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A
History of the Right Honorable William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, containing his
Speeches in Parliament, a considerable Portion of his Correspondence when
Secretary of State, upon French, Spanish, and American Affairs, never before
published; and an Account of the principal Events and Persons of his Time,
connected with his Life, Sentiments and Administration. By the Rev. Francis
Thackeray, A.M. 2 Vols. 4to. London: 1827.
Though several years have elapsed since the publication of this work, it is
still, we believe, a new publication to most of our readers. Nor are we
surprised at this. The book is large, and the style heavy. The information which
Mr. Thackeray has obtained from the State Paper Office is new; but much of it is
very uninteresting. The rest of his narrative is very little better than
Gifford's or Tomline's Life of the second Pitt, and tells us little or nothing
that may not be found quite as well told in the Parliamentary History, the
Annual Register, and other works equally common.
Almost every mechanical employment, it is said, has a tendency to injure some
one or other of the bodily organs of the artisan. Grinders of cutlery die of
consumption; weavers are stunted in their growth; smiths become blear-eyed. In
the same manner almost every intellectual employment has a tendency to produce
some intellectual malady. Biographers, translators, editors, all, in short, who
employ themselves in illustrating the lives or the writings of others, are
peculiarly exposed to the Lues Boswelliana, or disease of admiration. But we
scarcely remember ever to have seen a patient so far gone in this distemper as
Mr. Thackeray. He is not satisfied with forcing us to confess that Pitt was a
great orator, a vigorous minister, an honorable and high-spirited gentleman. He
will have it that all virtues and all accomplishments met in his hero. In spite
of Gods, men, and columns, Pitt must be a poet, a poet capable of producing a
heroic poem of the first order; and we are assured that we ought to find many
charms in such lines as these:
"Midst all the tumults of the warring sphere, My light-charged bark may haply
glide; Some gale may waft, some conscious thought shall cheer, And the small
freight unanxious glide."1
Pitt was in the army for a few months in time of peace. Mr. Thackeray
accordingly insists on our confessing that, if the young cornet had remained in
the service, he would have been one of the ablest commanders that ever lived.
But this is not all. Pitt, it seems, was not merely a great poet, in esse, and a
great general in posse, but a finished example of moral excellence, the just man
made perfect. He was in the right when he attempted to establish an inquisition,
and to give bounties for perjury, in order to get Walpole's head. He was in the
right when he declared Walpole to have been an excellent minister. He was in the
right when, being in opposition, he maintained that no peace ought to be made
with Spain, till she should formally renounce the right of search. He was in the
right when, being in office, he silently acquiesced in a treaty by which Spain
did not renounce the right of search. When he left the Duke of Newcastle, when
he coalesced with the Duke of Newcastle, when he thundered against subsidies,
when he lavished subsidies with unexampled profusion, when he execrated the
Hanoverian connection, when he declared that Hanover ought to be as dear to us
as Hampshire, he was still invariably speaking the language of a virtuous and
enlightened statesman.
The truth is that there scarcely ever lived a person who had so little claim to
this sort of praise as Pitt. He was undoubtedly a great man. But his was not a
complete and well-proportioned greatness. The public life of Hampden or of
Somers resembles a regular drama, which can be criticized as a whole, and every
scene of which is to be viewed in connection with the main action. The public
life of Pitt, on the other hand, is a rude though striking piece, a piece
abounding in incongruities, a piece without any unity of plan, but redeemed by
some noble passages, the effect of which is increased by the tameness or
extravagance of what precedes and of what follows. His opinions were unfixed.
His conduct at some of the most important conjunctures of his life was evidently
determined by pride and resentment. He had one fault, which of all human faults
is most rarely found in company with true greatness. He was extremely affected.
He was an almost solitary instance of a man of real genius, and of a brave,
lofty, and commanding spirit, without simplicity of character. He was an actor
in the Closet, an actor at Council, an actor in Parliament; and even in private
society he could not lay aside his theatrical tones and attitudes. We know that
one of the most distinguished of his partisans often complained that he could
never obtain admittance to Lord Chatham's room till everything was ready for the
representation, till the dresses and properties were all correctly disposed,
till the light was thrown with Rembrandt-like effect on the head of the
illustrious performer, till the flannels had been arranged with the air of a
Grecian drapery, and the crutch placed as gracefully as that of Belisarius or
Lear.
Yet, with all his faults and affectations, Pitt had, in a very extraordinary
degree, many of the elements of greatness. He had genius, strong passions, quick
sensibility, and vehement enthusiasm for the grand and the beautiful. There was
something about him which ennobled tergiversation itself. He often went wrong,
very wrong. But, to quote the language of Wordsworth,
"He still retained, 'Mid such abasement, what he had received From nature, an
intense and glowing mind."
In an age of low and dirty prostitution, in the age of Dodington and Sandys, it
was something to have a man who might perhaps, under some strong excitement,
have been tempted to ruin his country, but who never would have stooped to
pilfer from her, a man whose errors arose, not from a sordid desire of gain, but
from a fierce thirst for power, for glory, and for vengeance. History owes to
him this attestation, that at a time when anything short of direct embezzlement
of the public money was considered as quite fair in public men, he showed the
most scrupulous disinterestedness; that, at a time when it seemed to be
generally taken for granted that Government could be upheld only by the basest
and most immoral arts, he appealed to the better and nobler parts of human
nature; that he made a brave and splendid attempt to do, by means of public
opinion, what no other statesman of his day thought it possible to do, except by
means of corruption; that he looked for support, not, like the Pelhams, to a
strong aristocratical connection, not, like Bute, to the personal favor of the
sovereign, but to the middle class of Englishmen; that he inspired that class
with a firm confidence in his integrity and ability; that, backed by them, he
forced an unwilling court and an unwilling oligarchy to admit him to an ample
share of power; and that he used his power in such a manner as clearly proved
him to have sought it, not for the sake of profit or patronage, but from a wish
to establish for himself a great and durable reputation by means of eminent
services rendered to the State.
The family of Pitt was wealthy and respectable. His grandfather was Governor of
Madras, and brought back from India that celebrated diamond which the Regent
Orleans, by the advice of Saint Simon, purchased for upwards of two millions of
livers, and which is still considered as the most precious of the crown jewels
of France. Governor Pitt bought estates and rotten boroughs, and sat in the
House of Commons for Old Sarum. His son Robert was at one time member for Old
Sarum, and at another for Oakhampton. Robert had two sons. Thomas, the elder,
inherited the estates and the parliamentary interest of his father. The second
was the celebrated William Pitt.
He was born in November, 1708. About the early part of his life little more is
known than that he was educated at Eton, and that at seventeen he was entered at
Trinity College, Oxford. During the second year of his residence at the
University, George the First died; and the event was, after the fashion of that
generation, celebrated by the Oxonians in many middling copies of verses. On
this occasion Pitt published some Latin lines, which Mr. Thackeray has
preserved. They prove that the young student had but a very limited knowledge
even of the mechanical part of his art. All true Etonians will hear with concern
that their illustrious schoolfellow is guilty of making the first syllable in
labenti short.2 The matter of the poem is as
worthless as that of any college exercise that was ever written before or since.
There is, of course, much about Mars, Themis, Neptune, and Cocytus. The Muses
are earnestly entreated to weep over the urn of Caesar; for Caesar, says the
Poet, loved the Muses; Caesar, who could not read a line of Pope, and who loved
nothing but punch and fat women.
Pitt had been, from his school-days, cruelly tormented by the gout, and was
advised to travel for his health. He accordingly left Oxford without taking a
degree, and visited France and Italy. He returned, however, without having
received much benefit from his excursion, and continued, till the close of his
life, to suffer most severely from his constitutional malady.
His father was now dead, and had left very little to the younger children. It
was necessary that William should choose a profession. He decided for the army,
and a cornet's commission was procured for him in the Blues.
But, small as his fortune was, his family had both the power and the inclination
to serve him. At the general election of 1734, his elder brother Thomas was
chosen both for Old Sarum and for Oakhampton. When Parliament met in 1735,
Thomas made his election to serve for Oakhampton, and William was returned for
Old Sarum.
Walpole had now been, during fourteen years, at the head of affairs. He had
risen to power under the most favorable circumstances. The whole of the Whig
party, of that party which professed peculiar attachment to the principles of
the Revolution, and which exclusively enjoyed the confidence of the reigning
house, had been united in support of his administration. Happily for him, he had
been out of office when the South-Sea Act was passed; and, though he does not
appear to have foreseen all the consequences of that measure, he had strenuously
opposed it, as he had opposed all the measures, good and bad, of Sutherland's
administration. When the South-Sea Company were voting dividends of fifty per
cent, when a hundred pounds of their stock were selling for eleven hundred
pounds, when Threadneedle Street was daily crowded with the coaches of dukes and
prelates, when divines and philosophers turned gamblers, when a thousand kindred
bubbles were daily blown into existence, the periwig-company, and the
Spanish-jackass-company, and the quicksilver-fixation-company, Walpole's calm
good sense preserved him from the general infatuation. He condemned the
prevailing madness in public, and turned a considerable sum by taking advantage
of it in private. When the crash came, when ten thousand families were reduced
to beggary in a day, when the people, in the frenzy of their rage and despair,
clamored, not only against the lower agents in the juggle, but against the
Hanoverian favorites, against the English ministers, against the King himself,
when Parliament met, eager for confiscation and blood, when members of the House
of Commons proposed that the directors should be treated like parricides in
ancient Rome, tied up in sacks, and thrown into the Thames, Walpole was the man
on whom all parties turned their eyes. Four years before he had been driven from
power by the intrigues of Sunderland and Stanhope; and the lead in the House of
Commons had been entrusted to Craggs and Aislabie. Stanhope was no more.
Aislabie was expelled from Parliament on account of his disgraceful conduct
regarding the South-Sea scheme. Craggs was perhaps saved by a timely death from
a similar mark of infamy. A large minority in the House of Commons voted for a
severe censure on Sunderland, who, finding it impossible to withstand the force
of the prevailing sentiment, retired from office, and outlived his retirement
but a very short time. The schism which had divided the Whig party was now
completely healed. Walpole had no opposition to encounter except that of the
Tories; and the Tories were naturally regarded by the King with the strongest
suspicion and dislike.
For a time business went on with a smoothness and a dispatch such as had not
been known since the days of the Tudors. During the session of 1724, for
example, there was hardly a single division except on private bills. It is not
impossible that, by taking the course which Pelham afterwards took, by admitting
into the Government all the rising talents and ambition of the Whig party, and
by making room here and there for a Tory not unfriendly to the House of
Brunswick, Walpole might have averted the tremendous conflict in which he passed
the later years of his administration, and in which he was at length vanquished.
The Opposition which overthrew him was an opposition created by his own policy,
by his own insatiable love of power.
In the very act of forming his Ministry he turned one of the ablest and most
attached of his supporters into a deadly enemy. Pulteney had strong public and
private claims to a high situation in the new arrangement. His fortune was
immense. His private character was respectable. He was already a distinguished
speaker. He had acquired official experience in an important post. He had been,
through all changes of fortune, a consistent Whig. When the Whig party was split
into two sections, Pulteney had resigned a valuable place, and had followed the
fortunes of Walpole. Yet, when Walpole returned to power, Pulteney was not
invited to take office. An angry discussion took place between the friends. The
Ministry offered a peerage. It was impossible for Pulteney not to discern the
motive of such an offer. He indignantly refused to accept it. For some time he
continued to brood over his wrongs, and to watch for an opportunity of revenge.
As soon as a favorable conjuncture arrived he joined the minority, and became
the greatest leader of Opposition that the House of Commons had ever seen.
Of all the members of the Cabinet Carteret was the most eloquent and
accomplished. His talents for debate were of the first order; his knowledge of
foreign affairs was superior to that of any living statesman; his attachment to
the Protestant succession was undoubted. But there was not room in one
Government for him and Walpole. Carteret retired, and was from that time
forward, one of the most persevering and formidable enemies of his old
colleague.
If there was any man with whom Walpole could have consented to make a partition
of power, that man was Lord Townshend. They were distant kinsmen by birth, near
kinsmen by marriage. They had been friends from childhood. They had been
schoolfellows at Eton. They were country neighbors in Norfolk. They had been in
office together under Godolphin. They had gone into opposition together when
Harley rose to power. They had been persecuted by the same House of Commons.
They had, after the death of Anne, been recalled together to office. They had
again been driven out together by Sunderland, and had again come back together
when the influence of Sunderland had declined. Their opinions on public affairs
almost always coincided. They were both men of frank, generous, and
compassionate natures. Their intercourse had been for many years affectionate
and cordial. But the ties of blood, of marriage, and of friendship, the memory
of mutual services, the memory of common triumphs and common disasters, were
insufficient to restrain that ambition which domineered over all the virtues and
vices of Walpole. He was resolved, to use his own metaphor, that the firm of the
house should be, not Townshend and Walpole, but Walpole and Townshend. At length
the rivals proceeded to personal abuse before a large company, seized each other
by the collar, and grasped their swords. The women squalled. The men parted the
combatants. By friendly intervention the scandal of a duel between cousins,
brothers-in-law, old friends, and old colleagues, was prevented. But the
disputants could not long continue to act together. Townshend retired, and, with
rare moderation and public spirit, refused to take any part in politics. He
could not, he said, trust his temper. He feared that the recollection of his
private wrongs might impel him to follow the example of Pulteney, and to oppose
measures which he thought generally beneficial to the country. He therefore
never visited London after his resignation, but passed the closing years of his
life in dignity and repose among his trees and pictures at Rainham.
Next went Chesterfield. He too was a Whig and a friend of the Protestant
succession. He was an orator, a courtier, a wit, and a man of letters. He was at
the head of ton in days when, in order to be at the head of ton, it was not
sufficient to be dull and supercilious. It was evident that he submitted
impatiently to the ascendancy of Walpole. He murmured against the Excise Bill.
His brothers voted against it in the House of Commons. The Minister acted with
characteristic caution and characteristic energy; caution in the conduct of
public affairs; energy where his own supremacy was concerned. He withdrew his
Bill, and turned out all his hostile or wavering colleagues. Chesterfield was
stopped on the great staircase of St. James's, and summoned to deliver up the
staff which he bore as Lord Steward of the Household. A crowd of noble and
powerful functionaries, the Dukes of Montrose and Bolton, Lord Burlington, Lord
Stair, Lord Cobham, Lord Marchmont, Lord Clinton, were at the same time
dismissed from the service of the Crown,
Not long after these events the Opposition was reinforced by the Duke of Argyle,
a man vainglorious indeed and fickle, but brave, eloquent and popular. It was in
a great measure owing to his exertions that the Act of Settlement had been
peaceably carried into effect in England immediately after the death of Anne,
and that the Jacobite rebellion which, during the following year, broke out in
Scotland, had been suppressed. He too carried over to the minority the aid of
his great name, his talents, and his paramount influence in his native country.
In each of these cases taken separately, a skilful defender of Walpole might
perhaps make out a case for him. But when we see that during a long course of
years all the footsteps are turned the same way, that all the most eminent of
those public men who agreed with the Minister in their general views of policy
left him, one after another, with sore and irritated minds, we find it
impossible not to believe that the real explanation of the phenomenon is to be
found in the words of his son, "Sir Robert Walpole loved power so much that he
would not endure a rival." Hume has described this famous minister with great
felicity in one short sentence,--"moderate in exercising power, not equitable in
engrossing it." Kind-hearted, jovial, and placable as Walpole was, he was yet a
man with whom no person of high pretensions and high spirit could long continue
to act. He had, therefore, to stand against an Opposition containing all the
most accomplished statesmen of the age, with no better support than that which
he received from persons like his brother Horace or Henry Pelham, whose
industrious mediocrity gave no cause for jealousy, or from clever adventurers,
whose situation and character diminished the dread which their talents might
have inspired. To this last class belonged Fox, who was too poor to live without
office; Sir William Yonge, of whom Walpole himself said, that "Nothing but such
parts could buoy up such a character, and that nothing but such a character
could drag down such parts; and Winnington, whose private morals lay, justly or
unjustly, under imputations of the worst kind."
The discontented Whigs were, not perhaps in number, but certainly in ability,
experience, and weight, by far the most important part of the Opposition. The
Tories furnished little more than rows of ponderous foxhunters, fat with
Staffordshire or Devonshire ale, men who drank to the King over the water, and
believed that all the fundholders were Jews, men whose religion consisted in
hating the Dissenters, and whose political researches had led them to fear, like
Squire Western, that their land might be sent over to Hanover to be put in the
sinking-fund. The eloquence of these zealous squires, and remnant of the once
formidable October Club, seldom went beyond a hearty Aye or No. Very few members
of this party had distinguished themselves much in Parliament, or could, under
any circumstances, have been called to fill any high office; and those few had
generally, like Sir William Wyndham, learned in the company of their new
associates the doctrines of toleration and political liberty, and might indeed
with strict propriety be called Whigs.
It was to the Whigs in Opposition, the Patriots, as they were called, that the
most distinguished of the English youth who at this season entered into public
life attached themselves. These inexperienced politicians felt all the
enthusiasm which the name of liberty naturally excites in young and ardent
minds. They conceived that the theory of the Tory Opposition and the practice of
Walpole's Government were alike inconsistent with the principles of liberty.
They accordingly repaired to the standard which Pulteney had set up. While
opposing the Whig minister, they professed a firm adherence to the purest
doctrines of Whiggism. He was the schismatic; they were the true Catholics, the
peculiar people, the depositaries of the orthodox faith of Hampden and Russell,
the one sect which, amidst the corruptions generated by time and by the long
possession of power, had preserved inviolate the principles of the Revolution.
Of the young men who attached themselves to this portion of the Opposition the
most distinguished were Lyttelton and Pitt.
When Pitt entered Parliament, the whole political world was attentively watching
the progress of an event which soon added great strength to the Opposition, and
particularly to that section of the Opposition in which the young statesman
enrolled himself. The Prince of Wales was gradually becoming more and more
estranged from his father and his father's ministers, and more and more friendly
to the Patriots.
Nothing is more natural than that, in a monarchy where a constitutional
Opposition exists, the heir-apparent of the throne should put himself at the
head of that Opposition. He is impelled to such a course by every feeling of
ambition and of vanity. He cannot be more than second in the estimation of the
party which is in. He is sure to be the first member of the party which is out.
The highest favor which the existing administration can expect from him is that
he will not discard them. But, if he joins the Opposition, all his associates
expect that he will promote them; and the feelings which men entertain towards
one from whom they hope to obtain great advantages which they have not are far
warmer than the feelings with which they regard one who, at the very utmost, can
only leave them in possession of what they already have. An heir-apparent,
therefore, who wishes to enjoy, in the highest perfection, all the pleasure that
can be derived from eloquent flattery and profound respect, will always join
those who are struggling to force themselves into power. This is, we believe,
the true explanation of a fact which Lord Granville attributed to some natural
peculiarity in the illustrious House of Brunswick. "This family," said he at
Council, we suppose after his daily half-gallon of Burgundy, "always has
quarreled, and always will quarrel, from generation to generation." He should
have known something of the matter; for he had been a favorite with three
successive generations of the royal house. We cannot quite admit his
explanation; but the fact is indisputable. Since the accession of George the
First, there have been four Princes of Wales, and they have all been almost
constantly in Opposition.
Whatever might have been the motives which induced Prince Frederick to join the
party opposed to the Government, his support infused into many members of that
party a courage and an energy of which they stood greatly in need. Hitherto it
had been impossible for the discontented Whigs not to feel some misgivings when
they found themselves dividing night after night, with uncompromising Jacobites
who were known to be in constant communication with the exiled family, or with
Tories who had impeached Somers, who had murmured against Harley and St. John as
too remiss in the cause of the Church and the landed interest, and who, if they
were not inclined to attack the reigning family, yet considered the introduction
of that family as, at best, only the least of two great evils, as a necessary
but painful and humiliating preservative against Popery. The Minister might
plausibly say that Pulteney and Carteret, in the hope of gratifying their own
appetite for office and for revenge, did not scruple to serve the purposes of a
faction hostile to the Protestant succession. The appearance of Frederick at the
head of the Patriots silenced this reproach. The leaders of the Opposition might
now boast that their course was sanctioned by a person as deeply interested as
the King himself in maintaining the Act of Settlement, and that, instead of
serving the purposes of the Tory party, they had brought that party over to the
side of Whiggism. It must indeed be admitted that, though both the King and the
Prince behaved in a manner little to their honor, though the father acted
harshly, the son disrespectfully, and both childishly, the royal family was
rather strengthened than weakened by the disagreement of its two most
distinguished members. A large class of politicians, who had considered
themselves as placed under sentence of perpetual exclusion from office, and who,
in their despair, had been almost ready to join in a counter-revolution as the
only mode of removing the proscription under which they lay, now saw with
pleasure an easier and safer road to power opening before them, and thought it
far better to wait till, in the natural course of things, the Crown should
descend to the heir of the House of Brunswick, than to risk their lands and
their necks in a rising for the House of Stuart. The situation of the royal
family resembled the situation of those Scotch families in which father and son
took opposite sides during the rebellion, in order that, come what might, the
estate might not be forfeited.
In April 1736, Frederick was married to the Princess of Saxe Gotha, with whom he
afterwards lived on terms very similar to those on which his father had lived
with Queen Caroline. The Prince adored his wife, and thought her in mind and
person the most attractive of her sex. But he thought that conjugal fidelity was
an unprincely virtue; and, in order to be like Henry the Fourth, and the Regent
Orleans, he affected a libertinism for which he had no taste, and frequently
quitted the only woman whom he loved for ugly and disagreeable mistresses.
1 The quotation is faithfully made from Mr. Thackeray.
Perhaps Pitt wrote guide in the fourth line.
2 So Mr. Thackeray has printed the poem. But it may be
charitably hoped that Pitt wrote labanti.
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