Part 13
Fox was a great-hearted man, with a beautiful disposition, high spirits, unbounded good-humour, delightful conversation, a great affection for his friends, an undeniable loyalty to those who trusted him; and these qualities, combined with his great natural abilities and an indisputable charm, made him a great, commanding and fascinating figure. Gibbon, a political opponent, said he possessed “the powers of a superior man, as they are blended in his attractive character, with the softness and simplicity of a child,” adding that “perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity or falsehood”; but the greatest tribute came from Burke, who described him simply and, perhaps, sufficiently as “a man made to be loved.”
Philip, Duke of Wharton
In the history of every country a few figures stand out conspicuous, not necessarily for ability or virtue, or even vice, but through the power of a dominating personality or the strangeness of their career. In the Georgian annals of England in the forefront of these heroes of romance stands, head and shoulders above the rest, Charles James Fox, whose genius and fascinations, indeed, whose very faults, seize the imagination, and hold it captive, a willing prisoner; but there are others, minor lights to this great star, yet still shining so brightly as to dazzle the sober senses of twentieth-century social historians, a body not given unduly to hero-worship. Such a one was Brummell, another was “Beau” Nash, both arbiters of fashion, veritable kings in the eyes of their contemporaries; a third was Elizabeth Chudleigh, Countess of Bristol, Duchess of Kingston, greater still as Beatrix, queen of hearts, in “Esmond”; and to a place in this gallery of adventurous spirits none can deny the right of Philip, Duke of Wharton, Richardson’s Lovelace, gallant, wit, statesman, satirist, poet and pamphleteer, like Dryden’s Zimri, “everything by starts and nothing long,” a man who threw away great gifts, honour, loyalty and love, as freely, and with as little regard for consequences, as Fox squandered his gold.
Philip, born on Christmas Eve, 1698, was the only son of Thomas, fourth Baron Wharton, by his second wife, Lucy, daughter of Lord Lisburne, who in that year was a toast at the Kit-Cat Club:
“When Jove to Ida did the gods invite, And in immortal toastings pass’d the night, With more than bowls of nectar were they blest, For Venus was the Wharton of the feast!”
Lord Wharton--for his services to William III. created in 1706 earl, when his heir became known as Viscount Winchendon--was not only a pleasure-loving man, but also a strenuous politician. He, imbued with the idea that his boy, in his turn, might add further laurels to the family name, with this object in view kept a more than paternal eye upon the direction of the youngster’s studies. To his parents’ great joy, Philip gave signs of precocious cleverness, and it was decided to have him educated by private tutors, instructed, after their pupil was well grounded in the classics, to teach him in a very thorough manner the history of Europe, with, of course, special reference to that of his own country; and to train him as an orator by making him read and recite passages from Shakespeare and from the great speeches of the most eloquent statesmen of that and bygone ages.
Philip evinced much readiness, and diligently applied himself to his studies; but his father’s love of pleasure was in his blood, and while for some time he submitted to the company of his teachers, with little or no relaxation from his books, at last, as was only to be expected from a high-spirited lad, he broke over the traces. Handsome and graceful, he found his pleasure with women: a fault which his father, now created Marquis of Wharton, could overlook in consideration of his son’s promise in other directions. However, the young man destroyed all the Marquis’s hope of an alliance with some lady of high rank and vast wealth by secretly espousing, at the Fleet, on 2nd March 1715, when he was in his seventeenth year, Martha, the penniless daughter of Major-General Holmes--a proceeding that the Marquis took so much to heart that, it was said, his death six weeks later was directly attributable to his grief and anger.
The effects of this madcap escapade might not have been very serious, for there was nothing to be urged against the girl except her lack of money and great connections, if the accomplished fact had been recognised in the right spirit by the young husband’s family; in which case, it is more than probable, his career might have been very different. As it was, however, his mother and his father’s trustees, Lord Dorchester, Lord Carlisle, and Nicholas Lechmere, thought it advisable temporarily to separate man and wife, and sent the Marquis abroad in charge of a French Protestant.
In this uncongenial company Philip visited Holland and Hanover and other German courts, and eventually settled down at Geneva. There he remained for a while, galled by the restrictions upon his personal liberty by the tutor, and infuriated by the inadequacy of the income allowed him by his trustees. The latter annoyance he overcame by raising money at, of course, exorbitant interest; the former by the simple expedient of running away from Geneva without his companion, who, a few hours after the flight of his charge, received from the latter a note: “Being no longer able to bear your ill-usage, I have thought proper to be gone from you; however, that you may not want company, I have left you the bear, as the most suitable companion in the world that could be picked out for you!”
The Marquis made his way to Lyons, where he arrived on 13th October 1716, and from there he sent a complimentary letter to the son of James II. at Avignon, and with the letter, as a present, a magnificent horse. The Pretender, delighted by the prospect of being able to detach from the Hanoverian interest even an eighteen-year-old marquis, and especially the son of that very pronounced Whig, Thomas Wharton, graciously despatched one of his Court to invite Philip to Avignon. There the lad went, stayed a day and night, and received from his host the dangerous compliment of an offer of the title of the Duke of Northumberland, after which, to make matters worse, he repaired to St Germain’s to pay his respects to Mary, Queen Dowager of England. The folly of his actions is the most remarkable thing about them. Had he been attached to the cause of the Chevalier de St George, the visits would have been natural; had he even desired, as so many had done, to be sufficiently attentive to the Prince so as to be free from molestation in case the latter should ever ascend the throne of England, the visits would have been explicable; but since he was not a Jacobite, and, if not too honest, at least too careless of his personal interest to be a “trimmer,” the only solution of the matter is that his actions were dictated by a spirit of revolt, the not unnatural reaction on escaping from custody.
How little the Marquis meant by his visits--which, in after days, he declared were mere personal courtesies--may be deduced from the fact that, as soon as he arrived at Paris, he called on Lord Stair, the English Ambassador--at whose table, it is said, in a drunken frolic he proposed the health of the Pretender! At a time when it was a matter of vital importance to know who was for and against the home Government, and when a fortune was spent on spies, Lord Stair, of course, knew that the Marquis had been to Avignon and St Germain’s; but if he did not close his ears to the tales of the young man’s doings, at least he did not avert his countenance from him. On the contrary, he received him with every attention, realising that here was, so to speak, a brand to be plucked from the burning. The lad was only eighteen, and so indiscretions might be dismissed as of no importance; whereas to dwell on them unduly would perhaps turn him into a Jacobite. Therefore much show of kindness was diplomatic, coupled, Lord Stair thought, with a trifle of admonition.
However, when the Ambassador began to utter a word in season, the Marquis did not show himself amenable to advice. Indeed, when Lord Stair, extolling the virtues of his guest’s father, said, “I hope you will follow so illustrious an example of fidelity to your Prince and love to your country,” the Marquis retorted, “I thank your Excellency for your good counsel, and as your Excellency had also a worthy and deserving father, I hope that you will likewise copy so bright an original and tread in all his steps”--which reply, though showing a keen sense of humour, was brutal, for the first Lord Stair had unhesitatingly betrayed his sovereign!
As a matter of fact, the Marquis would tolerate no interference, and when a friend, whether or not set to task by Lord Stair has not transpired, expostulated with him for having abandoned the principles of his father, “I have pawned my principles,” he said jauntily, “to Gordon, the Pretender’s banker, for a considerable sum; and till I have the money to repay him, I must be a Jacobite; but,” he added, “as soon as I have redeemed them, I shall be a Whig again!”
Perhaps this remark was conveyed to the Marquis’s trustees, for it is to be presumed that the Marquis’s financial obligations were discharged, since on his arrival in Ireland at the beginning of 1717 the Government seems to have connived at his taking his seat as Marquis Castlereagh, in the Irish House of Lords, though only in his nineteenth year--“which,” Budgell wrote to Mr Secretary Addison, “is the highest compliment that could have been paid to him.” Here Philip showed an apparently earnest desire to atone for his misdemeanours abroad, and his great talents made the task easy. He took a prominent part in debate, sat on committees, and in his official capacity conducted himself so that the British Government, congratulating themselves on their tact in having made light of his doings in France, thought it well to endeavour to bend him still more closely to their interests, by bestowing on him, perhaps as a set-off against the ducal title offered by the Pretender, an English dukedom.
“As it is the honour of subjects, who are descended from an illustrious family, to imitate the great examples of their ancestors, we esteem it no less our glory, as a King, after the manner of our predecessors, to dignify eminent methods by suitable rewards,” so ran the preamble to the patent. “It is on this account that we confer a new title on our right trusty and entirely beloved cousin, Philip Marquis of Wharton and Malmesbury, who though he be born of a very ancient noble family, wherein he may reckon as many patriots as forefathers, has rather chosen to distinguish himself by his personal merit. The British nation, not forgetful of his father lately deceased, gratefully remember how much their invincible King William III. owed to that constant and courageous assistor of the public liberty and the Protestant religion. The same extraordinary person deserved so well of us, in having supported our interests by the weight of his councils, the force of his wit, and the firmness of his mind, at a time when our title to the succession of this realm was endangered; that in the beginning of our reign we invested him with the dignity of a Marquis, as an earnest of our royal favour, the farther marks whereof we were prevented from bestowing by his death, too hasty, and untimely for his King and Country. When we see the son of that great man, forming himself by so worthy an example, and in every action exhibiting a lively resemblance to his father; when we consider the eloquence which he has exerted with so much applause in the parliament of Ireland; and his turn and application, even in early youth, to the serious and weighty affairs of the public, we willingly decree him honours, which are neither superior to his merits, nor earlier than the expectation of our good subjects.”
Vanity, it is generally assumed, was the moving spirit of the new Duke of Wharton, and it seems that to have earned a dukedom at twenty years of age temporarily lulled that passion, for, after the bestowal of that high honour, the recipient seems to have rested on his oars, and for the next year to have abandoned himself to unbridled excesses in drink and profligacy. “Aye, my lord,” said Swift, who admired his talents, when his Grace had been recounting some of his frolics to the Dean of St Patrick’s, “Aye, my lord, you have had many frolics; but let me recommend you one more: take a frolic to be virtuous; I assure you it will do you more honour than all the rest!”
Whether caused by Swift’s words, or whether it was the swing of the pendulum, on coming of age Philip made a complete change in his mode of living, and for a while led a decent private life. “The Duke of Wharton has brought his Duchess to town, and is fond of her to distraction; to break the hearts of all the other women that have any claim on his,” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote to her sister, Lady Mar. “He has public devotions twice a day, and assists at them in person with exemplary devotion; and there is nothing pleasanter than the remarks of some great pious ladies on the conversion of so great a sinner.” How long this period of conjugal fidelity might have endured is uncertain, but it was brought to an untimely end when the Duchess, in defiance of her husband’s command, came from Winchendon to London, bringing with her their child, the twelve-months’ old Earl of Malmesbury, who in the metropolis caught smallpox and died. This, it is said by all loyal biographers, so affected his Grace that, regarding the bereavement as caused by the violation of his wishes, he could not bear the sight of his wife. Persons less prone to sentiment than biographers may perhaps see in this yet another swing of the pendulum.
If the Duke’s private life was for a while exemplary, the same cannot at any time be said of his political career. A young man may change his opinion once without giving serious offence, he may even be forgiven for reverting to his earlier beliefs, but he can expect but scant mercy if he chops and changes with every breath of wind. At Avignon Philip had accepted a title from the Pretender, in Ireland he had accepted a dukedom from George I. as a reward for his vigorous support of the ministry; but now, when he took his seat in the English Parliament, to the general astonishment, he threw himself into uncompromising opposition.
The report of his great talents, his brilliant oratory, and his powers as a debater had reached Westminster, where his appearance was eagerly awaited, and he felt it incumbent upon him to show that rumour had not magnified his gifts; on 24th April 1720 he took part in a debate on a Bill to give further powers to the South Sea Company, and made a magnificent onslaught not only on this proposal, but on the entire policy of the Government, concluding with a terrible attack on Lord Stanhope, whom he accused of having made, or at least of having fostered, the breach between the King and the Prince of Wales, comparing him to Sejanus, “that evil and too powerful minister who made a division in the Imperial party, and rendered the reign of Tiberius hateful to the Romans.” Lord Stanhope was not the man to sit quiet under such castigation, and he turned the tables on his assailant with undoubted dexterity. “The Romans were most certainly a great people, and furnished many illustrious examples in their history, which ought to be carefully read,” he said in reply. “The Romans were likewise universally allowed to be a wise people, and they showed themselves to be so in nothing more than by debarring young noblemen from speaking in the Senate till they understood good manners and propriety of language; and as the Duke has quoted an instance from this history of a bad minister, I beg leave to quote from the same history an instance of a great man, a patriot of his country, who had a son so profligate that he would have betrayed the liberties of it, on which account his father himself had him whipped to death.”
The Minister’s apt retort rankled, and it doubtless did much to confirm the Duke in his attitude. He spoke against the Government, not only in the House of Lords, but in the City of London and in the country; and in the following year, returning to the question of the South Sea Company’s affairs, he attacked Lord Stanhope in so brilliant and bitter a speech that the latter, rising in a passion to reply, broke a blood-vessel, from the effects of which he died on the following day. It was somewhat later that the Duke attacked Lord Chancellor Macclesfield, suspected and eventually found guilty of fraud in connection with the South Sea Company’s affairs, not only by word of mouth, but also in a satirical ballad entitled “An Epistle from John Sheppard to the Earl of Macclesfield”:
“Were thy virtues and mine to be weighed in a scale, I fear, honest Thomas, that thine would prevail, For you break through all laws, while I only break jail. Which nobody can deny.
When curiosity led you so far As to send for me, my dear lord, to the bar, To show what a couple of rascals we were. Which nobody can deny.
You’ll excuse me the freedom of writing to thee, For all the world then agreed they never did see A pair so well matched as your lordship and me. Which nobody can deny.
At the present disgrace, my lord! ne’er repine, Since fame thinks of nothing but thy tricks and mine, And our name shall alike in history shine. Which nobody can deny.”
Having established his fame as an orator with his speeches on the South Sea question, Wharton gained yet further distinction by his impassioned defence of Bishop Atterbury, but what reputation he gained as a speaker he lost in honour, for he had obtained the material for his oration by a mean trick. The day before he spoke he went to Sir Robert Walpole, told him he was sorry for his opposition to the Government and intended to reinstate himself in favour at Court and with the Ministry by speaking against the Bishop, and he begged the Prime Minister to give him some assistance in preparing his arguments. Walpole went carefully over the ground with his visitor, and showed him the strong and the weak points of the case. The Duke expressed his thanks, spent the night in a drinking bout, and, without going to bed, went to the House of Lords and spoke _for_ the Bishop, making use most effectively of the information he had obtained on the previous day. Then, when sentence of banishment was pronounced on the Bishop, he saw him off, and, returning home, wrote and published some verses on “The Banishment of Cicero,” in which, of course, the Bishop was Cicero, and George I. Clodius, concluding:
“Let Clodius now in grandeur reign, Let him exert his power, A short-lived monster in the land, The monarch of an hour; Let pageant fools adore their wooden god, And act against their senses at his nod.
Pierced by an untimely hand To earth shall he descend, Though now with gaudy honours clothed, Inglorious in his end. Blest be the man who does his power defy, And dares, or truly speaks, or bravely die!”
In the meantime the Duke had reverted to his dissipated habits in private life, and it amused and annoyed many of his contemporaries that in public he, the President of the Hell-fire Club, should, on the ground of morality, inveigh against various measures. Wharton, however, paid little or no heed to those who held the view that a profligate is not the proper person to preach virtue; but when the King in council, on 29th April 1721, issued a proclamation against “certain scandalous clubs or society, who in the most impious and blasphemous manner insult the most sacred principles of our holy religion, and corrupt the minds and morals of one another,” Wharton, as President of the Hell-fire Club, rose in his place in the House of Lords, declared he was not, as was thought, a “patron of blasphemy,” and, pulling out a Bible, proceeded to read several texts.
He went occasionally to his seat in Westmoreland, and was a frequent visitor to the seat of his kinsman, Sir Christopher Musgrave, at Edenhall, where was preserved the great crystal goblet, supposed to have been seized by some earlier Musgrave from a fairy banquet, and known as “The Luck of Edenhall.” The legend ran:
“If this glass do break or fall, Farewell the luck of Edenhall!”
but in spite of this warning the Duke, out of sheer devilment, would toss the goblet high in the air, and once, but for a wary butler, it would have fallen to the ground and have been smashed to atoms. It was at Edenhall that the Homeric drinking match took place, which Wharton, its proposer, celebrated in verse in the form of “An Imitation of Chevvy-Chace.”
“God prosper long our noble king, And likewise _Eden-Hall_; A doleful Drinking-Bout I sing, There lately did befal.
To chace the Spleen with Cup and Can Duke _Philip_ took his Way; Babes yet unborn shall never see Such Drinking as that Day.
The stout and ever thirsty Duke A vow to God did make His pleasure within _Cumberland_ Three live-long Nights to take.
Sir _Musgrave_ too of Martindale, A true and worthy knight, Eftsoons with him a Bargain made In drinking to delight.
The Bumper swiftly pass’d about, Six in a Hand went round, And with their Calling for more Wine, They made the Hall resound.”
So began the ballad, and it goes on to tell how the news of the battle spread, how others then hastened to the board, and fell, man by man, overcome by their potations.
The Duke, however, did not care for his place in the north, and was more frequently to be found at Twickenham, a fact duly noted by Horace Walpole in his “Parish Register” of that village:
“Twickenham, where frolic Wharton revelled, Where Montagu, with locks dishevelled, Conflict of dirt and warmth combin’d, Invoked,--and scandalised the _Nine_.”
It was not by accident that Walpole put these names in juxtaposition, for there was a great intimacy between the two, and it was said, probably with reason, that it was the Duke’s attentions to the lady that turned Pope’s affection to hatred and caused the historic breach between them. But though Lady Mary “Worldly” Montagu, as Philip called her, may have been attached to the Duke, she was never in any doubt as to the worthlessness of his professions of love. “In general, gallantry never was in so elevated a figure as it is at present,” she told Lady Mar. “Twenty very pretty fellows (the Duke of Wharton being president and chief director) have formed themselves into a committee of gallantry. They call themselves _Schemers_; and meet regularly three times a week, to consult on gallant schemes for the advantage and advancement of that branch of happiness.”