Wesley was very near getting married in Georgia. A clever and pretty young woman in Savannah set herself at him. She consulted him about her spiritual salvation, she dressed always in white because she understood that he liked such simplicity of color, she nursed him when he was ill. The governor of the colony favored the young lady's intentions, which were indeed strictly honorable, being most distinctly matrimonial. At one time it seemed very likely that the marriage would take place, but Wesley's heart was evidently not in the affair. Some of his colleagues told him plainly enough that they believed the young lady to be merely playing a game, that she put on affection and devotion only that she might put on a wedding-dress. Wesley consulted some of the elders of the Moravian Church, and promised to abide by their decision. Their advice was that he should go no further with the young woman, and Wesley kept his word and refused to see her any more. She married, soon after, the chief magistrate of the colony, and before long we find Wesley publicly reprehending her for "something in her behavior of which he disapproved," and threatening even to exclude her from the communion of the Church until she should have signified her sincere repentance. Her family took legal proceedings against him. Wesley did not care; he was about to return to England, and he was called on to give bail for his reappearance in the colony. He contemptuously refused to do anything of the kind, and promptly sailed from Savannah.

This little episode of the Georgian girl is characteristic of the man. He did not care about marrying her, but it did not seem to him a matter of much importance either way, and he doubtless would have married her but that he thought it well to seek the advice of his Moravian friends, and bound himself to abide by their decision. That decision once given, he had no further wavering or {137} doubt, but the course he had taken and the manner in which he had completely thrown over the woman did not prevent him in the least from visiting her with a public rebuke when he saw something in her conduct of which he disapproved. He saw no reason why, because he refused to be her lover, he should fail in his duty as her minister.

[Sidenote: 1738—Wesley's unhappy marriage]

We may anticipate a little as to Wesley's personal history. Later in his life he married. He was not happy in his marriage. He took for his wife a widow who plagued him by her narrow-mindedness, her bitterness, and her jealousy. Wesley's care and kindness of the women who came under his ministrations set his wife wild with suspicion and anger. She could not believe that a man could be kind to a woman, even as a pastor, without having evil purpose in his heart. She had the temper of a virago; she stormed against her husband, she threatened him, she sometimes rushed at him and tore his hair; she repeatedly left his house, but was prevailed upon by him to return. At last after a fierce quarrel she flung out of the house, vowing that she would never come back. Wesley's comment, which he expressed in Latin, was stern and characteristic: "I have not left her, I have not put her away, I will never recall her." He kept his word.

Wesley started on his mission to preach to the people and to pray with them. Whitefield and Charles Wesley did the same. Charles Wesley was the hymn writer, the sweet singer, of the movement. The meetings began to grow larger, more enthusiastic, more impassioned, every day. John Wesley brought to his work "a frame of adamant" as well as "a soul of fire." No danger frighted him, and no labor tired. Rain, hail, snow, storm, were matters of indifference to him when he had any work to do. One reads the account of the toil he could cheerfully bear, the privations he could recklessly undergo, the physical obstacles he could surmount, with what would be a feeling of incredulity were it possible to doubt the unquestionable evidence of a whole cloud of {138} heterogeneous witnesses. Not Mark Antony, not Charles the Twelfth, not Napoleon, ever went through such physical suffering for the love of war, or for the conqueror's ambition, as Wesley was accustomed to undergo for the sake of preaching at the right time and in the right place to some crowd of ignorant and obscure men, the conversion of whom could bring him neither fame nor fortune.

All the phenomena with which we have been familiar in modern times of what are called "revivalist" meetings were common among the congregations to whom Wesley preached. Women especially were affected in this way. They raved, shrieked, struggled, flung themselves on the ground, fainted, cried out that they were possessed by evil spirits. Wesley rather encouraged these manifestations, and indeed quite believed in their genuineness. No doubt for the most part they were genuine: that is, they were the birth of hysterical, highly strung natures, stimulated into something like epilepsy or temporary insanity by the unbearable oppression of a wholly novel excitement. No such evidences of emotion were ever given in the parish church where the worthy clergyman read his duly prepared or perhaps thoughtfully purchased sermon. Sometimes a new form of hysteria possessed some of Wesley's congregations, and irrepressible peals of laughter broke from some of the brethren and sisters, who declared that they were forced to it by Satan. Wesley quite accepted this explanation, and so did most of his companions. Two ladies, however, refused to believe, and insisted that "any one might help laughing if she would." But very soon after these two sceptics were seized with the very same sort of irrepressible laughter. They continued for two days laughing almost without cessation, "a spectacle to all," as Wesley tells, "and were then upon prayer made for them delivered in a moment." It is almost needless now to say that bursts of irrepressible laughter are among the commonest forms of hysterical excitement.

[Sidenote: 1738—Whitefield's oratory]

The cooler common-sense of Charles Wesley, however, {139} saw these manifestations with different eyes. He felt sure that there was sometimes a good deal of affectation in them, and he publicly remonstrated with some women who, as it appeared to him, were needlessly making themselves ridiculous. He was probably right in these instances: the instinct of imitation is so strong among men and women that every genuine outburst of maniacal excitement is sure to be followed by some purely mimetic efforts of a similar demonstration. The novelty of the whole movement was enough to account for the genuine and the sham hysterics. It was an entirely new experience then for English men and women of the humblest class, and of that generation, to be addressed in great open-air masses by renowned and powerful preachers. Whitefield's first great effort at field-preaching was made for the benefit of the colliers at Kingswood, near Bristol. Before many weeks had gone by, he could gather round him some twenty thousand of these men. Whitefield had a marvellous fervor and force of oratory. His voice, his gestures, his sudden and startling appeals, his solemn pauses, the dramatic and even theatric energy which he threw into his attitudes and his action, his flights of lofty and sustained declamation, contrasting with sentences of homely colloquialism, were overwhelming in their effect on such an audience. "The first discovery," he says himself, "of their being affected was to see the white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their cheeks, black as they came out of the coal-pits." It was not only miners and other illiterate men whom Whitefield impressed by the fervor and passion of his eloquence. Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Walpole, and other men as well qualified to judge, and as little likely to fall under the spell of religions or sentimental enthusiasm, have borne willing testimony to the irresistible power of a sermon from Whitefield.

Wesley and Whitefield did not remain long in spiritual companionship. They could not agree as to the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. Wesley was opposed to {140} the doctrine; Whitefield willing to accept it. They discussed and discussed the question, but without drawing any nearer together. Indeed, as might naturally have been expected, they only fell more widely asunder, and after a while the difference of opinion grew to something like a personal estrangement. Wesley had already broken away from spiritual communion with some of his old friends, the Moravians. Probably he felt all the stronger for his own work now that he stood as a leader all but alone. He walked his own wild road; Whitefield took a path for himself. Wesley soon found that he was gaining more followers than he had lost. He had to adopt the practice of employing lay preachers; it was a matter of necessity to his task. He could not induce many clergymen to work under his guidance and after his fashion. The movement was spreading all over the country. Wesley became the centre and light of his wing of the campaign. The machinery of his organization was simple and strong. A conference was called together every year, which was composed of preachers selected by Wesley. These formed his cabinet or central board, and lent their authority to his decisions.

This was the germ of the great Wesleyan organization, which has since become so powerful, and has spread itself so widely over Great Britain and the American States. The preachers were sent by Wesley from one part of the country to another, just as he thought best; and it never occurred to any missionary to refuse, remonstrate, or even delay. The system was admirable; the discipline was perfect. Wesley was as completely in command of his body of missionaries as the general of the order of Jesuits is of those over whom he is called to exercise control. The humblest of the Wesleyan preachers caught something, caught indeed very much, of the energy, the courage, the devotion, the self-sacrifice, of their great leader. No doubt there were many errors and offences here and there. Good taste, sobriety of judgment, prudence, common-sense, were now and then offended. Most of the preachers were {141} ignorant men, who had nothing but an untaught enthusiasm and a rude, uncouth eloquence to carry them on. They had to preach to multitudes very often more ignorant and uncouth than themselves. It would be absolutely impossible under such conditions that there should not sometimes be offence, and, as Hamlet says, "much offence too." But there was no greater departure from the lines of propriety and good taste than any one who took a reasonable view of the whole work and its workers must have expected to find.

[Sidenote: 1738—Opposition to Wesleyanism]

Of course a strong opposition to the movement showed itself in many parts of the country. The Wesleyans were denounced; they were ridiculed; they were caricatured; they were threatened; they were set upon by ruffians; they were stoned by mobs. In some places it was said that the local magistrates actually connived with the attempt to drive them out by force. Projects are actually declared to have been formed for their complete extermination. Such projects, however, do not succeed. No amount of violence has ever yet exterminated religious zeal and impassioned, even let it be fanatical, enthusiasm. John Wesley went his way undismayed. He even appears to have positively enjoyed the excitement and the danger. The persecution began after a while to languish in its efforts, and the Wesleyans kept growing more and more numerous and strong. But the movement in growing grew away from the Church of England. Wesley had been drawn out of his original intent step after step. He could not help himself, once his movement had been started. He had had to take to field preaching, for the good reason that he could not otherwise reach the people whom it was his heart's warmest longing to reach. He had to take to employing lay preachers, because without them he could not have got his preaching done. At last he began to ordain ministers, and even, it is said, bishops, for the missions in America. He had, in fact, broken away altogether from the discipline of the Church of England, although he persisted to his dying day that he never had any design of {142} separating from the Church, "and had no such design now." Near to the close of his long life he declared, "I live and die a member of the Church of England, and none who regard my judgment or advice will ever separate from it." No one can doubt that Wesley spoke in full sincerity. When he stepped outside the pale of Church practice it was only to do what he believed ought to have been the work of the Church itself, but which the Church did not then care to attempt, and which, as he felt convinced, could not afford to wait for the indefinite time when the Church might have the spirit, the energy, and the resources needed for such an undertaking.

Wesley was a thorough despot; as much of a despot as Peter the Great or Napoleon. He took no trouble to disguise his despotic purpose. He did not shelter himself, as Napoleon once wished to do, under the draperies of a constitutional king. Wesley was satisfied in his own mind that he knew better than any other man how to guide his movements and govern his followers, and he told people that he knew it, and acted accordingly. The members of his conference, or what we have called his cabinet, were only like Clive's council of war; Wesley listened to their advice and their arguments, but acted according to his own judgment all the same. Late in his career it was charged against him that he was trying to turn himself into a sort of Methodist pope. He asked for some explanation of this, and was told that he had invested himself with arbitrary power. His answer was simple and straightforward. "If by arbitrary power you mean a power which I exercise singly, without any colleagues therein, this is certainly true; but I see no hurt in it." All the actions of his life show this complete faith in himself where the business of his mission was concerned. He was dogmatic, masterful, overbearing, very often far from amiable, sometimes all but unendurable, to those around him. But if he had not had these peculiar qualities or defects he would not have been the man that he was; he would not have been able to bear the charge of such a task at such a {143} time. It is probable that Hannibal did not cut through the Alps with vinegar; it is certain that he could not have pierced his way with honey.

[Sidenote: 1738—Religion out of fashion]

Nothing can better show than the rise and progress of the great Methodist movement how vast is the difference between a people and what is commonly called society. In society everywhere throughout England, in the great provincial cities as well as in the capital, religion seemed to have completely gone out of fashion. The Court cared nothing about it. The King had no real belief in his heart; he had as little faith in Divine guidance as he had in the honor of man or the chastity of woman. The Queen's devotional exercises were nothing but a mere performance carried on sometimes through a half-opened door, the attendant minister on one side of the door and the gossiping, chattering ladies on the other. The leading statesmen of the age were avowedly indifferent or professedly unbelieving. Bolingbroke was a preacher of unbelief. Walpole never seems to have cared to turn his thoughts for one moment to anything higher than his own political career, the upholding of his friends if they stood fast by him, and the downfall of his enemies. Chesterfield was not exactly the sort of man to be stirred into spiritual life. Morals were getting out of fashion as much as religion. Society had all the grossness without much of the wit which belonged to the days of the Restoration. Yet the mere fact that the Wesleyan movement made such sudden way among the poor and the lowly shows beyond question that the heart of the English people had not been corrupted. Conscience was asleep, but it was not dead. The first words of Wesley seemed to quicken it into a new life.

We have somewhat anticipated the actual course of events in order to show at once what the Wesleyan movement came to. During the lifetime of its founder it had grown into a great national and international institution. Since his time it has been spreading and growing all over the world where Christianity grows. It is the severest in {144} its discipline of all the Protestant churches, and yet it exercises a charm even over gentle and tender natures, and makes them its willing servants, while it teaches the wilder and fiercer spirits to bend their natures and tame their wild passions down. [Sidenote: 1738—The Wesleyan work] In the United States of America Wesleyanism is now one of the most popular and powerful of all the denominations of Christianity. It has since been divided up into many sections, both here and there, on questions of discipline, and even on questions of belief; but in its leading characteristics it has been faithful to the main purpose of its founder. Its success did not consist mainly in what it accomplished for its own people; it achieved a great work also by the impulse it gave to the Church of England. That Church for a while seemed to be filled with a reviving spiritual and ministerial activity. It appeared to take shame to itself that it had remained so long apathetic and perfunctory, and it flung itself into competition with the younger and more energetic mission. The English Church did not indeed retain this mood of ardor and of eagerness very long. After a time it relapsed into comparative inactivity; and a new and very different movement was needed at a period much nearer to our own to make it once again a ministering power to the people—to the poor. But for the time the revival of the Church was genuine and was beneficent. With the quickened religious vitality of the Wesleyan movement came also a quickened philanthropic spirit; a zeal for the instruction, the purification, and the better life of men and women. The common instinct of humanity always is to strive for higher and better ways of living, if only once the word of guidance is given and the soul of true manhood is roused to the work. Indeed, there is not much about this period of English history concerning which the modern Englishman can feel really proud except that great religious revival which began with the thoughts and the teachings of John Wesley. One turns in relief from the partisan struggles in Parliament and out of it, from the intrigues and counter-intrigues of selfish and perfidious statesmen, and {145} the alcove conspiracies of worthless women, to Wesley and his religious visions, to Whitefield and his colliers, to Charles Wesley and his sweet devotional hymns. Many of us are unable to have any manner of sympathy with the precise doctrines and the forms of faith which Wesley taught. But the man must have no sympathy with faith or religious feeling of any kind who does not recognize the unspeakable value of that great reform which Wesley and Whitefield introduced to the English people. They taught moral doctrines which we all accept in common, but they did not teach them after the cold and barren way of the plodding, mechanical instructor. They thundered them into the opening ears of thousands who had never been roused to moral sentiment before. They inspired the souls of poor and commonplace creatures with all the zealot's fire and all the martyr's endurance. They brought tears to penitent eyes which had never been moistened before by any but the selfish sense of personal pain or grief. They pierced through the dull, vulgar, contaminated hideousness of low and vicious life, and sent streaming in upon it the light of a higher world and a better law. Every new Wesleyan became a missionary of Wesleyanism. The son converted the father, the daughter won over the heart of the mother. There was much that was hard, much that was fierce, in the doctrine and the discipline of Methodism, but that time was not one in which gentler teachings could much prevail. Men and women had to be startled into a sense of the need of their spiritual regeneration. Wesley and the comrades who worked with him in the beginning, and with some of whom, like Whitefield, he ceased after a while to work, were just the men needed to call aloud to the people and make sure that their voices must be heard. They had to talk in a shout if they were to talk to any purpose. There was much in their style of eloquence against which a pure and cultured criticism would naturally protest. But they did not speak for the pure and cultured criticism. They came to call ignorant sinners to repentance. They have the one great abiding {146} merit, they have the one enduring fame—that they saw their real business in life; that they kept to it through whatever disadvantage, pain, and danger; and that they accomplished what they had gone out to do. Their monument lives to-day in the living history of England and of America.



{147}

CHAPTER XXXI.

ENGLAND'S HONOR AND JENKINS'S EAR.

[Sidenote: 1738—The passion of war]

"Madam, there are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe, and not one Englishman among them." This was the proud boast which, as has been already mentioned, Walpole was able to make to Queen Caroline not very long before her death, when she was trying to stir him up to a more agressive policy in the affairs of the Continent. Walpole's words sound almost like an anticipation of Prince Bismarck's famous declaration that the Eastern Question was not worth to Germany the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier. But Prince Bismarck was more fortunate than Walpole in his policy of peace. He had secured a position of advantage for himself in maintaining that policy which Walpole never had. Prince Bismarck had twice over made it clear to all the world that he could conduct to the most complete success a policy of uncompromising war. Walpole had all the difficulty in keeping to his policy of peace which a statesman always has who is suspected, rightly or wrongly, of a willingness to purchase peace at almost any price. It is melancholy to have to make the statement, but the statement is nevertheless true, that in the England of Walpole's day, and in the England of our own day as well, the statesman who is known to love peace is sure to have it shrieked at him in some crisis that he does not love the honor of his country. A periodical outbreak of the craving or lust for war seems to be one of the passions and one of the afflictions of almost every great commonwealth in Europe. A wise and just policy may have secured a peace that has lasted for years; but the mere fact that peace has lasted for years {148} seems to many unthinking people reason enough why the country should be favored with a taste of war. We are constantly declaring that England is not a military nation, and yet no statesman is ever so popular for the hour in England as the statesman who fires the people with the passion of war. Many a minister, weak and unpopular in his domestic policy, has suddenly made himself the hero and the darling of the moment by declaring that some foreign state has insulted England, and that the time has come when the sword must be drawn to defend the nation's honor. Then "away to heaven, respective lenity" indeed! The appeal acts like a charm to call out the passion and to silence the reason of vast masses of the population in all ranks and conditions. Even among the working-classes and the poor—who, one might imagine, have all to lose and nothing to gain by war—it is by no means certain that the war fever will not flame for the hour. There are seasons when, as Burke has said, "even the humblest of us are degraded into the vices and follies of kings."

[Sidenote: 1738—The patriots' war-cry]

War had no fascination for Walpole. He saw it only in its desolation, its cruelty, its folly, and its cost. At the time which we have now reached he looked with clear gaze over the European continent, and he saw nothing in the action of foreign Powers which concerned the honor and the interest of England enough to make it necessary for her to draw the sword. But, unfortunately for his country and for his fame, Walpole was not a statesman of firm and lofty principle. He was always willing to come to terms. In the domestic affairs of England he allowed grievances to exist which he had again and again condemned and deplored, and which every one knew he was sincerely desirous to remove; he allowed them to exist because it might have been a source of annoyance to the King if the minister had troubled him about such a subject. He acted on this policy with regard to the grievances of which the Dissenters complained, and, as he always admitted, very justly complained. Much as he detested a policy of war, he was not the minister who would {149} stand by a policy of peace at the risk of losing his popularity and his power. Much as he loved peace, he loved his place as Prime Minister still more. It is probable that his enemies gave him credit for greater fixity of purpose in regard to his peace policy than he really possessed. They believed, perhaps, that they had only to get up a good, popular war-cry in England, and that Walpole would have to go out of office. They told themselves that he would not make war. On this faith they based their schemes and founded their hopes. It would have been well for Walpole and for England if their belief had been justified by events.

The Patriots raised their war-cry. The honor of England had been insulted. Her claims had been rejected with insolent scorn. Her flag had been trampled on; her seamen had been imprisoned, mutilated, tortured; and all this by whom? By whom, indeed, but the old and implacable enemy of England, the Power which had sent the Armada to invade England's shores and to set up the Inquisition among the English people—by Spain, of course, by Spain! In Spanish dungeons brave Englishmen were wearing out their lives. In mid-ocean English ships were stopped and searched by arrogant officers of the King of Spain. Why did Spain venture on such acts? Because, the Patriots cried out, Spain believed that England's day of strength had gone, and that England could now be insulted with impunity. What wonder, they asked, in patriotic passion, if Spain or any other foreign state should believe such things? Was there not a Minister now at the head of affairs in England, now grasping all the various powers of the state in his own hands, who was notoriously willing to put up with any insult, to subject his country to any degradation, rather than venture on even a remonstrance that might lead to war? Let the flag of England be torn down and trailed in the dust—what then? What cared the Minister whose only fear was, not of dishonor, but of danger.

This was the fiery stuff which the Patriots kept {150} flooding the country with; which they poured out in speeches and pamphlets, and pasquinades and lampoons. Some of them probably came in the end to believe it all themselves. Walpole was assailed every hour—he was held up to public hatred and scorn as if he had betrayed his country. Bolingbroke from his exile contributed his share to the literature of blood, and soon came over from his exile to take a larger share in it. The Craftsman ran over with furious diatribes against the Minister of Peace. Caricatures of all kinds represented Walpole abasing himself before Spain and entering into secret engagements with her, to the prejudice and detriment of England. Ballads were hawked and sung through the streets which described Walpole as acknowledging to the Spanish Don that he hated the English merchants and traders just as much as the Don did, and that he was heartily glad when Spain applied her rod to them. The country became roused to the wildest passion; the Patriots were carrying it all their own way.

What was it all about? What was Spain doing? What ought England to do?

[Sidenote: 1738—The treaties with Spain]

The whole excitement arose out of certain long-standing trade disputes between England and Spain in the New World. These disputes had been referred to in the Treaty of Utrecht, which was supposed to have settled them in 1713; and again in the Treaty of Seville, which was believed to have finally settled them in 1729. England had recognized the right of Spain to regulate the trade with Spanish colonies. Spain agreed that England should have the privilege of supplying the Spanish colonies with slaves. This noble privilege English traders exercised to the full. It is not very gratifying to have to recollect that two of England's great disputes with Spain were about England's claim to an unlimited right to sell slaves to the Spanish colonies. To England, or at least to the English South Sea Company, was also conceded the permission to send one merchant vessel each year to the South Seas with as much English goods to sell to the Spanish colonies as a {151} ship of 500 tons could carry. As everybody might have expected, the provisions of the treaty were constantly broken through. The English traders were very eager to sell their goods; the Spanish colonists were very glad to get them to buy. All other commerce than that in slaves and the one annual shipload of English goods was strictly prohibited by Spain. The whole arrangement now seems in the highest degree artificial and absurd; but it was not an uncommon sort of international arrangement then. As was to be expected, the English traders set going a huge illicit trade in the South Seas. This was done partly by the old familiar smuggling process, and partly, too, by keeping little fleets of smaller vessels swarming off the coasts and reloading the one legitimate vessel as often as her contents were sent into a port. This ingenious device was said to have been detected by the Spanish authorities in various places. The Spaniards retaliated by stopping and searching English vessels cruising anywhere near the coast of a Spanish colony, and by arresting and imprisoning the officers and sailors of English merchantmen. The Spaniards asserted, and were able in many instances to make their assertions good, that whole squadrons of English trading vessels sometimes entered the Spanish ports under pretence of being driven there by stress of weather, or by the need of refitting and refreshing; and that, once in the port, they managed to get their cargoes safely ashore. Sometimes, too, it was said, the vessels lay off the shore without going into the harbor; and then smugglers came off in their long, low, swift boats, and received the English goods and carried them into the port. The fact undoubtedly was that the English merchants were driving a roaring trade with the Spanish colonies; just as the Spanish authorities might very well have known that they would be certain to do. Where one set of men are anxious to sell, and another set are just as anxious to buy, it needs very rigorous coastguard watching to prevent the goods being sent in and the money taken away.

This fact, however, does not say anything against the {152} right of Spain to enforce, if she could, the conditions of the treaties. On that point Spain was only asserting her indisputable right. But would it be reasonable to expect that Spain or any other country could endeavor to maintain her right in such a dispute, and under such conditions, without occasional rashness, violence, and injustice on the part of her officials? There can be no doubt that many high-handed and arbitrary acts were done against English subjects by the officers of Spanish authority. On every real and every reported and every imaginary act of Spanish harshness the Patriots seized with avidity. They presented petitions, moved for papers, moved that this injured person and that be allowed to appear and state his case at the bar of the House of Commons. Some English sailors and other Englishmen were thus allowed to appear at the bar, and did make statements of outrage and imprisonment. Some of these statements were doubtless true, some were probably exaggerated; the men who made them were not on oath; there was every temptation to exaggerate, because it had become apparently the duty of every true Patriot who loved old England to believe anything said by anybody against Spain. The same sort of thing has happened again and again in times nearer to our own, where some class of English traders have been trying to carry on a forbidden traffic with the subjects of a foreign sovereign. We see the same things, now in China, and now in Burmah; dress goods in one place, opium in another, slaves in another; reckless smuggling by the traders, overdone reprisals by the authorities; and then we hear the familiar appeal to England not to allow her sons to be insulted and imprisoned by some insolent foreign Power.

Walpole was not inclined to allow English subjects to be molested with impunity. But he saw no reason to believe that Spain intended anything of the kind. The advices he received from the British Minister at the Spanish Court spoke rather of delays and slow formalities, and various small disputes and misunderstandings, than of {153} wilful denial of justice. Walpole felt satisfied that by putting a little diplomatic pressure on the proceedings every satisfaction fairly due to England and English subjects could be obtained. He, therefore, refused for a long time to allow his hand to be forced by the Opposition, and was full of hope that the good sense of the country in general would sustain him against the united strength of his enemies, as it had so often done before.

[Sidenote: 1738—Alderman Perry's motion]

Walpole did not know how strong his enemies were this time. He did not know what a capital cry they had got, what a powerful appeal to national passion they could put into voice, and what a loud reply the national passion would make to the appeal. On Saturday, March 2, 1738, a petition was presented to the House of Commons from divers merchants, planters, and others trading to and interested in the British plantations in America. The petition was presented by Mr. Perry, one of the representatives of London, and an alderman of the City. The petition set forth a long history of the alleged grievances, and of the denial of redress, and prayed the House to "provide such timely and adequate remedy for putting an end to all insults and depredations on them and their fellow-subjects as to the House shall seem meet, as well as procure such relief for the unhappy sufferers as the nature of the case and the justice of their cause may require; and that they may be heard by themselves and counsel thereupon."

On the same day several other petitions from cities, and from private individuals, were presented on the same subject. The debate on Mr. Perry's motion mainly turned, at first, on the minor question, whether the house would admit the petitioners to be heard by themselves and also by counsel, or, according to the habit of the House, by themselves or counsel. Yet, short and almost formal as the debate might have been, the opponents of the Government contrived to import into it a number of assumptions, and an amount of passion, such as the earlier stages of a difficult and delicate international dispute are seldom allowed to exhibit. Even so cautious and respectable a man as Sir {154} John Barnard, a typical English merchant of the highest class, did not hesitate to speak of the grievances as if they were all established and admitted, and the action of Spain as a wilful outrage upon the trade, the honor, and the safety of Great Britain. Walpole argued that the petitioners should be heard by themselves and not by counsel; but the main object of his speech was to appeal to the House "not to work upon the passions where the head is to be informed." Mr. Robert Wilmot thereupon arose, and replied in an oration belonging to that "spread-eagle" order which is familiar to American political controversy. "Talk of working on the passions," this orator exclaimed; "can any man's passions be wound up to a greater height, can any man's indignation be more raised, than every free-born Briton's must be when he reads a letter which I have received this morning, and which I have now in my hand? This letter, sir, gives an account that seventy of our brave sailors are now in chains in Spain. Our countrymen in chains, and slaves to Spaniards! Is not this enough to fire the coldest? Is not this enough to rouse all the vengeance of a national resentment? Shall we sit here debating about words and forms while the sufferings of our countrymen call out loudly for redress?"

[Sidenote: 1738—An unlucky argument]

Pulteney himself, when speaking on the general question, professed, indeed, not to assume the charges in the petitions to be true before they had been established, but he proceeded to deal with them on something very like a positive assumption that they would be established. Thereupon he struck the key-note of the whole outcry that was to be raised against the Ministry. Could any one believe, he indignantly asked, that the Court of Spain "would have presumed to trifle in such a manner with any ministry but one which they thought wanted either courage or inclination to resent such treatment?" He accused the Ministry of "a scandalous breach of duty" and "the most infamous pusillanimity." Later in the same day Sir John Barnard moved an Address to the Crown, asking for papers to be laid before the House. Walpole did not actually oppose {155} the motion, and only suggested a modification of it, but he earnestly entreated the House not, at that moment, to press the Sovereign for a publication of the latest despatches. He went so far as to let the House understand that the latest reply from Spain was not satisfactory, and that it might be highly injurious to the prospects of peace if it were then to be given to the world; and he pointed to the obvious fact that "when once a paper is read in this House the contents of it cannot be long a secret to the world." The King, he said, had still good hopes of being able to prevail on Spain to make an honorable and ample reparation for any wrongs that might have been done to Englishmen. "We ought," Walpole pleaded, "to wait, at least, till his Majesty shall tell us from the throne that all hopes of obtaining satisfaction are over. Then it will be time enough to declare for a war with Spain." Unfortunately, Walpole went on to a mode of argument which was, of all others, the best calculated to give his enemies an advantage over him. His language was strong and clear; his sarcasm was well merited; but the time was not suited for an appeal to such very calm common-sense as that to which the great minister was trying in vain to address himself. "The topic of national resentment for national injury affords," Walpole said, "a fair field for declamation; and, to hear gentlemen speak on that head, one would be apt to believe that victory and glory are bound to attend the resolutions of our Parliament and the efforts of our arms. But gentlemen ought to reflect that there are many instances in the history of the world, and some in the annals of England, which prove that conquest is not always inseparable from the justest cause or most exalted courage."

The hearts of the Patriots must have rejoiced when they heard such an argument from the lips of Walpole. For what did it amount to? Only this—that this un-English Minister, this unworthy servant of the crown, positively admitted into his own mind the idea that there was any possibility of England's being worsted in any war with {156} any state or any number of states! Fancy any one allowing such a thought to remain for an instant in his mind! As if it were not a settled thing, specially arranged by Providence, that one Englishman is a match for at least any six Spaniards, Frenchmen, or other contemptible foreigners! Walpole's great intellectual want was the lack of imagination. If he had possessed more imagination, he would have been not only a greater orator, but a greater debater. He would have seen more clearly the effect of an argument on men with minds and temperaments unlike his own. In this particular instance the appeal to what he would have considered cool common-sense was utterly damaging to him. Pulteney pounced on him at once. "From longer forbearance," he exclaimed, "we have everything to fear; from acting vigorously we have everything to hope." He admitted that a war with Spain was to be avoided, if it could be avoided with honor; but, he asked, "will it ever be the opinion of an English statesman that, in order to avoid inconvenience, we are to embrace a dishonor? Where is the brave man," he demanded, "who in a just cause will submissively lie down under insults? No!—in such a case he will do all that prudence and necessity dictate in order to procure satisfaction, and leave the rest to Providence." Pulteney spoke with undisguised contempt of the sensitive honor of the Spanish people. "I do not see," he declared—and this was meant as a keen personal thrust at Walpole—"how we can comply with the form of Spanish punctilio without sacrificing some of the essentials of British honor. Let gentlemen but consider whether our prince's and our country's honor is not as much engaged to revenge our injuries as the honor of the Spaniards can be to support their insolence." There never, probably, was a House of Commons so cool-headed and cautious as not to be stirred out of reason and into passion by so well-contrived an appeal. The appeal was followed up by others. "Perhaps," Sir William Wyndham said, "if we lose the character of being good fighters, we shall at least gain that {157} of being excellent negotiators." But he would not leave to Walpole the full benefit of even that doubtful change of character. "The character of a mere negotiator," he insisted, "had never been affected by England without her losing considerable, both in her interest at home and her influence abroad. This truth will appear plainly to any one who compares the figure this nation made in Europe under Queen Elizabeth with the figure she made under her successor, King James the First. The first never treated with an insulting enemy; the other never durst break with a treacherous friend. The first thought it her glory to command peace; the other thought it no dishonor to beg it. In her reign every treaty was crowned with glory; in his no peace was attended with tranquillity; in short, her care was to improve, his to depress the true British spirit." Even the cool-headed and wise Sir John Barnard cried out that "a dishonorable peace is worse than a destructive war."

[Sidenote: 1738—Wyndham's taunts]

We need not go through all the series of debates in the Lords and Commons. It is enough to say that every one of these debates made the chances of a peaceful arrangement grow less and less. The impression of the Patriots seemed to be that Walpole was to be held responsible for every evasion, every delay, every rash act, and every denial of justice on the part of Spain. With this conviction, it was clear to them that the more they attacked the Spanish Government the more they attacked and damaged Walpole. Full of this spirit, therefore, they launched out in every debate about Spanish treachery, and Spanish falsehood, and Spanish cruelty, and Spanish religious faith in a manner that might have seemed deliberately designed to render a peaceful settlement of any question impossible between England and Spain. Yet we do not believe that the main object of the Patriots was to force England into a war with Spain. Their main object was to force Walpole out of office. They were for a long time under the impression that he would resign rather than make war. Once he resigned, the Patriots would very soon abate {158} their war fury, and try whether the quarrel might not be settled in peace with honor. But they had allowed themselves to be driven too far along the path of war; and they had not taken account of the fact that the great peace Minister might, after all, prefer staying in office and making war to going out of office and leaving some rival to make it.

[Sidenote: 1738—Walpole almost alone]

Suddenly there came to the aid of the Patriots and their policy the portentous story of Captain Jenkins and his ear. Captain Jenkins had sailed on board his vessel, the Rebecca, from Jamaica for London, and off the coast of Havana he was boarded by a revenue-cutter of Spain, which proceeded to subject him and his vessel to the right of search. Jenkins declared that he had been fearfully maltreated; that the Spanish officers had him hanged up at the yard-arm and cut down when he was half-dead; that they slashed at his head with their cutlasses and hacked his left ear nearly off; and that, to complete the measure of their outrages, one of them actually tore off his bleeding ear, flung it in his face, and bade him carry it home to his king and tell him what had been done. To this savage order Jenkins reported that he was ready with a reply: "I commend," he said, "my soul to God, and my cause to my country"—a very eloquent and telling little sentence, which gives good reason to think of what Jenkins could have done after preparation in the House of Commons if he could throw off such rhetoric unprepared, and in spite of the disturbing effect of having just been half-hanged and much mutilated. Jenkins showed, indeed, remarkable presence of mind in every way. He prudently brought home the severed ear with him, and invited all patriotic Englishmen to look at it. Scepticism itself could not, for a while at all events, refuse to believe that the Spaniards had cut off Jenkins's ear, when, behold! there was the ear itself to tell the story. Later on, indeed, Scepticism did begin to assert herself. Were there not other ways, it was asked, by which Englishmen might have lost an ear as well as by the fury of the hateful Spaniards? {159} Were there not British pillories? Whether Jenkins sacrificed his ear to the cause of his country abroad or to the criminal laws of his country at home, it seems to be quite settled now that his story was a monstrous exaggeration, if not a pure invention. Burke has distinctly stigmatized it as "the fable of Jenkins's ear." The fable, however, did its work for that time. It was eagerly caught up and believed in; people wanted to believe in it, and the ear was splendid evidence. The mutilation of Jenkins played much the same part in England that the fabulous insult of the King of Prussia to the French envoy played in the France of 1870. The eloquence of Pulteney, the earnestness of Wyndham, the intriguing genius of Bolingbroke, seemed only to have been agencies to prepare the way for the triumph of Jenkins and his severed ear. The outcry all over the country began to make Walpole feel at last that something would have to be done. His own constitutional policy came against him in this difficulty. He had broken the power of the House of Lords and had strengthened that of the House of Commons. The hereditary Chamber might perhaps be relied upon to stand firmly against a popular clamor, but it would be impossible to expect such firmness at such a time from an elective assembly of almost any sort. In this instance, however, Walpole found himself worse off in the House of Lords than even in the House of Commons. The House of Lords was stimulated by the really powerful eloquence of Carteret and of Chesterfield, and there was no man on the ministerial side of the House who could stand up with any effect against such accomplished and unscrupulous political gladiators.

Walpole appealed to the Parliament not to take any step which would render a peaceful settlement impossible, and he promised to make the most strenuous efforts to obtain a prompt consideration of England's claims. He set to work energetically for this purpose. His difficulties were greatly increased by the unfriendly conduct of the Spanish envoy, who was on terms of confidence with the Patriots, and went about everywhere declaring {160} that Walpole was trying to deceive the English people as well as the Spanish Government. It must have needed all Walpole's strength of will to sustain him against so many difficulties and so many enemies at such a crisis. It had not been his way to train up statesmen to help him in his work, and now he stood almost alone.

The negotiations were further complicated by the disputes between England and Spain as to the right of English traders to cut logwood in Campeachy Bay, and as to the settlement of the boundaries of the new English colonies of Florida and Carolina in North America, and the rival claims of England and Spain to this or that strip of border territory. Sometimes, however, when an international dispute has to be glossed over, rather than settled, to the full satisfaction of either party, it is found a convenient thing for diplomatists to have a great many subjects of disputation wrapped up in one arrangement. Walpole was sincerely anxious to give Spain a last chance; but the Spanish people, on their side, were stirred to bitterness and to passion by the vehement denunciations of the English Opposition. Even then, when daily papers were little known to the population of either London or Madrid, people in London and in Madrid did somehow get to know that there had been fierce exchange of international dislike and defiance. Walpole, however, still clung to his policy of peace, and his influence in the House of Commons was commanding enough to get his proposals accepted there. In the House of Lords the Ministry were nowhere in debate. Something, indeed, should be said for Lord Hervey, who had been raised to the Upper House as Baron Hervey of Ickworth in 1733, and who made some speeches full of clear good-sense and sound moderating argument in support of Walpole's policy. But Carteret and Chesterfield would have been able in any case to overwhelm the Duke of Newcastle, and the Duke of Newcastle now was turning traitor to Walpole. Stupid as Newcastle was, he was beginning to see that the day of Walpole's destiny was nearly over, and he was taking {161} measures to act accordingly. All that Newcastle could do as Secretary for Foreign Affairs was done to make peace impossible.

[Sidenote: 1739—The Convention]

Walpole thought the time had fully come when it would be right for him to show that, while still striving for peace, he was not unprepared for war. He sent a squadron of line-of-battle ships to the Mediterranean and several cruisers to the West Indies, and he allowed letters of marque to be issued. These demonstrations had the effect of making the Spanish Government somewhat lower their tone—at least they had the effect of making that Government seem more willing to come to terms. Long negotiations as to the amount of claim on the one side and of set-off on the other were gone into both in London and Madrid. We need not study the figures, for nothing came of the proposed arrangement. It was impossible that anything could come of it. England and Spain were quarrelling over several great international questions. Even these questions were themselves only symbolical of a still greater one, of a paramount question which was never put into words: the question whether England or Spain was to have the ascendent in the new world across the Atlantic. Walpole and the Spanish Government drew up an arrangement, or rather professed to find a basis of arrangement, for the paying off of certain money claims. A convention was agreed upon, and was signed on January 14, 1739. The convention arranged that a certain sum of money was to be paid by Spain to England within a given time, but that this discharge of claims should not extend to any dispute between the King of Spain and the South Sea Company as holders of the Asiento Contract; and that two plenipotentiaries from each side should meet at Madrid to settle the claims of England and Spain with regard to the rights of trade in the New World and the boundaries of Carolina and Florida. This convention, it will be seen, left the really important subjects of dispute exactly where they were before.

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Such as it was, however, it had hardly been signed before the diplomatists were already squabbling over the extent and interpretation of its terms, and mixing it up with the attempted arrangement of other and older disputes. Parliament opened on February 1, 1739, and the speech from the throne told of the convention arranged with Spain. "It is now," said the Royal speech, "a great satisfaction to me that I am able to acquaint you that the measures I have pursued have had so good an effect that a convention is concluded and ratified between me and the King of Spain, whereby, upon consideration had of the demands on both sides, that prince hath obliged himself to make reparation to my subjects for their losses by a certain stipulated payment; and plenipotentiaries are therein named and appointed for redressing within a limited time all those grievances and abuses which have hitherto interrupted our commerce and navigation in the American seas, and for settling all matters in dispute in such a manner as may for the future prevent and remove all new causes and pretences of complaint by a strict observance of our mutual treaties and a just regard to the rights and privileges belonging to each other." The King promised that the convention should be laid before the House at once.

Before the terms of the convention were fully in the knowledge of Parliament, there was already a strong dissatisfaction felt among the leading men of the Opposition. We need not set this down to the mere determination of implacable partisans not to be content with anything proposed or executed by the Ministers of the Crown. Sir John Barnard was certainly no implacable partisan in that sense. He was really a true-hearted and patriotic Englishman. Yet Sir John Barnard was one of the very first to predict that the convention would be found utterly unsatisfactory. There is nothing surprising in the prediction. The King's own speech, which naturally made the best of things, left it evident that no important and international question had been touched by the convention. {163} Every dispute over which war might have to be made remained in just the same state after the convention as before. Lord Carteret in the House of Lords boldly assumed that the convention must be unsatisfactory, and even degrading, to the English people, and he denounced it with all the eloquence and all the vigor of which he was capable. Lord Hervey vainly appealed to the House to bear in mind that the convention was not yet before them. "Let us read it," he urged, "before we condemn it." Vain, indeed, was the appeal; the convention was already condemned. The very description of it in the speech from the throne had condemned it in advance.

[Sidenote: 1739—Petition against the Convention]

The convention was submitted to Parliament and made known to the country. The reception it got was just what might have been expected. The one general cry was that the agreement gave up or put aside every serious claim made by England. Spain had not renounced her right of search; the boundaries of England's new colonies had not been defined; not a promise was made by Spain that the Spanish officials who had imprisoned and tortured unoffending British subjects should be punished, or even brought to any manner of trial. In the heated temper of the public the whole convention seemed an inappropriate and highly offensive farce. On February 23d the sheriffs of the City of London presented to the House of Commons a petition against the convention. The petition expressed the great concern and surprise of the citizens of London "to find by the convention lately concluded between his Majesty and the King of Spain that the Spaniards are so far from giving up their (as we humbly apprehend) unjust pretension of a right to visit and search our ships on the seas of America that this pretension of theirs is, among others, referred to the future regulation and decision of plenipotentiaries appointed on each side, whereby we apprehend it is in some degree admitted." The petition referred to the "cruel treatment of the English sailors whose hard fate has thrown them into the {164} hands of the Spaniards," and added, with a curious mixture of patriotic sentiment and practical, business-like selfishness, that "if this cruel treatment of English seamen were to be put up with, and no reparation demanded, it might have the effect"—of what, does the reader think?—"of deterring the seamen from undertaking voyages to the seas of America without an advance of wages, which that trade or any other will not be able to support."

[Sidenote: 1739—Carteret's attack]

The same petition was presented to the House of Lords by the Duke of Bedford. Lord Carteret moved that the petitioners should be heard by themselves, and, if they should desire it, by counsel. It was agreed, after some debate, that the petitioners should be heard by themselves in the first instance, and that if afterwards they desired to be heard by counsel their request should be taken into consideration. Lord Chesterfield in the course of the debate contrived ingeniously to give a keen stroke to the convention while declaring that he did not presume as yet to form any opinion on it, or to anticipate any discussion on its merits. "I cannot help," he said, "saying, however, that to me it is a most unfavorable symptom of its being for the good of the nation when I see so strong an opposition made to it out-of-doors by those who are the most immediately concerned in its effects."

A debate of great interest, animation, and importance took place in the House of Lords when the convention was laid before that assembly. The Earl of Cholmondeley moved that an address be presented to the King to thank him for having concluded the convention. The address was drawn up by a very dexterous hand, a master-hand. Its terms were such as might have conciliated the leaders of the Opposition, if indeed these were to be conciliated by anything short of Walpole's resignation, for, while the address approved of all that had been done thus far, it cleverly assumed that all this was but the preliminary to a real settlement; and by ingenuously expressing the entire reliance of the House on the King's taking care that proper provision should be made for the redress of various {165} specified grievances, it succeeded in making it quite clear that in the opinion of the House such provision had not yet been made. The address concluded most significantly with an assurance to the King that "in case your Majesty's just expectations shall not be answered, this House will heartily and zealously concur in all such measures as shall be necessary to vindicate your Majesty's honor, and to preserve to your subjects the full enjoyment of all those rights to which they are entitled by treaty and the Law of Nations." An address of this kind would seem one that might well have been moved as an amendment to a ministerial address, and understood to be obliquely a vote of censure on the advisers of the Crown. It seems the sort of address that Carteret might have moved and Chesterfield seconded. Carteret and Chesterfield opposed it with spirit and eloquence. "Upon your Lordships' behavior to-day," said Carteret at the close of a bitter and a passionate attack upon the Ministry and the convention, "depends the fate of the British Empire. . . . This nation has hitherto maintained her independence by maintaining her commerce; but if either is weakened the other must fail. It is by her commerce that she has been hitherto enabled to stand her ground against all the open and secret attacks of the enemies to her religion, liberties, and constitution. It is from commerce, my Lords, that I behold your Lordships within these walls, a free, an independent assembly; but, should any considerations influence your Lordships to give so fatal a wound to the interest and honor of this kingdom as your agreeing to this address, it is the last time I shall have occasion to trouble this House. For, my Lords, if we are to meet only to give a sanction to measures that overthrow all our rights, I should look upon it as a misfortune for me to be either accessary or witness to such a compliance. I will not only repeat what the merchants told your Lordships—that their trade is ruined—I will go further; I will say the nobility is ruined, the whole nation is undone. For I can call this treaty nothing else but a mortgage of {166} your honor, a surrender of your liberties." Such language may now seem too overwrought and extravagant to have much effect upon an assembly of practical men. But it was not language likely to be considered overwrought and extravagant at that time and during that crisis. The Opposition had positively worked themselves into the belief that if the convention were accepted the last day of England's strength, prosperity, and glory had come. Carteret, besides, was talking to the English public as well as to the House of Lords. He knew what he meant when he denounced the enemies of England's religion as well as the enemies of England's trade. The imputation was that the Minister himself was a secret confederate of the enemies of the national religion as well as the enemies of the national trade. Men who but a few short years before were secretly engaged in efforts at a Stuart restoration, which certainly would not be an event much in harmony with the spread of the Protestant faith in England, were now denouncing Walpole every day on the ground that he was caballing with Catholic Spain, the Spain of Philip the Second, the Spain of the Armada and the Inquisition, the implacable enemy of England's national religion.

[Sidenote: 1739—Argyle's anecdote]

The Duke of Argyle made a most vehement speech against the proposed address. He dealt a sharp blow against the Ministry when he declared that the whole convention was a French and not a Spanish measure. He said he should never be persuaded that fear of aught that could be done by Spain could have induced ministers to accept "this thing you call a convention." "It is the interest of France that our navigation and commerce should be ruined, we are the only people in the world whom France has reason to be apprehensive of in America, and every advantage that Spain gains in point of commerce is gained for her. . . . So far as I can judge from the tenor of our late behavior, our dread of France has been the spring of all our weak and ruinous measures. To this dread we have sacrificed the most distinguishing honors of this kingdom. This dread of France has changed {167} every maxim of right government among us. There is no measure for the advantage of this kingdom that has been set on foot for these many years to which she has not given a negative. There is no measure so much to our detriment into which she has not led us." He scornfully declared that what the reasons of ministers might be for this pusillanimity he could not tell, "for, my Lords, though I am a privy councillor I am as unacquainted with the secrets of the Government as any private gentleman that hears me." Then he told an anecdote of the late Lord Peterborough. "When Lord Peterborough was asked by a friend one day his opinion of a certain measure, says my lord, in some surprise, 'This is the first time I ever heard of it.' 'Impossible,' says the other; 'why, you are a privy councillor.' 'So I am,' replies his lordship, 'and there is a Cabinet councillor coming up to us just now; if you ask the same question of him he will perhaps hold his peace, and then you will think he is in the secret; but if he opens once his mouth about it you will find he knows as little of it as I do.' No, my Lords," exclaimed the Duke of Argyle, "it is not being in Privy Council or in Cabinet Council; one must be in the Minister's counsel to know the true motives of our late proceedings." The duke concluded his oration, characteristically, with a glorification of his own honest and impartial heart.

The address was sure to be carried; Walpole's influence was still strong enough to accomplish that much. But everybody must already have seen that the convention was not an instrument capable of satisfying, or, indeed, framed with any notion of satisfying, the popular demands of England. It was an odd sort of arrangement, partly international and partly personal; an adjustment, or attempted adjustment here of a dispute between States, and there of a dispute between rival trading companies. The reconstituted South Sea Company—which had now become one of the three great trading companies of England, the East India Company and the Bank being the {168} other two—had all manner of negotiations, arrangements, and transactions with the King of Spain. All these affairs now became mixed up with the national claims, and were dealt with alike in the convention. The British plenipotentiary at the Spanish Court was—still further to complicate matters—the agent for the South Sea Company. The convention provided that certain set-off claims of Spain should be taken into consideration as well as the claims of England. Spain had some demands against England for the value of certain vessels of the Spanish navy attacked and captured during the reign of George the First without a declaration of war. The claim had been admitted in principle by England, and it became what would be called in the law courts only a question of damages. Then the convention contained some stipulations concerning certain claims of Spain upon the South Sea Company; that is, on what was, after all, only a private trading company. When the anomaly was pointed out by Lord Carteret and others in the House of Lords, and it was asked how came it that the English plenipotentiary at the Court of Spain was also the agent of the South Sea Company, it was ingeniously answered on the part of the Government that nothing could be more fitting and proper, seeing that, as English plenipotentiary, he had to act for England with the King of Spain, and as agent for the South Sea Company to deal with the same sovereign in that sovereign's capacity as a great private merchant. Therefore the national claims were made, to a certain extent, subservient to, or dependent on, the claims of the South Sea Company. Whether we may think the claims of the English merchants and seamen were exaggerated or not, one thing is obvious: they could not possibly be satisfied under such a convention.

[Sidenote: 1739—The Prince's first vote]

The debate in the House of Lords was carried on by the Opposition with great spirit and brilliancy. Lord Hervey defended the policy of the Government with dexterity. Possibly he made as much of the case as could be made of it. The motion for the address was carried {169} by seventy-one votes against fifty-eight—a marked increase of strength on the part of the Opposition. It is to be recorded that the Prince of Wales gave his first vote in Parliament to support the Opposition. The name of "His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales" is the first in the division list of the peers who voted against the address and in favor of the policy of war. There was nothing very mutinous in Frederick's action so far as the King was concerned. Very likely Frederick would have given the same vote, no matter what the King's views on the subject. But every one knew that George was eager for war, that he was fully convinced of his capacity to win laurels on the battle-field, and that he was longing to wear them. A Bonaparte prince of our own day was described by a French literary man as an unemployed Caesar. King George believed himself an unemployed Caesar, and was clamorous for early employment.



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CHAPTER XXXII.

WALPOLE YIELDS TO WAR.

[Sidenote: 1739—Horatio Walpole's prediction]

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

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

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

{172}

[Sidenote: 1739—The secession]

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

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

[Sidenote: 1739—The policy of secession]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: 1739-1740—Death of Wyndham]

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

[Sidenote: 1740—Walpole's fatal mistake]

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

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

[Sidenote: 1743—George at Dettingen]

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

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



{185}

CHAPTER XXXIII.

"AND WHEN HE FALLS——"

[Sidenote: 1741—Motions against Walpole]

Walpole soon found that his enemies were no less bitter against him, no less resolute to harass and worry him, now that he had stooped to be their instrument and do their work. Every unsuccessful movement in the war was made the occasion of a motion for papers, a motion for an inquiry, a vote of want of confidence, or some other direct or indirect attack upon the Prime-minister. In the House of Lords, Lord Carteret was especially unsparing, and was brilliantly supported by Lord Chesterfield. In the House of Commons, Samuel Sandys, a clever and respectable country gentleman from Worcestershire, made himself quite a sort of renown by his motions against Walpole. On Friday, February 13, 1741, a motion was made in each of the Houses of Parliament calling on the King "to remove the Right Honorable Sir Robert Walpole, Knight of the most noble Order of the Garter, First Commissioner for executing the office of Treasurer of the Exchequer, Chancellor and Under-Treasurer of the Exchequer, and one of his Majesty's most honorable Privy Council, from his Majesty's presence and councils forever." In the House of Lords the motion was made by Lord Carteret; in the House of Commons by Mr. Sandys, who was nicknamed "the motion-maker." The motion was lost by a large majority in the House of Lords; and in the House of Commons there were only 106 for it, while there were 290 against it. This was a victory; but it did not deceive Walpole. There would soon be a new Parliament, and Walpole knew very well that the country was already growing sick of the unmeaning war, and that he was held {186} responsible alike for the war policy which he had so long opposed, and the many little disasters of the war with which he had nothing to do. In Walpole's utter emergency he actually authorized a friend to apply for him to James Stuart at Rome, in the hope of inducing James to obtain for him the support of some of the Jacobites at the coming elections. What he could possibly have thought he could promise James in return for the solicited support it is hard, indeed, to imagine; for no one can question the sincerity of Walpole's attachment to the reigning House. Perhaps if James had consented to go into the negotiations Walpole might have made some pledges about the English Catholics. Nothing came of it, however. James did not seem to take to the suggestion, and Walpole was left to do the best he could without any helping hand from Rome. Lord Stanhope thinks it not unlikely that King George was fully aware of this curious attempt to get James Stuart to bring his influence to bear on the side of Walpole. The elections were fought out with unusual vehemence of partisanship, even for those days, and the air was thick with caricatures of Walpole and lampoons on his policy and his personal character. When the election storm was over, it was found that the Ministry had distinctly lost ground. In Scotland and in parts of the west of England the loss was most manifest. Walpole now was as well convinced as any of his enemies could be that the fall was near. He must have felt like some desperate duellist, who, having fought his fiercest and his best, is conscious at last that his strength is gone; that he is growing fainter and fainter from loss of blood; and conscious, too, that his antagonist already perceives this and exults in the knowledge, and is already seeking out with greedy eye for the best place in which to give the final touch of the rapier's point.