LIFE AND TIMES OF GEORGE II.[8]

It has been the fortune of England to have undergone more revolutions than any other kingdom of Europe. Later periods have made Revolution synonymous with popular violence; but the more effectual revolution is that which, being required by the necessities of a people, is directed by the national judgment. It is not the convulsion of a tempest, which, if it purifies the air, strips the soil; it is a change, not of temperature but of the seasons, gradual but irresistible; it is a great operation of moral Nature, in every change preparing for the more abundant provision of public prosperity.

It is an equally remarkable contrast to the condition of other kingdoms, that while their popular revolutions have almost always plunged the country into confusion, and been ultimately rectified only by the salutary despotism of some powerful master, the hazards of our revolutions have chiefly originated in personal ambition, and have been reduced to order by popular sentiment.

The Reformation was the firstgreatrevolution of England: it formed the national circle of light and darkness. All beyond it was civil war, arbitrary power, and popular wretchedness—all within it has been progress, growing vigour, increasing illumination, and more systematic liberty. Like the day, it had its clouds; but the sun was still above, ready to shine through their first opening. That sun has not yet stooped from its meridian, and will go down, only when we forget to honour the Beneficence and the power which commanded it to shine.

The accession of the Hanoverian line was one of those peaceful revolutions—it closed the era of Jacobitism. The reign of Anne had vibrated between the principles of the constitution and the principles of Charles II. Never was a balance more evenly poised, than the fate of freedom against the return to arbitrary power. Anne herself was a Jacobite—she had all the superstition of “Divine right.” By her nature she had the infirmities of the convent. She was evidently fitter to be an abbess than a queen: a character of frigidness and formality designated her for the cloister; and if the Hanoverian succession had not been palpably prepared before the national eye, to ascend the throne at the moment when the royal coffin sank into the vault, England might have seen the profligate son of James dealing out vengeance through a corrupted or terrified legislature; the Reformation extinguished by the Inquisitor; the jesuit at the royal ear, mass in Westminster Abbey, and the scaffold the instrument of conversion to the supremacy of Rome.

The expulsion of the Stuarts had left the throne to the disposal of the nation. By the Bill of Rights, it was determined that the succession should go to the heirs of William and Mary; and, in their default, to Anne, daughter of James. But the deaths of Mary, and of the Duke of Gloucester, awoke the hopes of Popery and the cabals of Jacobitism once more. The danger was imminent. William became deeply anxious for the Protestant succession, and a bill was brought into the House of Commons, declaring that the crown should devolve on the Electress Sophia, Duchess-dowager of Hanover, and her heirs,—the Electress of Hanover (or more correctly, of Brunswick and Luneburg) being the tenth child of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, daughter of James I., the only Protestant princess among the foreign relations of the line. The next in succession to Anne in the Roman Catholic line would have been the houses of Savoy, France, and Spain, through Henrietta, daughter of Charles I. This order of succession was made law by the 12th of William III., and confirmed in the next session by the Abjuration Act, (13th William,) so named from the oathabjuringthe Pretender.

It is striking to observe how many high matters of legislation have seemed the work of casualty. The Habeas Corpus Act, confessedly the noblest achievement of British liberty since Magna Charta, was said to have been carried by a mistake in counting the votes of the House; the limitation to the Electress was proposed by a half-lunatic; the oath of abjuration was carried but by a majority of one; and the Reform Bill, which, though a measure as doubtful in its principles as disappointing in its promises, has yet exercised an extraordinary power over the constitution, was carried in its second reading by a majority of only one.

It is more important to observe how large a share of legislation, in the reign of Anne, was devoted to the security of the Protestant succession. The 4th, 6th, and 10th of Anne are occupied in devising clauses to give it force. It was guaranteed in all the great diplomatic transactions of the reign,—in the Dutch Treaty of 1706, in the Barrier Treaty of 1709, in the Guarantee Treaty of 1713, and in the Treaty of Utrecht of the same year, between England and France, and England and Spain.

This diligence and determination seem wholly due to the spirit of the people. The Queen was almost a Jacobite; her ministers carried on correspondences with the family of James; there was scarcely a man of influence in public life who had not an agent at St Germains. Honest scruples, too, had been long entertained among individuals of high rank. Six of the seven bishops who had so boldly resisted the arrogance of James, shrank from repudiating the claims of his son. It is true, that nothing could be feebler than their reasons; for nothing could be more evident than the treason of James to the oath which he had sworn at his coronation. Its violation was his virtual dethronement—his abdication was his actual dethronement; and the principles of his family, all Papists like himself, rendered it impossible to possess freedom of conscience, while any one of a race of bigots and tyrants retained the power to oppress. Thus the nation only vindicated itself, and used only the common rights of selfdefence; and used them only in the calm and deliberate forms of self-preservation.

This strong abhorrence of the exiled family arose alike from a sense of religion, and a sense of fear. The people had seen with disgust and disdain the persecution of Protestantism by the French King. They had seen the scandalous treachery which had broken all compacts, the ostentatious falsehood which had trafficked in promises, and the remorseless cruelty which had strewed the Protestant provinces with dead. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes gave a sanguinary and perpetual caution “not to put their trust in princes;” and the generous spirit of the people, doubly excited by scorn for the persecutor, and pity for his victims, was thenceforth armed in panoply alike against the arts and the menaces of Jacobitism and Popery. So it has been, and so may it ever be. The Stuarts have passed away—they mouldered from the sight of men; they have no more place or name on earth; they have been sunk in the mire of their monkism; their “drowned honour” is incapable of being plucked up even “by the locks;” but their principles survive, and against their corruption we must guard the very air we breathe.

The Electress, a woman of remarkable intelligence, died in 1714, in her 84th year. The Queen died in the August following. George I., Elector of Brunswick, son of Sophia, arrived in England in September, and was King of the fairest empire in the world. He was then fifty-four years old.

The habits of George I. were Continental—a phrase which implies all of laxity that is consistent with the etiquette of a court. His personal reign was anxious, troubled, and toilsome; but the nation prospered, and the era had evidently arrived when the character of the sitter on the throne had ceased to attract the interest, or influence the conduct of the nation. The King had no taste for the fine arts: he had no knowledge of literature. He had served in the army, like all the German princes, but had served without distinction. He loved Hanoverian life, and he was incapable of enjoying the life of England. He lived long enough to be easily forgotten, and died of apoplexy on hisway to Hanover!

George II., the chief object of these Memoirs, only son of George I. and Sophia Dorothea, was forty-four at his accession. In 1705 he had married Caroline, daughter of the Margrave of Brandenburg Anspach.

The reign of George II. was the era of another revolution—the supremacy of ministers. A succession of ambitious and able men governed the country by parties. The King was intelligent and active, yet they controlled him, until he found his chief task to be limited to obedience. He was singularly fond of power, and openly jealous of authority, but his successive ministers were the virtual masters of the crown. His chief vexations arose from their struggles for office; and his only compensation to his injured feelings was, in dismissing one cabinet, to find himself shackled by another. He seems to have lived in a state of constant ebullition with the world—speaking sarcastically of every leading person of his own society, and on harsh terms with his family. His personal habits were incapable of being praised, even by flattery, and the names of the Walmodens, the Deloraines, and the Howards, still startle the graver sensibilities of our time.

But his public conduct forms a striking contrast to those painful scenes. He was bold in conception and diligent in business. He felt the honour of being an English king; and though he wasted time and popularity in his childish habit of making his escape to Hanover whenever he could, he offered no wilful offence to the feelings of the people. His letters on public affairs exhibit strong sense, and he had the wisdom to leave his finance in the hands of Walpole, and the manliness to suffer himself to be afterwards eclipsed by the lustre of Chatham. His reign, which had begun in difficulties, and was carried on in perils, closed in triumph.—The French navy was swept from the ocean; the battle of the Heights of Abraham gave him Canada; the battle of Plassy gave him India; and at his death, in 1760, at the age of seventy-seven, he left England in a blaze of glory.

The death of George I. had brought Walpole forward as the minister of his son. The story of Sir Spencer Compton has been often told, but never so well as in these Memoirs. The King died on the 11th of June 1727 at Osnaburg. The news reached Walpole on the 14th, at his villa in Chelsea. He immediately went to Richmond to acquaint the Prince of Wales with this momentous intelligence. The Prince was asleep after dinner, according to his custom; but he was awakened for the intelligence, which he appeared to receive with surprise. Yet, neither the sense of his being raised to a throne, nor the natural feelings of such an occasion, prevented the exhibition of his dislike to Walpole. On being asked, when it was his pleasure that the Council should be summoned, the King’s abrupt answer was, “Go to Chiswick, and take your directions from Sir Spencer Compton.” Sir Robert bore this ill-usage with his habitual philosophy, and went to Compton at once. There he acted with his usual address; told him that he was minister, and requested his protection; declaring that he had no desire for power or business, but wished to have one of the “white sticks,” as a mark that he was still under the shelter of the crown.

Lord Hervey delights in portraiture, and his portraits generally have a bitter reality, which at once proves the truth of the likeness and the severity of the artist. He daguerreotypes all his generation. He thus describes Sir Spencer: “He was a plodding, heavy fellow, with great application but no talents; with vast complaisance for a court; always more concerned for the manner of the thing than for the thing itself; fitter for a clerk to a minister than for a minister to a prince. His only pleasures were money and eating; his only knowledge forms and precedents; and his only insinuation bows and smiles.” Walpole and he went together to the Duke of Devonshire, President of the Council, but laid up with the gout. Lord Hervey’s sketch of him is certainly not flattering—but such is the price paid by personal feebleness for public station—“He was more able as a virtuoso than a statesman, and a much better jockey than a politician.”

At the council Sir Spencer took Walpole aside, and begged of him, as a speech would be necessary for the King in Council, that, as Sir Robert was more accustomed to that sort of composition than himself, he should go into another room, and make a draft of the speech. Sir Robert retired to draw up his paper, and Sir Spencer went to Leicester Fields, where the King and Queen were already, followed by all who had any thing to ask, or any thing to hope—a definition which seems to have included the whole of what, in later parlance, are called the fashionable world. Whether the present sincerity of court life is purer than of old may be doubtful, but the older manners were certainly the more barefaced. When the new premier was returning to his coach he walked through a lane of “bowers,” all shouldering each other to pay adoration to the new idol.

During the four days of the King’s remaining in town, Leicester House, which used to be a desert, was “thronged from morning till night, like the ‘Change at noon.’” But Walpole walked through those rooms “as if they had been empty.” The same people who were officiously, a-week before, crowding the way to flatter his prosperity, were now getting out of it to avoid sharing his disgrace. Horace Walpole says, that his mother could not make her way to pay her respects to the King and Queen between the scornful backs and elbows of her late devotees, nor could approach nearer to the Queen than the third or fourth row, until the Queen cried out,—“There, I am sure I see a friend.” The torrent then divided, and shrank to either side. In short, Walpole, with his brother Horace, ambassador to France, the Duke of Newcastle and Lord Townshend, the two Secretaries of State, were all conceived to be as much undone, as a pasha on the arrival of the janizary with the bowstring.

The evidences, it must be owned, seemed remarkably strong. The King had openly, and more than once, called Walpole “rogue and rascal;” he had called the ambassador “a scoundrel and a fool;” he had declared his utter contempt for the Duke, and his determination never to forgive him. Townshend fared still worse. The King looked on him to be no more an honest man than an able minister, and attributed all the confusion in foreign affairs to the heat of his temper and his scanty genius, to the strength of his passions and the weakness of his understanding. There can be no doubt that a minister of foreign affairs, with those qualities, might become a very mischievous animal.

On Compton’s receiving the speech drawn up by Walpole, he carried it, in his own handwriting, to the King. The King objected to a paragraph, which Sir Spencer Compton was either unwilling or unable to amend; and not being satisfied of his own powers of persuasion, he actually solicited Walpole to go to the King, and persuade him to leave it as it was! The Queen, who was the friend of Walpole, instantly took advantage of this singular acknowledgment of inferiority, and advised the King to retain the man whom his intended successor so clearly acknowledged to be his superior.

Nothing can be more evident than that Sir Spencer played the fool egregiously. To place a rival in immediate communication with the King was, at least, an unusual way of supplanting him; while, to give him the advantage of his authorship, by sending him to explain it to the King, would have been ridiculous under any circumstances. But there are no miracles in politics; and he was evidently so far convinced of his own security, that the idea of a rival was out of the question. Compton had been all his life a political personage. He had been Paymaster; he had been Speaker in three Parliaments; he wasau faitin the routine of office; and he had evidently received the King’s order to make a ministry. But we have had such sufficient proof in our own time that princes and kings are different persons according to circumstances, that we can perfectly comprehend the cessation of the royal favouritism on one side, and of the royal aversion on the other. The civil list was still to be voted—the subject dearest to the royal heart. Walpole was noted for financial management, and Compton’s awkwardness in the preceding transaction might well have startled the monarch. The general result was, that Walpole remained minister, Compton was quietly put out of the way with a peerage, as Lord Wilmington, and an enormous civil list was carried, with but a single vote, that of Mr William Shippen, against it. The civil list was little less than £900,000 a-year, an immense revenue, when we consider that the value of money at that time probably made it equal to double the sum now. The present civil list would be practically not much more than a fourth of the amount in 1777. The Queen’s jointure was equally exorbitant; it was £100,000 a-year, besides Somerset House and Richmond Lodge, a sum amounting to double what any Queen of England had before.

Walpole was now paramount; he had purchased his supremacy by his official prodigality. Lord Hervey thinks that he was still hurt by two mortifications—the displacement of his son-in-law, Lord Malpas, and of Sir William Yonge, a Lord of the Treasury, and his notorious tool. But, contrasting those trifling changes with the plenitude of Walpole’s power, and recollecting the extraordinary wiliness of his nature, it seems not improbable that he either counselled or countenanced those dismissals, to escape the invidiousness of absolute power; for both Malpas and Yonge clung to the court, and, after a decent interval, were replaced in office. Walpole was, perhaps, one of the most singular instances of personal dexterity in the annals of statesmanship. Without eloquence in the House, or character out of it; without manners in the court, or virtue any where, he continued to hold supreme ministerial power for nearly a quarter of a century, under the most jealous of kings, with the weakest of cabinets, against the most powerful Opposition, and in the midst of the most contemptuous people. His power seems even to have grown out of those sinister elements. By constantly balancing them against each other, by at once awaking fears and exciting hopes, he deluded all the fools, and enlisted all the knaves of public life in his cause. The permanency of his office, however, wholly rested upon the Queen; and he had the dexterity to discover, from the moment of the Royal accession, that, insulted as she was by the King’s conduct, she was the true source of ministerial power. He accordingly adhered to her, in all the fluctuations of the court, appeared to consult her on all occasions, studied her opinions, and provided for her expenses. The want of money, or its possession, seem to have exerted an extraordinary influence on the higher ranks in those days; and one of the first acts of Walpole was to offer the Queen £60,000 a-year. Sir Spencer Compton had been impolitic enough to propose but £40,000, on the ground that this sum had been sufficient for Charles II.’s queen. The sum was at last settled at £50,000, and the donor was not forgotten.

But it seems impossible to doubt, that Walpole’s character was essentially corrupt; that he regarded corruption as a legitimate source of power; that he bribed every man whom he had the opportunity to bribe: that he laughed at political integrity, and did his best to extinguish the little that existed; that no minister ever went further to degrade the character of public life; and that the period of his supremacy is a general blot upon the reign, the time, and the people.

The celebrated Burke, in that magnanimous partiality which disposed him to overlook the vices of individuals in the effect of their measures, has given a high-flown panegyric on the administration of Walpole; but the whole is a brilliant paradox. He looked only to the strength of the Brunswick succession, and, taking his stand upon that height, from which he surveyed grand results alone, neglected or disdained to examine into the repulsive detail. Seeing before him a national harvest of peace and plenty, he never condescended to look to the gross and offensive material by which the furrow was fertilised. Nothing is more certain, than that the daily acts of Walpole would now stamp a ministry with shame—that no man would dare now to express the sentiments which form the maxims of the minister; and that any one of the acts which, though they passed with many a sneer, yet passed with practical impunity, in the days of George II., would have ruined the proudest individual, and extinguished the most powerful cabinet, of the last fifty years.

The arguments which Lord Hervey puts into the lips of the Queen are scarcely less corrupt in another style. She tells the King not merely that Walpole’s long experience and known abilities would make him the best minister, but that his simply being in power would make him the most submissive—that his having made a vast fortune already would make him less solicitous about his own interest—thatnewleeches would be more hungry, and that, Walpole’s fortune being made, he would have nothing in view but serving the King, and securing the government, to keep what he had got—closing all this grave advice with that maxim of consummate craft, that in royal breasts both enmity and friendship alike should always give way to policy. If such were to be regarded as the habitual rules of the highest rank, well might we remonstrate against their baseness. The bigotry of James, or the morals of Charles II., would be preferable to this scandalous selfishness. But those maxims have never found tolerance among the people of England. We are to recollect that they came from a despotic soil, that they were the wisdom of courts where the great corrective of state-craft, public opinion, was unknown; that they were the courage of the timid, and the integrity of the intriguing; and that the maxims, the manners, and the system, have alike been long since consigned to a deserved and contemptuous oblivion.

By much the best part of Lord Hervey’s authorship consists in his characters of public personages. No rank is suffered to shield any man. He exercises a sort of Egyptian judgment even upon kings, and pronounces sentence upon their faults with all the indignation of posthumous virtue. The King of France at that period had begun to exercise a powerful influence over Europe. France, always liable to great changes, had been for half a century almost prostrated before the great powers of Europe. The triumphs of Marlborough in the earliest years of the century had swept her armies from the field, as the close of the preceding century had desolated the industry of her southern provinces by persecution. The supremacy of the Regent had subsequently dissolved almost the whole remaining force of public character in a flood of profligacy, and the reigning King was perhaps the most profligate man in the most licentious nation of the world. The description of him in these volumes is equally disdainful and true. “I cannot,” says Lord Hervey, “by the best accounts I have had, and by what I have myself seen of this insensible piece of royalty, venture absolutely to say that he was of a good or bad disposition, for, more properly speaking, he was of no disposition at all. He was neither merciful nor cruel, without affection or enmity, without gratitude or resentment, and, to all appearance, without pleasure or pain.” His actions are described as resembling more the mechanical movements of an automaton, than the effects of will and reason. The state of his mind seemed to be a complete apathy, neither acting nor acted on. If he had any passion, it was avarice; and if he took pleasure in any amusement, it was in gaming. It is observed that he had not any share in the “epidemical gaiety that runs through the French nation.” He appeared to take as little pleasure as he gave, to live to as little purpose to himself as to any body else, and to have no more joy in being King, than his people had advantage in being his subjects.

It was the good fortune of France to be governed at this period by Cardinal Fleury, a man of no distinction for talents, yet possessing a plain, practical understanding, habitual prudence, and personal honesty. But his most important qualification was a remarkable absence of the passion for disturbing the world, which seems to have made him an exception to all Frenchmen since the days of Julius Cæsar. Fleury loved peace, and was so far an illustrious anomaly in French nature. Something of this singular contradiction to his countrymen may have arisen from his being eighty years old, from his habits as an ecclesiastic, and from his being fully acquainted with the fact, that France had not the power to go to war. The result of this policy was not merely tranquillising to Europe, but fortunate for France. Her task was to recover from the wasteful wars of Louis XIV., from the general corruption of the Regency, from the financial follies of the Mississippi scheme, and from the weak and rapacious ministry of the Duke of Bourbon. The administration of Cardinal Fleury met all her evils, and met them with patience, and thus with success. France has been always the great disturber of Europe, and will be so whenever she has the power to disturb; but the old Cardinal, conscious of her helplessness, applied himself to restrain her ambition, and taught her that the indulgence of vanity was no compensation for defeat, and that war was folly, at least until success was possible. Under this rational course of government, the public mind was turned to intellectual advancement and national industry. Paris, instead of being the centre of European profligacy, rapidly became the centre of European science. A succession of extraordinary men threw light upon every kingdom of nature and knowledge. The Continent actually basked in the beams of France; her language became universal, her literature the general model, her taste the leader of European refinement, her manners the standard of fashion to the world; and, at the accession of the unfortunate Louis XVI., Paris, the court, and the people, possessed an acknowledged supremacy over the opinions, the habits, and the accomplishments of Europe, to which no kingdom of the modern world has ever exhibited a parallel.

The closing period of the eighteenth century has already been given to the world by a historian equal to the magnitude of his subject. The “History of the French Revolution,” by Alison, will never be superseded. The extent of its information, the clearness of its details, the freshness and fidelity of its descriptions, and the force and vividness of its language, place it at the head of all contemporary annals. But we should wish also to see a History of the whole preceding portion of the century. The French Revolution was a result: we should desire to see the origin. It was a burst of gigantic violence, and gigantic strength: we should desire to have the primalmythof this assault of the Titans; the narrative of their growth, their passions, and their powers, until the moment when they moved against the battlements of all that was lofty, magnificent, and glittering in the land. There is nothing without a cause on earth,—accident is a name which has no place in the Providential supremacy of things. To investigate the sources of even the common events of nature, is a subject worthy of the philosopher. But there never was a time when it was more important to connect its mightier changes with the mystery in which they find their birth; to ascertain the laws of national convulsion; to fix the theory of moral storms and inundations. Such would be among the highest services, as they might administer to the most effective security of the social system.

It strikes us, that our chief historians have hitherto limited their view too much to England: a broader view would have been more productive. The combinations of this great country with the Continental kingdoms; the contrasts furnished by them all; the variety in their means of working out the same object of national power; their comparative tardiness; even their failures, would have supplied new conceptions of history, and have added alike to the illustration and the interest of that political science which is among the noblest bequests of a great nation to posterity. We are fully convinced that politics, rightly examined, will be found to constitute asystem, as much as astronomy, and that asolitarykingdom would be as much a contradiction to nature as a solitary star.

We now glance over the pages of these volumes: they are very amusing. If they do not give the courtcostumesof a hundred years ago, they give the mental costumes. The witty and the wise, the great and the little, pass before the eye with the rapidity and the oddity of the figures in a show-box. Kings, queens, and courtiers are exhibited to the life; and, harsh as their physiognomies may sometimes seem, the exhibition is always amusing.

The King was generally regarded as being governed by his wife, and the opinion was not the less general because the King constantly boasted of his own independence. One day, alluding to this subject, he said, “Charles I. was governed by his wife, Charles II. by his mistresses, James by his priests, William by his men-favourites, and Anne by her women-favourites.” He then turned with a significant and satisfied air, and asked, “Who do they say governs now?” The political squibs of the time were, however, of a different opinion from the King. For example—

“You may strut, dapper George, but ‘twill all be in vain,We know ’tis Queen Caroline, not you, that reign—You govern no more than Don Philip of Spain.Then, if you would have us fall down and adore you,Lock up your fat spouse, as your dad did before you.”

“You may strut, dapper George, but ‘twill all be in vain,

We know ’tis Queen Caroline, not you, that reign—

You govern no more than Don Philip of Spain.

Then, if you would have us fall down and adore you,

Lock up your fat spouse, as your dad did before you.”

The “dapper” was an allusion to the King’s figure, which was much under size. The locking up was an allusion to the imprisonment of the wife of George I., whom, by an atrocious act of cruelty, he had shut up in one of his castles for thirty-two years. It argues something in favour of the progress of public opinion, that in our day the most despotic or powerful sovereign of Europe would not dare to commit an act, which was then committed with perfect impunity by a little German Elector. Another of those squibs began—

“Since England was England there never was seenSo strutting a King, and so prating a Queen.”

“Since England was England there never was seen

So strutting a King, and so prating a Queen.”

The first of those brought Lord Scarborough into a formidable scrape; for, being taxed by the King with having seen it, evidently in private, the King demanded to know who had shown it to him. Scarborough declared that he was on his honour, not to reveal it. On this the King became furious, and said to him, “Had I been Lord Scarborough in this situation, and you king, the man should have shot me, or I him, who had dared to affront me in the person of my master, by showing me such insolent nonsense!” His Lordship replied, that he never told his Majesty it was a man from whom he had it. He consequently left the King, (who never spoke to him for three months after,) almost as much irritated against him as the author.

Lord Hervey’s portrait of the celebrated Chesterfield is a work of elaborate peevishness. It has all the marks of an angry rival, and all the caricature of a pen dipped in personal mortification. He allows him wit, but with an utter “mismanagement in its use;” talent without common-sense, and a ridiculous propensity to love-making, with an ungainly face and a repulsive figure. This character is new to those who have been so long accustomed to regard Chesterfield even on the more unfavourable side of his character. To his admirers the portrait is of course intolerable; but we must leave some future biographer to settle those matters with the ghost of his libeller.

An anecdote is given illustrative of the violence of Lord Townshend’s temper, and the cutting calmness of Walpole’s. Townshend was a man of considerable powers, but singularly irritable. He had been from an early period engaged in office, and was a constant debater in the House. His temper, however, made him so publicly disliked, and his selfishness so much alienated public men, that when he left office he did not leave a regret behind. He was followed only by epigrams, of which one is given—

“With such a head, and such a heart,If fortune fails to take thy part,And long continues thus unkind,She must be deaf as well as blind,And, quite reversing every rule,Nor see the knave, nor hear the fool.”

“With such a head, and such a heart,

If fortune fails to take thy part,

And long continues thus unkind,

She must be deaf as well as blind,

And, quite reversing every rule,

Nor see the knave, nor hear the fool.”

Lord Townshend had been Foreign Secretary, and Walpole had to defend his blunders in the Commons. This made the latter anxious, and the former jealous. Another source of discontent was added, probably with still greater effect. Walpole, who had begun as a subordinate to Townshend, had risen above him. He had begun poor, and now exceeded him in fortune; and, as the last offence, he had built Houghton, a much handsomer mansion than Lord Townshend’s house at Raynham, which his lordship had once considered as the boast of Norfolk. Thus both were in a condition for perpetual squabble. The anecdote to which we have alluded was this:—One evening, at Windsor, on the Queen’s asking Walpole and Townshend where they had dined that day, the latter said that he had dined at home with Lord and Lady Trevor; on which Walpole said to her Majesty, smiling, “My lord, Madam, I think, is growncoquetfrom a long widowhood, and has some design upon my Lady Trevor; for his assiduity of late, in that family, is grown so much beyond common civility, that without this solution I know not how to account for it.” The burlesque of this not very decorous observation was obvious, for Lady Trevor was nearly seventy years old, and, besides being a woman of character, was of the “most forbidding countenance that natural ugliness, age, and small-pox, ever compounded.”

But Townshend, affecting to take the remark literally, replied with great warmth—“No, sir, I am not one of those fine gentlemen who find no time of life, nor any station in the world, preservatives against follies and immoralities that are hardly excusable when youth and idleness make us most liable,” &c., &c. In short, his lordship made a speech in which his voice trembled, and every limb shook with passion. But Walpole, always master of his temper, made him no other answer than asking him with a smile, and in a very mild tone of voice, “What, my lord, all this for Lady Trevor!”

The Queen grew uneasy, and, to avoid Townshend’s replying, only laughed, and turned the conversation.

An anecdote is told of the Duchess of Queensberry’s being forbid the court; which belongs to the literary history of the cleverest opera in our own or any other language—Gay’s famous production. Walpole, justly regarding himself as caricatured in the “Beggar’s Opera,” obtained the Duke of Grafton’s authority as Lord Chamberlain to suppress the representation of his next opera, “Polly.” Gay resolved to publish it by subscription, and his patroness, the Duchess of Queensberry, put herself at the head of the undertaking, and solicited every person she met, to subscribe. As the Duchess was handsome, a wit, and of the first fashion, she obtained guineas in all directions, even from those who dreaded to encourage this act of defiance. The Duchess’s zeal, however, increased with her success; and she even came to the drawing-room, and under the very eye of majesty solicited subscriptions for a play which the monarch had forbidden to be acted. When the King came into the drawing-room, seeing the Duchess very busy in a corner with three or four persons, he asked her what she was doing. She answered, “What must be agreeable, she was sure, to any body so humane as his Majesty, for it was an act of charity; and a charity to which she did not despair of bringing his Majesty to contribute.” This proceeding was so much resented, that Mr Stanhope, vice-chamberlain to the King, was sent in form to the Duchess to forbid her coming to court. The message was verbal; but she desired to send a written answer—wrote it on the spot—and thus furnished a document, whose style certainly exhibited more sincerity than courtiership.

“That the Duchess of Queensberry is surprised and well pleased that the King has given her so agreeable a command as to stay from court, where she never came for diversion, but to bestow a great civility on the King and Queen. She hopes that, by such an unprecedented order as this, the King will see as few as he wishes at his court, particularly such as dare to think or speak truth. I dare not do otherwise, and ought not, nor could have imagined that it would not have been the very highest compliment I could possibly pay the King, to endeavour to support truth and innocence in his house—particularly when the King and Queen both told me that they had not read Mr Gay’s play. I have certainly done right, then, to stand by my own words rather than his Grace of Grafton’s, who hath neither made use of truth, judgment, nor honour, through this whole affair, either for himself or his friends.

“C. Queensberry.”

When her Grace had finished this paper, drawn up, as Lord Hervey observes, “with more spirit than accuracy,” Stanhope requested of her to think again, and give him a more courtly message to deliver. The Duchess took her pen and wrote another, but it was so much more disrespectful, that he asked for the former one and delivered it.

There was, of course, a prodigious quantity of court gossip on this occasion: and, doubtless, though some pretended to be shocked, many were pleased at the sting of royalty, and many more were amused at the dashing oddity of the Duchess. But public opinion, on the whole, blamed the court. It certainly was infinitely childish in the King, to have inquired into what the Duchess was doing among her acquaintances in the drawing-room; it was equally beneath the natural notions of royal dignity that the King should put himself in a state of hostility with a subject, and in so trifling a matter as the subscription to an unpublished play; and it was equally impolitic, for the world was sure to range itself on the side of the woman, especially when that woman was handsome, eccentric, and rich. It produced some inconvenience, however, to the lady’s husband, as he, in consequence, gave up the office of Admiral of Scotland.

The history of the “Beggar’s Opera” is still one of those mysticisms which perplex the chroniclers of the stage. It has been attributed to the joint conception of Swift, Pope, and Gay. The original idea probably belonged to Swift, who, in that fondness for contrasts, and contempt of romance, which belonged to him in every thing, had observed, “What a pretty thing a Newgate pastoral would make!” Pope may have given hints for the epigrammatic pungency of the dialogue; while the general workmanship may have been left to Gay. It is scarcely possible to doubt the sharp and worldly hand of Swift in some of the scenes and songs. Pope may have polished the dialogue, or nerved some of the songs, otherwise it is difficult to account for the total failure of all those characters of sternness, sharpness, and knowledge of the world, in Gay’s subsequent and unassisted drama, “Polly.” For, as the note on the subject observes, nothing can be more dull and less sarcastic, or, in fact, less applicable to either public characters or public events than the latter opera, against which a prime minister levelled the hostilities of the Lord Chamberlain, and engaged the indignation of the King.

Gay had been a dependant on Mrs Howard,—a matter which, in the scandalous laxity of the time, was by no means disgraceful. He had been solicitor for some place under the court, and had been disappointed. But the “Beggar’s Opera” had been written before his disappointment. Of course, it is unlikely that he should have then thought of burlesquing the minister. His disappointment, however, may have given him new intentions, and a few touches from Swift’s powerful hand might have transformed Macheath, Peachum, and Lockit into the fac-similes of the premier and his cabinet. It is remarkable that Gay had never attempted any thing of the kind before, nor after. His solitary muse was the very emblem of feebleness, his ambition never soared beyond a salary, and his best authorship was fables.

As ours is the day when rioting is popular, and rebels in every country are modellers of government, it may be amusing to remember how those matters were managed in the last century. The history of the famous Excise scheme, which in its day convulsed England, and finally shook the most powerful of all ministers out of the most powerful of all cabinets, is amongst the curious anecdotes of a time full of eccentricity. Walpole was no more superior to the effects of prosperity than honester men. Long success had confirmed him in a belief of its perpetual power; and the idea that, with a court wholly at his disposal, with a Queen for his agent, a King almost for his subject, the peerage waiting his nod, and the commons in his pay, he could be cast down and shattered like a plaster image, seems never to have entered into his dreams. But in this plenitude of power, whether to exercise his supremacy, or for the mere want of something to do, it occurred to him to relieve the country gentlemen by reducing the land-tax to a shilling in the pound, turning the duty on tobacco and wine, then payable on importation, into inland duties,—that is, changing customs on those two commodities into excise. By which scheme, and the continuation of the salt-duty, he proposed to improve the revenue half a million a-year, so as to supply the abatement of the shilling in the pound. The plan seemed feasible, and it also appeared likely to attract popularity among the country gentlemen, who had frequently complained of the pressure of the land-tax—two shillings in the pound.

The result, however, showed that a man may govern a court who is unequal to govern a people. The very mention of excise raised a universal storm,—all kinds of exaggerations flew through the land. The subject, at no time popular, was converted into a source of frantic indignation. The orators alleged, that if excise was once to be made a substitute for the land-tax, it might be made a substitute for every tax; that if it was laid on wine and tobacco, it would soon be laid on corn and clothing; that every man’s house would be at the mercy of excise-officers, whose numbers would amount to a standing army, and of the most obnoxious kind, an army of tax-gatherers; that liberty must perish; Magna Charta be not worth its own parchment; parliament be voted useless; and the monarch, who could extract every shilling from the pockets of his subjects under the pretext of an excise, might soon ride roughshod over the liberties of England. Petition on petition, of course, showered into parliament; the boroughs angrily advised their representatives to vote against the measure; and the towns and cities haughtily commanded their parliamentary delegates to resist all extension of the excise, however qualified, corrected, or modelled by the minister.

Walpole was thunderstruck; but he still relied upon his fortune. His friends crowded round him with entreaties that he would abandon the measure. But his argument was the argument of infatuation—the old absurdity of exposing himself to immediate ruin, through fear of being ruined at some future time, which might never arrive. In fact, his flexibility, which often saves a minister, was suddenly exchanged for the stubbornness which is the ministerial road to ruin. At last the memorable day came, March 14, 1743, when the bill was to be presented to parliament. It was reported that thousands of the people would block up the House, and there was a general order for constables, peace-officers, and the Guards to be in readiness. The mob, however, were neither so numerous nor so unruly as was expected. The debate was long, and the question was carried for the excise scheme by a majority of 61—the numbers being 204 and 265. The King was so anxious on the subject, that he made Lord Hervey write to him from the House at five o’clock; and, when the debate broke up at one in the morning, and Lord Hervey came to St James’s to mention the result, the King carried him into the Queen’s bedchamber, and kept him there till three in the morning, (without having dined;) asking him ten thousand questions, not merely about the speeches, but the very looks of the speakers.

The memoirs of persons in high life have a certain use for those who will draw the true moral from them; which is, that the highest rank is by no means the happiest. The exterior glitters to the eye, and doubtless there are few pedestrians who would not rejoice to drive in a gilt coach, with a squadron of hussars prancing round them. But the Memoirs of George II. and his Queen, altogether independently of private character, give formidable evidence of the cares which haunt even thrones. Yet, perhaps, there was no more palmy state of public affairs than that which saw George and Caroline on the throne. The country was in profound peace, commerce was flourishing, there was no impediment to the wheels of society—neither famine nor pestilence, nor rebellion; and yet distress, vexation, and perplexity seem to be as frequent inmates of the palace as they could have been of the workhouse. Even the great minister himself, though the head and front of the whole immediate disturbance, and likely to suffer more severely than all the rest, bore the crisis with more equanimity than either of their majesties.

“This evening,” says Lord Hervey, “Sir Robert Walpole saw the King in the Queen’s apartment, and the final resolution was then taken to drop the bill; but as there was a petition to come from the city of London against it the next day, it was resolved that the bill should not be dropped till that petition was rejected, lest it should be thought to be done by the weight and power of the city.” Walpole, on coming from this conference, called on Lord Hervey to let him know what had passed. Sir Robert was extremely disconcerted. Lord Hervey told him that he had been twice that afternoon sent for by the King; but, not knowing in what strain to talk to him, as he was ignorant whether Sir Robert intended to go forward or retreat, and expecting that he should be asked millions of questions relating to what he saw, and what he heard, and what he thought; to avoid the difficulties which this catechism would lay him under, he kept out of the way.

In the mean time, Sir Robert had gone to the Queen, and told her, that the clamour had grown so great, that there were but two ways of trying to appease it, one by dropping the project, and the other by dropping the projector. The Queen chid him extremely “for thinking it possible she could act so cowardly a part.” When Lord Hervey went up to the drawing-room, he saw that her Majesty had been weeping very plentifully, and found her so little able to disguise what she felt, that she was forced to pretend headach and vapours, and break up her quadrille party sooner than the usual hour. When the drawing-room was over, the King called Lord Hervey into the Queen’s bedchamber, and began with great eagerness to ask him where he had been all day, whom he had seen, what he had heard, and how both friends and foes looked? To some of the replies, referring to the Opposition, the King said with great warmth, “It is a lie; those rascals in the Opposition are the greatest liars that ever spoke.” The city petition was presented the next morning, and attended by a train of coaches reaching from Temple Bar to Westminster. The prayer of the petition was, that they might be heard by counsel against the bill. After a debate till midnight the petition was rejected, but only by a majority of seventeen—214 to 197. Walpole was never more deeply smitten than by this defeat, for so small a majority was a virtual defeat. He stood for some time after the House was up, leaning against the table, with his hat pulled over his eyes, and some few friends, with melancholy countenances, round him. As soon as the whole was over, Pelham went to the King, and Hervey to the Queen, to acquaint them with what had passed. When Hervey, at his first coming into the room, shook his head and told her the numbers, the tears ran down her cheeks, and for some time she could not utter a word. At last she said, “It is over—we must give way; but pray tell me a little how it passed.”

On the next day, Walpole proposed the postponement of the tobacco bill for two months. On coming out of the House, the mob, who had increased in numbers, continued to insult the members. Walpole, though warned of the reception which he was likely to get, determined to face the mob, as he boldly said, “there was no end of flying from their menaces, and that meeting dangers of this kind was the only way to put an end to them.” With some friends, and to a certain degree protected by the constables, who made a passage for the members to go out, he at last worked his way through the mob; though there was a great deal of jostling, and the constables were obliged to make large use of their staves. Three of his friends (among whom was Lord Hervey) were hurt. The city had been filled with illuminations and bonfires the night before, when Sir Robert Walpole, with a fat woman, (meant for the Queen,) was burnt in effigy. It is singular that this triumph was carried as far as Oxford, where for three nights together, round the bonfires in the streets, the healths of Ormond, Bolingbroke, and James III. were publicly drunk!

Lord Hervey’s sketches of character are among the best specimens of his writing, and the most interesting portions of his book. They are always acute and forcible, natural though epigrammatic, and remorseless though polished. As the lives of Chancellors have been, of late, so frequently brought before the public, we give his sketch of Lord Chancellor King. Speaking of King as having risen from obscurity to the woolsack, without an obstruction in his career, and with the general approbation of all judges of legal merit, he observes that, from the moment of his presiding in Chancery, his reputation began to sink. But this is explained, not by any newly discovered deficiency of talent, but by deficiency of decision. “Expedition,” says Lord Hervey, “was never reckoned among the merits of the Court of Chancery; but while Lord King presided there, its delays became insupportable. He had such a diffidence of himself, that he dared not do right for fear of doing wrong. Decrees were always extorted from him; and, had he been left alone, he would never have given any suitor his due, for fear of giving him what was not so; never reflecting that the suspension of justice was almost as bad as the total privation of it. His understanding was of that balancing irregular kind, which gives people just light enough to see difficulties and form doubts, yet not enough to surmount the one, or remove the other. This sort of understanding, which was of use to him as a pleader, was a trouble to him as a judge, and made him make a great figure at the bar, but an indifferent one upon the bench. The Queen once said of him, very truly, as well as agreeably, that ‘he was just in the law, what he had formerly been in the gospel—making creeds of the one, without any steady belief, and judgments in the other, without any settled opinion. But the misfortune,’ said she, ‘for the public is, that though they can reject his silly creeds, they are forced to submit to his silly judgments.’” (Lord King had dabbled in divinity, and published a history of the Apostles’ Creed.) Complaints soon arose, that all the equity of the nation was at a stand. He afterwards nearly lost his senses by repeated attacks of apoplexy. He was at last induced to retire on a pension of £3000. He died in the next year, “little regretted by any body, but least of all by his Majesty, who saved £3000 a-year by it.”

The condition of the court seems to have been perpetual conflict. The King’s personal conduct was inexcusable; the Queen’s great object was the possession of power; and the Prince was an object of suspicion to both, as both were objects of vexation to the Prince. His case in short was this: “He had a father that abhorred him, a mother that despised him, sisters that betrayed him, a brother set up against him, and a set of servants that neglected him, and were neither of use to him, nor capable of being of use, nor desirous of being of use.”

The Opposition were in pretty much the same condition: they, too, were in a state of civil war. Lord Carteret and Bolingbroke had no correspondence at all; Pulteney and Bolingbroke hated each other; Carteret and Pulteney were jealous of each other; Sir William Wyndham and Pulteney the same; while Chesterfield had a little correspondence with them all, but was confided in by none.

The Princess’s marriage to the Prince of Orange had long engrossed the consideration of the court. The Princess was not ill-looking, but her figure was short, and inclined to be fat. She seems to have resembled both the King and the Queen in their better, and in their worst, qualities. She was quick, intelligent, and passionate; yet could be cool, callous, and ready to sacrifice every thing to power. The Prince of Orange was poor, having but £12,000 a-year, and he was deformed, having a humpback, and altogether exhibiting the least attractive object possible in the eyes of a princess as haughty as any in Christendom. The marriage was solemnised at seven in the evening: the chapel was splendidly fitted up; but the Queen and the Princesses exhibited so much undisguised concern, that the procession to the chapel, and the aspect of matters there, looked more like a sacrifice than a marriage. We cannot go any further into details which, however suitable to foreign manners, can only disgust the fortunate delicacy of the English mind. But Lord Hervey’s manner of consoling the philosophic Queen in her disdain and disgust, is capital, as a specimen at once of the man of the world and of the courtier.

His answer was, “Madam, in half a year all persons are alike; and the figure one is married to, like the prospect of the place one lives at, grows so familiar to one’s eyes, that we look at it mechanically, without regarding either the beauties or deformities that strike a stranger.” The Queen’s answer was clever: “One may, and I believe one does, grow blind at last; but you must allow, my dear Lord Hervey, that there is a great difference, as long as one sees, in themannerof one’s growing blind.” The sisters spoke much in the same style as the mother, with horror at his figure, and commiseration for his wife. The Princess Emily said, “nothing on earth should have induced her to marry the monster.” The Princess Caroline, in her soft sensible way, spoke truth and said, “She must own it was very bad, but that, in her sister’s situation, all things considered, she believed she should have come to the same resolution.”

From time to time, some traits of men and history oddly remind us of foreign courts in our own day. The Emperor of Germany, a personage in whom ambition and imbecility seem to have contended for the mastery, had commenced a war, which transferred hostilities into Italy. France, Sardinia, and Spain attacked him there, and pushed his army to the walls of Mantua. The position of Radetsky, while he continued constrained by a court which gave him little more than orders and counter-orders, was evidently thefac-simileof Austrian affairs in 1733. “Those affairs,” says Lord Hervey, “were sowell managed, that with thirteen thousand men in Lombardy, and provisions for double the number, and ammunition in proportion, those essentials of war were so dispersed and scattered, that, wherever there were provisions there was no ammunition, and where there was ammunition there were no provisions, and where there were men there was neither ammunition nor provisions.”

The German war engaged a good deal of the public attention at this time; but much less in the nation than at the court. Prince Eugene, on the Rhine, marched to the relief of Philipsburg, while Marshal Berwick, with one hundred thousand men, carried on the siege. The high reputation of Prince Eugene had excited the King’s hope that Philipsburg would be relieved. It was, however, taken. This gave rise to a smart saying of the Princess Royal. She observed to Lord Hervey, after the drawing-room, shrugging up her shoulders, “Was there ever any thing so unaccountable as the temper of papa! He has been snapping and snubbing every mortal for this week, because he began to think that Philipsburg would be taken; and this very day, that he hears it is actually taken, he is in as good humour as ever I saw him in my life. But all this seems so odd, that I am more angry at his good humour than I was at his bad.” Lord Hervey said, with that sort of wit which was fashionable at the time, “that this was like David, who, when his child lived wore sackcloth, but when it was dead, shaved and drank wine.”—“It may be like David,” said the Princess, “but I am sure it is not like Solomon.”

The King had a foolish habit of talking of war, of imagining his genius made for renown, and of pronouncing himself infinitely unlucky in not being permitted by his minister to gain laurels in Germany. Walpole exhibited his power in nothing more effectually than in preventing the operation of this thirst for “glory.”—“He could not bear,” said the monarch, “that while he was engaged only in treaties, letters, and despatches, his booby brother, the brutal King of Prussia, should pass his time in camps and in the midst of arms,” neither desirous of the glory, nor fit for the employment.

Walpole, who saw the danger of involving England in this war, and probably the absurdity of going to war for the sake of any foreigners, reminded the King of the existence of the Pretender, and of the probability “that his crown would yet have to be fought for on British ground.” As to the Queen, Lord Hervey said, “theshadowof the Pretender would beat the whole German body.”

His lordship’s knowledge of the world appears to have extinguished all his ideas of its generosity: for he finds a personal motive in every thing. Thus, he assigns three reasons for Walpole’s pacific advice. One was, to avoid new clamour against his administration; the next was, to avoid the unpopularity of new taxes; and the third was, that military business might not throw his power into the hands of military men.

The Memoir then proceeds “to toss and gore” all the prominent public men in succession. It tells us “that the Duke of Newcastle, who always talked as his master talked,” echoed all the King’s “big words,” and expatiated for ever on regaining Italy for the Emperor, chastising Spain, and humbling the pride of France. Next comes the Duke of Grafton; of whom it is said, that loving to make his court as well as the Duke of Newcastle, he talked in the same strain, and for the same reason; but “could never make any great compliment to the King and Queen of embracing their opinions, as he never understood things enough to have one of his own.” Next comes Lord Grantham. “He was a degree still lower, and had the gift of reasoning in so small a proportion, that his existence was barely distinguished from a vegetable.” Then follows Lord Harrington. Of him it is said that, “with all his seeming phlegm, he was as tenacious of an opinion, when his indolence suffered him to form one, as any man living. His parts were of the common run of mankind. He was well bred, a man of honour, and fortunate, loved pleasure, and was infinitely lazy.” The Queen once in speaking of him said, “There is a heavy insipid sloth about that man, that puts me out of all patience: he must have six hours to dress, six more to dine, six more for his intrigues, and six more to sleep; and there, for a minister, are the four-and-twenty admirably disposed of; and if, now and then, he borrows six of those hours, to do any thing relating to his office, it is for something that might be done in six minutes, and ought to have been done six days before.”

We have then another instance of the discomforts of Royalty in those times. The day before the birthday, October 29, 1734, the court removed from Kensington to London, and the Queen, “who had long been out of order with a cough and a little lurking fever, notwithstanding she had been twice blooded, grew every hour worse and worse. However, the King forced her, the night she came from Kensington—the first of Farinelli’s performances—to the Opera, and made her the next day go through all the tiresome ceremonies of drawing-rooms and balls, the fatigues of heats and crowds, and every other disagreeable appurtenance to the celebration of a birthday.”

His lordship observes that “there was a strange affectation of an incapacity of being sick, that ran through the whole royal family. I have known the King to get out of his bed, choking with a sore throat, and in a high fever, only to dress and have a levee, and, in five minutes after it, undress and return to his bed, till the same ridiculous farce of health was to be presented the next day at the same hour. He used to make the Queen, in like circumstances, commit the same extravagances; but never with more danger than at this time. In the morning drawing-room, she found herself so near swooning, that she was forced to send Lord Grantham to the King, to beg he would retire, for that she was unable to stand any longer; notwithstanding which, at night, he brought her into a still greater crowd at the ball, and there kept her till eleven o’clock.”

The recollections of those times constantly bring the name of Lady Suffolk before the eye. We have no wish to advert to the grossnesses connected with the name; but the waning of her power gave a singular pungency to opinion in the palace. The Princesses were peculiarly candid upon the occasion. The Princess Emily “wished Lady Suffolk’s disgrace, because she wished misfortune to most people. The Princess Caroline, because she thought it would please her mother. The Princess Royal was for having her crushed; and, when Lord Hervey made some remonstrance, she replied, that Lady Suffolk’s conduct, with regard to politics, had been so impertinent, that she cannot be too ill used.” It must seem strange to us that such topics should have been in the lips of any women, especially women of such rank—but they seem to have been discussed with the most perfect familiarity; and a name and conduct which ought to have been suppressed through mere delicacy, appear to have furnished the principal conversation of the court.

The next affair was the quarrel with the Princess of Orange, from her reluctance to return to Holland. As she was about to be confined, her husband was desirous that his child should be born in Holland. To this the Princess demurred. However, they at length contrived to send her on board, and she sailed from Harwich; but after she had been some time at sea, she either grew so ill, or pretended to be so ill, that she either was, or pretended to be, in convulsions: we give his lordship’s rather ungallant surmise. On this, and the wind not being quite fair, she obliged the captain of the yacht to put back to Harwich. She then despatched a courier to London with letters, written, as it was supposed, by her own absolute command, from her physician, her accoucheur, and her nurse, to say that she was disordered with her expedition, and that she could not be stirred for ten days from her bed, nor put to sea again, without the hazard of her child’s life and her own. The King and Queen declined giving any orders. The Prince of Orange was written to, and he desired that his wife might go by France to Holland. The King, hating the bustle of a new parting, directed that she should cross the country from Harwich to Dover; but his Majesty, after having been informed that the roads were impassable at this time of the year in a coach, (how strangely this sounds in our day of universal locomotion!) permitted her to come to London and go over the bridge; but it was a positive command that she should not lie in in London, nor even come to St James’s. Accordingly, “after all her tricks and schemes, to avoid going to Holland, and to get back to London, she was obliged to comply with those orders; and had the mortification and disgrace to go, without seeing any of her family, over London Bridge to Dover.”

A note conjectures, that the Princess Royal might have had some expectation of ascending the throne of England, neither of her brothers being then married; a circumstance, which may account for the Princess’s anxiety to have her child born in this country.

The next scene is laid among the bishops. The bishopric of Winchester had been promised to Hoadly. Willis, the Bishop of Winchester, was seized with an apoplectic fit, and Lord Hervey instantly wrote to Hoadly, who was then Bishop of Salisbury, to come up to town and enforce his claim. The bishop wrote to the Queen and Sir Robert letters, which were to be delivered as soon as Willis was dead. The Queen, on presenting those letters, asked Lord Hervey if he did not blush for the conduct of his friend in this early and pressing application for a thing not yet vacant. While he was speaking, the King came in, and both King and Queen talked of Hoadly, in such a manner as plainly showed that they neither esteemed nor loved him. Potter, Bishop of Oxford, a great favourite of the Queen, strongly solicited Winchester, and would have obtained it, but for Walpole’s suggestion, that the engagements to Hoadly could not be broken without scandal. Hoadly at last obtained Winchester; and, as the Memoir observes, one of the best preferments in the church was conferred upon a man hated by the King, disliked by the Queen, and long estranged from the friendship of Walpole. Then all followed in the way which might have been anticipated; the King not speaking a word to the new bishop, either when he kissed his hand or did homage; the Queen, when she found it could not be helped, making the most of promoting him,—and Sir Robert taking the whole merit of the promotion to himself.

Another source of contention now arose. The Chancellor Talbot had recommended Rundle, a chaplain of his father, the late Bishop of Durham, for the see of Gloucester, which had been vacant a twelvemonth. Gibson, Bishop of London, objected to him, that fourteen or fifteen years before he had been heard to speak disrespectfully of some portions of Scripture, and Rundle was suspected of Arianism. This reason was certainly sufficient to justify inquiry.

Sir Robert, in his usual style, tried to mediate; begged of the Chancellor to give up his support of Rundle, offering him at the same time a deanery, or to give him the Bishopric of Derry in Ireland, then possessed by Henry Downes; of whom the Memoir speaks as a crazy old fellow with three thousand a-year. This affair ended in Benson’s being made Bishop of Gloucester, and Secker Bishop of Bristol, both formerly chaplains to the Chancellor’s father. Rundle was subsequently made Bishop of Derry, where he died, nine years after, in his sixtieth year, much regretted.

Walpole was now visibly approaching decline. He had become negligent of the claims of his friends, and solicitous only to conciliate his enemies. Of course, where he bought over one opponent, there were fifty others ready to fill up his place. This policy failed, and ought always to fail. At the close of the session, say the Memoirs, “the harvest of court favour was small, though the labourers were many.” The only things to give away were the Privy Seal, by the retirement of Lord Lonsdale, and the Secretaryship at War, by the dismissal of Sir William Strickland, “who was become so weak in mind and body, that his head was as much in its second infancy as his limbs.”

A new source of ministerial vexation was added to themêlée, by the King’s sudden determination to run over to Hanover, in spite of all remonstrance—the royal answer being always “Pooh, stuff! You think to get the better of me, but you shall not.”

Walpole, who dreaded that the King, once in Hanover, would plunge the country into a war, tried to set the Queen against this untoward journey; but her Majesty, though she gave the minister fair words, was in favour of the freak. The reasons assigned by the Memoir for her conduct being those rather irreverent ones, on the part of his lordship—pride in theéclatof the regency; the ease of being mistress of her hours, which was not the case for two hours together, when the King was in England; and, “besides theseagrémens, she had the certainty of being, for six months at least, not only free from the fatigue of being obliged to entertain him for twenty hours in the twenty-four, but also from the more irksome office of being set up to receive thequotidiansallies of a temper that, let it be charged by what hand it would, used always to discharge its hottest fire, on some pretence or other, upon her.”

But “one trouble arose from the King’s going to Hanover, which her Majesty did not at all foresee;” and which was his becoming, soon after his arrival, so much attached to a Madame Walmoden, “a married woman of the first fashion in Hanover,” that nobody in England talked of any thing but the declining power of the Queen.

They might justly have talked much more of the insult of this conduct to public morals; but we shall not go further into those details. They absolutely repel the common-sense of propriety, to a degree which, we hope, will never be endurable in England. The King, however, gave her Majesty, in the long succession of his correspondence, the complete history of his passion, its progress, and his final purchase of the lady for 1000 ducats! A proof, as Lord Hervey says, more of his economy than his passion.

The life of courts is stripped of its glitter a good deal by the indefatigable courtier who has here left us his reminiscences; but it requires strong evidence, to believe that the persons who constitute the officials of royal householdscansubmit to the humiliations described in these volumes.

The Queen narrates a sort of quarrel which she had with Lady Suffolk, a woman so notoriously scandalous, that the wife of George II. ought not to have suffered her to approach her person. The quarrel was, as a note conceives it, not about holding a basin for the Queen to wash in, but about holding it on her knees. (What person of any degree of self-respect can discover the difference?) But Lady Suffolk, on this nice distinction, consulted the well-known Lady Masham, bedchamber woman to Queen Anne, as to the point of etiquette. This authority delivered her judgment of chambermaid duties, in the following style:—“When the Queen washed her hands, a page of the backstairs brought and set down upon a side-table the basin and ewer. Then the bedchamberwomanset it before the Queen, andknelton the other side of the table over against the Queen, the bedchamberladyonly looking on. The bedchamberwomanbrought in the chocolate, and gave itkneeling.” Lady Suffolk, formerly Mrs Howard, had been bedchamberwoman, and of course had performed this menialism! “We shall see by-and-by,” adds the note, “that, theladyof the bedchamber, though a countess, presented the basin for the Queen’s washing,on her knees.”

If such things were done, we must own that it wholly exceeds our comprehension how they could be exacted on the one side, or submitted to on the other. We are sure that there is not a scullion in England who would stoop to hold a basin for her mistress’s ablutions on her knees. Yet, however we may be surprised at the existence of such practices, it is impossible to feel the slightest sympathy for the persons whom their salaries tempt to the sufferance.

We have left ourselves but little room for the biography of Lord Hervey himself. He was born in 1696, the second son of the first Lord Bristol. He travelled; returned to solicit a commission; failed in his solicitation; became, of course, “a virtuous opponent of the court,” and attached himself to the Prince and Princess, who held a sort of Opposition court at Richmond. Hervey, young, handsome, and polished, became a general favourite. He won the most accomplished woman of her time; married; and, in 1723, became Lord Hervey by the death of his elder brother, a man of ability, but of habits remarkably profligate.

On the death of George I., Hervey changed his politics; abandoned Pulteney; leveed Walpole; obtained a pension of £1000 a-year; received another gilded fetter, in the office of vice-chamberlain, and became a courtier for life.

Whether to console himself for this showy slavery, or to indulge a natural taste for the sarcasm which is forbidden in the atmosphere of high life, he wrote the Memoirs, of which we have given a sketch. The prudence of his son, the third earl, kept them in secret. The marquis, nephew of that earl, probably regarding the time as past when they could provoke private resentment, has suffered them to emerge, and Mr Croker has edited them, for the benefit of the rising generation.

Whether the editor has done credit to himself or service to the public, by this employment of his hours of retirement, has been the subject of considerable question. That the volumes are amusing there can be no doubt; that they are flippant and frivolous there can be no question whatever; that they disclose conceptions of the interior of courts which may “make the rabble laugh and the judicious grieve,” that, though filtered through three generations of correctors, they yet remain miry enough still, requires no further proof than their perusal.

We say this in no favouritism for either the King or the Queen: the truth was probably told of both. Their foreign habits evidently clung to them; and the purer feelings of England, as evidently, had not the power to purify the practices of their foreign descent. But if Lord Hervey’s mind was exercised in giving the secret life of courts to the world, we think that a much more contemptuous subject for the pencil might be found, in the man who, earning his daily bread by his courtiership, pretended to independence of opinion; who, listening to every expression of royalty with a bow, and receiving every command with the submission of a slave, threw off the sycophant only to assume the satirist, and revenged his sense of servitude only by privately registering the errors of those, the dust of whose shoes he licked for twelve hours in every twenty-four.

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