On Wednesday, May 30th, the second reading of the Bill for the princess's dowry came on in the House of Lords. Several of the peers complained warmly of the manner in which the grant to the princess had been stuck into a general measure disposing of various sums of money. It was a Bill of items. There was a sum of 500,000 pounds for the current service of the year. There was 10,000 pounds by way of a charity "for those distressed persons who are to transport themselves to the colony of Georgia." There was a vote for the repairing of an old church, and there {44} were other votes of much the same kind; and amid them came the item for the dowry of the Royal Princess. The Earl of Winchelsea complained of this strange method of huddling things together, and declared it highly unbecoming to see the grant made "in such a hotch-potch Bill—a Bill which really seems to be the sweepings of the other House." The Earl of Crawford declared it a most indecent thing to provide the marriage-portion of the Princess Royal of England in such a manner; "it is most disrespectful to the royal family." The Duke of Newcastle could only say in defence of the course taken by the Government that he saw nothing disrespectful or inconvenient in the manner of presenting the vote. Indeed, he went on to argue, or rather to assert, for he did not attempt to argue, that it was the only way by which such a provision could have been made. It could not well have been done by a particular Bill, he said, because the marriage was not as yet fully concluded. But the resolution of the House of Commons was that out of the money then remaining in the receipt of the Exchequer arisen by the sale of the lands in the island of St. Christopher's his Majesty be enabled to apply the sum of 80,000 pounds for the marriage-portion of the Princess Royal. What possible difficulty there could be about the presenting of that resolution in the form of a separate Bill, or how such a form of presentation could have been affected by the fact that the marriage had not yet actually been concluded, only a brain like that of the Duke of Newcastle could settle. Of course the Bill was passed; each noble lord who criticised it was louder than the other in declaring that he had not the slightest notion of opposing it. "I am so fond," said the Earl of Winchelsea, "of enabling his Majesty to provide a sufficient marriage-portion for the Princess Royal that I will not oppose this Bill." There was much excuse for being fond of providing his Majesty in this instance, seeing that the money was not to be found by the tax-payers. Probably the true reason why the grant was asked in a manner which would not be {45} thought endurable in our days, was that the Government well knew the King himself cared as little about the marriage as the people did, and were of opinion that the more the grant was huddled up the better.

[Sidenote: 1736—A projected double alliance]

We get one or two notes about this time that seem to have a forecast of later days in them. An explosion of some kind takes place in Westminster Hall while all the courts of justice were sitting. No great harm seems to have been done, but the event naturally startled people, and was instantly regarded as evidence of a Jacobite plot to assassinate somebody; it was not very clear who was the particular object of hatred. Walpole wrote to his brother, telling him of the explosion, and adding, "There is no reason to doubt that the whole thing was projected and executed by a set of low Jacobites who talked of setting fire to the gallery built for the marriage of the Princess Royal" by means of "a preparation which they call phosphorus, that takes fire by the air." About the same time, too, we hear of an outbreak of anti-Irish riots in Shoreditch and other parts of the east end of London. The "cry and complaint" of the anti-Irish was, as Walpole described the matter, that they were underworked and starved by Irishmen. Numbers of Irishmen, it would seem, were beginning to come over to this country, not merely to labor in harvesting in the rural districts, as they had long been accustomed to do, but undertaking work of all kinds at lower wages than English workmen were accustomed to receive. "The cry is, Down with the Irish," Walpole says; and Dr. Sheridan, Swift's correspondent, proclaiming in terms of humorous exaggeration his desire to get out of Cavan, protests that, failing all other means of relief, "I will try England, where the predominant phrase is, Down with the Irish."

George had at one time set his heart upon a double alliance between his family and that of King Frederick William of Prussia. The desire of George was that his eldest son, Frederick, should marry the eldest daughter of the Prussian King, and that the Prussian King's eldest {46} son should marry George's second daughter. The negotiation, however, came to nothing. The King of Prussia was prevailed upon to make objections to it by those around him who feared that he might be brought too much under the influence of England; and, indeed, it is said that he himself became a little afraid of some possible interference with his ways by an English daughter-in-law. The only interest the project has now is that it put the two kings into bad humor with each other. The bad humor was constantly renewed by the quarrels arising out of the King of Prussia's rough, imperious way of sending recruiting parties into Hanover to cajole or carry off gigantic recruits for his big battalions. So unkingly did the disputation at last become that George actually sent a challenge to Frederick William, and Frederick William accepted it. A place was arranged where the royal duellists, each crossing his own frontier for the purpose, were to meet in combat. The wise and persistent opposition of a Prussian statesman prevailed upon Frederick to give up the idea, and George too suffered himself to be talked into something like reason. It is almost a pity for the amusement of posterity that the duel did not come off. It would have almost been a pity, if the fight had come off, that both the combatants should not have been killed. The King of Prussia and the King of England were, it may safely be said, the two most coarse and brutal sovereigns of the civilized world at the time. The King of Prussia was more cruel in his coarseness than the King of England. The King of England was more indecent in his coarseness than the King of Prussia. For all their royal rank, it must be owned that they were arcades ambo—that is, according to Byron's translation, "blackguards both."

[Sidenote: 1736—Following the ways of his ancestors]

The fight, however, did not come off, and George had still to find a wife for his eldest son. She was found in the person of the Princess Augusta, sister of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha. The duke gave his consent; the princess offered no opposition, and indeed would not have been {47} much listened to if she had had any opposition to offer. King George wished his son to get married to anybody rather than remain longer unmarried; and the prince, who had tried to make a runaway match with a young English lady before this time, appeared to be absolutely indifferent on the subject. So the Princess Augusta was brought over to Greenwich, and thence to London, and on April 28, 1736, the marriage took place. The princess seems to have been a very amiable, accomplished, and far from unattractive young woman. The Prince of Wales grew to be very fond of her, and to be happy in the home she made him. He continued, of course, to follow the ways of his father and his grandfather, and had his mistresses as well as his wife. The Prince of Wales would probably have thought he was not acting properly the part of royalty if he had been contented with the companionship of one woman, and that woman his wife. His wife had to put up with the palace manners of the period. Frederick had at one time been noted for his dutiful ways to his mother; but more lately the mother and son had become hopelessly estranged. George hated Frederick, and the hatred of the mother for the son seemed quite as strong as that of the father.

A courtly chronicler and genealogist, writing at a period a little later, describes George the Second as in the height of glory, a just and merciful prince, but dryly adds, "He resembles his father in his too great attachment to the electoral dominions." So indeed he did. The whole policy of his reign was affected or controlled by his love for Hanover, or, at least, his love for his own interest in Hanover. He had no patriotic or unselfish attachment to the land of his ancestry and his birth; he was incapable of feeling any such exalted emotion. But the electoral dominions, which were his property, he clung to with ardor, and Hanover was the garden of the pleasures he enjoyed most highly. He never could understand English ways. He once scolded an English nobleman, the Duke of Grafton, for his delight in the hunting field. It was a {48} pretty occupation, the King said, for a man of the duke's years, and of his rank, to spend so much of his time in tormenting a poor fox, that was generally a much better beast than any of those that pursued him; for the fox hurts no other animal but for his subsistence, while the brutes who hurt the fox did it only for the pleasure they took in hurting. One might admire such a declaration if it could be thought to come from a too refined and sensitive humanity. An eccentric, but undoubtedly benevolent, member of the House of Commons declared, in a speech made in that House some years ago, that he only once joined in a hunt, and then it was only in the interest of the fox. George had no such feeling; he simply could not understand the tastes or the sports of English country life.

[Sidenote: 1736—To Hanover at all hazards]

George came back from an expedition to Hanover in a very bad humor. He hated everything in England; he loved everything in Hanover. It was with the uttermost reluctance that he dragged himself back from the place of his amusements and his most cherished amours. He had lately found in Hanover a new object of adoration. This was a Madame Walmoden, a fashionable young married woman, with whom George had fallen headlong into love. He wrote home to his wife, telling her of his admiration for Madame Walmoden, and describing with some minuteness the lady's various charms of person. He induced Madame Walmoden—probably no great persuasion was needed—to leave her husband and become the mistress of a king. George, it is said, paid down the not very extravagant sum of a thousand dollars to make things pleasant all round. During his stay in Hanover he and his new companion behaved quite like a high-Dutch Antony and Cleopatra. They had revels and orgies of all kinds in the midst of a crowd of companions as refined and intellectual as themselves. George had paintings made of some of these scenes, with portrait likenesses of those who took a leading part in them, and these paintings he brought home to England, and was accustomed {49} to exhibit and explain to the Queen, or to anybody else who happened to be in the way. But he did not as yet venture to bring Madame Walmoden to England; and his having to part with her threw him into a very bad temper. The curious reader will find an amusing, but at the same time very painful, account of the manner in which George vented his temper by snubbing his children and insulting his wife. The Queen bore it all with her wonted patience. George had made a promise to get back to Hanover very soon to see his beloved Madame Walmoden. Walpole restrained him for a long time, which made the King more and more angry. Once, when the Queen was urging him to be a little more considerate in his dealings with some of the bishops, the King of England, Defender of the Faith, told her he was sick of all that foolish stuff, and added, "I wish with all my heart that the devil may take all your bishops, and the devil take your minister, and the devil take the Parliament, and the devil take the whole island, provided I can get out of it and go to Hanover." Caroline herself could be sharp enough in her tone with the bishops sometimes, but the manners of the King seemed to her to go beyond the bounds of reason.

The King was determined to get back to Hanover by a certain date. Walpole swore to some of his friends that the King should not go. The King did go, however, and left the Queen to act as regent of the kingdom during his absence. This time George was to be absent from his wife on his birthday, and the poor Queen took this bitterly to heart. She consulted Walpole, and Walpole was frank, although on this particular occasion he does not seem to have been coarse. He reminded the Queen that she was ceasing to be young and attractive, and, as it was necessary that she must keep a hold over the King's regard, he strongly urged her to write to George and ask him to bring Madame Walmoden over to England with him. Even this the Queen, after some moments of agonized mental struggle, consented to do. She wrote to the {50} King, and she began to make preparations for the suitable reception of the new sultana. She carried her complacency so far as even to say that she would be willing to take Madame Walmoden into her own service. Even Walpole thought this was carrying humbleness too far. "Why not?" poor Caroline asked; was not Lady Suffolk, a former mistress of the King, in the Queen's employment? Walpole pointed out, with the worldly good-sense which belonged to him, that public opinion would draw a great distinction between the scandal of the King's making one of the Queen's servants his mistress and the Queen's taking one of the King's mistresses into her service.

[Sidenote: 1736—Handelists and anti-Handelists]

The quarrels between the Prince of Wales and the other members of the royal family kept on increasing in virulence. The prince surrounded himself with the Patriots, and indeed openly put himself at their head. The King and Queen would look at no one who was seen in the companionship of the prince. The Queen is believed to have at one time cherished some schemes for separating the Electorate of Hanover from the English Crown, in order that Hanover might be given to her second son. With the outer public the Prince of Wales seems to have been popular in a certain sense, perhaps for no other reason than because he was the Prince of Wales and not the King. When he went to one of the theatres he was loudly cheered, and he took the applause with the gratified complacency of one who knows he is receiving nothing that he has not well deserved. He would appear to have been continually posturing and attitudinizing as the young favorite of the people. The truth is that the people in general knew very little about the prince, and knew a good deal about the King, and naturally leaned to the side of the man who might at least turn out to be better than his father.

Even the seraphic realms of music were invaded by the dispute between the adherents of the King and the adherents of the prince. The King and Queen were supporters {51} of Handel, the prince was against the great composer. The prince in the first instance declared against Handel because his sister Anne, the Princess of Orange, was one of Handel's worshippers, therefore a great number of the nobility who sided with the prince set up, or at least supported, a rival opera-house to that in which Handel's music was the great attraction. The King and Queen, Lord Hervey tells, were as much in earnest on this subject as their son and daughter, though they had the prudence to disguise it, or to endeavor to disguise it, a little more. They were both Handelists, "and sat freezing constantly at his empty Haymarket opera, whilst the prince, with all the chief of the nobility, went as constantly to that of Lincoln's Inn Fields." "The affair," Hervey adds, "grew as serious as that of the Greens and the Blues under Justinian at Constantinople; an anti-Handelist was looked upon as an anti-courtier, and voting against the Court in Parliament was hardly a less remissible or more venial sin than speaking against Handel or going to the Lincoln's Inn Fields Opera." Hervey was a man of some culture and some taste; it is curious to observe how little he thought of the greatest musician of his time, one of the very greatest musicians of all time. The London public evidently could not have been gifted with very high musical perception just then. Indeed, later on, when Handel brought out his "Messiah," it was met with so cold and blank a reception in London that the composer began to despair of the English public ever appreciating his greatest efforts. He made up his mind to try his "Messiah" in Ireland. He went to Dublin, and there found a splendid reception for his masterpiece, and he remained there until the echo of his great success had made itself heard in England, and he then came back and found his welcome in London. This, however, is anticipating. At present we are only concerned with the fact, as illustrating the existing condition of things in London, that to be an admirer of Handel was to be an enemy of the Prince of Wales, and not to be an {52} admirer of Handel was to be an enemy of the King. The feud ran so high that the Princess Royal said she expected in a little while to see half the House of Lords playing in the orchestra in their robes and coronets. She herself quarrelled with the Lord Chamberlain for preserving his usual neutrality on this occasion, and she spoke of Lord Delaware, who was one of the chief managers against Handel, "with as much spleen as if he had been at the head of the Dutch faction who opposed the making her husband Stadtholder." It seems needless to say that George himself had no artistic appreciation of Handel. He subscribed one thousand a year to enable Handel to fight his battle, but he talked over the matter with unenthusiastic prosaic common-sense. He said he "did not think setting one's self at the head of a faction of fiddlers a very honorable occupation for people of quality, or the ruin of one poor fellow so generous or so good-natured a scheme as to do much honor to the undertakers, whether they succeeded in it or not; but, the better they succeeded in it, the more he thought they would have reason to be ashamed of it." There were some gleams of manhood shining through George still, and he could appreciate fair play although he could not quite appreciate Handel. For the ruin of one poor fellow! The poor fellow was Handel. The faction of fiddlers that could ruin that poor fellow had not been found in the world, even if we were to include Nero himself among the number. One poor fellow! We wonder how many sovereigns living in George's time the world could have spared without a pang of regret if by the sacrifice it could secure for men's ennobling delight the immortal music of Handel.

[Sidenote: 1736—William Pitt]

On April 29, 1736, an event of importance took place in the House of Commons; the event was a maiden speech, the speech was the opening of a great career. The orator was a young man, only in his twenty-eighth year, who had just been elected for the borough of Old Sarum. The new member was a young officer of {53} dragoons, and his name was William Pitt. Pitt attached himself at once to the fortunes of the Patriot, or country, party, and was very soon regarded as the most promising of Pulteney's young recruits. His maiden speech was spoken of and written of by his friends as a splendid success, as worthy of the greatest orator of any age. Probably the stately presence, the magnificent voice, and the superb declamation of the young orator may account for much of the effect which his first effort created, for in the report of the speech, such as it has come down to us, there is little to justify so much enthusiasm; but that the maiden speech was a signal success is beyond all doubt. A study of the history of the House of Commons will, however, make it clear, that there is little guarantee, little omen even, for the future success of a speaker in the welcome given to his maiden speech. Over and over again has some new member delighted and thrilled the House of Commons by his maiden speech, and never delighted it or thrilled it any more. Over and over again has a new member failed in his maiden speech, failed utterly and ludicrously, and turned out afterwards to be one of the greatest debaters in Parliament. Over and over again has a man delivered his maiden speech without creating the slightest impression of any kind, good or bad, so that when he sits down it is, as Mr. Disraeli put it, hardly certain whether he has lost his Parliamentary virginity or not; and a little later on the same man has the whole House trembling with anxiety and expectation when he rises to take part in a great debate. On the whole, it is probable that the chances of the future are rather in favor of the man who fails in his maiden speech. At all events, there is as little reason to assume that a man is about to be a success in the House of Commons because he has made a successful maiden speech as there would be to assume that a man is to be a great poet because he has written a college prize poem. The friends of young William Pitt, however, were well justified in their expectations; and the magic of {54} presence, voice, and action, which led to an exaggerated estimate of the merits of the speech, threw the same charm over the whole of Pitt's great career as an orator in the House of Commons.

[Sidenote: 1736—Pitt—Pulteney]

Pitt came of a good family. His grandfather was the Governor of Madras to whom Mary Wortley Montagu more than once alludes: the "Governor Pitt" who was more famous in his diamonds than in himself, and whose most famous brilliant, the Pitt diamond, was bought by the Regent Duke of Orleans to adorn the crown of France. William Pitt was a younger son, and was but poorly provided for. A cornet's commission was obtained for him. The family had the ownership of some parliamentary boroughs, according to the fashion of those days and of days much later still. At the general election of 1734 William Pitt's elder brother Thomas was elected for two constituencies, Okehampton and Old Sarum. When Parliament met, and the double return was made known to it, Thomas Pitt decided on taking his seat for Okehampton, and William Pitt was elected to serve in Parliament for Old Sarum. He soon began to be conspicuous among the young men—the "boy brigade," who cheered and supported Pulteney. William Pitt was from almost his childhood tortured with hereditary gout, but he had fine animal spirits for all that, and he appears to have felt from the first a genuine delight in the vivid struggles of the House of Commons. He began to outdo Pulteney in the vehemence and extravagance of his attacks on the policy and the personal character of the ministers. His principle apparently was that whatever Walpole did must ipso facto be wrong, and not merely wrong, but even base and criminal. Walpole was never very scrupulous about inflicting an injury on an enemy, especially if the enemy was likely to be formidable. He deprived William Pitt of his commission in the army. Thereupon Pitt was made Groom of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales. When the address was presented to the King on the occasion of the prince's marriage with the Princess of {55} Saxe-Gotha, it was Pulteney, leader of the Opposition, and not Walpole, the head of the Government, who moved its adoption. It was in this debate that William Pitt delivered that maiden speech from which so much was expected, and which was followed by so many great orations and such a commanding career. As yet, however, William Pitt is only the enthusiastic young follower of Pulteney, whom men compare with, or prefer to, other enthusiastic young followers of Pulteney. Even those who most loudly cried up his maiden speech could have had little expectation of what the maturity of that career was to bring.



{56}

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE PORTEOUS RIOTS.

[Sidenote: 1736—The gin riots]

A good deal of disturbance and tumult was going on in various parts of the provinces. Some of our readers have probably not forgotten the riots which took place in the early part of the present reign, in consequence of the objection to the turnpike gate system, and in which the rioters took the name of "Rebecca and her daughters." Riots almost precisely similar in origin and character, but much more extensive and serious, were going on in the western counties during the earlier years of George the Second's reign. The rioting began as early as 1730, and kept breaking out here and there for some years. The rioters assembled in various places in gangs of about a hundred. Like "Rebecca and her daughters," they were usually dressed in women's clothes; they had their faces blackened; they were armed with guns and swords, and carried axes, with which to hew down the obnoxious turnpike gates. The county magistrates, with the force at their disposal, were unable at one time to make any head against the rioters. The turnpike gates were undoubtedly a serious grievance, and at that time there was hardly any idea of dealing with a grievance but by the simple process of imprisoning, suppressing, or punishing those who protested too loudly against it.

The Gin riots were another serious disturbance to social order. Gin-drinking had grown to such a height among the middle classes in cities that reformers of all kinds took alarm at it. A Bill was brought into Parliament by Sir Joseph Jekyll, the Master of the Rolls, in 1736, for the purpose of prohibiting the sale of gin, or at least laying so heavy a duty on it as to put it altogether out of {57} the reach of the poor, and absolutely prohibiting its sale in small quantities. The Bill was not a ministerial measure, and indeed Walpole seems to have given it but a cool and half-hearted approval, and the Patriots vehemently opposed it as an unconstitutional interference with individual habits and individual rights. The Bill, however, passed through Parliament and was to come into operation on the 29th of the following September. At first it appears to have created but little popular excitement; but as the time drew near when the Act was to come into operation, and the poorer classes saw themselves face to face with the hour that was to cut them off from their favorite drink, a sudden discontent flashed out in the form of wide-spread riot. Only the most energetic action on the part of the authorities prevented the discontent from breaking into wholesale disturbance.

It does not seem as if the Gin Act did much for the cause of sobriety. Public opinion among the populace was too decidedly against it to allow of its being made a reality. Gin was every day sold under various names, and, indeed, it was publicly sold in many shops under its own name. The Gin Act called into existence an odious crew of common informers who used to entrap people into the selling and drinking of gin in order to obtain their share of the penalty, or, perhaps, in some cases to satisfy a personal spleen. The mob hated the common informers as bitterly as a well-dressed crowd at a race-course in our own time hates a "welsher." When the informer was got hold of by his enemies he was usually treated very much after the fashion in which the welsher is handled to-day.

It would be needless to say that the Gin Act and the agitation concerning it called also into existence a whole literature of pamphlets, ballads, libels, and lampoons. The agitation ran its course during some two years, more than once threatened to involve the country in serious disturbance, and died out at last when the legislation which had caused so much tumult was quietly allowed to become a dead letter.

{58}

Suddenly Edinburgh became the theatre of a series of dramatic events which made her, for the moment, the centre of interest to the political world. It is, perhaps, a sufficient proof of the delicate condition of the relations between the two countries that the arrest of two smugglers came within measurable distance of awaking civil war. These two smugglers, Wilson and Robertson, being under sentence of death, made, while in church under armed escort, a desperate effort to escape. Wilson, a man of great strength, by holding two soldiers with his hand, and a third with his teeth, gave Robertson the chance, which he gladly seized, of plunging into the crowd of the dispersing congregation, and vanishing into space.

[Sidenote: 1736—John Porteous]

The Edinburgh magistrates, alarmed at the escape, offended by the display of popular sympathy with the escaped smuggler, and fearing, not, as it was said, without good cause, that an attempt would be made to rescue the single-minded and not unheroic Wilson, resolved to take all possible precautions to insure the carrying out of the sentence of the law. To do this the more effectively they ordered out nearly the whole of their own city guard under the command of Captain Porteous, and in doing so made one of the greatest mistakes recorded in their annals.

Captain John Porteous was in his way and within his sphere a remarkable man. He belonged to that large crew of daring, resolute, and unscrupulous adventurers who, under happy conditions, become famous free companions, are great in guerilla wars, make excellent explorers, and even found colonies and lay the foundations of States, but who, under less auspicious stars, are only a terror to the peaceable and an example to the law-abiding. To the romancist, to the dramatist, the character of such a man as John Porteous is intensely attractive; even in the graver ways of history he claims the attention imperatively, and stands forward with a decisive distinctness that lends to him an importance beyond his deserts. {59} His life had been from the beginning daring, desperate, and reckless. He was the son of a very respectable Edinburgh citizen, who was also a very respectable tailor, and whose harmless ambition it was to make the wild slip of his blood a respectable tailor in his turn. Never was the saying "Like father, like son" more astonishingly belied. Young John Porteous would have nothing to do with the tailor's trade. He was dissipated, he was devil-may-care; there was nothing better to be done with him than to ship him abroad into the military service of some foreign State, the facile resource in those days for getting rid of the turbulent and the troublesome. John Porteous went into foreign service; he entered the corps known as the Scotch-Dutch, in the pay of the States of Holland, and plied the trade of arms.

Time went on, and in its course it brought John Porteous back to Edinburgh. Here his military training served the city in good stead during the Jacobite rising of 1715. He disciplined the city guard and got his commission as its captain. But, if wanderings and foreign service had turned the tailor's son into a stout soldier, they had in no degree mended his morality or bettered his reputation. Edinburgh citizenship has always been commended for keeping a strict eye to the respectabilities, and the standard of public and private decorum was held puritanically high in the middle of the last century; but even in the most loose-lived of European cities, even in the frankest freedom of barracks or of camp, John Porteous, if his reputation did not belie him, might have been expected to hold his own among the profligate and the brutal. It seems to be uncertain whether he was the more remarkable for his savage temper or for the dissolute disorder of his life. Naturally enough, perhaps in obedience to that law of contrast which seems so often to preside over the destinies of such men, his appearance did not jump with his nature. We read that he was of somewhat portly habit, by no means tall; that his face was rather benign than otherwise, and that his eyes suggested a sleepy {60} mildness. Such as he was, he had lived a queer, wild life, but its queerest and its wildest scenes were now to come in swift succession before the end.

[Sidenote: 1736—Scene at an execution]

The city guard, of which Porteous was the commander, were scarcely more popular than their chief. Ferguson, the luckless tavern-haunting poet, the Francois Villon of Edinburgh, the singer whose genius some critics believe to be somewhat unfairly overshadowed by the greater fame of Burns, has branded them to succeeding generations as "black banditti." They were some 120 in number; they were composed of veteran soldiers, chiefly Highlanders; they were considered by such of the Edinburgh population as often came into conflict with them to be especially ferocious in their fashion of preserving civic order. Captain John Porteous seems to have found them men after his own heart, to have been very proud of them, and to have considered that they and he together were equal to coping with any emergency that a disturbed Edinburgh might present. He was therefore deeply affronted when the magistrates, after according to him and his men the duty of guarding the scaffold on which Wilson was to die, considered it necessary for the further preservation of peace and the overawing of any possible attempt at rescue to order a regiment of Welsh fusileers to be drawn up in the principal street of the city. Wrath at the escape of Robertson, and indignation at the slight which he conceived to be put upon him and his men, acting upon his old hatred for his enemies, the Edinburgh mob, seems to have whipped the fierce temper of Porteous into wholly ungovernable fury. The execution took place under peculiarly painful conditions. Porteous insisted on inflicting needless torture upon the unhappy Wilson by forcing upon his wrists a pair of handcuffs that were much too small for the purpose. When Wilson remonstrated, and urged that the pain distracted his thoughts from those spiritual reflections which were now so peremptory, Porteous is said to have replied with wanton ruffianism that such reflections would matter very {61} little, since Wilson would so soon be dead. The prisoner is reported to have answered with a kind of prophetic dignity that his tormentor did not know how soon he might in his turn have to ask for himself the mercy which he now refused to a fellow-being. With these words, almost the latest on his lips, the smuggler went to his death and met it with a decent courage.

While the execution took place no signs were shown on the part of the great crowd that had assembled of any desire to rescue the prisoner. But the sentence had hardly been carried out when the temper of the mob appeared to change. Stones were thrown, angry cries were raised, and the mob, as if animated by a common purpose, began to press around the scaffold. One man leaped upon the gibbet and cut the rope by which the body was suspended; others gathered round as if to carry off the body. Then it is asserted that Porteous completely lost his head. The passion that had been swaying him all day entirely overmastered him. He is said to have snatched a musket from the hands of the soldier nearest to him, to have yelled to his men to fire, and to have shown the example by pointing his own piece and shooting one of the crowd dead.

Whether Porteous gave the order or not, it is certain that the attack upon the gibbet was followed by a loose fire from the guard which killed some six or seven persons and wounded many others. Then Porteous made an attempt to withdraw his men, and as they were moving up the High Street the now infuriated mob again attacked, and again the guards fired upon the people, and again men were killed and wounded. Thus, as it were, fighting his way, Porteous got his men to their guard-house.

The popular indignation was so great that the Edinburgh authorities put Porteous upon his trial. Porteous defended himself vigorously, denied that he had ever given an order to fire, denied that he had ever fired his piece, proved that he had exhibited his piece to the magistrates immediately after the occurrence unused and still loaded. This defence was met by the counter-assertion {62} that the weapon Porteous had used was not his own, but one seized from the hands of a soldier. A large number of persons gave evidence that they heard Porteous give the order to fire, that they saw him level and discharge the piece he had seized, and that they had seen his victim fall. After a lengthy trial Porteous was found guilty and sentenced to death.

[Sidenote: 1736—Attacking the Tolbooth]

The sentence was received with practically general approval in Edinburgh, but with very different feelings in London. The Queen, who was acting as regent in the absence of George II., felt especially strongly upon the subject. Lamentable as the violence of Captain Porteous had been, it was still urged that he had acted in obedience to a sense of duty. It was feared, too, that the sufficiently lawless attitude of the lower population of Edinburgh towards authority would be gravely and dangerously intensified if so signal an example were to be made of an officer whose offence was only committed under conditions of grave provocation and in the face of an outbreak which might well appear to resemble riot. The Government in London came to the conclusion that it would not do to hang John Porteous, and a message was sent by the Duke of Newcastle notifying her Majesty's pleasure that Porteous should have a reprieve for a period of six weeks—a preliminary step to the consequent commutation of the death sentence.

But, if the Government in London proposed to reprieve Porteous, the wild democracy of Edinburgh were not willing to lose their vengeance so lightly. The deaths caused by the discharge of the pieces of Porteous's men had aroused the most passionate resentment in Edinburgh. Men of all classes, those directly affected by the deaths of friends and relatives, and those who looked upon the quarrel from an attitude of unconcerned justice, alike agreed in regarding Porteous's sentence as righteous and deserved; now, alike, they agreed in resenting the interference of the Queen, and the apparently inevitable escape of Porteous from the consequences of his crime.

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What followed fills one of the most dramatic of all the many dramatic pages in the history of Edinburgh town. John Porteous was imprisoned in the Tolbooth, in the very thick of the city. Some of his friends, stirred by fears which if vague were not imaginary, urged him to petition to the authorities to be removed to the Castle, perched safe aloft upon its rock. But Porteous, filled with a false security, and rejoicing in the reprieve that had arrived from London, took no heed of the warnings. Perhaps, like the Duke of Guise on something of a like occasion, he would, if warned that there was any thought of taking his life, have answered, secure in the sanctity of the old Tolbooth, in the historic words, "They would not dare." Porteous remained in the old Tolbooth; he gave an entertainment in honor of his reprieve to certain privileged friends; he was actually at supper, with the wine going round and round, and his apartment noisy with talk and laughter, when the jailer entered the room with a pale face and a terrible tale. Half Edinburgh was outside the Tolbooth, armed and furious, their one demand for the person of Porteous, their one cry for his life.

The tale was strange enough to seem incredible even to minds more sober than those of Porteous and his companions, but it was perfectly true. Edinburgh had risen in the most mysterious way. From all parts of the town bands of men had come together; the guard-house of the city guard had been seized upon, the guards disarmed, and their weapons distributed among the conspirators. In a very short space of time Edinburgh was in the hands of an armed and determined mob; the magistrates, who attempted to enforce their authority, were powerless, and the crowd, with a unanimity which showed how well their plans had been preconcerted, directed all their energies to effecting an entrance into the Tolbooth. This proved at first exceedingly difficult. The great gate seemed to defy the force of all the sledge-hammer strokes that could be rained against it, and its warders were obstinate alike to the demands and the threats of the besiegers. But some {64} one in the ranks of the besiegers suggested fire, and through fire the Tolbooth fell. Fagots were piled outside the great gate and lighted, and the bonfire was assiduously fed until at last the great gate was consumed and the rioters rushed to their purpose over the glowing embers and through the flying sparks.

[Sidenote: 1736—A "respectable" mob]

They found Porteous in his apartment, deserted by his companions, dizzy with the fumes of wines, and helpless with the horror of the doom that menaced him. He might perhaps have escaped when the first alarm was sounded, but, as he lost his head before through passion, so he seems to have lost it again now through dismay. The poor wretch had indeed at the last moment, when it was too late, sought refuge in the chimney of his room; his flight was stopped by a grating a little way up; to this grating he clung, and from this grating he was plucked away by his assailants. In a few moments he was carried into the open air, was borne, the bewildered, despairing, struggling centre of all that armed and merciless mass, swiftly towards the Netherbow. In the midst of the blazing torches, the Lochaber axes, the guns and naked swords, that hemmed him in, the helpless, hopeless victim was swept along. A rope was readily found, but a gibbet was not forthcoming; a byer's pole served at the need. Within a little while after the forcing of the Tolbooth gate, Porteous was hanged and dead, and his wild judges were striking at his lifeless body with their weapons. It is said, and we may well believe it, that Porteous died, when he found that he had to die, bravely enough, as became a soldier. In that wild, mad life of his he had faced many perils, and if he pleaded for his life with his self-ordained executioners while there was any chance that pleading might prevail, it is likely enough that he accepted the inevitable with composure. Wilson was avenged; the victims of the fusillade of the city guard had been atoned for by blood, and Edinburgh had asserted with a ferocity all her own that England's will was not her will, and England's law not her law.

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The peculiar characteristics of the crowd that battered down the Tolbooth gate and carried off Porteous to his death in the Grassmarket were its orderliness, its singleness of purpose, and the curious "respectability," if such a term may be employed, of its composition. Its singleness of purpose and its orderliness were alike exemplified by the way in which it went about its grim business and by the absolute absence of all riot or pillage of any kind, or indeed of any sort of violence beyond that essential to the carrying out of its intent. No peaceable persons were molested; no buildings other than the Tolbooth were broken into; the very rope which hanged the unhappy Porteous was immediately and amply paid for. No one except the central victim of the conspiracy received harm at the hands of the mob. The "respectability" of a large proportion of the mob and of those controlling its actions was afterwards vouched for in many ways. Ladies told tales of their carriages being stopped by disguised individuals of courteous bearing and marked politeness, who with the most amiable apologies turned their horses' heads from the scene of action. It was afterwards reported and commonly believed that the Edinburgh authorities knew more about the purpose of the self-appointed executions than was consonant with a due regard for law and order. In fact, if the passions of the mob were aroused they were undoubtedly organized, directed, and held in check by those who knew well how to command, and to give to an illegal act the gravity and decorum of legality.

News travelled slowly in those days. There were no telegrams, no special editions, no newspapers, to tell the Londoner in the morning of the grim deed that had been done in Edinburgh overnight. But when the news did come it certainly startled London, and it raised up a perfect passion of rage, a hysterica passio, in the heart and brain of one person. That person was the Queen, who had herself specially ordered the reprieve of the condemned man. Queen Caroline's reason seemed for the {66} moment to be wellnigh unhinged by her anger at the news. She uttered the wildest threats, and talked vehemently of inflicting all manner of impossible punishment upon Edinburgh for the offences of its mob.

[Sidenote: 1737—Scottish dignity]

Fortunately for the maintenance of peace between the two countries, the question of the justice or the injustice of Porteous's fate was not to be settled by the caprice of an irritated woman. In obedience, however, to the Queen's wishes, the Government introduced into the House of Lords, in April, 1737, a Bill the terms of which proposed to disable the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Alexander Wilson, "from taking, holding, or enjoying any office or place of magistracy in the city of Edinburgh, or elsewhere in Great Britain, and for imprisoning the said Alexander Wilson, and for abolishing the town guard kept up in the said city, commonly called the Town Guard, and for taking away the gates of the Netherbow port of the said city, and keeping open the same." The Bill was the occasion of long and bitter debates, in which Lord Carteret made himself the most conspicuous advocate of the Government measure, and the Duke of Argyll acted as the chief champion of the Scotch peers, who resolutely opposed it. The debate was curious and instructive, in serving to show the extreme delicacy of the relations between England and Scotland, and the difficulties presented by the differences between the Scotch law and the English law. Porteous was tried and condemned naturally by Scotch law, and many, if not most, of the English advocates of the Bill seemed to find it hard to put it out of their heads that because the trial was not conducted in accordance with the principles of English legislation it could possibly be a fair or a just trial.

If the Bill was calculated to irritate the susceptibilities of the Scotch peers, there were attendant circumstances still more irritating. The three Scotch judges were summoned from Scotland to answer certain legal questions connected with the debate. On their arrival a fresh debate sprang up on the question whether they should be {67} examined at the Bar of the House of Lords or upon the wool-sacks. The Scotch peers considered it disrespectful to their judges to be examined at the Bar of the House of Lords, and urged some of their arguments against it in terms of ominous warning. It is curious to find a speaker in this debate telling the Government that the strength of the legal union that existed between England and Scotland depended entirely upon the way in which the people of Scotland were treated by the majority in the two Houses. If any encroachment be made, the speaker urged, on those articles which have been stipulated between the two countries, the legal union will be of little force: the Scotch people will be apt to ascribe to the present royal family all the ills they feel or imagine they feel; and if they should unanimously join in a contrary interest they would be supported by a powerful party in England as well as by a powerful party beyond the seas. For such reasons the speaker urged that any insult, or seeming insult, to the people of Scotland was especially to be avoided, and any disrespect to the Scotch judges would be looked upon by the whole nation as a violation of the Articles of Union and an indignity to the Scottish people.

The use of such words in the House of Lords within two-and-twenty years of the rising of 1715 ought to have been found most significant. No one who was present and who heard those words could guess indeed that within eight more years Scotland and England would witness a rising yet more formidable than that of the Old Pretender, a rising which would put for a moment in serious peril the Hanoverian hold of the throne. But they might well have been accepted as of the gravest import by those who voted for the attendance of the Scotch judges at the Bar of the House of Lords, and who carried their point by a majority of twelve.

The question of the judges being settled, the debate on the Bill went on, and the measure was read a third time, on Wednesday, May 11th, and passed by a majority of fifty-four to twenty-two. On the following Monday, May 16th, {68} the Bill was sent down to the House of Commons, where it occasioned debates even warmer than the debates in the Upper House. The Scotch opposition was more successful in the Commons than it had been in the Lords. So strenuously was the measure opposed that at one time it seemed likely to be lost altogether, and was only saved from extinction by a casting vote. When at last it was read a third time, on June 13th, it was a very different measure, in name and in form, from the Bill which had come down from the Peers a month earlier. The proposal to abolish the Edinburgh city guard and to destroy the gate of the Netherbow port disappeared from the Bill, and the proposed punitive measures finally resolved themselves into the infliction of a fine of two thousand pounds upon the city of Edinburgh, and the declaration that the provost, Alexander Wilson, was incapable of holding office. Such was the pacific conclusion of a controversy that at one time seemed likely to put a dangerous strain upon the amicable relations between the two countries. It may indeed be shrewdly suspected that the memory of the Porteous mob, and of the part which the Hanoverian Queen and the Whig Government played in connection with it, may have had no small share in fanning the embers of Jacobite enthusiasm in Scotland in swelling the ranks of the sympathizers with King James and Prince Charles over the water, and in precipitating the insurrectionary storm which was to make memorable the name of the Forty-five. Perhaps to the world at large the most momentous result of that wild and stormy episode is to be found in the enchanting fiction which has illuminated, with the genius of Walter Scott, the stirring scenes of the Porteous riots, and has lent an air of heroic dignity and beauty to the obscure smuggler, George Robertson. It is the happy privilege of the true romancer to find history his handmaid, and to make obscure events immortal, whether they be the scuffles of Greeks and barbarians outside a small town in Asia Minor, or the lynching of a dissolute adventurer by an Edinburgh mob at the Grassmarket.



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CHAPTER XXV.

FAMILY JARS.

[Sidenote: 1737—Unpopularity of George the Second]

"How is the wind now for the King?" "Like the nation—against him." Such was the question put, and such the answer promptly given, by two persons meeting in a London street during certain stormy days of December, 1736. The King had been on a visit to his loved Hanover. When the royal yachts were returning, some fierce tempests sprang up and raged along both coasts; and the King's vessel was forced to return to Helvoetsluis, in Holland, from which she had sailed. She had parted company with some of the other vessels. The storms continued to rage, and the King, who had been most reluctant to leave Hanover, was wild with impatience to get away from Helvoetsluis. Having had to take leave of Madame Walmoden, he was now anxious to get back to the Queen. He sailed for Helvoetsluis while the tempest was still not wholly allayed, and another tempest seemed likely to spring up. News travelled slowly in those times, and there were successive intervals of several days, during which the English Court and the English public did not know whether George was safe in a port, or was drifting on a wreck, or was lying at the bottom of the sea.

That was a trying time for the Queen and those who stood by her. George the Second was just then very unpopular in London, and indeed all over England. "The King's danger," Lord Hervey says, "did not in the least soften the minds of the people towards him; a thousand impertinent and treasonable reflections were thrown out against him every day publicly in the streets—such as wishing him at the bottom of the sea; that he had been {70} drowned instead of some of the poor sailors that had been washed off the decks—and many other affectionate douceurs in the same style." A man went into an ale-house where several soldiers were drinking; he addressed them "as brave English boys," and called on them to drink "damnation to your master." The man went on to argue that there was no reason why the English people should not hate the King, and that the King had gone to Hanover only to spend the money of England there, and to bring back his Hanoverian mistress. There is not much in this of any particular importance; but there is significance in what followed. The man was arrested, and the sergeant who was with the soldiers when the invitation to drink was given went to Sir Robert Walpole to tell him what had happened. Sir Robert thanked the sergeant and rewarded him, but enjoined him to leave out of the affidavit he would have to make any allusion to the English money and the Hanoverian mistress. There was quite enough in the mere invitation to drink the disloyal toast, Sir Robert said, to secure the offender's punishment; but the Prime-minister was decidedly of opinion that the less said just then in public about the spending of English money and the endowment of Hanoverian women, the better for peace and quietness.

[Sidenote: 1737—The Prince of Wales]

The Queen and Sir Robert and Lord Hervey were in constant consultation. They would not show in public the fear which all alike entertained. The Queen went to chapel, and passed her evenings with her circle just as usual; but she was in the uttermost alarm and the deepest distress. Any hour might bring the news that the King was drowned; and who could tell what might not happen in England then? Of course in the natural order of things the Prince of Wales would succeed to the throne; and what would become of the Queen and Walpole and Hervey then? Hervey, indeed, tried to reassure the Queen, and to persuade her that her son would acknowledge her influence and be led by it; but Caroline could not be prevailed upon to indulge in such a hope even for {71} a moment. To add to her troubles, her daughter, the Princess of Orange, was lying in a most dangerous condition at the Hague—her confinement had taken place; she had suffered terribly; and, to save her life, it had been found necessary to sacrifice the unborn child, a daughter. Every hour that passed without bringing news of the King seemed to increase the chance of the news when it came proving the worst. Such was the moment when the Prince of Wales made himself conspicuous by several bids for popularity. He gave a dinner to the Lord Mayor and aldermen of the City of London on the occasion of their presenting him with the freedom of the city. The Queen, who, for all her philosophical scepticism and her emancipated mind, had many lingering superstitions in her, saw an evil omen in the fact that the only two Princes of Wales who before Frederick had been presented with the freedom of the city were Charles the First and James the Second. The prince was reported to the Queen to have made several speeches at the dinner which were certain to ingratiate him in popular favor. "My God!" she exclaimed, "popularity always makes me sick; but Fritz's popularity makes me vomit." People told her that the prince and those around him talked of the King's being cast away "with the same sang-froid as you would talk of a coach being overturned." She said she had been told that Frederick strutted about as if he were already King. But she added, "He is such an ass that one cannot tell what he thinks; and yet he is not so great a fool as you take him for, neither." The Princess Caroline vowed that if the worst were to prove true, she would run out of the house au grand galop. Walpole described the prince to Hervey as "a poor, weak, irresolute, false, lying, dishonest, contemptible wretch," and asked, "What is to become of this divided family and this divided country?" It is something of a relief to find that there was in one mind at least a thought of what might happen to the country.

We have to take all these pictures of Frederick on {72} trust—on the faith of the father who loathed him, of the mother who detested and despised him, of the brothers and sisters who shrank away from him, of the minister who could not find words enough to express his hatred and contempt for him. Of course the mere fact that father and mother, brothers and sisters, felt thus towards the prince is terrible testimony against him. But there does not seem much in his conduct, at least in his public conduct, during this crisis, which might not bear a favorable interpretation. He might have given his dinners, as the Queen held her public drawing-rooms, for the purpose of preventing the spread of an alarm. No doubt the entertainment to the Lord Mayor and aldermen had been long arranged; and the prince may have thought it would be unwise to put it off at such a moment. Every report was believed against him. A fire broke out at the Temple, and the prince went down and stayed all night, giving directions and taking the control of the work for the putting out of the flames. His exertions undoubtedly helped to save the Temple from destruction; and he became for the time a hero with the populace. It was reported to Caroline that either the prince himself or some of his friends were going about saying that the crowd on the night of the fire kept crying out, "Crown him! crown him!"

[Sidenote: 1737—Monarchy a prosaic institution]

So far as the alarm of the Queen and Walpole had to do with the state of the country, it does not seem that there was any solid ground. What would have happened if the bloated King had been tossed ashore a corpse on the coast of England or the coast of Holland? So far as the public affairs of England are concerned, nothing in particular would have happened, we think. George would have been buried in right royal fashion; there would have been an immense concourse of sight-seers to stare at the royal obsequies; and Frederick would have been proclaimed, and the people would have taken little notice of the fact. What could it have mattered to the English people whether George the Second or his eldest son was {73} on the throne? No doubt Frederick was generally distrusted and disliked wherever he was known; but, then, George the Second was ever so much more widely known, and therefore was ever so much more distrusted and disliked. The chances of a successful Jacobite rising would not have been affected in any way by the fact that it was this Hanoverian prince and not that who was sitting on the throne of England. It would be hardly possible to find a more utterly unkingly and ignoble sovereign than George the Second; it is hardly possible that his son could have turned out any worse; and there was, at all events, the possibility that he might turn out better. Outside London and Richmond very few people cared in the least which of the Hanoverians wore the crown. Those who were loyal to the reigning family were honestly loyal on the principle that it was better for the country to have a Hanoverian sovereign than a Stuart. Many of those who in their feelings were still devoted to the Stuart tradition did not think it would be worth while plunging the country into a civil war for the almost hopeless chance of a revolution. England was beginning to see that, with all the corruption of Parliament and the constituencies under Walpole's administration, there was yet a very much better presentation of constitutional government than they had ever seen before. The arbitrary power of the sovereign had practically ceased to affect anybody outside the circles of the Ministry and the Court. The law tribunals sat and judged men impartially according to their lights, and person and property were at least secure against the arbitrary intrusion of the sovereign power. The old-fashioned chivalric, picturesque loyalty was gone; not merely because royalty itself had ceased to be chivalric and picturesque, but because men had, after so many experiments and changes, come to regard the monarchy as a merely practical and prosaic institution, to be rated according to its working merits. The majority in England at the time when George was tossing about the North Sea, or waiting impatiently at Helvoetsluis, had come to the conclusion {74} that on the whole the monarchy worked better under the Hanoverians than it had done under the Stuarts, and was more satisfactory than the protectorate of Cromwell. Therefore, we do not believe there was the slightest probability that the loss of George the Second would have brought any political trouble on the State. One can imagine objections made even by very moderate and reasonable Englishmen to each and all of the Hanoverian kings; but we find it hard to imagine how any reasonable Englishman, who had quietly put up with George the Second, should be at any pains to resist the accession of George the Second's eldest son.

But the truth is that although in her many consultations with Walpole and with Hervey the Queen did sometimes let drop a word or two about the condition of the country and the danger to the State, she was not thinking much about the state of the country. She was thinking honestly about herself and those who were around her, and whom she loved and wished to see maintained in comfort and in dignity. Her conviction was that if her son Frederick came to the throne she and her other children would be forced to go into an obscure life in Somerset House, the old palace which had been assigned to her in her jointure, and that they would even in that obscurity have to depend very much on the charity of the new King. This was the view Walpole took of the prospect. He thought those most in peril, those most to be pitied, were the Queen and the duke, her son, and the princesses. "I do not know," said Walpole to Hervey, "any people in the world so much to be pitied as that gay young company with which you and I stand every day in the drawing-room, at that door from which we this moment came, bred up in state, in affluence, caressed and courted, and to go at once from that into dependence on a brother who loves them not, and whose extravagance and covetousness will make him grudge every guinea they spend, as it must come from out of a purse not sufficient to defray the expenses of his own vices."

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Walpole, to do him justice, did think of the country. For all his rough, coarse, selfish ways, Walpole was an English patriot. He thought of the country, but he saw no danger to national interests in the change from George to Frederick. He saw, indeed, a great prospect of miserable mismanagement, blundering, and confusion in the Government. He foresaw the reliance of the coming King on the most worthless favorites. He foresaw more corruption and of a worse kind, and more maladministration, than there had been before at any time since the accession of George the First. He feared that it might not be possible for him to remain at the head of affairs when Frederick should have come to reign. But he does not appear to have had any dread of any immediate cataclysm or even disturbance. The troubles Walpole looked for were troubles which might indeed make government difficult, disturb the House of Commons, and bring discomfort of the bitterest kind into Court circles, but which would be hardly heard of in the great provincial towns, and not heard of at all in the country—at least not heard of outside the park railings of the great country-houses.

[Sidenote: 1737—A Royal love-letter]

Whatever the alarm, it was destined suddenly to pass away. While Caroline was already secretly putting her heart into mourning for her husband the news was suddenly brought that George was safe and sound in Helvoetsluis. He had been compelled to return, and there he had to remain weather-bound. He wrote to the Queen a long, tender, and impassioned love-letter—like the letter of a youthful lover in whose heart the first feeling on an unexpected escape from death is the glad thought that he is to look once again on the fair face of his sweetheart. George really had a gift for love-letter writing, the only literary gift which he seems to have possessed. It is impossible to read the letters from Helvoetsluis without believing that they were written under the inspiration of genuine emotion. Their style might well raise over again that interesting subject of speculation—whether it is in the power of man to be in love with two or more women {76} the same time. King George was unquestionably in love with Madame Walmoden: while he was near her he could think of nothing else. He was in Hanover, feasting and dancing, always in Madame Walmoden's company, while his daughter was lying on what seemed at one time like to be her death-bed at the Hague. It is not a very far cry from Hanover to the Hague, but it never occurred to George to entertain the idea of leaving Madame Walmoden to go and pay a visit to his daughter. Out of Madame Walmoden's presence his thoughts appear to have flown at once back to his wife. To her he wrote, not in the mere language of conjugal affection and sympathy, but with the passionate raptures of young love itself. The Queen was immensely proud of this letter, although she took care to say that she believed she was not unreasonably proud of it. She showed it to Walpole and to Hervey, who both agreed that they had a most incomprehensible master. Walpole was a very shrewd and keen-sighted man, but he did not understand Queen Caroline or her feeling towards her husband. He had told Hervey more than once that he did not know whether the Queen hated more her son or her husband; and, indeed, he said there was good reason why she should hate the husband the more of the two, seeing that he had treated her so badly while she had been all devotion to him. The love of a woman is not always governed by a sense of gratefulness. There are women whose hearts are like the grape, and give out their best juices to him who tramples on them. If anything is certain in all the coarse and dreary story of that Court, it is that Queen Caroline adored her husband—that she was too fond of her most filthy bargain.

[Sidenote: 1737—A fickle, inconsiderate Prince]

The danger in which George had been, and out of which he had escaped, did not in any way soften the hearts of King and prince, of father and son, towards each other. The prince still occupied a suite of rooms in St. James's Palace, and the King and he met on public occasions, but they never spoke. The Queen was even more constant in her hatred to the prince than the King himself. It does {77} not seem possible to find out how this detestation of the son by the mother ever began to fill the Queen's heart. She was not an unloving mother; indeed, where her affection to the King did not stand in the way, she was fond and tender to nearly all her children. But towards her eldest son she seems to have felt something like a physical aversion. Then, again, the King was a dull, stupid, loutish man, over whose clouded faculties any absurd prejudice or dislike might have settled unquestioned; but Caroline was a bright, clever, keen-witted woman, who asked herself and others why this or that should be. She must have many times questioned her own heart and reasoned with herself before she allowed it to be filled forever with hatred to her son. Lord Hervey, who had a true regard for her, and in whom she trusted as much as she trusted any human being, does not appear to have ever fully understood the cause of the Queen's feelings towards the prince; nor does he appear to have shared her utter distrust and dislike of him. As far as one can judge, the prince appears to have been fickle, inconsiderate, and flighty rather than deliberately bad. He sometimes did things which made him seem like a madman. Such a person would not be charmed into a healthier condition of mind and temper by the knowledge daily thrust upon him that his own father and mother, and his own sister, were the three persons who hated him most in the world. Of course, in this as in other cases of a palace quarrel between a king and an eldest son, there was a bitter wrangle about money. The prince demanded an allowance of one hundred thousand a year to be secured to him independently of his father's power to recall or reduce it. The King had hitherto only given him what Frederick called a beggarly allowance of fifty thousand a year, and even that had not been made over to the prince unconditionally and forever. The prince argued that his father's civil list was now much larger than that of George the First at the time when the Prince of Wales of that day, George the Second now, was allowed an income of one {78} hundred thousand a year. The Princess of Wales had as yet received no jointure, and she and the prince were thus kept, as Frederick's friends insisted, in the condition of mere pensioners and dependants upon the royal bounty. The prince's friends were, for the most part, eager to stir him up to some open measure of hostility; especially the younger men of the party were doing their best to drive the prince on. Pulteney, it must be said, was not for any such course of action, indeed, was against it, and had given the prince good advice; and Carteret was not for it. But Lord Chesterfield and several other peers, and Lyttelton and William Pitt in the House of Commons, were eager for the fray, and their counsels prevailed. To use an expression which became famous at a much later day, "the young man's head was on fire," and it soon became known to the King and Queen that the prince had resolved to act upon a suggestion made by Bolingbroke two years before, and submit his claim to the decision of Parliament. More than that, when Walpole was consulted Walpole felt himself obliged to declare his belief, or at least his fear, that if the prince should persist in making his claim he would find himself supported by a majority in the House of Commons. The story had reached the Queen in the first instance through Lord Hervey, and the manner of its reaching Lord Hervey is worth mentioning, because it brings in for the first time a name destined to be famous during two succeeding generations. The prince, having been persuaded to appeal to Parliament, at once began touting for support and for votes after the fashion of a candidate for a Parliamentary constituency. He sent the Duke of Marlborough to speak to Mr. Henry Fox, a young member of Parliament, and to ask Mr. Fox for his vote. Henry Fox was the younger of two brothers, both of whom were intimate friends of Lord Hervey. He had not been long in the House of Commons, having obtained a seat in 1735, as member for Hendon, in Wiltshire. He had come into Parliament in the same year with William Pitt, whose foremost political rival he was soon destined {79} to be. He was also destined to be the father of the greatest rival of his opponent's son. English public life was to see a Pitt and a Fox opposed to each other at the head of rival parties in one generation, and a far greater Fox and a not inferior Pitt standing in just the same attitude of rivalry in the generation that succeeded.

[Sidenote: 1737—A Royal liar]

Henry Fox went at once to Lord Hervey and told him how he had been asked to support the prince, and how he had answered that he should do as his brother did, whatever that might be. Lord Hervey at first was not inclined to attach much importance to the story. He said he had heard so often that the prince was going to take up such a course of action and nothing had come of it so far, and he did not suppose anything would come of it this time. Fox, however, assured him that the attempt would now most certainly be made, and was surprised to find that the ministers appeared to know nothing about it. He declared that he did not believe there was a man on the side of the Opposition who had not already been asked for his vote. Lord Hervey hurried to the Queen and told her the unpleasant news. Caroline sent for Walpole; and at last the story was told to the King himself. The Queen was urged by Lord Hervey to speak to her son privately, and endeavor to induce him not to declare open war upon his father. The Queen would not do anything of the kind. She declared that her speaking to her son would only make him more obstinate than ever, and that he was such a liar that it would not be safe for her to enter into any private conference with him. Other intercessors were found, but the prince was unyielding; and George himself, as obstinate as his son, could not be induced at first by Walpole, or by any one else, to make any show of concession or compromise. The Princess Caroline kept saying ever so many times a day that she prayed her brother might drop down dead; that he was a nauseous beast, and she grudged him every hour he continued to exist. These sisterly expressions did not contribute much to any manner of settlement, and the prince held on his course. {80} The calculations of Frederick's friends gave him in advance a majority of forty in the House of Commons; and even the most experienced calculators of votes on the King's side allowed to the prince a majority of ten. Walpole began to think the crisis one of profound danger. He felt it only too likely that the fate of his administration would depend on the division in the House of Commons.

[Sidenote: 1737—Frederick's "dutiful expressions"]

Something must be done; something at least must be attempted. Walpole saw nothing for it but to endeavor to arrange a compromise. Parliament had opened on February 1st, and the day appointed for the debate on this important question of the prince's allowance was to be Tuesday, the 22d of the month. On the Monday previous, Walpole made up his mind that if the King did not offer some fair show of compromise his party would be beaten when the question came to be put to the vote. His plan of arrangement was that the King should spontaneously send to the prince an intimation that he was willing to settle a jointure at once on the princess, with the added remark that this had already been under consideration—which indeed was true—not a very common occurrence in Royal messages of that day; and that he was also prepared to settle fifty thousand a year on the prince himself forever and without condition. Walpole did not believe that the prince would accept this offer of compromise. He knew very well that Frederick, full of arrogant confidence and obstinacy, and backed up by the zeal and passion of his friends, would be certain to refuse it. But Walpole was not thinking much about the impression which the offer would make on the prince. The thought uppermost in his mind was of the impression it would make on the House of Commons. Unless some new impression could be made upon the House, the triumph of the prince was absolutely certain; and Walpole felt sure that if any step could now alter the condition of things in the House of Commons it would be the publication of the fact that the King had spontaneously held out the olive-branch; that {81} he had offered a fair compromise, and that the prince had refused it.

Walpole had much trouble to prevail upon the King to make any offer of compromise. Even Lord Hervey was strongly of opinion that the attempt would be a failure, that the proffered concession would be wholly thrown away; such a movement, he said, would neither put off the battle nor gain the King one single desertion from the ranks of the enemy, while to the King's own party it would seem something like a lowering of the flag. Walpole, however, persevered, and he carried his point. A deputation, headed by the new Lord Chancellor, Lord Hardwicke, who had succeeded to the Great Seal on the death of his famous rival, Lord Chancellor Talbot, was sent to wait on the prince and submit to him the proposition of his father. The prince answered rather ungraciously that the matter was entirely out of his hands now, and that therefore he could give no answer to the Royal message. It must be gratifying to every patriotic soul to know that his Royal Highness accompanied this declaration with "many dutiful expressions" towards his father, and that he even went so far as to say he was sorry it was not in his power to do otherwise than as he had done. The dutiful expressions did not by any means charm away the wrath either of the King or the Queen. The two stormed and raged against Frederick, and called him by many very hard names. Both were much disposed to storm against Walpole too, for the advice he had given, and for his pertinacity in forcing them on to a step which had brought nothing but humiliation. Walpole bore his position with a kind of patience which might be called either proud or stolid, according as one is pleased to look at it. With all his courage, Walpole must have felt some qualms of uneasiness now and then, but if he did feel he certainly did not show them.



{82}

CHAPTER XXVI.

A PERILOUS VICTORY.

[Sidenote: 1737—Incentives to valor]

On Tuesday, February 22d, the debate took place in the House of Commons. It came on in the form of a motion for an address to the Sovereign, praying that he would make to the Prince of Wales an independent allowance of one hundred thousand a year. The motion was proposed by Pulteney himself. Lord Hervey seems to be surprised that Pulteney, after having advised the prince not to press on any such motion, should, nevertheless, when the prince did persevere, actually propose the motion himself. But such a course is common enough even in our own days, when statesmen make greater effort at political and personal consistency. A man often argues long and earnestly in the Cabinet or in the councils of the Opposition against some particular proposal, and then, when it is, in spite of his advice, made a party resolve, he goes to the House of Commons and speaks in its favor; nay, even it may be, proposes it. Pulteney made a long and what would now be called an exhaustive speech. It was stuffed full of portentous erudition about the early history of the eldest sons of English kings. The speech was said to have been delivered with much less than Pulteney's usual force and fire; and indeed, so far as one can judge by the accounts—they can hardly be called reports—preserved of it, one is obliged to regard it as rather a languid and academical dissertation. We start off with what Henry the Third did for his son, afterwards Edward the First, when that noble youth had reached the unripe age of fourteen. He granted to him the Duchy of Guienne; he put him in possession of the Earldom of {83} Chester; he made him owner of the cities and towns of Bristol, Stamford, and Grantham, with several other castles and manors; he created him Prince of Wales, to which, lest it should be merely a barren title, he annexed all the conquered lands in Wales; and he created him Governor of Ireland. All this, to be sure, was mightily liberal on the part of Henry the Third, and a very handsome and right royal way of providing for his own family; but it might be supposed an argument rather to frighten than to encourage a modern English Parliament. But the orator went on to show what glorious deeds in arms were done by this highly endowed prince, and the inferences which he appeared to wish his audience to draw were twofold: first, that Edward would never have done these glorious deeds if his father had not given him these magnificent allowances; and next, that if an equal, or anything like an equal, liberality were shown to Frederick, Prince of Wales, it was extremely probable that he would rush into the field at the first opportunity and make a clean sweep of the foes of England.

We need not follow the orator through his account of what was done for Edward the Black Prince, and what Edward the Black Prince had done in consequence; and how Henry the Fifth had been able to conquer France because of his father's early liberality. The whole argument tended to impress upon the House of Commons the maxim that in a free country, above all others, it is absolutely necessary to have the heir-apparent of the crown bred up in a state of grandeur and independency. Despite the high-flown sentiments and the grandiose historical illustrations in which the speaker indulged, there seems to the modern intelligence an inherent meanness, a savor of downright vulgarity, through the whole of it. If you give a prince only fifty thousand a year, you can't expect anything of him. What can he know of grandeur of soul, of national honor, of constitutional rights, of political liberty? You can't get these qualities in a prince unless you pay him at least a hundred thousand a year while his {84} father is living. [Sidenote: 1737—Providing for a Prince] The argument would have told more logically if the English Parliament were going into the open market to buy the best prince they could get. There would be some show of reason in arguing that the more we pay the better article we shall have. But it is hard indeed to understand how a prince who is to be worth nothing if you give him only fifty thousand a year, will be another Black Prince or Henry the Fifth if you let him have the spending of fifty thousand a year more. Walpole led the Opposition to the motion. Much of the argument on both sides was essentially sordid, but there was a good deal also which was keen, close, and clever, and which may have even now a sort of constitutional interest. The friends of the prince knew they would have to meet the contention that Parliament had no right to interfere with the Sovereign's appropriation of the revenues allotted to him. They therefore contended, and, as it seems to us, with force and justice, that the Parliament which made the grants had a perfect right to see that the grants were appropriated to the uses for which they were intended, to follow out the grants in the course of their application, and even to direct that they should be applied to entirely different purposes; even, if need were, to resume them. It would naturally seem to follow from this assumption, that Parliament had a right to call on the King to make the allowance to the prince, but it would seem to follow also that the allowance ought not to be made independent and absolute. For, if the Prince of Wales had an allowance absolutely independent of the will of any one, he had something which Pulteney and his friends were contending, as it was their business just then to contend, that the English Parliament had never consented to give to the King. On the other hand, it was pointed out with much effect that there never had been any express regulation in England to provide that the Prince of Wales should be made independent of his father, and there was clear good-sense in the contempt with which Walpole treated the argument that the State dependency upon his father in {85} which the son of a great family usually lives, must necessarily tend to the debasing of the son's mind and the diminishing of his intelligence, or that the dignity and grandeur even of a Prince of Wales could not be as well supported by a yearly allowance as by a perpetual and independent settlement. Some of the speakers on Walpole's side—indeed, Walpole himself occasionally—strove to show their willingness to serve the prince by utterances which must have caused the prince to smile a grim, sardonic smile if he had any existing sense of humor. Please do not imagine—this was the line of observation—that we think one hundred thousand a year too much for his Royal Highness. Oh dear, no; nothing of the kind; we do not think it would be half enough if only the nation had the money to give away. "Why," exclaimed one gushing orator, "if we had the money the only course we could take would be to offer his Royal Highness whatever he pleased to accept, and even in that case we should have reason to fear lest his modesty might do an injury to his generosity by making him confine his demand within the strictest bounds of bare necessity." "Were we," another member of the Court party declared, "to measure the prince's allowance by the prince's merit, as we know no bounds to the latter, we could prescribe no bounds to the former." Therefore, as it was totally impossible that the treasury of any State could reward this extraordinary prince according to his merit, the speakers on Walpole's side mildly pleaded that they had only to fall back on the cold and commonplace rules of ordinary economy, and try to find out what sum the nation could really afford to hand over.

The men who talked these revolting absurdities were saying among themselves an hour after that the prince was an avaricious and greedy beast, and were openly proclaiming their pious wish that Providence would be graciously inclined to rid the world of him. Nothing strikes one as more painful and odious in the ways of that Court and that Parliament than the language of sickening sycophancy which is used by all statesmen alike in public {86} with regard to kings and princes, for whom in private they could find no words of abuse too strong and coarse, no curse too profane. Never was an Oriental despot the most vain and cruel addressed in language of more nauseous flattery by great ministers and officers of State than were the early English sovereigns of the House of Hanover. The filthy indecency which came so habitually from the lips of Walpole, of other statesmen, of the King—sometimes even of the Queen herself—hardly seems more ignoble, more demoralizing, than the outpouring of a flattery as false as it was gross, a flattery that ought to have sickened alike the man who poured it out and the man whom it was poured over. Poor, stupid George seems to have been always taken in by it. Indeed, in his dull, heavy mind there was no praise the voice of man could utter which could quite come up to his perfections. The quicker-witted Queen sometimes writhed under it.

[Sidenote: 1737—Comparisons]

Walpole, however, did not depend upon argument to carry his point. The stone up his sleeve, to use a somewhat homely expression, which he meant to fling at his enemy, was something quite different from any question of Constitution or prescription or precedent; of the genius of the Black Prince, and the manner in which Wild Hal, Falstaff's companion, had been endowed and allowanced into Henry, the victor of Agincourt. Walpole flung down, metaphorically speaking, on the table of the House the record of the interview between the Prince of Wales and the great peers who waited on him, bearing the message of the King. The record set forth all that had happened: how the King had declared himself willing to provide at once a suitable jointure for the Princess of Wales; how he had shown that this had been under consideration, and explained in the simplest way the reason why the arrangement had been delayed; how his Majesty had voluntarily taken it on himself that the prince should have fifty thousand a year absolutely independent of the Sovereign's future action, and over and above the revenues arising from the duchy of Cornwall, which his Majesty {87} thinks a very competent allowance, considering his own numerous issue and the great expenses which do, and which necessarily must, attend an honorable provision for his whole royal family. And then the record gave the answer of the Prince of Wales and its peculiar conclusion; "Indeed, my lords, it is in other hands—I am sorry for it;" "or," as the record of the peers cautiously concluded, "to that effect."