Part 14
Wharton’s gallantries, or, to give them their proper though less euphonious name, profligacies, were carried to such excess that they, together with his political infidelities, disgusted even his far from strait-laced contemporaries; and it was only his great talents that enabled him to hold his own with them. But his marvellous gift of oratory and his ingenious but always sound reasoning were appreciated even by, or, perhaps, it should be said, especially by, his enemies; while his occasional outbursts of humour made it difficult for anyone to keep a straight face. Who could help laughing when a certain Bishop in the House of Lords rose to speak and remarked he should divide what he had to say into twelve parts, and Wharton, interrupting, begged he might be permitted to tell a story that could only be introduced at that moment: “A drunken fellow was passing by St Paul’s at night, and heard the clock slowly chiming twelve. He counted the strokes, and when it was finished, looking towards the clock, said, ‘Damn you, why couldn’t you give us all that at once?’” There was an end of the Bishop’s speech!
But not great talents, combined with a keen sense of humour, could save a person as volatile as the Duke. He founded in 1723 an Opposition paper, _The True Briton_, written by himself, issued twice weekly, which secured a large circulation, and for publishing which, Payne, indicted for libel, and found guilty, was heavily fined; but this may be regarded as a legitimate political move. As he was known to be in correspondence with the Pretender, it is not easy to see how he escaped impeachment, unless it was that the Government was reluctant to proceed against a young man, the son of a valued supporter and an old friend of Sir Robert Walpole, and the godson of the two preceding sovereigns of Great Britain.
The Government, however, was soon relieved from any anxiety on this score, for the Duke’s extravagance in money matters had been so great that his creditors had, for their own benefit, obtained a decree of the Court of Chancery placing his estates in the hands of trustees until his liabilities had been liquidated. These trustees allowed his Grace an income of twelve hundred pounds, upon which, deciding it was impossible in this country to support his dignity on that sum, he left England, thus bringing to a close the first act of his wasted life.
Before the Duke went abroad he had been careful to make his peace with the Pretender, for the latter, writing in 1725 to Atterbury, then at Paris, says: “I am very glad you were to send into England ... for everybody is not so active as Lord Wharton, who writes me often and wants no spur.” The Pretender had not yet discovered the danger of a follower so wayward and unreliable as this young man, who did more harm than good to any cause he espoused; and so, when the Duke arrived on the Continent in May 1725, he sent him as envoy to Vienna to do his utmost to promote a good understanding between his master and the Emperor Charles VI. In this Wharton was not altogether unsuccessful, and when he reported the result of his mission the Chevalier de St George, then resident at Rome, rewarded him with the empty title of Duke of Northumberland and the Order of the Garter.
In the following April the Duke was sent to Madrid, where his folly became notorious. “The Duke of Wharton has not been sober, or scarce had a pipe out of his mouth, since he came back from his expedition to St Ildefonso,” wrote Mr (afterwards Sir Benjamin) Keene, British Ambassador at Madrid. “He declared himself to be the Pretender’s Prime Minister, and Duke of Wharton and Northumberland. Hitherto, added he, my master’s interest has been managed by the Duke of Perth and three or four old women, who meet under the portal of St Germain’s. He wanted a Whig, and a brisk one too, to put them in a right train, and I am the man. You may now look upon me, Sir Philip Wharton, knight of the Garter, and Sir Robert Walpole, knight of the Bath, running a course,--and, by heaven! he shall be pressed hard. He bought my family pictures, but they shall not be long in his possession; that account is still open.” In spite of the Duke’s follies, the Court of Spain did not show itself so unfriendly to him, and to the cause he represented, as Keene thought it should; and he warned his Government. The reply from England came in the form of a summons under the Privy Seal to the Duke to return at once to his own country--a summons which, it is needless to say, was ignored by the recipient.
While at Madrid Philip learnt that his wife, whom he had left in London, had died, and forthwith he proposed to Maria, the daughter of Colonel Henry O’Beirne, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Spain. Her Majesty raised various objections, but was eventually persuaded to consent to the alliance, which took place in July 1726, after the Duke had embraced the Roman Catholic faith, a step he took in spite of the fact that on 17th June he had written to his sister, Lady Jane Holt, assuring her he would never forsake the religion in which he had been born and bred.
It is probable that the Duke changed his faith to win his bride, but there may have been at the back of his mind the thought that it would please his master. If this was so, it was an entirely mistaken idea, because his conversion--occurring at the same time as that of Lord North, who had also left England and abjured the Hanoverian cause--gave the impression that to be in favour with the Chevalier de St George it was necessary to be of his faith, which in English eyes was a fatal objection. This, indeed, the Chevalier had realised, as may be gathered from a letter of the Duchess of Orleans, so far back as 10th September 1712: “Our King of England, I mean the true one, no longer dislikes Protestants, for he has taken many of them for his servants.” What Atterbury thought of the Duke’s action, he said very clearly in a letter to the Pretender: “The strange turn taken by the Duke of Wharton gave me such mortifying apprehensions that I have forborne for some posts to mention him at all. You say, Sir, that he advised with few of his friends in this matter. I am of opinion he advised with none. It is easy to suppose you were both surprised and concerned at the account when it first reached Rome, since it is impossible you should not be so; the ill consequences are so many, so great, and so evident, that I am not only afflicted but bewildered when I think of them. The mischief of one thing you mention is, that he will scarce be believed in what he shall say in that occasion (so low will his credit have sunk), nor be able effectually to stop the mouth of malice by any after declaration.” In England nothing that the Duke of Wharton could do created any astonishment, such was the estimate in which he was held in his own country; and popular opinion was expressed by Curll in an epigram:
_On the Duke of Wharton Renouncing the Protestant Religion_
“A _Whig_ He was bred, but at length is turn’d _Papist_, Pray God send the next Remove be not an _Atheist_.
“_N.B._--To believe _every Thing_ and _Nothing_ is much the same.”
After his marriage, the Duke paid a visit to his master at Rome, but he “could not keep himself within the bounds of the Italian gravity,” and the Chevalier ordered him and his wife to return to Spain. There he volunteered to serve with the Spanish army in the siege of Gibraltar. Hitherto there had been some suspicion of his courage, but that slur he now wiped off by exposing his person freely; indeed, the story goes that one day he walked from the Spanish camp to the very walls of Gibraltar, and, when challenged, declared his identity, and sauntered back leisurely, the soldiers, unwilling to kill a great nobleman of their own nationality, holding their fire.
After the siege, the Duke returned to Madrid, where he was given the rank of Colonel-Aggregate to the Irish regiment, Hibernia, in the Spanish service, commanded by the Marquis de Castelar; and then proposed to settle for a while at the Pretender’s Court. That royal personage, however, had by this time realised that his adherent’s gifts were so handicapped by various undesirable qualities that he showed very plainly that he wished any intimate connection should cease: he did, indeed, consent to grant a last interview at Parma, but he neutralised the effect of this favour by taking the opportunity to refuse to allow the Duke to reside at his Court.
The Duke took the rebuff in good part, wrote to the Chevalier reiterating his great and enduring devotion to the Jacobite cause, and, journeying with his wife to Paris, in that city at once made overtures to Horace Walpole, the British Ambassador. “I am coming to Paris, to put myself entirely under your Excellency’s protection, and hope that Sir Robert Walpole’s good nature will prompt him to save a family, which his generosity induced him to spare,” he wrote in May 1728. “If your Excellency would permit me to wait upon you for an hour, I am certain you would be convinced of the sincerity of my repentance for my former madness; would become an advocate with his Majesty to grant me his most gracious pardon, which it is my comfort I shall never be required to purchase by any step unworthy of a man of honour. I do not intend, in the case of the king’s allowing me to pass the evening of my days under the shadow of his royal protection, to see England for some years, but shall remain in France or Germany, as my friends shall advise, and enjoy country sports till all former stories are buried in oblivion. I beg of your Excellency to let me receive your orders at Paris, which I will send to your hotel to receive. The Duchess of Wharton, who is with me, desires leave to wait on Mrs Walpole, if you think proper.”
Horace Walpole received him, listened to his assurances of future loyalty, and conveyed his protestations of good behaviour to the Duke of Newcastle, who replied on 12th July:
“Having laid before the King your Excellency’s letter, giving an account of a visit you had received from the Duke of Wharton, and enclosing a copy of a letter he wrote to you afterwards upon the same occasion, I am commanded to let you know that his Majesty approves of what you said to the Duke, and your behaviour towards him; but that the Duke of Wharton has conducted himself in so extraordinary a manner since he left England, and has so openly declared his disaffection to the King and his government, by joining with and serving under his Majesty’s professed enemies, that his Majesty does not think fit to receive any application from him.”
It is unnecessary to give in detail the subsequent actions of the Duke: how, incensed by the King’s refusal, he printed in _Mist’s Journal_ a bitter satirical attack on George II. and his ministers; how he was tried for high treason for having taken up arms against his country, found guilty, outlawed, and deprived of his property; how at the eleventh hour unofficial overtures were made to him from England, which he refused to entertain unless unconditional pardon was granted him; how he stayed awhile in a monastery, a fervent devotee, and after a few weeks returned to the world to plunge into greater excesses; how he publicly proclaimed his attachment to the Pretender and the Catholic religion.
His estates being sequestrated, he was now penniless, and reduced to most miserable straits. “Notwithstanding what my Brother Madman has done to undo himself, and everybody who was so unlucky as to have the least concern with him,” wrote a friend who journeyed with him from Paris to Orleans at the beginning of June 1729, “I could not help being sensibly moved at so extraordinary a vicissitude of fortune, to see a great man fallen from that shining light, in which I have beheld him in the House of Lords, to such a degree of obscurity, that I have observed the meanest commoner decline his company; and the Jew he would sometimes fasten on, grow tired of it; for you know he is but a bad orator in his cups, and of late he has been but seldom sober.” Eventually, after overcoming great difficulties, the Duke arrived in Spain, where he joined his regiment, and endeavoured to live upon his pay of eighteen pistoles a month, and sums of money sent to him by the Pretender. He devoted his leisure to reading and to the composition of a play based on the tragic story of Mary Queen of Scots, and, after an illness of some months, he died on 31st May 1731, at the age of thirty-two, in the shelter of the Franciscan monastery of Poblet.
Such is the story of the life of Philip, Duke of Wharton, which, surely, arouses feelings of pity rather than anger. “Like Buckingham and Rochester,” says Horace Walpole, “he comforted all the grave and dull by throwing away the brightest profusion of parts on witty fooleries, debaucheries, and scrapes, which may mix graces with a great character, but can never compose one.” He had, indeed, genius, wit, humour, eloquence, rank, wealth and good looks, but because he lacked stability and principles, all his great talents went for nothing. Never was there a character more fitted to point a moral, and if the writers of Sunday school prize-books have not taken him as their text, this can only be because they are unacquainted with his history. “The great abilities of the Duke of Wharton are past dispute,” Atterbury wrote to the Pretender, in September 1736; “it is he alone who could render them less useful than they might have been.” And this was kindly put, for Atterbury might well have said that as an adherent to any cause so unreliable and faithless a person was an open danger.
For every man some excuse can be found, but while excuses for the Duke of Wharton there must be, it is, indeed, not easy to find them. His early training may have been unsuitable for a character so mercurial, and the early death of his mother and father probably removed any change of controlling him. That he was mad is a theory practical enough, for this would explain many sudden changes of opinion, and many instances of unfaithfulness, which had not even self-interest to explain them; and it seems certain that he was intoxicated with vanity. This last assumption is supported by the testimony of Pope, who has for all time put on record a character sketch of the Duke, which, in spite of the poet’s bias, must unfortunately be accepted as a portrait all too true:
“Wharton, the scorn and wonder of our days, Whose ruling passion was the lust of praise: Born with whate’er could win it from the wise, Women and fools must like him or he dies; Though wondering senates hung on all he spoke, The club must hail him master of the joke. Shall parts so various aim at nothing new? He’ll shine a Tully and a Wilmot too, Then turn repentant, and his God adores With the same spirit that he drinks and w----; Enough if all around him but admire, And now the punk applaud, and now the friar. Thus with each gift of nature and of art, And wanting nothing but an honest heart; Grown all to all, from no one vice exempt; And most contemptible, to shun contempt: His passion still, to covet general praise, His life, to forfeit it a thousand ways; A constant bounty which no friend has made; An angel tongue, which no man can persuade; A fool, with more of wit than half mankind, Too rash for thought, for action too refined: A tyrant to the wife his heart approves; A rebel to the very king he loves; He dies, sad outcast of each church and state, And, harder still, flagitious, yet not great. Ask you why Wharton broke through every rule? ’Twas all for fear the knaves should call him fool.”
_Index_
Alvanley, William, Lord, 41, 53–55, 64, 67, 69, 99, 223
Anglesea, Lord, 19, 99
Archer, Lady, 86
Arden, Sir Pepper, 54
Argyll, Duke of, 48
Armitstead, Mrs, (Mrs Charles James Fox), 241, 245
Ashton, Hervey, 48
Atterbury, Francis, Bishop of Rochester, 266, 272, 275, 281
Aubrey, Colonel, 90
Beauclerk, Topham, 89, 226
Beckford, William, of Fonthill, 189–215
Bligh, Robert, 84
Brummell, George Bryan, 48, 55–74, 84, 85, 253
Buckinghamshire, Lady, 86
Burke, Edmund, 230, 231
Carlisle, Lord, 89, 227, 256
Carlisle, Countess of, 240
Carlyle, Dr Alexander, 173, 178
Chatham, Lord, 194, 197, 231
Cholmondeley, Lord, 90
Damer, Colonel Dawson, 48
Dashwood, Sir Francis, 168, 170
Dashwood, Sir C., 175, 176
De Ferretti, Bailli, 91
De Ros, Henry, 48
Devonshire, Duchess of, 240
D’Orsay, Count, 74, 78, 99
Draper, Daniel, 132, 136, 137, 155
Draper, Mrs Elizabeth, 129–157
Drummond, George Harley, 63
Dudley and Ward, Lord, 48, 51
Fife, Lord, 77
Fitzpatrick, General, 89
Foley, Lord, 47
Fox, Charles James, 13, 47, 57, 79, 81, 87, 89, 219–249, 253
Fox, Stephen, 224, 227
Francis, Sir Philip, 86, 87
Garland, Squire, 173
George I., 263, 264, 267
George II., 279
George III., 56, 85, 93, 107, 108, 121, 233, 235, 236, 239
George, Prince of Wales, Regent (afterwards George IV.), 13, 15, 17, 19, 23–25, 34, 47, 51, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62–66, 69–72, 82, 83, 93, 113, 121, 122, 237, 241–243, 248, 249
Gifford, Lord, 49
Gilbert, 173, 175
Gordon, Lady Margaret (Mrs Beckford), 203, 204
Greville, Charles, 54, 72, 80
Gronow, R. H., 56, 59, 74, 82, 92, 97, 223
Hall-Stevenson, John, 161–185
Hall, Colonel George Lawson, 173
Hamilton, Sir William, 202
Hanger, George, 13, 19–33
Hanger, William (“Blue”), 25–28
Henley, Rev. Samuel, 205
Hertford, Lord, 47, 89
Hewett, William, 171, 172, 177
Holland, Lord, 219, 224, 227, 229
Holmes, Martha, Duchess of Wharton, first wife of Philip, Duke of Wharton, 255, 262, 272
Holt, Lady Jane, 274
Hood, Admiral, 240
Hughes, “Golden Ball,” 76, 77, 97
Irvine, Andrew (“Paddy Andrews”), 173, 176
James, “The Old Pretender,” 256–260, 263, 272–277
James, Mr and Mrs William, 133, 134, 135, 138, 139, 140, 151
Johnson, Dr Samuel, 14, 16, 17
Keene, Sir Benjamin, 273
Knighton, Sir William, 49
Lade, Lady, 17, 18
Lade, Sir John, 13–19, 95
Lascelles, Rev. Robert (“Panty”), 170, 174–176
Lee, Charles, 173
Lettice, Rev. John, 195, 196, 197, 201
Mackinnon, Dan, 48
Marsh, Charles, 25
Mildmay, Sir Henry, 64
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 262, 270
Montrond, Count, 91
Moore, Zachary, 169, 170
Morris, Charles, 80, 81
Mozart, 195
Musgrave, Sir Christopher, 268
Nash, “Beau,” 253
North, Lord, 232, 234, 236
O’Beirne, Maria, Duchess of Wharton, second wife of Philip, Duke of Wharton, 274
O’Connell, Morgan, 55
Petersham, Lord, 47, 50, 51
Pickering, Mrs Elizabeth, 130, 131, 145
Pierrepoint, Henry, 48, 64
Pitt, William, 95, 195, 197, 221, 222, 230, 243, 244, 247
Pole, Wellesley, 76
Portland, Duke of, 89
“Pringello, Don,” 167, 170, 171
Queensberry, Duchess of, 197
Queensberry, Duke of, 89, 92–96
Raikes, Tom, 26, 67–69, 84
Raynal, Abbé, 139
Redding, Cyrus, 24, 32, 125, 200, 213
Rigby, Right Honourable Charles, 221
Rumbold, Sir Thomas, 79
Saye and Sele, Lord, 223
Sclater, Elizabeth. _See_ Draper, Mrs Elizabeth
Sclater, Richard, Mr and Mrs, 130, 131, 150
Sclater, Thomas Matthew, 131, 139, 142, 143, 145, 148, 156
Scroope, 173, 175
Selwyn, George, 94, 221, 227
Sefton, Lord, 89
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 57, 79, 85, 95, 221, 227
Skeffington, Sir Lumley St George, 13, 33–43, 52, 53
Smollett, Tobias George, 172
Stair, Lord, 257–259
Sterne, Lawrence, 129–157, 161–163, 169, 175, 176, 178–182, 185
Swift, Jonathan, 261, 262
Talbot, Jack, 223
Trotter, Lawson, 163, 164
Upton, General Sir Arthur, 63
Walpole, Horace, 97, 168, 224, 225, 235, 236, 269, 277, 278
Walpole, Sir Robert, 266, 271, 273
Wellington, Duke of, 72
Wharton, Philip, Duke of, 168, 253–282
Wilkes, John, 168
William III., 254, 260
William IV., 73
Wolcot, Dr (“Peter Pindar”), 24, 30, 104–126
Worcester, Lord, 48
Wray, Sir Cecil, 239, 240
Wyatt, James, 206
York, Frederick, Duke of, 24, 49, 54, 63, 77, 84, 113
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End of Project Gutenberg's Some Eccentrics & a Woman, by Lewis Melville