Walpole, however, was for strengthening himself after the old fashion.
He was determined to put the King into the hands of some woman who
would play into the hands of the minister.  The Duke of Grafton and the
Duke of Newcastle tried to persuade Walpole to make use of the
influence of the Princess Emily.  They insisted that she was sure to
succeed to the management of the King, but that if Walpole approached
her at once he might easily make her believe that she owed it all to
him, and that she might thus be induced to stand by him and to assist
him.  Walpole would have nothing of the kind.  He only believed in the
ruling power of a mistress now that the {126} Queen was gone.  He gave
his opinions in his blunt, characteristic way.  He meant, he said, to
bring over Madame de Walmoden, and would have nothing to do with "the
girls."  "I was for the wife against the mistress, but I will be for
the mistress against the daughters."  Accordingly he earnestly advised
the King not to fret any longer with a vain sorrow, but to try to
distract himself from grief, and urged him, for this purpose, to send
over at once to Hanover for Madame Walmoden.  Walpole's way of talking
to the young princesses would seem absolutely beyond belief if we did
not know that the reports of it are true.  He told the princesses that
they must try to divert their father's melancholy by bringing women
round him; he talked of Madame Walmoden, and repeated to them what he
had said to Lord Hervey, that, though he had been for the Queen against
Lady Suffolk and every other woman, yet now he would be for Madame
Walmoden, and advised them in the mean time to bring Lady Deloraine, a
former mistress, to her father, adding with brutal indecency that
"people must wear old gloves until they get new ones."  He offended and
disgusted the Princesses Caroline and Emily, and they hated him forever
after.  Walpole did not much care.  He was not thinking much about "the
girls," as he called them.  He believed he saw his way.

{127} CHAPTER XXX.

THE WESLEYAN MOVEMENT.

[Sidenote: 1738--John Wesley]

In 1738 John Wesley returned to London from Georgia, in British North
America.  He had been absent more than two years.  He had gone to
Georgia to propagate the faith to which he was devoted; to convert the
native Indians and to regenerate the British colonists.  He did not
accomplish much in either way.  The colonists preferred to live their
careless, joyous, often dissolute lives, and the stern spirit of Wesley
had no charm for them.  The Indians refused to be Christianized; one
chief giving as his reason for the refusal a melancholy fact which has
kept others as well as him from conversion to the true faith.  He said
he did not want to become a Christian because the Christians in
Savannah got drunk, told lies, and beat men and women.  Wesley had,
before leaving England, founded a small religious brotherhood, and on
his return he at once set to work to strengthen and enlarge it.

John Wesley was in every sense a remarkable man.  If any one in the
modern world can be said to have had a distinct religious mission,
Wesley certainly can be thus described.  He was born in 1703 at
Epworth, in Lincolnshire.  John Wesley came of a family distinguished
for its Churchmen and ministers.  His father was a clergyman of the
Church of England, and rector of the parish of Epworth; his grandfather
was also a clergyman, but became a Non-conformist minister, and seems
to have been a good deal persecuted for his opinions on religious
discipline.  John Wesley's father was a sincere and devout man, with a
certain literary repute and well read in {128} theology, but of narrow
mind and dogmatic, unyielding temper.  The right of King William to the
Throne was an article of faith with him, and it came on him one day
with the shock of a terrible surprise that his wife did not altogether
share his conviction.  He vowed that he would never live with her again
unless or until she became of his way of thinking; and he straightway
left the house, nor did he return to his home and his wife until after
the death of the King, when the controversy might be considered as
having closed.  The King died so soon, however, that the pair were only
separated for about a year; but it may fairly be assumed that, had the
King lived twenty years, Wesley would not have returned to his wife
unless she had signified to him that she had renounced her pestilent
scepticism.

The same stern strength of resolve which Wesley, the father, showed in
this extraordinary course was shown by the son at many a grave public
crisis in his career.  The birth of John Wesley was the result of the
reconciliation between the elder Wesley and his wife.  There were other
children, elder and younger; one of whom, Charles, became in after-life
the faithful companion and colleague of his brother.  John and Charles
Wesley were educated at Oxford, and were distinguished there by the
fervor of their religious zeal and the austerity of their lives.  There
were other young men there at the time who grew into close affinity
with the Wesleys.  There was George Whitefield, the son of a Gloucester
innkeeper, who at one time was employed as a drawer in his mother's
tap-room; and there was James Hervey, afterwards author of the flowery
and sentimental "Meditations," that became for a while so famous--a
book which Southey describes "as laudable in purpose and vicious in
style."  These young men, with others, formed a sort of little
religious association or companionship of their own.  They used to hold
meetings for their mutual instruction and improvement in religious
faith and life.  They shunned all amusement and all ordinary social
intercourse.  They were ridiculed {129} and laughed at, and various
nicknames were bestowed on them.  One of these nicknames they accepted
and adopted; as the Flemish _Gueux_ had done, and many another
religious sect and political party as well.  Those who chose to laugh
at them saw especial absurdity in their formal and methodical way of
managing their spiritual exercises and their daily lives.  The jesters
dubbed them Methodists; Wesley and his friends welcomed the title; and
the fame of the Methodists now folds in the orb of the earth.

[Sidenote: 1738--Torpor of the English Church]

Wesley and his friends had in the beginning, and for long years after,
no idea whatever of leaving the fold of the English Church.  They had
as little thought of that kind as in a later generation had the men who
made the Free Church of Scotland.  Probably their ideas were very vague
in their earlier years.  They were young men tremendously in earnest;
they were aflame in spirit and conscience with religious zeal; and they
saw that the Church of England was not doing the work that might have
been and ought to have been expected of her.  She had ceased utterly to
be a missionary Church.  She troubled herself in nowise about spreading
the glad tidings of salvation among the heathen.  At home she was
absolutely out of touch with the great bulk of the people.  The poor
and the ignorant were left quietly to their own resources.  The
clergymen of the Church of England were not indeed by any means a body
of men wanting in personal morality, or even in religious feeling, but
they had as little or no religious activity because they had little or
no religious zeal.  They performed perfunctorily their perfunctory
duties; and that, as a rule, was all they did.

Atterbury, Burnet, Swift, all manner of writers, who were themselves
ministering in the Church of England, unite in bearing testimony to the
torpid condition into which the Church had fallen.  Decorum seemed to
be the highest reach of the spiritual lives of most of the clergy.  One
finds curious confirmation of the statements {130} made publicly by men
like Atterbury and Burnet in some of the appeals privately made by
Swift to his powerful friends for the promotion of poor and deserving
clergymen whose poverty and merit had been brought under his notice.
The recommendation generally begins and ends in the fact that each
particular man had led a decent, respectable life; that he was striving
to bring up honestly a large family; and that his living or curacy was
not enough to maintain him in comfort.  We hardly ever hear of the work
which the good man had been doing among the poor, the ignorant, and the
sinful.  Swift has said many hard and even terrible things about
bishops and deans, and vicars and curates.  But these stern accusations
do not form anything like as formidable a testimony against the
condition into which the Church had fallen as will be found in the
exceptional praise which he gives to those whom he specially desires to
recommend for promotion; and in the fact that the highest reach of that
praise comes to nothing more than the assurance that the man had led a
decent life, had a large family, and was very poor.  Such a
recommendation as that would not have counted for much with John
Wesley.  He would have wanted to know what work the clergyman had done
outside his own domestic life; what ignorance had he enlightened, what
sinners had he brought to repentance.

[Sidenote: 1738--An "archbishop of the slums"]

Things were still worse in the Established Church of Ireland.  Hardly a
pastor of that Church could speak three words of the language of the
Irish people.  Lord Stanhope, in his "History of England from the Peace
of Utrecht," writes as if the Irish clergymen--the clergymen, that is,
of the Established Church of Ireland--might have accomplished wonders
in the way of converting the Irish peasantry to Protestantism if they
only could have preached and controverted in the Irish language.  We
are convinced that they could have done nothing of the kind.  The Irish
Celtic population is in its very nature a Catholic population.  Not all
the preaching since Adam {131} could have made them other than that.
Still it struck John Wesley very painfully later on that the effort was
never made, and that the men who could not talk to the Irish people in
their own tongue, and who did not take the trouble to learn the
language, were not in a promising condition for the conversion of
souls.  The desire of Wesley and his brother, and Whitefield and the
rest, seems only at first to have been an awakening of the Church in
these islands to a sense of her duty.  They do not appear to have had
any very far-reaching hopes or plans.  They saw that the work was left
undone, and they labored to bring about a spirit which should lead men
to the doing of it.  At first they only held their little meetings on
each succeeding Sunday; but they found themselves warming to the task,
and they began to meet and confer very often.  Their one thought was
how to get at the people; how to get at the lowly, the ignorant, and
the poor.  Soon they began to see that the lowly, the ignorant, and the
poor would not come to the Church, and that, therefore, the Church must
go out to them.  In a day much nearer to our own a prelate of the
Established Church indulged in a very unlucky and unworthy sneer at the
expense of the first Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster.  He
called him an "Archbishop of the slums."  The retort was easy and
conclusive.  It was an admission.  "Exactly; that is just what I am.  I
am an archbishop of the slums; that is my business; that is what I
desire to be.  My ministry is among the hovels and the garrets and the
slums; yours, I admit, is something very different."

This illustrates to the life the central idea which was forming itself
gradually and slowly into shape in the mind of John Wesley and in the
minds of his associates.  They saw that archbishops of the slums were
the very prelates whom England needed.  Their souls revolted against
the apparently accepted idea that the duties of a priest of the Church
of England were fulfilled by the preaching of a chill, formal, written
sermon once a week, and the attendance {132} on Court ceremonials, and
the dining at the houses of those who would then have been called "the
great."  An institution which could do no more and strove to do no more
than the Church of England was then doing did not seem to them to
deserve the name of a Church.  It was simply a branch of the Civil
Service of the State.  But Wesley and his brother, and Whitefield and
the rest, fully believed at first that they could do something to
quicken the Church into a real, a beneficent, and a religions activity.
Most of them had for a long time a positive horror of open-air
preaching and of the co-operation of lay preachers.  Most of them for a
long time clung to all the traditional forms and even formulas amid
which they had grown up.  What Wesley and the others did not see at
first, or for long after, was that the Church of England was not then
equal to the work which ought to have been hers.  A great change was
coming over the communities and the population of England.  Small
hamlets were turning into large towns.  Great new manufacturing
industries were creating new classes of working-men.  Coal-mines were
gathering together vast encampments of people where a little time
before there had been idle heath or lonely hill-side.  The Church of
England, with her then hide-bound constitution and her traditional
ways, was not equal to the new burdens which she was supposed to
undertake.  She suffered also from that lack of competition which is
hurtful to so many institutions.  The Church of Rome had been
suppressed for the time in this country, and the most urgent means had
been employed to keep the Dissenters down; therefore the Church of
England had grown contented, sleek, inert, and was no longer equal to
its work.  This fact began after a while to impress itself more and
more on the minds of the little band who worked with John Wesley.  They
resisted the idea to the very last; they hoped and believed and dreamed
that they might still be part of the Church of England.  They found
themselves drawn outside the Church, and they found, too, that when
once they had gone even a very little way out of the {133} fold, the
gates were rudely closed against them, and they might not return.  It
was not that Wesley and his associates left the Church of England.  The
Church would not have them because they would persist in doing the work
to which she would not even attempt to put a hand.

[Sidenote: 1738--John Wesley's Charity]

John Wesley had been profoundly impressed by William Law's pious and
mystical book, "A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life," which was
published in 1729.  Law lived in London, and Wesley, who desired to be
in frequent intercourse with him, used to walk to and from the
metropolis for the purpose.  The money he thus saved he gave to the
poor.  He wore his hair at one time very long in order to save the
expense of cutting and dressing it, and thus have more money to give
away in charity.  He and his little band of associates, whose numbers
swelled at one time up to twenty-five, but afterwards dropped down to
five, imposed on themselves rules of discipline almost as harsh as
those of a monastery of the Trappist order.  They fasted every
Wednesday and Friday, and they made it a duty to visit the prisons and
hospitals.  Wesley's father, who was growing old, was very anxious that
his son should succeed him in the rectory of Epworth.  John would not
hear of it.  In vain his father pressed and prayed; the son could not
see his way in that direction.  John Wesley has been blamed by some of
his biographers for not accepting the task which his father desired and
thought right to impose on him.  But no one on earth could understand
John Wesley's mission but John Wesley himself.  When it was pressed
upon him that in the living of Epworth he would have the charge of two
thousand souls he said, "I see not how any man can take care of a
hundred."  It was pointed out to him that his little band of companions
had been growing smaller and smaller; he only answered that he was
purifying a fountain and not a stream.  The illustration was effective
and happy.

The truth is that the tremendous energies of John {134} Wesley could
not possibly find employment within the narrow field of work adopted by
the Established Church of his day.  Wesley was a fighter; he had to go
out into the broad living world and do battle there.  He had
originality as well as energy; he must do his work his own way; he
could not be a minister of routine.  He soon found it borne in upon him
that he must speak to his fellow-man wherever he could find him.  For a
long time he held back from the thought of open-air preaching, but now
he saw that it must be done.  There was a period of his life, he says,
when he would have thought the saving of a soul "a sin almost if it had
not been done in a church."  But from the first moment when he began to
preach to crowds in the open air he must have felt that he had found
his work at last.  His friend and colleague Whitefield, who had more of
the genius of an orator than Wesley, had preceded him in this path.
One is a little surprised that such men as Wesley and Whitefield should
ever have found any difficulty about preaching to a crowd in the open
air.  The Hill of Mars at Athens listened to an open-air sermon from an
apostle, and Whitefield himself observed at a later date that the
"Sermon on the Mount is a pretty remarkable precedent of field
preaching."

[Sidenote: 1738--Wesley's superstition]

Meanwhile, however, Wesley's father died, and Wesley received an
invitation to go out to Georgia with General Oglethorpe, the governor
of that settlement, to preach to the Indians and the colonists.  He
sailed for the new colony on October 14, 1735.  He was accompanied by
his brother Charles and two other missionaries, and on board the vessel
was a small band of men from "the meek Moravian Missions."  The
Moravian sect was then in its earliest working order.  It had been
founded--or perhaps it would be more fitting to say restored--not many
years before, by the enthusiastic and devoted Count Von Zinzendorf.
Wesley was greatly attracted by the ways and the spiritual life of the
Moravians.  It is worthy of note that when Count Zinzendorf began the
formation or {135} restoration of Moravianism he had as little idea of
departing from the fold of the Confession of Augsburg as Wesley had of
leaving the Church of England.  John Wesley did not, as we have said,
accomplish much among the colonists and the Indians.  Perhaps his ways
were too dogmatic and dictatorial for the colonists.  He departed
altogether from the Church discipline in some of his religious
exercises, while he clung to it pertinaciously in others.  He offended
local magnates by preaching at them from the pulpit, giving them pretty
freely a piece of his mind as to their conduct and ways of life, and,
indeed, turning them to public ridicule with rough and rasping
sarcasms.  With the Indians he could not do much, if only for the fact
that he had to speak to them through an interpreter.  The tongue, says
Jean Paul Richter, is eloquent only in its own language, and the heart
in its own religion.  It certainly was not from lack of zeal and energy
that Wesley failed to accomplish much among the Indians.  He flung
himself into the work with all his indomitable spirit and disregard for
trouble and pain.  One of his biographers tells us that "he exposed
himself with the utmost indifference to every change of season and
inclemency of weather; snow and hail, storm and tempest, had no effect
on his iron body.  He frequently lay down on the ground and slept all
night with his hair frozen to the earth; he would swim over rivers with
his clothes on and travel till they were dry, and all this without any
apparent injury to his health."  It is no wonder that Wesley soon began
to regard himself as a man specially protected by divine power.  He was
deeply, romantically superstitious.  He commonly guided his course by
opening a page of the Bible and reading the first passage that met his
eye.  He saw visions; he believed in omens.  He tells us himself of the
instantaneous way in which some of his prayers for rescue from danger
were answered from above.  Those who believe that the work Wesley had
to do was really great and beneficent work will hardly feel any regret
that such a man should have allowed himself to be governed {136} by
such ideas.  It was necessary to the tasks he had to execute that he
should believe himself to bear a charmed life.

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.

{162}

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.

{170}

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 théâtre_.  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.

The new Parliament met on December 1, 1741, and re-elected Mr. Onslow
as Speaker.  The speech from the throne was almost entirely taken up
with somewhat cheerless references to the war with Spain, and the
debate on {187} the address was naturally made the occasion for new
attacks on the policy of the Government.  "Certainly, my Lords," said
Chesterfield, "it is not to be hoped that we should regain what we have
lost but by measures different from those which have reduced us to our
present state, and by the assistance of other counsellors than those
who have sunk us into the contempt and exposed us to the ravages of
every nation throughout the world."  This was the string that had been
harped upon in all the pamphlets and letters of the Patriots during the
progress of the war.  Walpole had done it all; Walpole had delayed the
war to gratify France; he had prevented the war from being carried on
vigorously in order to assist France; he had obtained a majority in
Parliament by the most outrageous and systematic corruption; he was an
enemy of his country, and so forth.  All these charges and allegations
were merely founded on Walpole's public policy.  They simply came to
this, that a certain course of action taken by Walpole, with the
approval of Parliament, was declared by Walpole to have been taken from
patriotic motives and for the good of England, and was declared by his
enemies to have been taken from unpatriotic motives and in the interest
of France.  It was of no avail for Walpole to point out that everything
he had done thus far had been done with the approval of the House of
Commons.  The answer was ready: "Exactly; and there is another of your
crimes: you bribed and corrupted every former House of Commons."

[Sidenote: 1742--Pulteney's attempt to refer]

On January 21, 1742, Pulteney brought forward a motion to refer all the
papers concerning the war, which had just been laid on the table, to a
select committee of the House, in order that the committee should
examine the papers, and report to the House concerning them.  This was
simply a motion for a committee of inquiry into the manner in which
ministers were carrying on the war.  The House was the fullest that had
been known for many years.  Pulteney had 250 votes with him; Walpole
had only 253--a majority of three.  Some of the efforts made {188} on
both sides to bring up the numbers on this occasion remind one of
Hogarth's picture of the "Polling Day," where the paralytic, the
maimed, the deaf, and the dying are carried up to record their vote.
Men so feeble from sickness that they could not stand were brought down
to the House wrapped up like mummies, and lifted through the division.
Walpole seems to have surpassed himself in the speech which he made in
his own defence.  At least such is the impression we get from the
declaration of some of those who heard it, Pulteney himself among the
rest.  Pulteney always sat near to Walpole on the Treasury bench;
Pulteney, of course, not admitting that he had in any way changed his
political principles since Walpole and he were friends and colleagues.
Pulteney offered to Walpole his warm congratulations on his speech, and
added, "Well, nobody can do what you can."  Pulteney might afford to be
gracious.  The victory of three was a substantial defeat.  It was the
prologue to a defeat which was to be formal as well as substantial.
The Patriots were elated.  The fruit of their long labors was about to
come at last.

All this was telling hard upon Walpole's health.  We get melancholy
accounts of the cruel work which his troubles were making with that
frame which once might have seemed to be of iron.  The robust animal
spirits which could hardly be kept down in former days had now changed
into a mournful and even a moping temperament.  His son, Horace
Walpole, gives a very touching picture of him in these decaying years.
"He who was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow--for I have
frequently known him snore ere they had drawn his curtains--now never
sleeps above an hour without waking; and he who at dinner always forgot
he was minister, and was more gay and thoughtless than all the company,
now sits without speaking, and with his eyes fixed for an hour
together."  Many of his friends implored him to give up the hopeless
and thankless task.  Walpole still clung to office; still tried new
stratagems; planned new combinations; racked {189} his brain for new
devices.  He actually succeeded in inducing the King to have an offer
made to the Prince of Wales of an addition of fifty thousand pounds a
year to his income, provided that Frederick would desist from
opposition to the measures of the Government.  The answer was what
every one--every one, surely, but Walpole, must have expected.  The
prince professed any amount of duty to his father, but as regards
Walpole he was implacable.  He would listen to no terms of compromise