of a heap on the Treasury bench, was a Mercury in mien and motion, it seems, when he was young When I was young!-ah, woful when, Lord North was three-and-twenty when he returned to England. At thirty he took office as one of the Lords of the Treasury-being at that time a rather active member of the House, and enjoying some reputation there, although his "future mastery of it was not yet foreseen by others, nor probably anticipated by himself." In 1767, four years later, Lord Chatham applied for and obtained the King's permission to offer him the Exchequer Seals, but Lord North, "from an undue diffidence of his own merit," declined them. Some three years more, however, saw him Prime Minister as well as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He unwillingly assumed this topmost place, and his acquiescence it was, at a harassing political crisis, when the wheels of administration seemed almost at a dead-lock, that won the King's particular favour and esteem. His consenting to become Premier when the Duke of Grafton, in a moment of "considerable public difficulty and embarrassment, of what, in those easy days of fair weather, was called danger, suddenly threw up the seals, and retired to his diversions and his mistress at Newmarket"§-this the King gratefully regarded as an act of loyal self-devotion. Nor did his majesty ever cease to testify the lively sense he felt of this matter, of the personal obligation under which Lord North had laid him, by "coming to his assistance in that emergency." Ten years had George III. now been upon the throne, and this was his seventh Prime Minister. And of all the six predecessors of Lord North, not one, it has been remarked,|| had entered office under less favourable circumstances, with less freedom of choice, or with less prospect of permanence: yet, so strange are the chances and changes of public life, that this administration endured longer than all its six predecessors combined. Walpole begins to take notice of Lord North the year (1764) after his first joining a Government at all. In one letter he talks of the noble lord "rumbling in vain about his mustard-pot, and endeavouring to outroar alone a whole party." In another he says: "Lord North, who will not lose his bellow, though he may lose his place, endeavoured to roar up the courage of his comrades, but it would not do."** This refers to the great debates in the House on the question of General Warrants. Between which period and the year of North's becoming Prime Minister (1770), we scarcely find him alluded to, whether as a bellowing bull of Bashan, or otherwise, in the Complete Letter Writer. But from that year onwards he figures, of course, with due ex officio prominence, in the Horatian Epistles. It was in January that his lordship succeeded the Duke of Grafton, and in a letter to Maun, dated February 2nd, we read: * Coleridge, Youth and Age. Lord Mahon's History of England, vol v. ch. xli. Mahon, ch. xlviii. ** Ibid. 186-7. "Wednesday, the critical day, is over, and the Administration stands. Lord North pleased all that could bring themselves to be pleased; he not only spoke with firmness and dignity, but with good humour; and fairly got the better of Colonel Barré, who attacked him with rudeness and brutality. Lord North has very good parts, quickness, great knowledge, and, what is much wanted, activity." Again, midway in March, "I have a great opinion of Lord North's prudence," writes Horace. In June: "Lord North's behaviour is so sensible and moderate that he offends nobody." During the Wilkes riots of next year another complimentary allusion to him occurs: "Lord North was attacked with still more inveteracy ;t his chariot was torn to pieces, and several spectators there was a moment when they thought he must be destroyed. Sir William Meredith, though in Opposition, and a Mr. La Roche, saved him from the fury of the people. He went into the House and spoke with great firmness and as much coolness." Just twelve months later (March, 1772), Horace is still civilly disposed to the First Lord of the Treasury. On the Royal Marriage Bill debates he remarks: "Lord North, though disliking the Bill, supported it like a man; the rest [of the ministry] treacherously condemning it, voting for it, and wishing it might miscarry. -Lord North," he adds, in a fresh paragraph, "is likely to have the Duke of Saxe-Gotha's vacant Garter, the only one except my father's that has shone in the House of Commons since Queen Elizabeth's day." In February, 1773, however, we have a glimpse of the Premier in quite a new character-out of temper, and all but out of office. He was unexpectedly defeated on a question of revenue by a majority of more than three to one. "Lord North had thought of taking no part, and had spoken to nobody against it,§ for, indeed, when all are on his side, how could he suspect that nobody would be with him? Sir Gilbert Elliott backed the petition; Lord North resisted; the consequence I have told you. The next day Lord North, angry with good reason, was on the point of making the affair very serious, and was with difficulty kept from resigning." That luxury his lordship could not afford for years to come. A few months later again we read: "Lord North gets through his regulations, though with many désagrémens. The world has expected that he would retire: I hope he will not: he is an honest and a moderate man. A passage of an earlier date in Walpole's Journal, not his Letters, chronicles Lord North "beaten by 62 to 61-a disgraceful event for a Prime Minister." This relates to Fox's motion on the Marriage Bill (in April, 1772), and it elicits from the Journalist some disparaging comments on the head of the Government. He says Lord North ought to have taken care to have his members about him; that he daily showed, * Walpole's Letters (complete edition), vol. v. p. 225. †Than the two Foxes. March, 1771. And only two, Mr. Peter Cunningham observes, have shone there since Lord North's time, Lord Castlereagh's and Lord Palmerston's. Scil. A petition (presented by Lord Howe) from the Naval captains on halfpay for increase of allowance. The majority in favour of the petition was 154 against 45. ** Ibid. 473. however, that he was only a subservient minister; that the Scotch cabal and the Tories could sway him as they pleased; and that his negligence proved him to follow their dictates, not his own objects. "In fact, he disliked his post, and retained it only from hopes of securing some considerable emoluments for his family. He was indolent, good-humoured, void of affectation of dignity, void of art; and his parts and the goodness of his character would have raised him much higher in the opinion of mankind, if he had cared either for power or applause."* From about this time forth, Walpole's tone gradually changes in his references to the Minister, until it reaches the stormy altitude of invective aspired to by the ultra-Opposition itself. We shall give occasional extracts from the Letters and from the Last Journals indiscriminately. "At this time [March, 1773] there were certainly designs going on against Lord North; and some thoughts of putting the Treasury into Lord Gower's hands. Lord North was very ungracious and indolent; Lord Mansfield blamed him loudly." In May we have the Journalist's strictures on the "pusillanimous, uncertain, contradictory variations and indecision of Lord North,"+ who "only contrived to make his own defeat appear merited." In June, "Lord North opened the Budget, and in the conclusion made a peroration on himself and his own situation, in which, after mentioning the reports of his intending to resign, he vaunted his own firmness in the cause of the public, vaunted his merit in having undertaken the burden in so critical a situation, when tempted neither by avarice nor ambition; and he vowed with tears to persist in sustaining his part till he should have perfected his plans." Horace is now, Northwards, in a disposition to impute ungenerous motives and disbelieve honest impulses, and put the shabbiest construction upon everything; he sees in the Minister's emotion a proof rather of "the want of firmness to resign, than firmness in remaining," and infers that " as his measures were successful, it could only be the uneasiness of his situation in the Cabinet that called forth tears; and this scene he had repeated too often." Anon we have recurrent passages about "Lord North, with his usual illbreeding and indifference," &c. In December, his lordship's father, the old Earl of Guildford, "extremely infirm and very rich, but very covetous," being appointed Treasurer to the Queen, Horace observes that "this mark of grace to Lord North would silence him from complaining that he had no power, or might engage his serving in some new, dirty, or despotic job." In the same paragraph he taxes the Minister with sending a "thoroughly brutal" letter to George Selwyn. Then again, on the passing of the Royal Marriage Act, to which "Lord North had been the most averse of all; but it was now whispered [and Horace of course makes a stage whisper of it, emphasising it to the echo] that his assent and support had been purchased at a very dear rate indeed-that is, by a grant of the Savoy, or part of it, for the sale of which a bill had passed; corruption so scandalous, that it ought not to be believed till the proof shall come out." Beautiful is the charity that thinketh no evil, nor, till there is no avoiding it, will think it, of any man. Whether Walpole's heart was as open to melting charity of this sort, as his ear was to whispers, in closets or on housetops, judge ye. * Last Journals of Horace Walpole, I. 86. In dealing with General Burgoyne's attack on Lord Clive. Early in 1774 the Public Advertiser's libel on Mr. Speaker (Sir Fletcher Norton) evoked an appeal to Lord North to vindicate the dignity of the Speaker and the House. "Lord North, with his usual indolent indecision, replied he had not determined, he must have time to think of it," but being called up again by the excitement of the House, Walpole owns that "Lord North himself took up spirit, and spoke well, as he always did when he took his part; and he drew a ridiculous picture of a former transaction, to mortify Sawbridge and the City patriots." A subsequent debate led to the dismissal from office of the most promising, though perhaps least practicable, of his lordship's colleagues. "Charles Fox, struck with Lord North's insufficient behaviour, and impatient to aggrandise himself at his expense," "rudely blamed " the imprudence of his chief, and within a week was declared to be no longer a Lord of the Treasury. Walpole, as usual, knows the innermost reason why. was not entirely presumption and ambition that had driven Charles Fox on hostilities towards Lord North. Edmund Burke had great weight with him; and Burke, tired of a hopeless opposition, of desperate fortune, and apt to deal in moneyed projects, had, in concert with Garrick the actor, engaged Fox in soliciting Lord North for a grant of land in America. If it succeeded, Burke and Fox would have sold their shares ; if it miscarried, Fox would be a great acquisition to the discontented. Lord North refused the grant-Fox attacked him, and was turned out." "It The following year, 1775, finds the Minister "getting his foot into" that slough of despond, American Affairs. In February we read: “Lord North, by his lazy dilatoriness, had given time, after venting his hostile intentions, to apprise the Americans of those intentions a fortnight before Administration took a single step." "Yet Lord North, with all his faults, was capable of one still greater though wishing and professing moderation, he was capable of lending himself to all the injustice of the Court if his own professions should dupe the Americans into submission." October comes, and with it this entry: "The Scotch party at Court were also busy in keeping up animosity against the Americans, leaving the management of the war to the Ministers, who had applied little to it. Lord North, of astonishingly gay indolence, had taken his pleasure in the country,' "-"had neither devised the war nor liked it, whatever he pretended." A letter to Mann, of this date, relates how Fox told Lord North, that not Alexander nor Cæsar had ever conquered so much as he had lost in one campaign. "Even his Lordship's friends, nay the Scotch, taunt him in public with his laziness." And the Journal for the year (not that it was actually written at that period) winds up with this piece of strong writing, which one can't help thinking is like Walpole, but not like North: "A nature so capable of outrage as Lord North's was, under the veil of uncommon good-humour and idleness, recalled to mind a picture drawn of him early by one who knew him well: Mr. Henry Legge, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was uncle of Lord Dartmouth, who was son-in-law of the Earl of Guildford, Lord North's father, and the young, Lords had travelled together. Very few days before Mr. Legge died, Sir Edward Walpole, his friend, visiting him, a picture of Lord North by Pompeis hung over the chimney. Sir Edward said, 'Pompeis must be an able painter to make so good a picture of a man so ugly as Lord North.' Legge replied, 'To have made it like, he should have drawn his inside as hideous as his outside; I have not breath now, or I would tell you circumstances to confirm what I say.' Sir Edward often repeated this story"—and offered, Horace assures us, to repeat it to Lord North's own ugly face. "Lord North did not desire that confrontation."* We trow not, indeed. Mr. Legge's residuum of breath might have been better expended than in talk about "drawing the inside" of a Minister, as if he were a Michaelmas goose or a Christmas turkey; and Sir Edward's repetition of the story by no means conciliates us in his favour; and Horace's reiteration of it, at third-hand, in black and white, is the flat reverse of -confirmation strong As proof of holy writ. But to proceed, with a few more illustrative extracts from the Journal and the Letters conjointly. In the beginning of 1776 we find Walpole describes Lord George Germaine as "leaving the whole burden of supplies on the shoulders of Lord North, whom, at the same time, without reserve in his most public conversations, he spoke of as a trifling and supine Minister." Horace adds, that Lord North had all the air of subscribing to that character, and augmented his natural and jocose levity, as if his coadjutor had rendered the office of Prime Minister a sinecure. Presently again we are told that Lord North "was a pliant tool, without system or principle." In March we read: "Commonly he treated most subjects with ridicule, and this winter was more than ever cried up for his wit." "Lord North had more humour than wit, though rarely deficient in the latter." In May: "Lord North, whose jocularity was overset by the bad news from America, lost his temper most indecently." Things looking ugly in France, too, "The stocks immediately fell, and the arrogance of the Ministers was so sunk, that Lord North said to a person from whom I had it, 'I wish the time was come for my being abused for having made a disgraceful peace with America!' In August, the Ministers being exceedingly dismayed at the failure at Charlestown, "which was much worse than they owned, and most disgraceful," the Duke of Newcastle, " finding Lord North treat the affair with his usual indifference and jollity, took notice of it to him. 'Faith, 'Faith, my lord,' said Lord North, if fretting would make me thin, I would be as sorry as your Grace; but since it will not have that effect, I bear it as well as I can.' The next observable entry is in March, 1777. Lord North has "a dangerous illness," but "without losing his good humour." His physician asking him what he felt? "he, who was very gross, replied, what I have not felt a great while, my own ribs.'" In January, 1778, we have Charles Fox, "in an admirable speech," attacking Lord North on having called himself "an unfortunate Minister," and proving that "all the disgraces had happened by ignorance, blunders, and misconduct, not by misfortune. Lord North answered with some humour; and as Fox had accused him of idleness and listening to flatterers, he said he passed a great deal of time in that House, where he could not be idle, and it *For the quotations foregoing, see Last Journals of Horace Walpole, vol. i pp. 188, 244 sq., 268, 276-7, 278, 280 sq., 304-5, 312 sq., 456, 505, 534-7. Also, Walpole's Letters, VI. 278, &c. |