessed the influence and used it with
disastrous effect.  He moulded the feeble intelligence of the young
Prince George; he guided his thoughts, directed his studies in
statecraft, and was to all intents and purposes the governor of the
young Prince's person.  The young Prince could hardly have had a worse
adviser.  Bute was a man of many merits, but his defects were in the
highest degree dangerous in a person who had somehow become possessed
of almost absolute power.  In the obscurity of a private life, the man
who had borne poverty with dignity at an age when poverty was
peculiarly galling to one of his station might have earned the esteem
of his immediate fellows.  In the exaltation of a great if an
unauthorized rule, and later in the authority of an important public
office, his defects were fatal to his fame and to the fortunes of those
who accepted his sway.  For nearly ten years, from the death of
Frederick, Prince of Wales, to the death of George the Second, Bute was
all-powerful in his influence over the mother of the future King and
over the future King himself.  When the young Prince came to the throne
Lord Bute did not immediately assume ostensible authority.  He remained
the confidential adviser of the young King until 1761.  In 1761 he took
office, assuming the Secretaryship of State resigned by Lord
Holdernesse.  From a secretaryship to the place of Prime Minister was
but a step, and a step soon taken.  Although he did not occupy office
very long, he held it long enough to become perhaps the most unpopular
Prime Minister England has ever had.

[Sidenote: 1760--Hannah Lightfoot and Lady Sarah Lennox]

The youth of George the Third was starred with a strange romance.  The
full truth of the story of Hannah Lightfoot will probably never be
known.  What is known is sufficiently romantic without the additions of
legend.  Hannah Lightfoot was a beautiful Quaker girl, the daughter of
a decent tradesman in Wapping.  Association with the family of an
uncle, a linendraper, who lived near the {9} Court, brought the girl
into the fashionable part of the town.  The young Prince saw her by
accident somehow, somewhere, in the early part of 1754, and fell in
love with her.  From that moment the girl disappears from certain
knowledge, and legend busies itself with her name.  It is asserted that
she was actually married to the young Prince; that William Pitt,
afterwards Earl of Chatham, was present at the marriage; that she bore
the Prince several children.  Other versions have it that she was
married as a mere form to a man named Axford, who immediately left her,
and that after this marriage she lived with the Prince.  She is
supposed to have died in a secluded villa in Hackney.  It is said that
not only the wife of George the Third but the wife of George the Fourth
believed that the marriage had taken place.  We must not attach too
much importance to a story which in itself is so very unlikely.  It is
in the last degree improbable that a statesman like Pitt would have
lent himself to so singular a proceeding.  Even if an enamoured young
Prince were prepared to sanction his affections by a marriage, he would
scarcely have found an assistant in the ablest politician of the age.
The story of the Axford marriage is far more probable.  If Hannah
Lightfoot had been married to George she would have been Queen of
England, for there was no Royal Marriage Act in those days.

Another and more famous romance is associated with the youth of George
the Third.  Lady Sarah Lennox, the youngest daughter of the second Duke
of Richmond, was one of the most beautiful women of her time.  The
writers of the day rave about her, describe her as "an angel," as
lovelier than any Magdalen by Correggio.  When she was only seventeen
years old her beauty attracted the young King, who soon made no secret
of his devotion to her.  The new passion divided the Court into two
camps.  The House of Lennox was eager to bring about a marriage, which
was not then obstructed by the law.  Henry Fox, one of the most
ambitious men of that time or of any time, was Lady Sarah's
brother-in-law, and he did his best to promote the marriage.  On the
other hand, the {10} party which followed the lead of the Princess
Dowager and Lord Bute fought uncompromisingly against the scheme.  The
Princess Dowager had everything to lose, Lord Bute had everything to
lose, by such an alliance.  The power of the Princess Dowager over the
young King would vanish, and the influence of Lord Bute over the
Princess Dowager would cease to have any political importance.  Lord
Bute did all he could to keep the lovers apart.  Henry Fox did all he
could to bring the lovers together.  For lovers they undoubtedly were.
George again and again made it plain to those who were in his
confidence that he was in love with Lady Sarah, and was anxious to make
her his queen; and Lady Sarah, though her heart is said to have been
given to Lord Newbottle, was quite ready to yield to the wishes of her
family when those wishes were for the crown of England.  On the meadows
of Holland House the beautiful girl, loveliest of Arcadian rustics,
would play at making hay till her royal lover came riding by to greet
her.

But the idyll did not end in the marriage for which Fox and the
Lennoxes hoped.  It is said that the King was jealous of Lord
Newbottle; it is said that a sense of duty to his place and to his
people made him resolve to subdue and sacrifice his own personal
feelings.  He offered his hand and his crown to the Princess of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz.  Lady Sarah lost both her lovers, the King and
Lord Newbottle, who, in the words of Grenville, "complained as much of
her as she did of the King."  But she did not remain long unmarried.
In 1762 she accepted as husband the famous sporting Baronet Sir Thomas
Charles Bunbury, and nineteen years later she married the Hon. George
Napier, and became the mother of an illustrious pair of soldier
brothers, Sir Charles Napier, the hero of Scinde, and Sir William
Napier, perhaps the best military historian since Julius Caesar.  Lady
Sarah died in 1826, in her eighty-second year.  In her later years she
had become totally blind, and she bore her affliction with a sweet
patience.  At her death she is described by the chroniclers of the time
as "probably the last surviving {11} great-grand-daughter of King
Charles the Second."  A barren honor, surely.

[Sidenote: 1760--Princess Charlotte Sophia]

The young Princess whom George married was in many ways well and even
excellently qualified to make a good queen.  It is said that she was
discovered for her young husband after a fashion something resembling a
tale from the "Arabian Nights."  The Princess Dowager, eager to
counteract the fatal effect of the beauty of Lady Sarah Lennox, was
anxious to have the young King married as soon as possible.  Her own
wishes were in favor of a daughter of the House of Saxe-Gotha, but it
is said that fear of a disease hereditary in the family overruled her
wishes.  Then, according to the story, a Colonel Graeme, a Scotch
gentleman upon whose taste Lord Bute placed great reliance, was sent on
a kind of roving embassy to the various little German Courts in search
of the ideal bride.  The lady of the quest was, according to the
instructions given to Colonel Graeme, to be at once beautiful, healthy,
accomplished, of mild disposition, and versed in music, an art to which
the King was much devoted.  Colonel Graeme, with this pleasing picture
of feminine graces ever in his mind, found the original of the portrait
in Charlotte Sophia, the second daughter of Charles Lewis Frederick,
Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

There is another version of the manner of George's wooing which
nullifies the story of Colonel Graeme's romantic mission.  According to
this other version George fell in love with his future queen simply
from reading a letter written by her.  The tale sounds as romantic as
that of the Provencal poet's passion for the portrait of the Lady of
Tripoli.  It is true, however, that the letter of Charlotte Sophia was
something of the nature of a state paper.  The Duchy of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz, of which the Princess Charlotte's brother was the
sovereign, had been overrun by the troops of the King of Prussia.  The
young Princess wrote a letter to the Prussian King, which came to
George's notice and inspired him, it is said, with the liveliest
admiration for the lady who penned it.  Whatever the actual reason,
whether the report of Colonel Graeme or the {12} charms of her
epistolary style, the certain thing is that George was married, first
by proxy and afterwards in due form, to the young Princess in 1761.
The young Princess was not remarkably beautiful.  Even the courtiers of
the day, anxious to say their strongest in her praise, could not do
much more than commend her eyes and complexion and call her "a very
fine girl," while those who were not inclined to flatter said her face
was all mouth, and declared, probably untruly, that the young King was
at first obviously repelled by the plainness of his wife's appearance.
If she was plain, her plainness, as Northcote, the painter, said, was
an elegant, not a vulgar plainness, and the grace of her carriage much
impressed him.  Walpole found her sensible, cheerful, and remarkably
genteel, a not inconsiderable eulogy from him.  She was fairly
educated, as the education of princesses went in those days.  She knew
French and Italian, knew even a little English.  She had various
elegant accomplishments--could draw, and dance, and play, had acquired
a certain measure of scientific knowledge, and she had what was better
than all these attainments, a good, kindly, sensible nature.  The
marriage could hardly be called a popular marriage at first.  Statesmen
and politicians thought that the King of England ought to have found
some more illustrious consort than the daughter of a poor and petty
German House.  The people at large, we are told from a private letter
of the time, were "quite exasperated at her not being handsome," beauty
in a sovereign being a great attraction to the mass of subjects.  The
courtiers in general were amused by, and secretly laughed at, her
simple ways and old-fashioned--or at least un-English--manners.

[Sidenote--1761--The Coronation of George the Third]

After the wedding came the coronation, a very resplendent ceremony,
which was not free from certain somewhat ludicrous features, and was
not denied a certain tragic dignity.  It was enormously expensive.
Horace Walpole called it a puppet-show that cost a million.  Loyal
London turned out in its thousands.  Surprisingly large sums of money
were paid for rooms and scaffolds from which the outdoor sight could be
seen, and much larger were paid {13} for places inside the Abbey.  It
was very gorgeous, very long, and very fatiguing.  The spectator
carried away, with aching senses, a confused memory of many soldiers,
of great peers ill at ease in unbecoming habits, of beautiful women
beautifully attired, of a blaze of jewels that recalled the story of
Aladdin's mine, and of the wonderful effect by which the darkness of
Westminster Hall was suddenly illuminated by an ingenious arrangement
of sconces that caught fire and carried on the message of light with
great rapidity.  The heralds in whose hands the ceremonial arrangements
lay bungled their business badly, causing fierce heartburnings by
confusions in precedence, and displaying a lamentable ignorance of the
names and the whereabouts of many wearers of stately and ancient
titles.  When the King expressed his annoyance at some of the blunders,
Lord Effingham, the Earl Marshal, offered, for amazing apology, the
assurance that the next coronation would be conducted with perfect
order, an unfortunate speech, which had, however, the effect of
affording the King infinite entertainment.  The one tragic touch in the
whole day's work may be legend, but it is legend that might be and that
should be truth.  When Dymoke, the King's Champion, rode, in accordance
with the antique usage, along Westminster Hall, and flung his glove
down in challenge to any one who dared contest his master's right to
the throne of England, it is said that some one darted out from the
crowd, picked up the glove, slipped back into the press, and
disappeared, without being stopped or discovered.  According to one
version of the incident, it was a woman who did the deed; according to
another it was Charles Edward himself, the Young Pretender--now no
longer so very young--who made this last protest on behalf of his lost
fortunes and his fallen House.  It is possible, it is even probable,
that Charles Edward was in London then and thereafter, and it seems
certain that if he was in London King George knew of it and ignored it
in a chivalrous and kingly way.  The Young Pretender could do no harm
now.  Stuart hopes had burned high for a moment, fifteen years earlier,
when a handsome young {14} Prince carried his invading flag halfway
through England, and a King who was neither handsome nor young was
ready to take ship from Tower Stairs if worse came of it.  But those
hopes were quenched now, down in the dust, extinguished forever.  No
harm could come to the House of Hanover, no harm could come to the King
of England, if at Lady Primrose's house in St. James's Square a party
should be interrupted by the entrance of an unexpected guest, of a man
prematurely aged by dissipation and disappointment, a melancholy ruin
of what had once been fair and noble, and in whom his amazed and
reverent hostess recognized the last of the fated Stuarts.  There were
spies among those who still professed adherence to Charles Edward and
allegiance to his line, spies bearing names honorable in Scottish
history, who were always ready to keep George and George's ministers
posted in the movements of the unhappy Prince they betrayed.  George
could afford to be magnanimous, and George was magnanimous.  If it
pleased the poor Pretender to visit, like a premature ghost, the city
and the scenes associated with his House and its splendor and its awful
tragedies, he did so untroubled and unharmed.  It was but a cast of the
dice in Fortune's fingers, and Charles Edward would have been in
Westminster Hall and had a champion to assert his right.  But the cast
of the dice went the other way, and George the Third was King, and his
little German Princess was Queen of England.

[Sidenote--1761--The London gayeties of the time]

It is probable that those early days in London were the happiest in the
little Queen's long life.  She had come from exceeding quiet to a great
and famous city; she was the centre of splendor; she was surrounded by
splendid figures; she was the first lady of a great land; she was the
queen of a great king; she was the fortunate wife of a loyal,
honorable, and pure-minded man.  She was young, she was frank, she was
fond of all innocent pleasures, keenly alive to all the entertainment
that Court and capital could offer her.  She crammed more gayeties into
the first few days of her marriage than she had dreamed of in all her
previous life.  The girl, who had never seen {15} the sea until she
took ship for England, had never seen a play acted until she came to
London.  Mecklenburg-Strelitz had its own strong ideas about the folly
and frivolity of the stage, and no Puritan maiden in the sternest days
of Cromwellian ascendency, no Calvinist daughter of the most rigorous
Scottish household, could have been educated in a more austere
ignorance of the arts that are supposed to embellish and that are
intended to amuse existence.  She went to playhouse after playhouse,
alarmed at the crowds that thronged the streets to see her, but
fascinated by the delights that awaited her within the walls.  She
attended the opera.  She saw "The Beggar's Opera," which may have
charmed her for its story without perplexing her by its satire.  She
saw "The Rehearsal," and did not dream that twenty years later the
humors of Bayes, which she probably did not understand, would be
eclipsed forever by the fantasies of Mr. Puff.  She carried the King to
Ranelagh, to that amazing, enchanting assembly where all the world made
masquerade, and mandarins, harlequins, shepherdesses, and
much-translated pagan divinities jostled each other through Armida's
gardens, where the pink of fashion and the plain citizen, the patrician
lady and the plebeian waiting-maid made merry together in a motley rout
of Comus, and marvelled at the brilliancy of the illuminations and the
many-colored glories of the fireworks.

The London to which the little Princess came, and which she found so
full of entertainment, was a very different London from the city for
which the first of the Georges had quitted reluctantly the pleasures of
Hanover and the gardens of Herrenhausen.  The Hanoverian princes had
never tried, as the Stuart sovereigns had tried, to stop by peremptory
legislation the spread of the metropolis.  London had been steadily
spreading in the half-century of Guelph dominion, eating up the green
fields in all directions, linking itself with little lonely hamlets and
tiny rustic villages, and weaving them close into the web of its being,
choking up rural streams and blotting out groves and meadows with
monuments of brick and mortar.  Where {16} the friends of George the
First could have hunted and gunned and found refreshment in secluded
country ale-houses, the friends of George the Third were familiar with
miles of stony streets and areas of arid squares.  London was not then
the monster city that another century and a half has made it, but it
was even more huge in its proportion to the size of any of its rivals,
if rivals they could be called, among the large towns of England.  The
great city did not deserve the adjective that is applied to it by the
poet of Chevy Chase.  London was by no means lovely.  However much it
might have increased in size, it had increased very little in beauty,
and not at all in comfort, since the days when an Elector of Hanover
became King of England.  It still compared only to its disadvantage
with the centres of civilization on the Continent; it still was rich in
all the dangers and all the discomforts Gay had celebrated nearly two
generations earlier.  And these dangers and discomforts were not
confined to London.  The world beyond London was a world of growing
provincial towns and increasing seaports connected by tolerable and
sometimes admirable highways, and of smaller towns and villages reduced
for the most part to an almost complete isolation by roads that were
always nearly and often quite impassable.  To travel much in England in
those days was scarcely less adventurous even for an Englishman than to
travel in Africa to-day; for a foreigner the adventure was indeed
environed by perils.

[Sidenote: 1761--Fashions under George the Third]

Dress and manners had changed in the Hanoverian half-century, though
not as much as they were to change in the fifty years that were still
in futurity.  Extravagance of attire still persisted, though the
extravagance had changed its expression.  The gigantic hoops in which
ladies had delighted had diminished, had dwindled, and gowns were of a
slender seemliness.  But reformed below, fantasy rioted above.  The
headdresses of women in the early days of the third George were as
monstrous, as horrible, and as shapeless in their way as the hideous
hoops had been in theirs.  Vast pyramids of false hair were piled on
the heads of fashionable ladies, were pasted together with pomatums,
{17} were smothered in powder and pricked with feathers like the
headgear of a savage.  These odious erections took so long to build up
that they were suffered to remain in their ugly entirety not for days
but for weeks together, until the vast structure became a decomposing
mass.  It is rather ghastly to remember that youth and beauty and grace
allowed itself to be so loathsomely adorned, that the radiant women
whose faces smile from the canvases of great painters, and whose names
illuminate the chronicles of the wasted time of the reign of George the
Third, were condemned to dwell with corruption in consenting to be
caricatured.  Till far on in the lifetime of Queen Charlotte the
fashion in women's wear oscillated from one extreme to another, the
gracious of to-day becoming the grotesque of yesterday, and mode
succeeding mode with the confusion and fascination of a masquerade.

The men were no less remarkable than the women for the clothes they
wore, no less capricious in their changes.  A decided, if not a
conspicuous, turn of public taste had done much since the accession of
the first George to minimize if not to obliterate the differences
between class and class.  Men no longer consented readily to carry the
badge of their calling in their daily costume, and the great world came
gradually to be no longer divided sharply from the little world by
marked distinction of dress.  But still, and for long after 1760, the
clothes of men were scarcely less brilliant, scarcely less importunate
in their demands upon the attention of their wearers, than the clothes
of women.  Men made a brave show in those days.  A group of men might
be as strong in color and as vivid in contrast as a group of women; the
neutralization of tone, the degradation of hue, did not begin till much
later, and only conquered in the cataclysm of the birth-throes of two
republics.  Blue and scarlet, green and yellow, crimson and purple,
orange and plum-color were the daily wear of the well-to-do; and even
for the less wealthy there were the warm browns and murreys, the
bottle-greens and clarets, and lavenders and buffs which made any crowd
a thing to please a painter in the eighteenth century.  In all the {18}
varying breeds of beaux and macaronis and dandies, of bucks and
fribbles, into which the fine gentlemen of the age allowed themselves
to be classified, the one dominant feature, the one common
characteristic, was the love for gold and silver and fine laces, for
gaudiness of color and richness of ornament, for every kind of
exquisite extravagance, every refinement in foppishness.  There was a
passion for the punctilio of dress, for the grace of a gold-headed cane
and a chased sword-hilt, for the right ribbon, the right jewel, the
right flower, and the right perfume, for the right powder in the hair
and the right seals on the fob and the right heels and buckles on the
shoes.  There was an ardent appreciation, an uncompromising worship of
the fine feathers that make fine birds.

[Sidenote: 1761--The wine-drinking propensities of the age]

The social system of the polite world had been slowly changing with the
successive Georges.  The familiar events in the lives of the well-to-do
classes were growing steadily later.  The dinner hour, which was
generally at noon or one in the reign of Queen Anne, had crept on to
three o'clock under the first, and to four o'clock under the second
George.  Under the third it was to grow later and later, until it made
Horace Walpole rage as if the world were coming to an end because among
fashionable folk it had settled itself at six o'clock.  In the country,
indeed, for the most part people lived the quiet lives and kept the
early hours of Sir Roger de Coverley.  But, however, London lived, and
whatever London chose to do, England's simple honest King and England's
simple honest Queen would have no concern with the follies of fashion
and the luxuries of late hours.  However much the rashness and
wrong-headedness of his public policy forced him to accept the services
and prime the pockets of a gang of drunkards and debauchees who called
themselves and were called the King's friends, the evil communications
had not the slightest influence upon the royal good manners, and did
not alter by one jot the rigid frugality of George's life and that of
his royal consort.  The King's friends were only the King's jackals;
they never were suffered for a moment to cross the line which severed
the {19} sovereign's private life from his public actions.  Indeed, it
may be assumed that few of the hard-drinking, hard-living, gambling,
raking ruffians who battened on the King's bounty, and who voted white
black and good bad with uncompromising pertinacity and unappeasable
relish, would have welcomed the hard seats at the royal table, the
meagre fare on the royal platters, the homely countrified air the royal
couple breathed, and the homely countrified hour at which the royal
couple took up their candles and went to bed.  George the Third would
be long asleep at an hour when his friends would be thinking of paying
a visit to Ranelagh, or preparing to spend a pleasant evening over
their cards, their dice-box, and their wine.

Especially their wine.  The one great characteristic of the gentility
of the day was its capacity for drinking wine.  "Wine, dear child, and
truth," says a Greek poet, naming the two most admirable gifts of life.
Truth was not always very highly prized by the men who set manners and
made history in the second half of the eighteenth century, but to wine
they clung with an absolutely unswerving and unalterable attachment.
If the great Oriental scholar who adorned the age had been more
fortunate in his studies, if Sir William Jones had chanced to make
acquaintance with a Persian poet who has since become very famous among
Englishmen, he would have found in the quatrains of Omar Khayyam the
very verses to please the minds and to interpret the desires of the
majority of the statesmen, soldiers, divines, lawyers, and fine
gentlemen of the day.  It is as impossible to imagine the men of the
eighteenth century without their incessant libations of wine as it is
impossible to imagine what the eighteenth century would have been like
if it had been for the most part abstemious, sober, or even reasonably
temperate.  As we read the memoirs of the day, and if we believe only a
part of what they tell us, making the most liberal allowance for the
exaggeration of the wit and the satire of the cynic, we have to picture
the political and social life of the time as a drunken orgy.
Undoubtedly there were then, as always, men of decent behavior and
discreet life, men who would {20} no more have exceeded in wine than in
any other way.  But the temper of the age and the tone of the
fashionable world was not in tune with their austerity.  Wonder at the
frequency with which men of position got drunk then is only rivalled by
wonder at the amount which they could drink without getting drunk.

[Sidenote: 1761--Unpropitious time for the King's rule]

The cry of the Persian nightingale to the Persian rose, "wine, wine,
wine," was the cry to which hearts responded most readily in all the
Georgian era.  Walpole the father made Walpole the son drink too much,
that he might not be unfilially sober while his father was unpaternally
drunk.  A generation later the younger Pitt plied himself with port as
a medicine for the gout.  The statesmen of the period, in the words of
Sir George Trevelyan, sailed on a sea of claret from one comfortable
official haven to another.  The amount of liquor consumed by each man
at a convivial gathering was Gargantuan, prodigious, hardly to be
credited.  Thackeray tells, in some recently published notes for his
lectures on the four Georges, of a Scotch judge who was forced to drink
water for two months, and being asked what was the effect of the
_régime_, owned that he saw the world really as it was for the first
time for twenty years.  For a quarter of a century he had never been
quite sober.  This man might be taken as a type of the _bons vivants_,
the _buveurs très illustres_ of the eighteenth century.  They were
never quite sober all through their lives.  They never saw the world as
it really was.  They pleaded, preached, debated, fought, gambled,
loved, and hated under the influence of their favorite vintage, saw all
things through a vinous fume, and judged all things with inflamed
pulses and a reeling brain.  But it must not be forgotten that the
population of the country was not entirely composed of corrupt,
hard-drinking politicians, profligate, hard-drinking noblemen, and
furious, hard-drinking country gentlemen.  If these were, in a sense,
the more conspicuous types, there were other types very different and
very admirable.  Apart from the great mass of the people, living their
dull daily lives, doing their dull daily tasks, quiet, ignorant,
unconscious that they {21} could or should ever have any say in the
disposition of their existences, there were both in town and country
plenty of decent, sober, honorable, and upright men and women who had
nothing in common with the fine gentlemen and the fine ladies who fill
the historical fashion plates.  If, unfortunately, Squire Western and
Parson Truliber were true pictures, at least Parson Adam and Sir Roger
de Coverley still held good.  None the less a young, self-willed King,
not too intelligent and not too well educated, could scarcely have come
to his sovereignty at a time less like to be fruitful of good for him
or for the country that he was resolved to govern.




{22}

CHAPTER XLIII.

GEORGE AND THE DRAGONS.

[Sidenote: 1760--George the Third as a "Briton"]

The King was not lucky in his first act of sovereignty.  In his speech
at the opening of Parliament on November 18, 1760, he used a form of
words which he, and some of those who advised him, evidently believed
to be eminently calculated to advance his popularity.  "Born and
educated in this country, I glory in the name of Briton," the King
said; and the words would seem to suggest such an intimacy of
association between the King and the kingdom as must needs knit the
hearts of ruler and of ruled more closely together.  Yet the choice of
words gave offence in certain quarters, and for two quite distinct
reasons.  Many of the adherents and admirers of the late King--for even
George the Second had his admirers--were indignant at the contrast
which the new King seemed deliberately to draw between himself and his
grandfather.  In accentuating the fact that he was born and bred in
England, George the Third appeared by imputation to be casting a slur
upon the German nature and German prejudices of George the Second.
This boast, however much it might offend the feelings of the friends of
the late King, was not at all calculated to affect the mass of the
public, who had little love for George the Second, and whose affection
for the new King was based mainly on the hope and the assumption that
he would prove to be as unlike the old King as possible.  But there was
another interpretation to be put upon the royal words which was likely
to cause a wider impression and a wider hostility.  It would seem that
some of the King's advisers wished him to write that he gloried in the
name of Englishman; it would even seem that the King had actually used
this word in the written draft of his speech.  {23} Lord Bute, it was
said, had struck out the word "Englishman," and had induced the King to
accept the word "Briton" as a substitute.  The difference would not be
quite without moment now: it appeared very momentous to many then, who
read in the word chosen a most convincing proof of the Scotch influence
behind the throne.  The King's pride in styling himself a Briton was
taken to be, what indeed it was, evidence of his affection for the
Scotch peer who had been so lately sworn into his Privy Council; and
the alarm and indignation of all who resented the Scotch influence was
very great.  The Duke of Newcastle in especial was irritated by the use
of the word "Briton," and the evidence it forced upon him of his own
waning influence and the waxing power of Bute.  He even went so far as
to wish that some notice should be taken of the "royal words" both in
the motion and the address; but in the end he and those who thought
with him felt that they must submit and stifle their anger for the
time, and so the King, unchallenged, proclaimed himself a Briton.

Whatever else George had learned in the days of his tutelage, he had
learned to form an ideal of what a king should be and a determination
to realize that ideal in his own rule.  The old idea of the personal
authority of the sovereign seemed to be passing away, to be dropping
out of the whole scheme and system of the English Constitution along
with the belief in the theory of the Divine right of kings.  The new
King, however, was resolved to prove that he was the head of the state
in fact as well as in name; that with his own hands he would restore to
himself the power and authority which his grandfather and his
great-grandfather had allowed unwisely to slip through their fingers.
The difficulties in the way of such an enterprise might very well have
disheartened any being less headstrong, any spirit less stubborn.
There were forces opposed to him that seemed to overmatch his puny
purpose as much as the giants overmatched the pigmy hero of the nursery
tale.  St. George in the chivalrous legend had but one dragon to
destroy; the young royal St. George set himself {24} with a light heart
to attack a whole brood of dragons--the dragons of the great Whig party.

When George the Third came to the throne the government of the country
was entirely in the hands of the Whigs.  The famous stately Whig
Houses, the Houses of Cavendish, of Russell, of Temple, of Bentinck, of
Manners, of Fitzroy, of Lennox, of Conway, of Pelham, of Wentworth,
were as little subservient to the sovereign as the great Frankish
nobles who stood about the throne of the Do-nothing kings.  The Tory
party was politically almost non-existent.  No Tory filled any office,
great or little, that was at the disposal of the Whigs, and the Whigs
had retained their ascendency for well-nigh half a century.  Jacobitism
had been the ruin of the Tory cause.  All Tories were not Jacobites,
but, roughly speaking, all Jacobites were Tories, and there were still,
even at the date of George's accession, stout-hearted, thick-headed
Tory gentlemen who believed in or vaguely hoped for a possible
restoration of a Stuart prince.  It is curious to find that, though the
Whig ranks stood fast in defence of the House of Hanover, had made that
House, and owed their ascendency to their loyalty to that House, the
latest Hanoverian sovereign not only disliked them, but dealt them blow
after blow until he overthrew their rule.  The Tories, who sighed for a
Stuart prince over the water, suddenly found to their astonishment that
they had a friend in the Hanoverian Guelph, whose name they hated,
whose right to the throne they challenged, and whose authority they
derided, when they dared not despise.

[Sidenote: 1761--The corrupt methods of the Whig party]

It cannot be denied that the Whigs had often abused, and more than
abused, the privileges which their long lease of power had given to
them.  All political parties ruled by corruption during the last
century.  The Whig was not more corrupt than the Tory, but it can
hardly be maintained that he was less corrupt.  The great Whig Houses
bought their way to power with resolute unscrupulousness.  A majority
in either House was simply a case of so much money down.  The genius of
Walpole had secured his own pre-eminence at the cost of the almost
total degradation {25} of the whole administrative system of the
country.  When George the Third came to the throne the Whigs were
firmly established in a powerful league of bigotry and in tolerance,
cemented by corruption, by bribery, by purchase of the most
uncompromising, of the basest kind.  George the Third had fostered
through youthful years of silence those strong ideas of his own about
the importance of the kingly office which he was now to proclaim by his
deeds.  In the way of those strong ideas, in the way of the steadfast
determination to be King in fact as well as in name, stood the great
Whig faction, flushed with its more than forty years' debauch of power,
insolent in the sense of its own omnipotence.  George was resolute to
show that the claim to omnipotence was a sham, and, to do him justice,
he succeeded in his resolve.

At the head of the Whig party in the House of Lords was the Duke of
Newcastle.  At its head in the House of Commons was William Pitt.
These two ministers seemed fixed and irremovable in their supreme
authority.  While Newcastle lavished the money of the state in that
spacious system of bribery which welded the party into so formidable a
mass, it was the proud privilege of Pitt to illuminate its policy by
his splendid eloquence at home and by the splendor of his enterprises
abroad.  Both the ministers were an enormous expense to the country.
Newcastle never counted the cost so long as there was a county member
to be bought or a placeman to be satisfied.  Pitt never counted the
cost so long as he could add another trophy of victory to the walls of
Westminster Abbey and inscribe another triumph on England's roll of
battles.  The sordid skill of Newcastle and the dazzling genius of Pitt
seemed between them to make the Whig party invulnerable and
irresistible.  There was no opposition in Upper or Lower House; there
had been for many years no hint of royal opposition.  Everything
promised a long continuance of the undisputed Whig sway when suddenly
the secret determination of a young King and the secret instigations of
a Scotch peer dissipated the stately fabric that had endured so long.

{26}

The fixed purpose of Lord Bute was to get rid of Pitt.  The fixed
purpose of Lord Bute created the fixed purpose of the King, and the
hours of Pitt's administration were numbered.  After a season of rare
glory, of resplendent triumph, Pitt found himself face to face with a
formidable coalition of interests against him, a coalition of interests
none the less formidable because it was headed by a man for whose
attainments, opinions, and ability Pitt must have felt, and scarcely
concealed, the greatest contempt.  Pitt had not made himself an object
of personal affection to those with whom he was brought into immediate
contact.  In the time of his supremacy he had carried himself with a
haughty arrogance, with an austere disdain which had set the smaller
men about him raging in secret antagonism.  The King, driven on by his
own dreams of personal authority, disliked the great minister.  Bute,
drunk with the wild ambitions of a weak man, seems to have believed
that in succeeding to Pitt's place he could also succeed to Pitt's
genius.  Pitt soon became aware of the strength of the cabal against
him.  While some of his colleagues were disaffected, others were almost
openly treacherous.  Bute's manner waxed more arrogant in Council.  The
King's demeanor grew daily cooler.  The great question of war or peace
was the question that divided the Cabinet.  On a question of war or
peace Bute triumphed and Pitt fell.

Pitt was all for carrying on the war, which had thus far proved so
successful for the British flag.  But Pitt was not powerfully supported
in his belief.  If he had his brothers-in-law James Grenville and Lord
Temple on his side, he had ranged against him a powerful opposition
formed by Henry Fox and George Grenville, by Lord Hardwicke and the
Duke of Bedford.  On the side of the peace party Bute ranged himself,
bringing with him all the enormous weight that his influence with the
King gave him.  The case of the peace party was a simple,
straight-forward case.  Why, they asked, should we continue to fight?
Our sweet enemy France is on her knees and ready to accept our terms.
Let us enforce those terms and make {27} a triumphant peace instead of
further bleeding our exhausted treasury in the prosecution of a war
from which we have now nothing more to gain.  Chance gave the peace
party their opportunity.  Pitt had become cognizant of the treaty
between France and Spain known as the "Family Compact," the secret
treaty which we have already fully described, by which the two Bourbon
princes agreed to make common cause against England.  Pitt straightway
proposed that the hostile purposes of Spain should be anticipated by an
immediate declaration of war against Spain and the immediate despatch
of a fleet to Cadiz.  Bute promptly opposed the proposal in the
Cabinet, and carried the majority of the Council with him in his
opposition.  Pitt instantly resigned.

[Sidenote: 1761--Pitt's probity]

A curious thing had happened at the coronation ceremony.  One of the
largest jewels in the royal crown got loose and fell from its place.
This was looked upon at the time by superstitious people as a sinister
omen.  These now saw the fulfilment of their forebodings in the loss to
the state of the services of the great minister.  The King himself had
no sense that his regal glory was dimmed in its lustre by the
resignation of Pitt.  He was so delighted at having got rid thus easily
of the great obstacle to his own authority that he could readily
consent to lend to the act of parting a gracious air of regret.  Much
was done to lighten Pitt's fall.  Very liberal offers were made by the
King, offers which seemed to many to mask a hope, and more than a hope,
of undermining the popularity of the great leader.  Pitt declined
several offers that were personal to himself, but expressed his
readiness to accept some signs of the royal favor on behalf of his wife
and his family.  A barony was conferred upon Pitt's wife and a pension
of three thousand a year upon Pitt for three lives.  There was nothing
unworthy in Pitt's action.  He was notoriously poor; he was no less
notoriously honest; it was perfectly certain that, in an age when a
successful politician was for the most part a peculator, no shilling of
public money had ever stuck to Pitt's fingers.  If he was instantly
attacked by libels and pamphlets that were {28} probably paid for by
Bute, or that at least were inspired by a desire to please Bute, the
attacks did Pitt more good than harm.  They produced a prompt reaction,
and only had the effect of making Pitt more dear to the people than
before.  His pictures had an enormous sale, and his partisans on the
press poured out caricatures and lampoons upon Bute and his Scotchmen
in greater volume and with greater violence than ever.

Bute was not content with the overthrow of Pitt.  He wished to stand in
isolated splendor, and to accomplish this Newcastle too must go.  The
great briber of yesterday had to give way to the great briber of
to-day, and Bute stood alone before the world, the head of the King's
Ministry, the favorite of the King, the champion of a policy that
promised peace abroad and purity at home, and that resulted in a
renewal of war under conditions of peculiar disadvantage and a renewed
employment of the basest forms of political corruption.  Bute had
gained the power he longed for, but Bute was soon to learn that power
need not and did not mean popularity.  "The new Administration begins
tempestuously," Walpole wrote on June 20, 1762.  "My father was not
more abused after twenty years than Lord Bute is after twenty days.
Weekly papers swarm, and, like other swarms of insects, sting."  Bute
affected an indifference to this unpopularity which he did not really
feel.  It is not flattering to a statesman's pride to be unable to go
abroad without being hissed and pelted by the mob, and it is hard for a
minister to convince himself of the admiration of a nation when a
strong bodyguard is necessary to secure him from the constant danger of
personal attacks.  Bute's character did not refine under the tests
imposed upon it.  His objectionable qualities grew more and more
unpopular.  The less he was liked the less he deserved to be liked.
Adversity did not magnify that small soul.  In his mean anger he sought
for mean revenge.  Every person who owed an appointment to the former
ministry felt the weight of the favorite's wrath.  Dismissal from
office was the order of the day, and Whig after Whig was forced to
leave his place or office open for {29} some Tory who was ready to
express an enthusiasm for the statesmanship of Bute.

[Sidenote: 1762--Bute's foreign policy]

Bute's idea of a foreign policy was to reverse the policy of Pitt.  He
abandoned Frederick of Prussia to his enemies by cutting off the
subsidy which Pitt had paid him, on the ground that the time agreed on
for the subsidy was up, and that as England only granted it for her own
purposes, and not to benefit Frederick, she was justified in
discontinuing it whenever it suited her.  Only a chance saved the Great
Frederick from what seemed like inevitable ruin.  The Czarina,
Elizabeth of Russia, died, and was succeeded by Peter the Third.  With
the change of sovereign came a change in the purposes of Russia.  The
Russian army, which had fought with Austria against Frederick, now
received orders to fight with Frederick against Austria.  The war with
Spain that Pitt had predicted Bute was obliged to wage.  The conduct of
Spain made it impossible for him not to declare war, and, aided by
Pitt's preparations, he was able to carry on the war with considerable
success.  But the credit for such success was generally given to Pitt,
and when Bute made peace with Spain and France it was generally felt
that the terms were not such as Pitt would have exacted after so long
and splendid a succession of victories.  There was, indeed, a good deal
to be said for the peace, but at the time those who tried to say it did
not get a very patient hearing.  It was well that the long Continental
war was ended.  Few of those engaged in it had gained much by it.
Prussia, indeed, though it left her wellnigh bankrupt and almost ruined
by the enormous burdens she had sustained, was better in position.  She
came out of the struggle without the loss of a single acre of
territory, and with what Frederick especially coveted, the rank of a
first-rate Power in Europe.  If Prussia, which had been so long
England's ally, had gained, England had not lost.  Undoubtedly Pitt's
war was popular; no less undoubtedly Bute's peace was unpopular, and
the unpopularity of the policy intensified the unpopularity of the
minister.  In the eyes of the bulk of the English people Lord Bute, as
a Scotchman, was {30} a foreigner, as much a foreigner as if he hailed
from France or the Low Countries.  Lord Chesterfield was finely
disdainful of the popular opposition to Bute on account of his
nationality.  "If the vulgar are ever right," he said, "they are right
for the wrong reason.  What they selected to attack in Lord Bute was
his being a Scotchman, which was precisely what he could not help."
But it was not Bute's nationality, so much as his flagrant partiality
to his fellow-countrymen, that made him unpopular.  His affection for
his own countrymen, however admirable and even touching in itself, was
resented fiercely by the English people, who found themselves
threatened by a new invasion of the Picts and Scots.  Across the Border
came a steady stream of Bute's henchmen, men with names that seemed
outlandish and even savage to the Londoner, and every Scotchman found,
or hoped to find, through the influence of Bute his way to office and
emolument.  The growing hatred for Bute extended itself as rapidly as
unjustly to the nation from which Bute came.

The story of Bute's Ministry is a story of astonishing mistakes.  The
Tories, who for five-and-forty years had inveighed against the
political corruption which, fostered by Walpole, seemed to have
culminated under Newcastle, now boldly went in for a system of flagrant
bribery which surpassed anything yet essayed by the most cynical of
Whig ministers.  The Paymaster's Office became a regular mart where
parliamentary votes were bought and sold as unblushingly as humbler
folk bought and sold groceries across a counter.  A Ministry weakened
by an unpopular peace, and only held together by such cynical
merchandise, was not likely to withstand a strong storm, and the storm
was not long in rising.

To swell the exchequer, the Ministry proposed to raise revenue by a tax
on cider and perry.  It was resolved to levy an imposition of four
shillings per hogshead on the grower of the apple wine and the pear
wine.  The cider counties raised a clamor of indignation that found a
ready echo in London.  Pitt, Beckford, Lyttelton, Hardwicke, Temple,
all spoke against the proposed measure and {31} denounced its
injustice.  George Grenville defended the bill.

[Sidenote: 1763--George Grenville's characteristics]

Grenville was one of those honorable and upright statesmen who do not
contrive to make either honor or rectitude seem lovable qualities.  He
had first made himself conspicuous as one of the Boy Patriots who
rallied with Pitt against Walpole.  His abilities ran with swiftness
along few and narrow channels.  He was desperately well informed about
many things, and desperately in earnest about anything which he
undertook.  Blessed or cursed with a solemnity that never was enlivened
by a gleam of humor, a ray of fancy, or a flash of eloquence, Grenville
regarded the House of Commons with the cold ferocity of a tyrannical
and pompous schoolmaster.  A style of speech that would have made a
discourse upon Greek poetry seem arid and a dissertation upon Italian
painting colorless--if it were possible to conceive Grenville as
wasting time or thought on such trifles--added no grace to the
exposition of a fiscal measure or charm to the formality of a phalanx
of figures.  He was gloomy, dogged, domineering, and small-minded.  His
nearest approach to a high passion was his worship of economy; his
nearest approach to a splendid virtue was his stubborn independence.
He abandoned Pitt for Bute because he detested Pitt's prodigal policy,
but Bute was the more deceived if he fancied that he was to find in
Grenville the convenient mask that he had lost in Newcastle; and the
King himself had yet to learn how indifferent the dry, morose pedant
and preacher could be not merely to royal favor, but even to the
expression of royal opinion.  It was truly said of him by the greatest
of his contemporaries that he seemed to have no delight out of the
House except in such things as in some way related to the business that
was to be done within it.  The "undissipated and unwearied application"
which he devoted to everything that he undertook was now employed in
exasperating the country.  The time was not yet ripe for it to be
employed in dismembering the empire.

In his support of the cider tax Grenville managed to {32} make it and
himself ridiculous at the same time.  In his defence he kept asking,
over and over again, "Where will you find another tax? tell me where."
Pitt, who was listening disdainfully to his arguments, followed one of
these persistent interrogations by softly singing to himself, very
audibly, the words which belonged to a popular song, "Gentle shepherd,
tell me where."  The House took the hint with delight, and the title of
Gentle Shepherd remained an ironical adornment of Grenville for the
rest of his life.

Bute's disregard of public opinion was contrasted to his disadvantage
with the conduct of Sir Robert Walpole, who bowed to the demonstration
against his far wiser system of excise.  Bute forced his tax forward in
defiance of the popular feeling, and then, apparently alarmed by the
strength of the spirit he had himself raised, he answered the general
indignation by a sudden and welcome resignation on April 8, 1763.  This
was the end of Bute's attempt to be the recognized head of a
government, though he still hoped and believed that he could rule from
behind the throne instead of standing conspicuously at its side.  To
his unpopularity as a foreigner, to his unpopularity as a favorite,
public hostility added a fresh, if a far-fetched and fantastic reason
for detesting Bute.  It was pointed out that he had Stuart blood in his
veins, that an ancestor of his had been the brother of a Scottish King.
Any stick is good enough to strike an unpopular statesman with, and
there were not wanting people to assert, and perhaps even to believe,
that Bute had entertained insidious schemes for raising himself to the
throne.  Bute is said to have declared that he resigned in order to
avoid involving the King in the dangers with which his minister was
threatened.  If he did feel any fears for the King's safety he had
certainly done his best to make those fears reasonable.  It has not
often been given to any statesman to hold the highest office in the
state for so short a time, and in that time to accomplish so large an
amount of harm.  And the immediate harm of that year and a half was
little as compared with the harm that was to follow, a fatal legacy,
{33} from the principles that Bute advocated and the policy that Bute
initiated.

[Sidenote: 1763--The retirement of Bute]

With Bute retired two of his followers, Dashwood and Fox.  Dashwood
went to the Upper House as Lord Le Despencer; Fox accompanied him as
Lord Holland.  The disappearance of Dashwood from the Commons was a
matter of little importance.  The disappearance of Fox marked the
conclusion of what had been a remarkable, of what might have been a
great career.  From this time Fox ceased to take any real part in
public business, and if his presence lent no lustre to the Lords, his
absence made the character of the Commons more honorable.  Fox, with
all his faults, and they were many and grave, had in him the gifts of
the politician and the capacity of the statesman.  Dashwood was a
vulgar fool, who, as Horace Walpole said, with the familiarity and
phrase of a fishwife, introduced the humors of Wapping behind the veil
of the Treasury.  But Fox was a very different type of man.  Had he
been as keen for his own honor as he was eager in the acquisition of
money, had he been as successful in building up a record of great deeds
as he was successful in building up an enormous fortune, he might have
left behind him one of the greatest names in the history of his age.
But he carried with him to the Upper House the rare abilities which he
had put to such unworthy uses, and he lives in memory chiefly as the
father of his son.  In having such a son he rendered the world a good
service, which he himself labored with infinite pains to make into an
evil service.

A young, inexperienced, and headstrong King found himself suddenly the
central figure of perhaps as singular a set of men as ever were
gathered together for the purpose of directing the destinies of a
nation.  A famous caricature of the period represents the front of a
marionette-show, through an aperture of which the hand of Bute pulls
the wires that make the political puppets work, while Bute himself
peeps round the corner of the show to observe their antics.  No
stranger dolls ever danced around a royal figure to the manipulation of
a favorite's fingers.  At {34} a time when political parties as they
are now familiar to us did not exist, when Whiggism was so dominant
that Opposition in the modern sense was unknown, when the pleasures and
the gains of administration were almost entirely reserved for a
privileged caste, and when self-interest was the rarely disavowed spur
of all individual action, it is scarcely surprising to find that the
vast majority of the statesmen of the day were as unadmirable in their
private as they were unheroic in their public life.  For then and long
after, the political atmosphere, bad at its best, was infamous at its
worst, and by an unhappy chance the disposition of the King led him to
favor in their public life the very men whose private life would have
filled him with loathing, and to detest, where it was impossible to
despise, the men who came to the service of their country with
characters that were clean from a privacy that was honorable.  Many, if
not most, of the leading figures of that hour would have been more
appropriately situated as the members of a brotherhood of thieves and
the parasites of a brothel than as the holders of high office and the
caretakers of a royal conscience.  There were men upon the highway,
rogues with a bit of crape across their foreheads and a pair of pistols
in their holsters, haunting the Portsmouth Road or Hounslow Heath, with
the words "Stand and deliver" ever ready on their lips, who seem
relatively to be men of honor and probity compared with a man like the
first Lord Holland or like Rigby.  There were poor slaves of the stews,
wretched servants of the bagnios, whose lives seem sweet and decorous
when compared with those of a Sandwich or a Dashwood or a Duke of
Grafton.  Yet these men, whose companionship might be rejected by Jack
Sheppard, and whose example might be avoided by Pompey Bum, are the men
whose names are ceaselessly prominent in the early story of the reign,
and to whose power and influence much of its calamities are directly
due.

[Sidenote: 1763--The Duke of Grafton]

It is not easy to accord a primacy of dishonor to any one of the many
statesmen whose names degrade the age.  Possibly the laurels of shame,
possibly the palms of infamy {35} may be proffered to Augustus Henry
Fitzroy, third Duke of Grafton.  When George the Third came to the
throne the Duke of Grafton was only twenty-five years old, and had been
three years in the House of Lords, after having passed about twice as
many months in the House of Commons.  Destined to live for more than
half a century after the accession, and to die while the sovereign had
still many melancholy years to live, the Duke of Grafton enjoyed a long
career, that was unadorned by either public or private virtue.  There
is no need to judge Grafton on the indictment of the satirist who in a
later day made the name of Junius more terrible to the advisers of King
George than ever was the name of Pietro Aretino to the princes whom he
scourged.  The coldest chronicle of the Duke's careers, the baldest
narrative of his life, proves him to have been no less dangerous to the
public weal as a statesman than he was noxious to human society as an
individual.  He had not even the redeeming grace that the charm of
beauty of person lent to some of his companions in public incompetency
and private profligacy.  His face and presence were as unattractive as
his manners were stiff and repellent.  His grandfather, the first Duke,
was an illegitimate son of Charles the Second by the Duchess of
Cleveland, and the Duke's severest critic declared that he blended the
characteristics of the two Charles Stuarts.  Sullen and severe without
religion, and profligate without gayety, he lived like Charles the
Second, without being an amiable companion, and might die as his father
did, without the reputation of a martyr.

Grafton did not die the death of his royal ancestor.  He lived through
seventy-six years, of which less than half were passed in the fierce
light of a disgraceful notoriety, and more than half in a retirement
which should be styled obscure rather than decent.  The only
conspicuously creditable act of that long career was the patronage he
extended to the poet Bloomfield, a patronage that seems to have been
prompted rather by the fact that the writer was born near Grafton's
country residence than by any intelligent appreciation of literature.
His curious want of taste {36} and feeling allowed him to parade his
mistress, Nancy Parsons, in the presence of the Queen, at the Opera
House, and to marry, when he married the second time, a first cousin of
the man with whom his first wife had eloped, John, Earl of Upper
Ossory.  If his example as a father was not admirable, at least he
showed it to a numerous offspring, for by his two marriages he was the
parent of no fewer than sixteen children.

[Sidenote: 1763--Rigby and the Duke of Bedford]

Perhaps the prize for sheer political ruffianism, for the frank
audacity of the freebooter, unshadowed by the darker vices of his
better-born associates, may be awarded to Rigby.  Not that Rigby
redeemed by many private virtues the unblushing effrontery of his
public career.  It was given to few men to be as bad as Dashwood, and
Rigby was not one of the few.  But his gross and brutal disregard of
all decency in his acts of public plunder--for even peculation may be
done with distinction--was accompanied by a gross and brutal disregard
of all decency in his tastes and pleasures with his intimate
associates.  Richard Rigby sprang from the trading class.  He was the
son of a linen-draper who was sufficiently lucky to make a fortune as a
factor to the South Sea Company, and who was, in consequence, able to
afford his son the opportunity of a good education, and to launch him
on the grand tour of Europe with every aptitude for the costly vices
that men in those days seemed to think it the chief object of travel to
cultivate, and with plenty of money in his pocket to gratify all his
inclinations.  Rigby did not take much advantage of his educational
opportunities.  His Latinity laid him open to derision in the House of
Commons, and there were times when his spelling would have reflected
little credit upon a seamstress.  But he was quite capable of learning
abroad all the evil that the great school of evil was able to teach a
willing student.  He returned to England, and began his life there with
three pronounced tastes: for gambling, for wine, and for the baser uses
of politics.  His ambitions prompted him to adhere to the party of the
Prince of Wales, and his ready purse won him a welcome among the
courtiers of Leicester House.  The Prince of {37} Wales did little to
gratify his hopes, and Rigby would have found it difficult to escape
from the straits into which his debts had carried him if his gift of
pleasing had not procured for him a powerful patron.  The Duke of
Bedford had been attracted by the remarkable convivial powers of Rigby,
powers remarkable in an age when to be conspicuous for conviviality
demanded very unusual capacity both of head and of stomach.  To be
admired by Bedford was in itself a patent of dishonor, but it was a
profitable patent to Rigby.  The Duke, who was accused at times of a
shameful parsimony, was generous to profusion towards the bloated
buffoon who was able and willing to divert him, and from that hour
Rigby's pockets never wanted their supply of public money.

There were few redeeming features in Rigby's character.  It was his
peculiar privilege to be false to his old friends and to corrupt his
young ones.  In an age when sobriety was scorned or ignored he had the
honor to be famous for his insobriety.  A sycophant to those who could
serve him and a bully to those who could not, Rigby added the meanness
of the social parvenu to the malignity of the political bravo.  At a
time when men of birth and rank came to the House of Commons in the
negligence of morning dress, Rigby was conspicuous for the splendor of
his attire, and illuminated the green benches by a costume whose glow
of color only faintly attenuated the glowing color of his face.  There
were baser and darker spirits ready for the service of the King; there
was no one more unlovely.

Rigby's patron was as unadmirable as Rigby himself.  He was fifty years
old when George the Third came to the throne, and he had lived his half
a century in the occupation of many offices and through many
opportunities for distinction without distinguishing himself.  He had
still eleven years to live without adding anything of honor or credit
to his name, or earning any other reputation than that of a corrupt
politician whose private life was passed chiefly in the society of
gamblers, jockeys, and buffoons.  He had been Governor-General of
Ireland, and had {38} governed it as well as Verres had governed
Sicily.  He had been publicly horsewhipped by a county attorney on the
racecourse at Lichfield.  His career, always unimportant, was
ignominious when it was not incapable, and it was generally both the
one and the other.

All the statesmen of the day were not of the school of Grafton.  There
were numerous exceptions to the rule of Rigby.  The Graftons and the
Rigbys gain an unnatural prominence from the fact that then and later
it was to such tools the King turned, and that he always found such
tools ready to his hands.  There were many men who, without any show of
austerity or any burden of morality, were at least of a very different
order from the creatures whom the King did not indeed delight to honor,
but whom he condescended to employ.  The Earl of Granville, with the
weight of seventy years upon his shoulders, carried into active
political life under his fourth sovereign the same qualities both for
good and evil that adorned or injured the name of Carteret.  He
accepted Lord Bute's authority, and he did not live long enough to
witness Bute's fall.  He accorded to the peace brought about by Bute
"the approbation of a dying statesman," as the most honorable peace the
country had ever seen.  He died in the January of 1763, leaving behind
him the memory of a long life which had always been lived to his own
advantage but by no means to the disadvantage of his country.  He left
behind him a memory of rare public eloquence and graceful private
conversation, of an elegant scholarship that prompted him to the
patronage of scholars, of a profound belief in his own judgment, and a
no less profound contempt for the opinions of others.  His public life
was honest in an epoch when public dishonesty was habitual, and the
best thing to be said of him was the best thing he said of himself,
that when he governed Ireland he governed so as to please Dean Swift.

[Sidenote: 1763--Dr. Samuel Johnson]

At a time when the King was surrounded by such advisers as we have
seen, the King's chief servant and most loyal subject was a man no
longer young, who had nothing to do with the courts or councils, and
who yet was of {39} greater service to the throne and its occupier than
all the House of Lords and half the House of Commons.  Long years
before George the Third was born, a struggling, unsuccessful
schoolmaster gave up a school that was well-nigh given up by its
scholars and came to London to push his fortune as a man of letters.
When George the Third came to the throne the schoolmaster had not found
fortune--that he never found--but he had found fame, and the name of
Samuel Johnson was known and loved wherever an English word was spoken
or an English book read.  The conditions of political life in England
in the eighteenth century made it impossible for such a man as Samuel
Johnson ever to be the chosen counsellor, the minister of an English
king.  The field of active politics was reserved for men of family, of
wealth, or of the few whom powerful patronage served in lieu of birth
and aided to the necessary opulence.  Johnson was one of the most
influential writers of his day, one of the strongest intellectual
forces then at work, one of the greatest personalities then alive.  But
it would no more have occurred to him to dream of administrative honors
and a place in a Ministry than it would have occurred to George the
Third to send one of his equerries to the dingy lodgings of an author
with the request that Dr. Johnson would step round to St. James's
Palace and favor his Majesty with his opinion on this subject or on
that.  It is not certain that the King would have gained very much if
he had done anything so unusual.  Dr. Johnson's views were very much
the King's views, and we know that he would have been as obstinate as
the King in many if not most of the cases in which the King's obstinacy
was very fatal to himself.

When Queen Anne was still upon the throne of England, when James the
Second still lived with a son who dreamed of being James the Third, and
when George the First was only Elector of Hanover, people still
attributed to the sovereign certain gifts denied to subjects.  They
believed, for instance, that the touch of the royal fingers could cure
the malady of scrofula, then widely known in consequence of that belief
as the King's Evil.  In obedience to that {40} belief, in the spring of
1712 some poor folk of Lichfield travelled to London with their infant
son, in the hope that Queen Anne would lay her hand upon the child and
make him whole.  There were days appointed for the ceremony of the
touch, and on one of those days the Johnsons of Lichfield carried their
little Samuel into the royal presence, and Queen Anne stroked the child
with her hand.  For more than seventy years a dim memory remained with
Johnson of a stately lady in black; for more than seventy years the
malady that her touch was thought to heal haunted him.  When the man
who had been the sick child died, the third prince of a foreign house
was seated on the throne of England, and the third of the line owed,
unconscious of the debt, no little of his security on his throne and no
little of his popularity with the mass of his people to the struggling
author who had received the benediction of the last Stuart sovereign of
England.

Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, in Staffordshire, on September 8,
1709.  His father was a bookseller, perhaps too fond of books to be a
good dealer in them.  But his crowded shelves were a paradise to his
son when at the age of sixteen he came home from the last of many
schoolings, each of which had taught him much.  For two years he read
his way recklessly, riotously, and joyously through his father's
migratory library.  He took the advice of the varlet in "The Taming of
the Shrew," and studied what he most affected.  His memory was as vast
as his head was huge and his body bulky.  He read what he liked, and he
stored his mind with as miscellaneous a mass of knowledge as ever was
heaped up within the pent-house of one human skull.  That youthful zeal
and fiery heat of study remained youthful with him to the end of his
many days; the passion for learning never burned low in that mighty
brain.  The man who in his old age studied Dutch to test the acquiring
powers of his intellect, and still found them freshly tempered, acted
in his ebullient boyhood as if, like Bacon, he had taken all knowledge
to be his province.  The man who in his old age found an exquisite
entertainment in reading a Spanish romance of chivalry, in his eager
{41} boyhood found the Latin poems of Petrarch sweeter than apples.
The great Italian who counted the sonnets to which he owes his
immortality but as the clouds of a dream, and who built his hopes of
fame upon that "Africa" which the world has been willing to forget,
found the reader he would have welcomed and the student he would have
cherished in the ungainly youth who pored over him in a garret.  The
boy Johnson, bent over the great folio, forgot that he was poor, forgot
that he was ill-clad, under the spell of the stately lines that their
poet believed to be not less than Virgilian.  He had set out on an
errand even more trivial than that of Saul the son of Kish, and he had
found the illimitable kingdom of dreams.

[Sidenote: 1728--The college days of Dr. Johnson]

Chance sent the student of Petrarch to Pembroke College, Oxford, where
he passed two years eating the bitter bread of poverty in the bitter
pride of youth.  He was hungry, he was ragged, he was conscious of his
great knowledge and his great gifts, and he saw all around him men in
high places whose attainments he despised, and men seeking the same
goal as himself whose happy ease of circumstances he affected to
disdain and was compelled to envy.  His wild soul rose in rebellion at
the inequalities of life.  He passed for a mutineer.

His college days were bitter and rebellious; days of hunger and thirst
and ruined raiment.  Some well-meaning person, moved to pity by the
sight of Johnson's shabby shoes, patched and mended till they were past
all wholesome cobbling, placed a new sound pair at Johnson's door in
nameless benevolence.  Johnson cast them from him with fury, too proud
to be shod by another man's bounty.  He drifted through his few and
gloomy college days deriding and despising those in authority;
seemingly wasting his time and yet not wasting it; translating Pope's
"Messiah" into such noble Latin that Pope, moved by honest admiration,
declared that future times would be unable to tell which was the
original and which was the translation.  Johnson could be nowhere
without learning, and he learned something at Oxford; but in any case
his stay was short, and he drifted back to Lichfield, leaving on the
{42} banks of the Isis an amazing memory of a sullen savage creature,
brimmed with the strangest miscellaneous learning.  In Lichfield his
father's death, following hard upon his return from Oxford, left him
lonelier and poorer than ever, troubled by the grim necessity to be
fed, clothed, and sheltered, and by the uncertainty how to set about
it.  He did set about it, earnestly, strenuously, if not very
fruitfully.

[Sidenote: 1737--Johnson and his work]

He was ready to do anything, to turn to anything, to write, to
translate, to teach.  He fell in love with an amazing woman more than
twenty years his senior, monstrously fat, monstrously painted,
monstrously affected and absurd; he fell in love with her, and he
married her.  She had a little money, and Johnson set up an academy for
the instruction of youth.  But youth would not come to be instructed.
One youth came, one of the very few, a soldier's son and a grandson of
a Huguenot refugee, named David Garrick.  The master and the pupil
became friends, and the friendship lasted with life.  Master and pupil
resolved to make the adventure of the town together.  The eyes of
aspiring provincials turned always to the great city, every ambitious
provincial heart beat with desire for the conquest of London.  The
priest of letters and the player of parts, the real man and the shadow
of all men, packed up bag and baggage and came to London to very
different fame and very different fortune.  The great city had one kind
of welcome to give to the man who desired to speak truth and another to
the man who proposed to give pleasure.  The chances for men of letters
and for players were very unlike just then.  The two strands of life
ran across the web of London, the strand of Johnson iron-gray, the
strand of Garrick gleaming gold.  Through long years Johnson hid in
dingy courts and alleys, ill-clothed, ill-fed, an uncouth Apollo in the
service of Admetus Cave and his kind, while the marvellous actor was
climbing daily higher and higher on the ladder of an actor's fame, the
friend of the wealthy, the favored of the great, the admired, the
applauded, the well-beloved.  Garrick deserved his fame and his
fortune, his splendid successes and {43} his shining rewards; but the
grand, rough writer of books did not deserve his buffets and mishaps,
his ferocious hungers, his acquaintanceship with sponging-houses, and
all the catalogue of his London agonies.  His struggle for life was a
Titan's struggle, and it was never either selfish or ignoble.  He
wanted to live and be heard because he knew that he had something to
say that was worth hearing.  He needed to live for the sake of his
ardent squalid affections, for the sake of the people who were always
dependent upon his meagre bounty, for the sake of the wife he loved so
deeply, mourned so truly when she died, and remembered with such tender
loyalty so long as life was left to him.  Miserably poor himself, he
always had about him people more miserable and more poor, who looked to
him for the very bread and water of their affliction, dependents whom
he tended not merely generously, but, what was better still,
cheerfully.  Under conditions of existence that would have seemed
crushing to men of letters with a tithe of Johnson's greatness of soul,
Johnson fought his way inch by inch in the terrible career of the man
who lived by his pen, and by his pen alone.  He wrote anything and
everything so long as it was honorable to write and promised to make
the world better.  But it was not what Johnson wrote so much as what
Johnson did that commanded his age and commands posterity.  In the
truest sense of the word, he lived beautifully.  "Rasselas" and "The
Idler," "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes," "The Rambler" and
the "Sessions of Lilliput," and the "Lives of the Poets," and even the
famous "Dictionary," only claim remembrance because they were done by a
man who would be as interesting a study and as ennobling an example if
he had never written a line of the works that bear his signature in
every sentence of their solemn, even their portentous majesty.  Johnson
had the kindest heart wrapped in a rugged hide.  One of the noblest of
the many noble stories about him relates how he and a friend, whose
name of Burke was not then famous, found a poor woman of the streets
houseless, hungry, and exhausted in the streets.  Burke had a room
which he could {44} offer the poor creature for a night's shelter; but
Burke could not get the woman there.  Johnson had no room--his
dependents swarmed over every available space at his command--but he
had the strength of a giant, and he used it as a giant should, in
carrying the poor wretch in his arms to the roof that Burke could offer
her.  Long years later, another man of letters, hungry, homeless, and
friendless, sick almost unto death, found a kind friend and gentle
nurse in a woman of the streets.  In succoring De Quincey we may well
think that Anne was repaying something of the debt owed by one of her
unhappy class to two of the glories of literature and of humanity.

Slowly and surely Johnson's fame spread.  The "Dictionary," massive
fruit of many vigils, reward of many supplications, made him
illustrious.  It might have been dedicated to Chesterfield, if
Chesterfield had shown to the struggling author the courtesy he was
eager to extend to the established writer.  Chesterfield need not be
blamed if he was reluctant to welcome a queer ungainly creature whose
manners were appalling, and of whose genius no one save himself was
assured.  But he was to be blamed, and he deserved the stern punishment
he received in Johnson's stinging letter of repudiation, for
attempting, when Johnson was distinguished and beyond his power to
help, to win the great honor of a dedication by a proffer of friendship
that came too late.  Johnson needed no Chesterfield now.  London had
learned to reverence him, had learned to love him.  His friends were
the best Englishmen alive; the club which Johnson established bore on
its roll the most illustrious names in the country; at the home of the
Thrales Johnson tasted and appreciated all that was best in the home
life of the time.  He had a devoted friend in the person of a fussy,
fantastic, opinionated, conceited little Scotch gentleman, Mr. James
Boswell of Auchinleck, who clung to his side, treasured his utterances,
cherished his sayings, and made himself immortal in immortalizing his
hero.  It is good to remember that when George the Third came to the
throne a man like Johnson was alive.  It is not so good to remember how
seldom he found himself {45} face to face with the King, whom he might
have aided with his wisdom, his counsel, and his friendship.

[Sidenote: 1763--Johnson's influence on literature]

Johnson's presence adorned and honored four-and-twenty years of a reign
that was to last for sixty years.  He was the friend or the enemy of
every man worthy to arouse any strong emotion of love or scorn in a
strong spirit.  He had the admiration of all whose admiration was worth
the having.  The central figure of the literary London of his lifetime,
he exercised something of the same social and intellectual influence
over all Londoners that Socrates exercised over all Athenians.  The
affection he inspired survived him, and widens with the generations.
In the hundred years and more that have passed since Johnson's death,
his memory has grown greener.  The symbol of his life and of its lesson
is to be found in what Hawthorne beautifully calls the sad and lovely
legend of the man Johnson's public penance in the rain, amid the
jeering crowd, to expiate the offence of the child against its father.
Johnson was the very human apostle of a divine righteousness.




{46}

CHAPTER XLIV.

THE "NORTH BRITON"

[Sidenote: 1763--John Wilkes]

One of the most beautiful places on one of the most beautiful rivers in
the world is Medmenham on the Thames, hard by Marlow.  In the awakening
of spring, in the tranquillity of summer, or the rich decline of
August, the changing charm of the spot appeals with the special
insistence that association lends to nature.  Medmenham is a haunted
place.  Those green fields and smiling gardens have been the scenes of
the strangest idyls; those shining waters have mirrored the fairest of
frail faces; those woods have echoed to the names of the light nymphs
of town and the laughter of modish satyrs.  It was once very lonely in
its loveliness, a ground remote, where men could do and did do as they
pleased unheeded and unobserved.  Where now from April to October a
thousand pleasure-boats pass by, where a thousand pleasure-seekers land
and linger, a century and a half ago the spirit of solitude brooded,
and those who came there came to a calm as unvexed and as enchanting as
the calm of Avallon.  They made strange uses of their exquisite
opportunity.  They profaned the groves whose very winds breathed peace;
they polluted the stream that a poet would have found sacred.  The
remains are there of a Cistercian abbey, the ruins of a ruin, twice
fallen into disuse and decay.  It was a ruin in the eighteenth century
when a member of Parliament, who was also a baronet and a Chancellor of
the Exchequer, took it into his evil head to repair it.  Under the care
of Sir Francis Dashwood it was restored for a new and altered life.
The abbey rose again, and once again was associated with a brotherhood
of monks.  But where the quiet Cistercians had lived and prayed a new
{47} brotherhood of St. Francis, named after their founder, devoted
themselves to all manner of blasphemy, to all manner of offence.  In a
spot whose beauty might well be expected to have only a softening
influence, whose memories might at least be found exalting, a handful
of disreputable men gathered together to degrade the place, and, as far
as that was possible, themselves, with the beastly pleasures and
beastly humors of the ingrained blackguard.

The Hell-Fire Club was dead and gone, but the spirit of the Hell-Fire
Club was alive and active.  The monks of St. Francis were worthy pupils
of the principles of the Duke of Wharton.  They sought to make their
profligacy, in which they strove to be unrivalled, piquant by a parody
of the religious ceremonies of the Christian faith.  The energy and the
earnestness which other men devote to the advancement of some public
cause, to the furtherance of their country's welfare, or even to the
gratification of their own ambitions, these men devoted to a passion
for being pre-eminent in sin, conspicuous in infamy.  If they succeeded
in nothing else, they succeeded in making their names notorious and
shameful, they succeeded in stirring the envy of men no better than
they, but less enabled by wealth or position to gratify their passions.
They succeeded in arousing the loathing not merely of honest men, but
even of the knaves and fools whose rascality was not so rotten and
whose folly was not so foul as that of the noblemen and statesmen who
rioted within the walls of Medmenham.

It is curious and melancholy to record that the leading spirits of this
abominable brotherhood were legislators in both Houses of Parliament,
men of old family, great position, large means, men holding high public
office, members of the Government.  Their follies and their sins would
scarcely be worth remembering to-day were it not for the chance that
gave them for companion and ally one of the most remarkable men of his
age, a man whose abilities were in striking contrast to those of his
associates, a man who might almost be called a man of genius.

{48}

John Wilkes was the son of a rich distiller and of a Presbyterian
mother.  He had received a good education in England and at Leyden,
where so many of the Englishmen of that day went as students.  He had
travelled much in his youth upon the Continent.  On his return he was
induced by his father, he being then only two-and-twenty, to marry a
lady who was exceedingly rich, but who had the misfortune to be at
least ten years older than her husband.  It is scarcely surprising to
find that the marriage did not turn out happily.  Wilkes was young,
fresh from the bright Continental life, delighting in pleasure and the
society of those who pursued pleasure.  How far a happier marriage
might have influenced him for good it were idle to consider.  His
marriage he regarded always and spoke of always as a sacrifice to
Plutus, not to Venus, and he certainly was at no pains to make it any
more of a sacrifice than he could help.  His wild tastes, his wild
companions soon sickened and horrified Mrs. Wilkes.  The ill-matched
pair separated, and remained separate for the rest of their lives.

Wilkes was delighted to be free.  He was at liberty to squander his
money unquestioned and unchallenged in the society of as pretty a gang
of scoundrels as even the age could produce.  No meaner, more
malignant, or more repulsive figure darkens the record of the last
century than that of Lord Sandwich.  Sir Francis Dashwood ran him close
in infamy.  Mr. Thomas Potter was the peer of either in beastliness.
All three were members of Parliament; all three were partially
responsible for the legislation of the country; two were especially so
responsible.  All three were bound at least to a decorous
acknowledgment of the observances of the Church; one was in especial so
bound.  Sir Francis Dashwood and Lord Sandwich were, then or
thereafter, members of the Government.  Sir Francis Dashwood was
remarkable as having been the worst and stupidest Chancellor of the
Exchequer known to history.  Lord Sandwich was made First Lord of the
Admiralty.  As for the third in this triumvirate of blackguards, Mr.
Thomas Potter was a son of the Archbishop {49} of Canterbury, and he
was soon afterwards made Vice-Treasurer for Ireland.  Into such
honorable hands were the duties of government delivered less than a
century and a half ago.

[Sidenote: 1763--Wilkes's profligacy]

In this society Wilkes was made very welcome.  He brought to their
filthy fooleries something resembling wit; he brought an intelligence
as far above that of his companions as that of the monkey is above that
of the rabbit.  While he had money he spent it as royally as the rest.
If he rivalled them in their profligacy, he outstripped them by his
intellect.  They were conspicuous only by their vices; he would have
been a remarkable man even if it had pleased Providence to make him
virtuous.  It had not pleased Providence to make him attractive to look
upon.  There were few uglier men of his day; few who lost less by their
ugliness.  But though we are well assured that his appearance was
repulsive, he redeemed his hideousness by his ready tongue and witty
mind.  He said of himself, truly enough, that he only wanted half an
hour's start to make him even with the handsomest man in England.

Wilkes flung his money and his wife's money about recklessly, while he
played his part as a country gentleman upon the estate at Aylesbury
which his unhappy wife had resigned to him when they separated.  Of
this money some eight thousand pounds went in an unsuccessful attempt
to bribe his way into the representation of Berwick, and seven thousand
more went in the successful attempt to buy himself the representation
of Aylesbury.  It is probable that he hoped to advance his failing
fortunes in Parliament.  His fortunes were failing, failing fast.  He
made an ignoble attempt to bully his wife out of the miserable income
of two hundred a year which was all that she had saved out of her
wealth, but the attempt was happily defeated by that Court of King's
Bench against which Wilkes was to be pitted later in more honorable
hostility.

It was perhaps impossible that Wilkes could long remain content with
the companionship of men like Dashwood and Sandwich; it was certainly
impossible that men {50} like Dashwood and like Sandwich could for long
feel comfortable in the companionship of a man so infinitely their
superior in wit, intelligence, and taste.  The panegyrists of
Sandwich--for even Sandwich had his panegyrists in an age when wealth
and rank commanded compliment--found the courage to applaud Sandwich as
a scholar and an antiquarian, on the strength of an account of some
travels in the Mediterranean, which the world has long since willingly
let die.  But the few weeks or months of foreign travel that permitted
Sandwich to pose as a connoisseur when he was not practising as a
profligate could not inspire him with the humor or the appreciation of
Wilkes, and a friendship only cemented by a common taste for common
vices soon fell asunder.  There is a story to the effect that the
quarrel began with a practical joke which Wilkes played off on Sandwich
at Medmenham.  Sandwich, in some drunken orgy, was induced to invoke
the devil, whereupon Wilkes let loose a monkey, that had been kept
concealed in a box, and drove Sandwich into a paroxysm of fear in the
belief that his impious supplication had been answered.  For whatever
reason, Wilkes and Sandwich ceased to be friends, to Wilkes's cost at
first, and to Sandwich's after.  Sandwich owes his unenviable place in
history to his association with Wilkes in the first place, and in the
next to his alliance with the beautiful, unhappy Miss Ray, who was
murdered by her melancholy lover, the Rev. Mr. Hickman, at the door of
Covent Garden Theatre.  The fate of his mistress and his treason to his
friend have preserved the name of Sandwich from the forgetfulness it
deserved.

[Sidenote: 1763--Wilkes as a Member of Parliament]

In those days Wilkes made no very remarkable figure in Parliament.  It
was outside the walls of Westminster that he first made a reputation as
a public man.  In the unpopularity of Bute, Wilkes found opportunity
for his own popularity.  The royal peace policy was very unwelcome, and
agitated the feeling of the country profoundly.  Political controversy
ran as high in the humblest cross-channels as in the main stream of
courtly and political life.  At that time, we are told by a
contemporary {51} letter-writer, the mason would pause in his task to
discuss the progress of the peace, and the carpenter would neglect his
work to talk of the Princess Dowager, of Lord Treasurers and
Secretaries of State.  To win support and sympathy from such keen
observers, the Ministry turned again for aid to the public press that
had been so long neglected by the Whigs.  Smollett, the remembered
novelist, Murphy, the forgotten dramatist, were commissioned to
champion the cause of the Government in the two papers, the _Briton_
and the _Auditor_.

The Government already had a severe journalistic critic in the
_Monitor_, a newspaper edited by John Entinck, which had been started
in 1755.  The _Monitor_ was not at all like a modern newspaper.  It was
really little more than a weekly pamphlet, a folio of six pages
published every Saturday, and containing an essay upon the political
situation of the hour.  Its hostility to Bute goaded the minister into
the production of the _Briton_, which was afterwards supplemented by
the creation of the _Auditor_ when it was found that Smollett had
called up against the Ministry a more terrible antagonist than the
_Monitor_.  For the _Briton_ only lives in the memories of men because
it called into existence the _North Briton_.

Wilkes had entered Parliament as the impassioned follower of Pitt.  He
made many confessions of his desire to serve his country, professions
which may be taken as sincere enough.  But he was also anxious to serve
himself and to mend his fortunes, and he did not find in Parliamentary
life the advancement for which he hoped.  Twice he sought for high
position under the Crown, and twice he was unsuccessful.  He wished to
be made ambassador to Constantinople, where he would have found much
that was congenial to him, and his wish was not granted.  He wished to
be made Governor-General of the newly conquered Quebec, and again his
desires were unheeded.  Wilkes believed that Bute was the cause of his
double disappointment.  He became convinced that while the favors of
the State lay in Bute's hands they would only be given to Tories, and
more especially to Tories who were also {52} Scotchmen.  If Bute could
have known, it would have been a happy hour for him which had seen
Wilkes starting for the Golden Horn or sailing for the St. Lawrence.
But Bute was a foolish man, and he did his most foolish deed when he
made Wilkes his enemy.

The appearance of the _North Briton_ was an event in the history of
journalism as well as in the political history of the country.  It met
the heavy-handed violence of the _Briton_ with a frank ferocity which
was overpowering.  It professed to fight on the same side as the
_Monitor_, but it surpassed Entinck's paper as much in virulence as in
ability.  Under the whimsical pretence of being a North Briton, Wilkes
assailed the Scotch party in the State with unflagging satire and
unswerving severity.  In the satire and the severity he had an able
henchman in Charles Churchill.

[Sidenote: 1731-1764--The poet Churchill]

Those who are inclined to condemn Wilkes because for a season he found
entertainment in the society of a Sandwich, a Dashwood, and a Potter,
must temper their judgment by remembering the affection that Wilkes was
able to inspire in the heart of Churchill.  While the scoundrels of
Medmenham were ready to betray their old associate, and, with no touch
of the honor proverbially attributed to thieves, to drive him into
disgrace, to exile, and if possible to death, the loyal friendship of
the poet was given to Wilkes without reserve.  Churchill was not a man
of irreproachable character, of unimpeachable morality, or of
unswerving austerity.  But he was as different from the Sandwiches and
the Dashwoods as dawn is different from dusk, and in enumerating all of
the many arguments that are to be accumulated in defence of Wilkes, not
the least weighty arguments are that while on the one hand he earned
the hatred of Sandwich and of Dashwood, on the other hand he earned the
love of Charles Churchill.

Churchill's name and fame have suffered of late years.  Since Byron
stood by the neglected grave and mused on him who blazed, the comet of
a season, the genius of Churchill has been more and more disregarded.
But the Georgian epoch, so rich in its many and contrasting types {53}
of men of letters, produced few men more remarkable in themselves, if
not in their works, than Charles Churchill.  The cleric who first
became famous for most unclerical assaults upon the stage, the satirist
who could be the most devoted friend, the seducer who could be so loyal
to his victim, the spendthrift who could be generous, the cynic who
could feel and obey the principles of the purest patriotism, was one of
those strangely compounded natures in which each vice was as it were
effaced or neutralized by some compensating virtue.  It may be fairly
urged that while Churchill's virtues were his own, his vices were in
large part the fault of his unhappy destiny.  The Westminster boy who
learned Latin under Vincent Bourne, and who was a schoolfellow of
Warren Hastings, of Cowper, and of Colman, might possibly have made a
good scholar, but was certainly not of the stuff of which good
clergymen are made.  An early marriage, an unhappy marriage contracted
in the Rules of the Fleet, had weighed down his life with encumbrances
almost before he had begun to live.  Compelled to support an unsuitable
wife and an increasing family, Churchill followed his father's example
and his father's injudicious counsel and took Holy Orders.  Men took
Orders in those days with a light heart.  It afforded the needy a
livelihood, precarious indeed for the most part, but still preferable
to famine.  Men took Orders with no thought of the sanctity of their
calling, of the solemn service it exacted, of its awful duties and its
inexorable demands.  They wished merely to keep famine from the door,
to have food and fire and shelter, and they took Orders as under other
conditions they would have taken the King's shilling, with no more
feeling of reverence for the black cassock than for the scarlet coat.
Churchill was not the man to wear the clergyman's gown with dignity, or
to find in the gravity of his office consolation for the penury that it
entailed.  The Establishment offered meagre advantages to an
extravagant man with an extravagant wife.  He drifted deeper and deeper
into debt.  He became as a wandering star, reserved for the blackness
of bailiffs and the darkness of duns.  But the {54} rare quality he had
in him of giving a true friendship to his friend won a like quality
from other men.  Dr. Lloyd, under-master of his old school of
Westminster, came to his aid, helped him in his need, and secured the
patience of his creditors.  He was no longer harassed, but he was still
poor, and the spur of poverty drove him to tempt his fortune in
letters.  Like so many a literary adventurer of the eighteenth century,
he saw in the writing of verse the sure way to success.  Like so many a
literary adventurer of the century, he carried his first efforts
unsuccessfully from bookseller to bookseller.  The impulses of his wit
were satirical; he was not dismayed by failure; the stage had
entertained him and irritated him, and he made the stage the subject of
his first triumph.  "The Rosciad" was in every sense a triumph.  Its
stings galled the vanity of the players to frenzy.  At all times a
susceptible brotherhood, their susceptibilities were sharply stirred by
Churchill's corrosive lines and acidulated epigrams.  Their indignation
finding vent in hot recrimination and virulent lampoon only served to
make the poem and its author better known to the public.  Churchill
replied to the worst of his assailants in "The Apology," which rivalled
the success of "The Rosciad," and gained for the satirist the
friendship of Garrick, who had affected to disdain the praises of "The
Rosciad," but who now recognized in time the power of the satirist and
the value of his approval.  Churchill himself was delighted with his
good fortune.  He was the talk of the town; he had plenty of money in
his pocket; he was separated from his wife, freed from his uncongenial
profession, and he could exchange the solemn black of the cleric for a
blue coat with brass buttons and a gold-laced hat.

[Sidenote: 1762--Newspaper polemics]

Lest the actors whom he had lashed should resort to violence for
revenge, he carried with ostentation a sturdy cudgel.  It was a
formidable weapon in hands like Churchill's, and Churchill was not
molested.  For Churchill was a man of great physical strength.  He
tells the world in the portrait he painted of himself of the vastness
of his bones, of the strength of his muscles, of his arms like {55} two
twin oaks, of his legs fashioned as if to bear the weight of the
Mansion House, of his massive body surmounted by the massive face,
broader than it was long.  The ugly face was chiefly remarkable,
according to the confession of its owner, for its expression of
contentment, though the observant might discern "sense lowering in the
penthouse of his eye."  Like most giants, he overtaxed his strength,
both mentally and physically.  Whatever he did he did with all his
mighty energy.  He loved, hated, worked, played, at white heat as it
were, and withered up his forces with the flame they fed.  In nothing
did his zeal consume itself more hotly than in his devotion to Wilkes.

Churchill met Wilkes in 1762, and seems to have fallen instantly under
the spell which Wilkes found it so easy to exercise upon all who came
into close contact with him.  Undoubtedly Churchill's friendship was
very valuable to Wilkes.  If Churchill loved best to express his satire
in verse, he could write strongly and fiercely in prose, and the _North
Briton_ owed to his pen some of its most brilliant and some of its
bitterest pages.  In the _North Briton_ Wilkes and Churchill laid about
them lustily, striking at whatever heads they pleased, holding their
hands for no fame, no dignity, no influence.  It was wholly without
fear and wholly without favor.  If it assailed Bute again and again
with an unflagging zeal, it was no less ready to challenge to an issue
the greatest man who over accepted a service from Bute, and to remind
Dr. Johnson, who had received a pension from the King's favorite, of
his own definition of a pension and of a pensioner.

Before the fury and the popularity of the _North Briton_ both the
_Auditor_ and the _Briton_ had to strike their colors.  The _Auditor_
came to its inglorious end on February 8, 1763.  The _Briton_ died on
the 12th of the same month, leaving the _North Briton_ master of the
field.  Week after week the _North Briton_ grew more severe in its
strictures upon the Government, strictures that scorned the veil of
hint and innuendo that had hitherto prevailed in these pamphleteering
wars.  Even the _Monitor_ had always alluded to the statesmen whom it
assailed by initial letters.  {56} The _North Briton_ called them by
their names in all the plainness of full print, the name of the
sovereign not being excepted from this courageous rule.  But the fame
of the _North Briton_ only came to its full with the number forty-five.




{57}

CHAPTER XLV.

NUMBER FORTY-FIVE.

[Sidenote: 1763--Wilkes's criticism of the King's speech]

When Bute disappeared from the public leadership of his party, Wilkes,
from professedly patriotic motives, delayed the publication of the
current number of the _North Briton_, to see if the policy which Bute
had inspired still guided the actions of the gentle shepherd, George
Grenville.  Wilkes wished to know if the influence of the Scottish
minister was at an end, or if he still governed through those wretched
tools who had supported the most odious of his measures, the
ignominious peace, and the wicked extension of the arbitrary mode of
excise.  He declared himself that if Bute only intended to retire into
that situation which he held before he took the seals, a situation in
which he dictated to every part of the King's administration, Wilkes
was as ready to combat the new Administration as he had been steady in
his opposition to a single, insolent, incapable, despotic minister.

Any hope that Wilkes may have entertained of a reformation of the
Ministry was dispelled by a talk which he had with Temple and Pitt at
Temple's house, where Temple showed him an early copy of the King's
speech.  Wilkes, Pitt, and Temple were entirely in agreement as to the
fatal defects of the speech, and Wilkes went promptly home and wrote
the article which made the forty-fifth number of the _North Briton_
famous.

In itself the number forty-five was no stronger in its utterances than
many of the preceding numbers.  If its tone be compared with the tone
of journalistic criticism of ministers or their sovereign less than a
generation later, it seems sober and even mild.  Wilkes's article
started with a citation from Cicero: "Genus orationis atrox et {58}
vehemena, cui opponitur genus illud alterum lenitatis et
mansuetudinis."  Then came Wilkes's comment on the speech.  He was
careful not to criticize directly the King.  With a prudence that was
perhaps more ironical than any direct stroke at the sovereign, he
attacked the minister who misled and misrepresented the monarch.  "The
King's speech has always been considered by the legislature and by the
public at large as the speech of the minister."

Starting from this understanding, Wilkes went on to stigmatize the
Address as "the most abandoned instance of ministerial effrontery ever
attempted to be imposed upon mankind," and he doubted whether "the
imposition is greater upon the sovereign or on the nation."  "Every
friend of his country," the writer declared, "must lament that a prince
of so many great and amiable qualities, whom England truly reveres, can
be brought to give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious
measures and to the most unjustifiable public declarations from a
throne ever renowned for truth, honor, and unsullied virtue."

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

[Sidenote: 1763--Arrest of Wilkes]

The King's messengers came upon Wilkes in his house in Great George
Street, Westminster.  It is honorably characteristic of the man that in
the moment of his own danger he felt more concern for the danger of
another.  While he was arguing with the officials that they had no
power to arrest him, as he was a member of Parliament and therefore
privileged against arrest, Churchill came into the room on a visit to
Wilkes.  Churchill, Wilkes knew, was as certain to be arrested as he
was.  Churchill could plead no privilege.  It was probable that the
messengers were unfamiliar with Churchill's face.  Wilkes, with happy
good-nature and happy audacity, immediately hailed Churchill as Mr.
Thompson, clasped his hand and inquired affectionately how Mrs.
Thompson did and if she was going to dine in the country.  If Wilkes
was clever in his suggestion Churchill was no less clever in taking the
hint.  He thanked Wilkes, declared that Mrs. Thompson was at that
moment waiting for him, and that he had merely called in to inquire
after the health of Wilkes.  Saying which, Churchill swiftly bowed
himself out, hurried home, secured all his papers, and disappeared into
the country.  The King's messengers, who were promptly at his lodgings,
were never able to discover his whereabouts.

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

While Churchill was making his way as quickly as possible out of a town
that his services to his friend had rendered too hot to hold him,
Wilkes was immediately hurried before Lord Halifax and Lord Egremont at
Whitehall.  He carried himself very composedly in the presence of his
enemies.  He persistently asserted his privilege, as a member of
Parliament, against arrest.  He refused to answer any questions or to
acknowledge the authorship of No. 45 of the _North Briton_.  He
professed with equal enthusiasm his loyalty to the King and his
loathing of the King's advisers, and he announced his intention of
bringing the matter before Parliament the moment that the session
began.  Egremont and Halifax retaliated by sending Wilkes to the Tower
and causing his house to be searched and all his papers to be seized.
The high-handed folly of the King's friends had for their chief effect
the conversion of men who had little sympathy for Wilkes into, if not
his advocates, at least his allies against the illegal methods which
were employed to crush him.

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

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

It was while Wilkes was before Pratt at Westminster that, if we may
accept the authority of Churchill, one of Wilkes's keenest enemies
seized an opportunity for a cruel {61} revenge.  Hogarth hated both
Wilkes and Churchill.  He had begun the quarrel by attacking the _North
Briton_ and the _Monitor_ in his cartoon "The Times," executed for the
greater glorification of the painter's patron, Lord Bute.  The _North
Briton_ replied to this attack with a vigor which infuriated Hogarth,
who had his full share of the irritable vanity which the world always
attributes to the artist.  In Wilkes's difficulty Hogarth saw his
opportunity.  Lurking behind a screen in the Court of Common Pleas, the
painter sought and found an opportunity for making a sketch of Wilkes.
While Justice Pratt, with what Wilkes called "the eloquence and courage
of old Rome," was laying down the law upon the prisoner's plea
preparatory to setting him at liberty, Hogarth's busy pencil was
engaged upon the first sketch for that caricature which has helped to
make Wilkes's features famous and infamous throughout the world.  The
print was promptly published at a shilling, and commanded an enormous
sale.  Nearly four thousand copies, it is said, were sold within a few
weeks.  The envenomed skill of Hogarth has made the appearance of
Wilkes almost as familiar to us as to the men of his own time.  The
sneering, satyr face, the sinister squint, the thrust-out chin and
protruding lower jaw belong to a face severely visited by Nature, even
when liberal allowance is made for the animosity that prompted the hand
of the caricaturist.  The caricature was a savage stroke; to Wilkes's
friends it seemed to be a traitor's stroke.  Wilkes appears to have
taken it, as he took most things, with composure.  "I know," he wrote
later, "but one short apology to be made for the person of Mr. Wilkes;
it is that he did not make himself, and that he never was solicitous
about the case of his soul (as Shakespeare calls it) only so far as to
keep it clean and in health.  I never once heard that he hung over the
glassy stream, like another Narcissus, admiring the image in it, nor
that he ever stole an amorous look at his counterfeit in a side mirror.
His form, such as it is, ought to give him no pain while it is capable
of giving so much pleasure to others.  I believe he finds himself
tolerably happy in the clay {62} cottage to which he is a tenant for
life, because he has learned to keep it in pretty good order; while the
share of health and animal spirits which Heaven has given him shall
hold out, I can scarcely imagine he will be one moment peevish about
the outside of so precarious, so temporary a habitation, or will ever
be brought to own 'Ingenium Galbae male habitat:' 'Monsieur est mal
logé.'"  Good-humored at the time, his good-humor persevered, and in
later life he was wont to say jestingly that he found he was growing
more and more like his famous portrait every day.  But if it was
becoming of Wilkes to bear the attack in so serene and even so jocular
a spirit, it was not unbecoming, as it was not ungenerous, of his
friends to fail to imitate the coolness of their leader.  It is not
quite easy to understand why, in an age of caricature, an age when all
men of any notoriety were caricatured, the friends of Wilkes were so
sensitive to the satire of Hogarth.  Public men, and the friends of
public men, have grown less sensitive.  However, Wilkes's friends were,
and showed themselves to be, as angry as Wilkes was, or showed himself
to be, indifferent, and the hottest and angriest of them all was
Churchill.  Churchill could retaliate, and Churchill did retaliate with
a ferocity that equalled and more than equalled Hogarth's.

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

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

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

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

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

And then, in some two hundred lines of strenuous rage, Churchill
denounced Hogarth with a denunciation that was the more effective
because it was accompanied by a frank and full recognition of Hogarth's
great gifts and deserved title to fame.  Hogarth retaliated by his
famous caricature of Churchill as a canonical bear with a pot of porter
in one paw and a huge cudgel in the other, the knots on the cudgel
being numbered as Lie 1, Lie 2, and so forth.  Instantly the great
caricaturist was attacked by others eager to strike at one who had
struck so hard in his day.  The hatred of Bute was extended to the
painter who condescended to accept Bute's patronage, and who labored to
please his patron.  Hogarth was derided as "The Butyfier," in mockery
of his "Analysis of Beauty."  It would have been as lucky for Hogarth
as it would have been lucky for Bute to let Wilkes alone.

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

[Sidenote: 1763--Wilkes and his accusers]

Every man who wished to curry favor with the King and the King's
ministers was ready to strike his blow at Wilkes.  There was not a
bully among the hangers-on of the King and ministers who was not eager
to cross swords with Wilkes or level pistol at him.  Insult after
insult, injury after injury, were offered to the obnoxious politician.
The King dismissed him from the colonelcy of the Buckinghamshire
Militia.  Lord Temple was the Lord-Lieutenant of the county of
Buckinghamshire, and as Lord-Lieutenant it was his duty to convey to
Wilkes the news of his disgrace.  Never was such news so conveyed.
Temple told Wilkes of his dismissal in a letter of warm enthusiasm, of
warm personal praise.  The King immediately retaliated by removing
Temple from the Lord-Lieutenancy and striking his name off the list of
privy councillors.  The enmity was not confined to the King and to the
parasites who sought to please the King.  Dr. Johnson declared that if
he were the monarch he would have sent half a dozen footmen to duck
Wilkes for daring to censure his royal master or his royal master's
ministers.  In the House of Commons the hostility was at its height.
When Parliament met Wilkes sought to call the attention of the House to
his case, but was anticipated by Grenville, who read a royal message
directed at Wilkes, the result of which was that the House voted that
the number Forty-five of the _North Briton_ was a seditious libel, and
ordered it to be burned by the common hangman.

The basest part of the attack upon Wilkes was the use that his enemies
made of his private papers, the way in which they associated his
political conduct with an offence that was wholly unpolitical.  It had
amused Wilkes to set up a private printing-press at his own house.  At
this {65} press certain productions were printed which were no doubt
indecent, which were no doubt blasphemous, but which were furthermore
so foolish as to make both their indecency and their blasphemy of very
little effect.  One was the "Essay on Woman," written as a parody of
Pope's "Essay on Man;" the other was an imitation of the "Veni
Creator."  Neither of these pieces of gross buffoonery bore any
author's name.  Very few copies of them had been printed, and these few
solely for circulation among private friends with a taste for foul
literature.  No offence had been committed, no offence had been
intended, against public morality.  It is certain, as far as any
literary puzzle can be regarded as certain, that Wilkes's share in the
dirty business was chiefly, if not entirely, limited to the printing of
the pages.  The "Essay on Woman," as those who have had the misfortune
to read it know, is a dreary writer's piece of schoolboy obscenity, if
entirely disgusting, no less entirely dull.  The text of the "Essay"
was composed in great part, if not altogether, by Potter, the unworthy
son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and worthy member of the Medmenham
brotherhood.  When Wilkes's papers were seized, or by some other means,
the Government got possession of the proof sheets of the "Essay on
Woman."  They immediately resolved, in defiance of public decency, of
political morality, to use it as a weapon against their enemy.  It
shows the shallowness of their pretence at justification that they put
the weapon into the hands of the worst and basest of Wilkes's former
friends and allies in profligacy, into the hands of Lord Sandwich.  On
the first night of the session Lord Sandwich rose in the House of
Lords, and proceeded to denounce Wilkes and the "Essay on Woman" with a
vehemence of false austerity that impressed the assembly and infinitely
delighted Lord Le Despencer, who had been the common friend, the
brother sinner of accuser and accused, and who now expressed much
entertainment at hearing the devil preach.  The spurious virtue of
Sandwich was followed by the spurious indignation of Warburton.  The
"Essay on Woman" contained certain notes written in parody of
Warburton's notes {66} to the "Essay on Man," just as the verses
themselves were a parody on Pope's poem.  Warburton chose to regard
this as a broach of privilege, and he assailed Wilkes with even greater
fury than Sandwich had done, winding up by apologizing to the devil for
even comparing Wilkes to him.  An admiring House immediately voted the
poems obscene, libellous, and a breach of privilege.  Two days
afterwards an address from the Lords called upon the King to prosecute
Wilkes for blasphemy.

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

Wilkes was unable to face this new attack.  He had already fallen a
victim to an attack of another and no less malignant nature.  While the
creatures of the Government in the Upper House were trying to destroy
his character, one of their creatures in the Lower House was doing his
best to take Wilkes's life.  This was a man named Martin, who had been
attacked in the _North Briton_ some eight months earlier.  Martin
seemed to have resolved upon revenge, and to have set about obtaining
it after the fashion not of the gentleman, but of the bravo.  Day by
day, week by week, month by month he practised himself in pistol
shooting, until he considered that his skill was sufficient to enable
him to take the dastard's hazard in a duel.  He seized the opportunity
of the debate on November 15th to describe the writer in the _North
Briton_ as a "coward and a malignant scoundrel."  When Wilkes, on the
following day, avowed the authorship of the paper, Martin sent him a
challenge.  The challenge was in all respects a strange one.  It was
treacherous, because it came at the heels of deliberate preparation.
It was peremptory, for it called upon Wilkes to meet his enemy in Hyde
Park within an hour.  It contravened the laws of the duello, because
Martin, who was the challenger, himself insisted on the use of the
weapons with which he had made himself so murderously skilful.  Wilkes
accepted the duel with characteristic courage, with characteristic
rashness.  He met Martin in Hyde Park, and the amateur bravo shot
Wilkes through the body.  It is a further characteristic of the many
elements of good that went to Wilkes's strange composition that, as he
lay on the grass bleeding fast and {67} apparently mortally wounded,
his first care was not for himself and his hurt, but for the safety of
his adversary, of an adversary who deserved chivalrous treatment as
little as if he had taken Wilkes unawares and shot him in the back.

While Wilkes was lying on what threatened to be his death-bed the
feeling on both sides only increased in intensity.  The Ministry were
indifferent to the helplessness of their enemy.  Wilkes was expelled
from the House of Commons.  He was expelled from the Militia.  The
common hangman was ordered publicly to burn the _North Briton_, but the
hangman was not suffered to obey the order.  An angry mob set upon him
and upon the sheriffs who were assisting at the ceremony, rescued the
_North Briton_ from its persecutors, and in rude retaliation burned
instead the joint emblems of the popular disdain--a boot and a
petticoat.  The people's blood was up; the symptoms were significant
enough for any save such a King and such ministers to understand.
While the Ministry, with a refinement of cruelty, were sending daily
the King's surgeons to watch Wilkes's health and proclaim the moment
when he might again be attacked, the Corporation of Dublin was setting
an example that was soon followed by the Corporation of London and by
other corporations in presenting him with the freedom of its city.
While Wilkes was slowly journeying towards Paris, where his daughter
was, and passing, as he wrote, "the most unhappy days he had known," an
angry mob gibbeted the effigy of Bute at one of the gates of Exeter,
and kept the image swinging there in derision for a fortnight in
defiance of the authorities.  While Wilkes was languishing in foreign
exile to save his liberty and his very life from the malignity of his
enemies, his portrait, painted by Reynolds, was placed in the Guildhall
with an inscription in honor of the jealous assertor of English liberty
by law.

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

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

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

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

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

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




{71}

CHAPTER XLVI.

THE AMERICAN COLONIES.

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

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

When Bute, perhaps in fear for his life, perhaps in despair at his
unpopularity, resigned the office he filled so ill, he hoped to find in
his successor Grenville a supple and responsive creature, through whom
Bute would still be as powerful as before.  Bute had to taste a bitter
disappointment.  Grenville's gloomy spirit and narrow mind unfitted
him, indeed, for the office he was called upon to hold, but they
afforded him a stubbornness which declined to recognize either the
authority of the favorite or the authority of the favorite's master.
By the time that Grenville had been two years in office the King hated
him as {72} bitterly as he had ever hated Pitt.  If Bute was impotently
furious to find himself discarded and despised by his intended tool,
the King was still more exasperated to find that the King's servant
proposed to be the King's master.  Grenville was a good lawyer and a
good man of business, but he was extremely dull and extremely tactless,
and he was at as much pains to offend the King as if he intended
offence.  He was overbearing in manner to a monarch who was himself
overbearing; he badgered him with long rambling discourses upon his
royal duty; he deliberately wounded him in his two warmest affections,
his love for his mother and his regard for Bute.  Grenville was right
enough in his objection to the undue influence of Bute, but his
animadversions came with a bad grace from the man who was to do as much
harm to England as Bute had ever done.  As Grenville had triumphed over
Bute and driven him into the background, so he wished to triumph over
the Princess Dowager and deprive her of power.  In 1765 the King fell
ill for the first time of that malady from which he was to suffer so
often and so heavily.  As soon as he was restored to health he proposed
the introduction of a Regency Bill to settle satisfactorily the
difficulties that might very well arise if the heir to the throne were
to succeed before the age of eighteen.

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

Grenville acted in the matter of the Regency Bill as if the dearest
wish of his heart were to flout the King's wishes and to wound his
feelings.  The King wished, lest he should again be stricken with
illness while the heir-apparent was still an infant, to be given the
right to name a regent by will.  Grenville and Grenville's colleagues,
who were now as jealous of the authority of Bute as any subscriber to
the _North Briton_, saw or professed to see in the King's proposal an
insidious scheme for placing little less than royal power within the
reach of the favorite.  They made it impossible for the King to name
Bute by limiting his choice to the members of the royal family.  But
they went further than this in affronting the King.  They limited his
choice of a regent to members of the royal family, but they also
limited the number of {73} members of the royal family from whom he
might make his choice.  They insisted that the name of the King's
mother, of the Princess Dowager, should not be included in the Bill.
It is difficult to understand how the King could ever have been induced
to consent to this peculiarly galling insult.  It seems that Grenville
assured him, on entirely false premises, that if her name were
mentioned in the Bill the House of Commons would be certain to strike
it out.  Preferring the private to the public affront, George
surrendered to his minister, only to find that his minister was
flagrantly misinformed.  The friends of the Princess in the House of
Commons moved that her name should be written into the Bill, and they
carried their point in Grenville's teeth.  Grenville had played the
tyrant and George had accepted the humiliation for nothing.  George
tried at once to overthrow Grenville.  In those days a king who
disliked a minister had a very simple and easy way of showing and of
gratifying his dislike.  He could dismiss his minister without ceremony
and without question.  Nowadays a minister depends for his power and
tenure of office upon the majority in the House of Commons, and a
sovereign would not think of dismissing a minister, or of doing
anything else than accepting formally the decision of the House of
Commons.  But when George the Third was king the only check upon the
royal power of dismissing a minister lay in the possible difficulty of
finding another to take his place.  This was the check George now met.
He wanted with all his heart to dismiss Grenville.  He turned to
Cumberland of Culloden, and implored him to bring back Pitt and enable
him to get rid of Grenville.  Cumberland tried and Cumberland failed.
Pitt was in one of those paroxysms of illness which seem to have
completely overmastered him.  He was almost entirely under the
influence of Temple.  Temple's detestation of Bute reconciled him to
Grenville's policy when he found that Grenville seemed to share that
detestation.  Temple persuaded Pitt to refuse.  Cumberland came back to
the King to tell of his failure.  There was nothing to be done.
Grenville had to be kept on.  If the enforced association {74} did not
make the sovereign and his minister better friends, if both smarted
under a sense of humiliation and defeat, it is scarcely surprising that
the stubbornness of both was intensified in cases where their
stubbornness was pitted not against each other, but against a common
obstacle.  Such a case was then in existence.

[Sidenote: 1765--The American colonies]

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

Mr. Willett, senior, in "Barnaby Rudge," explains to his friends that
his absent son Joe is away in "the Salwanners in America, where the war
is."  Mr. Willett's knowledge and appreciation of the American colonies
represents pretty well for profundity and accuracy the knowledge and
appreciation of the majority of the English people in the times
contemporary with, and indeed long subsequent to, the quarrels between
the old country and the new.  To the bulk of the British people America
was a vague and shadowy region, a sort of no-man's land, peopled for
the most part with black men and red men, and dimly associated with
sugar-planting and the tobacco trade.  Its distance alone made it seem
sufficiently unreal to those whose way of life was not drawn by
business or {75} by politics into association with its inhabitants.
The voyage to America was a grimly serious adventure, calling for
fortitude and triple brass.  The man was indeed lucky who could make
the passage from shore to shore in six weeks of stormy sea, and the
journey generally took a much longer time, and under the same
conditions of discomfort and of danger that attended on the voyage of
the "Mayflower."  The vast majority of Englishmen concerned themselves
as little with America as they concerned themselves with Hindostan.
Both were British possessions, and as such important, but both were too
far away to assume any very substantial reality in the consciousness of
the bulk of the English people.  Of the minority who did possess
anything that can be called knowledge of the American colonies, the
majority imbibed its information from official sources, from the
reports of governors of provinces and official servants of the Crown.
These reports were for the most part as reliable for a basis on which
to build an intelligent appreciation as the legends of the Algonquins
or the myths of the Six Nations.

If the English knowledge of the American colonies had been a little
more precise it would have run to this effect.  The colonies of the New
England region were mainly peopled by a hardy, industrious, sober,
frugal race, still strongly Puritanical in profession and in practice,
and knowing but little of the extremes of fortune.  Neither great
poverty nor great wealth was common among those sturdy farmers, who
tended their own farms, tilled their own land, lived upon their own
produce, and depended for their clothing and for most of the
necessaries of life upon the work of their own hands.  A slender
population was scattered far asunder in lonely townships and straggling
villages of wooden houses, built for the most part in the formidable
fashion imposed upon men who might at any time have to resist the
attacks of Indians.  Inside these villages the rough, rude justice of
the Puritan days still persisted.  The stocks and the pillory and the
stool of repentance were things of the present.  A shrewish housewife
might still be made to stand at her cottage door with {76} the iron gag
of the scold fastened upon her shameful face.  A careless Sabbatarian
might still find himself exposed to the scorn of a congregation, with
the words "A wanton gospeller" placarded upon his ignominious breast.
Inside those wooden houses a rude simplicity and a rough plenty
prevailed.  The fare was simple; the labor was hard; simple fare and
stern labor between them reared a stalwart, God-fearing race.  Its
positive pleasures were few and primitive.  Husking-bees, quiltings, a
rare dance, filled up the measure of its diversions.  But the summer
smiled upon those steadfast, earnest, rigorous citizens, and in the
wild and bitter winters each household would gather about the cheerful
fire in the great chimney which in some of those cottages formed the
major part of the building, and find content and peace in quiet talk
and in tales of the past, of the French and Indian wars, and of their
ancestors, long ago, in old England.  Those same great fires that were
the joy of winter were also one of its troubles.  Once lit, with all
the difficulty attendant upon flint and steel and burnt rag, they had
to be kept alight from morning till night and from night till morning.
If a fire went out it was a woful business to start it again with the
reluctant tinder-box.  There was, indeed, another way, an easier way,
of going round to a neighbor and borrowing a shovelful of hot embers
wherewith to kindle the blackened hearth.  But in villages built for
the most part of wood this might well be regarded as a dangerous
process.  So the law did regard it, and to start a fire in this lazy,
lounging fashion was penalized as sternly as any breach of the Sabbath
or of public decorum, and these were sternly punished.  Drunkenness was
grimly frowned down.  Only decent, God-fearing men were allowed to keep
taverns, and the names of persons who had earned the reputation of
intemperance were posted up in those taverns as a warning to the host
that he should sell such men no liquor.  In Connecticut tobacco was
forbidden to any one under twenty years of age, unless on the express
order of a physician.  Those who were over twenty were only allowed to
smoke once a day, and then not within ten miles of any dwelling.

{77}

[Sidenote: 1765--American colonial customs]

In spite of their democratic simplicity, even the New England colonists
had their distinctions of rank as clearly marked as among the people of
old England.  The gentry dressed in one fashion; the working classes
dressed in another.  The family rank of students determined their
places in the lists of Harvard College and Yale College.  In Boston,
the chief New England town, life was naturally more elaborate and more
luxurious than in the country places.  Ladies wore fine clothes and
sought to be modish in the London manner; gentlemen made a brave show
in gayly colored silks and rich laces, gold-headed canes and costly
snuff-boxes.  Even in Boston, however, life was simpler, quieter, and
sweeter than it was across the Atlantic; there was Puritanism in its
atmosphere--Puritanism and the serenity of learning, of scholarship, of
study.

There was much more wealth in the province of New York; there was much
more display in the southern colonies.  New York was as famous for its
Dutch cleanliness and its Dutch comfort as for its Dutch windmills that
twirled their sails against the sky in all directions.  There was store
of plate and fine linen in New York cupboards.  There were good things
to eat and drink in New York households.  Down South the gentlefolk
lived as gentlefolk lived in England, with perhaps a more lavish
ostentation, a more liberal hospitality.  They loved horses and dogs,
horse-racing and fox-hunting, dancing, music, high living, all things
that added to the enjoyment of life.  Their servants were their own
black slaves.  The great city of the South was Charleston, the third of
the colonial cities.  The fourth and last was Philadelphia, the "faire
greene country town" of Penn's love, the last in our order, but the
first in size and splendor, with its flagged sidewalks that had made it
famous throughout the American continent as if it had been one of the
seven wonders of the world, with its stately houses of brick and stone,
its avenues of trees, its fruitful orchards and sweet-smelling gardens.
The people of Philadelphia had every right to be proud of their city.

Communication was not easy between one colony and {78} another, between
one town and another.  But neither was it easy in England.  For the
most part the conditions of life were much the same on one side of the
Atlantic as on the other.  The whole population, white and black,
freeman and slave, was about two million souls.  They were well-to-do,
peaceable, hard-working--those who had to work, good fighters--those
who had to fight, all very willing to be loyal and all very well worth
keeping loyal.  It was worth their sovereign's while, it was worth the
while of his ministers, to know something about these colonists and to
try and understand natures that were not at all difficult to
understand.  Had they been treated as the Englishmen they were, all
would have been well.  But the King who gloried in the name of Briton
did not extend its significance far enough.

[Sidenote: 1765--Friction with the American colonists]

It is not easy to understand the temper which animated all the King's
actions towards the American colonies.  They were regarded, and with
justice, as one of the greatest glories of the English crown; they were
no less a source of wealth than of pride to the English people.  Yet
the English prince persisted in pursuing towards them a policy which
can only be most mildly characterized as a policy of exasperation.
When George was still both a young man and a young king, the relations
between the mother country and her children across the Atlantic were,
if not wholly harmonious, at least in such a condition as to render
harmony not merely possible, but probable.  The result of a long and
wearing war had been to relieve the colonists directly from one and
indirectly from the other of their two greatest perils.  By the terms
on which peace was made the power of France was broken on the North
American continent.  The French troops had been withdrawn across the
seas.  The Lilies of France floated over no more important possessions
in the new world than a few insignificant fishing stations near
Newfoundland.  A dangerous and dreaded enemy to colonial life and
liberty could no longer menace or alarm.  As a consequence of the
withdrawal of the French troops the last united attack of the red men
against the white was made and failed.  {79} The famous conspiracy of
Pontiac was the desperate attempt of the Indian allies of France to
annihilate the colonists by a concerted attack of a vast union of
tribes.  The conspiracy failed after a bloody war that lasted for
nearly two years.  Pontiac, the Indian chief who had helped to destroy
Braddock, and who had dreamed that all the English might as easily be
destroyed, was defeated and killed; his league was dissipated, and the
power of the red men as a united force broken for good.  Under such
conditions of immunity from long-standing and pressing perils, due in
the main to the triumph of British arms, the colonists might very well
have been expected to regard with especial favor their association with
England.  If there had been differences between the two countries for
long enough, no moment could have been apter for the adoption of a
policy calculated to lessen and ultimately to abolish those differences
than the moment when the weary and wearing Seven Years' War came to its
close.  A far-seeing monarch, advised and encouraged by far-seeing
statesmen, might have soldered close the seeming impossibilities and
made them kiss.  Had the throne even been filled by a sovereign
slightly less stubborn, had the throne been surrounded by servants
slightly less bigoted, the arrogant patronage of the one part and the
aggressive protestation of the other part might have been judiciously
softened into a relationship wisely paternal and loyally filial.  The
advantage of an enduring union between the mother country and her
colonies was obvious to any reasonable observer.  A common blood, a
common tongue, a common pride of race and common interests should have
kept them together.  But the relations were not amicable.  The colonies
were peopled by men who were proud indeed of being Englishmen, but by
reason of that very pride were jealous of any domination, even at the
hands of Englishmen.  The mother country, on the other hand, regarded
the colonies, won with English hands and watered with English blood, as
being no less portion and parcel of English soil because three thousand
miles of stormy ocean lay between the port upon the Severn and the port
upon {80} the Charles River.  She came to regard as mere ingratitude
those assertions of independence which most characteristically proved
the colonies to be worthy of it and of her.  The theory of the absolute
dominion of England over the American colonies might have died a
natural death, a harmonious settlement of grievances and adjustment of
powers might have knitted the two peoples together in an enduring
league, if it had not been for George the Third.

[Sidenote: 1765--England and her colonial governors]

The mind of George the Third was saturated with a belief in his
personal importance; the heart of George the Third was exalted by the
determination to play a dominating part in the country of his birth and
the history of his reign.  The hostility to the exercise of home
authority latent in the colonies irritated the King like a personal
affront.  To resist or to resent the authority of the Government of
England was to resist and to resent the authority of the sovereign who
was determined that he would be to all intents and purposes the
Government of England.  If the relationship between England and America
had been far happier than George found it at the time of his accession,
it probably would not long have preserved a wholesome tenor.  But the
relationship was by no means happy.  The colonial assemblies were for
the most part at loggerheads with the colonial governors.  These
governors, little viceroys with petty courts, extremely proud of their
power and self-conscious in their authority, generally detested the
popular assemblies upon whom they were obliged to depend for the
payment of their salaries.  Their dislike found secret expression in
the letters which it was the duty and the pleasure of the colonial
governors to address to the Home Government.  The system of colonial
administration in England was as simple as it was unsatisfactory.  At
its head was a standing committee of the Privy Council which had been
established in 1675.  This committee was known at length as "The Lords
of the Committee of Trade and Plantations," and in brief and more
generally as "The Lords of Trade."  It was the duty of the colonial
governors to make lengthy reports to the Lords of Trade on the {81}
commercial and other conditions of their governorships.  It was too
often their pleasure to supplement these State papers with lengthy and
embittered private letters, addressed to the same body, making the very
most and worst of the difficulties they had to deal with in their work.
The colonies, as represented in these semi-official communications,
were turbulent, contumacious, discontented, disrespectful to viceregal
dignity, rebellious against the authority of Great Britain.  These
communications informed the minds of the Lords of Trade, who in their
turn influenced those who were responsible for the conduct of the
King's Government.  Thus a vicious system, acting in a vicious circle,
kept alive an irritation and fostered a friction that only increased
with the increasing years.  It had always been the worst feature of
England's colonial policy that she was ever ready to accept with too
little question the animadversions of the governors upon the governed.
The Lords of Trade accepted the communications of the colonial
governors as gospel truth, and as gospel truth it was taken in its turn
by the ministers to whom it was transmitted and by the monarch to whom
they carried it.  The general public were as ignorant of and as
indifferent to the American colonies as if they were situated in the
mountains of the moon.  The major part of the small minority that
really did seek or desire information about America gained it from the
same poisonous sources that inspired the Government, and based their
theories of colonial reform upon the peevish epistles, often mendacious
and always one-sided, which fed the intelligences of the Lords of
Trade.  The few who were really well informed, who had something like
as accurate an appreciation of the colony of Massachusetts as they had
of the county of Middlesex, were powerless to counteract the general
ignorance and the more particular misconception.  It was the cherished
dream of authority in England to bring the colonies into one common
rule under one head in such a way as to strengthen their military force
while it lessened their legislative independence.  It now seemed as if
with the right King and the right Ministry {82} this dream might become
a reality.  In George the Third and in George Grenville prerogative
seemed to have found the needed instruments to subjugate the American
colonies.

[Sidenote: 1765--Trade restrictions upon the colonies]

Many of the grievances of the colonies were grave enough.  If some of
the injuries that England inflicted upon her great dependency seem
petty in the enumeration, a number of small causes of irritation are no
less dangerous to peace between nations than some great injustice.  But
lest the small stings should not be enough, the Government was resolved
that the great injustice should not be wanting.  The colonists resented
the intermittent tyranny and the persistent truculence of the most part
of the royal governors.  The colonists resented the enforced
transportation of criminals.  The colonists resented the action of
Great Britain in annulling the colonial laws made to keep out slaves.
It is melancholy to reflect that the curse of slavery, for which
Englishmen of later days often so bitterly and so rightly reproached
America, was unhappily enforced upon a country struggling to be rid of
it by Englishmen who called themselves English statesmen.  The
colonists resented the astonishing restrictions which it pleased the
mother country to place, in what she believed to be her own interest,
upon colonial trade.  These laws commanded that all trade between the
colonies should be carried on in ships built in England or the
colonies.  This barred out all foreigners, especially the Dutch, then
the chief carriers for Europe.  They compelled the American farmer to
send his products across the ocean to England.  They forbade the
exportation of sugar, tobacco, cotton, wool, indigo, ginger,
dyeing-woods to any part of the world except to England or some English
colony.  They only allowed exportation of fish, fur, oil, ashes, and
lumber in ships built in England or the colonies.  They forced the
colonists to buy all their European goods in England and bring them
over to America in English vessels.  They prohibited the colonial
manufacture of any article that could be manufactured in England.  They
harassed and minimized the trade between one colony and another.  No
{83} province was permitted to send woollen goods, hats, or ironware to
another province.  Some of the regulations read more like the rules of
some Turkish pashalik than the laws framed by one set of Englishmen for
another set of Englishmen.  In the Maine woods, for instance, no tree
that had a diameter greater than two feet at a foot above the ground
could be cut down, except to make a mast for some ship of the Royal
Navy.

Bad and bitter as these laws were in theory, they did not for long
enough prove to be so bad in practice, for the simple reason that they
were very easy to evade and not very easy to enforce.  The colonists
met what many of them regarded as an elaborate system for the
restriction of colonial trade by a no less elaborate system of
smuggling.  Smuggling was easy because of the long extent of sea-coast.
Smuggling was lucrative, as few considered it an offence to evade laws
that were generally resented as unfair.  When the Sugar Act of 1733
prohibited the importation of sugar and molasses from the French West
Indies except on payment of a prohibitory duty, the New England
colonists, who did a thriving trade in the offspring of the union of
sugar and molasses, rum, found themselves faced by a serious problem.
Should they accept the Act and its consequential ruin of their trade or
ignore it, and by resorting to smuggling prosper as before?  Without
hesitation they decided that their rights as Englishmen were assailed
by the obnoxious imposition, and they turned to smuggling with the
light heart that is conscious of a heavy purse.  The contraband trade
was brisk, the contrabandists cheerful, and so long as England made no
serious attempt to put into operation laws that the genial and
business-like smugglers of the Atlantic sea-coast regarded as
preposterous nobody complained, and international relations were
cordial.  But the situation was not seen with so bright an eye by the
British merchant.  He witnessed with indignation the failure of the
attempt to monopolize the commerce of the colonies to his own
advantage, and he clamored for the restoration of his fat monopoly.
His clamor was unheeded while the great war {84} was running its
course.  But with the end of the war and the new conditions consequent
upon the advent of a new King with a brand-new theory of kingship and
prerogative, the situation began to change.

The colonial policy of George Grenville's Administration might be
conveniently considered under three heads.  The Ministry was resolved,
in the first place, to enforce Acts of Trade which smuggling had long
rendered meaningless in the American colonies.  The Ministry was
resolved, in the second place, to establish a permanent garrison of
some ten thousand men in America.  The Ministry was resolved, in the
third place, to make the colonists pay a third of the cost of keeping
up this garrison by a direct taxation.  It was easy enough for
Grenville to formulate the three ministerial purposes, but it was not
very easy to give them any effect.  The colonists resented and the
colonists resisted all three proposals.  If they were technically wrong
in their resentment at the enforcement of the Acts of Trade, they were
reasonable in their reluctance to accept the proposed garrison, and
they were justified by every law of liberty and of patriotism in
resisting with all the strength at their command the proposed scheme of
taxation.

[Sidenote: 1765--James Otis and John Adams]

The English Government began its task by a rigorous attempt to enforce
the Acts of Trade.  Grenville had made up his narrow mind that the
colonies should be compelled to adhere to the conditions which obliged
them to trade with England only for England's principal manufactures.
There should be no more smuggling from Spanish America, no more
smuggling from the West Indies.  To enforce this determination, which
deprived the colonists at a blow of the most profitable part of their
trade, the Government employed certain general search warrants, which,
if strictly legal in the letter, were conceived in a spirit highly
calculated to goad a proud people into illegal defiance.  They goaded
one proud man into active protest.  A distinguished servant of the
Government, James Otis, the King's Advocate, resigned his office in
order that he might be at liberty to denounce the Writs of Assistance.
{85} Otis may have been technically wrong in resisting the Writs of
Assistance, but it can scarcely be questioned that as a philosophic
politician, who was devoted to the interests of his countrymen, he was
ethically in the right.  Otis was thirty-six years old; he was known to
his compatriots as a graduate of Harvard, an able lawyer, a zealous
student of classical literature, and an author of repute on Latin
prosody.  The issue of the Writs of Assistance converted the respected
and respectable public servant into a conspicuous statesman as hotly
applauded by the one side as he was execrated by the other.  A single
speech lifted him from an esteemed obscurity to a leading place among
the champions of colonial rights against imperial aggressions.  The
assemblage which Otis addressed, which Otis dominated, was forever
memorable in the history of America.  "Otis was a flame of fire."  The
words are the words of one who was a young man when Otis spoke, who
listened and took notes as the words fell from Otis's lips.  "With a
promptitude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid
summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of legal
authorities, a prophetic glance of his eyes into futurity, and a rapid
torrent of tempestuous eloquence, he hurried away all before him.  Then
and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the
arbitrary claims of Great Britain.  Then and there the child
Independence was born.  Every man of an immense crowded audience
appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take up arms against Writs
of Assistance."

The youth who took notes of the words of Otis, and who was inspired by
them with the desire to rise and mutiny, was destined to play even a
greater part in the history of his country.  If Otis was one of the
first to assert actively, by deed as well as by word, the determination
of the colonies to oppose and, if needs were, to defy the domination of
England, John Adams was the first to applaud his action and to
appreciate its importance.  In 1763 John Adams was no more than a
promising young lawyer who had struggled from poverty and hardship to
regard and authority, and who had wrested from iron Fortune a great
{86} deal of learning if very little of worldly wealth.  Short of
stature, sanguine of temperament, the ruddy, stubborn, passionate small
man had fought his way step by step from the most modest if not the
most humble beginnings, as zealously as if he had known of the fame
that was yet to be his and the honor that he was to give to his name
and hand down to a long line of honorable descendants.  If the
ministers who weakly encouraged or meanly obeyed King George in his
frenzy against America could have understood even dimly the temper of a
race that was rich in sons of whom John Adams was but one and not the
most illustrious even to them, there must have come dimly some
consciousness of the forces they had to encounter, and the peril of
their policy.  But the Ministry knew nothing of Adams, and knew only of
Otis as a mutinous and meddlesome official.  Otis and his protest
signified nothing to them, and they would have smiled to learn that
young Mr. Adams, the lawyer, believed that American independence was
born when Mr. Otis's oration against Writs of Assistance breathed into
the colonies the breath of life that was to make them a nation.

[Sidenote: 1765--Taxation without representation]

If Otis voiced and Adams echoed the feelings of the colonists against
Writs of Assistance and the enforcement of the Acts of Trade, they
might no less eloquently have interpreted the general irritation at the
proposed establishment of a permanent garrison on the continent.  The
colonists saw no need of such a garrison so late in the day.  When the
Frenchmen held the field, when the red man was on the war path, then
indeed the presence of more British soldiers might have become welcome.
But the flag of France no longer floated over strong places, no longer
fluttered at the head of invasion.  The strength of the savage was
crippled if not crushed.  The colonists had nothing to fear from the
one and little to fear from the other foe.  They thought that they had
much to fear from the presence of a British garrison of ten thousand
men.  This British garrison might, on occasion, be used not in defence
of their liberties, but in diminution of their liberties.  The
irritation against the proposed garrison might have {87} smouldered out
if it had not been fanned into a leaping flame by the means proposed
for the maintenance of the garrison.  Grenville proposed to raise
one-third of the cost of support from the colonies by taxation.  No
proposal could have been better calculated to goad every colony and
every colonist into resistance, and to fuse the scattered elements of
resistance into a solid whole.  More than two generations earlier both
Massachusetts and New York had formally denied the right of the Home
Government to levy any tax upon the American colonies.  The colonies
were not represented at Westminster--could not, under the conditions,
be represented at Westminster.  The theory that there should be no
taxation without representation was as dear to the American for America
as it was dear to the Englishman for England.  Successive English
Governments, forced in times of financial pressure wistfully to eye
American prosperity, had dreamed, and only dreamed, of raising money by
taxing the well-to-do colonies.  It was reserved to the Government
headed by Grenville, in its madness, to attempt to make the dream a
reality.  It is true that even Grenville did not propose, did not
venture to suggest that the American colonies should be taxed for the
direct benefit of the English Government.  He brought forward his
scheme of taxation as a benefit to America, as a contribution to the
expense of keeping up a garrison that was only established in the
interests of America and for America's welfare.  In this spirit of
benevolence, and with apparent confidence of success, Grenville brought
forward his famous Stamp Act.

There were statesmen in England who saw with scarcely less indignation
than the Americans themselves, and with even more dismay, the unfolding
of the colonial policy of the Government.  These protested against the
intolerable weight of the duties imposed, and arraigned the folly
which, by compelling these duties to be paid in specie, drained away
the little ready money remaining in the colonies, "as though the best
way to cure an emaciated body, whose juices happened to be tainted, was
to leave it no juices at all."  They assailed the injustice that
refused {88} to recognize as legal tender any paper bills of credit
issued by the colonies.  Politicians, guided by the intelligence and
the inspiration of Burke, applauded the Americans for their firmness in
resolving to subsist to the utmost of their power upon their own
productions and manufactures.  They urged that it could not be expected
that the colonists, merely out of a compliment to the mother country,
should submit to perish for thirst with water in their own wells.  And
these clear-sighted politicians saw plainly enough that such blows as
the Government were aiming at America must in the end recoil upon Great
Britain herself.  They appreciated the injury that must be done to
British commerce by even a temporary interruption of the intercourse
between the two countries.  But bad as the restrictive measures were in
their immediate, as well as in their ultimate consequences, worse
remained behind.  The proposed Stamp Act scarcely shocked Otis or Adams
more directly and cruelly than it shocked the soundest and sanest
thinkers on the other side of the Atlantic.  Words which certainly
expressed the thoughts of Burke declared that the approval, even with
opposition, given to such a measure as the Stamp Act, the bare proposal
of which had given so much offence, argued such a want of reflection as
could scarcely be paralleled in the public councils of any country.

The King's speech at the opening of Parliament on January 10, 1765,
gave unmistakable evidence of the temper of the monarch and of the
Ministry.  It formally expressed its reliance on the wisdom and
firmness of Parliament in promoting the proper respect and obedience
due to the legislative authority of Great Britain.  The Government was
resolved to be what it considered firm, and it undoubtedly believed
that a proper show of firmness would easily overbear any opposition
that the colonists might make to the proposed measure.  The Stamp Act
was introduced, the Stamp Act was debated upon; in due time the Stamp
Act passed through both Houses, and in consequence of the ill health of
the King received the royal assent by commission on March 28, 1765.
The first foolish challenge to American loyalty was formally made, and
{89} America was not slow to accept it.  It may be admitted that in
itself the Stamp Act was not a conspicuously unfair or even a
conspicuously unreasonable measure.  It was a legitimate and perfectly
fair way of raising money from a taxable people.  It was neither
legitimate nor fair when imposed upon unrepresented colonists.  But if
it had been the sanest and most statesmanlike scheme for raising money
ever conceived by a financier, it would have deserved and would have
received no less hostility from the American people.  The principle
involved was everything.  To admit in any degree the right of Great
Britain to impose at her pleasure a tax upon the colonists was to
surrender in ignominy the privileges and to betray the duties of free
men.  Any expectations of colonial protest that the Ministry may have
allowed themselves to entertain were more than fulfilled.  Colony after
colony, great town after great town, great man after great man, made
haste to protest with an emphasis that should have been significant
against the new measure.  Boston led the way.  Boston's most
distinguished citizen, Boston's most respected son was the voice not
merely of his town, not merely of his State, but of the colonial
continent.  Ten years later the name of Samuel Adams was known, hated,
and honored on the English side of the Atlantic.

[Sidenote: 1765--Samuel Adams]

Samuel Adams was one of those men whom Nature forges to be the
instruments of revolution.  His three-and-forty years had taught him
much: the value of silence, the knowledge of men, the desire to change
the world and the patience to bide his time.  A few generations earlier
he might have made a right-hand man to Cromwell and held a place in the
heart of Hampden.  On the very threshold of his manhood, when receiving
his degree of Master of Arts at Harvard, he asserted his defiant
democracy in a dissertation on the right of the people of a
commonwealth to combine against injustice on the part of the head of
the State.  The badly dressed man with the grave firm face of a Pilgrim
Father was as ready and as resolute to oppose King George as any Pym or
Vane had been ready and resolute to oppose Charles Stuart.  He had at
one {90} time devoted himself to a commercial career, with no great
success.  He was made for a greater game than commerce; he had the
temper and he gained the training for a public life, and the hour when
it came found that the man was ready.  When the citizens of Boston met
to protest against the Stamp Act Samuel Adams framed the first
resolutions that denied to the Parliament of Great Britain the right to
impose taxes upon her colonies.

[Sidenote: 1765--The opposition to the Stamp Act]

If Massachusetts was the first to protest with no uncertain voice
against the Stamp Act, other colonies were prompt to follow her
example, and to prove that they possessed sons no less patriotic.
Virginia was as vehement and as vigorous in opposition as
Massachusetts.  One speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses made the
name of Patrick Henry famous.  Patrick Henry was a young man who tried
many things and failed in them before he found in the practice of the
law the appointed task for his rare gifts of reasoning and of
eloquence.  A speech in Hanover Court House in defence of the people
against a suit of the parish clergy gave him sudden fame.  As grave of
face as Samuel Adams, as careless of his attire, tall and lean, stamped
with the seal of the speaker and the thinker, Patrick Henry at
nine-and-twenty was already a very different man from the youth who
five years earlier seemed destined to be but a Jack of all trades and
master of none, an unsuccessful trader, an unsuccessful farmer, whose
chief accomplishments in life were hunting and fishing, dancing and
riding.  The debate on the Stamp Act gave him a great opportunity.  As
he addressed his words of warning to the stubborn sovereign across the
sea his passion seemed to get the better of his prudence and to tempt
him into menace.  "Caesar," he said, "had his Brutus, Charles the First
his Cromwell."  He was going on to say "and George the Third," when he
was interrupted by angry cries of "Treason!" from the loyalists among
his hearers.  Patrick Henry waited until the noise subsided, and then
quietly completed his sentence, "George the Third may profit by their
example.  If this be treason, make the most of it."  The words were not
treasonable, {91} but they were revolutionary.  They served to carry
the name of Patrick Henry to every corner of the continent and across
the Atlantic.  They made him a hero and idol in the eyes of the
colonists; they made him a rebel in the eyes of the Court at St.
James's.

Massachusetts had set an example which Virginia had bettered;
Massachusetts was now to better Virginia.  If Virginia, prompted by
Patrick Henry, declared that she alone had the right to tax her own
citizens, Massachusetts, inspired by James Otis, summoned a congress of
deputies from all the colonial assemblies to meet in common
consultation upon the common danger.  This congress, the first but not
the last, memorable but not most memorable, met in New York in the
early November of 1765.  Nine colonies were represented at its
table--Massachusetts, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island,
Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York.  The
congress passed a series of resolutions, as firm in their purpose as
moderate in their language, putting forward the grievances and
asserting the rights of the colonies.

But the protests against the Stamp Act were not limited to eloquent
orations or formal resolutions.  Deeds, as well as words, made plain
the purpose of the American people.  Riots broke out in colony after
colony; the most and worst in Massachusetts.  Boston blazed into open
revolt against authority.  There were two Government officials in
Boston who were especially unpopular with the mob--Andrew Oliver, the
newly appointed collector of the stamp taxes, and Chief Justice
Hutchinson.  A scarecrow puppet, intended to represent the obnoxious
Oliver, was publicly hung upon a tree by the mob, then cut down,
triumphantly paraded through the city to Oliver's door, and there set
on fire.  When the sham Oliver was ashes the crowd broke into and
ransacked his house, after which it did the same turn to the house of
Chief Justice Hutchinson.  Oliver and Hutchinson escaped unhurt, but
all their property went through their broken windows and lay in ruin
upon the Boston streets.  Hutchinson was busy upon a History of
Massachusetts; the manuscript shared the fate of its {92} author's
chairs and tables, and went with them out into the gutter.  It was
picked up, preserved, and exists to this day, its pages blackened with
the Boston mud.  Many papers and records of the province which
Hutchinson had in his care for the purpose of his history were
irretrievably lost.

The next day the judges and the bar, assembled in their robes at the
Boston Court House, were startled by the apparition of a haggard man in
disordered attire, whom they might have been pardoned for failing to
recognize as their familiar chief justice.  In a voice broken with
emotion Hutchinson apologized to the court for the appearance in which
he presented himself before it.  He and his family were destitute; he
himself had no other shirt and no other clothes than those he was at
that moment wearing.  Part even of this poor attire he had been obliged
to borrow.  Almost in rags, almost in tears, he solemnly called his
Maker to witness that he was innocent of the charges that had made him
obnoxious to the fury of the populace.  He swore that he never, either
directly or indirectly, aided, assisted, or supported, or in the least
promoted or encouraged the Stamp Act, but on the contrary did all in
his power, and strove as much as in him lay, to prevent it.  The court
listened to him in melancholy silence and then adjourned, "on account
of the riotous disorders of the previous night and universal confusion
of the town," to a day nearly two months later.

It was a thankless privilege to be a stamp officer in those stormy
hours.  Most of the stamp officers were forced to resign under pressure
which they might well be excused for finding sufficiently cogent.  In
order to make the new law a dead letter the colonists resolved that
while it was in force they would avoid using stamps by substituting
arbitration for any kind of legal procedure.  With a people in this
temper, there were only two things to be done; to meet their wishes, or
to annihilate their opposition.  It is possible that Grenville might
have preferred to attempt the second alternative, but by this time
Grenville's power was at an end.




{93}

CHAPTER XLVII.

EDMUND BURKE.

[Sidenote: 1730-82--Rockingham and his Ministry]

The friction between Grenville and the King was rapidly becoming
unbearable to George, if not to his minister.  George was resolved to
be rid of his intolerable tyrant at the cost of almost any concession.
He was now fully as eager to welcome Pitt back to office as he had once
been hot to drive him out of it.  Again Cumberland was called in; again
Cumberland approached Pitt; again Pitt's willingness to resume the
seals was overborne by the stubbornness of Temple.  The King was in
despair.  He would not endure Grenville and Grenville's bullying
sermons any longer, and yet it was hard indeed to find any one who
could take Grenville's place with any chance of carrying on Grenville's
work.  Cumberland had a suggestion to make, a desperate remedy for a
desperate case.  If Pitt and the old Whigs were denied to the King, why
should not the King try the new Whigs and Rockingham?

The old Whig party, as it had lived and ruled so long, had practically
ceased to exist.  So much the King had accomplished.  Saint George of
Hanover had struck at the dragon only to find that, like the monster in
the classical fable, it took new form and fresh vitality beneath his
strokes.  There was a Whig party that was not essentially the party of
Pitt, a party which was recruiting its ranks with earnest, thoughtful,
high-minded, honorable men to whom the principles or want of principles
which permitted the old Whig dominion were as intolerable as they
appear to a statesman of to-day.  At the head of this new development
of Whig activity was the man to whom Cumberland now turned in the hour
of the King's trial, Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquis of Rockingham.

{94}

Lord Rockingham was one of those ornaments of the English senate for
the benefit of whose biographers the adjective amiable seems especially
to have been invented.  Although the master of a large fortune, while
he was still a boy of twenty he was deservedly noted for the gravity
and stillness of his youth, and during a political career of
one-and-thirty years, if he showed neither commanding eloquence nor
commanding statesmanship, he did honor to the Whig party by his sincere
patriotism and irreproachable uprightness of character.  If heaven had
denied Rockingham the resplendent gifts that immortalize a Chatham, it
had given him in full measure of the virtues of patriotism, honesty,
integrity, and zeal.  The purity of his life, the probity of his
actions, and the excellence of all his public purposes, commended him
to the affectionate regard of all who held that morality was more
essential to a statesman than eloquence, and that it was better to fail
with such a man than to succeed with those to whom, for the most part,
the successes of that day were given.  Two years before, in 1763, his
dislike for the policy of Lord Bute had driven him to resign his small
office as Lord of the Bedchamber, and he carried his scrupulousness so
far as to resign at the same time his Lord-Lieutenantcy of Yorkshire.

To the delight of the Duke of Cumberland, and to the delight of the
King, Rockingham consented to form a Ministry.  With the best will in
the world Rockingham could not make his Ministry very commanding.  It
was but a makeshift, and not a very brilliant makeshift, but at least
it served to get rid of Grenville and of Grenville's harangues.  So
long as Grenville was unable to terrorize the royal closet with
reproaches and reproofs addressed to the King, and with menaces aimed
at Bute, George was quite willing to see Newcastle intrusted with the
Privy Seal, and Conway made Secretary of State for one department, and
the Duke of Grafton for the other.  But the Ministry which the King
accepted because he could get nothing better, and because he would have
welcomed something much worse so long as it delivered him from {95}
Grenville--the Ministry that provoked the derisive pity of most of its
critics was destined to attain an honorable immortality.  The
heterogeneous group of men who called themselves or were called, who
believed themselves or were believed to be Whigs, had obtained one
recruit whose name was yet to make the cause he served illustrious.
Lord Rockingham had many claims to the regard of his contemporaries;
undoubtedly his greatest claim to the regard of posterity lies in the
intelligence which enabled him to discern the rising genius of a young
writer, and the wisdom which found a place by his side and a seat in
the House of Commons for Edmund Burke.

[Sidenote: 1765--The coming of Edmund Burke]

The history of a nation is often largely the history of certain famous
men.  Great epochs, producing great leaders, make those leaders
essentially the expression of certain phases of the thought of their
age.  The life of Walpole is the life of the England of his time
because he was so intimately bound up with the great movement which
ended by setting Parliamentary government free from the possible
dominion of the sovereign.  The life of Chatham, the life of Pitt, the
life of Fox, each in its turn is a summary of the history of England
during the time in which they helped to guide its destinies.  But to
some men, men possessing in an exceptional degree the love for humanity
and the longing for progress, this power of representing in their lives
the sum and purpose of their age is markedly characteristic.  Just as
Mirabeau, until he died, practically represented the French Revolution,
so certain English statesmen have from time to time been representative
of the best life, the best thought, the best purposes, desires, and
ambitions of the country for whose sake they played their parts.  Of no
man can this theory be said to be more happily true than of Edmund
Burke.

It would scarcely be exaggeration to say that the history of England
during the middle third of the eighteenth century is largely the
history of the career of Edmund Burke.  From the moment when Burke
entered upon political life to the close of his great career, his name
was associated with every event of importance, his voice raised {96} on
one side or the other of every question that concerned the welfare of
the English people and the English Constitution.  As much as this,
however, might be said of more than one actor in the political history
of the period covered by Burke's public life.  But the influence which
Burke exercised upon his time, the force he brought to bear upon his
political generation, were a greater influence and a stronger force
than that directed by any other statesman of the age.  Whether for good
or for evil, according to the standards by which his critics may judge
him, Burke swayed the minds of masses of his countrymen to a degree
that was unequalled among his contemporaries.  With the two great
events of the century--the revolt of the American colonies and the
French Revolution--his name was the most intimately associated, his
influence the most potent.  With what in their degree must be called
the minor events of the reign--with the trial of Wilkes, with the trial
of Warren Hastings--he was no less intimately associated, and in each
case his association has been the most important feature of the event.
Where he was right as where he was wrong, and whether he was right or
whether he was wrong, he was always the most interesting, always the
most commanding figure in the epoch-making political controversies of
his day.  Grenville wrote of him finely, many years after his death,
that he was in the political world what Shakespeare was in the moral
world.

[Sidenote: 1729-59--Burke's early life]

Burke entered political life, or entered active political life, when he
was returned to Parliament in the December of 1765.  Up to that time
his life had been largely uneventful; much of it must be called as far
as we are concerned eventless, for of a great gap of his life, a gap of
no less than nine years, we know, if not absolutely nothing, certainly
next to nothing.  It is not even quite certain where or when he was
born.  The most approved account is that he was born in Dublin on
January 12, 1729, reckoning according to the new style.  The place of
his birth is still pointed out to the curious in Dublin: one of the
many modest houses that line the left bank of the Liffey.  His family
was supposed to stem from Limerick, from {97} namesakes who spelled
their name differently as Bourke.  His mother's family were Catholic;
Burke's mother always remained stanch to her native faith, and, though
Burke and his brothers were brought up as the Protestant sons of a
Protestant father, the influence of his mother must have counted for
much in creating that tender and generous sympathy towards a proscribed
creed which is one of the noblest characteristics of Burke's career.

Burke's earliest and in a sense his best education was received between
his twelfth and fourteenth years, in the school of a Yorkshire Quaker
named Abraham Shackleton, who kept a school at Ballitore.  Burke used
often to declare in later years that he owed everything he had gained
in life to the teaching and the example of those two years with Abraham
Shackleton.  The affectionate regard which Burke felt for his
schoolmaster, an affectionate regard which endured until Shackleton's
death, thirty years later, in 1771, he felt also for his schoolmaster's
son, Richard Shackleton.  Most of what we know of Burke's life in
Trinity College from 1743 to 1748 we gather from his letters to Richard
Shackleton, letters of absorbing interest to any student of the growth
of a great mind.  Less vivacious, less brilliant than the boyish
letters of Goethe, they resemble them in the eager thirst they display
for knowledge of all kinds, in their passionate enthusiasm for all the
rich varieties of human knowledge, in their restless experiments in all
directions.  In those younger days Burke thought himself, as every
generous and ambitious youth must needs think himself, a poet, and many
verses were forwarded to the faithful friend, to lighten the effect of
serious theological discussions and elaborate comparisons of classical
authors.

Dissensions with his father and a determination to study for the bar
sent Burke to England in the early part of 1750, and there for nine
long years he practically disappears from our knowledge.  All we know
is that he studied law, but that, like many another law student, he
gave more time and thought to literature than to his legal studies;
that this action deepened the hostility of his father, who {98} reduced
Burke's allowance to a pittance, and that his daily need as well as his
desire drove Burke to seek his livelihood in letters.

[Sidenote: 1759--The work of Edmund Burke]

He seems to have had a hard fight for it.  The glimpses we get of him
during that period of youthful struggle show him as an ardent student
of books, but a no less ardent student of life, not merely in the
streets and clubs and theatres of the great city, but in the seclusion
of quiet country villages and the highways and byways of rural England.
Romance has not failed to endeavor to illuminate with her prismatic
lantern the darkness of those nine mysterious years.  A vivid fancy has
been pleased to picture Burke as one of the many lovers of the
marvellous Margaret Woffington, as a competitor for the chair of Moral
Philosophy at Glasgow, as a convert to the Catholic faith, and, perhaps
most remarkable of all these lively legends, as a traveller in America.
These are fictions.  The certain facts are that somewhere about 1756 he
married a Miss Nugent, daughter of an Irish physician who had settled
in England.  Miss Nugent was a Catholic, and thus, for the second time,
the Catholic religion was endeared to Burke by one of the closest of
human relationships.  At about the same time as his marriage, Burke
made his first appearance as an author by the "Vindication of Natural
Society," a satire upon Bolingbroke which many accepted as a genuine
work of Bolingbroke's, and by the "Essay on the Sublime and the
Beautiful," which is perhaps most valuable because we owe to it in some
degree the later masterpiece of aesthetic criticism, the "Laocoon" of
Lessing.  From this time until his connection with public life began
his career was linked with Fleet Street and its brotherhood of authors,
and his pen was steadily employed.  With that love for variety of
subject which is characteristic of most of the authors of the
eighteenth century, he handled a number of widely differing themes.  He
wrote "Hints for an Essay on the Drama," a work which has scarcely held
its place in the library of the dramatist by the side of the "Paradoxe
sur le Comédien" of Diderot, or the "Hamburgische {99} Dramaturgie" of
Lessing.  He wrote an account of the European settlements in America,
still interesting as showing the early and intimate connection of his
thoughts with the greatest of English colonies.  He wrote an
"Abridgment of English History," which carries unfortunately no farther
than the reign of John a narrative that is not unworthy of its author.
He founded the "Annual Register," and was in its pages for many years
to come the historian of contemporary Europe.  Of all the many debts
that Englishmen owe to Burke, the conception and inception of the
"Annual Register" must not be reckoned as among the least important.

It was at this point in his career that Burke's connection with public
life began, not to end thenceforward until the end of his own life.
Single-speech Hamilton, so called because out of a multitude of
speeches he made one magnificent speech, was attracted to Burke by the
fame of the "Vindication of Natural Society," sought his acquaintance,
and when Hamilton went to Ireland as secretary to Lord Halifax, Burke
accompanied him.  For two years Burke remained with Hamilton in
Ireland, studying the Irish question of that day, with the closeness of
the acutest mind then at work and with the racial sympathy of the
native.  Then he quarrelled, and rightly quarrelled, with Hamilton,
because Hamilton, to whom the aid of Burke was infinitely precious,
sought to bind Burke forever to his service by a pension of three
hundred a year.  Burke demanded some leisure for the literature that
had made his name.  Hamilton justified Leland's description of him as a
selfish, canker-hearted, envious reptile by refusing.  Burke, who
always spoke his mind roundly, described Hamilton as an infamous
scoundrel, flung back his pension and returned to freedom,
independence, and poverty.  But he was soon to enter the service of
another statesman under less galling terms, under less unreasonable
conditions.

Burke's name was brought before Lord Rockingham, probably by Burke's
friend and namesake, though in all likelihood not kinsman, William
Burke.  Lord Rockingham {100} appointed Burke his private secretary,
and by the simple integrity of his character bound Burke, to use his
own words, "by an inviolable attachment to him from that time forward."
But the alliance thus begun was threatened in its birth.  A mysterious
hostility attributed by Burke to "Hell-Kite" Hamilton brought certain
charges to the notice of the Duke of Newcastle.  The Duke of Newcastle
hurried to Lord Rockingham to warn him that his newly appointed
secretary was a disguised Jesuit, a disguised Jacobite.  Lord
Rockingham immediately communicated these accusations to Burke, who
repelled them with a firmness and dignity which had the effect only of
confirming Lord Rockingham's admiration of Burke and of drawing closer
the friendship of the two men.  Burke was promptly brought into
Parliament as member for Wendover, and during the single year which
Lord Rockingham's Administration lasted its leader had every reason to
rejoice at the happy chance which had given to him such a follower and
such an ally.

Burke delivered his maiden speech in the House of Commons on January
27, 1766, a few days after the opening of the session, on the subject
of the dissatisfaction in the American colonies.  His speech won the
praise of the Great Commoner; his succeeding speeches earned him
enthusiastic commendation from friends and admirers outside and inside
the House of Commons.  The successful man of letters had proved himself
rapidly to be a successful orator and a politician who would have to be
reckoned with.

[Sidenote: 1766--The influence of Burke's career]

It has been contended, and not unreasonably, that as an orator Burke is
not merely in the first rank, but that he is himself the first, that he
stands alone, without a rival, without a peer, and that none of the
orators of antiquity can be said even to contest his unquestionable
supremacy.  But it is in no sense necessary to Burke's fame that the
fame of others should be in any way impugned or depreciated.  It is
sufficient praise to say that Burke is one of the greatest orators the
world has ever held.  To argue that he is superior to Demosthenes on
the {101} one hand, or to Cicero on the other, is to maintain an
argument very much on a par with that which it amused Burke himself to
maintain when he contended for the superiority of the "Aeneid" over the
"Iliad."  It is quite enough to be able to say well-nigh without fear
of contradiction that Burke is probably the greatest orator who ever
spoke in the English language.

Burke's political career began brilliantly in the championship of
freedom, in the defence of the oppressed, in the defiance of injustice.
He was made welcome to the great political arena in which he was to
fight so long and so hard.  His ability was recognized at once; he may
be said to have leaped into a fame that the passage of time has not
merely confirmed but increased.  No author more profoundly influenced
the thought of his time; no author of that time is likely to exercise a
more enduring influence upon succeeding generations.  Of all the men of
that busy and brilliant age, Burke has advanced the most steadily in
the general knowledge and favor.  While other men, his rivals in
eloquence, his peers in the opinions of his contemporaries, come year
by year to be less used as influences and appealed to as authorities,
the wisdom of Burke is more frequently drawn upon and more widely
appreciated than ever.  The world sees now, even more clearly than the
world saw then, that whether Burke was right or wrong in his
conclusions as to any question, it had to be admitted that the point of
view from which he started to get at that conclusion was the correct
one.




{102}

CHAPTER XLVIII.

THE STAMP ACT.

[Sidenote: 1766--Benjamin Franklin]

That the colonies were not well understood in England was no fault of
the colonists.  There was at that time and hour in England a man
specially authorized to speak on behalf of the colony of Pennsylvania,
and indirectly entitled as he was admirably qualified to represent the
other colonies.  At that time Benjamin Franklin was the most
distinguished American living and the most distinguished American who
had ever lived.  It was not his first visit to England.  He had crossed
the Atlantic forty years before when he was a youth of eighteen, eager
to set up for himself as a master printer, and anxious to obtain the
materials for his trade in the old country.  In those eighteen years he
had learned many things.  He had learned how to print; he had learned
how to bear poverty with courage and ambition with patience; he could
never remember a time when he was unable to read, but he had learned
how to read with inexhaustible pleasure and unfailing profit, and he
had learned how to write.  When he was seventeen he had run away from
his birthplace, Boston, and the home of an ill-tempered brother, and
made his way as best he might to Philadelphia.  As he tramped into the
city with a loaf under each arm for provender, a young woman leaning in
a doorway laughed at the singular figure.  Six years later she married
Franklin, who in the interval had been a journeyman printer in
Philadelphia, a journeyman printer in London, and had at last been able
to set up for himself in Philadelphia.  From 1729 the story of
Franklin's life is the story of a steady and splendid advance in
popularity and wealth, and in the greater gifts of knowledge, wisdom,
and humanity.  He published a newspaper, {103} the _Philadelphia
Gazette_; he disseminated frugality, thrift, industry, and the cheerful
virtues in "Poor Richard's Almanack," he was the benefactor and the
blessing of the city of his adoption.  He founded her famous library;
he devoted the results of his scientific studies to her comfort,
welfare, and comeliness; he maintained her defences as a military
engineer, and was prepared to serve her gallantly in the field against
the Indians as a colonel of Militia of his own raising.  No man ever
lived a fuller life or did so many things with more indomitable zeal or
more honorable thoroughness.  The colony of Pennsylvania was very proud
of her illustrious citizen and delighted to do him honor.  When he
visited England for the second time, in 1757, he was the Agent for the
General Assembly of Pennsylvania, he was Deputy Postmaster-General for
the British colonies, he was famous throughout the civilized world for
his discovery of the identity of lightning with the electric fluid.  He
was in London for the third time when Rockingham took office.  He had
lived nearly sixty years of a crowded, memorable, admirable life; he
was loaded with laurels, ripe in the learning of books and the learning
of the book of the world.  Even he whom few things surprised or took
unawares would have been surprised if he could have been told that the
life he had lived was eventless, bloodless, purposeless in comparison
with the life he had yet to live, and that all he had done for his
country was but as dust in the balance when weighed against the work he
was yet to do for her.  He was standing on the threshold of his new
career in the year when Edmund Burke entered Parliament.

The Rockingham Administration did its best to undo the folly of
Grenville's Government.  After long debates in both Houses, after
examination of Franklin at the bar of the Commons, after the strength
and acumen of Mansfield had been employed to sustain the prerogative
against the colonies and the voice of Burke had championed the colonies
against the prerogative, after Grenville had defended himself with
shrewdness and Pitt had added to the splendor of his fame, the Stamp
Act was formally {104} repealed.  Unhappily, the new Ministry was only
permitted to do good by halves.  The same session that repealed the
Stamp Act promulgated the Declaratory Act, asserting the full power of
the King, on the advice of Parliament, to make laws binding the
American colonies in all cases whatsoever.  This desperate attempt to
assert what the repeal of the Stamp Act virtually surrendered was
intended as a solace to the King and as a warning--perhaps a friendly
warning--to the colonies.  Those who were most opposed to it in England
may well have hoped that it might be accepted without too much
straining in the general satisfaction caused by the repeal of the hated
measure.  Even Franklin seemed to believe that the Declaratory Act
would not cause much trouble in America.  The event denied the hope,
and indignation at the Declaratory Act outlasted in America the
rejoicing over the subversion of Grenville's policy.  Nevertheless, the
rejoicing was very great.  On May 16, 1766, the public spirit of Boston
was stimulated by the distribution of a broadsheet headed "Glorious
News."  This broadsheet announced the arrival of John Hancock's brig
"Harrison," in six weeks and two days from London, with the important
tidings of the repeal of the Stamp Act.  The broadsheet painted a
lively picture of the enthusiasm at Westminster and the rejoicings in
the City of London over the total repeal of the measure.  It told of
the ships in the river displaying all their colors, of illuminations
and bonfires in many parts; "in short, the rejoicings were as great as
was ever known on any occasion."  This broadsheet, "printed for the
benefit of the public," ended in a rapture of delight.  "It is
impossible to express the joy the town is now in, on receiving the
above great, glorious, and important news.  The bells on all the
churches were immediately set a-ringing, and we hear the day for a
general rejoicing will be the beginning of next week."  Boston had
every reason to rejoice, to ring its bells and fly its flags, and set
poor debtors free from prison in honor of the occasion.  The colonies
had stood together against the Home Government, and had learned
something of {105} the strength of their union by the repeal of the
Stamp Act.

[Sidenote: 1766--Action of the Colonial Governors]

But when the bells had stopped ringing and the flags were hauled down
and the released debtors had ceased to congratulate themselves upon
their newly recovered liberty, Boston and the other colonial cities
found that their satisfaction was not untempered.  The broadsheet that
had blazoned the repeal had also assured its readers that the Acts of
Trade relating to America would be taken under consideration and all
grievances removed.  "The friends to America are very powerful and
disposed to assist us to the best of their ability."  The friends to
America were powerful, but they fought against tremendous odds.
Dulness and mediocrity, a spite that was always stupid, and a stupidity
that was often spiteful, an alliance of ignorance and arrogance were
the forces against which they struggled in vain.  The Acts of Trade
were to be enforced as rigidly as ever.  The Declaratory Act pompously
asserted the unimpeachable prerogative of British Majesty to make what
laws it pleased for the colonies.  The good that had been done seemed
small in comparison with the harm that might yet be done, that in all
probability would be done.

For the time more was to be feared from the viceroys of the provinces
than from the Home Government.  Mr. Secretary Conway addressed a
circular letter to the governors of the different colonies, reproving
the colonists, indeed, for the recent disturbances, but with a measured
mildness of reproof that seemed carefully calculated not to give
needless offence or cause unnecessary irritation.  "If by lenient
persuasive methods," Conway wrote, "you can contribute to restore the
peace and tranquillity to the provinces on which their welfare and
happiness depend, you will do a most acceptable and essential service
to your country."  An appeal so suave, advice so judicious, did not
seem the less prudent and humane because the Secretary insisted upon
the repression of violence and outrage and reminded those to whom his
letter was addressed that if they needed aid in the maintenance of law
and order {106} they were to require it at the hands of the commanders
of his Majesty's land and naval forces in America.  If all the
gentlemen to whom the Secretary's circular was addressed had been as
reasonable and as restrained in language as its writer, things might
even then have turned out very differently.  It was not to be expected,
and the colonists did not expect, that outrage and violence were to go
unchallenged and unpunished, and it is probable that few even in
Massachusetts would have objected to the formal expression of thanks
for firmness and zeal which was made by Conway to the governor of that
colony.  But the temperance that was possible to Conway was impossible
to Bernard.  Bernard was one of the worst of a long line of
inappropriate colonial governors.  He was a hot-headed, hot-hearted man
who seemed to think that to play the part of a domineering, blustering
bully was to show discretion and discernment in the duties of his
office.  He always acted under the conviction that he must always be in
the right and every one else always in the wrong, and he blazed up into
fantastic rages at the slightest show of opposition.  As this was not
the spirit in which to deal with the proud and independent men of
Massachusetts, Governor Bernard passed the better part of his life in a
passion and was forever quarrelling with his provincial legislature and
forever complaining to the Home Government of his hard lot and of the
mischievous, mutinous set of fellows he had to deal with.

When Bernard received the Secretary's letters and the accompanying
copies of the two Bills that had been passed by the British Parliament,
he hastened to make them known to the Assembly of Massachusetts.  But
he made them known in a speech that was wholly lacking in either
temperance or discretion.  Had it been at once his desire and his duty
to inflame his hearers against himself and the Government which he
represented he could hardly have chosen words more admirably adapted
for the purpose.  With a wholly unchastened arrogance and a wholly
ungoverned truculence, the governor of the province lectured or rather
hectored the gentlemen of the Council and the {107} gentlemen of the
House of Representatives after a fashion that would have seemed in
questionable taste on the part of an old-fashioned pedagogue to a
parcel of unruly schoolboys.  He was for bullying and blustering them
into a better behavior, and he assured those who were willing to make
amends and to promise to be good in the future that their past offences
would be buried in a charitable oblivion.  "Too ready a forgetfulness
of injuries hath been said to be my weakness," Bernard urged with
strange ignorance.  "However, it is a failing which I had rather suffer
by than be without."

The House of Representatives replied to the reproofs of their governor
in an address that was remarkable for the firmness with which it
maintained its own position and the irony with which it reviewed the
governor's pretensions.  To prove their independence of action, they
delayed the Act of Indemnity demanded by Secretary Conway for several
months, and then accompanied it with a general pardon to all persons
who had been concerned in the riots provoked by the Stamp Act.  Though
this Act was promptly disallowed by the Home Government on the ground
that the power of pardon belonged exclusively to the Crown, it took
effect nevertheless, and added another to the grievances of Bernard and
of his backers in England.

[Sidenote: 1766--End of the Rockingham Administration]

The slowly widening breach between the American colonies and the mother
country might even yet have been filled if it had been possible for the
King to depend upon the services and listen to the advice of ministers
whose good intentions and general good sense had the advantage of being
served and indirectly inspired by the genius of Burke.  But unhappily,
the fortunes of the party with whom he was allied were not long fated
to be official fortunes.  After a year of honorable if somewhat
colorless existence, the Rockingham Administration came to an end.
There was no particular reason why it should come to an end, but the
King was weary of it.  If it had not gravely dissatisfied him, it had
afforded him no grave satisfaction.  An Administration always seemed to
George the Third like a candle which he could illuminate or extinguish
at his {108} pleasure.  So he blew out the Rockingham Administration
and turned to Pitt for a new one.  In point of fact, an Administration
without Pitt was an impossibility.  The Duke of Grafton had resigned
his place in the Rockingham Ministry because he believed it hopeless to
go on without the adhesion of Pitt, and Pitt would not adhere to the
Rockingham Ministry.  Now, with a free hand, he set to work to form one
of the most amazing Administrations that an age which knew many strange
Administrations can boast of.

The malady which had for so long martyrized the great statesman had
afflicted him heavily of late.  His eccentricities had increased to
such a degree that they could hardly be called merely eccentricities.
But though he suffered in mind and in body he was ready and even eager
to return to power, so long as that power was absolute.  By this time
he had quarrelled with Temple, who had so often hindered him from
resuming office, and who was now as hostile to him as his brother,
George Grenville, had ever been.  Temple, in consequence, found no
place in the new Administration.  The Administration was especially
designed to please the King.  A party had grown up in the State which
was known by the title of the King's friends.  The King's friends had
no political creed, no political convictions, no desire, no ambition,
and no purpose save to please the King.  What the King wanted said they
would say; what the King wanted done they would do; their votes were
unquestionably and unhesitatingly at the King's command.  They did not,
indeed, act from an invincible loyalty to the royal person.  It was the
royal purse that ruled them.  The King was the fountain of patronage;
wealth and honors flowed from him; and the wealth and the honors welded
the King's friends together into a harmonious and formidable whole.
The King's friends found themselves well represented in a Ministry that
was otherwise as much a thing of shreds and patches as a harlequin's
coat.  Pitt had tried to make a chemical combination, but he only
succeeded in making a mixture that might at any time dissolve into its
component parts.  It was composed {109} of men of all parties and all
principles.  The amiable Conway and the unamiable Grafton remained on
from Rockingham's Ministry.  So did the Duke of Portland and Lord
Bessborough, so did Saunders and Keppel.  Pitt did not forget his own
followers.  He gave the Great Seal to Lord Camden, who, as Justice
Pratt, had liberated Wilkes from unjustifiable arrest.  He made Lord
Shelburne one of the Secretaries of State.  The Chancellorship of the
Exchequer was given to a politician with a passion for popularity that
made him as steadfast as a weathercock, Charles Townshend.

[Sidenote: 1766--Pitt as Earl of Chatham]

By this time Pitt was no longer the Great Commoner.  The House of
Commons was to know him no more.  Under the title of Earl of Chatham he
had entered the Upper House.  Such an elevation did not mean then, as
it came later to mean, something little better than political
extinction.  But Pitt's elevation meant to him a loss of popularity as
immediate as it was unexpected.  Though he was no longer young, though
he was racked in mind and body, though he sorely needed the repose that
he might hope to find in the Upper House, he was assailed with as much
fury of vituperation as if he had betrayed the State.  A country that
was preparing to rejoice at his return to power lashed itself into a
fury of indignation at his exaltation to the peerage.  In the twinkling
of an eye men who had been devoted yesterday to Pitt were prepared to
believe every evil of Chatham.  His rule began in storm and gloom, and
gloomy and stormy it remained.  The first act of his Administration
roused the fiercest controversy.  A bad harvest had raised the price of
food almost to famine height.  Chatham took the bold step of laying an
embargo on the exportation of grain.  The noise of the debates over
this act had hardly died away when Pitt's malady again overmastered
him, and once more he disappeared from public life into mysterious
melancholy silence and seclusion.  It was an unhappy hour for the
country which deprived it of the services of Chatham and left the helm
of state in the hands of Charles Townshend.

Charles Townshend was the erratic son of a singularly {110} erratic
mother.  The beautiful Audrey Harrison married the third Marquis
Townshend, bore him five children, and then separated from him to carry
her beauty, her insolence, and her wit through an amazed and amused
society.  It was one of her eccentricities to change her name Audrey to
Ethelfreda.  Another was to fancy herself and to proclaim herself to be
very much in love with the unhappy Lord Kilmarnock.  She attended the
trial persistently, waited under his windows, quarrelled with Selwyn
for daring to jest about the execution--no very happy theme for
wit--and was all for adopting a little boy whom some of the officials
of the Tower had palmed off upon her as Kilmarnock's son.  Walpole
liked her, delighted in her witty, stinging sayings.  She was always
entertaining, always alarming, always ready to say or do anything that
came into her mind.  She lived, a whimsical, spiteful, sprightly
oddity, to be eighty-seven years of age.  [Sidenote: 1766--Peculiar
characteristics of Charles Townshend] Charles Townshend was her second
son, and Charles Townshend was in many ways as whimsical as his mother.
He had a ready wit, a dexterity in epigram, an astonishing facility of
speech, and a very great appreciation of his own power of turning
friends or foes into ridicule.  It is told of him that once in his
youth, when a student at Leyden, he suffered from his readiness to jest
at the expense of another.  At a merry supper party he plied one of the
guests, a seemingly unconscious, stolid Scotchman named Johnstone, with
sneers and sarcasms which the Scotchman seemed to disregard or take in
good part.  On the next morning, however, Townshend's victim,
enlightened by some friend as to the way in which he had been made a
butt of, became belligerent and sent Townshend a challenge.  Various
opinions have been expressed of Townshend's action in the matter.  He
has been applauded for good sense.  He has been reproached for
cowardice.  Certainly Townshend did not, would not fight his
challenger.  It required a great deal of good sense to decline a duel
in those days, and Townshend did decline the duel.  He apologized to
his slow-witted but stubborn-purposed opponent with a profusion of
apology which some of his {111} friends thought to be excessive.  In
these days we should consider Townshend's refusal to fight a duel
merely as an unimportant proof of his common-sense, but in the last
century, in the society in which Townshend moved, and on the Continent,
such a refusal suggested the possession of a degree of common-sense
that was far from ordinary--that was, indeed, extraordinary.
Townshend's tact, wit, and good spirits carried him through the scrape
somehow.  He made the rounds of Leyden with his would-be adversary,
calling in turn upon each of his many friends, and obtaining from each,
in the presence of his companion, the assurance that Townshend had
never been known to speak of Johnstone slightingly or discourteously
behind his back.  The episode, trivial in itself, gains a kind of
gravity by the illustration it affords of Townshend's character all
through Townshend's short career.  The impossibility of restraining an
incorrigible tongue, and the unreadiness to follow out the course of
action to which his words would seem to have committed him, were the
distinguishing marks of Townshend's political existence.  No man, no
party, nor no friend could count on the unflinching services of
Townshend.  His conduct was as irresponsible as his eloquence was
dazzling.  In his twenty years of public life he had but one
purpose--to please and to be praised; and to gain those ends he
sacrificed consistency and discretion with a light heart.  The beauty
of his person and the fluent splendor of his speech went far towards
the attainment of an ambition which was always frustrated by a fatal
levity.  In the fine phrase of Burke, he was a candidate for
contradictory honors, and his great aim was to make those agree in
admiration of him who never agreed in anything else.

It has been given to few men to desire fame more ardently, and to
attain it more disastrously, than Charles Townshend.  If we may
estimate the man by the praises of his greatest contemporary, no one
better deserved a fairer fortune than fate allotted to him.  Burke
spoke of Townshend as the delight and ornament of the House of Commons,
and the charm of every private society which he honored with his
presence.  Though his passion for {112} fame might be immoderate, it
was at least a passion which is the instinct of all great souls.  While
Burke could rhapsodize over Townshend's pointed and finished wit, his
refined, exquisite, and penetrating judgment, his skill and power in
statement, his excellence in luminous explanation, Walpole was no less
enthusiastic in an estimate that contrasted Townshend with Burke.
According to Walpole, Townshend, who studied nothing with accuracy or
attention, had parts that embraced all knowledge with such quickness
that he seemed to create knowledge instead of seeking for it.  Ready as
Walpole admits Burke's wit to have been, he declares that it appeared
artificial when set by that of Townshend, which was so abundant in him
that it seemed a loss of time to think.  Townshend's utterances had
always the fascinating effervescence of spontaneity, while even Burke's
extempore utterances were so pointed and artfully arranged that they
wore the appearance of study and preparation.  This brilliant,
resplendent creature, in every respect the opposite to George
Grenville, showy where Grenville was solid, fluent where he was formal,
glittering and even glowing where he was sober or sombre, fascinating
where he was repellent, gracious where he was sullen, and polished
where he was rude, was nevertheless destined to share Grenville's
hateful task and Grenville's deserved condemnation.  Such enthusiasm as
Parliament had permitted itself to show over the repeal of Grenville's
Stamp Act had long flickered out.  The colonists were regarded with
more disfavor than ever by a majority that raged against their
ingratitude and bitterly repented the repeal of the Act.  Townshend's
passion for popularity forced him into the fatal blunder of his life.
He was indeed, as Burke said, the spoiled child of the House of
Commons, never thinking, acting, or speaking but with a view to its
judgment, and adapting himself daily to its disposition, and adjusting
himself before it as before a looking-glass.  The looking-glass showed
him a member of a Ministry that was unpopular because it refused to tax
America.  He resolved that the looking-glass should show him a member
of a Ministry popular because {113} it was resolved to tax America.
His hunger and thirst after popularity, his passion for fame, were
leading him into strange ways indeed.  He was to leave after him an
enduring name, but enduring for reasons that would have broken his
bright spirit if he could have realized them.  The shameful folly of
George Grenville was the shameful folly of Charles Townshend.  His name
stands above Grenville's in the roll of those who in that disastrous
time did so much to lower the honor and lessen the empire of England.
It became plain to Townshend that the Parliamentary majority regretted
the repeal of the Stamp Act and resented the theory that America should
not be taxed.  Townshend resolved that revenue could and should be
raised out of America.  He introduced a Bill imposing a tax on glass,
paper, and tea upon the American colonies.  Though the amount to be
raised was not large, no more than forty thousand pounds, and though it
was proposed that the whole of the sum should be spent in America, it
was as mischievous in its result as if it had been more malevolently
aimed.  [Sidenote: 1766--Death of Townshend] Townshend himself did not
live long enough to learn the unhappy consequences of his folly.  A
neglected fever proved fatal to him in the September of 1767, in the
forty-third year of his age.  Walpole lamented him with an ironical
appreciation.  "Charles Townshend is dead.  All those parts and fire
are extinguished; those volatile salts are evaporated; that first
eloquence of the world is dumb; that duplicity is fixed, that cowardice
terminated heroically.  He joked on death as naturally as he used to do
on the living, and not with the affectation of philosophers who wind up
their works with sayings which they hope to have remembered."
Townshend had passed away, but his policy remained, a fatal legacy to
the country.

Townshend was immediately succeeded in the Chancellorship of the
Exchequer by a young politician who had been for some years in
Parliament and had held several offices without conspicuously
distinguishing himself.  When Lord North entered the House of Commons
as member for Banbury, his record was that of any intelligent young
{114} nobleman of his time.  He had written pleasing Latin love poems
at Eton, he had been to Oxford, he had studied at Leipzig.  George
Grenville saw great promise in North.  He even predicted that if he did
not relax in his political pursuits he was very likely to become Prime
Minister.  Unhappily for his country, North did not relax in his
political pursuits.  There was an ironic fitness in the fact that North
should be admired by Grenville and should succeed to Townshend, for no
man was better fitted to carry on the fatal policy of the two men who
had outraged the American colonies by the Stamp Act and the tax on tea.




{115}

CHAPTER XLIX.

WILKES REDIVIVUS.

[Sidenote: 1767--The return of Wilkes]

While the King's Government was preparing for itself an infinity of
trouble abroad, it was not destined to find itself idle for want of
trouble at home.  Great and grave trouble came upon the King and his
friends suddenly, and out of a quarter from which they least expected
it.  If they were confident of anything, they were confident that they
had dealt the final blow to the audacious demagogue who for a time had
fluttered the town with the insolences of the _North Briton_.  The
_North Briton_ had ceased to exist.  Of the two men whose bitter genius
had been its breath, Churchill was dead, and Wilkes himself, a fugitive
and a beggar, drifting from one European capital to another, seemed as
little to be feared as if he slept by Churchill's side.  The visit of
the Commander's statue to Don Juan seemed scarcely more out of the
course of nature to Don Juan's lackey than the reappearance in active
public life of Wilkes appeared to the King's friends, for whom Wilkes
had ceased to exist.

Wilkes had wearied of Continental life.  His affection for his own
country was so earnest and so sincere that, in a letter to the Duke of
Grafton, he declared his willingness to bury himself in the obscurity
of private life, if he were permitted to return unmolested to England.
The appeal failed to extract a satisfactory reply.  The Ministers would
make no terms with their ruined foeman.  Wilkes then resolved to show
that he was not so helpless as his enemies appeared to think him.  He
published in 1767, in London, a pamphlet, in which he stated his case
with indignation, but not without dignity.  When the pamphlet had
obtained a wide circulation, Wilkes followed {116} it up by appearing
himself in London in the February of 1768, at the moment of the general
election, and announcing himself as a candidate for Parliament for the
City of London.  The audacity of this step amazed his enemies and
delighted his friends.  If it had been taken a little earlier it might
have won him the seat.  So calm and so wise an observer as Franklin, at
least, thought that it would have done so.  As it was, though Wilkes
came late into the field, and was placed at the bottom of the poll, he
secured more than twelve hundred votes, and did, in the conventional
phrase too often used to soothe defeat, gain a great moral victory.

The courage of the outlaw had more than revived all the old enthusiasm
for him.  We know on the authority of Burke that the acclamations of
joy with which he was welcomed by the populace were inconceivable, and
that the marks of public favor which he received were by no means
confined to the lower order of the people.  Several merchants and other
gentlemen of large property and of considerable interest openly
espoused his cause, and a subscription was immediately opened in the
City for the payment of his debts.  We know on other authority that in
an age when betting was the mode the extraordinary betting as to
Wilkes's success in his desperate enterprise was actually organized by
a certain number of brokers into stock which was quoted on 'Change.
Burke ascribes the reason for the failure to the open voting.  The
electors were obliged, he said, to record their names, and the
consequences of an opposition to great corporate and commercial
connections were too obvious not to be understood.

[Sidenote: 1768--Wilkes as Member for Middlesex]

As soon as Wilkes knew of his defeat in the City, he struck a yet
bolder note for success.  He came forward at once as a candidate for
the County of Middlesex in opposition to the established interest of
two gentlemen who had represented it for several years, who were
supported by the whole interest of the Court and who had considerable
fortunes and great connections in it.  But Wilkes, too, had powerful
abettors.  The Duke of Portland was one of his most prominent
supporters.  His old friend Temple {117} supplied the freehold
qualification which was then essential for a Parliamentary candidate.
Horne, the Rector of Brentford, where the election took place, gave all
his great influence and all his gifts to the service of Wilkes with the
same devotion that had formerly animated Churchill.  Horne was not
altogether an admirable character, and his enthusiasm for Wilkes had
hitherto awakened no corresponding enthusiasm on Wilkes's part.  But
Horne was invaluable at a crisis like the Middlesex election.  He had
the eloquence of a sophist; he had the strategy of a tactician; he was
endowed with an unconquerable energy, an indomitable determination.  He
was exceedingly popular in his parish; he caught the mood of the
popular party, and he happened to be on the right side.  It would be
difficult to exaggerate the importance of the services he rendered to
Wilkes and to the cause of which Wilkes was the figurehead by his work
in the Middlesex election.  The zeal of Horne, the friendship of
Temple, the daring of Wilkes carried the day.  It was no ordinary
victory.  It was an astonishing triumph.  As Burke pointed out, the
same causes did not operate upon the freeholders at large which had
prevented the inclinations of the livery of London from taking effect
in Wilkes's favor, and the result of the polling on March 28 was that
Wilkes was returned to Parliament by a prodigious majority.  Wilkes
polled 1290 votes.  Mr. George Cooke, the Tory candidate, who had been
the representative for eighteen years, only scored 827, and Sir W.
Beauchamp Procter, the Whig candidate, only got 807 votes.

There was great excitement in London when the result of the election
was known.  It pleased the popular voice to insist that every window
should be illuminated in honor of Wilkes's triumph, and all windows
that were not lit up were unhesitatingly broken.  Those persons who
were known to be Wilkes's principal opponents received the special
attentions of the mob.  Lord Bute's house had to stand a siege; so had
the house of Lord Egremont, who had signed the warrant for Wilkes's
committal; so had other houses which were either known to belong to the
{118} opponents of the hero or showed themselves to be such by their
darkened windows.  All such windows were instantly broken, to the joy
of the glaziers, who declared that a Middlesex election was worth any
number of Indian victories.  The mob had it all its own way, for the
strength of the constabulary had been drafted off to Brentford in
expectation of rioting there which never took place.  But the mob did
not abuse its triumph.  It was in its playful, not its dangerous mood.
It stopped the carriages of the gentry, made the occupants cheer for
Wilkes and Liberty, scrawled the number Forty-five upon the polished
panels, broke the glasses, but in the main let the carriage-owners go
unmolested.  The Duke of Northumberland was forced to toast the popular
favorite in a mug of ale.  One ludicrous occurrence very nearly became
an international episode.  The Austrian Ambassador, Count Hatzfeldt,
famed for his stateliness, for his punctiliousness in ceremonial, fell
a victim to popular misapprehension.  The mob that surrounded his coach
took him, unhappily, for a Scotchman, either because of his stiffness
of demeanor or because they could not understand what he was saying.
To be thought Scotch was a bad thing for any man in the hands of a mob
that howled for Wilkes, that howled against Bute.  The Austrian
Ambassador was dragged from his carriage and held uplifted in
sufficiently uncomfortable fashion while the magic number Forty-five
was chalked upon the soles of his shoes.  He was no further hurt; if he
had been a more prudent man he would have grinned at the mischance and
said no more about it.  But he chose to consider his dignity and the
dignity of his empire affronted by the follies of a crowd.  He lodged a
formal complaint with the English Government.  The English Government
could do nothing more than express regret with such gravity as it could
muster.  As for the irreverent rogues who had laid their hands upon the
feet of the representative of a friendly State, it was not in the power
of the Government to punish them.  The earth has bubbles as the water
has, and they were of them.

For two days the town was practically at the mercy of {119} the Wilkite
mob.  The trainbands were called out by the Mayor, who was an ardent
courtier, but the men of the trainbands were, for the most part, no
less ardent Wilkites.  They lent their drums to swell the noise of
Wilkes's triumph; they could not be counted on to lend their muskets to
the suppression of Wilkes's partisans.  Even the regular troops were
not, it was thought, to be relied upon in the emergency.  It was said
here that certain regimental drummers had beaten their drums for
Wilkes; it was said there that soldiers had been heard to declare that
they would never fire upon the people.

The fury of the Ministry, and especially the fury of the King, flamed
high.  The King's heat was increased by a letter which Wilkes had
addressed directly to him on his return to England.  In this letter
Wilkes made a not undignified appeal for the King's mercy and clemency,
complained of the wicked and deceitful acts of revenge of the late
Ministry, and assured the sovereign of his zeal and attachment to his
service.  To this letter, naturally, no direct reply was made.  The
form that the King's answer took was to insist that all the strength of
the Government must be used against Wilkes in order that he should be
driven from that Parliament to which the electors of Middlesex had
dared to return him.

[Sidenote: 1768--Wilkes in prison]

In the mean time the force of the law was slowly exerted against
Wilkes.  Wilkes had promised that on the first day of the term
following his arrival in England he would present himself at the Court
of King's Bench.  He kept his promise and surrendered himself on April
20.  The judges of the King's Bench seem to have been paralyzed by the
position.  It took them a whole week to decide that they would refuse
Wilkes bail--a whole week, every day, every hour of which served to
make Wilkes's cause better known and Wilkes himself more popular.
Wilkes went to prison under the most extraordinary circumstances.  His
journey from Westminster to Bishopsgate was more like a royal progress
than the passage of a criminal and an outlaw.  It was only with the
greatest difficulty that Wilkes was able to detach himself from the
zeal of the populace {120} and get quietly into his prison.  The prison
immediately became an object of greater interest than a royal palace.
Every day it was surrounded by a dense crowd that considered itself
rewarded for hours of patient waiting if it could but get a glimpse of
the prisoner's face at a window.  All this show of enthusiasm
exasperated the ministers and drove them into the very acts that were
best calculated to keep the enthusiasm alive.  On the day of the
opening of Parliament, May 10, the Government, under the pretence of
fearing riot, sent down a detachment of soldiers to guard the King's
Bench Prison, in St. George's Fields.  This was in itself a rash step
enough, but every circumstance attending it only served to make it more
rash.  As if deliberately to aggravate the popular feeling, the
regiment chosen for this pretence of keeping the peace was a Scotch
regiment.  At a moment when everything Scotch was insanely disliked in
London such a choice was not likely to insure good temper either on the
part of the mob or on the part of the military.  That good temper was
not intended or desired was made plain by a letter written by Lord
Weymouth, the Secretary of State, to the local magistrate, urging him
to make use of the soldiers in any case of riot.

What followed was only what might have been expected.  The crowd,
irritated by the non-appearance of Wilkes, still more irritated by the
presence of the soldiery, threatened, or was thought to threaten, an
attack upon the prison.  Angry words were followed by blows; the brawl
between the mob and the military became a serious conflict.  A young
man named Allan, who seems to have had nothing to do with the scuffle,
was killed in a private house by some of the soldiers who had forced an
entrance in pursuit of one of their assailants.  Then the Riot Act was
read; the troops fired; half a dozen of the rioters were killed,
including one woman, and several others were wounded.

News of this bad business intensified the angry feeling against the
Government.  A Scotch soldier, Donald Maclean, was put on his trial for
the murder of Allan.  His {121} acquittal caused an indignation which
deepened when the colonel of the regiment presented him with thirty
guineas on behalf of the Government.  This was taken as an example of
the determination of the Crown to silence the voice of the people with
the weapons of Scotch mercenaries.  Pamphlets, speeches, sermons, all
were employed to stimulate the general agitation and to brand with
atrocity the conduct of the Ministry.  The tombstone erected over the
murdered man Allan chronicled his inhuman murder "by Scottish
detachments from the Army," and quoted from Proverbs the words, "Take
away the wicked from before the King."

[Sidenote: 1768--The Ministry on its defence]

The ministers, on their side, were not slow to defend themselves.
Burke, with his usual fairness, has stated their case for them when he
tells how they painted in the strongest colors the licentiousness of
the rabble and that contempt of all government which makes it necessary
to oppose to a violent distemper remedies not less violent.  This is,
of course, the excuse of every overbearing authority, which, having
aroused irritation by its own mismanagement, can conceive of no better
way of allaying that irritation than the bayonet and the bullet.  The
Ministry and the advocates of the Ministry maintained that the unhappy
disposition of the people was such that juries under the influence of
the general infatuation could hardly be got to do justice to soldiers
under prosecution, unless Government interposed in the most effectual
manner for the protection of those who had acted under their orders.
They further urged that, in view of the danger of the insolence of the
populace becoming contagious with the very soldiery, it was necessary
for them to keep those servants firm to their duty by new and unusual
rewards.  "Whatever weight," says Burke, dryly, "might have been in
these reasons, they were but little prevalent, and the Ministry became
by this affair and its concomitant circumstances still more unpopular
than by almost any other event."  But it must in fairness be admitted
that, foolish, stubborn, and even brutal as the King's ministers showed
themselves to be, their position was a very difficult one.

{122}

It was well open to the Government to urge, and to urge with truth, the
peculiar lawlessness of the hour.  It is an effective example of the
ineffectiveness of a mere policy of coercion that, at a time when the
penal laws of Great Britain were ferocious to a degree that would have
disgraced Dahomey, the laws were so frequently defied, and defied with
impunity.  The laws might be merciless, even murderous, but the
Executive had not always the power to compel respect or to enforce
obedience.  Among the lower classes in the great city, and not merely
that portion of the lower classes who are qualified by the appellation
of the dangerous classes, but in strata where at least a moderate
degree of civilization might be hoped for, an amount of savagery, of
lawlessness, and of cruelty prevailed that would have not ill become
the pirates of the Spanish Seas or the most brutal of Calabrian
brigands.  The hideous institution of the pillory stimulated and
fostered all the worst instincts of a mob to whose better instincts no
decent system of education sought to appeal.  Ignorance, and poverty,
and dirt brooded over the bulk of the poorer population, to breed their
inevitable consequences.  Murder was alarmingly common.  Riots that
almost reached the proportions of petty civil wars were liable to arise
at any moment between one section of the poorer citizens and another.
The horrors of the Brownrigg case show to what extent lust of cruelty
could go.  The large disbandments that are the inevitable consequence
of peace after a long war had thrown out of employment, and thrown upon
the country, no small number of needy, unscrupulous, and desperate men,
only too ready to lend a hand to any disturbance that might afford a
chance of food and drink and plunder.

[Sidenote: 1752--Mob violence in London]

Mob law ruled in London to an extraordinary degree during the whole of
the eighteenth century.  It reached a high pitch, but not its highest
pitch, at the time when the watchword was Wilkes and Liberty.  London
was to witness bitterer work, bloodier work than anything which
followed upon the Middlesex election and the imprisonment of the
popular hero.  But for the time the audacity of the mob seemed to have
gone its farthest.  The temper of the {123} mob was insolent, its
insolence was brutal.  It hated all foreigners--and among foreigners it
now included Scotchmen--and it manifested its hatred in vituperation,
and when it dared in violence.  A white man would hardly be in more
danger in a mid-African village than a foreigner was in the streets of
London.  There is a contemporary account written by a French gentleman
who travelled in England, and who published his observations on what he
saw in England, which gives a piteous account of the barbarous
incivility to which he, his friends, and his servants were exposed when
they walked abroad.  The mob that jeered and insulted the master very
nearly killed the servant for the single offence of being a Frenchman.
But the brutalities of the mob were not limited to strangers.  The
citizens of London fared almost as badly if not quite as badly as any
Frenchman could do.  Fielding gives a picture in one of his essays of
the lawless arrogance which was characteristic of the rabble.  He gave
to the mob the title of the Fourth Estate in an article in the _Covent
Garden Journal_ for June 13, 1752, and in another article a week later
he painted an ironical picture of the brutal manners and overbearing
demeanor of the mob.  "A gentleman," he wrote, "may go a voyage at sea
with little more hazard than he can travel ten miles from the
metropolis."  On the river, on the streets, on the highways, according
to Fielding, mob manners prevailed, and brutal language might at any
moment be followed by brutal actions.  When the largest allowance is
made for the exaggeration of the satirist, enough remains to show that
the condition of London in the second half of the eighteenth century
was disorderly in the extreme.  People who ventured on the Thames were
liable to the foulest insults, and even to be run down by those who
were pleased to regard the stream as their appanage, and who resented
the appearance on it of any who seemed better dressed than themselves.
Women of fashion were liable to be hustled, mobbed, insulted if they
ventured in St. James's Park on a Sunday evening.  No one could walk
the streets by day without the probability of being annoyed, or by
night without the risk of {124} being knocked down.  After painting his
grim picture in the Hogarth manner, Fielding concluded grimly that he
must observe "that there are two sorts of persons of whom this fourth
estate do yet stand in some awe, and whom, consequently, they have in
great abhorrence: these are a justice of the peace and a soldier.  To
these two it is entirely owing that they have not long since rooted all
the other orders out of the commonwealth."

[Sidenote: 1769--Wilkes's expulsion from the Commons]

The Government hoped that the longer Wilkes lay in prison, the more
chance there was that the enthusiasm for him would abate.  But in this
hope the Government were disappointed.  Even in the ranks of the
ministers the King was not able to find unswerving agreement to his
demands for Wilkes's expulsion from Parliament.  Outside Parliament the
agitation was not only undiminished, but was even on the increase.
This was shown conclusively by a fresh event in connection with
Middlesex.  Cooke, who was the colleague of Wilkes in the
representation of the county, died.  Serjeant Glynn, who had made
himself conspicuous as the champion of Wilkes and the advocate of the
popular cause, came forward to contest the vacant seat, and carried the
constituency in spite of the most determined efforts on the part of the
royal faction to defeat him.  There were more riots, more deaths on the
popular side, more trials, more convictions for murder and more pardons
of the condemned men.  The agitation which had been burning at a steady
heat blazed up into a flame.  Wilkes made every use of the opportunity.
He had succeeded in getting a copy of the letter which Lord Weymouth
had sent to the magistrates, the letter in which Lord Weymouth had
practically urged the magistrates to fire upon the people.  Wilkes
immediately sent it to the _St. James's Chronicle_, a tri-weekly
independent Whig journal which had been started in 1760.  The _St.
James's Chronicle_ printed the letter, and Wilkes's own letter
accompanying it, in which he accused the Ministry of having planned and
determined upon the "horrid massacre of St. George's Fields."  The
letter, said Wilkes, "shows how long a hellish project can be brooded
over by some infernal {125} spirits without one moment's remorse."  It
may be admitted that if the language of Wilkes's enemies in the two
Houses was strong even to ruffianism, Wilkes could and did give them as
good as he got in the way of invective and vituperation.

The Government, goaded into fury by this daring provocation, resolved
to make an example of the offender.  Lord Barrington brought the letter
formally before the House of Commons.  The House of Commons immediately
voted it a libel, and summoned Wilkes from his prison to the bar of the
House.  On February 3, 1769, Wilkes appeared before the Commons.  With
perfect composure he admitted the authorship of the letter to the _St.
James's Chronicle_, and, with an audacity that exasperated the House,
he proclaimed his regret that he had not expressed himself upon the
subject in stronger terms, and added that he should certainly do so
whenever a similar occasion should present itself.  "Whenever," he
said, "a Secretary of State shall dare to write so bloody a scroll, I
will through life dare to write such prefatory remarks, as well as to
make my appeal to the nation on the occasion."  Wilkes found champions
in the House of Commons.  Burke, Beckford, and many others either
defended Wilkes or urged that the matter was not for the House of
Commons, but for the law courts to deal with.  In the division the
Government was triumphant by a majority of 219 against 137, and Wilkes
was formally expelled from the House of Commons on the ground, not
merely of his comments on the letter of Lord Weymouth, but on account
of the Number Forty-five of the _North Briton_ and the "Essay on Woman."

A new writ was issued for the county of Middlesex.  The county of
Middlesex promptly re-elected Wilkes without opposition on February 16.
On February 17 the House of Commons again voted the expulsion of
Wilkes.  This time the House of Commons exceeded its powers and its
privileges in adding that the expelled man was incapable of sitting in
the existing Parliament.  Every blow that the royal party had struck at
Wilkes had only aroused stronger sympathy for him; and this illegal
act, this usurpation {126} by one House of powers that only belonged to
Parliament, caused the liveliest indignation.  It was resolved by the
friends of Wilkes, and by all who were the friends of the principles
with which Wilkes had come to be identified, to fight to the utmost in
defence of their constitutional rights, that were now so gravely, so
wantonly jeopardized.  On March 16 there was a new polling at
Brentford, and, as before, Wilkes was returned unopposed.  There was,
indeed, an effort made by an obscure merchant named Dingley to oppose
him, but he could find no freeholder to second him, and he was chivied
ignominiously from the scene of the election.  On March 17 the House of
Commons, for the third time, played what Burke called the tragi-comedy
of declaring the election void.  A new writ was again issued, and this
time the Ministry were resolved that, come what come might, Wilkes
should have an opponent.  It was not the easiest of tasks to find a man
willing to oppose Wilkes's candidature on the hustings at Brentford.
Dingley, the merchant, had experienced the violence of the mob; it was
confidently assumed that any other antagonist would fare very much
worse.  But the Ministry found their champion in a young officer,
Colonel Luttrell, of the Guards, a son of Lord Irnham.  Luttrell was a
gallant young soldier, a man of that temper which regards all popular
agitations with supreme disdain, and of that courage that would face
any danger, not merely with composure, but with pleasure.  His friends
were so apprehensive that he was going to his death that his life was
insured, and the gentlemen of the clubs, who were always willing to bet
upon any imaginable contingency, betted freely on his chances of
surviving his adventure.  Wilkes's friends, however, were resolved to
disappoint the expectations of their enemies.  Thanks to their energy
and patience, the election went off with perfect order.  Wilkes was, of
course, returned at the top of the poll by an enormous majority.
Luttrell came next with less than a quarter of his votes, and an absurd
attorney, who had thrust himself into the election at the last moment,
came last with a ludicrous poll of five votes.

{127}

[Sidenote: 1769--Lord North and the Wilkes case]

On Thursday, April 13, Wilkes was elected.  London was again
illuminated, and a great demonstration outside the King's Bench Prison
congratulated the hero of the hour on his third triumph.  On the
following day the House of Commons prepared again to reject Wilkes.
The debate lasted over the Saturday--a rare event in those days--and in
the early dawning of Sunday morning Colonel Luttrell was declared to be
duly elected as the member for Middlesex.  The ministerial victory was
not a very great victory.  They had only a majority of 197 votes to
143.  It served their turn at a pinch, but it was not a big enough
majority to inspire Lord North with the courage to resist a proposal
that a fortnight should be allowed to the electors of Middlesex in
which, if they wished, to petition against conduct which practically
deprived them of their constitutional rights.

Lord North had many years of public life before him, many years of
slumbering and blundering on the treasury bench, before his death in
1792, as Lord Guildford, in a melancholy, premature old age.  In those
years he was privileged to do a vast amount of injury to his country,
uncompensated for by any act to her advantage.  Lord North's conduct in
the case of Wilkes was not the most foolish act in a career of folly,
but it certainly served as an illuminating preface to a chronicle of
wasted time.  No proofs of the wit that endeared him to his
contemporaries have been preserved; his fame for an unalterable
urbanity is but an empty memory; his record is only rescued from
oblivion by the series of incredible follies which began with the
unjust attempt to annihilate Wilkes.




{128}

CHAPTER L.

THE SPIRIT OP JUNIUS.

[Sidenote: 1769--The Letters of Junius]

While all this was going on a new force suddenly made itself felt in
English political life.  The King and his ministers found themselves
attacked by a mysterious and dangerous opponent.  On March 21, 1769, a
letter was addressed to the _Public Advertiser_, signed "Junius," which
marked the beginning of a new era in political literature.  At that
time the _Public Advertiser_ was the most important paper in London.
It had first appeared under that name in 1752, but it was the direct
descendant, through a series of changes of name, of the _Daily Post_,
which Defoe had helped to start in 1719.  It had its rivals in the
_Daily Advertiser_, which was founded in 1724, and the _Gazetteer_ and
_New Daily Advertiser_, which was started in 1728.  In the course of
time both these journals had sunk to be little more than advertising
sheets.  They gave hardly any news, and they had no political
influence.  The _Public Advertiser_ was a much more important paper.
It gave abundance of foreign and domestic intelligence, it had original
contributions in prose and verse, and its columns were always open to
letters from correspondents of all kinds on all manner of subjects.

It was not until the first letter signed with the signature of Junius
appeared that the paper assumed a serious political importance.  The
writer, whoever he was, who chose that signature had written before in
the columns of the _Public Advertiser_.  In 1767 Woodfall, the
publisher, received the first letter from the correspondent who was to
become so famous, and from time to time other letters came signed by
various names taken from classical nomenclature, such as Mnemon,
Atticus, Lucius, Brutus, {129} Domitian, Vindex, and, perhaps,
Poplicola.  But it was with the adoption of the name of Junius that the
real importance of the letters began.  They came at a crisis; they
spoke for the popular side; they spoke with a bitterness and a ferocity
that had hitherto not been attempted in political journalism.  The
great French writer Taine has said that the letters of Junius, at a
time of national irritation and anxiety, fell one by one like drops of
fire on the fevered limbs of the body politic.  He goes on to say that
if Junius made his phrases concise, and selected his epithets, it was
not from a love of style, but in order the better to stamp his insult.
Oratorical artifices in his hand became instruments of torture, and
when he filed his periods it was to drive the knife deeper and surer,
with an audacity of denunciation and sternness of animosity, with a
corrosive and burning irony applied to the most secret corners of
private life, with an inexorable persistence of calculated and
meditated persecution.

The first few letters of Junius were devoted to an altercation with Sir
William Draper over the character in the first place of Lord Granby and
in the second place of Lord Granby's defender, Sir William Draper.  Sir
William, though he fought stoutly for his friend and stoutly for
himself, did neither himself nor his friend much good by engaging in
the controversy.  He was no match for the weapons of Junius.  He had
neither the wit nor the venom of his antagonist.  But the great
interest of the letters began when Junius, taking up the cause of
Wilkes, struck at higher game than Sir William Draper or Lord Granby.
His first letter to the Duke of Grafton was an indictment of the Duke
for the conduct of the Crown in the case of a murder trial arising out
of the Brentford election.  A young man named George Clarke had been
killed in a riot and a man named Edward M'Quirk was tried and found
guilty of the murder.  A kind of hugger-mugger inquest produced a
declaration that Clarke's death was not caused by the blow he had
received from his assailant, and in consequence, "whereas a doubt had
arisen in our royal breast," the King formally pardoned the murderer by
royal {130} proclamation.  On this theme Junius lashed Grafton and
concluded his letter with a direct allusion to Wilkes.  He asked if
Grafton had forgotten, while he was withdrawing this desperate wretch
from that justice which the laws had awarded and which the whole people
of England demanded, that there was another man, the favorite of his
country, whose pardon would have been accepted with gratitude, whose
pardon would have healed all divisions.  "Have you quite forgotten that
this man was once your Grace's friend?  Or is it to murderers only that
you will extend the mercy of the Crown?"

The attack thus daringly begun was steadily maintained.  Wilkes had no
keener, no acuter champion than Junius.  With great skill Junius
avoided all appearance of violent partisanship.  He was careful to
censure much in Wilkes's conduct, careful to discriminate between
Wilkes's private character and Wilkes's public conduct.  The
unjustifiable action of the House of Commons in forcing Colonel
Luttrell upon the electors of Middlesex gave Junius the opportunity of
assailing Wilkes's enemies without appearing to champion Wilkes to the
utterance.  Junius admitted that the Duke of Grafton might have had
some excuse in his opposition to Wilkes on account of Wilkes's
character, and might have earned the approval of men who, looking no
further than to the object before them, were not dissatisfied with
seeing Mr. Wilkes excluded from Parliament.  But, Junius went on to
argue, "you have now taken care to shift the question; or, rather, you
have created a new one, in which Mr. Wilkes is no more concerned than
any other English gentleman.  You have united the country against you
on one grand constitutional point, on the decision of which our
existence as a free people absolutely depends.  You have asserted, not
in words but in fact, that representation in Parliament does not depend
upon the choice of the freeholders."

[Sidenote: 1769--The identity of Junius]

The authorship of the letters of Junius is one of those problems, like
the problems of the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, which have
never been settled with absolute certainty and which probably never
will be settled {131} with absolute certainty.  But between absolute
certainty and the highest degree of probability there is no very great
gulf fixed, and it is in the highest degree probable that the author of
the letters was Philip Francis.  The letters have been attributed to
all manner of men.  They were ascribed, absurdly enough, to Wilkes.
Wilkes could write bitterly and he could write well, but he could write
neither so well nor so bitterly as Mr. Woodfall's correspondent.  Dr.
Johnson, who ought to have known better, thought they were written by
Burke.  It is his excuse that there did not seem at the time any man of
the same ability as the writer of the letters except Burke.  But Dr.
Johnson, who had been quick enough to recognize the genius of the
anonymous author of the essay on "The Sublime and the Beautiful," erred
when he thought that the same hand penned the anonymous letters.  The
prose of Burke was as far above the prose of Junius as the prose of
Junius was above the prose of Wilkes.  None of the letters surpasses in
ferocity, none approaches in excellence the letter which Burke wrote to
the noble Duke who had slandered him.  The letters were attributed to
Barré; they were attributed to Lee, who was yet to earn another kind of
fame; they were attributed to many hands.  To us, at least, it seems
clear that they were the work of Philip Francis.

The electors of Middlesex did petition against the substitution of the
despised Luttrell for the adored Wilkes.  The consideration of the
petition was the occasion for one of the most memorable debates that
can be recorded of an age rich in memorable debates.  On the one side
the influence of the Ministry and the influence of the King induced
Blackstone to deny himself and to falsify those principles of
constitutional law with which his name is associated.  On the other
side principles as little honorable but a far acuter political
perception urged Wedderburn, who was nominally a King's man, to go over
to the popular cause with the air of a Coriolanus.  On the one side
Fletcher Norton upheld the authority of the resolution.  On the other
side George Grenville argued against it with an acumen which showed
that an able lawyer might have {132} been a great lawyer.  In that
famous debate Burke spoke at his best, and yet the event of that debate
was not the speech of Burke, was not the speech of the experienced
politician, of the seasoned statesman, of the famous man of letters,
but the speech of a young man who was almost a boy, the speech of
Charles James Fox.  All who have written on the debate agree in their
admiration of the speech of one who, as far as Parliament was
concerned, was but a raw lad and who nevertheless held his own on a
point of law against experienced lawyers, in statesmanship against
Grenville, and in eloquence against Burke.

[Sidenote: 1769--Unpopularity of George the Third]

Of course the petition of Middlesex was rejected; the election of
Luttrell was confirmed.  On the day of the confirmation the King
prorogued Parliament in a foolish speech in which he seemed to think
that he had gained a victory.  But if the King and the Ministry
believed or hoped that in expelling Wilkes from Parliament they had got
rid of Wilkes for good and all; if they believed or hoped that in thus
degrading Wilkes they would deprive him of his popularity with the
people or even diminish that popularity, they were speedily to be
undeceived and bitterly disappointed.  Both King and ministers knew
their business very badly; with limitations of intelligence which would
have been disastrous to the conduct of a small shop, they came in this
instance, as in other instances, within measurable distance of wrecking
a royalty.  It is probable that Franklin, shrewd, cool observer though
he was, went too far when he wrote in his journal that if George the
Third had had a bad private character, and John Wilkes a good one, the
latter might have turned the former out of his kingdom.  But it is
certain that the signs of the King's unpopularity were now as
significant as were the signs of Wilkes's popularity.  It had been said
that at this time a good half of the King's subjects preferred Wilkes
to their King.  The estimate is probably under rather than above the
fact.  Wilkes was placed in the position of being the champion of all
the rights and liberties that Englishmen most prized; the King in the
{133} position of being their most uncompromising, most obstinate
opponent.

Thus, while honors were offered daily to the prisoner of the King's
bench, insults were daily offered to his royal enemy.  The King could
scarcely go abroad without becoming the object of a demonstration of
popular disfavor, and even in his palace he could not escape from
deputations empowered to protest against the conduct of his ministers.
In all parts of the kingdom public meetings were held, and from these
public meetings petitions poured in upon the King calling upon him to
dissolve his Parliament.  It has been truly observed that the custom of
holding public meetings for the discussion of public grievances dates
from this period.  On two solemn occasions the Lord Mayor of London,
accompanied by the sheriffs, presented addresses to the King
remonstrating against the action of the House of Commons.  To the first
address the King replied that it was disrespectful to him, injurious to
Parliament, and irreconcilable to the principles of the Constitution.
After which reply he could think of nothing better, nothing more kingly
to do than to turn round to his courtiers and burst out laughing.  He
treated the second address with the same insolence, an insolence which
provoked from the Lord Mayor an uncourtierly reply which reminded the
King that those who endeavored to alienate the King's affections from
his subjects were violators of the public peace and betrayers of the
Constitution established by the glorious Revolution.  Those words were
afterwards inscribed in gold upon the monument of the mayor who spoke
them.  If those words, and words of like purport and temper, at first
moved the King to laughter, they soon exasperated him past laughing.
Once he clapped his hand to his sword-hilt and declared that he would
sooner have recourse to that than grant a dissolution.  The tension of
public feeling can best be estimated when a constitutional sovereign on
the one side could dare to make such a remark; when a representative of
the people like Colonel Barré on the other side could dare in the House
of {134} Commons to say that disregard of public petitions might lead
the people to think of assassination.

While the King was insulted and insulting, and longing to stifle
opposition by the sword, John Wilkes in his prison was receiving new
proofs of the place he held in public affection.  He was elected
alderman for the Ward of Farringdon Without.  We are told that his
table at the prison was daily supplied with the most rare and costly
delicacies, presented to him by his admirers.  The mysterious Chevalier
d'Eon sent him a present of Russian smoked tongues, with the whimsical
wish that they could have the eloquence of Cicero, and the delicacy of
Voltaire, to do him honor.  Friendly revellers sent him hampers of the
wine he liked the best.  More serious gifts were laid at his feet.  For
a while money literally rained in upon him.  The leading Whigs provided
him with an income.  Nobles and great ladies sent him large sums.  A
number of politicians banded together under the title of the Society
for Supporting the Bill of Rights, and raised a great deal of money,
much of which went in meeting some of the heavy debts with which Wilkes
was embarrassed, much of which went in keeping up the princely way of
living which suited Wilkes's temperament, and which was perhaps not
unsuited to the part he was playing as the rival of a prince.  In the
public press, on the platform, on the stage, his influence was
enormous.  His good pleasure sent politicians to Parliament; his good
pleasure made London sheriffs, made provincial mayors.  While the false
rumor that he was the author of "The Letters of Junius" only swelled
the volume of his fame, the author of those letters was adding to
Wilkes's pride and power by public championship and by private letters,
choking with an adulation that seems strange indeed from so savage a
pen.  If Garrick dared for a moment to run counter to popular feeling,
as a little earlier he had dared to disdain the praise of Churchill, he
had to give way in the case of Wilkes, as he had given way in the case
of Wilkes's poet.  The very name of Wilkes drove men on both sides of
the quarrel into a kind of frenzy.  Alexander Cruden, of the
"Concordance," {135} showed his devotion to his King and his dislike of
Wilkes by carrying a large sponge with him whenever he walked abroad in
order that he might wipe out the ominous number, forty-five, whenever
he saw it chalked up.  As the number was chalked up everywhere by the
Wilkites, Cruden soon found the task beyond his powers.  It was lucky
for him that he got no harm in his zeal, lucky for him that he did not
come across that militant clergyman who pulled the nose of a Scotch
naval officer for attacking Wilkes and then met his man in Hyde Park
and wounded him.

[Sidenote: 1770--A fight for the liberty of the Press]

On April 17, 1770, Wilkes's term of imprisonment came to an end.
Wilkes immediately started for Bath to avoid a demonstration in London;
but London was illuminated in his honor, and in a great number of
provincial towns his release was celebrated with all the signs of a
national holiday.  If he had been a hero in prison, he was no less a
hero out of it.  He moved from triumph to triumph.  While alderman he
won a victory over the Court and the Commons which did much to
establish the liberty of the press in England.  The House of Commons,
in a foolish attempt to suppress reports of the debates in Parliament,
tried to arrest certain printers.  Wilkes and the Lord Mayor took the
printers' part; advised them to conceal themselves; and in their turn
arrested those who, in obedience to a royal proclamation and the orders
of the House, arrested the printers.

The House of Commons committed the Lord Mayor and Alderman Oliver to
the Tower, and summoned Wilkes to appear at the bar.  Wilkes coolly
replied that as he was a member of Parliament, and as he was not
addressed as a member of Parliament should be, and ordered to attend in
his place according to custom, he should ignore the summons.  The House
made a second and yet a third order for his appearance, each of which
Wilkes treated with disdain.  It is a significant proof of the power of
Wilkes's popularity that the House did not take any steps to punish his
contumacy.  While it affected to find a consolation in the assurances
of the King that Wilkes was "below the {136} notice of the House," it
had to endure as best it might an affront resentment of which would
only have added to Wilkes's popularity.  The honors paid to the Lord
Mayor and the alderman during their imprisonment showed only too
plainly that hostility to the Court and the Parliamentary majority was
heroism in the eyes of the majority of the citizens of London.

Once again Wilkes had won the day.  From that time forward Parliament
put no embargo upon the publication of reports of its debates.  Fresh
honors were showered on Wilkes.  He was elected sheriff.  He was
presented by the Court of Common Council with a silver goblet, designed
according to his own wish with a representation of the death of Caesar,
and graced with the ominous motto from one of the poems of Churchill:

        May every tyrant feel
  The keen deep searchings of a patriot steel,

a citation which, taken in conjunction with Barré's wild talk in the
House about assassination, was sufficiently significant of the temper
of the time.

[Sidenote: 1774--Wilkes Lord Mayor of London]

Wilkes had been alderman; he had been sheriff; he was now to bear the
crown of civic honors.  He was put in nomination for the office of Lord
Mayor.  The Court party made a desperate effort to defeat him.  They
had tried and failed to prevent him from being elected to Parliament.
They had tried and failed to prevent him from being made alderman, from
being made sheriff.  They now tried with all their might to prevent him
from being made Lord Mayor.  Wilkes had much to fight against.  There
were defections from his own party.  The once devoted Horne had
squabbled with his idol over money matters, and was now as venomous an
enemy as he had been a fulsome partisan.  Alderman Townshend, an
ex-Lord Mayor, strained all his influence, which was great in the City,
against Wilkes.  A wild rumor got about at one time, indeed, that
Townshend had settled the difficulty of the Court forever by
challenging Wilkes and shooting him dead.  The story had no foundation,
but for a moment it flattered the hopes of Wilkes's {137} enemies and
fluttered the hearts of Wilkes's friends.  The opposition ended as
opposition to Wilkes always ended.  Twice he was placed at the head of
the poll, and twice the Court of Aldermen chose another candidate.  The
third time, in the election of 1774, Wilkes was at last chosen as Lord
Mayor by the Court of Aldermen in despite of the unwearied efforts of
the Court party to defeat him.  "Thus," wrote Walpole, "after so much
persecution by the Court, after so many attempts upon his life, after a
long imprisonment in jail, after all his own crimes and indiscretions,
did this extraordinary man, of more extraordinary fortune, attain the
highest office in so grave and important a city as the capital of
England, always reviving the more opposed and oppressed, and unable to
shock Fortune and make her laugh at him who laughed at everybody and
everything!"  It has been well said by Mr. Fraser Rae that the
significance of election to the office of Lord Mayor was very much
greater more than a hundred years ago than it is now.  Then the Chief
Magistrate of the City was not necessarily a man who had passed through
certain minor offices and who rose by routine to fill the highest.  At
that time the Corporation was a political power, which ministers had to
take into account, and which sovereigns had to propitiate.  A greater
triumph than the mayoralty followed in quick succession.  At the
general election of 1774 Wilkes came forward again, and for the fifth
time, as candidate for Middlesex.  This time he was not opposed.
Luttrell abandoned an impossible position and did not stand.  Ten years
after Wilkes's first appearance in the House of Commons he returned to
it again in triumph as the member for Middlesex and the Lord Mayor of
London.

And here, on the top of his triumph, Wilkes may be said to drop through
the tissue of our history.  He was to live nearly a quarter of a
century longer, three-and-twenty years of a life that was as calm and
peaceful as the hot manhood that preceded it had been vexed and
unquiet.  Although he lives in history as one of the most famous of the
world's agitators, he had in his heart little affection {138} for the
life of a public man.  And the publicity of the civic official was
especially distasteful to him.  He hated the gross festivals, the gross
pleasures, the gross display of City life.  He sickened of the long
hours spent in the business of mayoralty; he sickened yet more of the
pleasures incidental to mayoralty.  Though he remained in Parliament
for many years, and conducted himself there with zeal, discretion, and
statesmanship, and always, or almost always, proved himself to be the
champion of liberty and the democratic principle, he did not find his
greatest happiness in public speeches and the triumphs and defeats of
the division lobby.  What he loved best on earth was the society of his
daughter, between whom and himself there existed a friendship that is
the best advocate for Wilkes's character.  And he loved best to enjoy
that society in the kind of sham classic retirement which had so
powerful an attraction for so many of the men of the eighteenth
century.  His cottage in the Isle of Wight, with its Doric column to
the manes of Churchill, with its shrine to Fortuna Redux, was his idea
of the ancient city of Tusculum.

His tastes and pleasures were the tastes and pleasures of a man of
letters.  He affected a curious kind of scholarship.  The hand that had
been employed upon the _North Briton_, now devoted itself to the
editing of classic texts; the intellect that had been associated with
the privately printed "Essay on Woman" was now associated with
privately printed editions of Catullus which he fondly believed to be
flawless, and of Theophrastus, whose Greek text it pleased him to print
without accents.  In his tranquil old age he made himself as many
friends as in his hot manhood he had made himself enemies.  Those who
had most hated him came under the spell of his attraction, even the
King himself, even Dr. Johnson.  His interview with Dr. Johnson is one
of the most famous episodes in the literary and political history of
the last century.  His assurance to King George that he himself had
never been a Wilkite is in one sense the truest criticism that has ever
been passed upon him.  If to be a Wilkite was to entertain {139} all
the advanced and all the wild ideas expressed by many of those who took
advantage of his agitation, then certainly Wilkes was none such.  But
he was a Wilkite in the better sense of being true to his own opinions
and true to his sense of public duty.  When he expressed the wish to
have the words "A friend to liberty" inscribed upon his monument, he
expressed a wish which the whole tenor of his life, the whole tone of
his utterances fully justified.  And if he was loyal to his principles
he could be chivalrous to his enemies.  Almost his last public
appearance was at the general election of 1796, when he came forward,
with a magnanimity which would have well become many a better man, to
support the candidature of Horne Tooke at Westminster, of the man who,
after having been his fawning friend, his fulsome flatterer, had turned
against him with the basest treachery and the bitterest malignity.
There may have been, surely there must have been, a vein of irony in
the words in which Wilkes complimented the apostate and the turncoat as
a man of public virtues.  But the irony was cloaked by courtesy; if the
action smacked of the cynic, at least it was done in obedience to the
behest to forgive our enemies.

[Sidenote: 1797--Death of Wilkes]

On November 38, 1797, the old, worn, weary man, who had worked so hard
and done so much, welcomed, in his capacity of Chamberlain of the City
of London, Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson to the honorary freedom of the
City.  The setting star saluted the rising star.  Nelson was then
thirty-nine.  He had been at sea since he was twelve.  He had voyaged
in polar seas and tropic waters.  He had fought the Americans.  He had
fought the French.  "Hate a Frenchman as you would the devil" was his
simple-minded counsel of perfection.  He had fought the Spaniards.  He
had lost an eye at Calvi.  He had lost an arm at Santa Cruz.  He was
ten years married.  His love, his error, his glory, Emma Hamilton,
Carracioli, Trafalgar, were yet to come.

Less than a month later, in the late December, 1797, John Wilkes was
dead.  He was seventy years old.  For nearly forty years he had lived
unknown, unheeded.  For {140} ten years he was the most conspicuous man
in England, the best hated and the best loved.  For twenty years more
he was an honored public and private citizen.  He will always be
remembered as one of the most remarkable men of a century of remarkable
men.




{141}

CHAPTER LI.

CHARLES JAMES FOX.

[Sidenote: 1749-1768--A champion of popular rights]

One of the most immediate results of the Wilkes controversy in the
House of Commons was to draw attention to a young man who had entered
Parliament at the General Election of 1768 while he was still
considerably under age.  The young member for Midhurst made himself
conspicuous as the most impassioned opponent of Wilkes.  A strenuous
supporter of Luttrell outside the walls of Westminster, inside those
walls the boy who represented the fictitious constituency of Midhurst
distinguished himself by the easy insolence with which he assailed
Wilkes and the popular cause which Wilkes represented.  He delighted in
informing the delighted majority in the House that he, for his part,
"paid no regard whatever to the voice of the people."  When Burke
condescended to notice and to rebuke the impertinence of a youth of
nineteen, he little thought that the lad whom he reproved would come to
be a far more extreme advocate of popular rights than he himself, or
that the chronicle of the century in recording the names of those who
made themselves prominent for the utterance of democratic opinions
should place the name of John Wilkes far below the name of Charles
James Fox.

It would not be easy to imagine a worse training for a youth intended
for the service of his country and destined to contend for the honors
of the State than the life that was lived by Charles James Fox from
early boyhood to early manhood.  It was not in the power of his father,
Henry Fox, Lord Holland, to set before his son the example of a parent
whose public life was pure, admirable, and honorable.  But in the
domestic circle Lord Holland was {142} a very different man from the
corrupt and juggling politician known to the world.  In the domestic
circle his affections and his tendernesses were his most conspicuous
traits, and in the domestic circle he was as unfortunate for his
children through his very virtues as outside it he was unfortunate by
reason of his vices.  Fox was a loving husband, but he was an adoring
father, and the extremest zeal and warmth of his adoration was given to
his son Charles James.  The child was from the first precocious, alert,
and gifted beyond his years, and the father fostered and flattered the
precocity with a kind of worship that proved, as it was bound to prove,
disastrous.  It seems to have been Henry Fox's deliberate belief that
the best way to bring up a spirited, gifted, headstrong child was to
gratify every wish, surrender to every whim, and pander to every
passion that ebullient youth could feel.  The anecdotes of the day teem
with tales of the fantastic homage that Fox paid to the desires and
moods of his imperious infant.  He made him his companion while he was
still in the nursery; he allowed him to be his master before he had
fairly left it.  Never was the creed of Thelema acted upon more
consistently and persistently than by Lord Holland towards Charles
James Fox.  It is an astonishing proof of the strength and innate
goodness of the childish nature that it was not ruined outright,
hopelessly and helplessly, by the worst training ever given to a son by
a father.  That it did Fox infinite harm cannot be denied and was only
to be expected.  That it failed entirely to unbalance his mind and
destroy his character only serves to show the sterling temper of Fox's
metal.  His youth was like his childhood, petted, spoiled, wayward,
capricious, and captivating.  Every one loved him, his father, his
father's friends, the school companions with whom he wrote Latin verses
in praise of lovely ladies with lovely names.  All through his life the
love of men and the love of women was given to him with a generosity
that was only equal to the lovable nature that compelled and commanded
it.  His career is one record of unrivalled precocity.  As a child he
had been his father's friend rather than his father's plaything; as a
{143} lad he was his father's travelling companion, and learned from
that father the pleasant art of sowing wild oats not with the hand but
with the whole sack.  He returned to England a proficient gambler, a
finished rake, the dear friend of famous men, the darling of beautiful
women, to enter, before he was of age, upon that political career in
which it seemed certain that if he would follow in his father's steps
he might hope for more than his father's fortunes.  If Charles Fox had
been quite cankered by his father's care, if the essence of his genius
had been corruptible, he might have given the King's friends a leader
as far removed from them as Lucifer from his satellites, and contrived
perhaps--though that indeed would have been difficult--to amass almost
as much money as he was able to spend with comfort.  To judge by the
young man's initial enterprise, his Parliamentary career promised to be
as brilliant and as brutal as any king who hated Chatham and hated
Wilkes and hated the American colonies could possibly desire.  The
furious intolerance of his maiden speech was happily, however, only
like that false dawn familiar to travellers in the East.  The true
sunrise was yet to come.  But for six years he was as consistent in his
support of Lord North and the policy that North represented as for the
rest of his career he was consistent in opposition to it.

[Sidenote: 1768--Fox's scholarship]

The life of Fox recalls, in its brilliant activity, in its no less
brilliant scholarship, the dazzling careers of some of those Italian
princes who were equally at home and equally distinguished in the
battlefield and in the library, equally happy in handling their weapons
or in turning the pages of the latest volume from the presses of Aldus
that renewed the youth of some masterpiece of Greece or Rome.  Fox's
scholarship would have been remarkable in a man whose days and nights
were devoted to scholarship alone.  It was little less than marvellous
in a man who gave a large part of his days to the fiercest political
fights of a fiercely political age and a large part of his nights to
the fascination of the card-table, the disasters of the dice-box, and
the pursuit of the sweet, elusive shadow which is {144} called
pleasure.  Fox's love for literature was indeed its own reward.  In the
darkest hours of a life that tasted the bitterness of many public and
many private sorrows he could steep his vexed spirit in the sweet
waters watched by the Muses, and arise cleansed, inspirited, and
comforted.  Though he saw those public honors that his genius deserved
denied, though he lost those chances of command by which he could best
have served his country, though his own fault wrecked his fortune and
his own follies wasted his substance and delivered the home of his
glorious youth into alien hands, he could turn from troubles that would
have broken the spirit and cracked the heart of a less heroic fighter,
to find solace and consolation in the golden music of the "Odyssey" and
the majestic cadences of Virgil.

Fox loved the classics with the passion of a poet, not with the
patience of a pedant, and found that noble rapture in the human beauty
of Euripides which Parson Adams found in the divine grandeur of
Aeschylus.  But if his reading in the literatures of Greece and Rome
was wide and deep, it was not limited to the literatures which the
world calls classic.  France, Italy, Spain, offered him their best, and
found him a worthy worshipper, the faithful lover and loyal student of
all that was best in each.  He was the comrade of Don Quixote as he was
the comrade of Orlando Furioso and the comrade of Gil Blas.  But he was
never one of those who exalt the laurels of other lands to the neglect
of those of their own.  He knew English literature and loved English
literature as well as if he had never scanned a Latin line or
conjugated a Greek verb or read a page of Molière, or Calderon, or
Metastasio.  He knew Chaucer as well as it was possible for any one
then or for generations later to know Chaucer, and he appreciated him
as few have appreciated him before or since.  The poets of his own time
were as dear to him in their degree as the singer of England's morning
song.  It is hardly necessary to say that he was as familiar with
Shakespeare as every one should be and as very few are.  Only one arc
was wanting to the circle of his splendid {145} culture, only one
string was lacking to the bow of his prodigious reading.  There was a
great literature growing up in a neighboring country of which Charles
Fox knew nothing, and of which we cannot doubt that he would have
rejoiced to know much.  It is curious that in a country which had been
ruled for three successive reigns by German sovereigns, the German
language was entirely neglected and the glorious dawn of German
literature entirely ignored.  While Fox was still a young man, playing
at love, playing at cards, playing at politics, and through all these
diversions adding to that mighty store of learning, and training his
mind in the finest and most intimate judgments upon the Greek and Roman
poets, Germany had been enriched by the masterpiece of the greatest
critic since Aristotle, and was fostering the golden youth of the
greatest poet since Shakespeare.  It would have amazed Fox, as it would
have amazed every English scholar then living, if he could have been
told that the spirit of the antique world was to be renewed in a
country which had given them four generations of phlegmatic princes,
and in a language of which few scholars in England knew a single word.

[Sidenote: 1768--Fox's quarrel with Lord North]

Fox's term of adherence to North and to North's policy was not too
happy a time for the nominal superior.  A hot-headed young Lord of the
Admiralty resigned his office in a huff, and was not without difficulty
persuaded to return to office as Commissioner of the Treasury.  The
breach between Fox and North was bridged over, but the bridge was
frail.  The two men eyed each other with disfavor.  Fox asserted his
independence by occasionally voting against the minister, by consorting
with Burke.  After the death of Lord Holland, North revenged himself by
dismissing Fox from office in a letter famous for its insolent brevity.
For a time Fox still accorded to the ministry an uncertain support, but
he was drifting in thought and speech and action in the inevitable
direction of his genius.  The hour came when he took his seat on the
Opposition benches, and asserted himself as a {146} formidable opponent
of the Government.  A quarrel across the Atlantic gave him the
opportunity to prove that the principles which men of to-day would call
Liberal principles had gained one of their greatest and one of their
most eloquent champions.




{147}

CHAPTER LII.

ON THE CHARLES RIVER.

[Sidenote: 1765-74--Lord Hillsborough]

While the battle had been raging over Wilkes at home, the cloud of
trouble had been growing larger and larger abroad.  The discontent of
the American colonies increased in direct ratio with the determination
of the home Government to ignore or to override that discontent.  The
King was fortunate, or believed himself to be fortunate, in finding
among his ministers the aptest instrument he could desire for striking
at the Americans.  Lord Hillsborough, the Secretary of State, was one
of those men who appear to be inspired by a very genius of perversity.
He had a power of misunderstanding a political situation and
underestimating a political crisis which, if it could only have been
reversed, would have earned him a foremost place among the statesmen of
his time.  But his perversity was of like temper with the perversity of
the King, and Lord Hillsborough was admirably qualified to interpret
the King's dislike of his American subjects and to make himself the
mouthpiece of the anti-Colonial feeling which had been steadily growing
up in the House of Commons since the days when the repeal of the Stamp
Act had known its season of brief popularity.

The comparative temperance and lucidity of the Rockingham period seemed
now indeed remote and memorable.  Exasperation and not conciliation
appeared to be the persistent note of England's colonial policy.  It
was England's misfortune to be peculiarly ill served on both sides of
the Atlantic by those who were intrusted with the conduct of colonial
affairs.  It would be hard to say whether the provincial governors
abroad or the ministers at home were least capable of understanding the
people with whom they {148} had to deal, or were most to blame for
their actions in the face of a danger that their own folly had brought
about.  With a man like Lord Hillsborough for Secretary of State in
London, with a man like Bernard for Governor of Massachusetts in
Boston, it is not to be wondered at now, and it ought not to have been
wondered at then, that the colonies refused to crystallize into
tranquillity.  Francis Bernard was a man of certain ability, certain
gifts, and uncertain good intentions.  But he was, as we have seen, a
perfervid Tory, a zealous champion of the royal prerogative, a profound
believer in the wisdom of minimizing, if not abrogating, the privileges
of which the colonists, and especially the colonists of Massachusetts,
were so proud.  It was Bernard's peculiar fortune to be not merely the
supporter but the adviser of the English Ministries in almost all the
series of disastrous actions towards their colonies.  Bernard was
inspired by a kind of furious folly in his words and deeds.  Unhappily,
this kind of furious folly was not confined to the colonial governor.
Lord Hillsborough was no less foolish and no less dangerous than
Bernard.  Horace Walpole described Hillsborough as nothing more than a
pompous composition of ignorance and want of judgment.  He certainly
was hopelessly ignorant of America, and he certainly showed a hopeless
want of judgment in his dealings with the Americans.  Hillsborough
backed up Bernard in his blunders and his braggadocio with the light
heart that comes of an empty head.  He backed up Bernard with a steady
zeal that would have been splendid if it could have been made to serve
any useful purpose.  Where Bernard was bellicose and blustering,
Hillsborough blustered and was bellicose in his turn.  It was
Hillsborough's honest, innate conviction that the American colonists
were a poor-spirited, feeble-hearted, and still more feeble-handed pack
of rascals, braggarts whom a firm front discomfited, natural bondsmen
to whom it was only necessary, as in the old classic story, to show the
whip to awe them into cringing submission.  This theory found its
fittest formula a little later, when Hillsborough, speaking for the
Government he adorned, and {149} inspired by a more than usual afflatus
of folly, declared that "we can grant nothing to the Americans except
what they may ask with a halter round their necks."  It is difficult to
believe that a reasonable minister, endowed with a sufficient degree of
human ability to push his way from office to office and from title to
title, could have known so little of the history of his own country and
the characteristics of his own countrymen as to think that any of
England's children were easily to be frightened into ignominious
supplication.  But Hillsborough undoubtedly did think so, and he always
acted consistently in support of his strong conviction that the
independent colonists were nothing more than a mob of cowardly
malcontents.  He acted on this conviction to such good purpose that his
name has earned its place of honor with that of Grenville, of
Townshend, and of Wedderburn, in the illustrious junta who were
successfully busy about the sorry business of converting a great empire
into a small one.

[Sidenote: 1766--The Mutiny Act]

After the Stamp Act had raised its crop of disturbance and disorder,
the Government extended to the colonies the measure called the Mutiny
Act, for the quartering of troops and providing them with necessaries.
The Legislature of New York refused to execute this Act, on the ground
that it involved the very principle of taxation which had just been
abandoned by the repeal of the Stamp Act.  It made provision for the
troops in its own way, and calmly ignored the Act of Parliament.
Parliament retorted in due course by passing a bill by which the
Governor, Council, and Assembly of New York were prevented from passing
any law whatsoever until they had complied with the letter and the
spirit of the Mutiny Act.  This measure was loudly applauded in
England, even by some who had shown themselves very friendly to the
grievances of the colonists.  When New York found that her great deed
was too great, and, bending before the anger of Parliament, reluctantly
complied with the terms of the Mutiny Act, there were not wanting
observers to point out that the lesson, though only addressed to one
colony, was of significance to all, and that an inevitable surrender
was the proof {150} of the hopeless inferiority of the colonies when
brought into direct contest with the supreme power.  These jubilations
were as short-lived as they were untimely.  If New York was weak and
wavered, Massachusetts was more firm of purpose.  She sternly refused
to comply with the terms of the Mutiny Act.  She went farther still in
defiance of the Government.  She issued a circular to the other
colonies, calling upon them very frankly and very clearly to co-operate
in taking some united course for the purpose of obtaining redress for
the recent acts of the English Government.  This was the second
instance of deliberate combination for a definite end among the
colonies, and it caused much disquiet and more irritation to the
Government.  Lord Hillsborough, always in favor of what he believed to
be firm measures, immediately sent Governor Bernard instructions to
have the offending circular rescinded.  Governor Bernard would have
been only too glad to obey, but obedience was not easy.

[Sidenote: 1770--The Boston massacre]

Bernard could command, but Massachusetts could refuse to give way.
When Bernard retaliated by dissolving the Massachusetts Legislature,
colony after colony replied to his action by applauding the conduct of
Massachusetts and condemning Lord Hillsborough.  The English Government
answered the protests of Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Georgia, and New
York by creating a new office especially to deal with the colonies, and
by appointing Lord Hillsborough to fill the post.  Everything that
could be done on the English side of the Atlantic by those in power to
show those on the American side of the Atlantic that they might look in
vain for justice or for consideration from authority was done.  Lord
Hillsborough was under the impression that a little firmness--what he
called firmness--would soon bring the colonists to their senses, but
every mail that came across the Atlantic showed that Lord
Hillsborough's theory was unsupported by facts.  Now it was the news
that the seizure of John Hancock's sloop "Liberty" for a breach of the
revenue laws had brought about a riot in Boston in which the
Commissioners of Revenue had to fly for their lives.  Now it was the
news of {151} a great convention in Faneuil Hall to protest against the
troops which Hillsborough, at the request of Bernard; poured into
Boston.  Now it was the news of daily increasing hostility between the
citizens of Boston and the British soldiers quartered in the town.  It
was evident, even to Hillsborough, that a dangerous spirit had been
aroused in America, but he still believed that America could be easily
frightened or chastised into good behavior.  He proposed to enforce an
old law of Henry the Eighth by which the colonists offending could be
shipped across the Atlantic for trial in England.  All that was best
and most eloquent in the House of Commons protested against such folly,
and did not protest in vain.  Some small concessions were made in a
half-hearted and grudging way to the Americans.  Governor Bernard was
recalled.  Some of the obnoxious taxes were repealed, though Lord North
was not to be persuaded to abandon the tax on tea.  These poor
concessions were made known to the colonists in a more than usually
uncivil and injudicious letter from Lord Hillsborough.  The concessions
were too trivial and they came too late.  If Boston had its brief day
of rejoicing when Bernard took his departure, the men of Boston were
soon to be occupied with other thoughts than of banners and bonfires.
The bad feeling between the people and the military grew worse, and at
last displayed itself in active hostility.  March 5, 1770, was a
memorable day in the history of Boston.  Three thousand miles away Lord
North was moving in Parliament for the repeal of all the American
duties with the single and fatal exception of the tax on tea.  In
Boston a small quarrel between some of the citizens and certain British
troops under the command of Colonel Preston suddenly blazed up into a
dangerous collision.  Some of the soldiers fired.  Several citizens
were killed, several more wounded.  There was an angry call to arms,
and a general civil attack upon the military was only with difficulty
prevented by the Lieutenant-Governor, who ordered the arrest and
imprisonment of Colonel Preston and the soldiers under him.  These duly
underwent a trial whose conduct and whose issue reflect the highest
honor {152} upon Boston.  The soldiers were defended by no less
prominent a man and conspicuous a patriot than John Adams; and, thanks
to John Adams, Colonel Preston and six of his men were acquitted, and
only two of the soldiers convicted of manslaughter.  But if the people
of Boston were willing that even their enemies should be tried fairly,
and fairly acquitted, they were not willing to allow the events of that
day to pass into oblivion.  A public funeral was accorded to the
victims of the Boston Massacre, and the grim name for a grim deed was
for long years later solemnly and publicly commemorated.

The bad news of the Boston Massacre was followed to England by the bad
news of the business of the "Gaspee."  The "Gaspee" was an English
warship employed to enforce the Revenue Acts along the Rhode Island
coast.  Its commander, Lieutenant Duddington, took an active delight in
his duty which brought him into perpetual antagonism with a people who
regarded elusion of the revenue laws as their privilege and
prerogative.  One night the "Gaspee," pursuing the Providence packet,
that had refused to lower her colors in salutation as she passed, ran
aground in shallow water and lay fast bound for the night.  The news of
her insolence to the Providence packet and of her present plight flew
abroad all over Providence.  After sundown a number of the townspeople
of Providence, well armed and stern of purpose, rowed from the town to
the stranded "Gaspee," boarded her, and overcame the ineffectual
resistance of her crew.  In the scuffle Duddington was badly wounded.
His wounds were dressed: he and his men were put on shore with all
their belongings, and then and there the "Gaspee" was set fire to and
watched till she was consumed.  Though a large money reward was offered
for the apprehension of the offenders, no one of the assailants was
ever brought before the King's justice.

Misfortunes like the Boston Massacre, disorders like the burning of the
"Gaspee," naturally increased the anti-colonial exasperation of the
English King and of ministers like North and Hillsborough.  North
thought whatever {153} the King wished him to think.  Hillsborough
still believed that the Americans were only to be listened to when they
came with halters around their necks.  King George was convinced that
the New England mutineers would speedily prove to be lambs when England
chose to play the lion.  At this moment of extreme tension something
happened which still further strained the relations between the two
countries.

[Sidenote: 1767--The letters of Hutchinson and Oliver]

In the year 1767, Hutchinson, who was then Governor-General of
Massachusetts, and Oliver, the Lieutenant-Governor of the colony, wrote
certain letters to Whately, who was private secretary to George
Grenville.  These were private letters, confidential letters.  Neither
of the writers dreamed that they would ever become public possessions.
They were intended to inform and to advise a minister's secretary and
the minister himself.  In these letters Hutchinson and Oliver set forth
very fully and frankly their views as to the condition of the colonies
and the better way of dealing with them.  Hutchinson and Oliver had
suffered much at the hands of the people of Boston.  It was chance
rather than clemency which allowed them to escape with their lives on
that wild August day of 1765.  It is probable that their opinion of the
popular party in Massachusetts was colored if not prejudiced by
memories of the Stamp Act riots.  Hutchinson and Oliver were all for
strong measures of repression and coercion.  To their minds the
colonies were allowed a great deal too much liberty; their people and
their leaders were not nearly so sensible of the advantage of British
supremacy as they ought to be; they were forever asserting their own
rights and privileges in a spirit that could only be properly met by a
prompt and comprehensive curtailment of those rights and privileges.
The colonists were too free, too proud of their charters and
constitutions.  Hutchinson and Oliver, with that fine superiority to
charters and constitutions which characterized so many a royal
governor, insisted that very considerable changes of government, all in
the direction of coercion, were necessary, in order to make the
conceited colonists know their place and to keep {154} them in it.
These letters no doubt made their due impression upon Whately and upon
Grenville.  Letters like them were always being despatched across the
Atlantic by governors and deputy governors to persons of importance in
England, pointing out how ungrateful the colonists were for their many
blessings, and what a good thing it would be for them if a few of these
blessings were taken away.  These letters had their influence upon the
persons of importance to whom they were addressed.  They formed the
minds of ministers; they fed the fancies of the King.  They served to
bolster up the singular system of ignorance and incapacity which went
by the name of colonial administration.

Of course Hutchinson and Oliver and their kind thought that they were
only writing for ministerial eyes, that they were only whispering into
royal ears.  They no doubt assumed that their letters would be safely
pigeon-holed, or still more safely destroyed.  It did not occur to them
that they ever could or would be made public, and by their publication
thrust new weapons into the hands of the men whose liberties they were
so zealous to suppress.  But the unexpected often, if not always,
happens.  Whately died in the June of 1772, and after his death the
letters he had received, and preserved, from Hutchinson and Oliver,
were somehow stolen.  We shall probably never know how they were stolen
or by whom.  It was claimed in later years, but not proved, that Dr.
Hugh Williamson was the means of transmitting the letters to Franklin.
All that we know for certain is that they came into the hands of
Benjamin Franklin, and that Benjamin Franklin believed it to be his
duty as agent for Massachusetts to make them known to the colony he
represented.  He was only allowed to do so under certain strict and
definite conditions.  The source from which they came was to be kept
absolutely secret.  They were only to be shown to a few leading
colonists; they were to be neither printed nor copied, and they were to
be returned promptly.  Franklin accepted these conditions, and as far
as was in his power observed them.  The source from which they came was
kept a secret, is still a secret.  {155} But Franklin could not very
well enforce, perhaps did not very greatly desire to enforce, those
conditions upon his friends on the other side of the Atlantic.  He
pointed out that, though they might not be printed or copied, they
might be talked about.  And talked about they were.  The knowledge of
them set all Boston afire with excitement, filling the colonists with
indignation and their opponents with dismay.  The Massachusetts House
of Assembly carried by a large majority a petition to the King, calling
for the removal of Hutchinson and Oliver as betrayers of their trust
and enemies to the colony.  Hutchinson, soon made aware of the
publicity given to the correspondence, demanded to see the letters that
were said to come from him.  The Assembly permitted this, but accorded
the permission with a show of distrust that was in itself the crudest
affront.  A small committee was appointed to take the letters to
Hutchinson and to show him the letters in their presence, the
implication being that Hutchinson was not to be trusted with the
letters except in the presence of witnesses.  Hutchinson had to submit
to the insult; he had also to admit that the letters were genuine.  He
gave, or was understood to give, permission that the letters might be
made public.  The letters were promptly made public.  Thousands of
copies were struck off and scattered broadcast all over the continent.

[Sidenote: 1772--Temple and Whately fight a duel]

England was scarcely less excited than America by the publication.
There was a general curiosity to know how the letters had been
purloined and how they had been made public.  The Whately to whom the
letters had been addressed had a brother, William Whately.  William
Whately seems to have been alarmed lest it might be thought that he was
in any way instrumental to the promulgation of the letters.  He
diverted any suspicion from himself by accusing another man of the
theft.  This other man was a Mr. John Temple, who had once had an
opportunity of examining the papers of the late Mr. Whately.  Temple
immediately challenged his accuser; a duel was fought, and as far as
ordeal of battle went, Temple made good his innocence, for he wounded
William Whately.  At {156} this moment Franklin came forward.  He
admitted that the letters had come into his hands, and that he had
despatched them to America.  He declined to say how they did come into
his hands, but he solemnly asserted the absolute innocence of both
Temple and Whately of any knowledge of or complicity in the
transaction.  A storm of popular anger broke upon Franklin.  He was
regarded as a criminal, spoken of as a criminal, publicly denounced as
a criminal.  Wedderburn, the Solicitor-General, was his denunciator,
and he chose for the place of his attack the House of Commons, and for
the hour the occasion of the presentation of the petition of
Massachusetts for the removal of Hutchinson and Oliver.

[Sidenote: 1772--Wedderburn's attack on Franklin]

Wedderburn assailed Franklin in a speech whose ability was only
surpassed by its ferocity.  In the presence of an illustrious audience,
that numbered among its members some of the most famous men of that
time or of any time, Wedderburn directed against Franklin a fluency of
invective, a fury of reproach that was almost splendid in its unbridled
savagery.  The Privy Councillors, with one exception, rocked with
laughter and revelled in applause as the Solicitor-General pilloried
the agent from the colony of Massachusetts Bay as a thief, well-nigh a
murderer, a man lost to all honor, all decency.  The one grave
exception to the grinning faces of the Privy Councillors was the face
of Lord North.  He sat fixed in rigidity, too well aware of all that
depended upon the glittering slanders of Wedderburn to find any matter
of mirth in them.  Only one other man in all that assembly of genius
and rank and fame and wit carried a countenance as composed as that of
Lord North, and that was the face of the man whom Wedderburn was
bespattering with his ready venom.  Benjamin Franklin, dressed in a
gala suit, unlike the sober habit that was familiar with him, stood at
the bar of the House and listened with an unconquerable calm to all
that Wedderburn had to say.  If it was the hour of Wedderburn's
triumph, it was not the hour of Franklin's humiliation.  He held his
head high and suffered no emotion to betray itself while Wedderburn
piled insult upon insult, {157} and the majority of his hearers reeled
in a rapture of approval.  But if Franklin listened with an unmoved
countenance, the words of Wedderburn were not without their effect upon
him.  He was human and the slanders stung him, but we may well believe
that they stung him most as the representative of the fair and
flourishing colony whose petition was treated with the same insolence
that exhausted itself in attacking his honor and his name.

The clothes philosophy of Diogenes Teufelsdroch is readily annotated by
history.  There are garments that have earned an immortality of fame.
Such an one is the sky-blue coat which Robespierre wore at the height
of his power when he celebrated the festival of the Supreme Being, and
in the depths of his degradation when a few days later he was carried
to his death.  Such an one is the gala coat of flowered Manchester
velvet which Franklin wore in his day of degradation when he was
compelled to listen with a tranquil visage and a throbbing heart to the
fluent invective of Wedderburn, and which was laid away and left unused
through five tremendous years, not to be taken from its retirement
until Franklin wore it again on the day of his greatest triumph, when
he signed that treaty with England which gave his country her place
among the nations of the world.  Battles had been fought and won in the
saddest of civil wars, the trained and seasoned troops of Europe had
learned the lesson of defeat from levies of farmers, English generals
had surrendered to men of their own race and their own speech, and a
new flag floated over a new world between the day when Franklin went
smartly dressed to Westminster to hear Wedderburn do his best and
worst, and the day when Franklin vent smartly dressed to Paris as the
representative of an independent America.  Franklin's flowered coat is
no less eloquent than Caesar's mantle.

The man whom the Court party employed to deal the death-blow to
colonial hopes, and to overwhelm with insult and abuse the colonial
agent, was a countryman and intimate friend of the detested Bute.
Alexander Wedderburn attained the degree of eloquence with which he now
{158} assailed Franklin at a cost of scarcely less pains than those
devoted by Demosthenes to conquer his defects.  He had a strong and a
harsh Scotch accent, and neither the accent nor the race was grateful
to the London of the eighteenth century.  Wedderburn's native tenacity
enabled him in a great degree to overcome his native accent.  He toiled
under Thomas Sheridan and he toiled under Macklin the actor to attain
the genuine English accent, and his labors did not go unrewarded.
Boswell writes that he got rid of the coarse part of his Scotch accent,
retaining only so much of the "native wood-note wild" as to mark his
country, "which if any Scotchman should affect to forget I should
heartily despise him," so that by degrees he formed a mode of speaking
to which Englishmen did not deny the praise of eloquence.  Successful
as an orator, secure in the patronage of the royal favorite, Wedderburn
sought the society of the wits and was not welcomed by them.  Johnson
disliked him for his defective colloquial powers and for his supple
readiness to go on errands for Bute.  Foote derided him as not only
dull himself, but the cause of dulness in others.  Boswell, who admired
his successful countryman, assumed that his unfavorable appearances in
the social world were due to a cold affectation of consequence, from
being reserved and stiff.  The scorn of Johnson and the sneers of Foote
would not have saved him from oblivion; he owes his unlovely notoriety
to his assault upon Franklin, with all its disastrous consequences.
Many years later, when Wedderburn was Lord Loughborough and Chief
Justice of the Common Pleas, a humorous editor dedicated to him
ironically a new edition of Franklin's "Rules for Reducing a Great
Empire to a Small One."

The English Government was now resolved to show that it would temporize
no longer with the factious colonists.  If in a spirit of rash and
ill-repaid good-nature it had repealed certain taxes, at least it would
repeal no more.  The tax on tea existed; the tax on tea would be
enforced; the tax on tea should be respected.  The East India Company
had a vast quantity of tea which it desired {159} to sell.  It obtained
from the Government the permission to export the tea direct to America
instead of being obliged to let it pass through the hands of English
merchants.  Under such conditions the tea could be sold very cheaply
indeed in the colonies, and the Government hoped and believed that this
very cheapness would be a temptation too keen for the patriotism of a
tea-drinking city to withstand.

[Sidenote: 1773--The Boston "Tea-party"]

If the King and the East India Company were resolved to force their tea
upon the American colonists, the Americans were no less stubborn in
their resolution to refuse it.  The tea-ships sailed the seas,
weathered the winds and waves of the Atlantic, only to be, as it were,
wrecked in port.  The colonists in general, and especially the
colonists of Massachusetts, were resolved not to suffer the tea to be
landed, for they knew that once landed it could be sold so cheaply that
it would be hard for many to resist the temptation to buy it.  Every
effort was made to prevent the importation.  In many cases the
consignees were persuaded, not wholly without menace, to make public
engagement to relinquish their appointments.  Pilots were advised as
patriots to lend no aid to the threatened importation; indeed, it was
pretty plainly hinted to some of them that they would best prove their
patriotism by using their especial knowledge in such a way as would
most effectually prevent it.  Boston set the example of self-denial and
of resistance.  In the December of 1773 three ships laden with tea
arrived in her port.  Their captains soon heard of the hostility to
their mission, were soon warned of the dangers that awaited them.
Alarmed at their perils, the captains declared their perfect
willingness to return with their cargoes to England if they were
permitted to do so by the Board of Customs and the persons to whom the
tea had been consigned.  But the willingness of the captains was of no
avail.  The consignees insisted that the tea should be delivered to
them, and neither the Custom House nor the Governor would grant the
captains permission to return.  But if the consignees and the
authorities were resolved that the tea should be landed, the citizens
of Boston were equally resolved that it should {160} not.  Their
fantastic method of giving force to their resolution has made it
famous.  In the dusk of a December evening the three tea-ships were
suddenly boarded by what seemed to be a small army of Mohawk Indians in
all the terror of their war-paint.  These seeming Indians were in
reality serious citizens of Boston, men of standing, wealth, and good
repute, wearers of names that had long been known and honored in the
Commonwealth.  The frightful paint, the gaudy feathers, the moccasins
and wampum, the tomahawks, scalping-knives, and pistols that seemed so
alarming to the peaceful captains of the boarded ships were but the
fantastic accoutrements that concealed the placid faces and the portly
persons of many a respectable and respected Boston burgess.

The plan had been schemed out by a conclave of citizens around a bowl
of punch in Court Street, and was carried out with a success that was
no less remarkable than its peacefulness.  The trappings of the red man
concealed the identity of many prominent citizens, friends of John
Hancock and Samuel Adams, their rivals in ability and their peers in
energy.  The sham savages were so numerous and so determined that no
resistance was offered by the captains or the crews of the vessels.
The shore was picketed with sentinels ready to resist any interference
on the part of any representatives of royal authority.  There was no
interference.  The conspirators of the punch-bowl and those who obeyed
their instructions kept their secret so close, and did their work so
quickly, that those in authority knew nothing about the business until
the business was happily over.  In about two hours the entire cargo of
the three tea-ships was dragged out of the hold and flung into the sea.
The patriotic citizen who had asked significantly if tea could be made
with salt water was satisfactorily answered by the Mohawks when they
cast overboard the last of their three hundred and forty-two chests,
and prepared to disappear as rapidly and as mysteriously as they had
come.  During the whole adventure only one man was hurt, who tried to
secrete some of the tea about his person, and who was given a drubbing
for his pains.  The Mohawks {161} scattered and disappeared, washed
their faces, rolled up their blankets, concealed their pistols and
axes, and as many reputable Boston citizens returned to their homes.
It is related that some of them on their way home passed by a house in
which Admiral Montague was spending the evening.  Montague heard the
noise of the trampling feet, opened the window and looked out upon the
fantastic procession.  No doubt some news of what had happened had
reached him, for he is reported to have called out: "Well, boys, you
have had a fine night for your Indian caper.  But mind, you've got to
pay the fiddler yet."  One of the Mohawk leaders looked up and answered
promptly: "Oh, never mind, squire.  Just come out here, if you please,
and we'll settle the bill in two minutes."  The admiral considered the
odds were against him, that the joke had gone far enough.  He closed
the window, leaving the bill to be settled by whoso thought fit, and
the laughing savages swept on to their respectable wigwams.  If some
very reputable citizens found a few leaves of tea in their shoes when
they took them off that night, they said nothing about it, and nobody
was the wiser.  So ended the adventure of the Boston Tea-party, which
was but the prologue to adventures more memorable and more momentous.
We learn that at least one of these masquerading Indians survived to so
late a date as the March of 1846.  Men now living may have clasped
hands with Henry Purkitt and David Kinnison and heard from their own
lips the story of a deed that enraged a King, offended Chatham, was
disapproved of by George Washington, and was not disapproved of by
Burke.

[Sidenote: 1773--After the Boston "Tea-party"]

The news of the Boston Tea-party reached London on January 19, 1774,
and was public property on the 21st.  Other news little less unpleasant
soon followed.  At Charleston tea was only landed to lie rotting in
damp cellars, not an ounce of it to be bought or sold.  In Philadelphia
a proclamation of December 27, 1773, announced that "THE TEA-SHIP being
arrived, every Inhabitant who wishes to preserve the Liberty of America
is desired to meet at the STATE-HOUSE, This Morning, precisely {162} at
TEN O'clock, to advise what is best to be done on this alarming
Crisis."  "What was best to be done" proved to be to compel the
tea-ship to return at once with its cargo to England.  New York refused
to allow the tea-ship "Nancy" to enter the harbor, and if some tea was
eventually landed under the cannon of a man-of-war, it was only to be
locked up as in Charleston, and to be left to lie unused.  The bad news
was received in England with an unreasoning fury by those whose fault
it was, and by those who knew nothing at all about the matter; with a
grave indignation by those who, like Pitt, were as resolute to support
the supremacy of England as to plead for justice to her colonies; with
despair by those who dreamed of an honorable and abiding union between
the two peoples; and with applause by those who admired any protest
against injustice, however vehement and irregular.

It is difficult, in reading the debates on the troubles in America, to
credit the sanity of the majority of the speakers.  These advocated a
colonial policy that should only have commended itself to a session of
Bedlamites, and clamored for a treatment of the colonists that might
well have shocked the susceptibilities of a savage.  No Virginian
planter could be more disdainful of the rights of his slaves, or more
resentful at any attempt to assert them, than the average member of
Parliament was disdainful of the rights of the American colonists and
resentful at their assertion.  The English country gentlemen who
applauded the ministers and who howled at Burke seemed to be absolutely
unconscious that the men of Massachusetts and the men of New York were
not merely like themselves made in the same image, but brethren of
their own race, blood of their blood and bone of their bone, children
of the same stock whose resistance to oppression was recorded at
Runnymede and Worcester, at the Boyne and at Culloden.  Even if the
colonists had been the knaves and fools and cowards that the
Parliamentary majority appeared to think them, the action of that
majority was of a kind eminently calculated to lend strength to the
most feeble spirit and courage to the most craven heart.  The coarse
{163} contempt, the brutal menace which were the distinguishing
features of all that ill-timed oratory might well have goaded into
resistance men who had been slaves for generations till servility had
grown a habit.  Yet this contempt and menace were addressed to men
trained by harsh experiences to be stubborn in defence and sturdy in
defiance, men who had won their liberty from the sea and the
wilderness, who were as tenacious of their rights and as proud of their
privileges as they were tenacious of the soil which they had wrested
from the red man and the wolf, and proud of the stately cities which
had conquered the forest and the swamp.  It was the descendants of
Miles Standish and John Smith, of Endicott and Bradford and Underhill
and Winslow whom the Squire Westerns of Westminster were ready to
insult and were eager to enslave.

It must, however, be remembered that even men who had advocated the
claims of the colonies were, or professed to be, shocked at the daring
deed of the men of Boston.  Dean Tucker declared that mutinous colonies
were no use to England, and had better be allowed to depart.  Chatham
found the action of the Boston people criminal, prompted by passions
and wild pretences.  In America George Washington disapproved of the
exploit.

[Sidenote: 1774--Closing the port of Boston]

The East India Company, pressed by the pinch of financial difficulties,
clamored for a revenge that the King was resolved to give them.  Under
his instigation Lord North, in the beginning of 1774, introduced the
famous measure for closing the port of Boston against all commerce.
The Bill declared that "in the present condition of the town and harbor
the commerce of his Majesty's subjects cannot be safely carried on
there."  It was accordingly asserted to be "expedient that the officers
of his Majesty's Customs should be forthwith removed from the said
town."  It was enacted that "from and after the first day of June,
1774, it shall not be lawful for any person or persons to lade, or
cause to be laden, or put off from any quay, wharf, or other place
within the town of Boston, or in or upon any part of the shore of the
bay, commonly called the harbor of Boston, into any ship, vessel, boat,
etc., any goods, wares, {164} or merchandise whatsoever . . . or to
take up, discharge, or cause or procure to be taken up or discharged
within the town, out of any boat, lighter, ship, etc., any goods,
wares, or merchandise whatsoever . . . under pain of the forfeiture of
the goods and merchandise and of the boat," and so on, in a long and
drastic measure practically intended to ruin Boston.  This was what the
Government thought it well to describe by the word "expedient."  This
was not all.  Comprehensive alterations of the laws of the province
followed.  The charter of Massachusetts was changed.  The council for
the province, which had hitherto been chosen by the people, was now to
be chosen by the Crown, and the judges of the province were to be
nominated by the Crown.  Another measure authorized the Governor to
send persons implicated in the disturbances to England for trial.
Boston and the province were indeed to be heavily punished and sternly
brought to their senses.

The King and the King's ministers had hoped fondly, in the old as well
as the new sense of the word, that their action towards the port of
Boston would effectually humble the spirit and crush the opposition of
that mutinous city.  Their scheme was founded upon a nice calculation
of the innate baseness of human nature.  They argued that the closing
of the port of Boston would turn the stream of her commerce in the
direction of other cities, which would be only too glad to enrich
themselves at the expense of their disabled comrade.  While they
believed that the punishment of Boston would thus breed a selfish
disunion in the province of Massachusetts, they trusted also that the
spectacle of the severe punishment meted out to Massachusetts would
have its wholesome deterring effect upon other colonies and destroy at
once whatever desire for union might exist among them.  The King and
the King's ministers were the more deceived.  Their ingenious scheme
produced a result precisely the opposite of that which they so
confidently anticipated.  The other ports of Massachusetts did not
seize with avidity the opportunity for plunder afforded them by the
humiliation of Boston.  The other colonies were not driven into discord
by the sight of {165} the punishment of Massachusetts.  On the
contrary, the ports of Massachusetts refused to take advantage of the
degradation of Boston, and the colonies were urged, and almost forced,
into union by what they regarded as the despotic treachery of the
English Crown.  The most devoted friend, the most enthusiastic advocate
of the rights of the American colonists could scarcely have devised
better means of drawing them together and welding them into a solid
fellowship than those which had been employed by George the Third and
his advisers for the purpose of keeping them apart forever.

[Sidenote: 1774--General Gage]

An immense number of copies of the Boston Port Bill were sent with
great rapidity all over the colonies.  In the fine phrase which we must
needs believe to be Burke's, these had the effect which the poets
ascribe to the Fury's torch; they set the countries through which they
passed in a flame.  At Boston and New York "the populace had copies of
the Bill printed upon mourning paper with a black border, which they
cried about the streets under the title of a barbarous, cruel, bloody,
and inhuman murder."  In other places the Bill was publicly burned.
All over the Continent great meetings were held, at which, with more or
less vehemence of speech, but with a common enthusiasm and a common
indignation, the Bill was denounced, and the determination to resist it
defiantly asserted.  When General Gage arrived on his mission of
administration he found not merely the colony of Massachusetts, but the
whole continent in an uproar.  He had to deal with a vast majority of
the people who were in proclaimed resistance to the Act, and who only
differed in the extreme of resistance to which they were prepared
immediately to go, and a minority who either approved or did not
altogether disapprove of the Act.  Gage was condemned to the government
not of a cowed, humbled, and friendless province, but of a raging
nation, frantic at the infringement of its rights, and sustained in the
struggle it was resolved to make by the cheer and aid of a league of
sister nations.  The flame from the Fury's torch had spread with a
vengeance.  Gage was a brave man, an able man, an {166} honorable man;
but for Alexander he was a little over-parted.  The difficulties he had
to encounter were too great for him to grapple with; the work he was
meant to do too vast for his hands or the hands of any man.  He was
sent out to sway a chastened and degraded province; he found himself
opposed by a defiant people, exalted by injustice and animated by
attack.




{167}

CHAPTER LIII.

THE "VICAR OF WAKEFIELD."

[Sidenote: 1774--Death of Oliver Goldsmith]

In the early spring that followed upon the winter when the Mohawks of
Boston made tea with salt water, at a time when politicians were busy
fighting over the Boston Port Bill, and neither side dreamed of the
consequences that could come of a decision, one of the gentlest and
sweetest writers of the English speech passed quietly, and somewhat
unhappily, away from a world he had done so much to make happy.  With
Oliver Goldsmith an epoch of literature came to an end, as the year
that saw his death ended an epoch in the history of the world.  The
characteristic literature of the eighteenth century, the literature
that began with Swift and Addison, and Steele and Pope; that boasted
among its greatest the names of Sterne and Richardson, Smollett and
Fielding, came to its close with the genius of Goldsmith.  With the new
conditions which were coming over the world a new literature was to be
created.  Wordsworth was a child of four, at Cockermouth; Coleridge was
a child of four, at Bristol; over in Germany a young poet, whose name
was unknown in England, had been much influenced by Goldsmith's
immortal story, and was in his turn and time to have a very profound
influence over the literature of Goldsmith's adopted country.  The year
of Goldsmith's death was the year in which the young Goethe published
those "Sorrows of Werther" which marked the birth of a new form of
expression in art.

Goldsmith was born in Ireland, at Pallas, in the county of Longford, in
the early November of 1728.  He lived for over forty-five years a life
of poverty, of vagrancy, of squalor, of foolish dissipation, of
grotesque vanity, of an {168} industry as amazing as his improvidence,
of a native idleness that was successfully combated by a tireless
industry, of an amazing simplicity that was only rivalled by his
amazing genius.  There were a great many contrasting and seemingly
incompatible elements in Goldsmith's queer composition, but his faults
were not of a kind to prevent men from finding him lovable, and,
whatever his faults were, they left no stain upon his writings.

The writings of Goldsmith are distinguished in English literature, and,
indeed, in the literature of the world, by their sweet pure humor,
fresh and clear and sparkling as a fountain whose edges the satyr's
hoof has never trampled.  They charm by their humanity, by their tender
charity, by the nobility of their lesson, a nobility only heightened by
the intense sympathy with the struggles, and sorrows, and errors of
mankind.  A new St. Martin of letters, he was ever ready to share his
mantle of pity with the sad and sinning.  He had himself suffered so
much, and been so tempted and tested, and had retained throughout his
trials so much of the serenity of a child, that all his writings
breathe compassion for frailty and failure with something of a
schoolboy sense of brotherhood which softens even his satire.  The
flames of London's fiery furnace had blazed and raged about him, but he
passed through them unconsumed.  The age in which he lived was not an
age of exalted purity, the city wherein he dwelt was scarcely saintly.
He lived in some of the most evil days of the eighteenth century, but
his writings and his life escaped pollution.  He was not a saint,
indeed; he was a spendthrift and he loved his glass, but he was never
tainted with the servile sins of cities.  Through all the weltering
horror of Hogarth's London we seem to see him walk with something of
the freshness of his boyhood still shining on his face.  The reflection
of the Irish skies was too bright upon his eyes to let them be dimmed
by the squalor and the shame of a squalid and shameful city.

[Sidenote: 1774--The friends of Goldsmith]

With the true instinct of his fine nature he made his friends and
companions among the wisest and highest of his time.  His intimates and
companions were Edmund {169} Burke, and Dr. Johnson, and Sir Joshua
Reynolds.  He had women friends too, as wisely chosen as the men--women
who were kind to him and admired him, women whose kindness and
admiration were worth the winning, women whose friendship brightened
and soothed a life that was darkened and vexed enough.  Mary Horneck
and her sister were the stars of his life, his heroines, his idols, his
ideals.  He has made Mary Horneck immortal as the "Jessamy Bride."  In
his hours of poverty he was cheered by the thought of her; while he
lived he worshipped her, and when he died a lock of his hair was taken
from his coffin and given to her.  Thackeray tells a touching little
story of the Jessamy Bride.  She lived long after the death of the man
of genius who adored her, lived well into the nineteenth century, and
"Hazlitt saw her, an old lady, but beautiful still, in Northcote's
painting-room, who told the eager critic how proud she was always that
Goldsmith had admired her."

Goldsmith was a companionable being and loved all company that was not
vicious and depraved.  He could be happy at the club in the society of
the great thinkers and teachers and wits of the time.  He could be more
than happy at Barton, in the society of Mary and her sister.  But he
could be happy too, in far humbler, far less romantic fellowship.  "I
am fond of amusement," he declares in one of his most delightful
essays, "in whatever company it is to be found, and wit, though dressed
in rags, is ever pleasing to me."  There was plenty of wit dressed in
rags drifting about the London of that day.  Men of genius slept on
bulkheads and beneath arches, and starved for want of a guinea, or
haunted low taverns, or paced St. James's Square all night in
impecunious couples for sheer need of a lodging, cheering each other's
supperless mood with political conversations and declarations that, let
come what might come, they would never desert the Ministry.  But
Goldsmith unearthed men of genius whose names nobody ever heard of, and
studied them and made merry with them, and transferred them to his
pages for us to make merry with more than a century after Goldsmith
{170} fell asleep.  We may suspect that Goldsmith never really found
those wonderful beggars he chronicles.  He did not discover them as
Cabot discovered America; he is their inventor, as the fancy of poets
invented the Fortunate Islands.

Goldsmith's strolling player is as real as Richard Savage, with whom he
is contemporary, and it must be admitted that he is a more presentable
personage.  What a jolly philosophy is his about the delights of
beggary!  It has all the humor of Rabelais with no touch of the
Touraine grossness.  It has something of the wisdom of Aurelius, only
clad in homespun instead of the purple.  The philosophy of contentment
was never more merrily nor more whimsically expressed.  A synod of
sages could not formulate a scheme in praise of poverty more impressive
than the contagious humor of his light-hearted merriment.  The
strolling player has the best of the argument, but he has it because he
is speaking with the persuasive magic of the tongue of Oliver Goldsmith.

The same pervading cheerfulness, the same sunny philosophy, which is,
however, by no means the philosophy of Pangloss, informs all his work.
Beau Tibbs boasting in his garret; Dr. Primrose in Newgate; the
good-natured man, seated between two bailiffs, and trying to converse
with his heart's idol as if nothing had happened; Mr. Hardcastle,
foiled for the five-hundredth time in the tale of Old Grouse in the Gun
Room; each is an example of Goldsmith's method and of Goldsmith's
manner.  If Goldsmith did not enjoy while he lived all the admiration,
all the rewards that belonged of right to his genius, the generations
that have succeeded have made amends for the errors of their ancestors.
"She Stoops to Conquer" is still the most successful of the stock
comedies.  If "The Good-Natured Man" can scarcely be said to have kept
the stage, it is still the delight of the student in his closet.  What
satires are better known than the letters of the "Citizen of the
World"?  What spot on the map is more familiar than Sweet Auburn?  As
for the "Vicar of Wakefield," what profitable words could now be added
to {171} its praise?  It has conquered the world, it is dear to every
country and known in every language, it has taken its place by
unquestionable right with the masterpieces of all time.

[Sidenote: 1774--Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson]

"Dr. Goldsmith," said his most famous friend of the man who was then
lying in the Temple earth--"Dr. Goldsmith was wild, sir, but he is so
no more."  This epitaph has been quoted a thousand times, but it must
in no sense be taken as a summing-up of the dead man's career.  It was
a rebuke, justly administered, to the critic who at such a moment could
have the heart to say that Oliver Goldsmith had been wild.  Dr.
Johnson, who uttered the rebuke, put the same thought even more
profoundly in a letter addressed to Bennet Langton shortly after
Goldsmith's death.  In this letter he announces Goldsmith's death,
speaks of his "folly of expense," and concludes by saying, "But let not
his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man."  These simple
words are infinitely more impressive than the magniloquence of the
epitaph which Johnson wrote on Goldsmith.

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

There is not a space in the scope of this history to deal, otherwise
than incidentally, with the literature of England in the eighteenth
century.  The whole Georgian era, from its dawn to its dusk, is rich in
splendid names in {172} letters as in art.  The great inheritance from
the Augustan age of Anne, the anguish of Grub Street, the evolution of
the novel, the eloquence of the pulpit and the bar, the triumphs of
science, the controversies of scholars, the fortunes of the drama, the
speculations of philosophy, the vacillations of the pamphleteer, the
judgments of the critics, the achievements of historians--these are
themes whose intimate consideration is outside the range of this work's
purpose.  All that is possible is here and there to linger a little in
the company of some dear and famous figure--a Swift, a Johnson, a
Goldsmith, a Sheridan--who stands above his fellows in the world's
renown or in our individual affection, who played while he lived his
conspicuous part on the great stage of public life, or who helped
conspicuously to influence public thought.  The selection is, within
these limitations, inevitably arbitrary, and is given frankly as such.
Certain names assert themselves masterfully, and of these Goldsmith's
is one of the most masterful.  He added images to daily life and common
thought as Bunyan did or Shakespeare.  There is no more need to explain
Dr. Primrose than there is to explain Mr. Facing-both-ways, and if Beau
Tibbs is only less familiar as Osric, Tony Lumpkin is to the full as
familiar as Falstaff.  Goldsmith himself is the lovable type of a class
that was often unlovely in the eighteenth century, the needy man of
letters.  If he has his lodging in the Grub Street of Dreams, his
presence there brings sunlight into the squalid place, and an infinite
humor, an infinite charity compensate royally for a little finite folly
and finite vanity.  In the great art he served and the great age he
adorned Goldsmith stands, not alone, but apart, with the very human
demigods.




{173}

CHAPTER LIV.

YANKEE DOODLE.

[Sidenote: 1775--The Philadelphia Congress]

An English ministry and an English king were convinced that everything
necessary to do for the suppression of the mutinous spirit in a
turbulent but unwarlike people had been done.  The existence of Boston
as a trading port had been abolished; Carthage had been blotted out;
there was an English army within the walls of Boston; there was an
English fleet in the Charles River.  Who could doubt that the cowardly
farmers whom Sandwich derided, and their leaders, the voluble lawyers
whom Sandwich despised, would be cowed now into quiescence, only
thankful that things were no worse?  The best and wisest in England
were among those who did doubt, but they were like Benedict in the
play--nobody marked them, or at least nobody responsible for any
control over the conduct of affairs.  Official confidence was suddenly
and rudely shaken.  The lawyers proved to be men of deeds as well as of
words.  The disdained farmers showed that the descendants of the men
who had fought with beasts and with Indians after the manner of
Endicott and Standish had not degenerated in the course of a few
generations.  Over the Atlantic came news which made the Boston
Massacre, the burning of the "Gaspee," and the Boston Tea-party, seem
trivial and insignificant events.  An astounded Ministry learned that a
formal Congress of Representatives of the different colonies had been
convened and had met in Philadelphia, and had drawn up a Declaration of
Rights.  Chatham admired and applauded their work.  To the King and the
King's ministers it was meaningless when it was not offensive.  But the
colonists showed that they could do more than meet in Congresses and
draw up {174} splendid State Papers.  The next news was of acts of war.
Gage schemed a raid upon the stores of powder and arms accumulated by
the disaffected colonists in Concord.  Warning of his plan was carried
at night by a patriotic engraver named Paul Revere to every hamlet
within reach of a horse's ride.  There was a skirmish at Lexington on
the road to Concord between the King's troops and a body of minute-men,
which resulted in the killing and wounding of many of the latter and
the dispersal of their force.  An expedition that began with what might
in irony be termed a victory for the British arms ended in a disaster
as tragic as it was complete.  Concord forewarned had nothing to yield
to the English soldiers who invaded her quiet streets; but the
surrounding country, equally forewarned, answered the invasion by
sending bodies of armed farmers and minute-men from every point of the
compass to the common centre of Concord.  There was a sharp, short
fight on Concord Bridge, which ended in the repulse of the royal troops
and the death of brave men on both sides.  Then the British officer
decided to retreat from Concord.  It proved one of the most memorable
retreats in history.  From behind every tree, every bowlder, every
wall, every hedge, enemies trained in the warfare of the wilderness
poured their fire upon the retiring troops.  It seemed to one of the
officers engaged in that memorable fight as if the skies rained down
foes upon them, unseen foes only made known by the accuracy of their
marksmanship and the pertinacity of their veiled pursuit.  All the way
from Concord the retiring troops fought in vain with an enemy that was
seldom seen, but whose presence was everywhere manifested by the
precision of his aim and the tale of victims that followed each volley.
The retreat was becoming a rout when reinforcements sent out from
Boston under the command of Lord Percy stayed an actual stampede.  But
it could not stay the retreat nor avert defeat.  Lord Percy, who had
marched out with his bands playing "Yankee Doodle," in mockery of the
Americans, had to retreat in his turn with no mocking music, carrying
with him the remnant of the invaders of Concord.  He {175} and his
force did not get within touch of Boston and the protection of the guns
of the fleet a moment too soon.  Had a large body of insurgents, who
came hurrying in to help their brethren, arrived on the field a little
earlier, Lord Percy and his command must inevitably have been made
prisoners of war.  As it was, this one day's business had given success
and the confidence that comes of success to the raw colonists, and had
inflicted a crushing defeat upon a body of soldiers who had been led to
believe that the sight of their scarlet coats would act like a charm to
tame their untutored opponents.

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

Gage only recovered from the shock of this disaster to realize that
Boston was invested by an insurgent army.  The victors of the fight and
flight from Concord were rapidly reinforced by bodies of men from all
parts of the country; their ranks were hourly swelled by levies roughly
armed but stubbornly resolved.  Unpleasant facts forced themselves
thick and fast upon Gage's notice.  But yesterday, as it were, he had
imagined that the mere presence of the forces under his command was
sufficient to overawe the colonists and settle any show of
insubordination forever; to-day he had to swallow in shame and anger a
staggering defeat.  Still Gage did nothing and his enemies accumulated.
Royal reinforcements arrived under Burgoyne, Clinton, and Howe, to do
nothing in their turn.  But the peasants they despised were not idle
and would not allow them to be idle.  The English general woke up one
morning to find that under cover of night an important point of vantage
overlooking the town of Boston had been occupied and roughly fortified
by the rebels.  The citizen soldiers who had gathered together to
defend their liberties had stolen a march upon the English general.
They had occupied the rising ground of Breed Hill, below Bunker's Hill,
on the Charlestown side of the Charles River, and had hurriedly
intrenched themselves there behind rude but efficient earthworks.  Gage
was resolved that the rebels should not remain long in their new
position.  Chance might have allotted them a scratch victory over a
small body of men taken unawares in unfamiliar country {176} and by
unfamiliar methods of fighting.  But here was a business familiar to
the British soldier; here was work that he did well and that he loved
to do.  If the colonists really believed that they could hold Breed
Hill against troops with whom the taking by storm of strong positions
was a tradition, so much the worse for them.  The order was given that
the rebels must be cleared away from Breed Hill at once, and the
welcome task was given to Lord Howe, in command of the flower of the
forces in Boston.  It is probable that Howe felt some pity for the rash
and foolhardy men whose hopes it was his duty and his determination to
destroy.  Confident that the enterprise would be as brief as it must be
decisive, Howe prepared to assault, and the battle of Breed Hill began.

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

The Breed Hill battle is one of the strangest and one of the bravest
fights ever fought by men.  On the one side were some hundreds of
simple citizens, civilians, skilled as individuals in the use of the
gun, and accustomed as volunteers, militia, and minute-men to something
that might pass for drill and manoeuvre, officered and generalled by
men who, like Warren and Greene, knew warfare only by the bookish
theoric, or by men who, like Putnam and Pomeroy, had taken their
baptism of fire and blood in frontier struggles with wild beast and
wilder Indian.  On the other side were some thousands of the finest
troops in the world, in whose ranks victory was a custom, on whose
banners the names of famous battles blazed.  They were well trained,
well armed, well equipped.  They moved at the word of command with the
monotonous precision and perfection of a machine.  They were led by
officers whose temper had been tested again and again in the sharp
experiences of war, men to whom the thought of defeat was as unfamiliar
as the thought of fear.  The contrast between the two opposing forces
was vividly striking in the very habiliments of the opponents.  The men
who were massed behind the breastworks of Breed Hill were innocent of
uniform, of the bright attire that makes the soldier's life alluring,
innocent even of any distinction between officer and private, or, if
the words seem too formal {177} for so raw a force, between the men who
were in command and the men who were commanded.  The soldiers who were
massed below, the force whose duty it was to march up the hill and
sweep away the handful in hodden gray and black broadcloth who held it,
glittered with all the bravery of color dear to the British army.
Splendid in scarlet and white and gold, every buckle shining, every
belt and bandolier as brightly clean as pipeclay could make it, the
little army under Howe's command would have done credit to a parade in
the Park or a field day at Windsor.  The one side was as sad and sombre
as a Puritan prayer-meeting; the other glowed with all the color and
warmth of a military pageant.  The holders of the hill had come from
their farms and their fields in the homely working clothes they wore as
they followed the plough or tended their cattle; the townsmen among
them came in the decent civic suits they wore behind their desks or
counters.  Few men's weapons were fellows in that roughly armed array.
Each militant citizen carried his own gun, some favorite weapon,
familiar from long practice in fowling, or from frequent service
further afield against the bear, the panther, and the wolf.  Some of
the flint-locks were enormously long; many of them would have seemed
extremely old-fashioned to an ordnance officer.  But every gun was like
an additional limb to those practised marksmen, who knew little of
firing in platoons, but everything of the patient accuracy which gives
the backwoodsman his unerring aim.  The assailants carried the latest
weapons approved of by the War Office, and manipulated them with the
faultless unison and unswerving harmony that would have compelled the
compliments of a commander-in-chief at a review.  At the top of the
hill were some sixteen hundred men, a mob of undisciplined
sharpshooters, few of whom had ever fired a shot in organized warfare.
At the bottom of the hill were some four thousand of the finest troops
in the world, stiffened with all the strength that prestige and
practice could give them.  It did not seem on the face of it a very
equal combat; it did not seem to the English generals that it ought to
take very long to {178} march from the bottom to the top of the hill
and make short work of the mutinous peasants on its summit.  The best
indeed that the mutinous peasants could hope for when the British were
upon them was to be shot or bayoneted as quickly as possible, for the
terms of Gage's proclamation directly threatened with the gallows every
rebel taken with arms in his hands.

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

[Sidenote: 1775--The Continental Army]

Already insurgent America had an army, and an army of investment.  The
rebels, whom Gage affected to despise almost as much as he was himself
despised by General Burgoyne, were massed in numbers unknown to the
loyalists before Boston, and the English soldiers were cooped up in the
city they had crossed the seas to command.  The colonial army was rude
and rough, but earnest and resolute, and it had evolved generals of its
own making, rough and rude as itself, but able, daring, and fearless.
Israel Putnam, who killed a wolf once with his own hands in his wild
youth, gripping it by the throat till he had choked its life out, had
come to fight against the flag beneath which he had fought so well in
the French wars.  Nathaniel Greene had flung down his military books
and caught up the sword, had abandoned the theory for the practice, and
was beginning to make a name.  Benedict Arnold, after a life as varied,
as shady, and as adventurous as that of any picaroon in a Spanish
story, leaped into fame as a daring spirit by the way in which he and
Ethan Allen, at the head of a mixed force of Vermonters and New
Englanders, had taken Fort Ticonderoga, on the great lakes, by
surprise, and had endowed the dawning army with its captured cannon.
Prescott, the hero of Breed Hill, was now a veteran soldier; and the
names of Artemas Ward, of Schuyler, of Pomeroy, Heath and Thomas,
Sullivan and Montgomery, Wooster and Spencer were becoming more than
mere names to Englishmen in Boston and in London.  Two Englishmen held
rank as generals in the crude colonial army--the adventurer Charles
Lee, whom some foolish people believed to be the real Junius, and
Horatio Gates.  There were few thoroughly worthless men in the young
army, but it is painful to record that Lee and Gates were eminent among
them.  These were the generals of what was now to be called the {180}
Continental Army.  Happy in most of them, happy in much, it was
happiest of all in this: that it had for its commander-in-chief the
noblest man, who was to prove the greatest soldier, then living in the
world.

[Sidenote: 1775--George Washington]

When Braddock died, the hero of a hopeless fight and the martyr of his
own folly, the funeral service was read over his body by the young
Virginian soldier who had fought by his side and had warned him against
his rashness.  To men in later years there seemed to be something
prophetic, with the blended irony and pathos of prophecy, in the
picture of that dead Englishman, his scarlet coat torn and bloody with
so many wounds, lying in his grave while his American lieutenant read
over him the words that committed so much wasted courage to the earth.
At the time and hour the thing signified no more than the price of a
petty victory of allied French and Indians, which the Virginian soldier
was soon to avenge.  After planting the banner of King George on the
ruins of Fort Duquesne, Captain Washington sheathed his sword and
retired from military into civil life, with as little likelihood as
desire of ever carrying arms again.  All he asked and all he
anticipated was to live the tranquil life of a comfortable colonial
gentleman.  After a youth that had been vexed by many experiences of
the passion of love he had married happily and wisely, and had settled
down to a gracious rural life at Mount Vernon, on the banks of the
Potomac River.  He wished no better than to be a country gentleman,
with a country gentleman's pleasures and pursuits--farming, hunting,
fishing--with a country gentleman's friendships for neighbors like
himself.  He was a dutiful servant of his State; he was a member of the
Virginia Houses of Burgesses for fifteen years after the fall of Fort
Duquesne, and though he seldom played any part in debate he commanded
the confidence and the esteem of his colleagues and of his
fellow-citizens.  He lived and enjoyed a peaceful, honorable, useful,
uneventful life, and might have lived it to its end in dignified
obscurity if a rash and headstrong sovereign over-seas had not found
ministers too servile or too foolish to say him nay.

{181}

The Continental Congress, conscious of Washington's ability, offered
him the command of its improvised army.  Washington accepted the duty,
well aware of its gravity, its danger, its awful responsibility.  He
refused any pay beyond his actual expenses, and he entered upon a
struggle whose difficulties were not all or nearly all due to the enemy
in the sternest and noblest sense of duty to his countrymen and to the
principles of liberty.  At first, in his own words, he loathed the idea
of independence.  He only took up arms to defend cherished rights; the
day was not yet, though the day was not far off, when the Virginian
soldier would renounce his allegiance to the King whose commission he
had carried and to the country from which his race stemmed.
Washington's military genius soon showed itself in the use he made of
the loose, incoherent, disorganized mass of men which was called the
Continental Army.  It was fortunate for the Continental cause that the
English generals, penned up within the walls of Boston, had little idea
of the obstacles Washington had to overcome, the opposition he had to
encounter, the sore straits to which the want of everything essential
to a besieging army drove him.  But his indomitable courage, his
unfailing coolness, his unconquerable resource overcame a sea of
troubles that might well have swept even a strong man and a brave
soldier off his feet.  With regiment after regiment quietly disbanding
as their term of service expired; with a plentiful lack of powder, of
arms, of provisions, of uniforms; with a force that at moments
threatened to dissolve into nothingness and leave him with a handful of
generals alone beneath his insurgent flag, Washington never allowed the
enemy, and seldom allowed a friend, to guess how near at times he came
to despair.  He raised troops somehow; he got provisions somehow;
somehow he managed to obtain powder; somehow he managed to obtain arms.
The want of weapons was so great that many bodies of men were only
provided with pikes, and that Franklin was driven to suggest, and
partly in a spirit of humanity, that American farmers fighting for
their liberty should be armed with the bows and arrows of the red {182}
men, and should strive to renew upon the fields of Massachusetts the
successes of their ancestors, the yeomen of Agincourt, with their
clothyard shafts.

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

{183}

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

The war did go on.  It lasted for five years more, in spite of the
protests of every truly patriotic Englishman, in spite of proof after
proof that nothing could break the spirit or crush the courage of the
colonists.  While in England Fox arrayed himself in the blue and buff
that composed the uniform of the Continental Army, while the Duke of
Richmond made it a point to speak, and with excellent reason, of the
Continental Army as "our army," while the eloquence of Chatham and the
eloquence of Burke were launched in vain against campaigns as idle as
they were infamous, the war went stubbornly on.  The King and his
ministers proposed new measures of repression and expended vast sums in
the purchase of Hessian regiments to dragoon the defiant colonists.
Soon all pretence of loyalty had to be abandoned by the Americans.  The
statue of King George was dragged from its place of honor in Bowling
Green, New York, and run into bullets to be used against his German
levies.  In the summer that followed the evacuation of Boston the
rebellious colonies proclaimed their independence in the most memorable
declaration of a people's right ever made by men.  This was in 1776.
The disastrous war had still five years to run.

The fortunes of the war varied.  The early victories of the Americans
were followed by a series of defeats which left Philadelphia in the
hands of the British, and which would have broken the heart of any man
of less heroic mould than Washington.  Hope revived with a series of
Continental victories.  Aid came to America from abroad.  France,
Germany, Poland sent stout soldiers to fight for freedom--Lafayette,
Von Steuben, Kosciusko.  The English general Burgoyne surrendered with
all his army at Saratoga.  After the winter of 1777, when Washington
and his army suffered all the rigors of Valley Forge, France
acknowledged the independence of America, the British evacuated
Philadelphia, and Paul Jones made himself forever famous by the way in
which he and his ship "Le Bonhomme Richard," carried the American war
to the coast of England.  Again came colonial reverses.  A {184} steady
succession of English successes scarcely struck so hard a blow at the
Continental cause as the treason of Benedict Arnold, who entered into
negotiations with the British to betray his command.  Washington had
trusted and loved Arnold like a brother.  "Whom can I trust now?" he
asked in momentary despair when the capture of an English officer.
Major André, and the flight of Benedict Arnold to the British lines
revealed to him an undreamed-of treason which had threatened to
undermine the colonial cause.  But Benedict Arnold's crime had for its
only result the death of a better man than himself, of Major André, who
had by the laws of war to suffer death as a spy.  There were other
traitors and semi-traitors in the American army: Lee was certainly the
first; Gates was almost, if not quite, the second.  But Lee and Gates
failed to do the mischief to which their base jealousy of Washington
prompted them.  The right cause triumphed.  In 1781 another British
army surrendered, the army of Cornwallis, at Yorktown.  Even North was
forced to recognize that this crushing disaster to the royal hopes and
the royal arms practically ended the war.  It was suspended in the
following year, and in 1783, after much negotiation, which at times
threatened to come to nothing, a treaty of peace was signed in France,
and the American Republic took its place among the nations of the
earth.  It was for these negotiations that Franklin, as we have said,
brought out from its obscurity that gala suit which he had worn for the
last time when he stood at the bar of the House of Commons and listened
to the brutal and foolish assaults of Wedderburn.  Many days had passed
since that day.

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

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

The fatal war which had cost the English King the loss of his greatest
colonies, which had spilt a vast amount of blood and wasted a vast
amount of treasure in order to call into being a strong and naturally
resentful rival to the power of England, must be said also to have cost
the life of the greatest English statesman of the century.  The genius
of Chatham had never been more nobly employed than in protesting with
all the splendor of its eloquence against the unjust war upon the
Americans and the unjust deeds which had heralded the war.  But time,
that had only swelled the ranks of the wise and sane who thought as
Chatham had thought and found their own utterance from the fire of his
words, had wrought a change in the attitude of a great statesman.
Harassed by the disease that racked his body, the mind of Chatham had
altered.  The noble views that he had maintained in defiance of a
headstrong king and a corrupt ministry had changed in the face of the
succession of calamities that had fallen upon his country.  The success
that he had desired for the insurgent arms had been accorded, and he
came to despair at the consequence of that success.  He had been
granted his heart's desire in full measure, and the gratification
choked him.  When it came to be a question of conceding to the
colonists that formal recognition of an independence which they had
already won, the intellect of Chatham revolted against the policy
himself had fostered.  He forgot or he forswore the principles which
animated Burke, which animated Fox, which guided the course of
Rockingham and inspired the utterances of Richmond.  All he could see
was an England humiliated by many defeats, an England threatened by
many terrible alliances, and in the face of humiliation and of menace
he forgot that both alike were the inevitable, the well-deserved fruit
of injustice.  Remembering that he had helped to make England great, he
refused to remember that England would have been still greater if she
had {186} followed the honorable course his wisdom had made plain to
her.  His proud, unhappy spirit could not consent to her dismemberment,
a dismemberment which seemed to his fading intellect to be the
equivalent to her ruin.  He came from his sick bed, a ghastly image of
decay, to offer the desperate protest of a dying man against surrender
to the mutiny his own eloquence had fanned.  "Come the four quarters of
the world in arms and we will shock them."  The spirit of Faulconbridge
was strong in the ruined body of the statesman who was carried to his
seat in the House of Lords by the son who bore his name and by the Lord
Mahon who had married his daughter.  His eagle face was turned against
the men who had been his colleagues.  His trembling hand pointed at
them in condemnation.  He gasped out a few sentences, almost
inarticulate, almost inaudible, before he reeled in a fit upon the arms
of those about him.  He was carried from the House; he was carried to
Hayes, and at Hayes a few weeks later the great career came to an end.
His last battle was at least heroic.  If his stroke was struck on the
wrong side and for a cause his prime had done so much to baffle, it is
not necessary to attribute his perversion entirely to the insidious
ravages of the malady that had clouded his whole life.  He could not
bear to see the country that was in so eminent and so intimate a sense
his country yield even to claims that were conspicuously right and just
at the command of a league between England's rebellious children and
England's enemy, France.  There broke his mighty heart.  In Chatham
England lost one of the greatest of her statesmen, one of the most
splendid of her sons.  His life was passionately devoted to his
country, his career one long struggle against a peculiarly bigoted,
stubborn, and unwise King.  Always hated by his enemies, often
misunderstood by his friends, he showed while he lived a steadfast
front alike against the enemies of England abroad and those worse
enemies of England at home who filled the throne and the places about
the throne.  He was buried with great pomp and honor at Westminster,
leaving behind him not merely the memory of an illustrious name, {187}
but a name that the second generation was still to make illustrious.

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

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

We may gather some idea of what risk wise men felt they were running
from a famous speech of Edmund {188} Burke.  He was striving to stay
the determination of the Ministry to declare war upon the American
colonies.  He wished his hearers to appreciate the progress that
America had made within living memory.  He called imagination to his
aid.  He spoke of a statesman then living in the late evening of an
honorable life.  He pictured that statesman in the promise of his early
dawn, saluted by the angel of his auspicious youth, and given the power
to see into the future, so far as to the hour when Burke was speaking.
"What," said Burke, "if while he was gazing with admiration on the then
commercial grandeur of England the genius should point out to him a
little speck, scarce visible in the mass of the nation's interest, and
should tell him, 'Young man, there is America, which at this day serves
for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and
uncouth manners, yet before you taste of death will show itself equal
to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.
Whatever England has been growing to by a progressive increase of
improvement, brought in by varieties of people, by succession of
civilizing conquests and civilizing settlements in a series of
seventeen hundred years, you shall see as much added to her by America
in the course of a single life!'  If this state of his country had been
foretold to him, would it not require all the sanguine credulity of
youth and all the fervid glow of enthusiasm to make him believe it?
Fortunate man, he has lived to see it."  If the genius of prophecy
could have stood by Burke's shoulder then, and illuminated his noble
soul with the knowledge that is the common possession of mankind
to-day, would it not have required all the sanguine credulity, all the
divine enthusiasm of genius to make him believe it?

[Sidenote: 1732-99--The death of Washington]

The war that gave the world a new nation and a republic greater than
Rome added one of the greatest names, and perhaps the noblest name, to
the roll-call of the great captains of the earth.  No soldier of all
those that the eyes of Dante discerned in the first circle, not even
"Caesar, all armored with gerfalcon eyes," adorns the annals of
antiquity more than George Washington illuminates the {189} last
quarter of the eighteenth century.  His splendid strength, his sweet
austerity, his proud patience are hardly to be rivalled in the previous
history of humanity, and have perhaps only been rivalled since his day
by children of the same continent and of the same southern soil, who
sacrificed qualities much akin to his own on a cause that, unlike his,
was not the cause of freedom.  "First in peace, first in war, and first
in the hearts of his country-men."  The phrase of Lee has been worn
threadbare with iteration since it was first uttered, but it always
rings true of the high-minded, unfaltering soldier and honorable,
simple gentleman whose genius in war and whose modesty in peace made
the republic of America an enduring fact in history.  Long after the
great soldier and good man had been laid to rest an English poet did
him justice, and no more than justice, by writing that "the first, the
last, the best, the Cincinnatus of the West, whom envy dared not hate,
bequeathed the name of Washington to make man blush there was but one."
Washington was made the first President of the American Republic in
1789, after resolutely resisting all suggestions to make himself king
of the new commonwealth.  He served for two terms of four years each,
and then retired into private life, unembittered by the cruel and
stupid ingratitude of the few and unspoiled by the reasoned and
grateful homage of the many.  He died in 1799 in his quiet home in
Mount Vernon, while the King who still regarded him as a rebel had many
years of his unquiet reign to live.




{190}

CHAPTER LV.

THE GORDON RIOTS.

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

In the year 1778 Sir George Savile earned for himself an honorable
distinction by passing his measure for the relief of Roman Catholics.
Sir George Savile was a man of advanced views; he fought gallantly in
the House of Commons through five successive Parliaments, in which he
represented York County, for all measures which he believed to be
sincerely patriotic, and against all measures which he believed to be
opposed to the honorable interests of his country.  He gained the
laurel of praise from Burke, who, in one of his famous Bristol
speeches, spoke of him as a true genius, "with an understanding
vigorous, acute, relined, distinguishing even to excess; and
illuminated with a most unbounded, peculiar, and original cast of
imagination."  The man whom Burke thus generously praised deserved the
praises.  He strove earnestly against the American war.  He
enthusiastically supported Pitt's motion in 1783 for a reform in
Parliament.  He was the author of an admirable Bill for the Limitation
of the Claims of the Crown upon Landed Estates.  But his name is
chiefly associated with his Bill for Catholic Relief, both because of
the excellent purpose of the measure itself, and because of the
remarkable outburst of fanaticism which followed it.

Sir George Savile's measure did away with certain restrictions, certain
barbarous restrictions, as they now seem, upon English subjects
professing the Catholic faith.  The famous Act of the eleventh and
twelfth years of King William the Third, the Act known as the Act for
the Further Preventing the Growth of Popery, had instituted certain
very harsh penal enactments against Catholics.  {192} That Act Sir
George Savile proposed largely to repeal.  This was a measure of relief
of no great magnitude, but it did at least recognize the common
humanity of Catholic Englishmen with Protestant Englishmen; it did at
least allow to Catholic Englishmen some of the dearest and most obvious
rights of citizenship.  The savage penal laws which for so long
afflicted the sister island of Ireland were tempered and abrogated in
this measure as far as England was concerned, and rumor spread it
abroad that a similar relief was soon to be extended to the Catholics
of Scotland.  Straightway a Bill which had passed both Houses without a
single negative aroused the fiercest opposition beyond the Border.  The
announcement of the recall of the Stuarts could not have spread a
greater panic through the ranks of the Scottish Protestants.  A violent
agitation was set on foot, an agitation which could not have been more
violent if the Highlanders had once again been at the gates of
Edinburgh.  An alarmist spirit spread abroad.  All manner of
associations and societies were called into being for the defence of a
faith which was not menaced.  Committees were appointed to inflame
faction and serve as the rallying points of bigotry.  Sectarian books
and pamphlets of the most exaggerated and alarming kind were sown
broadcast all over the country.  The result of this kind of agitation
showed itself in a religious persecution, which gradually developed
into a religious war.  The unfortunate Catholic residents in Edinburgh,
in Glasgow, and in other great Scottish towns found themselves suddenly
the victims of savage violence at the hands of mobs incited by the
inflammatory utterances and the inflammatory propaganda of the
Protestant committees.  In the face of the disorder which a suggestion
of mercy aroused in Scotland, the Government seemed to take fright, and
to abandon all thought of extending the clemency of the Relief Bill to
Scotland.

But the Scottish agitation against the Catholics soon spread across the
Border, soon directed itself, not against the imaginary Bill which it
might be the intention of the Government to pass, but against the
actual Bill which the {192} Government had passed for the benefit of
English Catholics.  The bigoted bodies, societies, and committees in
Scotland soon found their parallels in England.  The English Protestant
Association rose into being like some sudden evocation of a wizard, and
chose for its head and leader the man who had made himself conspicuous
as the head and leader of the movement in Scotland--Lord George Gordon.

[Sidenote: 1750-80--Lord George Gordon]

Lord George Gordon lives forever, a familiar figure in the minds of the
English-speaking race, thanks to the picture drawn by Charles Dickens.
Englishmen know, as they know the face of a friend, the ominous figure
"about the middle height, of a slender make and sallow complexion, with
an aquiline nose, and long hair of a reddish brown, combed perfectly
straight and smooth about his ears and slightly powdered, but without
the faintest vestige of a curl."  It is a living portrait of that
solemn gentleman in the suit of soberest black, with those bright large
eyes in which insanity burned, "eyes which betrayed a restlessness of
thought and purpose, singularly at variance with the studied composure
and sobriety of his mien, and with his quaint and sad apparel."  It
fits well with all that we know of Lord George Gordon, to learn that
there was nothing fierce or cruel in his face, whose mildness and whose
melancholy were chiefly varied by a haunting air of "indefinable
uneasiness, which infected those who looked upon him and filled them
with a kind of pity for the man: though why it did so they would have
had some trouble to explain."  Such was the strange fanatic whose name
was destined to be blown for a season throughout England, who was fated
to stand for a moment visible in the eyes of all men, the idol of
intolerance, the apostle of violence, of murder, and of fire, and then
to fall most pitiably, most pitifully into the dust.

Lord George Gordon was still a young man when he became leader of the
anti-Catholic agitation.  He would seem in our days a very young man,
for, as he was born in 1750, he was only thirty when the agitation
reached its height.  But a man of thirty was counted older than he
{193} would not be reckoned, in an epoch when it was possible for a
young man just come of age to lead the House of Commons.  Lord George
Gordon had led a somewhat varied life.  He had been in the navy, and
had left the service from pique, while the American war was still in
its earliest stages, in consequence of a quarrel with Lord Sandwich
concerning promotion.  The restless energy which he could no longer
dedicate to active service he resolved most unhappily to devote to
political life.  He entered Parliament as the representative of the
borough of Ludgershall, and soon earned for himself a considerable
notoriety in Westminster.  He had very fierce opinions; he attacked
everybody and everything; his vehemence and vituperation were seasoned
with a kind of wit, and he made himself, if not a power, at least an
important factor in the House of Commons.  Indeed, it passed into a
kind of proverb at St. Stephen's that there were three parties in the
State--the Ministry, the Opposition, and Lord George Gordon.
Parliament had seen before, and has seen since, many a politician
fighting thus like Hal o' the Wynd for his own hand, but no one so
influential for a season or so pernicious in his influence as Lord
George Gordon.

It seems quite clear to those who review so strange a career at this
distance of time that Lord George Gordon was of deranged intellect.  It
does not need the alleged contrast between his professions and his
practice to enforce this conclusion.  Many men have affected the
religious habit and the religious bearing while their lives were
privately profligate without deserving to be called insane except in
the sense in which any criminal excess may be regarded pathologically
as a proof of madness.  Even if it were true that the long-haired and
black-habited George Gordon were the debauched profligate that Hannah
More and Horace Walpole maintained him to be, he might find
fellow-sinners of unquestioned sanity.  But the conduct of his public
life goes to prove that his wits were diseased.  His behavior in the
House, when it was not intolerably tedious, was characterized by a
grotesque buffoonery which men looked upon as laughable {194} or
pitiable according to their tempers, but which they had not yet learned
to look upon as dangerous.  When he denounced the King as a Papist,
when he declared that the time would come when George Gordon would be
able to dictate to the Crown and Parliament, when he occasionally
interrupted his wild utterances to break into floods of tears, men
sneered or yawned or laughed.  They were soon to learn that the man was
something more than divertingly contemptible.

In the excitement that followed on the passing of the relief measure
Lord George Gordon found his opportunity for being actively noxious.  A
gloomy fanaticism in Scotland took fire at the fear lest kindred relief
should be extended to the North Briton, and, as we have said, displayed
itself in savage speech and savage deed.  In the press and from the
pulpit denunciations of the Catholics streamed.  The Synod of Glasgow
solemnly resolved that it would oppose any Bill brought into Parliament
in favor of Scottish Catholics.  In Edinburgh and in Glasgow houses
were wrecked and lives menaced.  In Glasgow a worthy potter, Mr.
Bagnal, who had brought from Staffordshire its famous art, had his
property wholly destroyed.  In Edinburgh the house of a Catholic priest
was wrecked in obedience to a brutal handbill which called upon its
readers to "take it as a warning to meet at Leith Wynd, on Wednesday
next, in the evening, to pull down that pillar of popery lately erected
there."  The "pillar of popery" was the dwelling occupied by the
priest, which was duly wrecked in obedience to the bidding of the
nameless "Protestant" who signed the manifesto.  It is curious to note
a postscriptum to the handbill, which ran thus: "Please to read this
carefully, keep it clean, and drop it somewhere else.  For King and
country.--UNITY."  The means which were adopted to spread fanaticism in
Scotland were carefully followed when the time came for carrying the
agitation into England.

[Sidenote: 1778-80--The English "Protestant Association"]

It was indeed not necessary to be a Catholic to call down the fury of
fanatical persecution.  To have expressed any sympathy for Catholicism,
to have taken part in any way, {195} no matter how indirect, in the
advocacy of the relief measure, was enough to mark men out for
vengeance.  Dr. Robertson, the historian, was threatened because he
advocated tolerance in religious matters.  A lawyer named Crosbie was
denounced merely because he had in the way of his regular business
drawn up the Bill intended for Parliament.  It was inevitable that the
action of intolerance in Scotland should come before the notice of
Parliament.  Wilkes, always ostentatious in the cause of liberty,
called upon Dundas to bring in his relief measure for Scotland.  When
Dundas declared that it was better to delay the measure until cooler
judgment might prevail, Wilkes denounced him for allowing Parliament to
truckle to riot, and the denunciation found support in the actions of
Burke and of Fox.  Lord George Gordon had found his opportunity.  He
assailed Fox; he assailed Burke.  He declared that every non-Catholic
in Scotland was ready to rise in arms against Catholic relief, and that
the rebels had chosen him for their leader.  He raged and vapored and
threatened on the floor of the House.  But he did more than rage and
vapor and threaten.  Whether of his own motion, or prompted by others,
he formed a "Protestant Association" in England.  Of this, as of the
similar Scottish Association, he was declared the head, and this
accumulation of honors wholly overthrew his intelligence.  An amiable
writer has declared that "it would be much beneath the dignity of
history to record the excesses of so coarse a fanatic but for the fatal
consequences with which they were attended."  The amiable defender of a
detestable phrase does not understand that it was the excesses of the
fanatic that led to the fatal consequences, and that Lord George
Gordon, as the ostensible head and conspicuous cause of one of the
gravest events of the history of England in the eighteenth century, is
in no sense beneath the "dignity of history."  The business of history
is with him and with such as he, as well as with the statelier,
austerer figures who sanely shape the destinies of the State.  There
was plenty of fanaticism abroad in England; it was reserved for Lord
George Gordon to bring it together into {196} a single body, to
organize it, and to employ its force with a terrible if temporary
success.  He issued an insane proclamation calling upon men to unite
against Catholicism; he held a great meeting of the Protestant
Association at Coachmakers' Hall, at which with a kind of
Bedlamite-brilliancy he raved against Catholicism and lashed the
passions of his hearers to delirium.  It was resolved to hold a huge
meeting of the Protestant Association in St. George's Fields on June 2.
At its head Lord George Gordon was to proceed to the House of Commons
and deliver the petition against Catholic relief.  All stanch
Protestants were to wear blue cockades in their hats to mark out the
faithful from the unfaithful.

[Sidenote: 1780--The Lord George Gordon riots]

On June 2, 1780, the meeting was held.  Lord George Gordon had
announced in his speech at the Coachmakers' Hall that he would not
deliver the petition if the meeting were less than twenty thousand
strong.  The number of Lord George's limit was enormously exceeded.  It
is said that at least sixty thousand persons were present in St.
George's Fields on the appointed day, and some chroniclers compute the
number at nearer one hundred thousand than sixty thousand.  It is
curious to note in passing that a Roman Catholic cathedral stands now
on the very site where this meeting was held.  After the meeting had
assembled it started to march six abreast to Westminster.  The hand of
the great romancer who has made George Gordon live has renewed that
memorable day, with its noise, its tumult, its tossing banners, its
shouted party cries, its chanted hymns, its military evolutions, its
insane enthusiasms, its dangerous latent passions.  Gibbon, who was
then a member of the House of Commons, declared that the assemblage
seemed to him as if forty thousand Puritans of the days of Cromwell had
started from their graves.  The forty thousand Puritans were escorted
by and incorporated with a still greater body of all the ruffianism and
scoundrelism that a great city can contribute to any scene of popular
agitation.  What fanaticism inspired rowdyism was more than ready to
profit by.  The march to Westminster and the arrival at Westminster
form one of {197} the wildest episodes in the history of London.  By
three different routes the blue-cockaded petitioners proceeded to
Westminster, and rallied in the large open spaces then existing in
front of the Houses of Parliament.  The innate lawlessness of the
assemblage soon manifested itself in a series of attacks upon the
members of both Houses who were endeavoring to make their way through
the press to their respective Chambers.  It is one more example of the
eternal irony of history that, while the mob was buffeting members of
the Lower House, and doing its best to murder members of the Upper
House, while a merciless intolerance was rapidly degenerating into a
merciless disorder, the Duke of Richmond was wholly absorbed in a
speech in favor of annual parliaments and universal suffrage.  Member
after member of the House of Lords reeled into the Painted Chamber,
dishevelled, bleeding, with pale face and torn garments, to protest
against the violence of the mob and the insult to Parliamentary
authority.  Ashburnham, Townshend and Willoughby, Stormont and
Bathurst, Mansfield, Mountfort, and Boston, one after another came in,
dismayed victims of and witnesses to the violence that reigned outside.
Bishop after bishop entered to complain of brutal ill-treatment.  But
the Duke of Richmond was so wrapped up in his own speech and its
importance that he could only protest against anything which
interrupted its flow.  It is agreeable to find that imbecility and
terror did not rule unchallenged over the Upper House that day.  One
account, that of Walpole, who is always malicious, represents Lord
Mansfield as sitting upon the woolsack trembling like an aspen.
Another, more creditable and more credible, declares that Lord
Mansfield showed throughout the utmost composure and presence of mind.
About the gallantry of Lord Townshend there can be no doubt.  When he
heard that Lord Boston was in the hands of the mob, he turned to the
younger peers about him, reminded them of their youth, and the fact
that they wore swords, and called upon them to draw with him and fight
their way to the rescue of their brother peer.  It was at least a
gallant if a hopeless suggestion.  What could the {198} rapiers of a
score of gentlemen avail against the thousands who seethed and raved
outside Westminster Hall?  The solemn Duke of Richmond interfered.  If
the Lords went forth to face the mob he urged that they should go as a
House and carrying the Mace before them.  On this a debate sprang up,
while the storm still raged outside.  A Middlesex magistrate, called to
the bar in haste, declared that he could only offer six constables to
meet the difficulty.  A proposal to call upon the military power was
fiercely opposed by Lord Shelburne.  Under such conditions the Peers
did nothing, and in the end retired, leaving Lord Mansfield alone in
his glory.

[Sidenote: 1780--Lord George Gordon at Westminster]

If things went badly in the Upper House, they went still worse in the
Lower House.  While members trying to gain entrance suffered almost as
much ill-treatment as the Peers at the hands of the mob, the Commons'
House was much more closely leaguered than the House of Lords.  For it
was in the Commons' House that the petition was to be presented.  It
was in the Commons' House that Lord George Gordon, pale, lank-haired,
black-habited, with the blue cockade in his hat, was calling upon the
Commons to receive immediately the monstrous petition.  Every entrance
to the House was choked with excited humanity.  The Lobby itself was
overflowing with riotous fanatics, who thundered at intervals upon the
closed doors of the Chamber with their bludgeons.  Shrieks of "No
Popery," and huzzas for Lord George Gordon filled the place with a
hideous clamor strangely contrasting with the decorum that habitually
reigned there.

Lord George Gordon did not cut a very heroic figure on that memorable
day at Westminster.  He was perpetually rushing from his place to the
door of the House to repeat to rowdyism in the Lobby what different
members had said in the debates.  At one time he denounced the Speaker
of the House; at another, Mr. Rous; at another, Lord North.
Occasionally he praised a speaker, and his praise was more ludicrous
than his condemnation.  At one moment, when Lord George was at the door
communicating with the crowd, Sir Michael le Fleming came up to him
{199} and tried to induce him to return to his seat.  Lord George
immediately began caressing Sir Michael le Fleming in a childish,
almost in an imbecile way, patting and stroking him upon the shoulders,
and expressing inarticulately a pitiful kind of joy.  He introduced Sir
Michael le Fleming to the mob as a man who had just been speaking for
them.  A little later Lord George again addressed the crowd, this time
from the little gallery, when he stimulated their passions by appeal to
the example of the Scotch, who had found no redress till they had
pulled down the Mass-houses.  Probably no stranger scene has ever been
witnessed at Westminster than this of the pale-faced fanatic and
madman, with the blue cockade in his hat, running backward and forward
from the Chamber to the door of the House, delivering inflammatory
addresses to the mob that raged in the Lobby, and stimulating them by
his wild harangues to persevere in their conduct, and to terrify the
King and the Parliament into obedience to their wishes.  The names of
the members who spoke against the petition he communicated to the
shrieking throng; their utterances he falsely reported.

It is deeply interesting to note a fact which has escaped the notice of
not merely the most conspicuous historians of the time, but also the
keen eye of the great novelist who studied the event.  It is recorded
in the "Annual Register" for the year 1780 that among the members whose
names Lord George Gordon denounced to the raving crowd in the Lobby the
name of Mr. Burke had especial prominence.  It is curious to picture
the imbecile fanatic standing upon the steps leading to the Strangers'
Gallery and invoking the fury of the fanatic and the lawless against
the greatest public man of his age.

For a while Lord George Gordon was suffered to rant unimpeded.  At last
Colonel Holroyd, seizing hold of him, threatened to move for his
immediate committal to Newgate, while Colonel Gordon, with a blunter
and yet more efficacious eloquence, declared that if any of the rioters
attempted to force his way past the door of the House, he, Colonel
Gordon, would run his sword through {200} the body, not of the invader,
but of Lord George Gordon.  As Colonel Gordon was a kinsman of Lord
George's, it may be that Lord George knew sufficient of his temper to
believe his word and was sufficiently sane to accept his warning.  At
least there came a pause in his inflammatory phrases, and shortly
afterward the news of the arrival of a party of Horse and Foot Guards
did what no persuasions or entreaties could effect.  It cleared the
Lobby and the approaches to the House.  Under conditions of what might
be called comparative quiet the division on Lord George Gordon's
proposal for the immediate reception of the petition was taken, and
only found six supporters against a majority of one hundred and
ninety-two.

[Sidenote: 1780--Spread of the Gordon Riots]

But mischief was afoot and began to work.  The mob that had been
dispersed from Westminster broke up into different parties and
proceeded to expend its fury in the destruction of buildings.  The
hustling of peers, the bonneting of bishops, the insulting of members
of Parliament, all made rare sport; but the demolition of Catholic
places of worship promised a better, and suggested exquisite
possibilities of further depredation.  The Catholic chapels in Duke
Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and in Warwick Street, Golden Square--the
one belonging to the Sardinian, the other to the Bavarian
Minister--were attacked, plundered, set fire to, and almost entirely
destroyed.  The military were sent for; they arrived too late to
prevent the arson, but thirteen of the malefactors were seized and
committed to Newgate, and for the night the mob was dispersed.  It was
not a bad day's work for the rioters.  Parliament had been insulted,
the Government and the very Throne menaced.  In two parts of the town
Catholic buildings, under the protection of foreign and friendly
Powers, stood stripped and blackened piles.  Riot had faced the
bayonets of authority--had for a moment seemed ready to defy them.  Yet
at first nobody seems to have taken the matter seriously or gauged its
grave significance.  Neither the Catholics, against whom the agitation
was levelled, nor the peers and prelates and members of Parliament who
had been so harshly treated seemed to understand the {201} sternness of
the situation.  There was a sense of confidence in law and order, a
feeling of security in good administration, which lulled men into a
false confidence.

This false confidence was increased by the quiet which reigned over
Saturday, June 3.  Parliament met undisturbed.  An address of Lord
Bathurst's, calling for a prosecution of "the authors, abettors, and
instruments of yesterday's outrages," was carried after a rambling and
purposeless debate, and the House of Lords adjourned till the 6th,
apparently convinced that there was no further cause for alarm.  This
public composure was rudely shaken on the following day, Sunday, June
4.  The rioters reassembled at Moorfields.  Once again the buildings
belonging to Catholics were ransacked and demolished; once again
incendiary fires blazed, and processions of savage figures decked in
the spoils of Catholic ceremonial carried terror before them.  The Lord
Mayor, Kennett, proved to be a weak man wholly unequal to the peril he
was suddenly called upon to face.  There were soldiers at hand, but
they were not made use of.  One act of resolution might have stayed the
disorder at the first, but no man was found resolute enough to perform
the act; and rapine, raging unchecked, became more audacious and more
dangerous.

On the Monday, though the trouble grew graver, nothing was done to meet
it beyond the issuing of a proclamation offering a reward of five
hundred pounds for the discovery of the persons concerned in the
destruction of the chapels of the Bavarian and Sardinian Ambassadors.
The mob gathered again, bolder for the impunity with which it had so
far acted.  Large bodies of men marched to Lord George Gordon's house
in Welbeck Street and paraded there, displaying the trophies stripped
from the destroyed chapels in Moorfields.  Others began work of fresh
destruction in Wapping and in Smithfield.  Sir George Savile's house in
Leicester Fields, and the houses of Mr. Rainsforth of Clare Market, and
Mr. Maberly of Little Queen Street, respectable tradesmen who had been
active in arresting rioters on the Friday night, were sacked and their
furniture burned in huge bonfires in the streets.  The {202} Guards who
had the task of escorting the prisoners taken on Friday to Newgate were
pelted.

On the Tuesday authority seemed to have wakened up to a vague sense
that the situation was somewhat serious.  Parliament reassembled to
find itself again surrounded and menaced by a mob, which wounded Lord
Sandwich and destroyed his carriage.  Lord George Gordon attended the
House, but even his madness appeared to have taken alarm, for he had
caused a proclamation to be issued in the name of the Protestant
Association disavowing the riots.  As he sat in his place, with the
blue cockade in his hat, Colonel Herbert, who was afterwards Lord
Carnarvon, called to him from across the House, telling him to take off
the badge or he would cross the floor and do it himself, Lord George's
vehemence did not stand him in good stead where he himself was menaced.
He had no following in the House.  Colonel Herbert was a man of the
sword and a man of his word.  Lord George Gordon took the cockade from
his hat and put it in his pocket.  If authority had acted with the
firmness of Colonel Gordon on the Friday and of Colonel Herbert on the
Tuesday, the tumult might have been as easily cowed as its leader.  But
still nothing was done.  The House of Commons made a half-hearted
promise that when the tumult subsided the Protestant petition would be
taken into consideration, and a suggestion that Lord George ought to be
expelled was unfavorably received.

From that moment, and for two long and terrible days, riot ruled in
London.  In all directions the evening sky was red with flames of
burning buildings; in all directions organized bands of men, maddened
with drink, carried terror and destruction.  The Tuesday evening was
signalized by the most extraordinary and most daring deed that the
insurgents had yet done.  Some of the men arrested on the Friday had
been committed to Newgate Prison.  To Newgate Prison a vast body of men
marched, and called upon Mr. Akerman, the keeper, to give up his keys
and surrender his prisoners.  His firm refusal converted the mob into a
besieging army.

{203}

[Sidenote: 1780--The burning of Newgate Prison]

Two men of genius have contributed to our knowledge of the siege of
Newgate.  Crabbe, the poet, was at Westminster on the Tuesday, and
after seeing all the disturbance there he made his way with the current
of destruction towards Newgate, and witnessed the astonishing capture
of a massive prison by a body of men, unarmed save with such rude
weapons of attack as could be hurriedly caught up.  The prison was so
strong that, had a dozen men resisted, it would have been almost
impossible to take it without artillery.  But there was nobody to
resist.  Mr. Akerman, the keeper, acted with great courage, and did his
duty loyally, but he could not hold the place alone.  Crowbars,
pickaxes, and fire forced an entrance into the prison.  "Not Orpheus
himself," wrote Crabbe, "had more courage or better luck" than the
desperate assailants of the prison.  They broke into the blazing
prison, they rescued their comrades, they set all the other prisoners
free.  Into the street, where the summer evening was as bright as
noonday with the blazing building, the prisoners were borne in triumph.
Some of them had been condemned to death, and never were men more
bewildered than by this strange reprieve.  The next day Dr. Johnson
walked, in company with Dr. Scott, to look at the place, and found the
prison in ruins, with the fire yet glowing.  The stout-hearted Doctor
was loud in his scorn of "the cowardice of a commercial place," where
such deeds could be done without hinderance.

While one desperate gang was busy with the destruction of Newgate,
other gangs, no less desperate, were busy with destructive work
elsewhere.  The new prison in Clerkenwell was broken open by one crowd,
and its prisoners set free.  Another assailed Sir John Fielding's
house, and burned its furniture in the streets.  A third attacked the
house of Lord Mansfield in Bloomsbury Square.  This last enterprise was
one of the most remarkable and infamous of the bad business.  Lord
Mansfield and his wife had barely time to escape from the house by a
back way before the mob were upon it.  The now familiar scenes of
savage violence followed.  The doors were broken open, the {204} throng
poured in, and in a comparatively short time the stately mansion was a
ruin.  Lord Mansfield's law library, one of the finest in the kingdom,
and all the judicial manuscripts made by him during his long career,
were destroyed.  A small detachment of soldiers came upon the scene too
late to prevent the destruction of the house or to intimidate the mob;
although, according to one account, the Riot Act was read and a couple
of volleys fired, with the result that several of the rioters were shot
and wounded.  It is curious to find that the reports of the intended
purposes of the wreckers drew persons of quality and curiosity to
Bloomsbury Square in their coaches as to a popular performance, and
that the destruction of Lord Mansfield's house proved more attractive
than the production of a new play.

[Sidenote: 1780--Public alarm in London]

The Wednesday was no less terrible than the Tuesday.  The rioters
seemed to think that, like so many Mortimers, they were now Lords of
London.  They sent messages to the keepers of the public prisons of the
King's Bench, the Fleet, and to prominent Catholic houses, informing
them of the precise time when they would be attacked and destroyed.  By
this time peaceable London was in a state of panic.  All shops were
shut.  From most windows blue banners were thrust out to show the
sympathy of the occupants with the agitation, and the words "No Popery"
were scrawled in chalk across the doors and windows of every
householder who wished to protect himself against the fanaticism of the
mob.  At least one enterprising individual got from Lord George Gordon
his signature to a paper bidding all true friends to Protestants to do
no injury to the property of any true Protestant, "as I am well assured
the proprietor of this house is a stanch and worthy friend to the
cause."  But there were plenty of houses where neither fear nor
fanaticism displayed blue banner or chalked scrawl, houses whose owners
boasted no safeguard signed by Lord George Gordon, and with these the
mob busied themselves.  The description in the "Annual Register" is so
striking that it deserves to be cited; it is probably from the pen of
Edmund Burke: "As soon {205} as the day was drawing towards a close one
of the most dreadful spectacles this country ever beheld was exhibited.
Let those who were not spectators of it judge what the inhabitants felt
when they beheld at the same time the flames ascending and rolling in
clouds from the King's Bench and Fleet Prisons, from New Bridewell,
from the toll-gates on Blackfriars Bridge, from houses in every quarter
of the town, and particularly from the bottom and middle of Holborn,
where the conflagration was horrible beyond description. . . .
Six-and-thirty fires, all blazing at one time, and in different
quarters of the city, were to be seen from one spot.  During the whole
night, men, women, and children were running up and down with such
goods and effects as they wished to preserve.  The tremendous roar of
the authors of these terrible scenes was heard at one instant, and at
the next the dreadful report of soldiers' musquets, firing in platoons
and from different quarters; in short, everything served to impress the
mind with ideas of universal anarchy and approaching desolation."

From the closing words of this account it is plain that at last
authority had begun to do its duty and to meet force with force.
Terrorized London shook with every wild rumor.  Now men said that the
mob had got arms, and was more than a match for the military; now that
the lions in the Tower were to be let loose; now that the lunatics from
Bedlam were to be set free.  Every alarming rumor that fear could
inspire and terror credit was buzzed abroad upon that dreadful day,
when the servants of the Secretary of State wore blue cockades in their
hats and private gentlemen barricaded their houses, armed their people,
and prepared to stand a siege.  Horace Walpole found his relative, Lord
Hertford, engaged with his sons in loading muskets to be in readiness
for the insurgents.  Everybody now shared in the general alarm, but the
alarm affected different temperaments differently.  Some men fled from
town; others loaded guns and sharpened swords; others put their hands
in their pockets and lounged, curious spectators, on the heels of riot,
eager to observe {206} and willing to record events so singular and so
unprecedented.

It is pleasant to be able to chronicle that the King showed an especial
courage and composure during that wild week's work.  George the Third
never lost head nor heart.  To do his House justice, personal courage
was one of their traditions, but the family quality never showed to
better advantage than in this crisis.  If indeed George the Second were
prepared, as has been hinted, to fly from London on the approach of the
young Pretender, George the Third displayed no such weakness in the
face of a more immediate peril.  The peril was more immediate, it was
also more menacing.  No man could safely say where bad work so begun
might ultimately pause.  What had been an agitation in favor of a
petition might end in revolution against the Crown.  Outrages that had
at first been perpetrated with the purpose of striking terror only were
changing their character.  Schemes of plunder formed no part of the
early plans of the rioters; now it began to be known that the rioters
had their eyes turned towards the Bank of England and were planning to
cut the pipes which provided London with water.  With a little more
laxity on the part of authority, and a few more successes on the part
of the mob, it is possible that Lord George Gordon might have found
himself a puppet Caesar on the shields of Protestant Praetorians.

[Sidenote: 1780--Stern action by the authorities]

That nothing even approaching to this did happen was largely due to the
courage and the determination of the Sovereign.  The Administration
vacillated.  The Privy Council, facing an agitation of whose extent and
popularity it was unaware, feared to commit itself.  George felt no
such fear.  Where authority fell back paralyzed in the presence of a
new, unknown, and daily increasing peril, he came forward and asserted
himself after a fashion worthy of a king.  If the Privy Council would
not act with him, then he would act without them.  He would lead out
his Guards himself and charge the rioters at their head.  The courage
which had shown itself at Dettingen, the courage which had been
displayed by generations of rough German {207} electors and Italian
princes, showed itself gallantly now and saved the city.  The King
lamented the weakness of the magistrates, but at least there was one,
he said, who would do his duty, and he touched his breast with his
hand.  George the Third is not a heroic figure in history, but just at
that moment he bore himself with a royal honor which ranked him with
Leonidas or Horatius.  If there are to be kings at all, that is how
kings ought to behave.  George was fortunate in finding a man to stand
by him and to lend to his soldierly courage the support of the law.
Wedderburn, the Attorney-General, declared, with all the authority of
his high position, that in cases where the civil power was unable to
restrain arson and outrage, it was the duty of all persons, civil as
well as military, to use all means in their power to deal with the
danger.  The reading of the Riot Act was nugatory in such exceptional
conditions, and it became the duty of the military to attack the
rioters.  Thus supported, the King ordered Wedderburn to write at once
to Lord Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief, authorizing him to employ the
military without waiting for authority from the civil powers.
Wedderburn, who in a few days was to become Chief Justice and Lord
Loughborough, wrote the order, kneeling upon one knee at the council
table, and from that moment the enemy was grappled with in grim earnest.

It was high time.  No less than two unsuccessful attacks had been made
during that day upon the Bank of England, but precautions had been
taken, and the successes of Newgate were not repeated in Threadneedle
Street.  The assailants were repulsed on each occasion by the military,
who occupied every avenue leading to the Bank.  Had the attack upon the
Bank succeeded it is impossible to form any estimate of what the result
might have been.  But it failed, and with that failure the whole
hideous agitation failed as well.  But the crowning horror of the whole
episode was reserved for that final day of danger.  In Holborn, where
riot raged fiercest, stood the distilleries of Mr. Langdale, a wealthy
Roman Catholic.  The distilleries were attacked and fired.  Rivers of
spirit ran in all the {208} conduits and blazed as they ran.  Men,
drunk with liquor and maddened with excitement, kneeled to drink, and,
drinking, fell and died where they lay.  By this time the soldiers were
acting vigorously, driving the rabble before them, shooting all who
resisted, as some did resist desperately.  The fire that had grown
during the week was quenched at last in blood.  On the Thursday morning
London was safe, comparatively quiet, almost itself again.  The shops
indeed were still closed, but mutiny had lived its life.  There was a
short, sharp struggle during the day in Fleet Street, between some of
the fanatics and the Guards, which was stamped out by repeated bayonet
charges which killed and wounded many.  Everywhere were blackened
spaces, smouldering ruins, stains of blood, and broken weapons,
everywhere the signs of outrage and of conflict.  But the incendiary
fires were quenched and with them the fire of insurrection.  The riots
were at an end.  The one wish of every one was to obliterate their
memory as speedily as might be.  The stains of blood were quickly
removed from the walls of the Bank of England, from the roadway of
Blackfriars Bridge.  The marks of musket shots were swiftly effaced
from the scarred buildings.

[Sidenote: 1780--Suppression of the Gordon Riots]

It was never fully known how far the rioters themselves suffered in the
suppression of the disorder.  The official returns give lists of 285
direct deaths, and of 173 cases of serious wounds in the hospitals.
But this can only represent a small proportion of the actual
casualties.  Many dead, many wounded, must have been carried away by
friends and hidden in hurried graves, or nursed in secret to recovery.
Many, too, perished at Blackfriars Bridge, or were hideously consumed
in the flames that rose from the burning of Langdale's distilleries.
But if the number of those who suffered remains an unknown quantity, it
is not difficult to approximate to the destructive power of the
disturbances.  The cost of the whole bad business has been estimated at
at least 180,000 pounds.  To that amount an imbecile insanity had
despoiled London.  But the imbecile insanity had incurred a deeper
debt.  In the wild trials that followed upon the panic and the violence
forty-nine {209} men were condemned to death for their share in the
riot, and twenty-nine of these actually suffered the last penalty of
the law.  It was not, in the eyes of some, a heavy sacrifice to pay.
It did not seem a heavy sacrifice in the eyes of John Wilkes, who
declared that if he were intrusted with sovereign power not a single
rioter should be left alive to boast of, or to plead for forgiveness
for, his offence.  But Lord George Gordon was not worth the life of one
man, not to speak of nine-and-twenty.

The folly of the Administration did not end with their victory.  On the
9th they did what they ought to have done long before, and arrested
Lord George Gordon.  But even this necessary belated act of justice
they performed in the most foolish fashion.  Everything that the pomp
and ceremonial of arrest and arraignment could do was done to exalt
Lord George in the eyes of the mob and swell his importance.  He was
conveyed to the Tower of London.  Though the rising was thoroughly
stamped out, and there was practically no chance of any attempt being
made to rescue the prisoner, Lord George was escorted to the Tower by a
numerous military force in broad daylight, with an amount of display
that gave him the dignity of a hero and a martyr.  To add to the
absurdity of the whole business, the poor crazy gentleman was solemnly
tried for high treason.  Many months later, in the early February of
the next year, 1781, when the riots were a thing of the past, and their
terrible memory had been largely effaced, George Gordon was brought to
the Bar of the Court of King's Bench for his trial.  His wits had not
mended during his confinement.  He had been very angry because he
thought that he was prevented from seeing his friends.  His anger
deepened when he learned that no friends had desired to see him.  The
fanatic had served his turn, and was forgotten.  He was not of that
temper which makes men devoted to a leader.  He was but the foolish
figurehead of a fanatical outburst, and when he was set aside he was
forgotten.  But when he was brought up for trial a measure of popular
enthusiasm in the man reasserted itself.  He behaved very strangely at
his trial, urging his right to read {210} long passages of Scripture in
his defence.  Happily for him, his defence was managed by abler hands
than his own.  The genius of Erskine, the gifts of Kenyon, were
expended in his behalf.  The unwisdom of the Government in prosecuting
him for high treason was soon apparent.  He was acquitted, to the
general satisfaction of his supporters, and of many who were not his
supporters.  If public thanksgiving were returned in several churches
for his acquittal, one grave manly voice was uplifted to swell the
approval.  Dr. Johnson declared that he was far better pleased that
Lord George Gordon should escape punishment than that a precedent
should be established for hanging a man for constructive treason.

Thus the great Gordon riots flickered ignominiously out.  Lord George
made occasional desperate efforts to reassert himself, trying to force
himself upon the notice of the King at St. James's.  In 1787 he was
found guilty of libels upon the Queen of France and the French
Ambassador.  He fled to Holland, where he was arrested by the Dutch
authorities, and shipped back to England.  He was committed to Newgate,
by curious chance, on the anniversary of the day on which it had been
burned by his followers.  In Newgate he lived for some years, adjuring
Christianity, and declaring himself to be a follower of the Jewish
faith.  In Newgate the fanatic, renegade, madman, died of jail
distemper on November 1, 1793.  He was only forty-two years old.  In
his short, unhappy life he had done a great deal of harm, and, as far
as it is possible to judge, no good whatever.  Perhaps the example of
the Gordon riots served as a precedent in another land.  If the news of
the fall of the Bastille and the September massacres reached Lord
George Gordon in his prison, he may have recalled to his crazed fancy
the fall of Newgate and the bloody Wednesday of the June of 1780.




{211}

CHAPTER LVI.

TWO NEW MEN.

[Sidenote: 1780--The younger Pitt and Brinsley Sheridan]

The year 1780 that witnessed the Gordon riots welcomed into political
life two men, both of whom were young, both of whom bore names that
were already familiar from an honorable parentage, and both of whom
were destined to play very conspicuous parts in the House of Commons.
One of the two men was known to his family alone, and his intimates, as
a youth of great promise and great knowledge, which gave to his twenty
years the ripened wisdom of a statesman and a scholar.  The other, who
was eight years older, had been for some years in the public eye, had
been the hero of a romantic scandal which had done much to make his
name notorious, and had written some dramatic works which had done more
to make his name famous.  It was a fortunate chance that when the House
of Commons stood in need of new blood and new men the same time and the
same year saw the return to Parliament of William Pitt and of Richard
Brinsley Sheridan.

It has been said that every reader of the "Iliad" finds himself
irresistibly compelled to take sides with one or other of the great
opposing camps, and to be thenceforward either a Greek or a Trojan.  In
something of the same spirit every student of the reign of the third
George becomes perforce a partisan of one or other of two statesmen who
divided the honors of its prime between them, who were opposed on all
the great questions of their day, and who represented at their best the
two forces into which English political life was then, and is still,
divided.  The history of England for the closing years of the
eighteenth century and the early dawn of the nineteenth century is
{212} the history of these two men and of their influence.  Those who
study their age and their career are separated as keenly and as hotly
to-day as they were separated keenly and hotly a hundred years ago into
the followers of Charles James Fox or the followers of William Pitt.
The record of English party politics is a record of long and splendid
duels between recognized chiefs of the two antagonistic armies.  What
the struggle between Gladstone and Disraeli, for example, was to our
own time, the struggle between Fox and Pitt was to our ancestors of
three generations ago.  All the force and feeling that made for what we
now call liberal principles found its most splendid representative in
the son of Lord Holland: all the force and feeling that rallied around
the conservative impulse looked for and found its ideal in the son of
Lord Chatham.  The two men were as much contrasted as the opinions that
they professed.  To the misgoverned, misguided, splendidly reckless
boyhood and early manhood of Fox Pitt opposed the gravity and stillness
of his youth.  The exuberant animal vitality of Fox, wasting itself
overlong in the flame of aimless passions, was emphasized by the solid
reserve, the passionless austerity of Pitt.  The one man was compact of
all the heady enthusiasms, the splendid generosities of a nature rich
in the vitality that sought eagerly new outlets for its energy, that
played hard as it worked hard, that exulted in extremes.  The other
moved in a narrow path to one envisaged aim, and, conscious of a
certain physical frailty, husbanded his resources, limited the scope of
his fine intellect, and acted not indeed along the line of least
resistance but within lines of purpose that were not very far apart.
The one explored the mountain and the valley, lingered in gardens and
orchards, or wandered at all adventure upon desolate heaths; the other
pursued in patience the white highway to his goal, untempted or at
least unconquered by allurements that could prove irresistible to his
adversary.

[Sidenote: 1780--The character of the younger Pitt]

The two men differed as much in appearance as in mind.  The outer
seeming of each is almost as familiar as the forms and faces of
contemporaries.  Fox was massively {213} corpulent, furiously untidy, a
heroic sloven, his bull throat and cheeks too often black with a three
days' beard, infinitely lovable, exquisitely cultured, capable of the
noblest tenderness, yet with a kind of grossness sometimes that was but
a part, and perhaps an inevitable part, of his wide humanity.  Pitt was
slender, boyish, precise, punctilious in attire, his native composure
only occasionally lightened by a flash of humor or sweetened by a show
of playfulness, old beyond his years and young to the end of his short
life, sternly self-restrained and self-commanded, gracious in a kind of
melancholy, unconscious charm, a curiously unadorned, uncolored
personality, that attracted where it did attract with a magnetism that
was perhaps all the more potent for being somewhat difficult to
explain.  Fox was always a lover in many kinds of love, fugitive,
venal, illicit, honorable, and enduring.  Pitt carried himself through
temptations with a monastic rigor.  There was a time when his friends
implored him for the sake of appearances, and not to flout too
flagrantly the manners of the time, to show himself in public with a
woman of the town.  His one love story, strange and fruitless, neither
got nor gave happiness and remains an unsolved mystery.

There were only two tastes held in common by the two men, and those
were tastes shared by most of the gentlemen of their generation and
century, the taste for politics and the taste for wine.  Men of the
class of Holland's son, of Chatham's son, if they were not soldiers and
sailors, and very often when they were soldiers and sailors, went into
political life as naturally as they went into a university or into the
hunting field.  In the case of the younger Fox and of the younger Pitt
the political direction was conspicuously inevitable from the
beginning.  The paths of both lay plain from the threshold of the
nursery to the threshold of St. Stephen's.  The lad who was the chosen
companion of his father at an age when his contemporaries had only
abandoned a horn-book to grapple with Corderius, the boy who learned
the principles of elocution and the essence of debate from the lips of
the Great Commoner, were children very specially fostered in the arts
of {214} statesmanship and curiously favored in the knowledge that
enables men to guide and govern men.  From the other taste there was no
escape, or little escape, possible for the men of that day.  It would
have been strange indeed if Fox had been absolved from the love of
wine, which was held by every one he knew, from his father's old friend
and late enemy Rigby to the elderly place-holder, gambler, and
letter-writer Selwyn, who loved, slandered, and failed to ruin Fox's
brilliant youth.  It would have been impossible for Pitt, floated
through a precarious childhood on floods of Oporto, to liberate his
blood and judgment from the generous liquor that promised him a
strength it sapped.  It was no more disgrace to the austere Pitt than
to the profligate Fox to come to the House of Commons visibly under the
influence of much more wine than could possibly have been good for
Hercules.  Sobriety was not unknown among statesmen even in those days
of many bottles, but intoxication was no shame, and Burke was no more
commended for his temperance than Fox, or Pitt, or Sheridan were blamed
for their intemperance.

[Sidenote: 1759-80--The youth of the younger Pitt]

William Pitt was born in 1759, when George the Second still seemed
stable on his throne, and when the world knew nothing of that grandson
and heir to whose service the child of Chatham was to be devoted.  He
was the fourth child and second son; the third son and last child of
Chatham was born two years later.  William Pitt was delicate from his
infancy, and by reason of his delicacy was never sent to school.  He
was educated by private tuition, directly guided and controlled by his
father.  From the first he was precocious, full of promise, full of
performance.  He acquired knowledge eagerly and surely; what he learned
he learned well and thoroughly.  Trained from his cradle in the
acquirements essential to a public life, he applied himself, as soon as
he was of an age to appreciate his tastes and to form a purpose, to
equipping himself at all points for a political career.  When the great
Chatham died he left behind him a son who was to be as famous as
himself, a statesman formed in his own school, trained in his own
methods, inspired by his counsels, and guided by {215} his example.  A
legend which may be more than legend has it that from the first destiny
seemed determined to confront the genius and the fame of Fox with the
genius and the fame of Pitt.  It is said that the Foxes were assured by
a relative of the Pitts that the young son of Chatham, then a child
under a tutor's charge, showed parts which were sure to prove him a
formidable rival to the precocious youth who was at once the delight
and the despair of Lord Holland's life.  It is certain that the young
Fox was early made acquainted with the ripe intelligence and eager
genius of the younger Pitt.  It was his chance to stand with the boy
one night at the bar of the House of Lords, and to be attracted and
amazed at the avidity with which Pitt followed the debate, the sagacity
with which he commented upon what he saw and heard, and the readiness
with which he formulated answers to arguments which failed to carry
conviction to his dawning wisdom.  Pitt loved the House of Commons
while he was still in the schoolroom; it was inevitable that he should
belong to the House of Commons, and he entered it at the earliest
possible moment, even before he was legally qualified to do so, for he
was not quite of age when he first took his seat.

The qualities of fairness and fitness which Greek wisdom praised in the
conduct of life were characteristic of Pitt's life.  In its zealous,
patient preparation for public life, its noble girding of the loins
against great issues, its wistful renunciation of human hopes, its
early consciousness of terrible disease, its fortitude in the face of
catastrophes so unexpected and so cruel; in its pensive isolation, in
the richness of those early successes that seemed as if in anticipation
to offer compensation for the early death, his life seems to have been
adorned with certain ornaments and ordered by certain laws that make it
strangely comely, curiously symmetrical.  In that youth of his which
was never quite young, and which was never allowed to grow old, in his
austere attitude to so much that youth holds most dear, in the high
passion of his patriotism with its eager desire, so often and so
sternly thwarted, to add to England's glory, he stands apart from {216}
many greater and many wiser men, in a melancholy, lonely dignity.  It
has been given to few men to inspire more passionate attachment in the
minds of his contemporaries; it has been given to few statesmen to be
regarded abroad, by eyes for the most part envious or hostile, as
pre-eminently representative of the qualities that made his country at
once disliked and feared.  His political instincts were for the most
part admirable, and if it had been his fortune to serve a sovereign
more reasonable, more temperate, and more intelligent than George the
Third his name might have been written among the great reformers of the
world.  At home an unhappy deference to the dictates of a rash and
incapable king, abroad an enforced opposition to one of the greatest
forces and one of the greatest conquerors that European civilization
has seen, prevented Pitt from gaining that position to which his
genius, under conditions less persistently unhappy, would have entitled
him.  To have gained what he did gain under such conditions was in
itself a triumph.

The new-comer who entered Parliament at the same period as William Pitt
was as curiously unlike him as even Fox himself.  If few knew anything
of Pitt every one knew something of Sheridan, who had already made fame
in one career and was now about to make fame in another.  It may afford
consolation to the unappreciated to reflect that the most famous
English dramatist since Shakespeare's day, the brightest wit of an age
which piqued itself into being considered witty, the most brilliant
orator of an age which regarded oratory as one of the greatest of the
arts, and whose roll is studded with the names of illustrious orators,
the most unrivalled humorist of a century which in all parts of the
world distinguished itself by its love of humor, was looked upon in his
nonage as a dull, unpromising boy, chiefly remarkable for his idleness
and carelessness.

[Sidenote: 1751-80--The parents of Brinsley Sheridan]

The quality which we now call Bohemianism certainly ran in Sheridan's
blood.  His grandfather, Dr. Thomas Sheridan, the friend of Swift, the
Dublin clergyman and schoolmaster, was a delightfully amiable, wholly
reckless, {217} slovenly, indigent, and cheerful personage.  His
father, Thomas Sheridan, was a no less cheerful, no less careless man,
who turned play-actor, and taught elocution, and married a woman who
wrote novels and a life of Swift.  At one time he could boast the
friendship of Dr. Johnson, who seems to have regarded him with an
ill-humored contempt, but Dr. Johnson's expression of this contempt
brought about a quarrel.  The most remarkable thing about him is that
he was the father of his son.  Neither he nor his wife appears to have
had any idea of their good fortune.  Mrs. Sheridan once declared of her
two boys that she had never met with "two such impenetrable dunces."
None the less the father contrived with difficulty to scrape together
enough money to send his boys to Harrow, and there, luckily, Dr. Parr
discerned that Richard, with all his faults, was by no means an
impenetrable dunce.  Both he and Sumner, the head-master of Harrow,
discovered in the schoolboy Sheridan great talents which neither of
them was capable of calling into action.

Richard Sheridan came from Harrow School and Harrow playgrounds to
London, and, later on, to Bath.  London did not make him much more
industrious or more careful than he had been at Harrow-on-the-Hill.  It
was far pleasanter to translate the honeyed Greek of Theocritus, with
its babble of Sicilian shepherds, its nymphs and waters and Sicilian
seas, than to follow the beaten track of ordinary education.  It was
vastly more entertaining to translate the impassioned prose of
Aristaenetus into impassioned verse, especially in collaboration with a
cherished friend, than to yawn over Euclid and to grumble over Cocker.
The translation of Aristaenetus, the boyish task of Sheridan and his
friend Halhed, still enjoys a sort of existence in the series of
classical translations in Bohn's Library.  It is one of the ironies of
literature that fate has preserved this translation while it has
permitted the two Begum speeches, that in the House of Commons and that
in Westminster Hall, practically to perish.  What little interest does
now cling to the early work belongs to the fact of its being a
collaboration.  Halhed, who worked {218} with Sheridan at the useless
task, was a clever young Oxford student, who was as poor as he was
clever, and who seemed to entertain the eccentric idea that large sums
of money were to be readily obtained from the reading public for a
rendering in flippant verse of the prose of an obscure author whose
very identity is involved in doubt.  Aristaenetus did not become the
talk of the town even in spite of an ingeniously promulgated rumor
assigning the authorship of the verses to Dr. Johnson.  Neither did the
plays and essays in which the friends collaborated meet with any
prosperous fate.

From the doing of Greek prose into English verse Sheridan and Halhed
turned to another occupation, in which, as in the first, they were both
of the same mind.  They both fell in love, and both fell in love with
the same woman.  All contemporary accounts agree in regarding the
daughter of Linley the musician as one of the most beautiful women of
her age.  Those who knew the portrait which the greatest painter of his
time painted of Sheridan's wife as St. Cecilia will understand the
extraordinary, the almost universal homage which society and art, wit
and wealth, and genius and rank paid to Miss Linley.  Unlike the girl
in Sheridan's own poem, who is assured by her adorer that she will meet
with friends in all the aged and lovers in the young.  Miss Linley
found old men as well as young men competing for her affection and for
the honor of her hand.

Sheridan and Halhed were little more than boys when they first beheld
and at once adored Miss Linley.  Charles Sheridan, Richard's elder
brother, was still a very young man.  But Miss Linley had old lovers
too, men long past the middle pathway of their lives, who besought her
to marry them with all the impetuosity of youth.  One of them, whom she
wisely rejected on the ground that wealth alone could not compensate
for the disparity in years, carried off his disappointment gracefully
enough by immediately settling a sum of three thousand pounds upon the
young lady.

There is an air of romance over the whole course of {219} Sheridan's
attachment to Miss Linley.  For a long time he contrived to keep his
attachment a secret from his elder brother, Charles, and from his
friend Halhed, both of whom were madly in love with Miss Linley, and
neither of whom appears to have had the faintest suspicion of finding a
rival, the one in so close a kinsman, the other in his own familiar
friend.  It must be admitted that Sheridan does not appear to have
behaved with that uprightness which was to be expected from his
gallant, impetuous nature.  Not merely did he keep his secret from his
brother and his friend, but he seems to have allowed his friend to look
upon him as a confidant and ally in pressing Halhed's suit upon Miss
Linley.  Halhed reproached him sadly, but not bitterly, in a poetical
epistle, the value of which is more personal than poetical, when he
discovered the real mind of his friend.  Then, like a wise man if a sad
one, Halhed went away.  He sailed for India, the golden land of so many
wrecked hopes and disappointed ambitions; he long outlived his first
love and his successful rival; he became in the fulness of time a
member of Parliament, and he died in 1830.  He is dimly remembered as
the author of a grammar of the Bengalee language and of a work on
Gentoo laws translated from the Persian.

[Sidenote: 1771--Marriage of Sheridan and Miss Linley]

Sheridan's courtship progressed more and more romantically.  The
persecutions of a married rake named Matthews drove Miss Linley to fly
to France with Sheridan, to whom she was secretly married at Calais.
The revengeful and disappointed Matthews inserted a libellous attack
upon Sheridan in the _Bath Chronicle_.  Sheridan extorted at his
sword's point a public apology from Matthews.  Further and baser
mendacity on the part of Matthews provoked a second duel, in which the
combatants seem to have fought with desperate ferocity, and in which
Sheridan, badly wounded, refused to ask his life at the hands of his
antagonist and was only rescued by the seconds.  A long period of
separation followed, full of dark hours for Sheridan, hours only
brightened by occasional meetings of the most eccentric kind, as when
the wild young poet, quaintly {220} disguised in the complicated capes
of a hackney coachman, had the tormenting privilege of driving his
beloved from Covent Garden Theatre, where her voice and beauty were
nightly charming all London.  At last the opposition of Linley was
overcome, and on April 13, 1773, the most brilliant man and most
beautiful woman of their day were for the second time and more formally
married, and a series of adventures more romantic than fiction came to
an end.

The romance, it is agreeable to think, did not conclude with the
marriage ceremony.  Sheridan seems to have offered his wife as devoted
an attachment after her marriage as he had shown in the days of
duelling and disguising that preceded it.  He wrote verses to her, and
she wrote verses to him, long after they had settled down to serene
domesticity, which breathe the most passionate expressions of mutual
love.  And yet there is a legend--it is to be hoped and believed that
it is only a legend--which ends the romance very sadly.  According to
the legend young Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Sheridan's close friend, felt
more than a friend's admiration for the wife of his friend.  According
to the legend Elizabeth Sheridan returned the passion, which by the
unhappiness it brought with it shortened her life.  According to the
legend Lord Edward only married the fair Pamela, Philippe Egalité's
daughter, because of the striking resemblance she bore to the St.
Cecilia of his dreams.  The legend rests on the authority of Madame de
Genlis, who was probably Pamela's mother and who is no infallible
authority.  It is possible that the undoubted resemblance of Pamela to
Mrs. Sheridan is the origin of the whole story.  Lord Edward was always
falling in love in a graceful, chivalrous kind of way.  But there is no
serious proof that his friendship for Mrs. Sheridan was anything more
than the friendship an honorable man may entertain for the wife of his
friend.  The graver and more authentic story of Fitzgerald's life has
yet to be told in these pages.

[Sidenote: 1775--Sheridan as dramatist and politician]

For a brief period after his marriage Sheridan thought of devoting
himself to the law.  But his thoughts and {221} tastes were otherwise
inclined, and on January 27, 1775, not quite two years after his
marriage, "The Rivals" was produced at Covent Garden and a new chapter
opened in the history of dramatic literature.  It is curious to think
that the clumsiness of the player to whom the part of Sir Lucius
O'Trigger was given came very near to damning the most brilliant comedy
that the English stage had seen for nearly two centuries.  The happy
substitution of actor Clinch for actor Lee, however, saved the piece
and made Sheridan the most popular author in London.  How grateful
Sheridan felt to Clinch for rescuing Sir Lucius is shown by the fact
that his next production, the farce called "St. Patrick's Day; or, the
Scheming Lieutenant," was expressly written to afford opportunity for
Clinch's peculiar talents.  In 1777 came "The School for Scandal,"
Sheridan's masterpiece, which was followed by Sheridan's last dramatic
work, "The Critic."  Never probably before was so splendid a success
gained so rapidly, so steadily increased in so short a time, to come so
abruptly to an end in the very pride of its triumph.

Quite suddenly the most famous English author then alive found
opportunity for the display of wholly new and unexpected talents, and
became one of the most famous politicians and orators alive.  There
had, indeed, always been a certain political bent in Sheridan's mind.
He had tried his hand at many political pamphlets, fragments of which
were found among his papers by Moore.  He had always taken the keenest
interest in the great questions which agitated the political life of
the waning eighteenth century.  The general election of 1780 gave him
an opportunity of expressing this interest in the public field, and he
was returned to Parliament as member for the borough of Stamford.  It
is difficult to find a parallel in our history for the extraordinary
success which attended Sheridan in his political life as it had already
attended him in his dramatic career.

Just on the threshold of his political career Sheridan lost the wife he
loved so well.  He was profoundly afflicted, but the affliction
lessened and he married a Miss {222} Ogle.  There is a story told in
connection with this second marriage which is half melancholy, half
humorous, and wholly pathetic.  The second Mrs. Sheridan, young,
clever, and ardently devoted to her husband, was found one day,
according to this story, walking up and down her drawing-room
apparently in a frantic state of mind because she had discovered that
the love-letters Sheridan had sent to her were the same as those which
he had written to his first wife.  Word for word, sentence for
sentence, passion for passion, they were the same letters.  No doubt
Sheridan made his peace.  It is to be presumed that he thought the
letters so good that they might very well serve a second turn; but this
act of literary parsimony was not happy.  Parsimony of his written work
was, however, Sheridan's peculiarity.  Verses addressed to his dear St.
Cecilia make their appearance again and again, under altered
conditions, in his plays.  It is singular enough, as has been happily
said, that the treasures of wit which Sheridan was thought to possess
in such profusion should have been the only species of wealth which he
ever dreamed of economizing.




{223}

CHAPTER LVII.

FOX AND PITT.

[Sidenote: 1781--Fall of the Lord North Administration]

Pitt entered public life the inheritor of a great name, the transmitter
of a great policy, at a time when the country was in difficulty and the
Government in danger.  In the January of 1781 North was still in power,
was still supported by the King, had still some poor shreds of hope that
something, anything might happen to bring England well out of the
struggle with America.  In the November of the same year North reeled to
his fall with the news of the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown.  In
those ten months Pitt had already made himself a name in the House of
Commons.  He was no longer merely the son of Pitt; he was Pitt.  He had
attached himself to an Opposition that was studded with splendid names,
and had proved that his presence added to its lustre.  The heroes and
leaders of Opposition at Westminster welcomed him to their ranks with a
generous admiration and enthusiasm.  Fox, ever ready to applaud possible
genius, soon pronounced him to be one of the first men in Parliament.
Burke hailed him, not as a chip of the old block, but as the old block
itself.  The praises of Burke and of Fox were great, but they were not
undeserved.  When the Ministry of Lord North fell into the dust, when the
King was compelled to accept the return of the Whigs to office, Pitt had
already gained a position which entitled him in his own eyes not to
accept office but to refuse it.

Rockingham formed a Ministry for the second time.  The new Ministry was
formed of an alliance between the two armies of the Rockingham Whigs and
the Shelburne Whigs.  Rockingham represented the political principles
that dated from the days of Walpole.  {224} Shelburne represented, or
misrepresented, the principles that dated from the days of Chatham.  The
King would very much have preferred to take Shelburne without Rockingham,
but even the King had to recognize that it was impossible to gratify his
preference.  Even if Shelburne had been a much better leader than he was
he had not the following which would entitle him to form a Ministry on
his own account.  And Shelburne was by no means a good leader.  To the
Liberal politician of to-day Shelburne seems a much more desirable and
admirable statesman than Rockingham.  Most of his political ideas were in
advance of his time, and his personal friendships prove him to have been
a man of appreciative intelligence.  He had proved his courage in his
youth as a soldier at Campen and Minden; he had maintained his courage in
1780 when he faced and was wounded by the pistol of Fullarton.  But his
gifts, whatever they were, were not of the quality nor the quantity to
make a leader of men.  He could not form a Ministry for himself, and he
was not an element of stability in any Ministry of which he was a member.
The Administration formed by the alliance of Rockingham and Shelburne
could boast of many brilliant names, and showed itself laudably anxious
to add to their number.  In an Administration which had Fox for a
Secretary of State, Burke for Paymaster-General of the Forces, and
Sheridan for Under-Secretary of State, the Vice-Treasurership of Ireland
was offered to Pitt.

[Sidenote: 1782--Fox's quarrel with Pitt]

Pitt declined the offer.  He had made up his mind that he would not
accept a subordinate situation.  Conscious of his ability, he was
prepared to wait.  He had not to wait long.  During the four agitated
months of life allowed to the Rockingham Administration Pitt
distinguished himself by a motion for reform in the representative system
which was applauded by Fox and by Sheridan, but which was defeated by
twenty votes.  Peace and reform were always passions deeply seated at the
heart of Pitt; it was ironic chance that associated him hereafter so
intimately with war and with antagonism to so many methods of reform in
which he earnestly believed.  When the quarrels {225} between Fox and
Shelburne over the settlement of the American war ended after
Rockingham's death in July, 1782, in the withdrawal from the Ministry of
Fox, Burke, and the majority of the Rockingham party, Pitt rightly saw
that his hour had come.  Fox resigned rather than serve with Shelburne,
Pitt accepted Shelburne, and made Shelburne's political existence
possible a little longer.  With the aid of Pitt, Shelburne could hold on
and let Fox go; without Pitt, Fox would have triumphed over Shelburne.
From this moment began the antagonism between Fox and Pitt which was to
last for the remainder of their too brief lives.  At the age of
twenty-three Pitt found himself Chancellor of the Exchequer, and one of
the most conspicuous men in the kingdom.  Fox, who was ten years older,
was defeated by the youth whose rivalry had been predicted to Fox when
the youth was yet a child.

Pitt's triumph lasted less than a year.  Fox, conscious of his own great
purposes, and eager to return to office for their better advancement, was
prepared to pay a gambler's price for power.  To overthrow Shelburne and
with Shelburne Pitt, he needed a pretext and an ally.  The pretext was
easy to find.  He had but to maintain that the terms of the peace with
America were not the best that the country had a right to expect.  The
ally was easy to find and disastrous to accept.  Nothing in the whole of
Fox's history is more regrettable than his unnatural alliance with Lord
North.  Ever since the hour when Fox had found his true self, and had
passed from the ranks of the obedient servants of the King into the ranks
of those who devoted themselves to the principles of liberty, there had
been nothing and there could have been nothing in common between Fox and
North.  Everything that Fox held most dear was detestable to North, as
North's political doctrines were now detestable to Fox.  The political
enmity of the two men had been bitter in the extreme, and Fox had
assailed North with a violence which might well seem to have made any
form of political reconciliation impossible.  Yet North was now the man
with whom Fox was content to throw in his lot in order to obtain the
{226} overthrow of Shelburne and of Pitt.  And Fox was not alone among
great Whigs in this extraordinary transaction.  He carried Burke with him
in this unholy alliance between all that was worst and all that was best
in English political life.  The two men whose genius and whose eloquence
had been the most potent factors in the fall of North a year before were
now the means of bringing the discredited and defeated statesman back
again into the exercise of a power which, as none knew better than they,
he had so shamefully misused.  Fox and North between them swept Shelburne
out of the field.  Fox and North between them were able to force a
Coalition Ministry upon a reluctant and indignant King.  The followers of
Fox and the followers of North in combination formed so numerous and so
solid a party that they were able to treat the sovereign with a lack of
ceremony to which he was little used.  Fox had gone out of office rather
than admit that the right to nominate the first minister rested with the
King instead of with the Cabinet.  Now that he had returned to office, he
showed his determination to act up to his principles by not permitting
the King to nominate a single minister.

[Sidenote: 1783--Fox's coalition with Lord North]

The King's contempt for North since the failure to coerce America, the
King's dislike of Fox since Fox became an advanced politician, were
deepened now into uncompromising and unscrupulous enmity by the cavalier
conduct of the coalition.  The King, with his doggedness of purpose and
his readiness to use any weapons against those whom he chose to regard as
his enemies, was a serious danger even to a coalition that seemed so
formidable as the coalition between Fox and North.  Fox may very well
have thought that his unjustifiable league with North would at least have
the result of giving him sufficient time and sufficient influence to
carry into effect some of those schemes for the good of the country which
he had most nearly at heart.  The statesman who makes some unhappy
surrender of principle, some ignoble concession to opportunity in order
to obtain power, makes his unworthy bargain from a conviction that his
hold of office is essential to the welfare of the State, and that a
little {227} evil is excusable for a great good.  The sophistry that
deceives the politician does not deceive the public.  Fox gravely injured
his position with the people who loved him by stooping to the pact with
North, and he did not reap that reward of success in his own high-minded
and high-hearted purposes which could alone have excused his conduct.
The great coalition which was to stand so strong and to work such wonders
was destined to vanish like a breath after accomplishing nothing, and to
condemn Fox with all his hopes and dreams to a career of almost unbroken
opposition for the rest of his life.  If anything in Fox's checkered
career could be more tragic than the degradation of his union with the
politician whom he declared to be void of every principle of honor and
honesty, it was the abiding consequences of the retribution that followed
it.  Fox had fought hard and with success to live down the follies of his
youth.  He had to fight harder and with far less success to live down
what the world persisted in regarding as the infamy of his association
with North.

It is difficult to realize the arguments which persuaded Fox, which
persuaded Burke, to join their forces with the fallen minister whom their
own mouths, but a little while before, had, in no measured terms,
declared to be guilty of the basest conduct and deserving of the severest
punishment.  All that we know of Fox, all that we know of Burke--and it
is possible to know them almost as well as if they were the figures of
contemporary history--would seem to deny the possibility of their
condescending to any act of conscious baseness.  Stained and sullied as
the youth of Fox had been with some of the more flagrant vices of a
flagrantly vicious society, his record as gambler, as spendthrift, and as
libertine seems relatively clean in comparison with this strange act of
public treason to the chosen beliefs of his manhood, of public apostasy
from those high and generous principles by whose strenuous advocacy he
had redeemed his wasted youth.  Fiery as Burke's temper had often proved
itself to be, fantastic and grotesque as his obstinacy had often showed
itself in {228} clinging defiantly to some crotchet or whimsey, that
seemed to the spectator unworthy the adhesion of his great intellect, his
most eccentric action, his most erratic impulse, appeared sweetly
reasonable and serenely lucid when contrasted with the conduct that
allowed him to guide or be guided by Fox in a course that proved as
foolish as it looked disgraceful, to lead or to follow Fox into packing
cards with their arch-enemy of the American war.

On the face of it there is nothing that seems not merely to justify, but
even to palliate, the conduct of Fox and Burke.  Ugly as the deed seemed
to the men of their day, to the men who believed in them, trusted them,
loved them, it seems no less ugly to those who at the distance of a
century revere their memories and cherish their teachings.  One thing may
be, must be, assumed by those before whom the lives of Fox and Burke lie
bare--that men so animated by high principles, so illuminated by high
ideals, cannot deliberately, of set purpose, have sinned against the
light.  They must have felt, and strongly felt, their justification for
entering on a course which was destined to prove so disastrous.  Their
justification probably was the conviction, nursed if not expressed, that
to statesmen whose hands were so full of blessings, to statesmen whose
hearts were so big with splendid enterprises, a trivial show of
concession, a little paltering with the punctilio of honor, a little
eating of brave words, and a little swallowing of principle, was a small
price to pay and a price well worth paying for the immeasurable good that
England was to gather from their supremacy.

Whatever may have been the motives which induced Fox and Burke to ally
themselves with a discredited and defeated politician like Lord North,
the results of that alliance were as unsatisfactory to the high
contracting parties as the most rigid believer in poetic justice could
desire.  The Coalition Ministry was unlucky enough in its enterprises to
satisfy George himself, who had talked of going back to Hanover rather
than accept its services, and had only been dissuaded from self-exile by
the sardonic reminder of Lord Thurlow that it might be easier for the
{229} King to go to Hanover than to return again to England.  Burke
inaugurated his new career at the Pay Office by an unhappy act of
patronage.  He insisted upon restoring to their offices two clerks, named
Powell and Bembridge, who had been removed and arraigned for
malversation, and he insisted upon defending his indefensible action in
the House of Commons with a fury that was as diverting to his opponents
as it was distracting to his colleagues.  Fox, who had earned so large a
share of public admiration for his advocacy of what now would be called
liberal opinions, was naturally held responsible by the public for the
successful opposition of the Coalition Ministry to Pitt's plan of
Parliamentary reform.

[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 entitled to vote for
the county in which such borough should be situated.  He suggested that
an addition of knights of the shire 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 compass 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 title 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
substitute 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 passing
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 unconstitutional 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
shine as a statesman and an extraordinary power of application had
equipped him with the varied information that enabled him to assert
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 assiduity 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
dictatorship 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 unconstitutional 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 document in his {235}
possession Lord Temple went from one noble lord to another, pointing out
the unwisdom of each in pursuing a course which would constitute 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 assert 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 unconstitutional 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 circumstance 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 ingratitude to
the man who had been his father's friend and to whom he himself had owed
so short a time before the leadership 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 embarrass his opponents.  But this "curious manoeuvre," as
Pitt himself called it, was nullified by the promptitude 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 constituency 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 unconstitutional 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 friendship 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 surpassed, 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 institution 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 competition.  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 analysis 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 document 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 passed 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 constitute 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 friendship.  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 attitude 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 assume the reins of government as he would have had
in the case of the death of the monarch.  Pitt maintained the more
constitutional 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 assume the title of Lord Coleraine, to which he
became entitled 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 ignoble 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 "Hellgate" 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 friendships, 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 pass 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 passed 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 conque