LIFE AND TIMES OF LORD HARDWICKE.[20]
The Law of England forms the most remarkable characteristic of the country. The Law is the spirit of the national liberty, the guardian of the national religion, and the foundation of the national government. Britain has the proud distinction of being almost the only country on earth, where no act of arbitrary power can be suffered—where no man’s person, property, or conscience, can be subjected to insult with impunity—and where every man hasrights, and all are alike under the safeguard of Law.
We propose to give a rapid sketch of the history of this great principle in England.
It is singular that the most intellectual nation of the ancient world—Greece—has not left us any system of law. Cicero speaks with professional scorn of all jurisprudence except the Roman. He would not have spoken thus of the Mosaic law, if he had known it. But one of the most extraordinary circumstances of the Hebrew commonwealth, is the general ignorance of its incomparable institutions, which prevailed among the most active inquirers of the northern world. But law existed from the earliest periods in Greece, though its name was often and curiously changed. In the time of Homer, the name of law wasThemis, or establishment. In the time of Hesiod, the name wasNomos, or distribution. In after times, it wasDikè, or justice. The cause of the Greek want of system was said to be thenumberof judges in their courts, which rendered the decision rather matter of popular sentiment than of fixed rule.
The systematic nature of the Roman law arose from there being in general butonejudge in each court. The two prætors—the one for the city, and the other for the external jurisdiction—were annually appointed, and were accustomed, on entering on their offices, to state the rules on which they intended to act. Those rules became gradually embodied, and finally formed the groundwork of the Roman law.
In the language of Rome, Law wasLex, fromLego, as the proposal of the rule wasreadby the magistrate to the assembly of the people. The Anglo-Saxon name was Laga, fromLegen, to lay down—from which comes our word Law.
Law in England ascends as high as the time of the Druids, who, however, had no written code. But they seem to have left us the custom of Gavelkind—the division of the property of an intestate between the widow and the children, and the burning of a widow found guilty of her husband’s murder.
The Roman, Pictish, and Saxon invasions, with the Heptarchy, filled the country with a general confusion of laws, until the time of Alfred. This great king and man of genius undertook to remodel the whole constitution of the West-Saxon monarchy—a design, for whose execution he has been praised by all the philosophic lawyers, as exhibiting the highest sagacity.
The principle of his reform was, to make every man answerable to an immediate superior for his personal conduct, and that of his neighbourhood. For this purpose, England was divided into tithings and hundreds, and perhaps into counties, all being under a supreme magistrate—the king. He also collected into a volume all the customs of the various districts, which he issued for the guidance of the several country courts. Those in their turn were liable to account to the king’s courts, which were kept in the royal household, and which travelled with this great king, whose life seems to have been chiefly occupied in traversing the kingdom as high minister of law, and teaching its principles to his people.
The Danish invasions shook this code, but had not the power to crush it. It was renewed by King Edgar, a man of vigour and talents. The digest was completed by his grandson, Edward the Confessor—the whole forming the common law, or lawcommonto the whole realm.
The principles of the Saxon law, which were the principles of their fathers in the German forests, and were the principles of truth and nature, were briefly these:—The establishment of the Wittena-gemote, or assembly of wise men—a species of parliament, without which no new law could be made, or old one changed; the election of all magistrates by the people; the hereditary descent of the crown; the commutation of capital punishments, on the first offence, for a fine; military service in proportion to land; forfeiture of land for treason, butnotcorruption of blood; the descent of lands to all the male’s equally, without right of primogeniture, (a rule unworthy of Saxon wisdom;) the use of county courts in ordinary cases, with courts held before the king in the higher; last, and most important of all, trial by jury (though trial was also held by ordeal.)
Of those principles, some were evidently unfit for subsequent civilisation; and some refined themselves. But the whole system, when compared with the old Roman code, and with many of the codes of Europe which followed it, exhibits an extraordinary evidence of the manliness of feeling, and justness of conception, existing among the Saxon ancestry of England.
In the eleventh century, the Norman Conquest burst in upon the country with the force of an inundation, and swept before it throne, liberty, andlaws. The influence of Rome now began to act powerfully on the people. Ecclesiastical courts were formed, separate from the civil, and the Romish priesthood were gradually exempted from the secular power.
Another formidable innovation was in the “royal forests.” The Norman kings were “mighty hunters,” and whole counties were stripped of their population, to give room for beasts of chase. They transplanted the forest laws of the Continent into England, and the penalties of their game laws were terrible. In the Saxon times, though no man was allowed “to kill the king’s deer,” yet every man was allowed to kill the game on his own estate. But the Norman law made the king the proprietor ofall game, and no man could kill bird of the air, or beast of the field, without express royal license, by a grant offree-warren, which was more for the purpose of preserving the game than giving a right to the subject.
With one exception, the Norman invasion was an unequivocal calamity. That exception was the right of primogeniture—a right essential to the establishment of a nobility, to the permanence of families in a condition of honour, and to the prevention of a gradual pauperism and degradation of society, as the lands became divided more and more. In all others, it was a sudden and mischievous extinction of all popular rights, and of all the principles of national progress. It made law arbitrary by curtailing the power of the county courts, and giving it to the king’s Norman justiciers, who thus became masters of every thing, and, by their Norman subtleties, altogether confused the national law. It introduced the feudal law, which was tyrannical in its essence. It almost excluded the national language from all public use, Norman-French alone being used in all the courts. It introduced the trial by combat, the origin of that custom which, under the name of duelling, authorises murder, provided the murdered man has previously had formal notice that his murder was intended; and also, that he had a chance of adding the murder of his adversary to his own. And to this Norman tyranny was due the whole long series of ruinous wars, which involved both England and France in infinite wretchedness, for little less than a hundred and fifty years.
The Saxon law continued in this state of humiliation until the reign of John, with slight occasional advances towards freedom. But, in this reign, the severity of the forest laws roused the barons into insurrection, and the King was forced to sign the two famous regulations, the Forest Charter, and the Great Charter. The former diminished some of the cruelties of the forest law, and the latter laid the foundations of the Constitution, by restoring the general principles of the Saxon law. It protected the subject from the severity of royal fines and royal loans, and considerably narrowed the wasteful expenditure of the throne. In private rights, it established the testamentary power of the husband over part of his estates, and the law of dowery. In public police, it established a uniformity of weights and measures, gave protection to commercial strangers, and forbade the alienation of lands by mortmain. In matters of public justice, it forbade all denials and delays of justice, established the court of Common Pleas at Westminster, to relieve the suitor from following the courts round the country; directed assizes and annual circuits to be held, and appointed inquests. It established the liberties of London, and of all the cities, towns, and ports of England. And finally, and by its noblest act of power, it declared the protection of every man in his life, liberty, and property, unless convicted by the judgment of his peers, or the law of the land. This was perhaps the noblest document ever published by a people, and well deserves its name ofMagna Charta.
In the Popish controversy of our day, the existence of Magna Charta has been adduced as a proof of the freedom encouraged under Popery. But it is forgotten that the whole proceeding was instantly denounced by the Pope, and laid under anathema. It was a recurrence to the laws of their Saxon ancestors, demanded by the severe necessities of the time, and originating in impulses of human nature too strong for the bondage of the national superstition.
The glorious Reformation in the sixteenth century produced a hidden and powerful change in the aspect of English law. The Papal supremacy fell, and relieved the law of a most intolerable obstruction. The crown became the true head of the government. Man no longer gave a divided allegiance to an English monarch and an Italian monk; and the appointment of the bishops was thenceforth taken from foreign hands, and invested in the sovereign of the realm. Freedom now began to make palpable progress; for although the prerogative was still unabated, and was often tyrannical in the reigns of Henry, Mary, and Elizabeth, there was a growing tendency to its abatement; and its use by Elizabeth was in general so lenient, as to be scarcely perceptible.
A general change in English society also powerfully co-operated with this progress. Peace had brought commerce, and commerce wealth to the merchant: the lower orders, of course, shared in the general prosperity, and their condition became more important in the national eyes, and in their own. The nobles, disdaining commerce, became unable to compete with the new generation of opulence, and dissipated their estates, which fell into the hands of the citizens. On the other hand, the throne, enriched by the confiscation of the monasteries, became hourly more independent of the barons; and the contest for power was evidently to be thenceforth determined between the throne and the people.
The glories of Elizabeth, her services to religion, and her gentle exercise of the sceptre, had reconciled the nation to the prerogative. But the accession of James awoke the nation: his manners were offensive, his habits were unmanly, he wanted the dignity of Elizabeth on the throne, and he wanted the spirit of her government among the people. His death left a legacy of revolution. His son had been intended by nature for private life, but he was marked by misfortune to be a king. Brave without fortitude, and graceful without sincerity, he would have made an incomparable figure in his own court, if he had not been encumbered with the high duties of a throne. Charles was destined to be undone, from the time when he began to revive the obsolete statutes of the forest law, sustain the severities of the Star Chamber and High Commission courts, and raise arbitrary taxes in the shape of tonnage and poundage. The disuse of parliaments alienated from him every lover of liberty. Hampden, a name deserving of all honour in the history of freedom, struck the first blow at the new fabric of tyranny, by his resistance to ship-money. The King himself hurried on his ruin, by concessions as precipitate as his demands had been unjustifiable; and this most melancholy of all struggles ended in the most melancholy of all consummations—a military tyranny.
The restoration of the Stuarts gave us the Habeas Corpus Act—an illustrious memorial of national good sense, and of national security. Magna Charta had gone no further than to forbid imprisonment, contrary to law. The Habeas Corpus gave the man power to release himself, and punish his injurers.
The glorious Revolution of 1688 gave another impulse to the whole system of English liberty. It pronounced the authority of law to be supreme. It gave us the Bill of Rights, the Toleration Act, and the Act of Settlement. It justified the doctrine of necessary resistance; it regulated trials for high treason; it modelled the Civil List; it made the administration of the income accountable to parliament; and constituted the judges independent of the throne.
The constitution was now complete, or if not, all the improvements still necessary to make it such, were prepared in the nature of the noble plan which was thus laid down by the nation. The changes which have since occurred in the general law have been scarcely more than attempts to simplify its proceedings. The changes in parliamentary law have been more perilous, through the Reform Bill of 1831 following the Popish Bill of 1829. The change in international law has been marked by a feature whose peril seems too imminent, yet whose practical effect is still to be ascertained,—the establishment of direct diplomatic intercourse with the Popedom. Protestantism is justly alarmed at this sudden abandonment of one of the fundamental principles of 1688; at the direct encouragement which it must give to all the demands of Popery in England; at the triumph which, for the first time in two centuries, it gives to the factious spirit of Popery; at the aid which it may give to its superstition; and at the national hazards which may be involved in the rash attempt to subdue Irish violence by Papal instrumentality, and even at the political perils which may result from the authorised presence of a Popish Italian at the court of a Protestant sovereign. The palliatives of the measure are certainly trifling. The ambassador is not to be an ecclesiastic, and the Pope is not to be called the “sovereign pontiff.” But a Jesuit may be the same in a plain coat and in a red hat, and the Pope is themasterof the Papist, call him by what name we will. Such is statesmanship in the nineteenth century!
The Lord Chancellor Hardwicke was the son of a country attorney, who was probably a respectable man——for he was needy, though the town-clerk, and seems to have had some friends, though in the profession of the law. The biographer labours hard to prove that he had ancestors—a matter which may be conceded to all men—and that, if some of them were poor, some were rich; a point perfectly within the possibilities of human things. He contends further, that abranchof the name of Yorke had held the mayoralty of Calais in the fifteenth century. But as he gives us no knowledge of thedistanceof that branch from the trunk, and as all have had kings as well as beggars among their progenitors, being the common descendants of Adam, there is not much use in those discoveries, and not the slightest balm to the hurt pride of the Hardwickes; for the whole dwindles down to the distressful but common conclusion, that in the seventeenth century the family were on the decline, and all their honours were diminished into the humility of a provincial solicitor.
But we come to wiser information. The first mention of the future chancellor is in the following document in his personal journal:—
“Philip Yorke, born at Dover the 1st day of December 1690, and baptised on Thursday 9th of December.”
The learned biographer wastes some more of his paragraphs in proving “that poverty is no disgrace;” but it must be acknowledged that it is neither comfort nor credit, and that it would have done no harm whatever to the attorney, if he had been in possession of a clear thousand a-year.
His son Philip was naturally intended to follow his own profession, and about his sixteenth year was sent to learn it in the office of a solicitor of the name of Salkeld, brother of the celebrated sergeant. It was a rather curious circumstance, that of the young men then in Salkeld’s office, there were two future Lord Chancellors, a Master of the Rolls, and a future Lord Chief Baron: Jocelyn, subsequently Chancellor of Ireland; Strange, Master of the Rolls; Parker, Chief of the Exchequer; and Yorke, who was destined to act as high a part in administration as in law.
There are some slight suspicions that young Yorke had beenarticledto Salkeld, and aclerkto his brother the sergeant. But against theseimputationsthe biographer battles with a desperate fidelity. It is a pity to see so much zeal thrown away; for the Great Chancellor, as he was deservedly called, would not have been an atom the less great if he had beenarticledto the one brother andclerkto the other. He might have been only the more entitled to praise for the eminence to which he rose. We respect the aristocracy so far as it ought to be respected; but we are not at all inclined to look for the pedigree of talents in the dusty records of a worn-out genealogy, or feel that the slightest degree of additional honour attaches to learning and integrity, by the best blazonry of the Herald’s Office.
The young student must have soon given evidence of his capacity; for Salkeld, a man sagacious in his estimate of his pupils, recommended that he should try the larger branch of the profession, and put his name on the books of the Temple, which was done Nov. 29, 1708. We have then a dissertation on the propriety of keeping Terms by dining in the hall of the Temple. This, too, is so much wisdom thrown away. A good dinner is, under all circumstances, a good thing. It requires as little apology as any conceivable act of human existence. In the hall, the young barrister is at least in the company of gentlemen, which he perhaps would not be, but for that contingency; if he does not learn much law, he at least learns something of life; and if he has a spark of ambition in his frame, it may be blown into a flame by the sight of so many portly Chief Justices, and Lord Chief Barons, with an occasional glimpse of a retired Lord Chancellor, reposing on a sinecure of £5000 a-year.
Another weakness of the biographer is an eloquent effort toprovethat a barrister, whose talents raise him to the summit of his profession, is but little the worse for the want of a university education. It would have been quite sufficient to say, that Philip Yorke rose to be the first lawyer of his age, and Lord Chancellor, without having ever set foot within the walls of a college.
Yorke, at the commencement of his career, was fortunate in an introduction through Parker, one of his fellow-students at Salkeld’s, to Lord Macclesfield, Lord Chief Justice, to whose son it is said that he was engaged as law-tutor. The Chief Justice received him at his table, took an evident interest in his progress, and patronised him on every important occasion. Yorke’s manners were as gentle as his intellect was acute; and such a man would naturally be received with favour at the table of a person so high in rank as Lord Macclesfield. But it has never been said that he humiliated himself for that honour; and through life he had a quiet way of gaining his point, of which a curious instance was given in his earliest days.
The wife of Salkeld was a thrifty personage, who, evidently thinking that her husband’s pupils might be employed in other operations than scribbling parchments, occasionally sent him on her messages, and even to execute some of her commissions in Covent Garden Market. Yorke obeyed, but on giving in the account of his expenditure on those occasions, there appeared frequent entries of coach hire, for “celery and turnips from Covent Garden,” a “barrel of oysters from the fishmonger’s,” &c. &c. Salkeld, perceiving this, remarked to his wife on the expensive nature of this “saving,” and Yorke was no longer employed as her conveyancer of celery and turnips.
He had also some pleasantry as well as point, of which an anecdote was told by the late Jeremy Bentham. Powis, one of the judges of the King’s Bench, one day at a lawyers’ dinner expressed to Yorke his “surprise” at his having got into so much business in so short a period. “I conceive,” said the old fool, “that you must have published some book, or be about publishing something; for look, d’ye see? (which seems to have been a favourite phrase of his,) there is scarcely a cause before the court but you are employed in it.” Yorke answered with a smile, “that he had indeed some thoughts of publishing, but that he had yet made no progress in his book. Powis, priding himself on his sagacity, begged to know its nature. He was answered that it was a “Versification of Coke upon Littleton.” The judge begged a specimen, on which Yorke recited—
“He that holdeth his lands in feeNeed neither to quake nor to shiver,I humbly conceive; forlook, do you see,They are his and his heirs for ever.”
“He that holdeth his lands in feeNeed neither to quake nor to shiver,I humbly conceive; forlook, do you see,They are his and his heirs for ever.”
“He that holdeth his lands in feeNeed neither to quake nor to shiver,I humbly conceive; forlook, do you see,They are his and his heirs for ever.”
“He that holdeth his lands in fee
Need neither to quake nor to shiver,
I humbly conceive; forlook, do you see,
They are his and his heirs for ever.”
It may fairly be presumed that a laugh went round the table; but Powis was so fully convinced that he had hit upon the true reason, that on meeting Yorke some months after, he inquired gravely about the progress of his volume.
However, Powis seems to have been a mark for the wits, as we find by some lines on the Bench, by the memorable Duke of Wharton:—
“When Powis sums up a cause without a blunder;And honest Price shall trim and truckle under;When Eyre his haughtiness shall lay aside,And Tracy’s generous soul shall swell with pride,Then will I cease my charmer to adore,And think of love and politics no more.”
“When Powis sums up a cause without a blunder;And honest Price shall trim and truckle under;When Eyre his haughtiness shall lay aside,And Tracy’s generous soul shall swell with pride,Then will I cease my charmer to adore,And think of love and politics no more.”
“When Powis sums up a cause without a blunder;And honest Price shall trim and truckle under;When Eyre his haughtiness shall lay aside,And Tracy’s generous soul shall swell with pride,Then will I cease my charmer to adore,And think of love and politics no more.”
“When Powis sums up a cause without a blunder;
And honest Price shall trim and truckle under;
When Eyre his haughtiness shall lay aside,
And Tracy’s generous soul shall swell with pride,
Then will I cease my charmer to adore,
And think of love and politics no more.”
Yorke was now beginning to feel his way in his profession; and if poverty had been his original stimulus, he had a fair prospect of exchanging it for wealth. Thedictumof Thurlow on this subject is proverbial. When asked by some friend to advise his son as to “the way he should go” to rise at the bar, that rough functionary said, “Let him spend all his fortune—then marry, and spend his wife’s fortune; and then let him return to his books, andhe mayhave some chance of business.”
But Yorke, without spending either his or his wife’s fortune, had already taken the first step to official distinction by entering Parliament, May 2, 1719. He was chosen member for Lewes in Sussex. The simplicity of this transaction affords a curious contrast to the performances of the present day. The Duke of Newcastle sent a letter to the “free and independent electors,” evidently directing them to elect his friend Mr Yorke. The letter was duly answered by an address from one hundred and thirty-two electors, in this style:—
“We, whose names are hereunto subscribed, the constables and inhabitants of the borough of Lewes, having heard your Grace’s letter publicly read, do not only herein return your Grace our hearty thanks for thehonouryou have done us in recommending so fit a person as Mr Yorke, to serve as one of our representatives in parliament for this town, for the present vacancy, but also beg leave to assure your Grace, that we do unanimously and entirely approve of him, and shall be readyon all occasionsto show the regard we have to the favour your Grace has pleased to lay upon us.
“Your Grace’s most obliged and“Obedient humble servants.”
“Your Grace’s most obliged and“Obedient humble servants.”
“Your Grace’s most obliged and“Obedient humble servants.”
“Your Grace’s most obliged and
“Obedient humble servants.”
The orthography of those honest people differs from modern penmanship,—but theprincipleof the affair, even in our polished day of liberalism, probably differs no more than a close borough of the year 1719 differs from an open borough of 1848. The successful barrister, and promising member of parliament, now made the most important step which any man can make, and took to himself a wife. It would be unfair to say that in this instance he was guided by the calculations which are so often charged upon his profession. But there can be no doubt, that whatever might be the pleasure of his new connexion, it had all the merit of prudence. The lady was a widow, young and pretty, and with a fortune of £6000, which at that time was probably equal to twice the sum in our day. But probably a charm of no inferior importance was her being the niece of Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls. The whole transaction was sufficiently juridical. Sir Joseph had sent a letter with Yorke, to be presented to Mr Charles Cox, the father of the lady, who had married Mary, the eldest daughter of Lord Somers. On reading the letter, the old gentleman desired Yorke to “leave his rental and writings” with him; and upon Yorke’s acknowledging that he had neither, Cox expressed his astonishment that his brother-in-law, Sir Joseph, “should have recommended such a person to him.” On writing to Sir Joseph on the subject, he received an answer, “not to hesitate a moment in accepting the offer, for that the gentleman who made it, and was now content with his daughter’s £6000, would in another year expectthree or four times the sum with a wife!” The letter had its effect, and the marriage took place.
Yorke then took a house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and began to go circuit; there his biographer stoutly and justly defends him against the imputation of “intriguing for business,” alleged in Lord Campbell’s “Lives of the Chancellors;” an imputation which has not been sustained by any part of his subsequent conduct. For, though charged with singular anxiety to realise a fortune, there is no evidence of any meanness in its pursuit. And his professional distinction, his natural talent, and his rank as a member of parliament, (a matter of high consideration in those days) rendered his possession of business natural and easy.
But he was soon to have official distinction. When going the Western Circuit, he received a letter from the Lord Chancellor, announcing to him “his Majesty’s pleasure to select him for Solicitor General;” an office into which he was sworn in March 1720, at the age of thirty!
Much professional dissatisfaction was exhibited on this promotion of so young a member of the bar; and for some period the attorneys exhibited an equal reluctance to employ him in important causes. But, as a leader, he soon showed qualities which had been partially concealed in his inferior rank, and reconciled at once the public and the profession to his precedency. It has been remarked, that some of the most distinguished judges havenotbeen successful in the lower rank of their profession, while it has not rarely happened that the most distinguished advocates have failed as judges. The qualifications for the bench, and those for the bar, or even for the leadership of the bar, have considerable differences, and the management of the great principles of law is evidently a separate task from the dexterity of detail.
The father of the Solicitor General, who had the happiness to see his son’s promotion, died in the following year. It appears that Yorke, who was now Sir Philip, kept up a constant and kind correspondence with his family, which was, of course, strengthened by his having obtained the recordership of Dover, an appointment which he valued very highly, and retained through life.
The volume contains some striking remarks on the often discussed question—“why lawyers seldom succeed as parliamentary speakers.” And the reason assigned, and truly assigned, is, that lawyers have something else to do. The man who is occupied all day in the courts, has no time for parliamentary subjects. He comes into the House fatigued, and unsupplied with the detail which isnecessaryto give effect to any address in so business-like an assembly. He merely gives an opinion and sits down. If he attempts more, he generally fails; or his best success is an escape. Thus the two greatest advocates whom England and Ireland have ever seen, Erskine and Curran, were ineffective in parliament—the only distinction being, that Erskine was laughed at, while Curran was laughed with. With these extraordinary men, who had every quality of the orator, and whose vigour of argument took the bench by storm, while the flashes of their imagination threw brilliancy over the dreariest topics, there could be no conceivable source of failure, except in their want of preparation for the peculiar objects of debate.
But there is also another, and an obvious consideration. There are but few orators in the world, and these few are not always either lawyers or members of parliament. But, when the true orator appears, he isfelt, and he would be felt in an assembly of Esquimaux. He requires no complacency in his audience; he communicates with their spirit, at once. He touches strings which, however unawakened before, are in every living bosom; he finds echoes in the heart, which a thousand other voices might have called on in vain.
At the same time it must be admitted, that the knowledge which law demands, is of high importance to any success which hopes to bepermanentin the House; that its nature in the questions constantly coming before an assembly of lawmakers, is indisputable; and that the perfection of a debater would consist in his possessing the knowledge of a lawyer, combined with the taste, talent, and expansive views of a statesman. The lawyers in parliament have always possessed great weight; and though the instances of their arriving at the Premiership areremarkablyfew, (we recollect but one, the late Mr Perceval,) they have always possessed a large share of parliamentary power.
A case of some peculiarity occurred at this time—it was the proposal to commute the sentence of death on some criminals, on condition of their submitting to inoculation for the small-pox. The case was laid before Raymond and Yorke, the Attorney and Solicitor General; whose answer was in this form;
“The lives of those persons being in the power of his majesty, he may grant a pardon to them on such lawful condition as he may think fit. And, as to this particular condition, we have no objection in point of law; the rather, because the carrying on this practice to perfection, may lead to the general benefit of mankind.”
The small-pox was then almost a plague: it assailed all classes; and some of the royal children, and many of those of the nobility died of it. Its extraordinary power of disfiguring the features of the survivors made it scarcely less dreaded than its mortality. In tropical climates it swept off the population by thousands. Mankind, in our age, cannot be too grateful to the good fortune, or rather to that interposition of providence, which, by giving us the discovery of Vaccination, has at length comparatively freed the world from this most afflicting and most fatal disease.
But Yorke was soon called on to perform other and more difficult duties than those of humanity. The influence of the exiled Stuarts was still powerful. Superstition and self-interest had sustained a close connexion in Great Britain. The manners of the Brunswick line had their share in sustaining this influence. They were singularly unpopular. The first George was coarse in manners, and vulgar in mind. All about him, even to his follies, was imported from Hanover; and he was never able to discover the distinction between an empire and an electorate. The second George was a man of ability; but while he was superior to the habits of his predecessor, he had equally repulsive habits of his own. The king was at once subtle and uncouth, artificial in his designs, yet rude in their execution; clear-headed in his views, yet confused in his government. Germanism clung to him, to the last. He, too, could not discover the distinction between the throne of the first country of Europe, and the sovereignty of a German province. The private history of his court, also, was the reverse of flattering to the morals of his country; and the public feeling often rebuked them with singular vigour of tone.
On the other hand, the misfortunes of the Stuarts, though most amply deserved, had thrown a tinge of romance over their fate; and even their insults to its freedom in religion and constitution were partially forgotten. The chivalric character of the Prince threw an additional interest on his story; and the contrast between a gallant young man, determined to struggle for the throne of his forefathers, and the crafty and egoistical character of the king, offered strong probabilities for the success of an enterprise worthy of a competitor for the crown of England.
On the 12th of May 1722, an announcement appeared in the newspapers, stating that the “Lord Mayor of London had received a letter from Lord Townshend, one of his Majesty’s principal Secretaries of State, informing him, that the king had received intelligence of a conspiracy, in concert with traitors abroad, to raise a rebellion in favour of the Pretender.”
A few days before, a proclamation had appeared, offering a reward of £500 for the apprehension of one Weston, formerly clerk to Gray’s Inn Chapel. Warrants were immediately issued for the apprehension of many other persons, of whom the principal was Atterbury, the Bishop of Rochester, who was arrested at his deanery in Westminster, carried before the Council, and committed to the Tower.
Shortly after, Lords North and Grey were arrested in the Isle of Wight; and about the same time the principal agent, one Layer, a barrister, was also seized. North was committed to the Tower, where, on his lady’s desiring admission to him, and being refused, he exhibited a specimen of that pleasantry which seems to have belonged to the name. Opening his window, “Madam,” said he, “this is aconventfor men, and not for your sex.”
Layer’s trial soon followed. The evidence proved that he had been engaged in a plan for a general insurrection, for the overthrow of the established government, and for bringing in the Chevalier. The king, the prince, and the ministers, were to be seized, the Tower was to be taken, and the army was to be bought over. The correspondence on this subject had been seized at Layer’s chambers, in Southampton Buildings, and was in his handwriting.
An instance of what may be regarded as the etiquette of English law, was given on his trial. The prisoner had been carried to the court at Westminster in fetters, of which he complained to the Chief Justice as an insult. To this it was replied, that he had made an attempt to escape; on which the judge said, that the use of the fetters was justifiable. But, on his being brought into court, his counsel applied to have the fetters taken off; to which the judge replied, “The ironsmustbe taken off: we shall not stir until the irons are taken off.”
The Solicitor General spoke with great effect in reply to the prisoner’s counsel, and Layer was found guilty. He was several times reprieved, in the hope of obtaining evidence sufficient to implicate persons of higher rank, who were strongly suspected, Layer being evidently but an agent. However, he was at length executed.
A bill of pains and penalties was then brought in against the Bishop of Rochester. Among the witnesses in his favour was the celebrated Alexander Pope, who came forward to depose to the Bishop’s domestic habits and studies. But it was remarked, that his performance on this occasion only showed that his abilities were not formed for exhibition in a court of justice. He made but an indifferent figure as a witness: he had but little to say, and that little he blundered.
Atterbury himself, however, made a better display. It having been insinuated that Sir Robert Walpole had tampered with the Bishop’s witnesses, for the purpose of involving other persons of condition, Walpole appeared in person to disavow the charge. Atterbury fastened on him, and exerted all his dexterity to make him contradict himself. “A greater trial of skill,” observed Speaker Onslow, “than this scarcely ever happened between two such combatants,—the one fighting for his reputation, the other for his acquittal.” The bill of pains and penalties was brought in by eighty-seven peers to forty-three. Atterbury was banished; and the following paragraph in one of the journals gives the account of his departure:—
“June 19, 1723.—Yesterday, between twelve and one, the deprived Bishop of Rochester set out from the Tower in the navy barge, and was delivered up to Captain Laurence, commander of the Aldborough man-of-war, lying in Long Reach. Two footmen in purple liveries attended him, himself being in a lay habit of gray cloth. Great numbers of people went to see him take water, many of whom accompanied him down the river in barges and boats. We hear that two messengers went on board the man-of-war, to see him set on shore at Ostend, whence, it is said, he will proceed to Aix-la-Chapelle, after staying some time at Brussels.”
The Bishop, however, was set on shore at Calais, from the violence of the weather, which made the passage to Ostend dangerous; and on being told at landing, that Bolingbroke had received the king’s pardon, and had arrived at the same place on his return to England, he pleasantly said, “Then I amexchanged.” Pope observed that “the nation was afraid of being overrun with too much politeness, and could not gain one great genius, but at the expense of another.”
That Bolingbroke was a man of remarkable talent, must be believed from the evidence of his public career. But the fame of Atterbury seems to have had no firmer foundations than his being the intimate of Pope, and a Jacobite. He had the scholarship of an academic, but he gave no exhibition of ability in public life. His sermons are extant, and are trifling. As a Jacobite, he must have been incapable of comprehending the value of liberty, regardless of Protestantism, and faithless to his king. His mitre alone probably saved him from a severer punishment than exile. But the simple fact that a Protestant bishop conspired to bring back a dynasty pledged to Popery, and notorious for persecution, is enough to consign his memory to historic shame.
Another curious instance, involving a bishop, occurred about this period. Wilson, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, in consequence of his refusal of the holy sacrament to the wife of the governor of the island, was thrown by him into prison, and fined. The bishop appealed to the Privy Council, by whom he was released, on the opinion of the Attorney and Solicitor Generals, and the fine was remitted. The Earl of Derby, the “sovereign” of the island, contended that it was a “free nation.” But he was not able to show that its freedom implied the power of controlling the spiritual functions of the bishop.
On this subject, however, it must be acknowledged that the right of refusing the sacrament to individuals who might be disapproved of by the clergy, was obviously dangerous, and, though retained in words, is justly abandoned in practice by the Establishment. Such a practice would imply that the clergyman could penetrate the secrets of the heart: it would also give a most offensive power of public insult, a strong temptation to private revenge, and might inflict an irreparable injury on personal character, without any public trial, or any means of personal defence. It is also observable, that no mancanascertain how suddenly and effectually conversion may change the whole tenor of the mind; while the mere fact of coming to the communion-table naturally implies a returning sense of duty. Some of the half Popish disciplinarians of our day, who talk much more of the church than they think of Christianity, have attempted to renew this harsh and hazardous practice. But the man of sense will avoid the insult; and the Christian will acknowledge that, if rebuke is to be administered at all, it ought to be in the shape of private exhortation, and not in the arbitrary and exasperating form of public shame.
The most painful part in the office of Attorney General is the duty of prosecuting high criminals. The Earl of Macclesfield now put this duty to the test. A charge was laid against the Chancellor for corruption in the sale of masterships in Chancery, and the embezzlement of the suitors’ money in their hands. He was impeached by the Commons, and tried by the Lords, was found guilty, and fined £30,000. But on the questions being put that he should be rendered incapable of serving the king, or sitting in parliament, both were negatived; but, for the honour of parliament, the one only by forty-two to forty-two, the Speaker giving, of course, the vote in his favour; and the latter by forty-five to thirty-nine. The trial lasted twenty days, and naturally excited great attention. The ground of his escape from official ruin, (for nothing could save him from public shame,) was probably his favouritism at St James’s—a favouritism which, unluckily for the honour of the courtiers, seems to have remained undiminished.
The conduct of the Attorney General has been censured, as ungrateful to his early patron; but the censure is unfounded. He did all that he could: he refused to join in the prosecution, and avoided this duty with some difficulty. The Earl’s guilt was notorious; nothing could save him. It was no part of the Attorney General’s virtues to thwart public justice, nor was it in his power. He simply consulted the delicacy of old friendship, by refusing to urge its progress. It has been even asked, Why did he notresign? Such is the absurdity of querists. His resignation could not have saved the Chancellor, who, after all, escaped with the easy sacrifice of a comparatively small sum from a purse believed to be plethoric with the public money.
Yorke still continued to advance in reputation and office. The deaths of the Chancellor and the Chief Justice were followed by the appointment of Talbot to the woolsack, and of Yorke to the Chief Justiceship, with an increase of the salary from £2000 to £4000 a-year, and the peerage, by the title of Baron Hardwicke, from an estate which he had purchased in the county of Gloucester.
He was now on the verge of his highest promotion. The Chancellor Talbot died in February 1736, after five days’ illness, at the age of fifty-three.
An entry in Lord Hardwicke’s private journal gives a curious and characteristic account of his promotion. “On Monday the 14th of February, about five in the morning, died Charles Talbot, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain. Thesame forenoon, being at the sittings in Westminster Hall, I received a letter from Sir Robert Walpole, desiring to speak with me on the event of that morning, and wishing that I would dine with him that day in private. I went accordingly, and after dinner he proposed the Great Seal to me in the king’s name. Thereupon I took occasion to state to him, that I was now in a quiet situation, which, by practice, was become easy to me; that I had noambitionto go higher; and, though I had the most grateful sense of his majesty’s goodness, desired to be left where I was.”
Sir Robert perfectly understood this “nolo episcopari” style, and pressed the appointment. We are a little ashamed for the delicacy of the future Chancellor; for he now told the minister, that the Chief Clerkship of the King’s Bench being likely to fall soon into his gift, which he might grant for two lives for the benefit of his family, he must have an equivalent! After some bargaining, Yorke offered to take the reversion of the Tellership of the Exchequer for his eldest son. Walpole objected, that the king “disliked reversions.” And well he might; for the Tellership of the Exchequer was said to have amounted (in subsequent times) to £40,000 a-year! The bargain was at length struck—the Tellership was given, and Hardwicke was Chancellor. A note in Horace Walpole’s Memoirs adds point to the transaction: it says that “Walpole, finding it difficult to make Hardwicke give up the Chief Justiceship, told him that, if he refused, he would give the Seals to Fazakerly. ‘What!’ exclaimed Hardwicke, ‘Fazakerly! he is a Tory, perhaps a Jacobite.’ ‘All very true,’ replied Walpole; ‘but if by one o’clock you do not accept my offer, Fazakerly,by two, becomes Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and one ofthe stanchest Whigs in England!’”
The Chancellor, as a scholar and a man of the world, was consulted by his friends on occasional rules of life; and, in answer to a request of the Marchioness of Annandale to give his opinion on the course of education proper for her son, Hardwicke, in giving a detail of the studies proper for a nobleman, as classics, mathematics, law, &c., alludes to foreign travel.
He observes “that, in former times, the people of Britain were observed to return home with their affections more strongly engaged towards the well-tempered constitution and liberty of their own country, from having observed the misery resulting from the military governments abroad. But, by an unlucky reverse, it (now) sometimes happens that, from being taught to like the fashions and manners of foreign countries, people are led to have no aversion to their political institutions, and their methods of exercising civil power.”
He then adverts to the still more serious evil which our own generation feel every day:
“The Protestant religion being established here, is one great security, not only of our religious, but also of our civil liberty. That ocular demonstration of the gross superstitions and absurdities of Popery which travelling furnishes, was formerly thought to fix the mind in a more firm attachment to the former, and abhorrence of the latter.” He then adverts to the culpable change frequently wrought by foreign life on this wise and salutary feeling. “I fear the case is now somewhat otherwise; with this further ill consequence, that many of our young men, by a long interruption of the exercise of their own religion, become absolutely indifferent to all.”
The truth of the case, however, is, that travelling isnotthe source of the injury done to the habits and principles of the English: it isresidenceabroad that does the irreparable mischief. Travelling enlarges the mind; residence abroad narrows, degrades, and vitiates it. No Englishman who has long resided in a foreign city, (except, perhaps, in a university, for the pursuit of learning,) is ever fit for any thing when he returns: he is a practical idler, and pitiful lounger round coffee-houses and gaming-tables. He discovers that his “feelings are too refined” for the roughness of English life—that his frame is “too delicate for anything but a southern climate”—boasts of his sensibilities, while he is leading a life of the most vulgar and gross vice—until, beggared by debauchery, or worn out with disease, he drops into the tomb, without leaving a regret or a manly recollection behind him. For all the higher purposes of life he had long been ruined—without country, without public spirit, without a sense of duty, he has lived only to eat and drink, to retail the gossip of the hour, and yawn through the day. He has abandonedall religion, and professes to think all creeds alike. His morals are of the same quality with his religion, and he creeps through society as worthless as the worm that shall soon feed on his better half—his body—in the grave.
Lord Hardwicke had now full opportunity for the display of all his talents; and their combination in one man was certainly an extraordinary evidence of the powers of discipline and nature. He was at once a first-rate lawyer, a first-rate statesman, and a first-rate public speaker. Any one of those high attainments might bring sufficient to make the business of a life—in him they were the easy attributes of a master-mind.
His oratory was not of the school which afterwards gave such eminence to Chatham. It had none of the brilliant impetuosity of that Demosthenes of English orators; but it had a captivation—the captivation of eloquence and grace—which gave interest even to the driest details of the tribunal. Lord Camden, himself a powerful public speaker, thus described Hardwicke on the bench:—
“In the Court of Chancery, multitudes would flock to hear the Lord Chancellor, asto hear Garrick. His clearness, arrangement, and comprehension of his subject, were masterly. But hisaddressin the turn which he gave to all, whether he was in the right, or was ‘to make the worse appear the better reason,’ was likemagic.”
His high employments now brought opulence with them; and he purchased from Lord Oxford the fine estate of Wimpole, in Cambridgeshire, which had come into the Oxford family by marriage with the Duke of Newcastle’s heiress. In 1740, Philip Yorke, the Chancellor’s eldest son, married the daughter of Lord Breadalbane, and grand-daughter of the Duke of Kent. Horace Walpole, in his correspondence with Conway, thus smartly sums up the good fortune of this most prosperous family:
“Harry, what luck the Chancellor has! first, indeed, to be in himself so great a man. But then, in accidents. He is made Chief Justice and Peer, when Talbot is made Chancellor and Peer. Talbot dies in a twelvemonth, and leaves him the Seals, at an age when others are scarcely made solicitors. Then he marries his son into one of the first families of Britain, obtains a patent for a marquisate, and eight thousand pounds a-year, after the Duke of Kent’s death. The Dukedies in a fortnight, and leaves them all! People talk of fortune’s wheel that is always rolling; troth, my Lord Hardwicke has overtaken her wheel, and rolled along with it.”
The present attempt to give legislative power to the Jews, an attempt whose success would inevitably change theChristian characterof the legislature, gives a revived interest to the following decision of the great Chancellor. A legacy of £12,000 having been left by a Jew, “for establishing an assembly for reading and improving the Jewish law,” and the case having been brought into court, the Chancellor decided against the application of the legacy. The note of this judgment, recorded in his own note-book, is as follows:—
“I was of opinion, that this appeared to be a charitable bequest or fund for promoting and propagating the Jewish religion, and consequentlycontrary to law. For that the Christian religionis part of the law of the land, and involved in theconstitution of this kingdom, according to my Lord Hale in Taylor’s case, 1 Ventr., and my Lord Raymond in Wolston’s case; and that it differed widely from the cases of charitable benefactions to the meeting-houses or congregations of Protestant dissenters, which are tolerated, and regulated by the Toleration Act. Therefore, Irefusedto decree for this charity.”
In March 1745, died the celebrated Sir Robert Walpole: of all the ministers of George the Second the most trusted, and of all the ministers of England the most unpopular; of all the statesmen of his day the most successful, and certainly, of all the public men of England, regarded, in his own time, as the most unscrupulous. If it be doubted that he was personally more unprincipled than other ministers, to him unquestionably was due thepracticeof corruption as an established principle of government. That any minister could have dared to adopt such a system in England, is to be accounted for only by the rapid changes of party since the beginning of the century, the changes of the Succession, the timidity of the press, yet but in its infancy, and the unsettled nature of the Brunswick throne.
In late years, Burke, inflamed with the love of splendid paradox, and delighting in the novelty of imagining personal virtue in the midst of public vice, amused his genius with throwing a factitious lustre over the memory of Walpole. But the voice of contemporary writers has been since amply echoed by the judgment of history. Walpolewasa corrupter; and, if the progress of his system had not been broken short by his fall, and by the hurried successions of ministers from each side of the House alternately, the government would perhaps have perished, or could have purified itself only by a revolution.
Walpole was a first-rate man ofcraft; his sagacity was vigilant; his industry was indefatigable; his speech plausible, and his management of the uncouth and suspicious King dexterous in a remarkable degree. But he lowered the whole tone of public life. No act of magnanimous policy ever originated with Walpole. He made no attempt, or but of the feeblest order, to add to the national intelligence. He encouraged none of the higher provinces of the arts, learning, or science; and, though he gave mitres to Butler, Gibson, and Sherlock, yet the religion of England languished scarcely less than its philosophy. It was what Burke himself subsequently termed its succeeding period, “burgomaster age,” and parliament was scarcely more than a Dutch council, until Chatham came and startled it again into life. Walpole obtains credit with posterity for the moderation of his wealth. But, beginning as the son of a country gentleman, he purchased a fine estate; he built a magnificent mansion, Houghton; he collected one of the finest private picture-galleries in Europe; and he always lived, so far as we can learn, in great affluence and expenditure.
But the country was suddenly to be tried by a new and most formidable hazard. News arrived in London that the Prince Charles Edward, the eldest son of the Pretender, had landed in Scotland, had raised the standard of the Stuarts, had been joined by some of the clans, and was determined on marching to the metropolis. This part of the Memoir is peculiarly interesting, from its giving the private impressions of individuals of rank and importance, on the everyday movements of the time.
On the 1st of August, Lady Hardwicke, who was, of course, acquainted with all the opinions of government, writes to her son Philip Yorke, who was then out of town:—“My heart is very heavy. Our folks are very busy at this time, by fresh alarms of the Pretender being in Scotland. But I believe the ship Captain Bret fought was the ship he was in. If it be so, he is not yet got there; which may give a little more time to prepare for him. The French disclaim sending him there; but that is nothing. They are to take Ostend; while Spain sends troops thence, to the other end of the kingdom, to distract our measures. This is my opinion, God grant I may be in the wrong. In the mean time, our king’s abroad, and our troops also. There comes out a proclamation this day, offering a reward for the Pretender, as I am informed.”
Lord Hardwicke had been appointed one of the Regency, on the King’s absence in Germany. And his views of the crisis were gloomy enough. In a letter to Lord Glenorchy (August 15) he says, “On Tuesday last we received advice from the Duke of Argyle and my Lord Justice Clerk, that the young Pretender was landed in the north-west parts of the Highlands. He is said to have come in a single ship of 16 or 18 guns, attended by about 70 persons, among whom are Lord Tullibardine and old Lochiel. When I look round me, and consider our whole situation,our all appears to be at stake.”
“The yachts sailed this morning for the King, who has declared he will set out from Hanover, as soon as he has heard they have arrived on the other side.”
This was desponding language from so eminent a person, but it was produced by deeper feelings than alarm at the landing of a few people in the north, though with a prince at their head. The plain truth, and no man was better aware of it than Hardwicke, was, that the conduct of the late Cabinet had utterly disgusted the nation. The contempt justly felt for Walpole had spread to higher objects; and the nation looked with an ominous quietude on the coming struggle between the young Chevalier and the possessor of the throne. As if the factions of parliament had been preparing for the success of the Stuarts, all their efforts for the last ten years had been directed to dismantle the country; all their harangues were turned to extinguishing the army, which they described as at once ruinous to the finances, and dangerous to the liberties of the country. Probably there was not a man of all those declaimers who believed a single syllable which he uttered; but “Reduction” was the party cry. With France in immense military power; with the Stuarts living under its protection; with the whole force of Popery intriguing throughout the country; and with a great number of weak people, who thought that their consciences called for the return of the exiled dynasty in the person of the Pretender, the reduction of the national defences by the ministry fell little short of treason. But when the intelligence of the prince’s arrival was brought to London, the kingdom seems to have been left almost without a soldier; every battalion being engaged in the lingering war in Germany. The King had not added to the strength of his government; his passion for going to Hanover had occasioned obvious public inconvenience, and his absence at the moment of public peril was felt with peculiar irritability. The Chancellor, on this subject, after alluding to his recovery from a slight illness, says, “Would to God, the state of our affairs were as much mended; but the clouds continue as black as ever; and how soon the storm may burst on us, we know not.”
On the first news of the Chevalier’s landing, a message had been sent to the King, to return with all haste, which he did, as is mentioned in a letter of the Chancellor to the Archbishop of York. After speaking of the difficulties of government, the letter closes with, “I had writ thus far, when a messenger from Margate brought the good news that the King landed there about half an hour after three this morning, and would be at Kensington within two hours. Accordingly, his Majesty arrived there about two o’clock, in perfect health. I really think I never saw him look better in my life. He appears also to be in very good humour, and to value himself upon the haste he has made to us, when there was any apprehension of danger affecting this country.”
In another letter, he sadly laments the absence of all public interest in the event of the Rebellion. “Can you tell what will makedouble heartstrue?... I have not slept these two nights;but sweat and prayed.... The Duke of Argyle is come to town, and done nothing; and Duke Athol is gone to a town in the Highlands, and does nothing neither. He has had Glengarrie with him, whose clan has joined the Pretender, and he is gone from him. In short, every thing is in a strange way, and nobody, hardly, is affected as they ought; at least as I am.... This is the real state of things, however they may be disguised, and I fear Sir J. Cope’snot equal to his business. God alone can save us, to whose merciful judgment we trust.”
The late Sydney Smith’s pleasantries on the novelty of invasion ideas in the brains of John Bull, and the difficulty of convincing him of the possibilities of such a thing, were fully exemplified in the cabinet, as well as in the people. The cabinet did little more than send for the King, and the King did little more than send an incompetent officer with a small detachment of troops to put down a rebellion which might have already enlisted the whole martial population of Scotland; even the Chancellor could not restrain himself from running down to one or other of his country houses, for two or three days at a time, while the government was actually trembling from hour to hour on the verge of the scaffold. This childish inability of self-control disparages the conduct of so distinguished a person. But with all his “sweating and praying,” he seems to have been totally incapable of denying himself this pitiful indulgence, when a week might see the Stuarts on the throne. At length troops were ordered from Germany, and six thousand arrived with General Ligonier. Some Dutch regiments followed; five men-of-war returned from the Mediterranean, and the British regiments were on their march through Holland. In the mean time came the startling announcement that the Pretender was in Edinburgh, that he was proclaimed there, and that he was royally lodged in Holyrood House. The Chancellor’s fears of Cope’s inefficiency were soon shown to have been prophetic. Cope had been sent to save Edinburgh,—the clans outmarched him, and Cope had no resource but to land at Dunbar. At Haddington he suddenly found the clans to the south of his force. They were about three thousand, half armed, to his two thousand two hundred disciplined troops; the Highlanders rushed upon him and routed him in a moment. The Chevalier returned to Edinburgh with a hundred pipers leading the march, and playing, “The king shall have his own again.”
The person who figures mainly at this period, and who appears to have shown alike good sense and courage, was Herring, Archbishop of York, an old friend of the Chancellor, who had recommended him to the government when but preacher at Lincoln’s Inn, obtained for him a bishopric, and pushed him forward into the Archbishopric of York. Herring was afterwards promoted to Canterbury, perhaps as a reward of his loyalty and manliness in this delicate and difficult time. Herring was evidently a sensible and high-minded man, and his letters to the Chancellor figure conspicuously among the mass of correspondence received by Hardwicke. On the battle of Prestonpans, this vigorous prelate thus wrote:—
“I conceal it, but I own I conceive terrible apprehensions from the affair at Prestonpans, where the conduct of our general, &c., was —— I won’t give it the right name, but that of the rebels excellent; and, from what I can collect, and the judgment which I form upon the opinion of the soldiers here, they are admirably disciplined, and, our soldiers have felt, well armed. They showed resolution and conduct in taking the little battery, and as they are vigorous and savage, their leaders well know how to point their strength properly and effectually. There is something, too, in their artful taciturnity that alarms one. They say it is a fact that from their setting out to this hour it is not easy to say who leads them, nor are they seen in a manner till they are felt, so silent and well conceived are their motions. I hope all this is known above much better than it is here, and that it is now seen that this rebellion is not to be quashed by small pelotons of an army, but must be attended tototis viribus. Who can say what will be the consequence of such an advantage gained in England?” In another letter Herring mentions that a meeting of the county was held at York, at which he presided.
London was of course full of rumours, and a letter from Lady Hardwicke gives them in grave yet ridiculous detail. After saying that the merchants had stopped the run upon the bank, she mentions a report that the Chancellor was turned out; that the Duke of Newcastle and his brother had run away, some said, to the Pretender; and others, that Lestock, the Admiral, had produced three letters from him forbidding him to fight; and these reports gained a universal run. People were told at the turnpikes as they passed through, that London was in an uproar and his Grace fled. Nay, the mobs gathered in crowds about his house, and saw some of the shutters unopened, whence they concluded he was gone; and when he went out they surrounded his chariot, and looked him in the face and said, “It is he! he is not gone. What is our condition, when such monstrous lies are spread to increase the terrors of honest minds?”
The Archbishop’s exertions gave great satisfaction to the King, whom he had so worthily and courageously served; and the Chancellor immediately wrote him an account of an interview which he had with his Majesty on the occasion. “I own,” said he, “I feel a particular pleasure in the great and noble part which your Grace has taken on this occasion, and in the gallant, wise, and becoming manner in which you have exerted yourself. I was so full of it, that I went immediately to Kensington, and gave the King an ample account of it in his closet. I found him apprised of it in the Lord Lieutenant’s letters, which he had received from the Duke of Newcastle; but he was so pleased with it that he was desirous of hearing it over again. I informed his Majesty of the substance of your letter, the sermon your Grace had preached last Sunday, and with such prodigious expedition printed and dispersed; and when I came to your speech, he desired me to show it him. His Majesty read it over from beginning to end, gave it the just praise it so highly deserves, and said it must be printed. I told him I believed it was printing at York, but it is determined to print it in the Gazette. When I had gone through this part, I said, your Majesty will give me leave to acquaint my Lord Archbishop that you approve his zeal and activity in your service—to which the King answered quick, My lord, that is not enough; you must also tell the Archbishop that I heartily thank him for it. His Majesty also highly applauded the affection, zeal, and unanimity which had appeared in the several lords and gentlemen on this occasion.”
The Chancellor also informs him that ten British regiments had arrived from Flanders, and that eight battalions more, and 1500 dragoons were ordered to embark. He then makes a natural and just remark on the faction that had clamoured against putting the country into a state of defence. “I know some friends of yours who had talked themselves hoarse in contending for this measure, and whose advice, if followed some time ago, might have prevented, in all human probability, this dismal scene. But the conduct ofsome personson this occasion has been infamous.” He then marks the true conduct to be adopted in all instances of civil war. “A great body of forces will forthwith be sent to the North. I contend every where, that they must be agreat body, for the protection of the King’s crown and his people. The work of the Revolution, which has been building up these seven-and-fifty years, must not be risked upon an even chance.” Such is true policy. The defence of an empire must not be risked upon a chance; the benighted and dishonest theorists, who would enfeeble the defences of England in our day, for the sake of gaining the clamour of a mob, would be the first to fly in the hour of danger; and although thecertaintyof a French war from the ambition of the monarchy, is at an end, and the Prince de Joinville is not likely to realise the suggestions of his detestable pamphlet, and have the honour of pouncing on our sea-coast villages; a Republic is a neighbour to which we have not been accustomed for a long while, and which, with the best intentions for the present, may very suddenly change its mind.
Another letter from Herring shows the gallant spirit which may exist under lawn sleeves. “I purposed,” said he, “to have set out for London on Wednesday; but I have had a sort of remembrance from the city here (York) that it will create some uneasiness. There is a great matter in opinion; and if my attendance at Bishopsthorpe serves to support a spirit, or to preserve a union, or that the people think so, I will not stir.... I have therefore put off my journey, but ordered my affairs so, that at the least intimation from your Lordship, I canvasa conclamare, and set out in an hour. To talk in the style military, (though my red coat is not made yet,) the firstcolumnof my family went off a week ago, the second moves on Wednesday, and the third attends my motions. I purpose to leave my house in a condition to receive the Marshal, if he pleases to make use of it. And there is a sort of policy in my civility, too; for while he occupies it, it cannot be plundered. I know your Lordship has ever an anxiety for your friends. But, if I must fly, the General and his hussars have offered to cover my retreat. But enough of this; I had rather laugh when the battle is won, and could not help putting up an ejaculation at the pond-side to-night,—Heaven grant I may feed my swans in peace!”
The mention of the red coat was probably suggested by a report that the Archbishop had been seen in uniform. And the “hussars” were a troop of young gentlemen, whom General Oglethorpe had embodied at York.
The prelate was somewhat of a humorist; and he thus writes on his military reputation:—“I find I must go into regimentals, in my own defence, in a double sense; for an engraver has already given me a Saracen’s head, surrounded with a chevalier in chains, and all the instruments of war, and the hydra of rebellion at my feet. And I see another copperplate promised, where I am to be exhibited in the same martial attitude, with all my clergy with me. By my troth, as I judge from applications made to me every day, I believe I could raise a regiment of my own order. And I had a serious offer the other day from a Welch curate, from the bottom of Merionethshire, who is six feet and a half high, that, hearing that I had put on scarlet, he was ready to attend me at an hour’s warning, if the Bishop of Bangor did not call upon him for the same service.”
The disregard of all preparation had left the whole English border defenceless. Hull and Carlisle were the only towns which had any means of resistance. York had walls, but they were in a state of decay, and had not a single piece of artillery. Thus the invaders were enabled to pursue any road which they pleased. But their entrance into England should have taught them that their enterprise had become hopeless. The country people every where fled before them—the roads were filled with the carriages and waggons of the gentry hurrying to places of safety. No gentleman of rank joined them. One army was on their rear, and the main army, under the Duke of Cumberland, was between them and London.
In the metropolis, the spirit of the people, always slow, until the danger is visible, now awoke. The lawyers, in a procession of two hundred and fifty carriages, carried up an address to the King, assuring him of their loyalty. The trained bands were summoned. Troops were sent to the coast to watch the French, if they should attempt invasion; alarm-posts and signals were appointed in case of tumults in London, and the capital was at length in safety against a much superior force to that of the Chevalier. But in December the gratifying news came, that on the 5th the invaders had retired from Derby, and were rapidly returning to the North.
The disorder and exhaustion of those gallant but unfortunate men, must have left them an easy prey to the superior forces which were now on their track, when the pursuit was suddenly stopped by an alarm of French invasion. Twelve thousand men had suddenly been collected; the Duke of Richelieu, with the Pretender’s second son, had come to Dunkirk; transports were gathered along the coast; and the invasion would probably have been attempted, but for a storm which drove many of their ships ashore near Calais. The troops in London were but six thousand! The 16th of April, at Culloden, closed this most unhappy struggle, and gave an internal peace to England which has never been broken.
The remarks in the memoir on this daring enterprise seem to be imperfect. The first is, that if England was to have been invaded at all, the effort should have been made before the army could be brought from Flanders. The second is, that the retreat from Derby should have been exchanged for a march on London. But the former would have required a totally different plan of operations. The Prince should have landed in Kent, if his object was to take London by surprise. But, as his only troops must be the clans, he must look for them in the North; and it would have been impossible to march an army from the Highlands to the metropolis in less than a fortnight. On the second point, the retreat from Derby was obviously necessary. The clans were already diminishing—every step must be fought for—they were but half armed—and the King’s troops were increasing day by day.
In one remark we agree, that the Chevalier should never have attempted more than the possession of Scotland. He should have remained in Holyrood House. There he had a majority of the nation in his favour,—the heads of the clans, and the old romantic recollections of his ancestral kings, all tending to support his throne. A French force might have been easily summoned to his assistance, and for a while he might have maintained a separate sovereignty. It is, on the other hand, not improbable that the Scottish nation might have looked on the sovereignty of a son of James, the persecutor, with jealousy; Protestantism would have dreaded a French alliance; and the expulsion of the Chevalier would have been effected in Scotland on the model of the English expulsion of James. Still, the experiment was feasible for the claimant of a crown; and the success of the adventure might have continued long enough to produce great evil to both countries.
We have found these volumes highly interesting, not merely from the importance of their period, but from their containing events so curiously parallel to those of our own time. Among the rest was the appointment to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. A letter from Charles Yorke thus says:—“The Archbishop of Canterbury died suddenly on Saturday. The Bishop of London has declined the offer of succeeding. It is now offered to the Bishop of Salisbury, who has not yet returned an answer. If he refuses, which some say he will, the Archbishop of York will be the man.”