Part 8

The strength of the party was the new aristocracy created by Henry VIII with the spoils of the monasteries, of which the Cavendishs, Russells, and other houses were the leaders.[25] They were naturally strongly Protestant: and their immense power dates from the Revolution in 1688. Their rivals, the Tories, were in opposition till the accession of George III; and, as their sympathies were all on the side of the exiled Roman Catholic Stuarts, they had little or no influence. When, however, George III, a prince born in England, ascended the throne, the Tories, who bore him no grudge for his treatment of the exiled royal family, rallied to the young monarch, who was resolved not to submit, as his grandfather had done, to the tyranny of the Whig oligarchy. Henceforward the Tories were on the side of the Crown, whilst their opponents resisted its encroachments. The revolt of the American colonies, provoked by Mr. Grenville’s Stamp Act, made the Whigs oppose the King, who was determined to coerce his disaffected subjects. When the French Revolution broke out, this party sympathised with the republicans; and were opposed to the war which began in 1792. Their following consisted of the dissenters and intellectuals: the former drawing their strength from the commercial classes, and the latter consisting of young men, enamoured with the cult of reason and extremely susceptible to new ideas. The bulk of the nation, however, the Church, the country gentry, the farmers, profiting by war prices, and even the lower orders, was Tory. The non-aristocratic members of the Whig party were often great sufferers. They were exposed to mob violence, as in the case of Dr. Priestley, to social ostracism, and to vindictive prosecutions by the government. But the great houses maintained their position and were too strongly entrenched in it to be seriously disturbed.

Thus we have the spectacle of liberal ideas being championed by a coterie of great families, haughty, withdrawn from common folk, and so exclusive that it was almost impossible to gain admission to their circle. Hereditary exercise of power extending over fully a century made them skilled politicians; and when they recruited talent from the middle classes, the Whigs made their allies feel their dependence upon the ruling caste. Neither the philosophy of Edmund Burke in one generation, nor the versatility of Henry Brougham in another, prevented either from the sense of being in a state of dependence on their patrons.

One man, however, without the advantages of birth or wealth, enjoyed the privilege of moving freely in this charmed circle, in the person of Mr. Creevey, whose memoirs only appeared in 1903. His editor, Sir Herbert Maxwell, describes his abilities as hardly of the second order, but I must confess that, considering the position he occupied in the party, I cannot share his opinion. Married to a Mrs. Orde and apparently living on his wife’s moderate fortune, sitting for Thetford, a close borough of the Duke of Norfolk’s, and after his wife’s death subsisting on an income of £200 ($1000) a year, he never stooped to flatter, gave his advice without fear or favour, and, when the Duke put him out of his seat in the House of Commons, wrote the head of the English peerage a letter which shewed that he looked on his patron as an equal who had treated him very shabbily. From the Duke’s reply to “My dear Creevey” it is easy to see that his Grace recognised that he had offended, not a humble dependant, but a man of great political and social influence.

I am now going to select a few passages dating from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens in 1803 and onwards, shewing how England was rent by faction, even in the most perilous days of the war with Napoleon. Remember that often the country was fighting alone against perhaps the greatest genius the world has ever seen, and that her position at times appeared to be almost hopeless.

In 1804, when Buonaparte’s camp was established at Boulogne ready for the invasion of England, party feeling ran extraordinarily high. Pitt was becoming impatient of the incompetence of his friend Addington; and, as a party manœuvre, he moved for an inquiry into the conduct of Admiral Lord St. Vincent and was supported by Fox. Creevey writes that he is convinced that the accused is innocent; but still he felt bound to vote with Fox. “I am,” he says, “more passionately attached every day to party. I am certain that without it nothing can be done.” A month later the King’s madness was coming on, and Creevey hopes that this attack will make an end of him as a ruler. “I hope that the Monarch is done and can no longer make ministers.” Later on, the prospect of disaffection in Ireland fills Creevey with hopes that Pitt’s position may become impossible; he says, “The country engaged in a new war unnecessarily undertaken and ungraciously entered upon, the Catholics discontented, and the Opposition unbroken. If such a combination of circumstances does not shake the Treasury bench, what can?” The next year, 1805 (Trafalgar), brings to Mr. Creevey and his friends the hope that Mr. Pitt may be exposed for lending Government money to a firm which had recently gone bankrupt. In 1808, when Sir Arthur Wellesley began his work in the Peninsula, the convention of Cintra made him most unpopular; and the nation was, says Sir Herbert Maxwell, “almost unanimous in demanding his degradation if not his death.” Mr. Whitbred writes to Mr. Creevey, “I grieve for the opportunity which has been lost of acquiring national glory, but I am not sorry to see the Wellesley pride a little lowered.” The next year witnessed the lamentable failure of the Walcheren Expedition, and Wellesley’s victory of Talavera. Captain Graham Moore, brother to Sir John Moore, writes to Creevey: “The Cannings are in a damned dilemma with this expedition and the victory of Talavera. They mean, I understand, to saddle poor Lord Chatham with the first, but who can they saddle the victory with? They cannot attack the Wellesleys as they did my poor brother. What a cursed set you (politicians) are.” The passage of the Douro by Wellesley led to Mr. Whitbred addressing the General in most complimentary terms; but the war occupied people’s thoughts but little, the main interest being centred in the exposure of the scandalous sale of commissions in the army by Mrs. Clarke, a friend of the Duke of York’s. Two years later, in 1811, Creevey takes encouragement from the number of sick in the army of Portugal and hopes it may bring about peace, and when the war in Spain was nearing its victorious conclusion a friend writes to him, abusing Wellington.

These remarks are indeed the mild utterances of leaders of a party more interested in disparaging their political opponents than in the progress of the war. When we turn to the extreme wing of the party we find Napoleon a hero and his defeat a calamity:

“But even with such mighty odds against him the towering and gigantic genius of Napoleon would have defied them all, if English money had not bribed some of his generals. It was this, and this only, that completed his downfall. To talk of the Duke of Wellington as the conqueror of Napoleon is an insult to the understanding of any intelligent man; and for Lord Castlereagh to have boasted of having subdued him as his lordship was wont to do, was pitiful, was wondrous pitiful.” So wrote Lady Ann Hamilton; in the same strain also at an earlier period spoke Mr. Fox of the virtues of his country’s greatest and most determined enemy. It is thus that history repeats itself in the wars my country has waged in her long history.

I now pass to a character very different from Creevey’s, to the man who ruled the fashionable world with an authority even more undisputed than that of the Prince of Wales, Beau Brummell, the prince of the dandies. The Beau had no advantages of birth and only a moderate fortune. It is often the custom to regard him as a mere coxcomb, the outcome of a frivolous society fitted only to point a moral and adorn a tale. I venture to take a more charitable view of him and to give my opinion that he owed his ascendancy to something more than extravagance of dress and unbounded impudence.

To take but a single example: Everybody knows the story of Brummell walking with Lord Alvanley in the Park being cut by the Prince Regent and enquiring in an audible voice, “Who is your fat friend?” There is very little point in the remark except its offensiveness. But the biographer of Brummell, Captain Jesse, got the true version from a friend who witnessed the incident. It was not in the Park, but at a ball given by Brummell, Lord Alvanley, and two others. The Prince was not invited, because of his quarrel with Brummell; but, as everybody was going, he signified his pleasure to be present. When he arrived he greeted Lord Alvanley and his other two hosts, cutting Brummell pointedly, thereby insulting one of his entertainers. The Prince had by a gross breach of good taste placed himself in an impossible position. If he did not know his host, his host had a right to regard him as an uninvited intruder; therefore the question was a snub, unanswerable even by the Regent. The life of Brummell is the record of much folly and frivolity, ending with a long exile in Calais, which terminated in imbecility and death in an almshouse. Nevertheless this famous dandy, fop though he was, is one of those butterflies whose useless lives at least add to the beauty of the scene. Nor is it for the recorder of his time to point the finger of scorn at him. Absurd as his ideal was, it was not wholly contemptible. His vanity was not malicious, he was at least no sycophant, he held his own among aristocrats, who were as vulgar as they were arrogant. He shamed his associates into decent manners, at a period when social polish was hardly skin deep. He insisted on personal cleanliness in days when it was disregarded by the highest in the land. He had the art of making friends who stood by him in his hours of poverty and distress. The Duke of York, with all his faults the best liked son of George III, the Duchess, one of the most amiable ladies of the day, the Duke of Beaufort, and many others remained staunch to him as long as he lived. He was a sharer in the follies of his day, but so far as I know he was not so heartless in his vices as many a greater man; nor did he pander to the vices of others. We can laugh at his absurdities, without having that feeling of disgust with which we regard many of the faults of his august rival, the Prince Regent. How delightful, for example, is his criticism of the Duke of Bedford’s coat! On one occasion his Grace asked the Beau his opinion of his new clothes. “Turn round,” said Brummell, “now stand still.” Then taking the garment by the lapel, he exclaimed, “Oh, Bedford, do you call this a coat?”

The thing which strikes us most in connection with the halcyon period of the dandies, with its follies and lavish expenditure, is that it coincided with some of the most anxious days through which England ever passed, and with the age when distress and poverty were most keenly felt. Fashionable life was indeed fast and furious and characterised by its reckless extravagance. Everybody gambled: every possible event was made the subject of a bet. The turf was, as it is to-day, crowded with blacklegs; and the issue of a great fight in the prize ring was watched with more trembling anxiety than that of a battle in Spain or Flanders. The prevalence of drunkenness was universal; every memoir of the time records drinking-bouts innumerable. The fine gentleman garnished every sentence with an oath and even used bad language in his letters to his friends. Duelling was universal. Pitt, the Duke of Wellington, Castlereagh, nearly all the leading statesmen, had to fight. Even the Duke of York, though very near the throne, ‘met’ the Duke of Richmond. But with all its failings the men of fashion had one merit: though they were almost incredibly coarse, brutal, and selfish, no one could reproach them with softness. They may have been bad, but they were men. If they went to see prize-fighters beat each other into a jelly, they were ready enough to use their fists themselves. If they gambled the cards and the dice, they did so at the risk of ending their days in a debtor’s prison. Many of them died ruined in purse and bankrupt even of honour. If they pursued their amours unscrupulously, there was always the risk of facing an outraged relative’s pistol. The spice of danger was never absent from their lives. One alone could share in all their pursuits, and be exempt from peril. He could drink himself drunk without danger of his words being called in question; he could ruin wives and daughters and no one would raise a hand against him; he could engage in shady transactions on the turf, and men made it a point of honour to shield his fair fame. If others were extravagant, they dissipated their own patrimony; and when that was gone, there was nothing for it but to starve. But he had only to fall back on national resources, and the taxpayer extricated him from his difficulties. It is because of its immunity, that the profligacy of George, as Prince, as Regent, and as King is so detestable.

It has been customary, I think, to underrate his abilities. Thackeray has a most misleading passage about his relation with the Whigs. “At first he made a pretence of having Burke and Fox and Sheridan for his friends. But how could such men be serious before such an empty scapegrace as this lad...; what had these men of genius in common with their tawdry young host of Carlton House? That fribble the leader of such men as Fox and Burke! That man’s opinions about the constitution--about any question graver than the button of a waistcoat or the sauce of a partridge worth anything! The friendship between the Prince and the Whig Chiefs was impossible. They were hypocrites in pretending to respect him, and if he broke the hollow compact between them, who shall blame him?” But if we turn to Creevey, we shall see that George played the game with the Whigs with consummate skill. Not that he cared a straw for the constitution or political matters. He wanted leisure, comfort, influence,--above all, money. He used the Whigs for his purposes in the question of the Regency, and in order to extort money from the nation. They were ready enough to serve him in defeating Pitt and their other opponents; but he, once he was Regent in 1812, with his father, the old King, hopelessly insane, flung them aside as no longer useful and made the Tory government uphold the two things now to his interest to conserve,--the _status quo_ and the power of the Crown.

No one has ever doubted the power of fascination exercised by George, which was due not less to his clever adaptability, than to his high position. What reader of Lockhart’s “Life of Scott” can forget the dinner party when the King and Sir Walter exchanged mutual badinage in the freest manner? We find the same in Creevey regarding the extreme affability with which he treated him and the Whig leaders at Brighton, when Prince Regent. George’s charm of manner and the ease with which he could adapt himself to his company and forget to all appearance his royal dignity in social intercourse was one of his most powerful political assets which he used to the fullest advantage.

The influence exercised by him was almost wholly evil. Head of the state in the days of its greatest military glory, when the moral and political influence of England was paramount in Europe; living in the days of great industrial and mechanical triumph, in which his country had the fullest share; confronted as King with some of the gravest social problems, which its poets and philosophers were taxing their utmost to expose and remove,--the marvel is that any man could have occupied such a position, and yet interested himself almost exclusively in frivolous pleasures and sensual amours.

I do not think that it is too harsh a verdict to say that George IV’s example acted like a poison to the social life of several generations. Vice was rampant enough in English society before he came to manhood; but his father had done much to set an example to his nobility of a pure domestic life, and to encourage simple tastes and pleasures. Gambling and profligacy went on despite the King; but his son led the orgies of extravagance. His taste was atrocious. What can be more monstrous than the Pavilion at Brighton? Read Thackeray’s description of his coming of age fête at Carlton House, quoted from the _European Magazine_, 1784: “The saloon may be styled the _chef-d’œuvre_, and in every ornament discovers great invention. It is hung with a figured plush.... The window curtains, sofas, and chairs are of the same colour. The ceiling is ornamented with emblematical paintings, representing the Graces and Muses, together with Jupiter, Mercury, and Apollo and Paris. Two ormolu chandeliers are placed here, etc., etc.”[26] The coronation was a monstrous exhibition of extravagance. For the feast in Westminster Hall, where the Champion of England, “mounted on a horse, borrowed from Astley’s theatre, rode into the Hall,” more than eight hundred dozen of wine and one hundred gallons of punch were provided. Vulgarity distinguished the period of the ‘First Gentleman in Europe.’ Countless families were brought to ruin by association with him, and at no time that I can call did more eminent people die by their own hands. As Thackeray says: “There is no greater satire on that proud society ... than that it admired George!”

One episode which perhaps throws as much light as anything upon the manners and morals of the time is the trial of Caroline of Brunswick, the unhappy, if indiscreet, consort of George IV. Before making the attempt I am afraid I must go back to 1795, when the Prince of Wales, on the report of his not too refined sailor brother, decided to offer his hand to that princess. He got very well paid by the country for the sacrifice. His income was raised from £60,000 ($300,000) to £125,000 ($625,000); for the preparations for the wedding he got £27,000 ($135,000); a further grant of jewels and plate, or cash to buy them, £28,000 ($140,000). Then came £15,000 ($130,000) to complete Carlton House; and the Princess, his wife, was in addition offered an allowance of £50,000 ($250,000) a year. For some reason--I should say she was the only princess who ever did so--Caroline accepted less than was offered as income; namely, £35,000 ($175,000).

It is true George also wanted his debts, amounting to a trifle of £600,000 ($3,000,000) odd, paid, and failed to get it; still, considering the value of money in those days, and that times in England were worse than had been known,--wars, taxes, bad seasons, the poor in abject distress, Pitt distracted how to raise money, sedition rampant, and no very glorious period for the British arms,--he certainly did not sell himself cheap. Of the miserable marriage which ensued little need be said. From the time the Prince raised his bride, when she tried to kneel, and said to Lord Malmesbury, “Harris, I am not well; get me a glass of brandy,” to her death twenty-six years later, it is one long discreditable story. But I allude to it for a personal reason. I have myself seen two of the counsels of the Queen in the celebrated trial. Dr. Lushington was a friend of my family’s, and I was at a school in Brighton which Lord Brougham used to visit; and--I believe I am correct in saying this--I actually received one of the prizes when he gave them away. I certainly have a book on my shelves which, I fancy, I got on that occasion. It assuredly does not make a man feel young when he realises that he has seen and can remember men who not only witnessed but took a very prominent part in a trial which was held ninety-six years ago.

Let me, however, recapitulate the events which led up to the great scene in the House of Lords. George as Prince of Wales hated his wife from the first, and after the birth of the Princess Charlotte refused to have anything to do with her. On April 30, 1796, the Prince wrote a letter to the Princess in which he said: “Our inclinations are not in our power, nor should either of us be held answerable to the other, because nature has not made us suitable to each other.... I shall now finally close this disagreeable correspondence, trusting that, as we have completely explained ourselves to each other, the rest of our lives will be passed in uninterrupted tranquillity.”

To do George justice, his wife does not seem to have been attractive. He had excellent taste in dress and deportment; and Caroline was far from being a model of refinement in appearance or manners, whilst her choice of company was never discreet. The old King always treated her with kindness and even affection, but he found it necessary to warn her to be more careful in the selection of her society. In 1804 the Prince of Wales instituted a “Delicate Enquiry,” which four Lords were appointed to conduct, with the result that the behaviour of the Princess was pronounced not _un_satisfactory. In the years which followed there were constant quarrels and recriminations about the education of their daughter, the Princess Charlotte of Wales, a high-spirited girl who stood up boldly to the ill treatment she received at her father’s hands, and defended her mother. In 1814 the Princess of Wales left England for her famous travels. Two years later the Princess Charlotte married Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, and settled down at Claremont, a beautiful place purchased for her by the nation. The young couple were thoroughly happy, the people looked forward to being one day ruled over by a beloved and virtuous queen. The incredible scandals of the family of George III were being forgotten, when the news came that the Princess was dead.

I shall _never_ get to the trial! I must digress once more. What ensued was almost farcical. Despite the fact that George III had an immense family, he had no grandchildren. All his elderly sons hastened to get married. The Prince Regent was very little married to his wife, and very much so to various other ladies; the Duke of York had married happily, and was, if not always faithful, a kindly husband; but he had no family. The Duke of Cumberland had married a princess of whom the royal family disapproved, and perhaps he was more hated by the nation than any member of the house of Hanover. Among other things, many firmly believed that he was really guilty of the murder of his servant, Sellis. The idea of his coming to the throne was dreaded on all sides. But there was no lack of _nominally_ unmarried Royal Dukes,--Clarence, Sussex, Kent, and Cambridge. The nearest persons to the succession, who had families, were the King of Würtemburg, his brother, and their sister the Princess Frederica Buonaparte. It became necessary for the Royal Dukes to take wives in accordance with the Royal Marriage Act of 1772;[27] and, though they had not only themselves but other ladies and their children to consider, these noble princes presented themselves at the altar of Hymen. Not, however, without some forethought, as the following remarks of the Duke of Kent to his friend Mr. Creevey testify: