[Sidenote: 1763—Johnson's influence on literature]

Johnson's presence adorned and honored four-and-twenty years of a reign that was to last for sixty years. He was the friend or the enemy of every man worthy to arouse any strong emotion of love or scorn in a strong spirit. He had the admiration of all whose admiration was worth the having. The central figure of the literary London of his lifetime, he exercised something of the same social and intellectual influence over all Londoners that Socrates exercised over all Athenians. The affection he inspired survived him, and widens with the generations. In the hundred years and more that have passed since Johnson's death, his memory has grown greener. The symbol of his life and of its lesson is to be found in what Hawthorne beautifully calls the sad and lovely legend of the man Johnson's public penance in the rain, amid the jeering crowd, to expiate the offence of the child against its father. Johnson was the very human apostle of a divine righteousness.



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CHAPTER XLIV.

THE "NORTH BRITON"

[Sidenote: 1763—John Wilkes]

One of the most beautiful places on one of the most beautiful rivers in the world is Medmenham on the Thames, hard by Marlow. In the awakening of spring, in the tranquillity of summer, or the rich decline of August, the changing charm of the spot appeals with the special insistence that association lends to nature. Medmenham is a haunted place. Those green fields and smiling gardens have been the scenes of the strangest idyls; those shining waters have mirrored the fairest of frail faces; those woods have echoed to the names of the light nymphs of town and the laughter of modish satyrs. It was once very lonely in its loveliness, a ground remote, where men could do and did do as they pleased unheeded and unobserved. Where now from April to October a thousand pleasure-boats pass by, where a thousand pleasure-seekers land and linger, a century and a half ago the spirit of solitude brooded, and those who came there came to a calm as unvexed and as enchanting as the calm of Avallon. They made strange uses of their exquisite opportunity. They profaned the groves whose very winds breathed peace; they polluted the stream that a poet would have found sacred. The remains are there of a Cistercian abbey, the ruins of a ruin, twice fallen into disuse and decay. It was a ruin in the eighteenth century when a member of Parliament, who was also a baronet and a Chancellor of the Exchequer, took it into his evil head to repair it. Under the care of Sir Francis Dashwood it was restored for a new and altered life. The abbey rose again, and once again was associated with a brotherhood of monks. But where the quiet Cistercians had lived and prayed a new {47} brotherhood of St. Francis, named after their founder, devoted themselves to all manner of blasphemy, to all manner of offence. In a spot whose beauty might well be expected to have only a softening influence, whose memories might at least be found exalting, a handful of disreputable men gathered together to degrade the place, and, as far as that was possible, themselves, with the beastly pleasures and beastly humors of the ingrained blackguard.

The Hell-Fire Club was dead and gone, but the spirit of the Hell-Fire Club was alive and active. The monks of St. Francis were worthy pupils of the principles of the Duke of Wharton. They sought to make their profligacy, in which they strove to be unrivalled, piquant by a parody of the religious ceremonies of the Christian faith. The energy and the earnestness which other men devote to the advancement of some public cause, to the furtherance of their country's welfare, or even to the gratification of their own ambitions, these men devoted to a passion for being pre-eminent in sin, conspicuous in infamy. If they succeeded in nothing else, they succeeded in making their names notorious and shameful, they succeeded in stirring the envy of men no better than they, but less enabled by wealth or position to gratify their passions. They succeeded in arousing the loathing not merely of honest men, but even of the knaves and fools whose rascality was not so rotten and whose folly was not so foul as that of the noblemen and statesmen who rioted within the walls of Medmenham.

It is curious and melancholy to record that the leading spirits of this abominable brotherhood were legislators in both Houses of Parliament, men of old family, great position, large means, men holding high public office, members of the Government. Their follies and their sins would scarcely be worth remembering to-day were it not for the chance that gave them for companion and ally one of the most remarkable men of his age, a man whose abilities were in striking contrast to those of his associates, a man who might almost be called a man of genius.

{48}

John Wilkes was the son of a rich distiller and of a Presbyterian mother. He had received a good education in England and at Leyden, where so many of the Englishmen of that day went as students. He had travelled much in his youth upon the Continent. On his return he was induced by his father, he being then only two-and-twenty, to marry a lady who was exceedingly rich, but who had the misfortune to be at least ten years older than her husband. It is scarcely surprising to find that the marriage did not turn out happily. Wilkes was young, fresh from the bright Continental life, delighting in pleasure and the society of those who pursued pleasure. How far a happier marriage might have influenced him for good it were idle to consider. His marriage he regarded always and spoke of always as a sacrifice to Plutus, not to Venus, and he certainly was at no pains to make it any more of a sacrifice than he could help. His wild tastes, his wild companions soon sickened and horrified Mrs. Wilkes. The ill-matched pair separated, and remained separate for the rest of their lives.

Wilkes was delighted to be free. He was at liberty to squander his money unquestioned and unchallenged in the society of as pretty a gang of scoundrels as even the age could produce. No meaner, more malignant, or more repulsive figure darkens the record of the last century than that of Lord Sandwich. Sir Francis Dashwood ran him close in infamy. Mr. Thomas Potter was the peer of either in beastliness. All three were members of Parliament; all three were partially responsible for the legislation of the country; two were especially so responsible. All three were bound at least to a decorous acknowledgment of the observances of the Church; one was in especial so bound. Sir Francis Dashwood and Lord Sandwich were, then or thereafter, members of the Government. Sir Francis Dashwood was remarkable as having been the worst and stupidest Chancellor of the Exchequer known to history. Lord Sandwich was made First Lord of the Admiralty. As for the third in this triumvirate of blackguards, Mr. Thomas Potter was a son of the Archbishop {49} of Canterbury, and he was soon afterwards made Vice-Treasurer for Ireland. Into such honorable hands were the duties of government delivered less than a century and a half ago.

[Sidenote: 1763—Wilkes's profligacy]

In this society Wilkes was made very welcome. He brought to their filthy fooleries something resembling wit; he brought an intelligence as far above that of his companions as that of the monkey is above that of the rabbit. While he had money he spent it as royally as the rest. If he rivalled them in their profligacy, he outstripped them by his intellect. They were conspicuous only by their vices; he would have been a remarkable man even if it had pleased Providence to make him virtuous. It had not pleased Providence to make him attractive to look upon. There were few uglier men of his day; few who lost less by their ugliness. But though we are well assured that his appearance was repulsive, he redeemed his hideousness by his ready tongue and witty mind. He said of himself, truly enough, that he only wanted half an hour's start to make him even with the handsomest man in England.

Wilkes flung his money and his wife's money about recklessly, while he played his part as a country gentleman upon the estate at Aylesbury which his unhappy wife had resigned to him when they separated. Of this money some eight thousand pounds went in an unsuccessful attempt to bribe his way into the representation of Berwick, and seven thousand more went in the successful attempt to buy himself the representation of Aylesbury. It is probable that he hoped to advance his failing fortunes in Parliament. His fortunes were failing, failing fast. He made an ignoble attempt to bully his wife out of the miserable income of two hundred a year which was all that she had saved out of her wealth, but the attempt was happily defeated by that Court of King's Bench against which Wilkes was to be pitted later in more honorable hostility.

It was perhaps impossible that Wilkes could long remain content with the companionship of men like Dashwood and Sandwich; it was certainly impossible that men {50} like Dashwood and like Sandwich could for long feel comfortable in the companionship of a man so infinitely their superior in wit, intelligence, and taste. The panegyrists of Sandwich—for even Sandwich had his panegyrists in an age when wealth and rank commanded compliment—found the courage to applaud Sandwich as a scholar and an antiquarian, on the strength of an account of some travels in the Mediterranean, which the world has long since willingly let die. But the few weeks or months of foreign travel that permitted Sandwich to pose as a connoisseur when he was not practising as a profligate could not inspire him with the humor or the appreciation of Wilkes, and a friendship only cemented by a common taste for common vices soon fell asunder. There is a story to the effect that the quarrel began with a practical joke which Wilkes played off on Sandwich at Medmenham. Sandwich, in some drunken orgy, was induced to invoke the devil, whereupon Wilkes let loose a monkey, that had been kept concealed in a box, and drove Sandwich into a paroxysm of fear in the belief that his impious supplication had been answered. For whatever reason, Wilkes and Sandwich ceased to be friends, to Wilkes's cost at first, and to Sandwich's after. Sandwich owes his unenviable place in history to his association with Wilkes in the first place, and in the next to his alliance with the beautiful, unhappy Miss Ray, who was murdered by her melancholy lover, the Rev. Mr. Hickman, at the door of Covent Garden Theatre. The fate of his mistress and his treason to his friend have preserved the name of Sandwich from the forgetfulness it deserved.

[Sidenote: 1763—Wilkes as a Member of Parliament]

In those days Wilkes made no very remarkable figure in Parliament. It was outside the walls of Westminster that he first made a reputation as a public man. In the unpopularity of Bute, Wilkes found opportunity for his own popularity. The royal peace policy was very unwelcome, and agitated the feeling of the country profoundly. Political controversy ran as high in the humblest cross-channels as in the main stream of courtly and political life. At that time, we are told by a contemporary {51} letter-writer, the mason would pause in his task to discuss the progress of the peace, and the carpenter would neglect his work to talk of the Princess Dowager, of Lord Treasurers and Secretaries of State. To win support and sympathy from such keen observers, the Ministry turned again for aid to the public press that had been so long neglected by the Whigs. Smollett, the remembered novelist, Murphy, the forgotten dramatist, were commissioned to champion the cause of the Government in the two papers, the Briton and the Auditor.

The Government already had a severe journalistic critic in the Monitor, a newspaper edited by John Entinck, which had been started in 1755. The Monitor was not at all like a modern newspaper. It was really little more than a weekly pamphlet, a folio of six pages published every Saturday, and containing an essay upon the political situation of the hour. Its hostility to Bute goaded the minister into the production of the Briton, which was afterwards supplemented by the creation of the Auditor when it was found that Smollett had called up against the Ministry a more terrible antagonist than the Monitor. For the Briton only lives in the memories of men because it called into existence the North Briton.

Wilkes had entered Parliament as the impassioned follower of Pitt. He made many confessions of his desire to serve his country, professions which may be taken as sincere enough. But he was also anxious to serve himself and to mend his fortunes, and he did not find in Parliamentary life the advancement for which he hoped. Twice he sought for high position under the Crown, and twice he was unsuccessful. He wished to be made ambassador to Constantinople, where he would have found much that was congenial to him, and his wish was not granted. He wished to be made Governor-General of the newly conquered Quebec, and again his desires were unheeded. Wilkes believed that Bute was the cause of his double disappointment. He became convinced that while the favors of the State lay in Bute's hands they would only be given to Tories, and more especially to Tories who were also {52} Scotchmen. If Bute could have known, it would have been a happy hour for him which had seen Wilkes starting for the Golden Horn or sailing for the St. Lawrence. But Bute was a foolish man, and he did his most foolish deed when he made Wilkes his enemy.

The appearance of the North Briton was an event in the history of journalism as well as in the political history of the country. It met the heavy-handed violence of the Briton with a frank ferocity which was overpowering. It professed to fight on the same side as the Monitor, but it surpassed Entinck's paper as much in virulence as in ability. Under the whimsical pretence of being a North Briton, Wilkes assailed the Scotch party in the State with unflagging satire and unswerving severity. In the satire and the severity he had an able henchman in Charles Churchill.

[Sidenote: 1731-1764—The poet Churchill]

Those who are inclined to condemn Wilkes because for a season he found entertainment in the society of a Sandwich, a Dashwood, and a Potter, must temper their judgment by remembering the affection that Wilkes was able to inspire in the heart of Churchill. While the scoundrels of Medmenham were ready to betray their old associate, and, with no touch of the honor proverbially attributed to thieves, to drive him into disgrace, to exile, and if possible to death, the loyal friendship of the poet was given to Wilkes without reserve. Churchill was not a man of irreproachable character, of unimpeachable morality, or of unswerving austerity. But he was as different from the Sandwiches and the Dashwoods as dawn is different from dusk, and in enumerating all of the many arguments that are to be accumulated in defence of Wilkes, not the least weighty arguments are that while on the one hand he earned the hatred of Sandwich and of Dashwood, on the other hand he earned the love of Charles Churchill.

Churchill's name and fame have suffered of late years. Since Byron stood by the neglected grave and mused on him who blazed, the comet of a season, the genius of Churchill has been more and more disregarded. But the Georgian epoch, so rich in its many and contrasting types {53} of men of letters, produced few men more remarkable in themselves, if not in their works, than Charles Churchill. The cleric who first became famous for most unclerical assaults upon the stage, the satirist who could be the most devoted friend, the seducer who could be so loyal to his victim, the spendthrift who could be generous, the cynic who could feel and obey the principles of the purest patriotism, was one of those strangely compounded natures in which each vice was as it were effaced or neutralized by some compensating virtue. It may be fairly urged that while Churchill's virtues were his own, his vices were in large part the fault of his unhappy destiny. The Westminster boy who learned Latin under Vincent Bourne, and who was a schoolfellow of Warren Hastings, of Cowper, and of Colman, might possibly have made a good scholar, but was certainly not of the stuff of which good clergymen are made. An early marriage, an unhappy marriage contracted in the Rules of the Fleet, had weighed down his life with encumbrances almost before he had begun to live. Compelled to support an unsuitable wife and an increasing family, Churchill followed his father's example and his father's injudicious counsel and took Holy Orders. Men took Orders in those days with a light heart. It afforded the needy a livelihood, precarious indeed for the most part, but still preferable to famine. Men took Orders with no thought of the sanctity of their calling, of the solemn service it exacted, of its awful duties and its inexorable demands. They wished merely to keep famine from the door, to have food and fire and shelter, and they took Orders as under other conditions they would have taken the King's shilling, with no more feeling of reverence for the black cassock than for the scarlet coat. Churchill was not the man to wear the clergyman's gown with dignity, or to find in the gravity of his office consolation for the penury that it entailed. The Establishment offered meagre advantages to an extravagant man with an extravagant wife. He drifted deeper and deeper into debt. He became as a wandering star, reserved for the blackness of bailiffs and the darkness of duns. But the {54} rare quality he had in him of giving a true friendship to his friend won a like quality from other men. Dr. Lloyd, under-master of his old school of Westminster, came to his aid, helped him in his need, and secured the patience of his creditors. He was no longer harassed, but he was still poor, and the spur of poverty drove him to tempt his fortune in letters. Like so many a literary adventurer of the eighteenth century, he saw in the writing of verse the sure way to success. Like so many a literary adventurer of the century, he carried his first efforts unsuccessfully from bookseller to bookseller. The impulses of his wit were satirical; he was not dismayed by failure; the stage had entertained him and irritated him, and he made the stage the subject of his first triumph. "The Rosciad" was in every sense a triumph. Its stings galled the vanity of the players to frenzy. At all times a susceptible brotherhood, their susceptibilities were sharply stirred by Churchill's corrosive lines and acidulated epigrams. Their indignation finding vent in hot recrimination and virulent lampoon only served to make the poem and its author better known to the public. Churchill replied to the worst of his assailants in "The Apology," which rivalled the success of "The Rosciad," and gained for the satirist the friendship of Garrick, who had affected to disdain the praises of "The Rosciad," but who now recognized in time the power of the satirist and the value of his approval. Churchill himself was delighted with his good fortune. He was the talk of the town; he had plenty of money in his pocket; he was separated from his wife, freed from his uncongenial profession, and he could exchange the solemn black of the cleric for a blue coat with brass buttons and a gold-laced hat.

[Sidenote: 1762—Newspaper polemics]

Lest the actors whom he had lashed should resort to violence for revenge, he carried with ostentation a sturdy cudgel. It was a formidable weapon in hands like Churchill's, and Churchill was not molested. For Churchill was a man of great physical strength. He tells the world in the portrait he painted of himself of the vastness of his bones, of the strength of his muscles, of his arms like {55} two twin oaks, of his legs fashioned as if to bear the weight of the Mansion House, of his massive body surmounted by the massive face, broader than it was long. The ugly face was chiefly remarkable, according to the confession of its owner, for its expression of contentment, though the observant might discern "sense lowering in the penthouse of his eye." Like most giants, he overtaxed his strength, both mentally and physically. Whatever he did he did with all his mighty energy. He loved, hated, worked, played, at white heat as it were, and withered up his forces with the flame they fed. In nothing did his zeal consume itself more hotly than in his devotion to Wilkes.

Churchill met Wilkes in 1762, and seems to have fallen instantly under the spell which Wilkes found it so easy to exercise upon all who came into close contact with him. Undoubtedly Churchill's friendship was very valuable to Wilkes. If Churchill loved best to express his satire in verse, he could write strongly and fiercely in prose, and the North Briton owed to his pen some of its most brilliant and some of its bitterest pages. In the North Briton Wilkes and Churchill laid about them lustily, striking at whatever heads they pleased, holding their hands for no fame, no dignity, no influence. It was wholly without fear and wholly without favor. If it assailed Bute again and again with an unflagging zeal, it was no less ready to challenge to an issue the greatest man who over accepted a service from Bute, and to remind Dr. Johnson, who had received a pension from the King's favorite, of his own definition of a pension and of a pensioner.

Before the fury and the popularity of the North Briton both the Auditor and the Briton had to strike their colors. The Auditor came to its inglorious end on February 8, 1763. The Briton died on the 12th of the same month, leaving the North Briton master of the field. Week after week the North Briton grew more severe in its strictures upon the Government, strictures that scorned the veil of hint and innuendo that had hitherto prevailed in these pamphleteering wars. Even the Monitor had always alluded to the statesmen whom it assailed by initial letters. {56} The North Briton called them by their names in all the plainness of full print, the name of the sovereign not being excepted from this courageous rule. But the fame of the North Briton only came to its full with the number forty-five.



{57}

CHAPTER XLV.

NUMBER FORTY-FIVE.

[Sidenote: 1763—Wilkes's criticism of the King's speech]

When Bute disappeared from the public leadership of his party, Wilkes, from professedly patriotic motives, delayed the publication of the current number of the North Briton, to see if the policy which Bute had inspired still guided the actions of the gentle shepherd, George Grenville. Wilkes wished to know if the influence of the Scottish minister was at an end, or if he still governed through those wretched tools who had supported the most odious of his measures, the ignominious peace, and the wicked extension of the arbitrary mode of excise. He declared himself that if Bute only intended to retire into that situation which he held before he took the seals, a situation in which he dictated to every part of the King's administration, Wilkes was as ready to combat the new Administration as he had been steady in his opposition to a single, insolent, incapable, despotic minister.

Any hope that Wilkes may have entertained of a reformation of the Ministry was dispelled by a talk which he had with Temple and Pitt at Temple's house, where Temple showed him an early copy of the King's speech. Wilkes, Pitt, and Temple were entirely in agreement as to the fatal defects of the speech, and Wilkes went promptly home and wrote the article which made the forty-fifth number of the North Briton famous.

In itself the number forty-five was no stronger in its utterances than many of the preceding numbers. If its tone be compared with the tone of journalistic criticism of ministers or their sovereign less than a generation later, it seems sober and even mild. Wilkes's article started with a citation from Cicero: "Genus orationis atrox et {58} vehemena, cui opponitur genus illud alterum lenitatis et mansuetudinis." Then came Wilkes's comment on the speech. He was careful not to criticize directly the King. With a prudence that was perhaps more ironical than any direct stroke at the sovereign, he attacked the minister who misled and misrepresented the monarch. "The King's speech has always been considered by the legislature and by the public at large as the speech of the minister."

Starting from this understanding, Wilkes went on to stigmatize the Address as "the most abandoned instance of ministerial effrontery ever attempted to be imposed upon mankind," and he doubted whether "the imposition is greater upon the sovereign or on the nation." "Every friend of his country," the writer declared, "must lament that a prince of so many great and amiable qualities, whom England truly reveres, can be brought to give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious measures and to the most unjustifiable public declarations from a throne ever renowned for truth, honor, and unsullied virtue."

The article was not intemperate and it certainly was not unjust. But when it appeared the King was still new flushed with his idea of his own personal authority in the State, and the slightest censure of his policy goaded him into a kind of frenzy. Had Wilkes endeavored with his own hand to kill the King in his palace of St. James's he could hardly have made the monarch more furious. He had long hated and his ministers had long dreaded the outspoken journalist. King and ministers now felt that the time had arrived when they could strike, and strike effectively. The King commanded the law officers of the Crown to read the article and give their opinion upon it. The law officers did the work that they knew the King expected from them. They found that the paper was an infamous and seditious libel tending to incite the people to insurrection. They declared that the offence was one punishable in due course of law as a misdemeanor. Upon this hint the ministers acted, rapidly and rashly. A general warrant was issued for the apprehension of the authors, printers, and publishers of the North Briton. The printer {59} and the publisher were arrested and brought before Lord Halifax and Lord Egremont, to whom they gave up the names of John Wilkes and Charles Churchill as the authors of the North Briton. The next step was to arrest Wilkes himself.

[Sidenote: 1763—Arrest of Wilkes]

The King's messengers came upon Wilkes in his house in Great George Street, Westminster. It is honorably characteristic of the man that in the moment of his own danger he felt more concern for the danger of another. While he was arguing with the officials that they had no power to arrest him, as he was a member of Parliament and therefore privileged against arrest, Churchill came into the room on a visit to Wilkes. Churchill, Wilkes knew, was as certain to be arrested as he was. Churchill could plead no privilege. It was probable that the messengers were unfamiliar with Churchill's face. Wilkes, with happy good-nature and happy audacity, immediately hailed Churchill as Mr. Thompson, clasped his hand and inquired affectionately how Mrs. Thompson did and if she was going to dine in the country. If Wilkes was clever in his suggestion Churchill was no less clever in taking the hint. He thanked Wilkes, declared that Mrs. Thompson was at that moment waiting for him, and that he had merely called in to inquire after the health of Wilkes. Saying which, Churchill swiftly bowed himself out, hurried home, secured all his papers, and disappeared into the country. The King's messengers, who were promptly at his lodgings, were never able to discover his whereabouts.

The flight to which Wilkes so ingeniously assisted him is not the brightest part of Churchill's career. He carried with him into his retreat a young girl, a Miss Carr, the daughter of a Westminster stonecutter, whom the charms of Churchill's manners had induced to leave her father's house. He could not marry the girl, as he was married already, and, to do him justice, he appears soon to have repented the wrong he had done her. But after an unsuccessful attempt on the girl's part to live again with her own people she returned to her lover, and she lived with her lover to the end. Churchill seems to have been sincerely {60} attached to her. If he had been a free man, if his life had not been blighted by his early unhappy marriage, their union might have been a very happy one. At his death he left annuities to both women, to the woman he had married and the woman he had loved, the wife's annuity being the larger of the two.

While Churchill was making his way as quickly as possible out of a town that his services to his friend had rendered too hot to hold him, Wilkes was immediately hurried before Lord Halifax and Lord Egremont at Whitehall. He carried himself very composedly in the presence of his enemies. He persistently asserted his privilege, as a member of Parliament, against arrest. He refused to answer any questions or to acknowledge the authorship of No. 45 of the North Briton. He professed with equal enthusiasm his loyalty to the King and his loathing of the King's advisers, and he announced his intention of bringing the matter before Parliament the moment that the session began. Egremont and Halifax retaliated by sending Wilkes to the Tower and causing his house to be searched and all his papers to be seized. The high-handed folly of the King's friends had for their chief effect the conversion of men who had little sympathy for Wilkes into, if not his advocates, at least his allies against the illegal methods which were employed to crush him.

Wilkes, through his friends, immediately applied to the Court of Common Pleas for a writ of habeas corpus. This was at once obtained, and was served upon the messengers of the Secretary of State. But Wilkes was no longer in their custody, and Wilkes was detained in the Tower for a whole week, part of the time, as he declared, in solitary confinement, before he was brought into court. Judge Pratt immediately ordered his discharge on the ground of his claim to immunity from arrest as a member of Parliament, without prejudice to any later action against him.

[Sidenote: 1763—Hogarth's caricature of Wilkes]

It was while Wilkes was before Pratt at Westminster that, if we may accept the authority of Churchill, one of Wilkes's keenest enemies seized an opportunity for a cruel {61} revenge. Hogarth hated both Wilkes and Churchill. He had begun the quarrel by attacking the North Briton and the Monitor in his cartoon "The Times," executed for the greater glorification of the painter's patron, Lord Bute. The North Briton replied to this attack with a vigor which infuriated Hogarth, who had his full share of the irritable vanity which the world always attributes to the artist. In Wilkes's difficulty Hogarth saw his opportunity. Lurking behind a screen in the Court of Common Pleas, the painter sought and found an opportunity for making a sketch of Wilkes. While Justice Pratt, with what Wilkes called "the eloquence and courage of old Rome," was laying down the law upon the prisoner's plea preparatory to setting him at liberty, Hogarth's busy pencil was engaged upon the first sketch for that caricature which has helped to make Wilkes's features famous and infamous throughout the world. The print was promptly published at a shilling, and commanded an enormous sale. Nearly four thousand copies, it is said, were sold within a few weeks. The envenomed skill of Hogarth has made the appearance of Wilkes almost as familiar to us as to the men of his own time. The sneering, satyr face, the sinister squint, the thrust-out chin and protruding lower jaw belong to a face severely visited by Nature, even when liberal allowance is made for the animosity that prompted the hand of the caricaturist. The caricature was a savage stroke; to Wilkes's friends it seemed to be a traitor's stroke. Wilkes appears to have taken it, as he took most things, with composure. "I know," he wrote later, "but one short apology to be made for the person of Mr. Wilkes; it is that he did not make himself, and that he never was solicitous about the case of his soul (as Shakespeare calls it) only so far as to keep it clean and in health. I never once heard that he hung over the glassy stream, like another Narcissus, admiring the image in it, nor that he ever stole an amorous look at his counterfeit in a side mirror. His form, such as it is, ought to give him no pain while it is capable of giving so much pleasure to others. I believe he finds himself tolerably happy in the clay {62} cottage to which he is a tenant for life, because he has learned to keep it in pretty good order; while the share of health and animal spirits which Heaven has given him shall hold out, I can scarcely imagine he will be one moment peevish about the outside of so precarious, so temporary a habitation, or will ever be brought to own 'Ingenium Galbae male habitat:' 'Monsieur est mal loge.'" Good-humored at the time, his good-humor persevered, and in later life he was wont to say jestingly that he found he was growing more and more like his famous portrait every day. But if it was becoming of Wilkes to bear the attack in so serene and even so jocular a spirit, it was not unbecoming, as it was not ungenerous, of his friends to fail to imitate the coolness of their leader. It is not quite easy to understand why, in an age of caricature, an age when all men of any notoriety were caricatured, the friends of Wilkes were so sensitive to the satire of Hogarth. Public men, and the friends of public men, have grown less sensitive. However, Wilkes's friends were, and showed themselves to be, as angry as Wilkes was, or showed himself to be, indifferent, and the hottest and angriest of them all was Churchill. Churchill could retaliate, and Churchill did retaliate with a ferocity that equalled and more than equalled Hogarth's.

[Sidenote: 1763—Churchill's denunciation of Hogarth]

With a rage that was prompted by friendship, yet with a coolness that the importance of the cause he championed called for, Churchill aimed blow after blow upon the offending painter. The skill of a practised executioner directed every stroke to a fresh spot, and with every stroke brought blood. The satirist called upon Hogarth by his name, to stand forth and be tried "in that great court where conscience must preside," bade him review his life from his earliest youth, and say if he could recall a single instance in which

Thou with an equal eye didst genius view And give to merit what was merit's duet Genius and merit are a sure offence, And thy soul sickens at the name of sense.

The poet goes on to say that "when Wilkes our countryman, {63} our common friend arose, his King, his country to defend," Malice

Had killed thee, tottering on life's utmost verge, Had Wilkes and Liberty escaped thy scourge.

And then, in some two hundred lines of strenuous rage, Churchill denounced Hogarth with a denunciation that was the more effective because it was accompanied by a frank and full recognition of Hogarth's great gifts and deserved title to fame. Hogarth retaliated by his famous caricature of Churchill as a canonical bear with a pot of porter in one paw and a huge cudgel in the other, the knots on the cudgel being numbered as Lie 1, Lie 2, and so forth. Instantly the great caricaturist was attacked by others eager to strike at one who had struck so hard in his day. The hatred of Bute was extended to the painter who condescended to accept Bute's patronage, and who labored to please his patron. Hogarth was derided as "The Butyfier," in mockery of his "Analysis of Beauty." It would have been as lucky for Hogarth as it would have been lucky for Bute to let Wilkes alone.

If Wilkes's release filled his supporters throughout the country with delight, it only spurred on his enemies to fresh attempts and fresh blunders. Had they left the matter where it stood, even though it stood at a defeat to them, they would have spared themselves much ignominy. But the fury of the King inspired a fiercer fury in the ministers and those who followed the ministers. Every weapon at their command was immediately levelled at Wilkes, even, it may not be unfairly asserted, the assassin's weapon. Wilkes carried himself gallantly, defiantly, even insolently. His attitude was not one to tempt angry opponents to forbearance. His letters from the Tower and after his release to Lord Halifax were couched in the most contemptuous language. He brought an action against Lord Halifax. He brought an action against Mr. Wood, the Under-Secretary of State, and was awarded 1,000 pounds damages. When Lord Egremont died, in the August of 1763, Wilkes declared that he had "been gathered {64} to the dull of ancient days." He republished the numbers of the North Briton in a single volume with notes, to prove that the King's speech could constitutionally be only regarded as the utterance of the King's ministers. There must have been a splendid stubbornness in the man which enabled him to face so daringly, so aggressively, the desperate odds against him.

[Sidenote: 1763—Wilkes and his accusers]

Every man who wished to curry favor with the King and the King's ministers was ready to strike his blow at Wilkes. There was not a bully among the hangers-on of the King and ministers who was not eager to cross swords with Wilkes or level pistol at him. Insult after insult, injury after injury, were offered to the obnoxious politician. The King dismissed him from the colonelcy of the Buckinghamshire Militia. Lord Temple was the Lord-Lieutenant of the county of Buckinghamshire, and as Lord-Lieutenant it was his duty to convey to Wilkes the news of his disgrace. Never was such news so conveyed. Temple told Wilkes of his dismissal in a letter of warm enthusiasm, of warm personal praise. The King immediately retaliated by removing Temple from the Lord-Lieutenancy and striking his name off the list of privy councillors. The enmity was not confined to the King and to the parasites who sought to please the King. Dr. Johnson declared that if he were the monarch he would have sent half a dozen footmen to duck Wilkes for daring to censure his royal master or his royal master's ministers. In the House of Commons the hostility was at its height. When Parliament met Wilkes sought to call the attention of the House to his case, but was anticipated by Grenville, who read a royal message directed at Wilkes, the result of which was that the House voted that the number Forty-five of the North Briton was a seditious libel, and ordered it to be burned by the common hangman.

The basest part of the attack upon Wilkes was the use that his enemies made of his private papers, the way in which they associated his political conduct with an offence that was wholly unpolitical. It had amused Wilkes to set up a private printing-press at his own house. At this {65} press certain productions were printed which were no doubt indecent, which were no doubt blasphemous, but which were furthermore so foolish as to make both their indecency and their blasphemy of very little effect. One was the "Essay on Woman," written as a parody of Pope's "Essay on Man;" the other was an imitation of the "Veni Creator." Neither of these pieces of gross buffoonery bore any author's name. Very few copies of them had been printed, and these few solely for circulation among private friends with a taste for foul literature. No offence had been committed, no offence had been intended, against public morality. It is certain, as far as any literary puzzle can be regarded as certain, that Wilkes's share in the dirty business was chiefly, if not entirely, limited to the printing of the pages. The "Essay on Woman," as those who have had the misfortune to read it know, is a dreary writer's piece of schoolboy obscenity, if entirely disgusting, no less entirely dull. The text of the "Essay" was composed in great part, if not altogether, by Potter, the unworthy son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and worthy member of the Medmenham brotherhood. When Wilkes's papers were seized, or by some other means, the Government got possession of the proof sheets of the "Essay on Woman." They immediately resolved, in defiance of public decency, of political morality, to use it as a weapon against their enemy. It shows the shallowness of their pretence at justification that they put the weapon into the hands of the worst and basest of Wilkes's former friends and allies in profligacy, into the hands of Lord Sandwich. On the first night of the session Lord Sandwich rose in the House of Lords, and proceeded to denounce Wilkes and the "Essay on Woman" with a vehemence of false austerity that impressed the assembly and infinitely delighted Lord Le Despencer, who had been the common friend, the brother sinner of accuser and accused, and who now expressed much entertainment at hearing the devil preach. The spurious virtue of Sandwich was followed by the spurious indignation of Warburton. The "Essay on Woman" contained certain notes written in parody of Warburton's notes {66} to the "Essay on Man," just as the verses themselves were a parody on Pope's poem. Warburton chose to regard this as a broach of privilege, and he assailed Wilkes with even greater fury than Sandwich had done, winding up by apologizing to the devil for even comparing Wilkes to him. An admiring House immediately voted the poems obscene, libellous, and a breach of privilege. Two days afterwards an address from the Lords called upon the King to prosecute Wilkes for blasphemy.

[Sidenote: 1763—Wilkes as a champion of popular liberty]

Wilkes was unable to face this new attack. He had already fallen a victim to an attack of another and no less malignant nature. While the creatures of the Government in the Upper House were trying to destroy his character, one of their creatures in the Lower House was doing his best to take Wilkes's life. This was a man named Martin, who had been attacked in the North Briton some eight months earlier. Martin seemed to have resolved upon revenge, and to have set about obtaining it after the fashion not of the gentleman, but of the bravo. Day by day, week by week, month by month he practised himself in pistol shooting, until he considered that his skill was sufficient to enable him to take the dastard's hazard in a duel. He seized the opportunity of the debate on November 15th to describe the writer in the North Briton as a "coward and a malignant scoundrel." When Wilkes, on the following day, avowed the authorship of the paper, Martin sent him a challenge. The challenge was in all respects a strange one. It was treacherous, because it came at the heels of deliberate preparation. It was peremptory, for it called upon Wilkes to meet his enemy in Hyde Park within an hour. It contravened the laws of the duello, because Martin, who was the challenger, himself insisted on the use of the weapons with which he had made himself so murderously skilful. Wilkes accepted the duel with characteristic courage, with characteristic rashness. He met Martin in Hyde Park, and the amateur bravo shot Wilkes through the body. It is a further characteristic of the many elements of good that went to Wilkes's strange composition that, as he lay on the grass bleeding fast and {67} apparently mortally wounded, his first care was not for himself and his hurt, but for the safety of his adversary, of an adversary who deserved chivalrous treatment as little as if he had taken Wilkes unawares and shot him in the back.

While Wilkes was lying on what threatened to be his death-bed the feeling on both sides only increased in intensity. The Ministry were indifferent to the helplessness of their enemy. Wilkes was expelled from the House of Commons. He was expelled from the Militia. The common hangman was ordered publicly to burn the North Briton, but the hangman was not suffered to obey the order. An angry mob set upon him and upon the sheriffs who were assisting at the ceremony, rescued the North Briton from its persecutors, and in rude retaliation burned instead the joint emblems of the popular disdain—a boot and a petticoat. The people's blood was up; the symptoms were significant enough for any save such a King and such ministers to understand. While the Ministry, with a refinement of cruelty, were sending daily the King's surgeons to watch Wilkes's health and proclaim the moment when he might again be attacked, the Corporation of Dublin was setting an example that was soon followed by the Corporation of London and by other corporations in presenting him with the freedom of its city. While Wilkes was slowly journeying towards Paris, where his daughter was, and passing, as he wrote, "the most unhappy days he had known," an angry mob gibbeted the effigy of Bute at one of the gates of Exeter, and kept the image swinging there in derision for a fortnight in defiance of the authorities. While Wilkes was languishing in foreign exile to save his liberty and his very life from the malignity of his enemies, his portrait, painted by Reynolds, was placed in the Guildhall with an inscription in honor of the jealous assertor of English liberty by law.

Wilkes was well advised in keeping out of England. He had done his part. The decisions of Pratt in the Court of Common Pleas, the decisions in the Guildhall, had conferred a permanent benefit upon the English citizen. But {68} Wilkes was not bound to put himself into the power of his enemies in order to establish the authorship of the "Essay on Woman." His enemies took as much advantage as they could of his absence. He was found guilty by the Court of King's Bench of having reprinted the number Forty-five and of having written the "Essay on Woman." As he did not appear to receive his sentence, he was promptly outlawed for contumacy. Thus a Ministry wise in their own conceit believed that they had got rid of Wilkes for good and all. They did not note, or if they noted did not heed, that the favorite sign of ale-houses throughout the country was the head of Wilkes. They were indifferent to the fact that Wilkes had come to be regarded in all directions as the champion of popular liberty. All they knew, all that they cared to know, was that Wilkes was in exile, and was like enough to die in exile. Even the success of "The Beggar's Opera" taught them nothing, and yet the success of "The Beggar's Opera" was a significant lesson. "The Beggar's Opera" was revived at Covent Garden while the excitement about Wilkes was at its height, and its audiences were as ready to read in political allusions between the lines as they had been at the time of its first production. The line "That Jemmy Twitcher should peach on me I own rather surprises me" was converted at once into an innuendo at the expense of Lord Sandwich, to whom the name Jemmy Twitcher was immediately applied by the public at large, almost to the disuse, so Horace Walpole tells us, of his own title.

[Sidenote: 1764—Death of Hogarth and Churchill]

But the Ministry had so far triumphed that for four years Wilkes remained away from England, drifting from one foreign capital to another, making friends and winning admirers everywhere, and employing his enforced leisure in attempting great feats of literary enterprise. A scheme for a Constitutional History of England was succeeded by a no less difficult and, as it proved, no less impracticable scheme. During Wilkes's exile he lost the most famous of his enemies and the most famous of his friends. On October 26, 1764, Hogarth died. It was commonly said, and generally credited, that he died of a broken heart {69} in consequence of the furious attacks which had followed upon his unhappy quarrel with Wilkes. It was a pity that the closing hours of Hogarth's life should have been occupied with so petty and so regrettable a squabble. Hogarth was entirely in the wrong. Hogarth began the quarrel; and if Hogarth was eager to give hard knocks he should have been ready to take hard knocks in return. But the world at large may very well be glad that Hogarth did lurk in the court by Justice Pratt and did make his memorable sketch of Wilkes. The sketch serves to show us if not what Wilkes exactly was, at least what Wilkes seemed to be to a great many of his countrymen. The caricaturist is a priceless commentator. If Hogarth indeed indirectly shortened his life by his portrait of Wilkes, he gave, as if by transfusion of blood, an increased and abiding vitality to certain of the most interesting pages of history.

Within a few days of Hogarth, Churchill died. His devotion to Wilkes prompted him to join him in his Continental banishment. He got as far as Boulogne, where Wilkes met him, and at Boulogne he died of a fever, after formally naming Wilkes as his literary executor. Wilkes, who was always prompted by generous impulses, immediately resolved that he would edit a collected edition of Churchill's works, and for a time he buried himself in seclusion in Naples with the firm intention of carrying out this purpose. But the task was too great both for the man and for the conditions under which he was compelled to work. In the first place, annotations of such poems as Churchill's required constant reference to and minute acquaintance with home affairs, such as it was well-nigh impossible for an exile to command. In the second place, it was not an easy task for a man even with a very high opinion of himself to play the part of editor and annotator of poems a great part of which had him for hero. In a very short time the work was abandoned, and Wilkes emerged from his literary retreat.

Wilkes has been very bitterly and, as it would appear, very unjustly upbraided for his seeming neglect of his dead friend's wishes, of his dead defender's fame. In spite of {70} those whose zeal for the memory of Churchill drives them into antagonism with the memory of Wilkes, it may be believed that the task was not one "for which Wilkes could, with the greatest ease, have procured all the necessary materials; and to which he was called not by the sacred duties of friendship only, but by the plainest considerations of even the commonest gratitude." Even if Wilkes had been, which Wilkes was not, the kind of a man to make a good editor, a good annotator, the difficulties that lay in the way of the execution of his task were too many. The fact that the poems were so largely about himself gave a sufficient if not an almost imperative reason why he should leave the task alone. But in any case he must have felt conscious of what events proved, that there was other work for him to do in the world than the editing of other men's satires.

Not, indeed, that the genius of Churchill needed any tribute that Wilkes or any one else could bestow. His monument is in his own verses, in the story of his life. If indeed the lines from "The Candidate" which are inscribed on Churchill's tombstone tell the truth, if indeed his life was "to the last enjoyed," part of that enjoyment may well have come from the certainty that the revolutions of time would never quite efface his name or obscure his memory. The immortality of the satirist must almost inevitably be an immortality rather historical than artistic; it is rather what he says than how he says it which is accounted unto him for good. As there are passages of great poetic beauty in the satires of Juvenal, so there are passages of poetic beauty in the satires of Churchill. But they are both remembered, the great Roman and the great Englishman, less for what beauty their work permitted than for the themes on which they exercised their wit. The study of Churchill is as essential to a knowledge of the eighteenth century in London as the study of Juvenal is essential to a knowledge of the Rome of his time. That fame Churchill had secured for himself; to that fame nothing that Wilkes or any one else might do could add.



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CHAPTER XLVI.

THE AMERICAN COLONIES.

[Sidenote: 1765—Grenville as Bute's successor]

Wilkes in exile had ceased to exist in the minds of the King's Ministry. In Naples or in Paris he was as little to be feared as Churchill in his grave. An insolent subject had presumed directly to attack the King's advisers and indirectly the King himself, and the insolent subject was a fugitive, a broken, powerless man. The young King might well be pleased with the success of his policy. In pursuance of that policy he had reduced the great fabric of the Whig party to a ruin, and had driven the factious demagogue who opposed him into an ignominious obscurity. To a temper flushed by two such triumphs opposition of any kind was well-nigh welcome for the pleasure of crushing it, and was never less likely to be encountered in a spirit of conciliation. Yet the King was destined in the very glow of his success to find himself face to face with an opposition which he was not able to crush, and on which any attempt at conciliation was but so much waste of time. The King's new and formidable opponent was his own chief minister.

When Bute, perhaps in fear for his life, perhaps in despair at his unpopularity, resigned the office he filled so ill, he hoped to find in his successor Grenville a supple and responsive creature, through whom Bute would still be as powerful as before. Bute had to taste a bitter disappointment. Grenville's gloomy spirit and narrow mind unfitted him, indeed, for the office he was called upon to hold, but they afforded him a stubbornness which declined to recognize either the authority of the favorite or the authority of the favorite's master. By the time that Grenville had been two years in office the King hated him as {72} bitterly as he had ever hated Pitt. If Bute was impotently furious to find himself discarded and despised by his intended tool, the King was still more exasperated to find that the King's servant proposed to be the King's master. Grenville was a good lawyer and a good man of business, but he was extremely dull and extremely tactless, and he was at as much pains to offend the King as if he intended offence. He was overbearing in manner to a monarch who was himself overbearing; he badgered him with long rambling discourses upon his royal duty; he deliberately wounded him in his two warmest affections, his love for his mother and his regard for Bute. Grenville was right enough in his objection to the undue influence of Bute, but his animadversions came with a bad grace from the man who was to do as much harm to England as Bute had ever done. As Grenville had triumphed over Bute and driven him into the background, so he wished to triumph over the Princess Dowager and deprive her of power. In 1765 the King fell ill for the first time of that malady from which he was to suffer so often and so heavily. As soon as he was restored to health he proposed the introduction of a Regency Bill to settle satisfactorily the difficulties that might very well arise if the heir to the throne were to succeed before the age of eighteen.

[Sidenote: 1765—The King seeks to remove Grenville]

Grenville acted in the matter of the Regency Bill as if the dearest wish of his heart were to flout the King's wishes and to wound his feelings. The King wished, lest he should again be stricken with illness while the heir-apparent was still an infant, to be given the right to name a regent by will. Grenville and Grenville's colleagues, who were now as jealous of the authority of Bute as any subscriber to the North Briton, saw or professed to see in the King's proposal an insidious scheme for placing little less than royal power within the reach of the favorite. They made it impossible for the King to name Bute by limiting his choice to the members of the royal family. But they went further than this in affronting the King. They limited his choice of a regent to members of the royal family, but they also limited the number of {73} members of the royal family from whom he might make his choice. They insisted that the name of the King's mother, of the Princess Dowager, should not be included in the Bill. It is difficult to understand how the King could ever have been induced to consent to this peculiarly galling insult. It seems that Grenville assured him, on entirely false premises, that if her name were mentioned in the Bill the House of Commons would be certain to strike it out. Preferring the private to the public affront, George surrendered to his minister, only to find that his minister was flagrantly misinformed. The friends of the Princess in the House of Commons moved that her name should be written into the Bill, and they carried their point in Grenville's teeth. Grenville had played the tyrant and George had accepted the humiliation for nothing. George tried at once to overthrow Grenville. In those days a king who disliked a minister had a very simple and easy way of showing and of gratifying his dislike. He could dismiss his minister without ceremony and without question. Nowadays a minister depends for his power and tenure of office upon the majority in the House of Commons, and a sovereign would not think of dismissing a minister, or of doing anything else than accepting formally the decision of the House of Commons. But when George the Third was king the only check upon the royal power of dismissing a minister lay in the possible difficulty of finding another to take his place. This was the check George now met. He wanted with all his heart to dismiss Grenville. He turned to Cumberland of Culloden, and implored him to bring back Pitt and enable him to get rid of Grenville. Cumberland tried and Cumberland failed. Pitt was in one of those paroxysms of illness which seem to have completely overmastered him. He was almost entirely under the influence of Temple. Temple's detestation of Bute reconciled him to Grenville's policy when he found that Grenville seemed to share that detestation. Temple persuaded Pitt to refuse. Cumberland came back to the King to tell of his failure. There was nothing to be done. Grenville had to be kept on. If the enforced association {74} did not make the sovereign and his minister better friends, if both smarted under a sense of humiliation and defeat, it is scarcely surprising that the stubbornness of both was intensified in cases where their stubbornness was pitted not against each other, but against a common obstacle. Such a case was then in existence.

[Sidenote: 1765—The American colonies]

Three thousand miles away the wealth and power of England was represented by a number of settlements occupying a comparatively narrow strip of territory on the Atlantic seaboard of the North American continent. The American colonies were the proudest possessions of the British Empire. Through generation after generation, for more than two centuries, English daring and English courage had built up those colonies, reclaiming them from the wilderness and the swamp, wresting them from wild man and wild beast, fighting for them with European power after European power. They were a source of wealth, a source of honor, and a source of strength to England. They were cheaply bought with the brave lives that had been given for them. It is hard to realize that any sovereign, that any statesman could fail to see how precious a possession they were, or how unwise any course of action must be which could tend in any way to lessen their affection or to alienate their support. Yet such a sovereign was upon the throne and such a minister was by his side.

Mr. Willett, senior, in "Barnaby Rudge," explains to his friends that his absent son Joe is away in "the Salwanners in America, where the war is." Mr. Willett's knowledge and appreciation of the American colonies represents pretty well for profundity and accuracy the knowledge and appreciation of the majority of the English people in the times contemporary with, and indeed long subsequent to, the quarrels between the old country and the new. To the bulk of the British people America was a vague and shadowy region, a sort of no-man's land, peopled for the most part with black men and red men, and dimly associated with sugar-planting and the tobacco trade. Its distance alone made it seem sufficiently unreal to those whose way of life was not drawn by business or {75} by politics into association with its inhabitants. The voyage to America was a grimly serious adventure, calling for fortitude and triple brass. The man was indeed lucky who could make the passage from shore to shore in six weeks of stormy sea, and the journey generally took a much longer time, and under the same conditions of discomfort and of danger that attended on the voyage of the "Mayflower." The vast majority of Englishmen concerned themselves as little with America as they concerned themselves with Hindostan. Both were British possessions, and as such important, but both were too far away to assume any very substantial reality in the consciousness of the bulk of the English people. Of the minority who did possess anything that can be called knowledge of the American colonies, the majority imbibed its information from official sources, from the reports of governors of provinces and official servants of the Crown. These reports were for the most part as reliable for a basis on which to build an intelligent appreciation as the legends of the Algonquins or the myths of the Six Nations.

If the English knowledge of the American colonies had been a little more precise it would have run to this effect. The colonies of the New England region were mainly peopled by a hardy, industrious, sober, frugal race, still strongly Puritanical in profession and in practice, and knowing but little of the extremes of fortune. Neither great poverty nor great wealth was common among those sturdy farmers, who tended their own farms, tilled their own land, lived upon their own produce, and depended for their clothing and for most of the necessaries of life upon the work of their own hands. A slender population was scattered far asunder in lonely townships and straggling villages of wooden houses, built for the most part in the formidable fashion imposed upon men who might at any time have to resist the attacks of Indians. Inside these villages the rough, rude justice of the Puritan days still persisted. The stocks and the pillory and the stool of repentance were things of the present. A shrewish housewife might still be made to stand at her cottage door with {76} the iron gag of the scold fastened upon her shameful face. A careless Sabbatarian might still find himself exposed to the scorn of a congregation, with the words "A wanton gospeller" placarded upon his ignominious breast. Inside those wooden houses a rude simplicity and a rough plenty prevailed. The fare was simple; the labor was hard; simple fare and stern labor between them reared a stalwart, God-fearing race. Its positive pleasures were few and primitive. Husking-bees, quiltings, a rare dance, filled up the measure of its diversions. But the summer smiled upon those steadfast, earnest, rigorous citizens, and in the wild and bitter winters each household would gather about the cheerful fire in the great chimney which in some of those cottages formed the major part of the building, and find content and peace in quiet talk and in tales of the past, of the French and Indian wars, and of their ancestors, long ago, in old England. Those same great fires that were the joy of winter were also one of its troubles. Once lit, with all the difficulty attendant upon flint and steel and burnt rag, they had to be kept alight from morning till night and from night till morning. If a fire went out it was a woful business to start it again with the reluctant tinder-box. There was, indeed, another way, an easier way, of going round to a neighbor and borrowing a shovelful of hot embers wherewith to kindle the blackened hearth. But in villages built for the most part of wood this might well be regarded as a dangerous process. So the law did regard it, and to start a fire in this lazy, lounging fashion was penalized as sternly as any breach of the Sabbath or of public decorum, and these were sternly punished. Drunkenness was grimly frowned down. Only decent, God-fearing men were allowed to keep taverns, and the names of persons who had earned the reputation of intemperance were posted up in those taverns as a warning to the host that he should sell such men no liquor. In Connecticut tobacco was forbidden to any one under twenty years of age, unless on the express order of a physician. Those who were over twenty were only allowed to smoke once a day, and then not within ten miles of any dwelling.

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[Sidenote: 1765—American colonial customs]

In spite of their democratic simplicity, even the New England colonists had their distinctions of rank as clearly marked as among the people of old England. The gentry dressed in one fashion; the working classes dressed in another. The family rank of students determined their places in the lists of Harvard College and Yale College. In Boston, the chief New England town, life was naturally more elaborate and more luxurious than in the country places. Ladies wore fine clothes and sought to be modish in the London manner; gentlemen made a brave show in gayly colored silks and rich laces, gold-headed canes and costly snuff-boxes. Even in Boston, however, life was simpler, quieter, and sweeter than it was across the Atlantic; there was Puritanism in its atmosphere—Puritanism and the serenity of learning, of scholarship, of study.

There was much more wealth in the province of New York; there was much more display in the southern colonies. New York was as famous for its Dutch cleanliness and its Dutch comfort as for its Dutch windmills that twirled their sails against the sky in all directions. There was store of plate and fine linen in New York cupboards. There were good things to eat and drink in New York households. Down South the gentlefolk lived as gentlefolk lived in England, with perhaps a more lavish ostentation, a more liberal hospitality. They loved horses and dogs, horse-racing and fox-hunting, dancing, music, high living, all things that added to the enjoyment of life. Their servants were their own black slaves. The great city of the South was Charleston, the third of the colonial cities. The fourth and last was Philadelphia, the "faire greene country town" of Penn's love, the last in our order, but the first in size and splendor, with its flagged sidewalks that had made it famous throughout the American continent as if it had been one of the seven wonders of the world, with its stately houses of brick and stone, its avenues of trees, its fruitful orchards and sweet-smelling gardens. The people of Philadelphia had every right to be proud of their city.

Communication was not easy between one colony and {78} another, between one town and another. But neither was it easy in England. For the most part the conditions of life were much the same on one side of the Atlantic as on the other. The whole population, white and black, freeman and slave, was about two million souls. They were well-to-do, peaceable, hard-working—those who had to work, good fighters—those who had to fight, all very willing to be loyal and all very well worth keeping loyal. It was worth their sovereign's while, it was worth the while of his ministers, to know something about these colonists and to try and understand natures that were not at all difficult to understand. Had they been treated as the Englishmen they were, all would have been well. But the King who gloried in the name of Briton did not extend its significance far enough.

[Sidenote: 1765—Friction with the American colonists]

It is not easy to understand the temper which animated all the King's actions towards the American colonies. They were regarded, and with justice, as one of the greatest glories of the English crown; they were no less a source of wealth than of pride to the English people. Yet the English prince persisted in pursuing towards them a policy which can only be most mildly characterized as a policy of exasperation. When George was still both a young man and a young king, the relations between the mother country and her children across the Atlantic were, if not wholly harmonious, at least in such a condition as to render harmony not merely possible, but probable. The result of a long and wearing war had been to relieve the colonists directly from one and indirectly from the other of their two greatest perils. By the terms on which peace was made the power of France was broken on the North American continent. The French troops had been withdrawn across the seas. The Lilies of France floated over no more important possessions in the new world than a few insignificant fishing stations near Newfoundland. A dangerous and dreaded enemy to colonial life and liberty could no longer menace or alarm. As a consequence of the withdrawal of the French troops the last united attack of the red men against the white was made and failed. {79} The famous conspiracy of Pontiac was the desperate attempt of the Indian allies of France to annihilate the colonists by a concerted attack of a vast union of tribes. The conspiracy failed after a bloody war that lasted for nearly two years. Pontiac, the Indian chief who had helped to destroy Braddock, and who had dreamed that all the English might as easily be destroyed, was defeated and killed; his league was dissipated, and the power of the red men as a united force broken for good. Under such conditions of immunity from long-standing and pressing perils, due in the main to the triumph of British arms, the colonists might very well have been expected to regard with especial favor their association with England. If there had been differences between the two countries for long enough, no moment could have been apter for the adoption of a policy calculated to lessen and ultimately to abolish those differences than the moment when the weary and wearing Seven Years' War came to its close. A far-seeing monarch, advised and encouraged by far-seeing statesmen, might have soldered close the seeming impossibilities and made them kiss. Had the throne even been filled by a sovereign slightly less stubborn, had the throne been surrounded by servants slightly less bigoted, the arrogant patronage of the one part and the aggressive protestation of the other part might have been judiciously softened into a relationship wisely paternal and loyally filial. The advantage of an enduring union between the mother country and her colonies was obvious to any reasonable observer. A common blood, a common tongue, a common pride of race and common interests should have kept them together. But the relations were not amicable. The colonies were peopled by men who were proud indeed of being Englishmen, but by reason of that very pride were jealous of any domination, even at the hands of Englishmen. The mother country, on the other hand, regarded the colonies, won with English hands and watered with English blood, as being no less portion and parcel of English soil because three thousand miles of stormy ocean lay between the port upon the Severn and the port upon {80} the Charles River. She came to regard as mere ingratitude those assertions of independence which most characteristically proved the colonies to be worthy of it and of her. The theory of the absolute dominion of England over the American colonies might have died a natural death, a harmonious settlement of grievances and adjustment of powers might have knitted the two peoples together in an enduring league, if it had not been for George the Third.

[Sidenote: 1765—England and her colonial governors]

The mind of George the Third was saturated with a belief in his personal importance; the heart of George the Third was exalted by the determination to play a dominating part in the country of his birth and the history of his reign. The hostility to the exercise of home authority latent in the colonies irritated the King like a personal affront. To resist or to resent the authority of the Government of England was to resist and to resent the authority of the sovereign who was determined that he would be to all intents and purposes the Government of England. If the relationship between England and America had been far happier than George found it at the time of his accession, it probably would not long have preserved a wholesome tenor. But the relationship was by no means happy. The colonial assemblies were for the most part at loggerheads with the colonial governors. These governors, little viceroys with petty courts, extremely proud of their power and self-conscious in their authority, generally detested the popular assemblies upon whom they were obliged to depend for the payment of their salaries. Their dislike found secret expression in the letters which it was the duty and the pleasure of the colonial governors to address to the Home Government. The system of colonial administration in England was as simple as it was unsatisfactory. At its head was a standing committee of the Privy Council which had been established in 1675. This committee was known at length as "The Lords of the Committee of Trade and Plantations," and in brief and more generally as "The Lords of Trade." It was the duty of the colonial governors to make lengthy reports to the Lords of Trade on the {81} commercial and other conditions of their governorships. It was too often their pleasure to supplement these State papers with lengthy and embittered private letters, addressed to the same body, making the very most and worst of the difficulties they had to deal with in their work. The colonies, as represented in these semi-official communications, were turbulent, contumacious, discontented, disrespectful to viceregal dignity, rebellious against the authority of Great Britain. These communications informed the minds of the Lords of Trade, who in their turn influenced those who were responsible for the conduct of the King's Government. Thus a vicious system, acting in a vicious circle, kept alive an irritation and fostered a friction that only increased with the increasing years. It had always been the worst feature of England's colonial policy that she was ever ready to accept with too little question the animadversions of the governors upon the governed. The Lords of Trade accepted the communications of the colonial governors as gospel truth, and as gospel truth it was taken in its turn by the ministers to whom it was transmitted and by the monarch to whom they carried it. The general public were as ignorant of and as indifferent to the American colonies as if they were situated in the mountains of the moon. The major part of the small minority that really did seek or desire information about America gained it from the same poisonous sources that inspired the Government, and based their theories of colonial reform upon the peevish epistles, often mendacious and always one-sided, which fed the intelligences of the Lords of Trade. The few who were really well informed, who had something like as accurate an appreciation of the colony of Massachusetts as they had of the county of Middlesex, were powerless to counteract the general ignorance and the more particular misconception. It was the cherished dream of authority in England to bring the colonies into one common rule under one head in such a way as to strengthen their military force while it lessened their legislative independence. It now seemed as if with the right King and the right Ministry {82} this dream might become a reality. In George the Third and in George Grenville prerogative seemed to have found the needed instruments to subjugate the American colonies.

[Sidenote: 1765—Trade restrictions upon the colonies]

Many of the grievances of the colonies were grave enough. If some of the injuries that England inflicted upon her great dependency seem petty in the enumeration, a number of small causes of irritation are no less dangerous to peace between nations than some great injustice. But lest the small stings should not be enough, the Government was resolved that the great injustice should not be wanting. The colonists resented the intermittent tyranny and the persistent truculence of the most part of the royal governors. The colonists resented the enforced transportation of criminals. The colonists resented the action of Great Britain in annulling the colonial laws made to keep out slaves. It is melancholy to reflect that the curse of slavery, for which Englishmen of later days often so bitterly and so rightly reproached America, was unhappily enforced upon a country struggling to be rid of it by Englishmen who called themselves English statesmen. The colonists resented the astonishing restrictions which it pleased the mother country to place, in what she believed to be her own interest, upon colonial trade. These laws commanded that all trade between the colonies should be carried on in ships built in England or the colonies. This barred out all foreigners, especially the Dutch, then the chief carriers for Europe. They compelled the American farmer to send his products across the ocean to England. They forbade the exportation of sugar, tobacco, cotton, wool, indigo, ginger, dyeing-woods to any part of the world except to England or some English colony. They only allowed exportation of fish, fur, oil, ashes, and lumber in ships built in England or the colonies. They forced the colonists to buy all their European goods in England and bring them over to America in English vessels. They prohibited the colonial manufacture of any article that could be manufactured in England. They harassed and minimized the trade between one colony and another. No {83} province was permitted to send woollen goods, hats, or ironware to another province. Some of the regulations read more like the rules of some Turkish pashalik than the laws framed by one set of Englishmen for another set of Englishmen. In the Maine woods, for instance, no tree that had a diameter greater than two feet at a foot above the ground could be cut down, except to make a mast for some ship of the Royal Navy.

Bad and bitter as these laws were in theory, they did not for long enough prove to be so bad in practice, for the simple reason that they were very easy to evade and not very easy to enforce. The colonists met what many of them regarded as an elaborate system for the restriction of colonial trade by a no less elaborate system of smuggling. Smuggling was easy because of the long extent of sea-coast. Smuggling was lucrative, as few considered it an offence to evade laws that were generally resented as unfair. When the Sugar Act of 1733 prohibited the importation of sugar and molasses from the French West Indies except on payment of a prohibitory duty, the New England colonists, who did a thriving trade in the offspring of the union of sugar and molasses, rum, found themselves faced by a serious problem. Should they accept the Act and its consequential ruin of their trade or ignore it, and by resorting to smuggling prosper as before? Without hesitation they decided that their rights as Englishmen were assailed by the obnoxious imposition, and they turned to smuggling with the light heart that is conscious of a heavy purse. The contraband trade was brisk, the contrabandists cheerful, and so long as England made no serious attempt to put into operation laws that the genial and business-like smugglers of the Atlantic sea-coast regarded as preposterous nobody complained, and international relations were cordial. But the situation was not seen with so bright an eye by the British merchant. He witnessed with indignation the failure of the attempt to monopolize the commerce of the colonies to his own advantage, and he clamored for the restoration of his fat monopoly. His clamor was unheeded while the great war {84} was running its course. But with the end of the war and the new conditions consequent upon the advent of a new King with a brand-new theory of kingship and prerogative, the situation began to change.

The colonial policy of George Grenville's Administration might be conveniently considered under three heads. The Ministry was resolved, in the first place, to enforce Acts of Trade which smuggling had long rendered meaningless in the American colonies. The Ministry was resolved, in the second place, to establish a permanent garrison of some ten thousand men in America. The Ministry was resolved, in the third place, to make the colonists pay a third of the cost of keeping up this garrison by a direct taxation. It was easy enough for Grenville to formulate the three ministerial purposes, but it was not very easy to give them any effect. The colonists resented and the colonists resisted all three proposals. If they were technically wrong in their resentment at the enforcement of the Acts of Trade, they were reasonable in their reluctance to accept the proposed garrison, and they were justified by every law of liberty and of patriotism in resisting with all the strength at their command the proposed scheme of taxation.

[Sidenote: 1765—James Otis and John Adams]

The English Government began its task by a rigorous attempt to enforce the Acts of Trade. Grenville had made up his narrow mind that the colonies should be compelled to adhere to the conditions which obliged them to trade with England only for England's principal manufactures. There should be no more smuggling from Spanish America, no more smuggling from the West Indies. To enforce this determination, which deprived the colonists at a blow of the most profitable part of their trade, the Government employed certain general search warrants, which, if strictly legal in the letter, were conceived in a spirit highly calculated to goad a proud people into illegal defiance. They goaded one proud man into active protest. A distinguished servant of the Government, James Otis, the King's Advocate, resigned his office in order that he might be at liberty to denounce the Writs of Assistance. {85} Otis may have been technically wrong in resisting the Writs of Assistance, but it can scarcely be questioned that as a philosophic politician, who was devoted to the interests of his countrymen, he was ethically in the right. Otis was thirty-six years old; he was known to his compatriots as a graduate of Harvard, an able lawyer, a zealous student of classical literature, and an author of repute on Latin prosody. The issue of the Writs of Assistance converted the respected and respectable public servant into a conspicuous statesman as hotly applauded by the one side as he was execrated by the other. A single speech lifted him from an esteemed obscurity to a leading place among the champions of colonial rights against imperial aggressions. The assemblage which Otis addressed, which Otis dominated, was forever memorable in the history of America. "Otis was a flame of fire." The words are the words of one who was a young man when Otis spoke, who listened and took notes as the words fell from Otis's lips. "With a promptitude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of legal authorities, a prophetic glance of his eyes into futurity, and a rapid torrent of tempestuous eloquence, he hurried away all before him. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born. Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take up arms against Writs of Assistance."