APPENDIX.

I.

SIR ROBERT WALPOLE.*

THE antagonist whom Lord Chatham first encountered on his entering into public life was the veteran Walpole, who instinctively dreaded him the moment he heard his voice; and having begun by exclaiming, "We must muzzle that terrible Cornet of horse!" either because he found him not to be silenced by promotion, or because he deemed punishment in this case better than blandishment, ended by taking away his commission, and making him an enemy for ever. It was a blunder of the first order: it was of a kind, too, which none less than Walpole were apt to commit: perhaps it was the most injudicious thing, possibly the only very injudicious thing, he ever did; certainly it was an error for which he paid the full penalty before he ceased to lead the House of Commons and govern the country.

Few men ever reached and maintained for so many years the highest station which the citizen of a free state can hold, who have enjoyed more power than Sir Robert Walpole, and have left behind them less just cause of blame, or more monuments of the wisdom and virtue for which his

country has to thank him. Of Washington, indeed, if we behold in him a different character, one of a far more exalted description, there is this to be said, both that his imperishable fame rests rather upon the part he bore in the Revolution than on his administration of the Government which he helped to create; and that his unequalled virtue and

*Walpole and Bolingbroke do not belong to the reign of George III. But it is impossible well to understand Lord Chatham without considering Walpole also. However, the great importance of continually holding up Walpole to the admiration of all statesmen, and Bolingbroke, except for his genius, to their reprobation, is the chief ground of inserting this Appendix.

self-denial never could be practised in circumstances which, like those of Walpole, afforded no temptation to ambition, because they gave no means of usurping larger powers than the law bestowed; consequently his case cannot be compared, in any particular, with that of a prime minister under an established monarchical constitution. But Walpole held for many years the reins of government in England under two princes, neither of them born or bred in the country-held them during the troubles of a disputed succession, and held them while European politics were complicated with various embarrassments; and yet he governed at home without any inroads upon public liberty; he administered the ordinary powers of the constitution without requiring the dangerous help of extreme temporary rigour; he preserved tranquillity at home without pressing upon the people; and he maintained peace abroad without any sacrifice either of the interests or the honour of the country. If no brilliant feats of improvement in our laws or in the condition of the state were attempted;-if no striking evolutions of external policy were executed; at least all was kept safe and quiet in every quarter, and the irrepressible energies of national industry had the fullest scope afforded them during a lengthened season of repose which in those days of "foreign war and domestic levy" was deemed a fortune hardly to be hoped for, and of which the history of the country had never offered any example.

Walpole was a man of an ancient, honourable, and affluent family, one of the first in the county of Norfolk, to whose possessions he succeeded while yet too young for entering into the Church, the profession he was destined to had an elder brother lived. Rescued from that humbler fortune (in which, however, he always said he would have risen to the Primacy), he had well nigh fallen into one more obscure-the life of a country gentleman, in which he might have whiled away his time like his ancestors, between the profession of a sportsman pursued with zeal, and that of a farmer always failing, because always more than half neglected by him who unites in his own person both landlord and tenant. The dangers of the Protestant succession at the close of King William's reign turned his attention

to political matters upon his entrance into Parliament. The death of the Duke of Gloucester, Princess Anne's son, had alarmed both the illustrious prince on the throne and the Whig party in general; the Tories had thrown every obstacle in the way of the Act of Settlement, by which the King was anxiously endeavouring to confirm the freedom he had conquered for his adopted country; they had only introduced it in the hopes of its miscarrying; and the near balance of parties in Parliament, when the Abjuration Oath was carried by a majority of one (188 to 187), evinced too clearly that in the country the decided majority were for the exiled family. It is easy to conceive how greatly the having commenced his public life at such a crisis must have attracted him towards state affairs,* and how lasting an impression the momentous question that first engaged his attention must have produced upon his political sentiments in after-life. Soon after came the great question of privilege, the case of the Aylesbury men, arising out of the action of Ashby v. White; and here he, with the other leading Whigs-the Cowpers, the Kings, the Jekyls, the Cavendishes-took a decided part for the general law of the land, against the extravagant doctrines of privilege maintained by the Tories. Sacheverell's trial—a Whig folly, which he privately did all in his power to prevent-completed his devotion to political life; he was one of the managers, and was exposed to his share of the popular odium under which all the promoters of that ill-advised proceeding not unnaturally fell. The Church party were so powerful that the mob was on their side as well as the Queen's Court; and this incident in Whig history, described by Bolingbroke as "having a parson to roast, and burning their hands in the fire," made Walpole dread that fire ever after; for it is not more certain that the share in the Act of Settlement with which he successfully commenced his public life, gave a strong Whig bias to his after-course, than it is certain that the Sacheverell case gave him a constitutional abhorrence of religious controversy, and an invincible repugnance to touch any question that could connect itself with Church or Sectarian clamour. Through his whole life he betrayed

He seconded the motion of Sir Charles Hedges for extending the oath to ecclesiastical persons. It was carried without a division.

a lurking dread of any measure on which the religious sentiments of the community could be brought to bear, as if aware that these being subjects on which men feel rather than reason, it is impossible to descry beforehand the course public opinion may take upon them, or fix bounds to the excitement they may produce. This, and not any indifference to the great cause of toleration, always kept him from seeking securities which there is every reason to think he would naturally have wished to obtain, against the High Church party, and in favour of the Sectaries.

The sagacity of such men as Godolphin and Marlborough early descried Walpole's merit, which at once procured him their favour-with the latter, to whom he owed his first appointment of Secretary at War, his intercourse was always intimate and confidential. When a vile Court intrigue saved France from being undone by the victories of that great man; when what St. Simon calls the "Miracle de Londres" unexpectedly rescued Louis XIV. from his doom; when, as Frederick II. many years after said, Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet, were all unable to defend him against detraction, and the French King was lost bad the intrigues of a mistress of the robes and a bedchamber-woman suffered the Great Captain to remain two years longer in power-Walpole threw up his place with the Duke, and nobly refused to join some shuffling place-seeking Whigs, who were talked over by Harley and St. John to remain under the Tories. This was an offence not to be forgiven. His aggravation of it, by boldly defending the conduct of Marlborough against the slanderous attacks of the adverse faction, produced the charge against him of corruption while at the War-Office: and he was sent to the Tower upon an accusation of having received 9007. from a contractor; was expelled the House of Commons, though never either impeached or prosecuted; and, on being re-elected in the same Parliament, was declared ineligible by a majority of the House.

That Walpole, through the whole of this proceeding, was regarded as the victim of party rancour; that but for the factious spirit of the day he never would have been accused; that nothing can be less decisive against any one than a vote carried by a majority of twelve in a full House of

Commons, in which many of the adverse party voted with the accused, and many more refused to vote at all; and that the greatest distrust of their case was shown by the accusers in never venturing to institute judicial proceedings of any kind-may all be easily admitted; and yet there rests a stain upon this part of Walpole's public conduct. For what was his defence? Not to deny that the contractors had given two notes, one of 500 guineas, and the other of as many pounds (of which all but 100 were paid), but to affirm that they were only paid through Walpole's hand to a friend named Mann, whom he had meant to favour by giving him a share of the contract, and who had agreed to take so much for his proportion of the profit. Mann was dead: the contractors had made the notes payable to Walpole in ignorance of Mann's name, and only knowing he was put upon them as a friend of the Minister; and thus a case of fraud and suspicion appeared against the latter, which the unfortunate accident of the former's death prevented from being clearly removed. Now, that such a proceeding, admitting it to have been as Walpole himself describes it, would in our purer time have been deemed most incorrect, nay, sufficient to stain the character of any minister, cannot be doubted. In those days the course of office seems to have sanctioned such impropriety; and that no man was ever injured by having so behaved, any more than the reputations of some French ministers seem to be the worse for the wear they undergo on the Stock Exchange, must be obvious from the fact of Walpole having, in four years after, been placed at the head of the Treasury, though without the place of Premier; and afterwards becoming, and continuing head of the Government for nearly the whole residue of his life, with no diminution of his influence or his estimation in consequence of the transaction at the War-Office, and with hardly any allusion ever made to that remarkable passage of his life, during the many years of the most factious opposition which his long administration encountered,-when, for want of the materials of attack, it was seriously urged against him that so long a tenure of power by one man was detrimental to the state, if not dangerous to the constitution. Nothing can more strikingly show the great improvement which the principles of