Chapter 2

PARTIES AND LEADERS.

[Sidenote: 1714--Whig and Tory]

All the closing months of Queen Anne's reign were occupied by Whigs and Tories, and indeed by Anne herself as well, in the invention and conduct of intrigues about the succession. The Queen herself, with the grave opening before her, kept her fading eyes turned, not to the world she was about to enter, but to the world she was about to leave. She was thinking much more about the future of her throne than about her own soul and future state. The Whigs were quite ready to maintain the Hanoverian succession by force. They did not expect to be able to carry matters easily, and they were ready to encounter a civil war. Their belief seems to have been that they and not their opponents would have to strike the blow, and they had already summoned the Duke of Marlborough from his retirement in Flanders to take the lead in their movement. Having Marlborough, they knew that they would have the army. On the other hand, if Bolingbroke and the Tories really had any actual hope of a restoration of the Stuarts, it is certain that up to the last moment they had made no substantial preparations to accomplish their object.

The Whigs and Tories divided between them whatever political force there was in English society at this time. Outside both parties lay a considerable section of people who did not distinctly belong to the one faction or the other, but were ready to incline now to this and now to that, according as the conditions of the hour might inspire them. Outside these again, and far outnumbering these and all others combined, was the great mass of the English {17} people--hard-working, much-suffering, poor, patient, and almost absolutely indifferent to changes in governments and the humors and struggles of parties. "These wrangling jars of Whig and Tory," says Dean Swift, "are stale and old as Troy-town story." But if the principles were old, the titles of the parties were new. Steele, in 1710, published in the _Tatler_ a letter from Pasquin of Rome to Isaac Bickerstaff, asking for "an account of those two religious orders which have lately sprung up amongst you, the Whigs and the Tories." Steele declared that you could not come even among women "but you find them divided into Whig and Tory." It was like the famous lawsuit in Abdera, alluded to by Lucian and amplified by Wieland, concerning the ownership of the ass's shadow, on which all the Abderites took sides, and every one was either a "Shadow" or an "Ass."

Various explanations have been given of these titles Whig and Tory. Titus Oates applied the term "Tory," which then signified an Irish robber, to those who would not believe in his Popish plot, and the name gradually became extended to all who were supposed to have sympathy with the Catholic Duke of York. The word "Whig" first arose during the Cameronian rising, when it was applied to the Scotch Presbyterians, and is derived by some from the whey which they habitually drank, and by others from a word, "whiggam," used by the western Scottish drovers.

The Whigs and the Tories represent in the main not only two political doctrines, but two different feelings in the human mind. The natural tendency of some men is to regard political liberty as of more importance than political authority, and of other men to think that the maintenance of authority is the first object to be secured, and that only so much of individual liberty is to be conceded as will not interfere with authority's strictest exercise. Roughly speaking, therefore, the Tories were for authority, and the Whigs for liberty. The Tories naturally held to the principle of the monarchy and of the State church; the Whigs {18} were inclined for the supremacy of Parliament, and for something like an approach to religious equality. [Sidenote: 1714--Political change] Up to this time at least the Tory party still accepted the theory of the Divine origin of the king's supremacy. The Whigs were even then the advocates of a constitutional system, and held that the people at large were the source of monarchical power. To the one set of men the sovereign was a divinely appointed ruler; to the other he was the hereditary chief of the realm, having the source of his authority in popular election. The Tories, as the Church party, disliked the Dissenters even more than they disliked the Roman Catholics. The Whigs were then even inclined to regard the Church as a branch of the Civil Service--to adopt a much more modern phrase--and they were in favor of extending freedom of worship to Dissenters, and in a certain sense to Roman Catholics. According to Bishop Burnet, it was in the reign of Queen Anne that the distinction between High-Church and Low-Church first marked itself out, and we find almost as a natural necessity that the High-Churchmen were Tories, and the Low-Churchmen were Whigs. Then as now the chief strength of the Tories was found in the country, and not in the large towns. So far as town populations were concerned, the Tories were proportionately strongest where the borough was smallest. The great bulk of the agricultural population, so far as it had definite political feelings, was distinctly Tory. The strength of the Whigs lay in the manufacturing towns and the great ports. London was at that time much stronger in its Liberal political sentiments than it has been more recently. The moneyed interest, the bankers, the merchants, were attached to the Whig party. Many peers and bishops were Whigs, but they were chiefly the peers and bishops who owed their appointments to William the Third. The French envoy, D'Iberville, at this time describes the Whigs as having at their command the best purses, the best swords, the ablest heads, and the handsomest women. The Tory party was strong at the University of Oxford; the Whig party was {19} in greater force at Cambridge. Both Whigs and Tories, however, were in a somewhat subdued condition of mind about the time that Anne's reign was closing. Neither party as a whole was inclined to push its political principles to anything like a logical extreme. Whigs and Tories alike were practically satisfied with the form which the English governing system had put on after the Revolution of 1688. Neither party was inclined for another revolution. The civil war had carried the Whig principle a little too far for the Whigs. The Restoration had brought a certain amount of scandal on sovereign authority and the principle of Divine right. The minds of men were settling down into willingness for a compromise. There were, of course, among the Tories the extreme party, so pledged to the restoration of the Stuarts that they would have moved heaven and earth, at all events they would have convulsed England, for the sake of bringing them back. These men constituted what would now be called in the language of French politics the Extreme Right of the Tory party; they would become of importance at any hour when some actual movement was made from the outside to restore the Stuarts. Such a movement would of course have carried with it and with them the great bulk of the new quiescent Tory party; but in the mean time, and until some such movement was made, the Jacobite section of the Tories was not in a condition to be active or influential, and was not a serious difficulty in the way of the Hanoverian succession.

The Whigs had great advantages on their side. They had a clear principle to start with. The constitutional errors and excesses of the Stuarts had forced on the mind of England a recognition of the two or three main principles of civil and religious liberty. The Whigs knew what they wanted better than the Tories did, and the ends which the Whigs proposed to gain were attainable, while those which the Tories set out for themselves were to a great extent lost in dream-land. The uncertainty and vagueness of many of the Tory aims made some of the {20} Tories themselves only half earnest in their purposes. Many a Tory who talked as loudly as his brothers about the king having his own again, and who toasted "the king over the water" as freely as they, had in the bottom of his heart very little real anxiety to see a rebellion end in a Stuart restoration. But, on the other hand, the Whigs could strive with all their might and main to carry out their principles in Church and in State without the responsibility of plunging the country into rebellion, and without any dread of seeing their projects melt away into visions and chimeras. A great band of landed proprietors formed the leaders of the Whigs. Times have changed since then, and the representatives of some of those great houses which then led the Whig party have passed or glided insensibly into the ranks of the Tories; but the main reason for this is because a Tory of our day represents fairly enough, in certain political aspects, the Whig of the days of Queen Anne. What is called in American politics a new departure has taken place in England since that time; the Radical party has come into existence with political principles and watchwords quite different even from those of the early Whigs. Some of the Whig houses, not many, have gone with the forward movement; some have remained behind, and so lapsed almost insensibly into the Tory quarter. But at the close of Queen Anne's reign all the great leading Whigs stood well together. They understood better than the Tories did the necessity of obtaining superior influence in the House of Commons. They even contrived at that time to secure the majority of the county constituencies, while they had naturally the majority of the commercial class on their side. Then, as in later days, the vast wealth of the Whig families was spent unstintingly, and it may be said unblushingly, in securing the possession of the small constituencies, the constituencies which were only to be had by liberal bribery. Then, as afterwards, there was perceptible in the Whig party a strange combination of dignity and of meanness, of great principles and of somewhat degraded practices. They had high {21} purposes; they recognized noble principles, and they held to them; they were for political liberty as they then understood it, and they were for religious equality--for such approach at least to religious equality as had then come to be sanctioned by responsible politicians in England. They were ready to make great sacrifices in defence of their political creed. But the principles and purposes with which they started, and to which they kept, did not succeed in purifying and ennobling all their parliamentary strategy and political conduct. They intrigued, they bribed, they bought, they cajoled, they paltered, they threatened, they made unsparing use of money and of power, they employed every art to carry out high and national purposes which the most unscrupulous cabal could have used to secure the attainment of selfish and ignoble ends. Their enemies had put one great advantage into their hands. The conduct of Bolingbroke and of Oxford during recent years had left the Whigs the sole representatives of constitutional liberty.

[Sidenote: 1714--Anarchy or "Perkin"]

The two great political parties hated and denounced each other with a ferocity hardly known before, and hardly possible in our later times. The Whigs vituperated the Tories as rebels and traitors; the Tories cried out against the Whigs as the enemies of religion and the opponents of "the true Church of England." Many a ballad of that time described the Whigs as men whose object it was to destroy both mitre and crown, to introduce anarchy once again, as they had done in the days of Oliver Cromwell. The Whig balladists retorted by describing the Tories as men who were engaged in trying to bring in "Perkin" from France, and prophesied the halter as a reward of their leading statesmen. In truth, the bitterness of that hour was very earnest; most of the men on both sides meant what they said. Either side, if it had been in complete preponderance, would probably have had very little scruple in disposing of its leading enemies by means of the halter or the prison. It was for the time not so much a struggle of political parties as a {22} struggle of hostile armies. The men were serious and savage, because the crisis was serious and portentous. The chances of an hour might make a man a prime-minister or a prisoner. Bolingbroke soon after was in exile, and Walpole at the head of the administration. The slightest chance, the merest accident, might have sent Walpole into exile, and put Bolingbroke at the head of the State.

[Sidenote: 1714--John Churchill]

The eyes of the English public were at this moment turned in especial to watch the movements of two men--the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Bolingbroke. Marlborough was beyond question the greatest soldier of his time. He had gone into exile when Queen Anne consented to degrade him and to persecute him, and now he was on his way home, at the urgent entreaty of the Whig leaders, in order to lend his powerful influence to the Hanoverian cause.

The character of the Duke of Marlborough is one which ought to be especially attractive to the authors of romance and the lovers of strong, bold portrait-painting. One peculiar difficulty, however, a romancist would have in dealing with Marlborough--he could hardly venture to paint Marlborough as nature and fortune made him. The romancist would find himself compelled to soften and to modify many of the distinctive traits of Marlborough's character, in order that he might not seem the mere inventor of a human paradox, in order that he might not appear to be indulging in the fantastic and the impossible. Pope has called Bacon "the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind," but Bacon was not greater in his own path than Marlborough in his, and Bacon's worst meannesses were nobility itself compared with some of Marlborough's political offences. Marlborough started in life with almost every advantage that man could have--with genius, with boundless courage, with personal beauty, with favoring friends. From his early youth he had been attached to James the Second and James the Second's court. One of Marlborough's {23} biographers even suggests that the Duchess of York, James's first wife, was needlessly fond of young Churchill. The beautiful Duchess of Cleveland--she of whom Pepys said "that everything she did became her"--was passionately in love with Marlborough, and, according to some writers, gave him his first start in life when she presented him with five thousand pounds, which Marlborough, prudent then as ever, invested in an annuity of five hundred a year. Burnet said of him that "he knew the arts of living in a court beyond any man in it; he caressed all people with a soft and obliging deportment, and was always ready to do good offices." His only personal defect was in his voice, which was shrill and disagreeable. He was, through all his life, avaricious to the last degree; he grasped at money wherever he could get it; he took money from women as well as from men. A familiar story of the time represents another nobleman as having been mistaken for the Duke of Marlborough by a mob, at a time when Marlborough was unpopular, and extricating himself from the difficulty by telling the crowd he could not possibly be the Duke of Marlborough, first, because he had only two guineas in his pocket, and next, because he was perfectly ready to give them away. Marlborough had received the highest favors from James the Second, but he quitted James in the hour of his misfortunes, only, however, it should be said, to return secretly to his service at a time when he was professing devotion to William the Third. He betrayed each side to the other. In the same year, and almost in the same month, he writes to the Elector at Hanover and to the Pretender in France, pouring forth to each alike his protestations of devotion. "I shall be always ready to hazard my fortune and my life for your service," he tells the Elector. "I had rather have my hands cut off than do anything prejudicial to King James's cause," he tells an agent of the Stuarts. James appears to have believed in Marlborough, and William, while he made use of him, to have had no faith in him. "The Duke of Marlborough," William {24} said, "has the best talents for a general of any man in England; but he is a vile man and I hate him, for though I can profit by treasons I cannot bear the traitor." William's saying was strikingly like that one ascribed to Philip of Macedon. Schomberg spoke of Marlborough as "the first lieutenant-general whom I ever remember to have deserted his colors." Lord Granard, who was in the camp of King James the Second on Salisbury Plain, told Dr. King, who has recorded the story, that Churchill and some other colonels invited Lord Granard to supper, and opened to him their design of deserting to the Prince of Orange. Granard not merely refused to enter into the conspiracy, but went to the King and told him the whole story, advising him to seize Marlborough and the other conspirators. Perhaps if this advice had been followed, King William would never have come to the throne of England. James, however, gave no credit to the story, and took no trouble about it. Next morning he found his mistake; but it was then too late. The truth of this story is corroborated by other authorities, one of them being King James himself, who afterwards stated that he had received information of Lord Churchill's designs, and was recommended to seize his person, but that he unfortunately neglected to avail himself of the advice. "Speak of that no more," says Egmont, in Goethe's play; "I _was_ warned."

[Sidenote: 1714--Marlborough]

Swift said of Marlborough that "he is as covetous as hell, and ambitious as the prince of it." Marlborough was as ignorant as he was avaricious. Literary taste or instinct he must have had, because he read with so much eagerness the historical plays of Shakespeare, and indeed frankly owned that his only knowledge of English history was taken from their scenes. Even in that time of loose spelling his spelling is remarkably loose. He seems to spell without any particular principle in the matter, seldom rendering the same word a second time by the same combination of letters. He was at one period of his life a libertine of the loosest order, so far as morals were {25} concerned, but of the shrewdest kind as regarded personal gain and advancement. He would have loved any Lady Bellaston who presented herself, and who could have rewarded him for his kindness. He was not of the type of Byron's "Don Juan," who declares that

The prisoned eagle will not pair, nor I Serve a Sultana's sensual phantasy.

Marlborough would have served any phantasy for gain. It has been said of him that the reason for his being so successful with women as a young man was that he took money of them. Yet, as another striking instance of the paradoxical nature of his character, he was intensely devoted to his wife. He was the true lover of Sarah Jennings, who afterwards became Duchess of Marlborough. A man of the most undaunted courage in the presence of the enemy, he was his wife's obedient, patient, timid slave. He lived more absolutely under her control than Belisarius under the government of his unscrupulous helpmate. Sarah Jennings was, in her way, almost as remarkable as her husband. She was a woman of great beauty. Colley Gibber, in his "Apology," pays devoted testimony to her charms. He had by chance to attend on her in the capacity of a sort of amateur lackey at an entertainment in Nottingham, and he seems to have been completely dazzled by her loveliness. "If so clear an emanation of beauty, such a commanding grace of aspect, struck me into a regard that had something softer than the most profound respect in it, I cannot see why I may not without offence remember it, since beauty, like the sun, must sometimes lose its power to choose, and shine into equal warmth the peasant and the courtier." He quaintly adds, "However presumptuous or impertinent these thoughts may have appeared at my first entertaining them, why may I not hope that my having kept them decently a secret for full fifty years may be now a good round plea for their pardon?" The imperious spirit which could rule Churchill long dominated the feeble nature of Queen Anne. But {26} when once this domination was overthrown, Sarah Jennings had no art to curb her temper into such show of respect and compliance as might have won back her lost honors. She met her humiliation with the most childish bursts of passion; she did everything in her power to annoy and insult the Queen who had passed from her haughty control. She was always a keen hater; to the last day of her life she never forgot her resentment towards all who had, or who she thought had, injured her. In long later years she got into unseemly lawsuits with her own near relations. But if one side of her character was harsh and unlovely enough, it may be admitted that there was something not unheroic about her unyielding spirit--something noble in the respect to her husband's memory, which showed itself in the declaration that she would not marry "the emperor of the world," after having been the wife of John, Duke of Marlborough.

[Sidenote: 1714--Bolingbroke]

Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, was in his way as great a man as the Duke of Marlborough. At the time we are now describing he seemed to have passed through a long, a varied, and a brilliant career, and yet he had only arrived at the age when public men in England now begin to be regarded as responsible politicians. He was in his thirty-sixth year. The career that had prematurely begun was drawing to its premature close. He had climbed to his highest position; he is Prime-minister of England, and has managed to get rid of his old colleague and rival, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. Bolingbroke had almost every gift and grace that nature and fortune could give. Three years before this Swift wrote to Stella, "I think Mr. St. John the greatest young man I ever knew; wit, capacity, beauty, quickness of apprehension, good learning and an excellent taste; the greatest orator in the House of Commons, admirable conversation, good nature and good manners, generous, and a despiser of money." Yet, as in the fairy story, the benign powers which had combined to endow him so richly had withheld the one gift which might have made all the rest of {27} surpassing value, and which being denied left them of little account. If Bolingbroke had had principle he would have been one of the greatest Englishmen of any time. His utter want of morality in politics, as well as in private life, proved fatal to him; he only climbed high in order to fall the lower. He was remarkable for profligacy even in that heedless and profligate time. Voltaire, in one of his letters, tells a story of a famous London courtesan who exclaimed to some of her companion nymphs on hearing that Bolingbroke had been made Secretary of State, "Seven thousand guineas a year, girls, and all for us!" Even if the story be not true it is interesting and significant as an evidence of the sort of impression which Bolingbroke had made upon his age. It was his glory to be vicious; he was proud of his orgies. He liked to be known as a man who could spend the whole night in a drunken revel, and the afternoon in preparing some despatch on which the fortunes of his country or the peace of the world might depend. The sight of a beautiful woman could turn him away for the time from the gravest political purposes. He was ready at such a moment to throw anything over for the sake of the sudden love-chase which had come in his way. He bragged of his amours, and boasted that he had never failed of success with any woman who seemed to him worth pursuing. Like Faust, he loved to reel from desire to enjoyment, and from enjoyment back again into desire. Bolingbroke was the first of a great line of parliamentary debaters who have made for themselves a distinct place in English history, and whose rivals are not to be found in the history of any other parliament. It is difficult at this time to form any adequate idea of Bolingbroke's style as a speaker or his capacity for debate when compared with other great English parliamentary orators. But so far as one may judge, we should be inclined to think that he must have had Fox's readiness without Fox's redundancy and repetition; and that he must have had the stately diction and the commanding style of the younger Pitt, with a certain freshness and force which {28} the younger Pitt did not always exhibit. Bolingbroke's English prose style is hardly surpassed by that of any other author, either before his time or since. It is supple, strong, and luminous; not redundant, but not bare; ornamented where ornament is suitable and even useful, but nowhere decorated with the purple rags of unnecessary and artificial brilliancy. Such a man, so gifted, must in any case have held a high place among his contemporaries, and probably if Bolingbroke had possessed the political and personal virtues of men like Burke and Pitt, or even the political virtues of a man like Charles Fox, he would have been remembered as the greatest of all English parliamentary statesmen. But, as we have already said, the one defect filled him with faults. The lack of principle gave him a lack of purpose, and wanting purpose he persevered in no consistent political path. Swift has observed that Bolingbroke "had a great respect for the characters of Alcibiades and Petronius, especially the latter, whom he would gladly be thought to resemble." He came nearer at his worst to Petronius than at his best to Alcibiades. Alcibiades, to do him justice, admired and understood virtue in others, however small the share of it he contrived to keep for himself. It is impossible to read that wonderful compound of dramatic humor and philosophic thought, Plato's "Banquet," without being moved by the generous and impassioned eulogy which Alcibiades, in the fulness of his heart and of his wine, pours out upon the austere virtue of Socrates. Such as Alcibiades is there described we may suppose Alcibiades to have been, and no one who has followed the career of Bolingbroke can believe it possible that he ever could have felt any sincere admiration for virtue in man or woman, or could have thought of it otherwise than as a thing to be sneered at and despised. The literary men, and more especially the poets of the days of Bolingbroke, seem to have had as little scruple in their compliments as a French _petit-maître_ might have in sounding the praises of his mistress to his mistress's ears. Pope talks of his villa, where, "nobly {29} pensive, St. John sat and thought," and declared that such only might

Tread this sacred floor Who dare to love their country and be poor.

[Sidenote: 1714--Pope's praises]

It is hard to think of Bolingbroke, even in his more advanced years, as "nobly pensive," sitting and thinking, and certainly neither Bolingbroke nor any of Bolingbroke's closer political associates was exactly the sort of man who would have dared "to love his country and be poor." In Bolingbroke's latest years we hear of him as amusing himself by boasting to his second wife of his various successful amours, until at last the lady, weary of the repetition, somewhat contemptuously reminds him that however happy as a lover he may have been once, his days of love were now over, and the less he said about it the better.

Nor was Pope less extravagant in his praise to Harley than to St. John. He says:

If aught below the seats divine Can touch immortals, 'tis a soul like thine; A soul supreme, in each hard instance tried, Above all pain, all passion, and all pride, The rage of power, the blast of public breath, The lust of lucre, and the dread of death.

These lines, it is right to remember, were addressed to Harley, not in his power, but after his fall. Even with that excuse for a friend's overcharged eulogy, they read like a satire on Harley rather than like his panegyric. Caricature itself could not more broadly distort the features of a human being than his poetic admirer has altered the lineaments of Oxford. Harley had been intriguing on both sides of the field. He professed devoted loyalty to the Queen and to her appointed successor, and he was at the same time coquetting, to put it mildly, with the Stuart family in France. Nothing surprises a reader more than the universal duplicity that seems to have prevailed in the days of Anne and of the early Georges. Falsehood appears to have been a recognized diplomatic {30} and political art. Statesmen, even of the highest rank and reputation, made no concealment of the fact that whenever occasion required they were ready to state the thing which was not, either in private conversation or in public debate. Nothing could exceed or excuse the boundless duplicity of Marlborough, but it must be owned that even William the Third told almost as many falsehoods to Marlborough as Marlborough could have told to him. At a time when William detested Marlborough, he yet occasionally paid him in public and in private the very highest compliments on his integrity and his virtue. Men were not then supposed or expected to speak the truth. A statesman might deceive a foreign minister or the Parliament of his own country with as little risk to his reputation as a lady would have undergone, in later days, who told a lie to the custom-house officer at the frontier to save the piece of smuggled lace in her trunk.

[Sidenote: 1714--Harley]

If a man like William of Nassau could stoop to deceit and falsehood for any political purpose, it is easy to understand that a man like Harley would make free use of the same arts, and for personal objects as well. Harley's political changes were so many and so rapid that they could not possibly be explained by any theory consistent with sincerity. It was well said of him that "his humor is never to deal clearly or openly, but always with reserve, if not dissimulation, and to love tricks when not necessary, but from an inward satisfaction in applauding his own cunning." He entered Parliament in 1689, and in 1700 was chosen Speaker of the House of Commons. At that time, and for long after, it was not an uncommon thing that a man who had been Speaker should afterwards become a Secretary of State, sitting in the same House. This was Harley's case: in 1704 he was made principal Secretary of State. In 1708 Harley resigned office, and immediately after took the leadership of the Tory party. In about two years he overthrew the Whig administration, and became the head of a new government, with the place of Lord High Treasurer, and the title of Earl of Oxford. {31} His craft seems only to have been that low kind of artifice which enables an unscrupulous man to cajole his followers and to stir up division among his enemies. His word was not to be relied upon by friend or enemy, and when he most affected a tone of frankness or of candor he was least to be trusted. As Lord Stanhope well says of him "His slender and pliant intellect was well fitted to crawl up to the heights of power through all the crooked mazes and dirty by-paths of intrigue; but having once attained the pinnacle, its smallness and meanness were exposed to all the world." Even his private life had not the virtues which one who reads some of the exalted panegyrics paid to him by contemporary poets and others would be apt to imagine. He was fond of drink and fond of pleasure in a small and secret way; his vices were as unlike the daring and brilliant profligacy of his colleague and rival Bolingbroke as his intellect was inferior to Bolingbroke's surpassing genius. For all Pope's poetic eulogy, the poet could say in prose of Lord Oxford that he was not a very capable minister, and had a good deal of negligence into the bargain. "He used to send trifling verses from court to the Scriblerus Club every day, and would come and talk idly with them almost every night, even when his all was at stake." Pope adds that Oxford "talked of business in so confused a manner that you did not know what he was about, and everything he went to tell you was in the epic way, for he always began in the middle." Swift calls him "the greatest procrastinator in the world." It is of Lord Oxford that the story is originally told which has been told of so many statesmen here and in America since his time. Lord Oxford, according to Pope, invited Rowe, the dramatic poet, to learn Spanish. Rowe went to work, and studied Spanish under the impression that some appointment at the Spanish court would follow. When he returned to Harley and told him he had accomplished the task, Harley said, "Then, Mr. Rowe, I envy you the pleasure of reading 'Don Quixote' in the original." Pope asks, "Is not that cruel?" But {32} others have held that it was unintentional on Lord Oxford's part, and merely one of his unthinking oddities.

[Sidenote: 1714--Walpole]

Another man, fifteen years younger than Harley, a school-fellow at Eton of Bolingbroke, was rising slowly, surely, into prominence and power. All the great part of his career is yet to come; but even already, while men were talking of Marlborough and Bolingbroke, they found themselves compelled to give a place in their thoughts to Robert Walpole. If Bolingbroke was the first, and perhaps the most brilliant, of the great line of parliamentary debaters who have made debate a moving power in English history, Walpole was the first of that line of statesmen who, sprung from the class of the "Commoner," have become leaders of the English Parliament. In position and in influence, although not in personal character or accomplishments, Walpole may be described as the direct predecessor of Peel and Gladstone. Just two years before the death of William the Third, Walpole entered Parliament for the first time. He married, entered Parliament, and succeeded to his father's estates in the same year, 1700. Walpole was only twenty-four years of age when he took his seat in the House of Commons as member for Castle Rising in Norfolk. He was a young country squire of considerable fortune, and a thorough supporter of the Whig party. Walpole came into Parliament at that happy time for men of his position when the change was already taking place which marked the representative assembly as the controlling power in the State. The Government as a direct ruling power was beginning to grow less and less effective, and the House of Commons beginning to grow more and more strong. This change had begun to set in during the Restoration, and by the time Walpole came to be known in Parliament it was becoming more and more evident that the Ministers of State were in the future only to be men intrusted with the duty of carrying out the will of the majority in the House of Commons. Before that majority every other power in the State was ultimately to bend. The man, therefore, {33} who could by eloquence, genuine statesmanship, and force of character, or even by mere tact, secure the adhesion of that majority, had become virtually the ruler of the State. But as will easily be seen, his rule even then was something very different indeed from the rule of an arbitrary minister. He would have to satisfy, to convince, to conciliate the majority. A single false step, an hour's weakness of purpose, nay, even a failure for which he was not himself accountable in home or foreign policy, might deprive him of his influence over the majority, and might reduce him to comparative insignificance. Therefore, the controlling power which a great minister acquired was held by virtue of the most constant watchfulness, the most unsparing labor, energy, and devotion, and also in a great measure by the favor of fortune and of opportunity.

Walpole was a man eminently qualified to obtain influence over the House of Commons, and to keep it up when he had once obtained it. No man could have promised less in the beginning. That was an acute observer who divined the genius of Cromwell under Cromwell's homely exterior when he first came up to Parliament. Almost as much acuteness would have been needed to enable any one to see the future Prime-minister of England and master of the House of Commons in the plain, unpromising form, the homely, almost stolid countenance, the ungainly movements and gestures of Walpole. Walpole was as much of a rustic as Lord Althorp in times nearer to our own acknowledged himself to be. Althorp said he ought to have been a grazier, and that it was an odd chance which made him Prime-minister. But the difference was great. Walpole had the gifts which make a man prime-minister, despite his country gentleman or grazier-like qualities. It was not chance, but Walpole himself which raised him to the position he came to hold. Walpole knew nothing and cared nothing about literature and art. His great passion was for hunting; his next love was for wine, and his third for his dinner. Without any natural gift of eloquence he became a great debater. {34} Nature, which seemed to have lavished all her most luxurious gifts on Bolingbroke, appeared to have pinched and starved Walpole. Where Bolingbroke was richest Walpole was poorest; Bolingbroke's genius required a frequent rein; Walpole's intellect needed the perpetual spur. Yet Walpole, with his lack of imagination, of eloquence, of wit, of humor, and of culture, went farther and did more than the brilliant Bolingbroke. It was the old fable of the hare and the tortoise over again; perhaps it should rather be called a new version of the old fable. The farther the hare goes in the wrong way the more she goes astray, and thus many of Bolingbroke's most rapid movements only helped the tortoise to get to the goal before him. In 1708 Walpole, now recognized as an able debater, a clever tactician, and, above all things, an excellent man of business, was appointed Secretary at War. He became at the same time leader of the House of Commons. He was one of the managers in the unfortunate impeachment of the empty-headed High-Church preacher, Dr. Sacheverell. He resigned office with the other Whig ministers in 1710. Harley coming into power offered him a place in the new administration, which Walpole declined to accept. The Tories, reckless and ruthless in their majority, expelled Walpole from the House in 1712 and imprisoned him in the Tower. The charge against him was one of corruption, a charge easily made in those days against any minister, and which, if high moral principles were to prevail, might probably have been as easily sustained as it was made. Walpole, however, was not worse than his contemporaries; nor, even if he had been, would the contemporaries have been inclined to treat his offences very seriously so long as they were not inspired to act against him by partisan motives. At the end of the session he was released, and now, in the closing days of Anne's reign, all eyes turned to him as a rising man and a certain bulwark of the new dynasty.

[Sidenote: 1714--The Dean of St. Patrick's]

It would be impossible not to regard Jonathan Swift as one of the politicians, one of the statesmen, of this age. {35} Swift was a politician in the highest sense, although he had seen little of the one great political arena in which the battles of English parties were fought out. He has left it on record that he never heard either Bolingbroke or Harley speak in Parliament or anywhere in public. He was at this time about forty-seven years of age, and had not yet reached his highest point in politics or in literature. The "Tale of a Tub" had been written, but not "Gulliver's Travels;" the tract on "The Conduct of the Allies," but not the "Drapier's Letters." Even at this time he was a power in political life; his was an influence with which statesmen and even sovereigns had to reckon. No pen ever served a cause better than his had served, and was yet to serve, the interests of the Tory party. He was probably the greatest English pamphleteer at a time when the pamphlet had to do all the work of the leading article and most of the work of the platform. His churchmen's gown sat uneasily on him; he was like one of the fighting bishops of the Middle Ages, with whom armor was the more congenial wear. He had a fierce and domineering temper, and indeed out of his strangely bright blue eyes there was already beginning to shine only too ominously the wild light of that _saeva indignatio_ which the inscription drawn up by his own hand for his tomb described as lacerating his heart. The ominous light at last broke out into the fire of insanity. We shall meet Swift again; just now we only stop to note him as a political influence. At this time he is Dean of St. Patrick's in Ireland; he has been lately in London trying, and without success, to bring about a reconciliation between Bolingbroke and Harley; and, finding his efforts ineffectual, and seeing that troubled times were near at hand, he has quietly withdrawn to Berkshire. Before leaving London he wrote the letter to Lord Peterborough containing the remarkable words with which we have opened this volume. It is curious that Swift himself afterwards ascribed to Harley the saying about the Queen's health and the heedless {36} behavior of statesmen. In his "Enquiry into the Behaviour of the Queen's Last Ministry," dated June, 1715, he tells us that "about Christmas, 1713," the Treasurer said to him "whenever anything ails the Queen these people are out of their wits; and yet they are so thoughtless that as soon as she is well they act as if she were immortal." To which Swift adds the following significant comment: "I had sufficient reason, both before and since, to allow his observation to be true, and that some share of it might with justice be applied to himself." It was at the house of a clergyman at Upper Letcomb, near Wantage, in Berkshire, that Swift stayed for some time before returning to his Irish home. From Letcomb the reader will perhaps note with some painful interest that Swift wrote to Miss Esther Vanhomrigh, whom all generations will know as Vanessa, a letter, in which he describes his somewhat melancholy mode of life just then, tells her "this is the first syllable I have wrote to anybody since you saw me," and adds that "if this place were ten times worse, nothing shall make me return to town while things are in the situation I left them."

[Sidenote: 1714--Addison]

Swift, in his heart, trusted neither Bolingbroke nor Harley. It seems clear that Lady Masham was under the impression that she had Swift as her accomplice in the intrigue which finally turned Harley out of office. She writes to him while he is at Letcomb a letter which could not have been written if she were not in that full conviction; and he does not reply until the whole week's crisis is past and a new condition of things arisen; and in the reply he commits himself to nothing. If he distrusted Bolingbroke he could not help admiring him. Bolingbroke was the only man then near the court whose genius must not have been rebuked by Swift. But Swift must, for all his lavish praises of Harley, have sometimes secretly despised the hesitating, time-serving statesman, with whom indecision was a substitute for prudence, and to be puzzled was to seem to deliberate. That Harley should have had the playing of a great political game {37} while Swift could only look on, is one of the anomalies of history which Swift's sardonic humor must have appreciated to the full. Swift took his revenge when he could by bullying his great official friends now and then in the roughest fashion. He knew that they feared him, and flattered him because they feared him, and he was glad of it, and hugged himself in the knowledge. He knew even that at one time they were uncertain of his fidelity, and took much pains by their praises and their promises to keep him close at their side; and this, too, amused him. He was amused as a tyrant might be at the obvious efforts of those around him to keep him in good-humor, or as a man conscious of incipient madness might find malign delight in the anxiety of his friends to fall in with all his moods and not to cross him in anything he was pleased to say.

Joseph Addison had a political position and influence on the other side of the controversy which entitle him to be ranked among the statesmen of the day. Only in the year before his tragedy of "Cato" had been brought out, and it had created an altogether peculiar sensation. Each of the two great political parties seized upon the opportunity given by Gate's pompous political virtue, and claimed him as the spokesman of their cause. The Whigs, of course, had the author's authority to appropriate the applause of Cato, and the Whigs had endeavored to pack the House in order to secure their claim. But the Tories were equal to the occasion. They appeared in great numbers, Bolingbroke, then Secretary of State, at their head. When Cato lamented the extinguished freedom of his country the Whigs were vociferous in their cheers, and glared fiercely at the Tories; but when the austere Roman was made to denounce Caesar and a perpetual dictatorship, the Tories professed to regard this as a denunciation of Marlborough, and his demand to be made commander-in-chief for life, and they gave back the cheering with redoubled vehemence. At last Bolingbroke's own genius suggested a master-stroke. He sent for the actor who played Cato's part, thanked him in face of the {38} public, and presented him with a purse of gold because of the service he had done in sustaining the cause of liberty against the tyranny of a perpetual dictator.

Addison held many high political offices. He was Secretary to a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland more than once; he was made Secretary to the "Regents," as they were called--the commissioners intrusted by George the First with the task of administration previous to his arrival in England. He sat in Parliament; he was appointed Under-secretary of State, and was soon to be for a while one of the principal Secretaries of State. The last number of his _Spectator_ was published at the close of 1714. This was indeed still a time when literary men might hold high political office. The deadening influence of the Georges had not yet quite prevailed against letters and art. Matthew Prior, about whose poetry the present age troubles itself but little, sat in Parliament, was employed in many of the most important diplomatic negotiations of the day, and had not long before this time held the office of Plenipotentiary in Paris. Richard Steele not merely sat in the House of Commons, but was considered of sufficient importance to deserve the distinction of a formal expulsion from the House because of certain political diatribes for which he was held responsible and which the Commons chose to vote libellous. At the time we are now describing he had re-entered Parliament, and was still a brilliant penman on the side of the Whigs. His career as politician, literary man, and practical dramatist combined, seems in some sort a foreshadowing of that of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Gay was appointed Secretary to Lord Clarendon on a diplomatic mission to Hanover. Nicholas Rowe, the author of the "Fair Penitent" and the translator of Lucan's "Pharsalia," was at one time an Under-Secretary of State. Rowe's dramatic work is not yet absolutely forgotten by the world. We still hear of the "gallant gay Lothario," although many of those who are glib with the words do not know that they come from the "Fair Penitent," and would not care even if they did know.

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