Bolingbroke and Walpole

Preface

About twenty-eight years ago, I delivered a series of lectures on “ English Politicians from Bolingbroke to Gladstone,” introduced by a discourse which sought to outline general laws of political evolution. Several of the lectures were soon afterwards written out in a greatly expanded form ; and the introductory one, by a series of expansions, became a large book of which the second edition is entitled “ The Evolution of States : An Introduction to English Politics.” Thus late in the day I have set about completing the long delayed scheme of the series of studies which dealt with the political evolution of England during nearly two hundred years.

It may be asked why this ground, so often traversed, should now be gone over again. Why, for instance, should any one want to write on Walpole after the pro¬ duction of so masterly and brilliant a book as the Walpole of Lord Morley ? The answer is that the original scheme of these studies was to set forth a total process of politicosocial evolution ; to view the leading politicians as they related to the total life of their time ; to deal with politics as a phase or function of that total life ; and accordingly to consider intellectual and economic aspects of the social process which books on politics and politicians do not usually face.

The last generation produced many intelligent and instructive studies in English political biography — for instance, the English Premiers of J. C. Earle (2 vols. 1871),

PREFACE the Representative Statesmen of A. C. Ewald (2 vols. 1879), the Statesmen Series edited by LI. C. Sanders, the Twelve English Statesmen series, that of The Prime Ministers of Queen Victoria, edited by S. J. Reid, and a number of very competent separate monographs on statesmen of the eighteenth as well as of the nineteenth century. It may be that they are all the better for following one always interesting and attractive method — that, broadly speaking, of Macaulay’s Essays. An attempt to present politics along with its background and basis of culture and economic life runs risks at once of dullness and of fallacy which are not incurred by political biography on the well-established line. But the end of the Great War seems a time when, if ever, past politics should be studied as an evolutionary process — as in fact the life of a community considered as a socio-political whole. And though the late Mr. Lecky’s History of England in the Eighteenth Century is always suggestive, its socio¬ logical interpretations are of less value than its general survey.

It may well be argued, again, that the sociological end had better be sought by way of a generalized present¬ ment, in which politicians are not made the central figures of periods but considered as mere functionaries of a total movement. But it has seemed to me that politics can be most intimately understood, whether as science or as art, by constantly considering the whole relation of the statesman to his ever-changing problem — his character, his preparation, his difficulties, his devices. The choice and action of every one of us is such an equation ; and all political progress is a matter of the better political education of the individual. A merely theoretic study of political problems is in the nature of things imperfectly educative : the issue always emerges

PREFACE in life as a conflict and an adjustment of wills ; and the best preparation for that is a realization of the person¬ alities and the conditions of past struggles. Hence my adherence to the original plan — which further presents a series not merely of statesmen or prime ministers, but of politicians. Burke, Paine, Cobbett, and Cobden are important forces ; the Pelhams and the Liverpools and Melbournes are not.

Some small personal share in active politics in the interim has perhaps enabled me to correct some of the judgments of the earlier written studies of the series — those on Bolingbroke and Walpole, Burke, Beaconsfield and Gladstone — and to handle with more comprehension the others. The whole series (if it be ever completed) would be a forbiddingly bulky collection to present as one book. Its utility, then, can best be tested by the issue of volumes in chronological order.

Contents

Preface .......

Chronological Table . . . . .

CHAPTER

Chapter I

Two hundred years ago, the outstanding political forces in England as in other countries of western Europe were those two correlatives : sectarian and dynastic sympathies and antipathies. That is to say, English political life was at once primitive in its pitch and sophisticated in its elements. The temper of civil antipathy was almost as raw and rude as it had been in some of the class strifes of ancient Rome ; but it was not a class antipathy. That political phase had appeared in earlier English history : it had been chronic in municipal life ; 1 on a larger scale it had come up in the risings of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, in the teaching of John Ball, in the movement of the Lollards ; and it had flashed up with a new light among the following of Cromwell ; but it was always local, never a matter of general propaganda. Only in the Rebellion did conditions arise in which local activities had a chance of becoming general, through a blending of ideas and ideals ; and time was still lacking for anything like popular political education on lines of economic thought.

Some of the new phases of that period were indeed remarkable. What we can to-day recognize as the idea of philosophic anarchism was set forth by Overton ; 2 and an equally bold and novel doctrine of a common right to the use of the earth as planned by “ the Creator, the spirit Reason,” had been given out for the Levellers 1 Cp. the author’s Evolution of States, pp. 379, 393.

by the pen of Winstanley ; 1 2 but it was impossible that in such an environment such doctrines should prosper. Ireton met them as doctrines of “ natural right ” have been met since, by insisting that the only rights are those constituted by law : Cromwell simply scouted them. That they found printed utterance and audience at all was due to the abnormal stimulus of the Rebellion, and to the new openings it gave for intellectual as well as for military originality. When simple republicanism collapsed, deeper doctrine necessarily disappeared. Not one Englishman in a thousand was capable of thinking on such lines. The spirit of class strife had accordingly been swallowed up in the spirit of sectarian strife, which on the royalist side throve in the atmosphere of the Restoration, after having flourished greatly on the other under the Commonwealth.

Thus English political life at the beginning of the eighteenth century in some aspects resembled more that of Christian Imperial Rome and Byzantium than that of pagan Rome and Greece. The sectarian spirit, the element of religious hate, is a special psychological growth, tracing historically from the East, through the small hotbed of Jewry, to the Christian creed and church ; but it is recognizably generated in certain political con¬ ditions and a certain state of culture in all periods. Broadly speaking, it is the complement of absolutism. Wherever despotism controlled daily life, arresting the reactions of the earlier and freer tribal and civic State, the checked energies of union and strife ran in the channels of religion ; even as in unfree communities of one religion they run to factions — “ Blacks and Whites,” “ Blues and Greens,” “ Hooks and Codfish ” ; and in free States to political parties. In Assyria and Babylon before Israel, *

1 G. P. Gooch, History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 1898, pp. 216, 220 ; L. H. Behrens, The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth, 1906, pp. 76, 90, etc.

in Egypt down to the Christian period, men passioned for Gods or cults as in the freer communities they did for the city, for plunder, for empire.

Entering into the life of Europe, largely in the persons of Orientals, when Roman Imperialism had prepared the way for it, the passion of creed is seen overlaying the simpler animal-political tendencies as if by a kind of hypnotism — the hypnotism of the Sacred Book, under whose spell the zeal with which the normal man backs his opinion is raised to the furor which recognizes in itself the voice of the supernatural. Pagan Romans, Greeks, and barbarians had warred on the spur of in¬ stincts which we may term primary, comparing as they do with the instinctive hostilities of animal species. But Christianity was not only in itself one cause for war the more, as between Christian and non-Christian rulers : it was a ready-made mechanism, first for the subjection and coercion of barbarian people by their kings,1 and later for the evocation of their energies of strife when the normal channels were barred by regal control.

Once ingrained by the church, however, the passion of creed blended with all the other motives of strife and union. Some heresies can be seen to be stigmatized as such by reason of the economic interests of the priest¬ hood ; 2 others flourished on lines of race division, thus helping to break up the empire ; 3 and in the Middle Ages the great movements of heresy and persecution were alike expressions of the economic bias of laity and clergy. 4 When, again, the growing strength of govern¬ ments curtailed social strife, unless foreign war came in as a commuting force the religious passion, inseparable from faith, found new scope in general heresy, leading to general schism. Thus we see dissent spreading in England under Henry IV, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, and

1 Cp. the author’s Short History of Christianity, 2nd ed., pp. 168-72.

James ; and afresh under Charles II and James II ; while in France under Louis XIV and Louis XV the stress of foreign war favours indifferentism, to be fol¬ lowed by a great freethinking activity, under a repressive system, after the peace of Paris in 1763.

In the France of the later half of the sixteenth cen¬ tury, and the England and Germany of the first half of the seventeenth, none of them being yet nearly ripe for rationalism, the religious motive to strife reached its highest modern pitch, dominating and pervading or transmuting all other motives in virtue of the well-nigh Hebraic absorption of the northern peoples in the newlyfelt fascination of the sectarian life. Thus the English Civil War became essentially a war of sects ; 1 and the fall of the Protectorate meant broadly that the most conservative of the Protestant sects won the upper hand by cohering, while the others were mutually frustrative. The great combining force on the royalist side was the dogma of the divinity of the king’s hereditary status — a primitive kind of “ taboo ” which the pagan Romans had completely transcended under the Empire, and which the Church of Rome had alternately maintained as against rebels and repudiated when kings turned anti-papal. In England, under clerical hands, the notion swiftly rose to a new fanaticism. Only the rudest stress of sectarian interest within the State Church — the dilemma set up for it when the Catholic king wrent about to intro¬ duce a Catholic polity — caused the re-established dynasty to fall. After the Restoration, the divine right of the king, little heard of previously, had become practically the Church’s chief dogma,2 the reaction against Puritanism thus taking at once a royalist and a religious shape ; and while the sectarian aspect of the war had caused thoughtful and clever men to turn wearily or contemp-

1 Buckle’s thesis, that it was a war of classes, is true insofar as the sect-lines followed class lines. The real cleavage, however, was rather sectarian. Cromwell was expressly hostile to class motives. * Evolution of States, pp. 440-44.

tuously away from theology,1 the spirit of faction survived on the lines in question. When, again, the political turmoil of the reign of Charles II culminated in the adventure and the overthrow of the Monmouth expedi¬ tion and the crushing of its promoters under James II, the checked political energies reverted as usual to the sectarian channels. Thus when James was expelled, the strain on the habits of the conservative sect and party, who had affirmed his sacrosanct right to reign, wTas so violent that a reaction was inevitable ; and under William and Mary many of them lived in a state of semi-repentance for their spasm of self-preservation. So strong was the belief in hereditary divine right that the “ warming-pan ” story of the child smuggled in to pass as the royal babe was a positive asset in the debate.

If this and many previous vacillations of national feeling were to be considered apart from their causation, they might be held to prove an abnormal instability of character in the English people ; and indeed no modern nation had collectively vacillated more. Under the Tudors it swung between Papalism and anti-Papalism four times, in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth : after the execution of Charles I, the majority — if there ever was a majority for the Parliament — reverted to royalism ; after the Restoration, many became disaffected to Charles II ; and all parties, later, underwent extreme changes of attitude in his reign, especially in the matter of the Popish Plot. It needed, again, the severest pressure from James II to rouse against him many who had sought his exclusion from the throne ; and William was hardly crowned when Jacobite sentiment revived. But on scrutiny all such revulsions, in England as elsewhere, are found to stand for normal forces of social causation acting on average minds ; and at the crisis under notice the ruling motive was one long ingrained in the popular culture.

i Evolution of States, pp. 444-8.

Chapter II

It belonged, however, to the sectarian motive to compound readily with the other passions, and to be as undignified as they. When James, aiming at the complete enfranchisement of Catholics, with a view to their ultimate supremacy, took the course of conciliating the persecuted Protestant dissenters, their ready com¬ pliance drove the alarmed churchmen to similar overtures. Those who a year before had been zealous persecutors strove to cajole their late victims, till it became hard to say what conscientious conviction had ever underlain either conformity or nonconformity. The semblance of moral superiority which belonged to the ground of action fell away like any other mere habit, under the due pressure of need and temptation. When, again, the seven bishops were put on trial for refusing to read the king’s arbitrary Declaration of Indulgence, and were acquitted (1688), a common emotion of antipathy and sympathy drew together all sects of Protestants ; but when the emergency was past, and a Protestant king sat on the throne, the churchman was as bent as before on penalizing alike the Catholic and the dissenter, and the old hate of the ever-present Roundhead took the place of fear of the remoter Papist.

For a hundred years, religious life had meant a reci¬ procity of hate, each creed while in power persecuting the others. Queen Anne, the “ wet nurse of the Church,” as Horace Walpole called her, was so resentful of Dissent that when a deputation of nonconformist clergy went to congratulate her on her accession she received them in frigid silence ; though she was said to be so lax in her own devotions as to have morning prayers said in an adjoining room while she dressed. In the early days of George I, brutish riots, in which dissenting chapels were destroyed, expressed the zeal for the church felt by mobs in the Jacobite counties;1 and at the time of the Union, the Episcopalians of Scotland — themselves savage persecutors in their day of power — were hated by their Presbyterian countrymen with a perfect hatred.* The English Presby¬ terians had been as zealous in tyranny as any ; and not in a generation could the restored Church of England unlearn the appetite for revenge. Everywhere rancour reigned. Defoe has told us that in his youth (1683) his fellow-dissenters hoped for the success of the Turks against Vienna, and that when “he opposed and wrote against it ” his reasoning “ was taken very unkindly indeed.” 3 And when in 1702 Defoe published his strate¬ gical piece The Shortest Way with the Dissenters , a fairly literal exposition of the case of the hot High Churchmen against their bites noires, the zest with which many of them applauded put upon the others the absurd necessity of prosecuting Defoe for libellous misrepresentation. Tantum relligio.

One of the clearest heads of that age, George Savile, Marquis of Halifax (d. 1695), who had played his part in most of its episodes, was fain to sum up on one line that “ the several sorts of religion in the world are little more than so many spiritual monopolies : if their interests could be reconciled, their opinions would be so too ” ; and again that “ most men’s anger about religion is as if two men should quarrel for a lady they neither of them cared for.” 4 But the deist devotee of Montaigne 5

1 Stanhope’s History of England, 1713-1783, ch. iv.

2 Lecky, Hist, of England in the Eighteenth Cent., ed. 1892, ii. 277.

3 Minto, Daniel Defoe, in “Men of Letters’1 series, 1879, p. 7.

4 Political Thoughts and Reflections : Religion (published with A Character of King Charles the Second, 1750).

5 See his Letter to Charles Cotton, at the end of his posthumous Miscellanies, 1700.

would doubtless have admitted that the disputants cared a great deal to gratify their wills, their animosities to men who challenged their habits ; and when he affirmed that “ the people would not believe in God at all if they were not permitted to believe wrong in him,” he hinted the whole fatality of religion in politics. A sacrosanct habit is a species of “ property ” ; it is grown “ proper ” or personal to the devotee ; and it needs a liberal educa¬ tion indeed to make him more tolerant of its impugners than he would be of a challenge to his ownership of his goods and chattels. Toleration is either a gift of temper or a fruit of philosophy ; and the gentry who legislated for England were far to seek in either sweetness or light.

The importance of toleration to the stability of the State was indoed too clear not to be urged by the wiser few. Spinoza in Holland, and afterwards Locke in England, put their hands to philosophic pleas for it, Spinoza in his fundamental negation of the entity of “ will,” which destroyed the chimera of “ sinning against light ” ; Locke by his acute reductio ad absurdum of the plea that it is a duty to enforce what tve believe to be the true religion.1 But there remained the vital difficulty that men who could so reason failed to impress the zealots as having the religious temper. It is indeed the historical fact that the tolerant men were hardly ever “ evangelical.” King William himself was known to be a latitudinarian,3

1 It should be noted that Locke wrought out his doctrine of toleration in the clearest way as early as 1667, when he was a tutor at Oxford and the persecuting laws of the Restoration (1662-65) were new and actively enforced. (See his Essay concerning Tolera¬ tion, printed in H. Fox Bourne’s Life of Locke, 1876, i. 174-94.) His views seem to have been shaped by the influence of Owen, who represented the most enlightened Independents. (Fox Bourne, as cited, i. 72-8, 166-7.) But the theory had been before pro¬ pounded by Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, and Milton.

3 “ His indifference to the forms of church government, and his being zealous for toleration, together with his cold behaviour towards the clergy, gave them generally very ill impressions of him.*1 (Burnet, Own Time, B. V, end. Cp. Macaulay, History, Student's ed. i. 692.)

and he sought latitudinarians for his bishops. Tillotson, Wilkins, and Cumberland,1 for instance, were rational¬ istic in their tone and practice ; and Tillotson was con¬ stantly charged with Socinianism at the least.2 3 4 Cromwell had been led rather by political necessity than by his inner light to insist on the indifferency of the State to the creeds of its servants (provided they were Protestants), as he was led by financial expediency to protect the Jews. George Fox, lacking such leading, could not forgo the joy of interrupting the services of which he disapproved. There is apparently no normal access to the principle of tolerance by the path of emotional faith : 3 the intel¬ lectual approach is by way of rational doubt or of in¬ difference : the common learning of the lesson is a matter either of reluctant recognition of counter-pressures or of mere acquiescence in a toleration that has been won. Halifax put the case with his usual felicity when he wrote that “ If men would think more they would act less : the greatest part of the business of the world is the effect of not thinking. Most men put their reason out to service to their will : the master and the man are perpetually falling out.” 4 But he knew better than to urge such precepts on churchmen by way of getting them to leave dissenters alone. As it was, his deism was divined and charged against him ; and Locke was promptly accused of promoting atheism.

The average human material, in short, was too bad,

1 The first important English writer on ethics on naturalistic lines after Hobbes. Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. i. 425. Macaulay (ii. 260) tells of his unexpected appointment.

2 See Tillotson’s preface to Wilkins’ posthumous work on Natural Religion for a sample of his rationalizing tone.

3 It is noteworthy that Procopius, who denounced the theological strifes of Byzantium, used the language of a non -scriptural theist (Be hello Gothico, i. 3) and has been denounced accordingly (Gibbon, note to ch. 47). There is accordingly reason to surmise that those Byzantines who in the iconoclastic period argued for toleration (Finlay, ed. Tozer, ii. 97) were of a rationalistic cast.

4 Political Thoughts and Reflections, ed. 1750, p. 178.

the main forces at work too irrational, to permit of any speedy success of the doctrine of toleration in England. When Locke wrote his first Letter on Toleration,1 in 1685, the Dutch had already gone far towards his ideal, not on any acceptance of the deep doctrine of Spinoza, but as a result of (a) the felt evils of intolerance, of (6) growing doubt, and of (c) the sheer multiplicity of sects.2 In Holland, however, there was no such preponderant Church as the Anglican, and no such monarchic power as in England had made common cause with the Church. Thus the Act of Toleration of 1689, to promote which Locke published in English his first letter, was at best a restraint on persecution, protecting the great majority of dissenters 3 by various compromises, but leaving schism unhealed. It was the king’s wish to add to tolera¬ tion “ comprehension,” and to make all Protestants eligible for public office ; but, as Macaulay has it, he came too late for the first and too early for the second. 4 The Comprehension Bill had to be abandoned, not on account of doctrinal difficulties but partly because of sheer clerical fanaticism for ritual, and partly because a number of the Presbyterian ministers of the time, being considerably better off as popular dissenters with rich flocks than they would be as churchmen, were not anxious to be “ comprehended.” 5 Thus the sectarian outs and ins

1 Written in Latin in 1685. Published in English in 1689.

1 Cp. Short Hist, of Freethought, 3rd ed. ii. 135-8 ; Halifax’s Letter to a Dissenter (in 1700 ed. of Miscellanies) p. 27 ; and Anthony Collins’ Discourse of Freethinking, 1713, p. 28.

3 “It is true that the Toleration Act recognized persecution as the rule, and granted liberty only as the exception. But it is equally true that the rule remained in force only against a few hundreds of Protestant dissenters, and that the benefit of the exceptions extended to hundreds of thousands.” (Macaulay, ch. xi.)

4 Ch. xi. Student’s ed. i. 692. A considerable measure of com¬ prehension (the absorption in the church of many Presbyterians, some of whom became bishops) had, however, been effected by express agreement at the Restoration — a circumstance Macaulay does not mention (cp. Fox Bourne, as cited, i. 170-1). But far more were driven out and persecuted than were taken in.

5 Macaulay, ed. cited, i. 703.

were left marked off as different social and religious species, and as such sure factors of future strife.

More intelligent motives of strife did not exist, with the partial exception of the reasons for and against the war with France ; and it would not be easy to underrate the moral and mental standards of public life in any class. To that day indeed belongs Locke’s treatise Of Civil Government (1689) ; but the constructive part of that essay — the weightiest practical argument for constitutional government thus far produced — was nearly as much above the plane of English politics as the more theoretic treatises of Harrington and Sidney. The shattering despotism of Cromwell had prepared the degradation of political life which visibly set in with the Restoration, when “ those persons who made politics their business were perhaps the most corrupt part of the corrupt society.” 1 Only the sobering danger of 1688 had forced prudence on the parliamentary majority : when the danger was past, every reckless passion and sinister interest resumed play ; and the political summary of the age is given in the grim saying of William, that if the king of England had enough good appointments to enrich all who sought them, the names of Whig and Tory would soon disappear.2 And yet the parties so named battled with a stress of malice that could hardly have been heightened by the intensest difference of con¬ viction. As was said by a cosmopolitan who had served in the English army, if the ideas held of each other by Whigs and Tories had been true, one would have lived in England in less security than among the savages of America.3

The very names of the parties told of a vulgar levity and a puerile pugnacity of temper, originating as they did in popular epithets of which the use could be traced

1 Macaulay, ch. ii, ed. cited, i. 89. Compare Clarendon, Con¬ tinuation of the Life, in 1-vol. ed. of History, 1843, p. 1004.

* De Cize, Histoire du Whigisme et du Torisme, 1718, p. 19.

3 Id. preface.

only to Scotch and Irish provincial feuds.1 Originally thrown out in the fashion of schoolboys, they met the psychological needs of the nation. In that atmosphere self-seeking motives and irrational doctrines prospered alike ; and the two central dogmas round which strife raged, the sacredness of the Church and the sacredness of the hereditary succession, were at once mystic watch¬ words for the many and symbols of self-interest for the more calculating few. What we may fitly term super¬ stition — something away from the primary or quasiuniversal grounds of sympathy and antipathy — was the ruling passion. In terms of superstition, sect hated sect ; in terms of superstition, Cavalier had hated Roundhead, and Jacobite now hated Hanoverian. Only the folly of the French king in proclaiming the Jacobite heir as king of England on his father’s death had held the bulk of the Tory party to William’s side ; the spirit of national animosity serving for the moment to override the spirit of dynastic superstition. Englishmen would have no king of Louis’s choosing. But the dynastic superstition survived the decisive outbreak of temper, and remained a variable quantity, according to circumstances. These were the main political forces with which Walpole and Bolingbroke, the two typical statesmen of the early

1 For “ Whig 31 there are three etymologies : (1) the word “ whey 33 as an epithet for the Puritans in Scotland (North’s Examen, 1740, p. 321) ; (2) the word “ whiggam,” said to have been used by the carriers of South-western Scotland in urging their horses, whence the name “ whigamors3 raid,33 applied to a march of Covenanters on Edinburgh in 1648 (Burnet, History of his Ovm Time, ed. 1838, p. 26 ; Burton, History of Scotland, vi. 419) ; (3) “ whig,” said to be a Scotch name for certain small caps worn by Scotch Puritans (De Cize, as cited, p. 21). The nickname “Tory33 is traced without dispute to Ireland, where it was given to a species of bandits, who were taken as typical royalists. Both names, as is well known, came into English use in 1679, in the wild strife over the proposal to exclude the Duke of York from the succession ; and from 1688 they were complacently borne by the two factions. The folkwords “ mob 33 and “ sham,33 as Macaulay reminds us, date from the same year, eighteenth century, had to deal. And the mere “ acci¬ dents ” of monarchic succession under the regimen of the monarchic superstition brought it about that for two whole generations political leaders and not monarchs were the prime movers in English affairs.

William could and did govern, though under desperate difficulties, shaping the organization of the Cabinet to his needs. Anne w'as in comparison impotent ; and under her the epoch of the great parliamentarians began ; to continue through the reigns of the first and second Georges, in virtue of their fears and their lucky inability to speak the tongue of the nation to whose throne they had succeeded ; 1 and, after that ample rooting time, to subsist for posterity. In Clarendon’s time, a “ first minister ” was something specially odious to the bulk of the English people, as Richelieu and Mazarin had been to the French ; and it was the sheer pressure of circumstances that forced the institution on them. It cannot be too strongly insisted on that the course of English political development is explicable only in terms of the series of accidents under notice. Had James II been, content to remain an Anglican, he could probably have built up a regal power as inflexible as that of Louis XIV. Had William lived for another thirty years, he in turn might well have established what in our current vocabulary would be an “ unconstitutional ” monarchy. It is by virtue of no innate English “ faculty ” for parlia¬ mentary evolution that we have attained a parliamentary regimen. Monarchism had hypnotized the England of the end of the seventeenth century about as completely as it had done Spain and France in their turn. It was the accidents of James’s infatuation, William’s Dutch nationality, his early death, Anne’s feebleness, and the incapacity of the first Georges to speak English, com¬ bined with their sense of instability, that permitted a