Chapter 12

WALPOLE YIELDS TO WAR.

[Sidenote: 1739--Horatio Walpole's prediction]

The nation was plunging, not drifting, into war. Walpole himself, while still striving hard to put off any decisive step, and even yet perhaps hoping against hope that the people would return to their senses and leave the Patriots to themselves, did not venture any longer to meet the demands of the Opposition by bold argument founded on the principles of justice and wisdom. He had sometimes to talk the same "tall talk" as that in which the Patriots delighted, and to rave a little about the great deeds that would have to be done if Spain did not listen to reason very soon. But he still pleaded that Spain would listen to reason soon, very soon, and that if war must come sooner or later he preferred to take it later. That, it need hardly be said, was not Walpole's expression--it belongs to a later day--but it represents his mode of argument.

On March 6th the House of Commons met for the purpose of taking the foredoomed convention into consideration. So intense was the interest taken in the subject, so highly strung was political feeling, that more than four hundred members were in their places at eight o'clock in the morning. Seldom indeed is anxiety expressed in so emphatic and conclusive a form among members of the House of Commons. Readers may remember one day within recent years when a measure of momentous importance was to be introduced into the House of Commons, and when, long before eight in the morning, every seat in the House was occupied. On this March 6, 1739, the House resolved itself into committee, and spent the whole {171} day in hearing some of the merchants and other witnesses against the convention. The whole of the next day (Wednesday) was occupied in the reading of documents bearing on the subject, and it was not until Thursday that the debate began. The debate was more memorable for what followed it than for itself. In itself it was the familiar succession of fierce and unscrupulous attacks on the policy of peace, mixed up with equally fierce but certainly very well-deserved attacks on the character of the convention. William Pitt wound up his speech by declaring that "this convention, I think from my soul, is nothing but a stipulation for national ignominy; an illusory expedient to baffle the resentment of the nation; a truce without a suspension of hostilities on the part of Spain; on the part of England a suspension, as to Georgia, of the first law of nature, self-preservation and self-defence; a surrender of the rights and the trade of England to the mercy of plenipotentiaries, and, in this infinitely highest and sacred point, future security, not only inadequate, but directly repugnant to the resolutions of Parliament and the gracious promise from the throne. The complaints of your despairing merchants, the voice of England, have condemned it; be the guilt of it upon the head of its adviser! God forbid that this committee should share the guilt by approving it!"

One point in the debate is worthy of notice. The address to the King approving of the convention was moved by Horatio Walpole, the diplomatist, brother of Sir Robert. In the course of his speech Horatio Walpole declared that the outbreak of war between England and any great continental State would be certain to be followed by a new blow struck by the Pretender and his followers. Some of the orators of Opposition spoke with immense scorn of the possibility of a Jacobite movement ever again being heard of in England. The Walpoles both generally understood pretty well what they were talking about. The prediction of Horatio Walpole came true.

{172}

[Sidenote: 1739--The secession]

The address was carried by 260 against 232. The ministerial majority had run down to 28. Next day the battle was renewed. According to parliamentary usage, the report of the address was brought up, and Pulteney seized the opportunity to make another vehement attack on the convention and the ministers. He accused the Prime-minister of meanly stooping to the dictates of a haughty, insolent Court, and of bartering away the lives and liberties of Englishmen for "a sneaking, temporary, disgraceful expedient." But the interest of the day was to come. The address was agreed to by a majority of 262 against 234. This was exactly the same majority as before, only with both sides slightly strengthened. Then the principal leaders of Opposition thought the time had come for them to intervene with a deliberately planned _coup de théâtre_. Acting, it is understood, under the advice of Bolingbroke, they had been looking out for an opportunity to secede from the House of Commons on the ground that it was vain for patriotic men to try to do their duty to their country in a House of which the majority, narrow though it was, was yet the absolute slave of such a minister as Walpole. They hoped that such a step would have two effects. It would, they believed, create an immense sensation all over England and make them the heroes of the hour; and they fondly hoped that it would scare Walpole, and prevent him from passing in their absence the measures which their presence was unable to prevent. Such, we have no doubt, were the ideas of Bolingbroke and of Pulteney and of others; but we do not say that they were the ideas of the man who was intrusted with the duty of announcing the intentions of his party. This was Sir William Wyndham; and we do not believe that any hope of being one of the heroes of the hour entered for a moment into his mind. He only in a general honest thought, and common good to all, made one of them. Wyndham rose, and in a speech of great solemnity announced that he was about to pay his last duty to his country as a member of that {117} House. What hope, he asked, was there when the eloquence of one man had so great an effect within the walls of the House of Commons, and the unanimous voice of a brave, suffering people without had so little? He implied that the majority of the House must have been determined "by arguments that we have not heard." He bade an adieu to Parliament. "Perhaps," he said, "when another Parliament shall succeed, I may again be at liberty to serve my country in the same capacity." In other words, if the next Parliament should declare war on Spain after having got rid of Walpole, then Wyndham and his friends might be prevailed on to return. "I therefore appeal to a future, free, uninfluenced Parliament. Let it be the judge of my conduct and that of my friends on this occasion. Meantime I shall conclude with doing that duty to my country which I am still at liberty to perform--which is to pray for its preservation. May, therefore, that Power which has so often and so visibly before interposed on behalf of the rights and liberties of this nation continue its care over us at this worst and most dangerous juncture; while the insolence of enemies without, and the influence of corruption within, threaten the ruin of her Constitution."

This speech created, as will readily be imagined, an immense sensation in the House. A member of the Administration, one of the Pelhams, lost his head so completely that he sprang up with the intention of moving that Wyndham be committed to the Tower. Walpole, who was not in the habit of losing his head, prevented the ardent Pelham from carrying out his purpose. Walpole knew quite well that something better could be done than to evoke for any of the Patriots the antiquated terrors of the Tower. Walpole delivered a speech which, for its suppressed passion and its stern severity, was well equal to the occasion. The threat of Wyndham and his friends gave him, he said, no uneasiness. The friends of the Parliament and the nation were obliged to them for pulling off the mask--"We can be upon our guard {174} against open rebellion; it is hard to guard against secret treason." "The faction I speak of never sat in this House, they never joined in any public measure of the Government but with a view to distress it and to serve a Popish interest." Walpole was delighted to have an opportunity of paying off the Opposition for their constant denunciations of his alleged subservience to the throne of France, by flinging in Wyndham's teeth his old devotion to the cause of the Stuarts. "The gentleman," he said, "who is now the mouth of this faction was looked upon as the head of those traitors who, twenty-five years ago, conspired the destruction of their country and of the royal family to set a Popish Pretender on the throne. He was seized by the vigilance of the then Government and pardoned by its clemency, but all the use he has ungratefully made of that clemency has been to qualify himself according to law, that he and his party may some time or other have an opportunity to overthrow all law." For himself, Walpole declared he was only afraid that the gentlemen would not be as good as their word, and that they would return to Parliament. "For I remember," he said, "that in the case of their favorite prelate who was impeached of treason"--Atterbury--"the same gentleman and his faction made the same resolution. They then went off like traitors as they were; but their retreat had not the detestable effect they expected and wished, and therefore they returned. Ever since they have persevered in the same treasonable intention of serving that interest by distressing the Government."

[Sidenote: 1739--The policy of secession]

The House broke up in wild excitement; such excitement as had not been known there since the Excise Bill or the South Sea Bubble. About sixty of the Opposition kept for the time their promise of secession. Sir John Barnard, and two or three other men of mark in the party, had the good-sense to see that they could serve their cause, whatever it might be, better by remaining at their posts than by withdrawing from public life. The secession of a party from the House of Commons can {175} hardly ever be anything but a mistake. We are speaking now, of course, of a secession more serious and prolonged than that which concerns a particular stage of some measure. There have been occasions when the party in Opposition, after having fought their best against some obnoxious measure in all its former stages, and finding that further struggle would be unavailing, consider that they can make their protest more effectively, and draw public attention more directly to the nature of the controversy, by withdrawing in a body from the House of Commons, and leaving the Government alone with their responsibility. Such a course as this has been taken more than once in our own days. It can do no practical harm to the public interest, and it may do some service as a political demonstration. But a genuine secession, a prolonged secession, must, in the nature of things, do harm. It is wrong in principle; for a man is elected to the House of Commons in order that he may represent his constituents and maintain their interests there. To do that is his plain duty and business, which is not to be put away for the sake of indulging in any petulant or romantic impulse to withdraw from an assembly because one cannot have one's way there. No matter how small the minority on one side of the question, we have seen over and over again what work of political education may be done by a resolute few who will not cease to put forward their arguments and to fight for their cause.

In the case with which we are now dealing Wyndham and his friends only gratified Walpole by their unwise course of action. They enabled him to get through some of the work of the session smoothly and easily. A division hardly ever was known, and of some debates on really important questions there is positively no record. There was, for instance, a motion made in the House of Commons on March 30th for leave to bring in a Bill "to repeal so much of an Act passed in the 25th of King Charles the Second, entitled An Act for preventing {176} Dangers which may happen from Popish Recusants, as obligeth all persons who are admitted to any office, civil or military, to receive the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper within a time limited by the said Act; and for explaining and amending so much of the said Act as relates to the declaration against trans-substantiation." This proposal was supported by some of Walpole's friends; and, of course, Walpole himself was in favor of its principle. But he was not disposed in the least to trouble his master or himself about the repeal of Test Acts, either in the interest of the Roman Catholics or the Non-conformists, and he opposed the motion. There was a long debate, but the record says that "the particulars of it not having been made public, we can give no further account of it, but that many of the members being retired from Parliament, as before mentioned, and most of those concerned in the Administration being against it, the question passed in the negative, 188 noes to 89 yeas."

The Government were also enabled to pass without any resistance in the House of Commons a very ignoble and shabby little treaty with the King of Denmark, by which England undertook to pay to Denmark seventy thousand pounds a year for three years on condition that Denmark should furnish to King George a body of troops, six thousand men in all, these troops to be ready at any time when the King of England should call for them, and he being bound to pay a certain sum "by way of levy-money" for each soldier. This was not really an English measure at all. It had nothing to do with the interests of England, or of George as Sovereign of England. It was merely an arrangement between the King of Denmark and the Elector of Hanover, and was the settlement or composition of a miserable quarrel about a castle and a scrap of ground which George had bought from the Duchy of Holstein, and which Denmark claimed as her own. The dispute led to a military scuffle, in which the Danes got the worst of it, and it might have led to a war but that the timely treaty and the promised annual {177} payment brought the King of Denmark round to George's views. The treaty met with some opposition, or at all events some remonstrance, in the House of Lords. Carteret, however, gave it his support, and declared that he thought the treaty a wise and a just measure. Carteret was always in favor of the Hanoverian policy of King George.

[Sidenote: 1739--Walpole has it his own way]

So far, therefore, Walpole had things his own way. He was very glad to be rid of the Opposition for the time. He might well have addressed them in words like those which a modern American humorist says were called out with enthusiasm to him when he was taking leave of his friends and about to sail for Europe: "Don't hurry back--stay away forever if you like."

But war was to come all the same. Walpole was not strong enough to prevent that. The incessant attacks made in both Houses of Parliament had inflamed the people of Spain into a passion as great as that which in England was driving Walpole before it. The Spanish Government would not pay the amount arranged for in the convention. They put forward as their justification the fact, or alleged fact, that the South Sea Company had failed to discharge its obligations to Spain. The British squadron had been sent to the Mediterranean, and the Spaniards declared that this was a threat and an insult to the King of Spain. The claim to the right of search was asserted more loudly and vehemently than ever. Near to the close of the session there was a passionate debate in the House of Lords on the whole subject. The Opposition insisted that the honor of England would not admit of further delay, and that the sword must be unsheathed at once. The Duke of Newcastle could only appeal to the House on the part of the Government not to pass a resolution calling upon the King to declare war, but to leave it to the King to choose his own opportunity. Newcastle feebly pleaded that to pass a resolution would be to give untimely warning to England's enemies, and reminded the House that England was likely to have to {178} encounter an enemy stronger and more formidable than Spain. Lord Hardwicke and Lord Scarborough could only urge on the House the prudence and propriety of leaving the time and manner of action in the hands of the Ministry, in the full assurance that the ministers would do all that the nation desired. In other words, the ministers were already pledged to war. The session was brought to an end on June 14th, and on October 19th England declared war against Spain. The proclamation was greeted with the wildest outburst of popular enthusiasm; an enthusiasm which at the time seemed to run through all orders and classes. Joy-bells rang out their inspiring chimes from every church. Exulting crowds shouted in a stentorian chorus of delight. Cities flamed with illuminations at night. The Prince of Wales and some of the leaders of the Opposition took part in the public demonstration. The Prince stopped at the door of a tavern in Fleet Street, as if he were another Prince Hal carousing with his mates, and called for a goblet of wine, which he drank to the toast of coming victory. The bitter words of Walpole have indeed been often quoted, but they cannot be omitted here: "They may ring their bells now; before long they will be wringing their hands." Walpole was thinking, no doubt, of the Family Compact, and of "the King over the Water."

Parliament met in November, 1739, and the seceders were all in their places again. They had been growing heartily sick of secession and inactivity, and they insisted on regarding the declaration of war against Spain as a justification of their return to parliamentary life. Pulteney made himself their spokesman in the debate on the Address. "Our step," he said, meaning their secession, "is so fully justified by the declaration of war, so universally approved, that any further vindication of it would be superfluous." They seceded when they felt that their opposition was ineffectual, and that their presence was only made use of to give the appearance of a fair debate to that which had already been ratified. "The {179} state of affairs is now changed; the measures of the ministers are altered; and the same regard for the honor and welfare of their country that determined these gentlemen to withdraw has now brought them hither once more, to give their advice and assistance in those measures which they then pointed out as the only means of asserting and retrieving them." Walpole's reply was a little ungracious. It was, in effect, that he thought the country could have done very well without the services of the honorable members; that they never would have been missed; and that the nation was generally wide-awake to the fact that the many useful and popular measures passed towards the close of the last session owed their passing to the happy absence from Parliament of Pulteney and his friends. One might well excuse Walpole if he became sometimes a little impatient of the attitudinizing and the vaporing of the Patriots.

[Sidenote: 1739-1740--Death of Wyndham]

One of the Patriots was not long to trouble Walpole. On July 17, 1740, Sir William Wyndham died. Wyndham was a man of honor and a man of intellect. We have already in this history described his abilities and his character, his political purity, his personal consistency. He had always been in poor health; his incessant parliamentary work certainly could not have tended to improve his physical condition; and he was but fifty-three years old when he died. Had he lived yet a little longer he must have taken high office in a new administration, and he might have proved himself a statesman as well as a party leader and a parliamentary orator. Perhaps, on the whole, it is better for his fame that he should have been spared the test. It proved too much for Carteret. We may give Bolingbroke credit for sincerity when he poured out, in letter after letter, his lament for Wyndham's death. There is something, however, characteristic of the age and the man in Bolingbroke's instant assumption that Walpole must regard the death as a fine stroke of good-luck for himself. "What a star has our Minister," Bolingbroke wrote to a friend--"Wyndham dead!" It seems strange {180} that Bolingbroke should not even then have been able to see that the star of the great minister was about to set. The death of Wyndham brought Walpole no profit; gave him no security. But Wyndham's premature end withdrew a picturesque and a chivalric figure from the life of the House of Commons. He was one of the few, the very few, really unselfish and high-minded men who then occupied a prominent position in Parliament. He was not fighting for his own hand. He was not a mere partisan. He had enough of the statesman in him to be able to accept established facts, and not to argue with the inexorable. He was not a scholar like Carteret, or an orator like Bolingbroke; he was not an ascetic; but he had stainless political integrity, and was a true friend to his friends.

[Sidenote: 1740--Walpole's fatal mistake]

Walpole committed the great error of his life when he consented to accept the war policy which his enemies had proclaimed, and which he had so long resisted. Even if we consider his conduct not as a question of principle, but only as one of mere expediency, it must still be condemned. No statesman is likely to be able to conduct a great war whose heart is all the time filled only with a longing for peace. Walpole was perhaps less likely than any other statesman to make a war minister. He could not throw his heart into the work. He went to it because he was driven to it. It was simply a choice between declaring war and resigning office, and he merely preferred to declare war. This is not the temper, these are not the conditions, for carrying out a policy of war. But, as a question of principle, Walpole's conduct admits of no defence. His plain duty was to refuse to administer a policy of which he did not approve, and to leave the responsibility of the war to those who did approve of it. It is said that he tendered his resignation to the King; that the King implored Walpole to stand by him--not to desert him in that hour of need--and that Walpole at last consented to remain in office. This may possibly be true; some such form may have been gone through. But it does not alter the historical judgment about Walpole's {181} action. Walpole ought not to have gone through any forms at such a time. He hated the war policy; he knew that he was not a war minister; he ought to have refused to administer such a policy, and have stood by his refusal. It is said that, in his conversation with the King, Walpole pointed out that to the minister would be attributed every disaster that might occur during a war, his opposition to which would always be considered a crime. But would there be anything very unfair or unreasonable in that? When a statesman who has fought hard against a war policy suddenly yields to it, and consents to put it into action, would it be unreasonable, if disaster should occur, that his enemies should say, "This comes of trying to conduct a war in which you have no heart or spirit?" Burke passes severe censure even on Walpole's manner of carrying on his opposition to the war party. "Walpole," says Burke, "never manfully put forward the strength of his cause; he temporized; he managed; and, adopting very nearly the sentiments of his adversaries, he opposed their inferences. This, for a political commander, is the choice of a weak post. His adversaries had the best of the argument as he handled it; not as the reason and justice of his cause enabled him to manage it." Then Burke adds this emphatic sentence: "I say this after having seen, and with some care examined, the original documents concerning certain important transactions of those times; they perfectly satisfied me of the extreme injustice of that war, and of the falsehood of the colors which, to his own ruin, and guided by a mistaken policy, he suffered to be daubed over that measure." To his own ruin? Yes, truly. The consequence of Walpole's surrender was to himself and his political career fatal--irretrievable. His wrong-doing brought its heavy punishment along with it. He has yet to struggle for a short while against fate and his own fault; he has still to receive a few successive humiliations before the great and final fall. But the day of his destiny is over. For all real work his career may be said to have closed on the day when he consented to remain in {182} office and become the instrument of his enemies. With that day he passed out of the real world and life of politics, and became as a shadow among shadows.

We need not trouble ourselves much about the war with Spain. On neither side of the struggle was anything done which calls for grave historical notice. Every little naval success one of our admirals accomplished in the American seas, as they were then called, was glorified as if it had been an anticipated Trafalgar; and our admirals accomplished blunders and failures as well as petty victories. The quarrel very soon became swallowed up in the great war which broke out on the death of Charles the Sixth of Spain, and the occupation of Silesia by Frederick of Prussia. England lent a helping hand in the great war, but its tale does not belong to English history. Two predictions of Walpole's were very quickly realized. France almost immediately took part with Spain, in accordance with the terms of the Family Compact. In 1740 an organization was got up in Scotland by a number of Jacobite noblemen and other gentlemen, pledging themselves to stake fortune and life on the Stuart cause whenever its standard, supported by foreign auxiliaries, should be raised in Great Britain. This was the shadow cast before by the coming events of "forty-five"--events which Walpole was not destined to see.

[Sidenote: 1743--George at Dettingen]

One link of personal interest connects England with the war. George sent a body of British and Hanoverian troops into the field to support Maria Theresa of Hungary. The troops were under the command of Lord Stair, the veteran soldier and diplomatist, whose brilliant career has been already described in this history. George himself joined Lord Stair and fought at the battle of Dettingen, where the French were completely defeated; one of the few creditable events of the war, so far as English arms were concerned. George behaved with great courage and spirit. If the poor, stupid, puffy, plucky little man did but know what a strange, picturesque, memorable figure he was as he stood up against the enemy at that battle of Dettingen! {183} The last king of England who ever appeared with his army in the battle-field! There, as he gets down off his unruly horse, determined to trust to his own stout legs--because, as he says, they will not run away--there is the last successor of the Williams, and the Edwards, and the Henrys; the last successor of the Conquerer, and Edward the First, and the Black Prince, and Henry the Fourth, and Henry of Agincourt, and William of Nassau; the last English king who faces a foe in battle. With him went out, in this country, the last tradition of the old and original duty and right of royalty--the duty and the right to march with the national army in war. A king in older days owed his kingship to his capacity for the brave squares of war. In other countries the tradition lingers still. A continental sovereign, even if he have not really the generalship to lead an army, must appear on the field of battle, and at least seem to lead it, and he must take his share of danger with the rest. But in England the very idea has died out, never in all probability to come back to life again. If one were to follow some of the examples set us in classical imaginings, we might fancy the darkening clouds on the west, where the sun has sunk over the battlefield, to be the phantom shapes of the great English kings who led their people and their armies in the wars. Unkingly, indeed unheroic, little of kin with them they might well have thought that panting George; and yet they might have looked on him with interest as the last of their proud race.

We have been anticipating a little; let us anticipate a little more and say what came of the war, so far as the claims originally made by England, or rather by the Patriots, were concerned. When peace was arranged, nearly ten years after, the _asiento_ was renewed for four years, and not one word was said in the treaty about Spain renouncing the right of search. The great clamor of the Patriots had been that Spain must be made to proclaim publicly her renunciation of the right of search; and when a treaty of settlement came to be drawn up not a {184} sentence was inserted about the right of search, and no English statesman troubled his head about the matter. The words of Burke, taken out of one of his writings from which a quotation has already been made, form the most fitting epitaph on the war as it first broke, out--the war of Jenkins's ear. "Some years after it was my fortune," says Burke, "to converse with many of the principal actors against that minister (Walpole), and with those who principally excited that clamor. None of them--no, not one--did in the least defend the measure or attempt to justify their conduct. They condemned it as freely as they would have done in commenting upon any proceeding in history in which they were totally unconcerned." Let it not be forgotten, however, that, while this is a condemnation of the Patriots, it is no less a condemnation of Walpole. The policy which none of them could afterwards defend, which he himself had always condemned and reprobated, he nevertheless undertook to carry out rather than submit to be driven from office. Schiller in one of his dramas mourns over the man who stakes reputation, health, and all upon success--and no success in the end. It was to be thus with Walpole.

{185}