The youth who took notes of the words of Otis, and who was inspired by them with the desire to rise and mutiny, was destined to play even a greater part in the history of his country. If Otis was one of the first to assert actively, by deed as well as by word, the determination of the colonies to oppose and, if needs were, to defy the domination of England, John Adams was the first to applaud his action and to appreciate its importance. In 1763 John Adams was no more than a promising young lawyer who had struggled from poverty and hardship to regard and authority, and who had wrested from iron Fortune a great {86} deal of learning if very little of worldly wealth. Short of stature, sanguine of temperament, the ruddy, stubborn, passionate small man had fought his way step by step from the most modest if not the most humble beginnings, as zealously as if he had known of the fame that was yet to be his and the honor that he was to give to his name and hand down to a long line of honorable descendants. If the ministers who weakly encouraged or meanly obeyed King George in his frenzy against America could have understood even dimly the temper of a race that was rich in sons of whom John Adams was but one and not the most illustrious even to them, there must have come dimly some consciousness of the forces they had to encounter, and the peril of their policy. But the Ministry knew nothing of Adams, and knew only of Otis as a mutinous and meddlesome official. Otis and his protest signified nothing to them, and they would have smiled to learn that young Mr. Adams, the lawyer, believed that American independence was born when Mr. Otis's oration against Writs of Assistance breathed into the colonies the breath of life that was to make them a nation.

[Sidenote: 1765—Taxation without representation]

If Otis voiced and Adams echoed the feelings of the colonists against Writs of Assistance and the enforcement of the Acts of Trade, they might no less eloquently have interpreted the general irritation at the proposed establishment of a permanent garrison on the continent. The colonists saw no need of such a garrison so late in the day. When the Frenchmen held the field, when the red man was on the war path, then indeed the presence of more British soldiers might have become welcome. But the flag of France no longer floated over strong places, no longer fluttered at the head of invasion. The strength of the savage was crippled if not crushed. The colonists had nothing to fear from the one and little to fear from the other foe. They thought that they had much to fear from the presence of a British garrison of ten thousand men. This British garrison might, on occasion, be used not in defence of their liberties, but in diminution of their liberties. The irritation against the proposed garrison might have {87} smouldered out if it had not been fanned into a leaping flame by the means proposed for the maintenance of the garrison. Grenville proposed to raise one-third of the cost of support from the colonies by taxation. No proposal could have been better calculated to goad every colony and every colonist into resistance, and to fuse the scattered elements of resistance into a solid whole. More than two generations earlier both Massachusetts and New York had formally denied the right of the Home Government to levy any tax upon the American colonies. The colonies were not represented at Westminster—could not, under the conditions, be represented at Westminster. The theory that there should be no taxation without representation was as dear to the American for America as it was dear to the Englishman for England. Successive English Governments, forced in times of financial pressure wistfully to eye American prosperity, had dreamed, and only dreamed, of raising money by taxing the well-to-do colonies. It was reserved to the Government headed by Grenville, in its madness, to attempt to make the dream a reality. It is true that even Grenville did not propose, did not venture to suggest that the American colonies should be taxed for the direct benefit of the English Government. He brought forward his scheme of taxation as a benefit to America, as a contribution to the expense of keeping up a garrison that was only established in the interests of America and for America's welfare. In this spirit of benevolence, and with apparent confidence of success, Grenville brought forward his famous Stamp Act.

There were statesmen in England who saw with scarcely less indignation than the Americans themselves, and with even more dismay, the unfolding of the colonial policy of the Government. These protested against the intolerable weight of the duties imposed, and arraigned the folly which, by compelling these duties to be paid in specie, drained away the little ready money remaining in the colonies, "as though the best way to cure an emaciated body, whose juices happened to be tainted, was to leave it no juices at all." They assailed the injustice that refused {88} to recognize as legal tender any paper bills of credit issued by the colonies. Politicians, guided by the intelligence and the inspiration of Burke, applauded the Americans for their firmness in resolving to subsist to the utmost of their power upon their own productions and manufactures. They urged that it could not be expected that the colonists, merely out of a compliment to the mother country, should submit to perish for thirst with water in their own wells. And these clear-sighted politicians saw plainly enough that such blows as the Government were aiming at America must in the end recoil upon Great Britain herself. They appreciated the injury that must be done to British commerce by even a temporary interruption of the intercourse between the two countries. But bad as the restrictive measures were in their immediate, as well as in their ultimate consequences, worse remained behind. The proposed Stamp Act scarcely shocked Otis or Adams more directly and cruelly than it shocked the soundest and sanest thinkers on the other side of the Atlantic. Words which certainly expressed the thoughts of Burke declared that the approval, even with opposition, given to such a measure as the Stamp Act, the bare proposal of which had given so much offence, argued such a want of reflection as could scarcely be paralleled in the public councils of any country.

The King's speech at the opening of Parliament on January 10, 1765, gave unmistakable evidence of the temper of the monarch and of the Ministry. It formally expressed its reliance on the wisdom and firmness of Parliament in promoting the proper respect and obedience due to the legislative authority of Great Britain. The Government was resolved to be what it considered firm, and it undoubtedly believed that a proper show of firmness would easily overbear any opposition that the colonists might make to the proposed measure. The Stamp Act was introduced, the Stamp Act was debated upon; in due time the Stamp Act passed through both Houses, and in consequence of the ill health of the King received the royal assent by commission on March 28, 1765. The first foolish challenge to American loyalty was formally made, and {89} America was not slow to accept it. It may be admitted that in itself the Stamp Act was not a conspicuously unfair or even a conspicuously unreasonable measure. It was a legitimate and perfectly fair way of raising money from a taxable people. It was neither legitimate nor fair when imposed upon unrepresented colonists. But if it had been the sanest and most statesmanlike scheme for raising money ever conceived by a financier, it would have deserved and would have received no less hostility from the American people. The principle involved was everything. To admit in any degree the right of Great Britain to impose at her pleasure a tax upon the colonists was to surrender in ignominy the privileges and to betray the duties of free men. Any expectations of colonial protest that the Ministry may have allowed themselves to entertain were more than fulfilled. Colony after colony, great town after great town, great man after great man, made haste to protest with an emphasis that should have been significant against the new measure. Boston led the way. Boston's most distinguished citizen, Boston's most respected son was the voice not merely of his town, not merely of his State, but of the colonial continent. Ten years later the name of Samuel Adams was known, hated, and honored on the English side of the Atlantic.

[Sidenote: 1765—Samuel Adams]

Samuel Adams was one of those men whom Nature forges to be the instruments of revolution. His three-and-forty years had taught him much: the value of silence, the knowledge of men, the desire to change the world and the patience to bide his time. A few generations earlier he might have made a right-hand man to Cromwell and held a place in the heart of Hampden. On the very threshold of his manhood, when receiving his degree of Master of Arts at Harvard, he asserted his defiant democracy in a dissertation on the right of the people of a commonwealth to combine against injustice on the part of the head of the State. The badly dressed man with the grave firm face of a Pilgrim Father was as ready and as resolute to oppose King George as any Pym or Vane had been ready and resolute to oppose Charles Stuart. He had at one {90} time devoted himself to a commercial career, with no great success. He was made for a greater game than commerce; he had the temper and he gained the training for a public life, and the hour when it came found that the man was ready. When the citizens of Boston met to protest against the Stamp Act Samuel Adams framed the first resolutions that denied to the Parliament of Great Britain the right to impose taxes upon her colonies.

[Sidenote: 1765—The opposition to the Stamp Act]

If Massachusetts was the first to protest with no uncertain voice against the Stamp Act, other colonies were prompt to follow her example, and to prove that they possessed sons no less patriotic. Virginia was as vehement and as vigorous in opposition as Massachusetts. One speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses made the name of Patrick Henry famous. Patrick Henry was a young man who tried many things and failed in them before he found in the practice of the law the appointed task for his rare gifts of reasoning and of eloquence. A speech in Hanover Court House in defence of the people against a suit of the parish clergy gave him sudden fame. As grave of face as Samuel Adams, as careless of his attire, tall and lean, stamped with the seal of the speaker and the thinker, Patrick Henry at nine-and-twenty was already a very different man from the youth who five years earlier seemed destined to be but a Jack of all trades and master of none, an unsuccessful trader, an unsuccessful farmer, whose chief accomplishments in life were hunting and fishing, dancing and riding. The debate on the Stamp Act gave him a great opportunity. As he addressed his words of warning to the stubborn sovereign across the sea his passion seemed to get the better of his prudence and to tempt him into menace. "Caesar," he said, "had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell." He was going on to say "and George the Third," when he was interrupted by angry cries of "Treason!" from the loyalists among his hearers. Patrick Henry waited until the noise subsided, and then quietly completed his sentence, "George the Third may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it." The words were not treasonable, {91} but they were revolutionary. They served to carry the name of Patrick Henry to every corner of the continent and across the Atlantic. They made him a hero and idol in the eyes of the colonists; they made him a rebel in the eyes of the Court at St. James's.

Massachusetts had set an example which Virginia had bettered; Massachusetts was now to better Virginia. If Virginia, prompted by Patrick Henry, declared that she alone had the right to tax her own citizens, Massachusetts, inspired by James Otis, summoned a congress of deputies from all the colonial assemblies to meet in common consultation upon the common danger. This congress, the first but not the last, memorable but not most memorable, met in New York in the early November of 1765. Nine colonies were represented at its table—Massachusetts, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York. The congress passed a series of resolutions, as firm in their purpose as moderate in their language, putting forward the grievances and asserting the rights of the colonies.

But the protests against the Stamp Act were not limited to eloquent orations or formal resolutions. Deeds, as well as words, made plain the purpose of the American people. Riots broke out in colony after colony; the most and worst in Massachusetts. Boston blazed into open revolt against authority. There were two Government officials in Boston who were especially unpopular with the mob—Andrew Oliver, the newly appointed collector of the stamp taxes, and Chief Justice Hutchinson. A scarecrow puppet, intended to represent the obnoxious Oliver, was publicly hung upon a tree by the mob, then cut down, triumphantly paraded through the city to Oliver's door, and there set on fire. When the sham Oliver was ashes the crowd broke into and ransacked his house, after which it did the same turn to the house of Chief Justice Hutchinson. Oliver and Hutchinson escaped unhurt, but all their property went through their broken windows and lay in ruin upon the Boston streets. Hutchinson was busy upon a History of Massachusetts; the manuscript shared the fate of its {92} author's chairs and tables, and went with them out into the gutter. It was picked up, preserved, and exists to this day, its pages blackened with the Boston mud. Many papers and records of the province which Hutchinson had in his care for the purpose of his history were irretrievably lost.

The next day the judges and the bar, assembled in their robes at the Boston Court House, were startled by the apparition of a haggard man in disordered attire, whom they might have been pardoned for failing to recognize as their familiar chief justice. In a voice broken with emotion Hutchinson apologized to the court for the appearance in which he presented himself before it. He and his family were destitute; he himself had no other shirt and no other clothes than those he was at that moment wearing. Part even of this poor attire he had been obliged to borrow. Almost in rags, almost in tears, he solemnly called his Maker to witness that he was innocent of the charges that had made him obnoxious to the fury of the populace. He swore that he never, either directly or indirectly, aided, assisted, or supported, or in the least promoted or encouraged the Stamp Act, but on the contrary did all in his power, and strove as much as in him lay, to prevent it. The court listened to him in melancholy silence and then adjourned, "on account of the riotous disorders of the previous night and universal confusion of the town," to a day nearly two months later.

It was a thankless privilege to be a stamp officer in those stormy hours. Most of the stamp officers were forced to resign under pressure which they might well be excused for finding sufficiently cogent. In order to make the new law a dead letter the colonists resolved that while it was in force they would avoid using stamps by substituting arbitration for any kind of legal procedure. With a people in this temper, there were only two things to be done; to meet their wishes, or to annihilate their opposition. It is possible that Grenville might have preferred to attempt the second alternative, but by this time Grenville's power was at an end.



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CHAPTER XLVII.

EDMUND BURKE.

[Sidenote: 1730-82—Rockingham and his Ministry]

The friction between Grenville and the King was rapidly becoming unbearable to George, if not to his minister. George was resolved to be rid of his intolerable tyrant at the cost of almost any concession. He was now fully as eager to welcome Pitt back to office as he had once been hot to drive him out of it. Again Cumberland was called in; again Cumberland approached Pitt; again Pitt's willingness to resume the seals was overborne by the stubbornness of Temple. The King was in despair. He would not endure Grenville and Grenville's bullying sermons any longer, and yet it was hard indeed to find any one who could take Grenville's place with any chance of carrying on Grenville's work. Cumberland had a suggestion to make, a desperate remedy for a desperate case. If Pitt and the old Whigs were denied to the King, why should not the King try the new Whigs and Rockingham?

The old Whig party, as it had lived and ruled so long, had practically ceased to exist. So much the King had accomplished. Saint George of Hanover had struck at the dragon only to find that, like the monster in the classical fable, it took new form and fresh vitality beneath his strokes. There was a Whig party that was not essentially the party of Pitt, a party which was recruiting its ranks with earnest, thoughtful, high-minded, honorable men to whom the principles or want of principles which permitted the old Whig dominion were as intolerable as they appear to a statesman of to-day. At the head of this new development of Whig activity was the man to whom Cumberland now turned in the hour of the King's trial, Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquis of Rockingham.

{94}

Lord Rockingham was one of those ornaments of the English senate for the benefit of whose biographers the adjective amiable seems especially to have been invented. Although the master of a large fortune, while he was still a boy of twenty he was deservedly noted for the gravity and stillness of his youth, and during a political career of one-and-thirty years, if he showed neither commanding eloquence nor commanding statesmanship, he did honor to the Whig party by his sincere patriotism and irreproachable uprightness of character. If heaven had denied Rockingham the resplendent gifts that immortalize a Chatham, it had given him in full measure of the virtues of patriotism, honesty, integrity, and zeal. The purity of his life, the probity of his actions, and the excellence of all his public purposes, commended him to the affectionate regard of all who held that morality was more essential to a statesman than eloquence, and that it was better to fail with such a man than to succeed with those to whom, for the most part, the successes of that day were given. Two years before, in 1763, his dislike for the policy of Lord Bute had driven him to resign his small office as Lord of the Bedchamber, and he carried his scrupulousness so far as to resign at the same time his Lord-Lieutenantcy of Yorkshire.

To the delight of the Duke of Cumberland, and to the delight of the King, Rockingham consented to form a Ministry. With the best will in the world Rockingham could not make his Ministry very commanding. It was but a makeshift, and not a very brilliant makeshift, but at least it served to get rid of Grenville and of Grenville's harangues. So long as Grenville was unable to terrorize the royal closet with reproaches and reproofs addressed to the King, and with menaces aimed at Bute, George was quite willing to see Newcastle intrusted with the Privy Seal, and Conway made Secretary of State for one department, and the Duke of Grafton for the other. But the Ministry which the King accepted because he could get nothing better, and because he would have welcomed something much worse so long as it delivered him from {95} Grenville—the Ministry that provoked the derisive pity of most of its critics was destined to attain an honorable immortality. The heterogeneous group of men who called themselves or were called, who believed themselves or were believed to be Whigs, had obtained one recruit whose name was yet to make the cause he served illustrious. Lord Rockingham had many claims to the regard of his contemporaries; undoubtedly his greatest claim to the regard of posterity lies in the intelligence which enabled him to discern the rising genius of a young writer, and the wisdom which found a place by his side and a seat in the House of Commons for Edmund Burke.

[Sidenote: 1765—The coming of Edmund Burke]

The history of a nation is often largely the history of certain famous men. Great epochs, producing great leaders, make those leaders essentially the expression of certain phases of the thought of their age. The life of Walpole is the life of the England of his time because he was so intimately bound up with the great movement which ended by setting Parliamentary government free from the possible dominion of the sovereign. The life of Chatham, the life of Pitt, the life of Fox, each in its turn is a summary of the history of England during the time in which they helped to guide its destinies. But to some men, men possessing in an exceptional degree the love for humanity and the longing for progress, this power of representing in their lives the sum and purpose of their age is markedly characteristic. Just as Mirabeau, until he died, practically represented the French Revolution, so certain English statesmen have from time to time been representative of the best life, the best thought, the best purposes, desires, and ambitions of the country for whose sake they played their parts. Of no man can this theory be said to be more happily true than of Edmund Burke.

It would scarcely be exaggeration to say that the history of England during the middle third of the eighteenth century is largely the history of the career of Edmund Burke. From the moment when Burke entered upon political life to the close of his great career, his name was associated with every event of importance, his voice raised {96} on one side or the other of every question that concerned the welfare of the English people and the English Constitution. As much as this, however, might be said of more than one actor in the political history of the period covered by Burke's public life. But the influence which Burke exercised upon his time, the force he brought to bear upon his political generation, were a greater influence and a stronger force than that directed by any other statesman of the age. Whether for good or for evil, according to the standards by which his critics may judge him, Burke swayed the minds of masses of his countrymen to a degree that was unequalled among his contemporaries. With the two great events of the century—the revolt of the American colonies and the French Revolution—his name was the most intimately associated, his influence the most potent. With what in their degree must be called the minor events of the reign—with the trial of Wilkes, with the trial of Warren Hastings—he was no less intimately associated, and in each case his association has been the most important feature of the event. Where he was right as where he was wrong, and whether he was right or whether he was wrong, he was always the most interesting, always the most commanding figure in the epoch-making political controversies of his day. Grenville wrote of him finely, many years after his death, that he was in the political world what Shakespeare was in the moral world.

[Sidenote: 1729-59—Burke's early life]

Burke entered political life, or entered active political life, when he was returned to Parliament in the December of 1765. Up to that time his life had been largely uneventful; much of it must be called as far as we are concerned eventless, for of a great gap of his life, a gap of no less than nine years, we know, if not absolutely nothing, certainly next to nothing. It is not even quite certain where or when he was born. The most approved account is that he was born in Dublin on January 12, 1729, reckoning according to the new style. The place of his birth is still pointed out to the curious in Dublin: one of the many modest houses that line the left bank of the Liffey. His family was supposed to stem from Limerick, from {97} namesakes who spelled their name differently as Bourke. His mother's family were Catholic; Burke's mother always remained stanch to her native faith, and, though Burke and his brothers were brought up as the Protestant sons of a Protestant father, the influence of his mother must have counted for much in creating that tender and generous sympathy towards a proscribed creed which is one of the noblest characteristics of Burke's career.

Burke's earliest and in a sense his best education was received between his twelfth and fourteenth years, in the school of a Yorkshire Quaker named Abraham Shackleton, who kept a school at Ballitore. Burke used often to declare in later years that he owed everything he had gained in life to the teaching and the example of those two years with Abraham Shackleton. The affectionate regard which Burke felt for his schoolmaster, an affectionate regard which endured until Shackleton's death, thirty years later, in 1771, he felt also for his schoolmaster's son, Richard Shackleton. Most of what we know of Burke's life in Trinity College from 1743 to 1748 we gather from his letters to Richard Shackleton, letters of absorbing interest to any student of the growth of a great mind. Less vivacious, less brilliant than the boyish letters of Goethe, they resemble them in the eager thirst they display for knowledge of all kinds, in their passionate enthusiasm for all the rich varieties of human knowledge, in their restless experiments in all directions. In those younger days Burke thought himself, as every generous and ambitious youth must needs think himself, a poet, and many verses were forwarded to the faithful friend, to lighten the effect of serious theological discussions and elaborate comparisons of classical authors.

Dissensions with his father and a determination to study for the bar sent Burke to England in the early part of 1750, and there for nine long years he practically disappears from our knowledge. All we know is that he studied law, but that, like many another law student, he gave more time and thought to literature than to his legal studies; that this action deepened the hostility of his father, who {98} reduced Burke's allowance to a pittance, and that his daily need as well as his desire drove Burke to seek his livelihood in letters.

[Sidenote: 1759—The work of Edmund Burke]

He seems to have had a hard fight for it. The glimpses we get of him during that period of youthful struggle show him as an ardent student of books, but a no less ardent student of life, not merely in the streets and clubs and theatres of the great city, but in the seclusion of quiet country villages and the highways and byways of rural England. Romance has not failed to endeavor to illuminate with her prismatic lantern the darkness of those nine mysterious years. A vivid fancy has been pleased to picture Burke as one of the many lovers of the marvellous Margaret Woffington, as a competitor for the chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, as a convert to the Catholic faith, and, perhaps most remarkable of all these lively legends, as a traveller in America. These are fictions. The certain facts are that somewhere about 1756 he married a Miss Nugent, daughter of an Irish physician who had settled in England. Miss Nugent was a Catholic, and thus, for the second time, the Catholic religion was endeared to Burke by one of the closest of human relationships. At about the same time as his marriage, Burke made his first appearance as an author by the "Vindication of Natural Society," a satire upon Bolingbroke which many accepted as a genuine work of Bolingbroke's, and by the "Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful," which is perhaps most valuable because we owe to it in some degree the later masterpiece of aesthetic criticism, the "Laocoon" of Lessing. From this time until his connection with public life began his career was linked with Fleet Street and its brotherhood of authors, and his pen was steadily employed. With that love for variety of subject which is characteristic of most of the authors of the eighteenth century, he handled a number of widely differing themes. He wrote "Hints for an Essay on the Drama," a work which has scarcely held its place in the library of the dramatist by the side of the "Paradoxe sur le Comedien" of Diderot, or the "Hamburgische {99} Dramaturgie" of Lessing. He wrote an account of the European settlements in America, still interesting as showing the early and intimate connection of his thoughts with the greatest of English colonies. He wrote an "Abridgment of English History," which carries unfortunately no farther than the reign of John a narrative that is not unworthy of its author. He founded the "Annual Register," and was in its pages for many years to come the historian of contemporary Europe. Of all the many debts that Englishmen owe to Burke, the conception and inception of the "Annual Register" must not be reckoned as among the least important.

It was at this point in his career that Burke's connection with public life began, not to end thenceforward until the end of his own life. Single-speech Hamilton, so called because out of a multitude of speeches he made one magnificent speech, was attracted to Burke by the fame of the "Vindication of Natural Society," sought his acquaintance, and when Hamilton went to Ireland as secretary to Lord Halifax, Burke accompanied him. For two years Burke remained with Hamilton in Ireland, studying the Irish question of that day, with the closeness of the acutest mind then at work and with the racial sympathy of the native. Then he quarrelled, and rightly quarrelled, with Hamilton, because Hamilton, to whom the aid of Burke was infinitely precious, sought to bind Burke forever to his service by a pension of three hundred a year. Burke demanded some leisure for the literature that had made his name. Hamilton justified Leland's description of him as a selfish, canker-hearted, envious reptile by refusing. Burke, who always spoke his mind roundly, described Hamilton as an infamous scoundrel, flung back his pension and returned to freedom, independence, and poverty. But he was soon to enter the service of another statesman under less galling terms, under less unreasonable conditions.

Burke's name was brought before Lord Rockingham, probably by Burke's friend and namesake, though in all likelihood not kinsman, William Burke. Lord Rockingham {100} appointed Burke his private secretary, and by the simple integrity of his character bound Burke, to use his own words, "by an inviolable attachment to him from that time forward." But the alliance thus begun was threatened in its birth. A mysterious hostility attributed by Burke to "Hell-Kite" Hamilton brought certain charges to the notice of the Duke of Newcastle. The Duke of Newcastle hurried to Lord Rockingham to warn him that his newly appointed secretary was a disguised Jesuit, a disguised Jacobite. Lord Rockingham immediately communicated these accusations to Burke, who repelled them with a firmness and dignity which had the effect only of confirming Lord Rockingham's admiration of Burke and of drawing closer the friendship of the two men. Burke was promptly brought into Parliament as member for Wendover, and during the single year which Lord Rockingham's Administration lasted its leader had every reason to rejoice at the happy chance which had given to him such a follower and such an ally.

Burke delivered his maiden speech in the House of Commons on January 27, 1766, a few days after the opening of the session, on the subject of the dissatisfaction in the American colonies. His speech won the praise of the Great Commoner; his succeeding speeches earned him enthusiastic commendation from friends and admirers outside and inside the House of Commons. The successful man of letters had proved himself rapidly to be a successful orator and a politician who would have to be reckoned with.

[Sidenote: 1766—The influence of Burke's career]

It has been contended, and not unreasonably, that as an orator Burke is not merely in the first rank, but that he is himself the first, that he stands alone, without a rival, without a peer, and that none of the orators of antiquity can be said even to contest his unquestionable supremacy. But it is in no sense necessary to Burke's fame that the fame of others should be in any way impugned or depreciated. It is sufficient praise to say that Burke is one of the greatest orators the world has ever held. To argue that he is superior to Demosthenes on the {101} one hand, or to Cicero on the other, is to maintain an argument very much on a par with that which it amused Burke himself to maintain when he contended for the superiority of the "Aeneid" over the "Iliad." It is quite enough to be able to say well-nigh without fear of contradiction that Burke is probably the greatest orator who ever spoke in the English language.

Burke's political career began brilliantly in the championship of freedom, in the defence of the oppressed, in the defiance of injustice. He was made welcome to the great political arena in which he was to fight so long and so hard. His ability was recognized at once; he may be said to have leaped into a fame that the passage of time has not merely confirmed but increased. No author more profoundly influenced the thought of his time; no author of that time is likely to exercise a more enduring influence upon succeeding generations. Of all the men of that busy and brilliant age, Burke has advanced the most steadily in the general knowledge and favor. While other men, his rivals in eloquence, his peers in the opinions of his contemporaries, come year by year to be less used as influences and appealed to as authorities, the wisdom of Burke is more frequently drawn upon and more widely appreciated than ever. The world sees now, even more clearly than the world saw then, that whether Burke was right or wrong in his conclusions as to any question, it had to be admitted that the point of view from which he started to get at that conclusion was the correct one.



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CHAPTER XLVIII.

THE STAMP ACT.

[Sidenote: 1766—Benjamin Franklin]

That the colonies were not well understood in England was no fault of the colonists. There was at that time and hour in England a man specially authorized to speak on behalf of the colony of Pennsylvania, and indirectly entitled as he was admirably qualified to represent the other colonies. At that time Benjamin Franklin was the most distinguished American living and the most distinguished American who had ever lived. It was not his first visit to England. He had crossed the Atlantic forty years before when he was a youth of eighteen, eager to set up for himself as a master printer, and anxious to obtain the materials for his trade in the old country. In those eighteen years he had learned many things. He had learned how to print; he had learned how to bear poverty with courage and ambition with patience; he could never remember a time when he was unable to read, but he had learned how to read with inexhaustible pleasure and unfailing profit, and he had learned how to write. When he was seventeen he had run away from his birthplace, Boston, and the home of an ill-tempered brother, and made his way as best he might to Philadelphia. As he tramped into the city with a loaf under each arm for provender, a young woman leaning in a doorway laughed at the singular figure. Six years later she married Franklin, who in the interval had been a journeyman printer in Philadelphia, a journeyman printer in London, and had at last been able to set up for himself in Philadelphia. From 1729 the story of Franklin's life is the story of a steady and splendid advance in popularity and wealth, and in the greater gifts of knowledge, wisdom, and humanity. He published a newspaper, {103} the Philadelphia Gazette; he disseminated frugality, thrift, industry, and the cheerful virtues in "Poor Richard's Almanack," he was the benefactor and the blessing of the city of his adoption. He founded her famous library; he devoted the results of his scientific studies to her comfort, welfare, and comeliness; he maintained her defences as a military engineer, and was prepared to serve her gallantly in the field against the Indians as a colonel of Militia of his own raising. No man ever lived a fuller life or did so many things with more indomitable zeal or more honorable thoroughness. The colony of Pennsylvania was very proud of her illustrious citizen and delighted to do him honor. When he visited England for the second time, in 1757, he was the Agent for the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, he was Deputy Postmaster-General for the British colonies, he was famous throughout the civilized world for his discovery of the identity of lightning with the electric fluid. He was in London for the third time when Rockingham took office. He had lived nearly sixty years of a crowded, memorable, admirable life; he was loaded with laurels, ripe in the learning of books and the learning of the book of the world. Even he whom few things surprised or took unawares would have been surprised if he could have been told that the life he had lived was eventless, bloodless, purposeless in comparison with the life he had yet to live, and that all he had done for his country was but as dust in the balance when weighed against the work he was yet to do for her. He was standing on the threshold of his new career in the year when Edmund Burke entered Parliament.

The Rockingham Administration did its best to undo the folly of Grenville's Government. After long debates in both Houses, after examination of Franklin at the bar of the Commons, after the strength and acumen of Mansfield had been employed to sustain the prerogative against the colonies and the voice of Burke had championed the colonies against the prerogative, after Grenville had defended himself with shrewdness and Pitt had added to the splendor of his fame, the Stamp Act was formally {104} repealed. Unhappily, the new Ministry was only permitted to do good by halves. The same session that repealed the Stamp Act promulgated the Declaratory Act, asserting the full power of the King, on the advice of Parliament, to make laws binding the American colonies in all cases whatsoever. This desperate attempt to assert what the repeal of the Stamp Act virtually surrendered was intended as a solace to the King and as a warning—perhaps a friendly warning—to the colonies. Those who were most opposed to it in England may well have hoped that it might be accepted without too much straining in the general satisfaction caused by the repeal of the hated measure. Even Franklin seemed to believe that the Declaratory Act would not cause much trouble in America. The event denied the hope, and indignation at the Declaratory Act outlasted in America the rejoicing over the subversion of Grenville's policy. Nevertheless, the rejoicing was very great. On May 16, 1766, the public spirit of Boston was stimulated by the distribution of a broadsheet headed "Glorious News." This broadsheet announced the arrival of John Hancock's brig "Harrison," in six weeks and two days from London, with the important tidings of the repeal of the Stamp Act. The broadsheet painted a lively picture of the enthusiasm at Westminster and the rejoicings in the City of London over the total repeal of the measure. It told of the ships in the river displaying all their colors, of illuminations and bonfires in many parts; "in short, the rejoicings were as great as was ever known on any occasion." This broadsheet, "printed for the benefit of the public," ended in a rapture of delight. "It is impossible to express the joy the town is now in, on receiving the above great, glorious, and important news. The bells on all the churches were immediately set a-ringing, and we hear the day for a general rejoicing will be the beginning of next week." Boston had every reason to rejoice, to ring its bells and fly its flags, and set poor debtors free from prison in honor of the occasion. The colonies had stood together against the Home Government, and had learned something of {105} the strength of their union by the repeal of the Stamp Act.

[Sidenote: 1766—Action of the Colonial Governors]

But when the bells had stopped ringing and the flags were hauled down and the released debtors had ceased to congratulate themselves upon their newly recovered liberty, Boston and the other colonial cities found that their satisfaction was not untempered. The broadsheet that had blazoned the repeal had also assured its readers that the Acts of Trade relating to America would be taken under consideration and all grievances removed. "The friends to America are very powerful and disposed to assist us to the best of their ability." The friends to America were powerful, but they fought against tremendous odds. Dulness and mediocrity, a spite that was always stupid, and a stupidity that was often spiteful, an alliance of ignorance and arrogance were the forces against which they struggled in vain. The Acts of Trade were to be enforced as rigidly as ever. The Declaratory Act pompously asserted the unimpeachable prerogative of British Majesty to make what laws it pleased for the colonies. The good that had been done seemed small in comparison with the harm that might yet be done, that in all probability would be done.

For the time more was to be feared from the viceroys of the provinces than from the Home Government. Mr. Secretary Conway addressed a circular letter to the governors of the different colonies, reproving the colonists, indeed, for the recent disturbances, but with a measured mildness of reproof that seemed carefully calculated not to give needless offence or cause unnecessary irritation. "If by lenient persuasive methods," Conway wrote, "you can contribute to restore the peace and tranquillity to the provinces on which their welfare and happiness depend, you will do a most acceptable and essential service to your country." An appeal so suave, advice so judicious, did not seem the less prudent and humane because the Secretary insisted upon the repression of violence and outrage and reminded those to whom his letter was addressed that if they needed aid in the maintenance of law and order {106} they were to require it at the hands of the commanders of his Majesty's land and naval forces in America. If all the gentlemen to whom the Secretary's circular was addressed had been as reasonable and as restrained in language as its writer, things might even then have turned out very differently. It was not to be expected, and the colonists did not expect, that outrage and violence were to go unchallenged and unpunished, and it is probable that few even in Massachusetts would have objected to the formal expression of thanks for firmness and zeal which was made by Conway to the governor of that colony. But the temperance that was possible to Conway was impossible to Bernard. Bernard was one of the worst of a long line of inappropriate colonial governors. He was a hot-headed, hot-hearted man who seemed to think that to play the part of a domineering, blustering bully was to show discretion and discernment in the duties of his office. He always acted under the conviction that he must always be in the right and every one else always in the wrong, and he blazed up into fantastic rages at the slightest show of opposition. As this was not the spirit in which to deal with the proud and independent men of Massachusetts, Governor Bernard passed the better part of his life in a passion and was forever quarrelling with his provincial legislature and forever complaining to the Home Government of his hard lot and of the mischievous, mutinous set of fellows he had to deal with.

When Bernard received the Secretary's letters and the accompanying copies of the two Bills that had been passed by the British Parliament, he hastened to make them known to the Assembly of Massachusetts. But he made them known in a speech that was wholly lacking in either temperance or discretion. Had it been at once his desire and his duty to inflame his hearers against himself and the Government which he represented he could hardly have chosen words more admirably adapted for the purpose. With a wholly unchastened arrogance and a wholly ungoverned truculence, the governor of the province lectured or rather hectored the gentlemen of the Council and the {107} gentlemen of the House of Representatives after a fashion that would have seemed in questionable taste on the part of an old-fashioned pedagogue to a parcel of unruly schoolboys. He was for bullying and blustering them into a better behavior, and he assured those who were willing to make amends and to promise to be good in the future that their past offences would be buried in a charitable oblivion. "Too ready a forgetfulness of injuries hath been said to be my weakness," Bernard urged with strange ignorance. "However, it is a failing which I had rather suffer by than be without."

The House of Representatives replied to the reproofs of their governor in an address that was remarkable for the firmness with which it maintained its own position and the irony with which it reviewed the governor's pretensions. To prove their independence of action, they delayed the Act of Indemnity demanded by Secretary Conway for several months, and then accompanied it with a general pardon to all persons who had been concerned in the riots provoked by the Stamp Act. Though this Act was promptly disallowed by the Home Government on the ground that the power of pardon belonged exclusively to the Crown, it took effect nevertheless, and added another to the grievances of Bernard and of his backers in England.

[Sidenote: 1766—End of the Rockingham Administration]

The slowly widening breach between the American colonies and the mother country might even yet have been filled if it had been possible for the King to depend upon the services and listen to the advice of ministers whose good intentions and general good sense had the advantage of being served and indirectly inspired by the genius of Burke. But unhappily, the fortunes of the party with whom he was allied were not long fated to be official fortunes. After a year of honorable if somewhat colorless existence, the Rockingham Administration came to an end. There was no particular reason why it should come to an end, but the King was weary of it. If it had not gravely dissatisfied him, it had afforded him no grave satisfaction. An Administration always seemed to George the Third like a candle which he could illuminate or extinguish at his {108} pleasure. So he blew out the Rockingham Administration and turned to Pitt for a new one. In point of fact, an Administration without Pitt was an impossibility. The Duke of Grafton had resigned his place in the Rockingham Ministry because he believed it hopeless to go on without the adhesion of Pitt, and Pitt would not adhere to the Rockingham Ministry. Now, with a free hand, he set to work to form one of the most amazing Administrations that an age which knew many strange Administrations can boast of.

The malady which had for so long martyrized the great statesman had afflicted him heavily of late. His eccentricities had increased to such a degree that they could hardly be called merely eccentricities. But though he suffered in mind and in body he was ready and even eager to return to power, so long as that power was absolute. By this time he had quarrelled with Temple, who had so often hindered him from resuming office, and who was now as hostile to him as his brother, George Grenville, had ever been. Temple, in consequence, found no place in the new Administration. The Administration was especially designed to please the King. A party had grown up in the State which was known by the title of the King's friends. The King's friends had no political creed, no political convictions, no desire, no ambition, and no purpose save to please the King. What the King wanted said they would say; what the King wanted done they would do; their votes were unquestionably and unhesitatingly at the King's command. They did not, indeed, act from an invincible loyalty to the royal person. It was the royal purse that ruled them. The King was the fountain of patronage; wealth and honors flowed from him; and the wealth and the honors welded the King's friends together into a harmonious and formidable whole. The King's friends found themselves well represented in a Ministry that was otherwise as much a thing of shreds and patches as a harlequin's coat. Pitt had tried to make a chemical combination, but he only succeeded in making a mixture that might at any time dissolve into its component parts. It was composed {109} of men of all parties and all principles. The amiable Conway and the unamiable Grafton remained on from Rockingham's Ministry. So did the Duke of Portland and Lord Bessborough, so did Saunders and Keppel. Pitt did not forget his own followers. He gave the Great Seal to Lord Camden, who, as Justice Pratt, had liberated Wilkes from unjustifiable arrest. He made Lord Shelburne one of the Secretaries of State. The Chancellorship of the Exchequer was given to a politician with a passion for popularity that made him as steadfast as a weathercock, Charles Townshend.

[Sidenote: 1766—Pitt as Earl of Chatham]

By this time Pitt was no longer the Great Commoner. The House of Commons was to know him no more. Under the title of Earl of Chatham he had entered the Upper House. Such an elevation did not mean then, as it came later to mean, something little better than political extinction. But Pitt's elevation meant to him a loss of popularity as immediate as it was unexpected. Though he was no longer young, though he was racked in mind and body, though he sorely needed the repose that he might hope to find in the Upper House, he was assailed with as much fury of vituperation as if he had betrayed the State. A country that was preparing to rejoice at his return to power lashed itself into a fury of indignation at his exaltation to the peerage. In the twinkling of an eye men who had been devoted yesterday to Pitt were prepared to believe every evil of Chatham. His rule began in storm and gloom, and gloomy and stormy it remained. The first act of his Administration roused the fiercest controversy. A bad harvest had raised the price of food almost to famine height. Chatham took the bold step of laying an embargo on the exportation of grain. The noise of the debates over this act had hardly died away when Pitt's malady again overmastered him, and once more he disappeared from public life into mysterious melancholy silence and seclusion. It was an unhappy hour for the country which deprived it of the services of Chatham and left the helm of state in the hands of Charles Townshend.

Charles Townshend was the erratic son of a singularly {110} erratic mother. The beautiful Audrey Harrison married the third Marquis Townshend, bore him five children, and then separated from him to carry her beauty, her insolence, and her wit through an amazed and amused society. It was one of her eccentricities to change her name Audrey to Ethelfreda. Another was to fancy herself and to proclaim herself to be very much in love with the unhappy Lord Kilmarnock. She attended the trial persistently, waited under his windows, quarrelled with Selwyn for daring to jest about the execution—no very happy theme for wit—and was all for adopting a little boy whom some of the officials of the Tower had palmed off upon her as Kilmarnock's son. Walpole liked her, delighted in her witty, stinging sayings. She was always entertaining, always alarming, always ready to say or do anything that came into her mind. She lived, a whimsical, spiteful, sprightly oddity, to be eighty-seven years of age. [Sidenote: 1766—Peculiar characteristics of Charles Townshend] Charles Townshend was her second son, and Charles Townshend was in many ways as whimsical as his mother. He had a ready wit, a dexterity in epigram, an astonishing facility of speech, and a very great appreciation of his own power of turning friends or foes into ridicule. It is told of him that once in his youth, when a student at Leyden, he suffered from his readiness to jest at the expense of another. At a merry supper party he plied one of the guests, a seemingly unconscious, stolid Scotchman named Johnstone, with sneers and sarcasms which the Scotchman seemed to disregard or take in good part. On the next morning, however, Townshend's victim, enlightened by some friend as to the way in which he had been made a butt of, became belligerent and sent Townshend a challenge. Various opinions have been expressed of Townshend's action in the matter. He has been applauded for good sense. He has been reproached for cowardice. Certainly Townshend did not, would not fight his challenger. It required a great deal of good sense to decline a duel in those days, and Townshend did decline the duel. He apologized to his slow-witted but stubborn-purposed opponent with a profusion of apology which some of his {111} friends thought to be excessive. In these days we should consider Townshend's refusal to fight a duel merely as an unimportant proof of his common-sense, but in the last century, in the society in which Townshend moved, and on the Continent, such a refusal suggested the possession of a degree of common-sense that was far from ordinary—that was, indeed, extraordinary. Townshend's tact, wit, and good spirits carried him through the scrape somehow. He made the rounds of Leyden with his would-be adversary, calling in turn upon each of his many friends, and obtaining from each, in the presence of his companion, the assurance that Townshend had never been known to speak of Johnstone slightingly or discourteously behind his back. The episode, trivial in itself, gains a kind of gravity by the illustration it affords of Townshend's character all through Townshend's short career. The impossibility of restraining an incorrigible tongue, and the unreadiness to follow out the course of action to which his words would seem to have committed him, were the distinguishing marks of Townshend's political existence. No man, no party, nor no friend could count on the unflinching services of Townshend. His conduct was as irresponsible as his eloquence was dazzling. In his twenty years of public life he had but one purpose—to please and to be praised; and to gain those ends he sacrificed consistency and discretion with a light heart. The beauty of his person and the fluent splendor of his speech went far towards the attainment of an ambition which was always frustrated by a fatal levity. In the fine phrase of Burke, he was a candidate for contradictory honors, and his great aim was to make those agree in admiration of him who never agreed in anything else.

It has been given to few men to desire fame more ardently, and to attain it more disastrously, than Charles Townshend. If we may estimate the man by the praises of his greatest contemporary, no one better deserved a fairer fortune than fate allotted to him. Burke spoke of Townshend as the delight and ornament of the House of Commons, and the charm of every private society which he honored with his presence. Though his passion for {112} fame might be immoderate, it was at least a passion which is the instinct of all great souls. While Burke could rhapsodize over Townshend's pointed and finished wit, his refined, exquisite, and penetrating judgment, his skill and power in statement, his excellence in luminous explanation, Walpole was no less enthusiastic in an estimate that contrasted Townshend with Burke. According to Walpole, Townshend, who studied nothing with accuracy or attention, had parts that embraced all knowledge with such quickness that he seemed to create knowledge instead of seeking for it. Ready as Walpole admits Burke's wit to have been, he declares that it appeared artificial when set by that of Townshend, which was so abundant in him that it seemed a loss of time to think. Townshend's utterances had always the fascinating effervescence of spontaneity, while even Burke's extempore utterances were so pointed and artfully arranged that they wore the appearance of study and preparation. This brilliant, resplendent creature, in every respect the opposite to George Grenville, showy where Grenville was solid, fluent where he was formal, glittering and even glowing where he was sober or sombre, fascinating where he was repellent, gracious where he was sullen, and polished where he was rude, was nevertheless destined to share Grenville's hateful task and Grenville's deserved condemnation. Such enthusiasm as Parliament had permitted itself to show over the repeal of Grenville's Stamp Act had long flickered out. The colonists were regarded with more disfavor than ever by a majority that raged against their ingratitude and bitterly repented the repeal of the Act. Townshend's passion for popularity forced him into the fatal blunder of his life. He was indeed, as Burke said, the spoiled child of the House of Commons, never thinking, acting, or speaking but with a view to its judgment, and adapting himself daily to its disposition, and adjusting himself before it as before a looking-glass. The looking-glass showed him a member of a Ministry that was unpopular because it refused to tax America. He resolved that the looking-glass should show him a member of a Ministry popular because {113} it was resolved to tax America. His hunger and thirst after popularity, his passion for fame, were leading him into strange ways indeed. He was to leave after him an enduring name, but enduring for reasons that would have broken his bright spirit if he could have realized them. The shameful folly of George Grenville was the shameful folly of Charles Townshend. His name stands above Grenville's in the roll of those who in that disastrous time did so much to lower the honor and lessen the empire of England. It became plain to Townshend that the Parliamentary majority regretted the repeal of the Stamp Act and resented the theory that America should not be taxed. Townshend resolved that revenue could and should be raised out of America. He introduced a Bill imposing a tax on glass, paper, and tea upon the American colonies. Though the amount to be raised was not large, no more than forty thousand pounds, and though it was proposed that the whole of the sum should be spent in America, it was as mischievous in its result as if it had been more malevolently aimed. [Sidenote: 1766—Death of Townshend] Townshend himself did not live long enough to learn the unhappy consequences of his folly. A neglected fever proved fatal to him in the September of 1767, in the forty-third year of his age. Walpole lamented him with an ironical appreciation. "Charles Townshend is dead. All those parts and fire are extinguished; those volatile salts are evaporated; that first eloquence of the world is dumb; that duplicity is fixed, that cowardice terminated heroically. He joked on death as naturally as he used to do on the living, and not with the affectation of philosophers who wind up their works with sayings which they hope to have remembered." Townshend had passed away, but his policy remained, a fatal legacy to the country.

Townshend was immediately succeeded in the Chancellorship of the Exchequer by a young politician who had been for some years in Parliament and had held several offices without conspicuously distinguishing himself. When Lord North entered the House of Commons as member for Banbury, his record was that of any intelligent young {114} nobleman of his time. He had written pleasing Latin love poems at Eton, he had been to Oxford, he had studied at Leipzig. George Grenville saw great promise in North. He even predicted that if he did not relax in his political pursuits he was very likely to become Prime Minister. Unhappily for his country, North did not relax in his political pursuits. There was an ironic fitness in the fact that North should be admired by Grenville and should succeed to Townshend, for no man was better fitted to carry on the fatal policy of the two men who had outraged the American colonies by the Stamp Act and the tax on tea.



{115}

CHAPTER XLIX.

WILKES REDIVIVUS.

[Sidenote: 1767—The return of Wilkes]

While the King's Government was preparing for itself an infinity of trouble abroad, it was not destined to find itself idle for want of trouble at home. Great and grave trouble came upon the King and his friends suddenly, and out of a quarter from which they least expected it. If they were confident of anything, they were confident that they had dealt the final blow to the audacious demagogue who for a time had fluttered the town with the insolences of the North Briton. The North Briton had ceased to exist. Of the two men whose bitter genius had been its breath, Churchill was dead, and Wilkes himself, a fugitive and a beggar, drifting from one European capital to another, seemed as little to be feared as if he slept by Churchill's side. The visit of the Commander's statue to Don Juan seemed scarcely more out of the course of nature to Don Juan's lackey than the reappearance in active public life of Wilkes appeared to the King's friends, for whom Wilkes had ceased to exist.

Wilkes had wearied of Continental life. His affection for his own country was so earnest and so sincere that, in a letter to the Duke of Grafton, he declared his willingness to bury himself in the obscurity of private life, if he were permitted to return unmolested to England. The appeal failed to extract a satisfactory reply. The Ministers would make no terms with their ruined foeman. Wilkes then resolved to show that he was not so helpless as his enemies appeared to think him. He published in 1767, in London, a pamphlet, in which he stated his case with indignation, but not without dignity. When the pamphlet had obtained a wide circulation, Wilkes followed {116} it up by appearing himself in London in the February of 1768, at the moment of the general election, and announcing himself as a candidate for Parliament for the City of London. The audacity of this step amazed his enemies and delighted his friends. If it had been taken a little earlier it might have won him the seat. So calm and so wise an observer as Franklin, at least, thought that it would have done so. As it was, though Wilkes came late into the field, and was placed at the bottom of the poll, he secured more than twelve hundred votes, and did, in the conventional phrase too often used to soothe defeat, gain a great moral victory.

The courage of the outlaw had more than revived all the old enthusiasm for him. We know on the authority of Burke that the acclamations of joy with which he was welcomed by the populace were inconceivable, and that the marks of public favor which he received were by no means confined to the lower order of the people. Several merchants and other gentlemen of large property and of considerable interest openly espoused his cause, and a subscription was immediately opened in the City for the payment of his debts. We know on other authority that in an age when betting was the mode the extraordinary betting as to Wilkes's success in his desperate enterprise was actually organized by a certain number of brokers into stock which was quoted on 'Change. Burke ascribes the reason for the failure to the open voting. The electors were obliged, he said, to record their names, and the consequences of an opposition to great corporate and commercial connections were too obvious not to be understood.

[Sidenote: 1768—Wilkes as Member for Middlesex]

As soon as Wilkes knew of his defeat in the City, he struck a yet bolder note for success. He came forward at once as a candidate for the County of Middlesex in opposition to the established interest of two gentlemen who had represented it for several years, who were supported by the whole interest of the Court and who had considerable fortunes and great connections in it. But Wilkes, too, had powerful abettors. The Duke of Portland was one of his most prominent supporters. His old friend Temple {117} supplied the freehold qualification which was then essential for a Parliamentary candidate. Horne, the Rector of Brentford, where the election took place, gave all his great influence and all his gifts to the service of Wilkes with the same devotion that had formerly animated Churchill. Horne was not altogether an admirable character, and his enthusiasm for Wilkes had hitherto awakened no corresponding enthusiasm on Wilkes's part. But Horne was invaluable at a crisis like the Middlesex election. He had the eloquence of a sophist; he had the strategy of a tactician; he was endowed with an unconquerable energy, an indomitable determination. He was exceedingly popular in his parish; he caught the mood of the popular party, and he happened to be on the right side. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the services he rendered to Wilkes and to the cause of which Wilkes was the figurehead by his work in the Middlesex election. The zeal of Horne, the friendship of Temple, the daring of Wilkes carried the day. It was no ordinary victory. It was an astonishing triumph. As Burke pointed out, the same causes did not operate upon the freeholders at large which had prevented the inclinations of the livery of London from taking effect in Wilkes's favor, and the result of the polling on March 28 was that Wilkes was returned to Parliament by a prodigious majority. Wilkes polled 1290 votes. Mr. George Cooke, the Tory candidate, who had been the representative for eighteen years, only scored 827, and Sir W. Beauchamp Procter, the Whig candidate, only got 807 votes.

There was great excitement in London when the result of the election was known. It pleased the popular voice to insist that every window should be illuminated in honor of Wilkes's triumph, and all windows that were not lit up were unhesitatingly broken. Those persons who were known to be Wilkes's principal opponents received the special attentions of the mob. Lord Bute's house had to stand a siege; so had the house of Lord Egremont, who had signed the warrant for Wilkes's committal; so had other houses which were either known to belong to the {118} opponents of the hero or showed themselves to be such by their darkened windows. All such windows were instantly broken, to the joy of the glaziers, who declared that a Middlesex election was worth any number of Indian victories. The mob had it all its own way, for the strength of the constabulary had been drafted off to Brentford in expectation of rioting there which never took place. But the mob did not abuse its triumph. It was in its playful, not its dangerous mood. It stopped the carriages of the gentry, made the occupants cheer for Wilkes and Liberty, scrawled the number Forty-five upon the polished panels, broke the glasses, but in the main let the carriage-owners go unmolested. The Duke of Northumberland was forced to toast the popular favorite in a mug of ale. One ludicrous occurrence very nearly became an international episode. The Austrian Ambassador, Count Hatzfeldt, famed for his stateliness, for his punctiliousness in ceremonial, fell a victim to popular misapprehension. The mob that surrounded his coach took him, unhappily, for a Scotchman, either because of his stiffness of demeanor or because they could not understand what he was saying. To be thought Scotch was a bad thing for any man in the hands of a mob that howled for Wilkes, that howled against Bute. The Austrian Ambassador was dragged from his carriage and held uplifted in sufficiently uncomfortable fashion while the magic number Forty-five was chalked upon the soles of his shoes. He was no further hurt; if he had been a more prudent man he would have grinned at the mischance and said no more about it. But he chose to consider his dignity and the dignity of his empire affronted by the follies of a crowd. He lodged a formal complaint with the English Government. The English Government could do nothing more than express regret with such gravity as it could muster. As for the irreverent rogues who had laid their hands upon the feet of the representative of a friendly State, it was not in the power of the Government to punish them. The earth has bubbles as the water has, and they were of them.

For two days the town was practically at the mercy of {119} the Wilkite mob. The trainbands were called out by the Mayor, who was an ardent courtier, but the men of the trainbands were, for the most part, no less ardent Wilkites. They lent their drums to swell the noise of Wilkes's triumph; they could not be counted on to lend their muskets to the suppression of Wilkes's partisans. Even the regular troops were not, it was thought, to be relied upon in the emergency. It was said here that certain regimental drummers had beaten their drums for Wilkes; it was said there that soldiers had been heard to declare that they would never fire upon the people.

The fury of the Ministry, and especially the fury of the King, flamed high. The King's heat was increased by a letter which Wilkes had addressed directly to him on his return to England. In this letter Wilkes made a not undignified appeal for the King's mercy and clemency, complained of the wicked and deceitful acts of revenge of the late Ministry, and assured the sovereign of his zeal and attachment to his service. To this letter, naturally, no direct reply was made. The form that the King's answer took was to insist that all the strength of the Government must be used against Wilkes in order that he should be driven from that Parliament to which the electors of Middlesex had dared to return him.

[Sidenote: 1768—Wilkes in prison]

In the mean time the force of the law was slowly exerted against Wilkes. Wilkes had promised that on the first day of the term following his arrival in England he would present himself at the Court of King's Bench. He kept his promise and surrendered himself on April 20. The judges of the King's Bench seem to have been paralyzed by the position. It took them a whole week to decide that they would refuse Wilkes bail—a whole week, every day, every hour of which served to make Wilkes's cause better known and Wilkes himself more popular. Wilkes went to prison under the most extraordinary circumstances. His journey from Westminster to Bishopsgate was more like a royal progress than the passage of a criminal and an outlaw. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Wilkes was able to detach himself from the zeal of the populace {120} and get quietly into his prison. The prison immediately became an object of greater interest than a royal palace. Every day it was surrounded by a dense crowd that considered itself rewarded for hours of patient waiting if it could but get a glimpse of the prisoner's face at a window. All this show of enthusiasm exasperated the ministers and drove them into the very acts that were best calculated to keep the enthusiasm alive. On the day of the opening of Parliament, May 10, the Government, under the pretence of fearing riot, sent down a detachment of soldiers to guard the King's Bench Prison, in St. George's Fields. This was in itself a rash step enough, but every circumstance attending it only served to make it more rash. As if deliberately to aggravate the popular feeling, the regiment chosen for this pretence of keeping the peace was a Scotch regiment. At a moment when everything Scotch was insanely disliked in London such a choice was not likely to insure good temper either on the part of the mob or on the part of the military. That good temper was not intended or desired was made plain by a letter written by Lord Weymouth, the Secretary of State, to the local magistrate, urging him to make use of the soldiers in any case of riot.

What followed was only what might have been expected. The crowd, irritated by the non-appearance of Wilkes, still more irritated by the presence of the soldiery, threatened, or was thought to threaten, an attack upon the prison. Angry words were followed by blows; the brawl between the mob and the military became a serious conflict. A young man named Allan, who seems to have had nothing to do with the scuffle, was killed in a private house by some of the soldiers who had forced an entrance in pursuit of one of their assailants. Then the Riot Act was read; the troops fired; half a dozen of the rioters were killed, including one woman, and several others were wounded.

News of this bad business intensified the angry feeling against the Government. A Scotch soldier, Donald Maclean, was put on his trial for the murder of Allan. His {121} acquittal caused an indignation which deepened when the colonel of the regiment presented him with thirty guineas on behalf of the Government. This was taken as an example of the determination of the Crown to silence the voice of the people with the weapons of Scotch mercenaries. Pamphlets, speeches, sermons, all were employed to stimulate the general agitation and to brand with atrocity the conduct of the Ministry. The tombstone erected over the murdered man Allan chronicled his inhuman murder "by Scottish detachments from the Army," and quoted from Proverbs the words, "Take away the wicked from before the King."

[Sidenote: 1768—The Ministry on its defence]

The ministers, on their side, were not slow to defend themselves. Burke, with his usual fairness, has stated their case for them when he tells how they painted in the strongest colors the licentiousness of the rabble and that contempt of all government which makes it necessary to oppose to a violent distemper remedies not less violent. This is, of course, the excuse of every overbearing authority, which, having aroused irritation by its own mismanagement, can conceive of no better way of allaying that irritation than the bayonet and the bullet. The Ministry and the advocates of the Ministry maintained that the unhappy disposition of the people was such that juries under the influence of the general infatuation could hardly be got to do justice to soldiers under prosecution, unless Government interposed in the most effectual manner for the protection of those who had acted under their orders. They further urged that, in view of the danger of the insolence of the populace becoming contagious with the very soldiery, it was necessary for them to keep those servants firm to their duty by new and unusual rewards. "Whatever weight," says Burke, dryly, "might have been in these reasons, they were but little prevalent, and the Ministry became by this affair and its concomitant circumstances still more unpopular than by almost any other event." But it must in fairness be admitted that, foolish, stubborn, and even brutal as the King's ministers showed themselves to be, their position was a very difficult one.

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It was well open to the Government to urge, and to urge with truth, the peculiar lawlessness of the hour. It is an effective example of the ineffectiveness of a mere policy of coercion that, at a time when the penal laws of Great Britain were ferocious to a degree that would have disgraced Dahomey, the laws were so frequently defied, and defied with impunity. The laws might be merciless, even murderous, but the Executive had not always the power to compel respect or to enforce obedience. Among the lower classes in the great city, and not merely that portion of the lower classes who are qualified by the appellation of the dangerous classes, but in strata where at least a moderate degree of civilization might be hoped for, an amount of savagery, of lawlessness, and of cruelty prevailed that would have not ill become the pirates of the Spanish Seas or the most brutal of Calabrian brigands. The hideous institution of the pillory stimulated and fostered all the worst instincts of a mob to whose better instincts no decent system of education sought to appeal. Ignorance, and poverty, and dirt brooded over the bulk of the poorer population, to breed their inevitable consequences. Murder was alarmingly common. Riots that almost reached the proportions of petty civil wars were liable to arise at any moment between one section of the poorer citizens and another. The horrors of the Brownrigg case show to what extent lust of cruelty could go. The large disbandments that are the inevitable consequence of peace after a long war had thrown out of employment, and thrown upon the country, no small number of needy, unscrupulous, and desperate men, only too ready to lend a hand to any disturbance that might afford a chance of food and drink and plunder.

[Sidenote: 1752—Mob violence in London]

Mob law ruled in London to an extraordinary degree during the whole of the eighteenth century. It reached a high pitch, but not its highest pitch, at the time when the watchword was Wilkes and Liberty. London was to witness bitterer work, bloodier work than anything which followed upon the Middlesex election and the imprisonment of the popular hero. But for the time the audacity of the mob seemed to have gone its farthest. The temper of the {123} mob was insolent, its insolence was brutal. It hated all foreigners—and among foreigners it now included Scotchmen—and it manifested its hatred in vituperation, and when it dared in violence. A white man would hardly be in more danger in a mid-African village than a foreigner was in the streets of London. There is a contemporary account written by a French gentleman who travelled in England, and who published his observations on what he saw in England, which gives a piteous account of the barbarous incivility to which he, his friends, and his servants were exposed when they walked abroad. The mob that jeered and insulted the master very nearly killed the servant for the single offence of being a Frenchman. But the brutalities of the mob were not limited to strangers. The citizens of London fared almost as badly if not quite as badly as any Frenchman could do. Fielding gives a picture in one of his essays of the lawless arrogance which was characteristic of the rabble. He gave to the mob the title of the Fourth Estate in an article in the Covent Garden Journal for June 13, 1752, and in another article a week later he painted an ironical picture of the brutal manners and overbearing demeanor of the mob. "A gentleman," he wrote, "may go a voyage at sea with little more hazard than he can travel ten miles from the metropolis." On the river, on the streets, on the highways, according to Fielding, mob manners prevailed, and brutal language might at any moment be followed by brutal actions. When the largest allowance is made for the exaggeration of the satirist, enough remains to show that the condition of London in the second half of the eighteenth century was disorderly in the extreme. People who ventured on the Thames were liable to the foulest insults, and even to be run down by those who were pleased to regard the stream as their appanage, and who resented the appearance on it of any who seemed better dressed than themselves. Women of fashion were liable to be hustled, mobbed, insulted if they ventured in St. James's Park on a Sunday evening. No one could walk the streets by day without the probability of being annoyed, or by night without the risk of {124} being knocked down. After painting his grim picture in the Hogarth manner, Fielding concluded grimly that he must observe "that there are two sorts of persons of whom this fourth estate do yet stand in some awe, and whom, consequently, they have in great abhorrence: these are a justice of the peace and a soldier. To these two it is entirely owing that they have not long since rooted all the other orders out of the commonwealth."

[Sidenote: 1769—Wilkes's expulsion from the Commons]

The Government hoped that the longer Wilkes lay in prison, the more chance there was that the enthusiasm for him would abate. But in this hope the Government were disappointed. Even in the ranks of the ministers the King was not able to find unswerving agreement to his demands for Wilkes's expulsion from Parliament. Outside Parliament the agitation was not only undiminished, but was even on the increase. This was shown conclusively by a fresh event in connection with Middlesex. Cooke, who was the colleague of Wilkes in the representation of the county, died. Serjeant Glynn, who had made himself conspicuous as the champion of Wilkes and the advocate of the popular cause, came forward to contest the vacant seat, and carried the constituency in spite of the most determined efforts on the part of the royal faction to defeat him. There were more riots, more deaths on the popular side, more trials, more convictions for murder and more pardons of the condemned men. The agitation which had been burning at a steady heat blazed up into a flame. Wilkes made every use of the opportunity. He had succeeded in getting a copy of the letter which Lord Weymouth had sent to the magistrates, the letter in which Lord Weymouth had practically urged the magistrates to fire upon the people. Wilkes immediately sent it to the St. James's Chronicle, a tri-weekly independent Whig journal which had been started in 1760. The St. James's Chronicle printed the letter, and Wilkes's own letter accompanying it, in which he accused the Ministry of having planned and determined upon the "horrid massacre of St. George's Fields." The letter, said Wilkes, "shows how long a hellish project can be brooded over by some infernal {125} spirits without one moment's remorse." It may be admitted that if the language of Wilkes's enemies in the two Houses was strong even to ruffianism, Wilkes could and did give them as good as he got in the way of invective and vituperation.

The Government, goaded into fury by this daring provocation, resolved to make an example of the offender. Lord Barrington brought the letter formally before the House of Commons. The House of Commons immediately voted it a libel, and summoned Wilkes from his prison to the bar of the House. On February 3, 1769, Wilkes appeared before the Commons. With perfect composure he admitted the authorship of the letter to the St. James's Chronicle, and, with an audacity that exasperated the House, he proclaimed his regret that he had not expressed himself upon the subject in stronger terms, and added that he should certainly do so whenever a similar occasion should present itself. "Whenever," he said, "a Secretary of State shall dare to write so bloody a scroll, I will through life dare to write such prefatory remarks, as well as to make my appeal to the nation on the occasion." Wilkes found champions in the House of Commons. Burke, Beckford, and many others either defended Wilkes or urged that the matter was not for the House of Commons, but for the law courts to deal with. In the division the Government was triumphant by a majority of 219 against 137, and Wilkes was formally expelled from the House of Commons on the ground, not merely of his comments on the letter of Lord Weymouth, but on account of the Number Forty-five of the North Briton and the "Essay on Woman."

A new writ was issued for the county of Middlesex. The county of Middlesex promptly re-elected Wilkes without opposition on February 16. On February 17 the House of Commons again voted the expulsion of Wilkes. This time the House of Commons exceeded its powers and its privileges in adding that the expelled man was incapable of sitting in the existing Parliament. Every blow that the royal party had struck at Wilkes had only aroused stronger sympathy for him; and this illegal act, this usurpation {126} by one House of powers that only belonged to Parliament, caused the liveliest indignation. It was resolved by the friends of Wilkes, and by all who were the friends of the principles with which Wilkes had come to be identified, to fight to the utmost in defence of their constitutional rights, that were now so gravely, so wantonly jeopardized. On March 16 there was a new polling at Brentford, and, as before, Wilkes was returned unopposed. There was, indeed, an effort made by an obscure merchant named Dingley to oppose him, but he could find no freeholder to second him, and he was chivied ignominiously from the scene of the election. On March 17 the House of Commons, for the third time, played what Burke called the tragi-comedy of declaring the election void. A new writ was again issued, and this time the Ministry were resolved that, come what come might, Wilkes should have an opponent. It was not the easiest of tasks to find a man willing to oppose Wilkes's candidature on the hustings at Brentford. Dingley, the merchant, had experienced the violence of the mob; it was confidently assumed that any other antagonist would fare very much worse. But the Ministry found their champion in a young officer, Colonel Luttrell, of the Guards, a son of Lord Irnham. Luttrell was a gallant young soldier, a man of that temper which regards all popular agitations with supreme disdain, and of that courage that would face any danger, not merely with composure, but with pleasure. His friends were so apprehensive that he was going to his death that his life was insured, and the gentlemen of the clubs, who were always willing to bet upon any imaginable contingency, betted freely on his chances of surviving his adventure. Wilkes's friends, however, were resolved to disappoint the expectations of their enemies. Thanks to their energy and patience, the election went off with perfect order. Wilkes was, of course, returned at the top of the poll by an enormous majority. Luttrell came next with less than a quarter of his votes, and an absurd attorney, who had thrust himself into the election at the last moment, came last with a ludicrous poll of five votes.

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[Sidenote: 1769—Lord North and the Wilkes case]

On Thursday, April 13, Wilkes was elected. London was again illuminated, and a great demonstration outside the King's Bench Prison congratulated the hero of the hour on his third triumph. On the following day the House of Commons prepared again to reject Wilkes. The debate lasted over the Saturday—a rare event in those days—and in the early dawning of Sunday morning Colonel Luttrell was declared to be duly elected as the member for Middlesex. The ministerial victory was not a very great victory. They had only a majority of 197 votes to 143. It served their turn at a pinch, but it was not a big enough majority to inspire Lord North with the courage to resist a proposal that a fortnight should be allowed to the electors of Middlesex in which, if they wished, to petition against conduct which practically deprived them of their constitutional rights.

Lord North had many years of public life before him, many years of slumbering and blundering on the treasury bench, before his death in 1792, as Lord Guildford, in a melancholy, premature old age. In those years he was privileged to do a vast amount of injury to his country, uncompensated for by any act to her advantage. Lord North's conduct in the case of Wilkes was not the most foolish act in a career of folly, but it certainly served as an illuminating preface to a chronicle of wasted time. No proofs of the wit that endeared him to his contemporaries have been preserved; his fame for an unalterable urbanity is but an empty memory; his record is only rescued from oblivion by the series of incredible follies which began with the unjust attempt to annihilate Wilkes.



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CHAPTER L.

THE SPIRIT OP JUNIUS.

[Sidenote: 1769—The Letters of Junius]

While all this was going on a new force suddenly made itself felt in English political life. The King and his ministers found themselves attacked by a mysterious and dangerous opponent. On March 21, 1769, a letter was addressed to the Public Advertiser, signed "Junius," which marked the beginning of a new era in political literature. At that time the Public Advertiser was the most important paper in London. It had first appeared under that name in 1752, but it was the direct descendant, through a series of changes of name, of the Daily Post, which Defoe had helped to start in 1719. It had its rivals in the Daily Advertiser, which was founded in 1724, and the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, which was started in 1728. In the course of time both these journals had sunk to be little more than advertising sheets. They gave hardly any news, and they had no political influence. The Public Advertiser was a much more important paper. It gave abundance of foreign and domestic intelligence, it had original contributions in prose and verse, and its columns were always open to letters from correspondents of all kinds on all manner of subjects.

It was not until the first letter signed with the signature of Junius appeared that the paper assumed a serious political importance. The writer, whoever he was, who chose that signature had written before in the columns of the Public Advertiser. In 1767 Woodfall, the publisher, received the first letter from the correspondent who was to become so famous, and from time to time other letters came signed by various names taken from classical nomenclature, such as Mnemon, Atticus, Lucius, Brutus, {129} Domitian, Vindex, and, perhaps, Poplicola. But it was with the adoption of the name of Junius that the real importance of the letters began. They came at a crisis; they spoke for the popular side; they spoke with a bitterness and a ferocity that had hitherto not been attempted in political journalism. The great French writer Taine has said that the letters of Junius, at a time of national irritation and anxiety, fell one by one like drops of fire on the fevered limbs of the body politic. He goes on to say that if Junius made his phrases concise, and selected his epithets, it was not from a love of style, but in order the better to stamp his insult. Oratorical artifices in his hand became instruments of torture, and when he filed his periods it was to drive the knife deeper and surer, with an audacity of denunciation and sternness of animosity, with a corrosive and burning irony applied to the most secret corners of private life, with an inexorable persistence of calculated and meditated persecution.

The first few letters of Junius were devoted to an altercation with Sir William Draper over the character in the first place of Lord Granby and in the second place of Lord Granby's defender, Sir William Draper. Sir William, though he fought stoutly for his friend and stoutly for himself, did neither himself nor his friend much good by engaging in the controversy. He was no match for the weapons of Junius. He had neither the wit nor the venom of his antagonist. But the great interest of the letters began when Junius, taking up the cause of Wilkes, struck at higher game than Sir William Draper or Lord Granby. His first letter to the Duke of Grafton was an indictment of the Duke for the conduct of the Crown in the case of a murder trial arising out of the Brentford election. A young man named George Clarke had been killed in a riot and a man named Edward M'Quirk was tried and found guilty of the murder. A kind of hugger-mugger inquest produced a declaration that Clarke's death was not caused by the blow he had received from his assailant, and in consequence, "whereas a doubt had arisen in our royal breast," the King formally pardoned the murderer by royal {130} proclamation. On this theme Junius lashed Grafton and concluded his letter with a direct allusion to Wilkes. He asked if Grafton had forgotten, while he was withdrawing this desperate wretch from that justice which the laws had awarded and which the whole people of England demanded, that there was another man, the favorite of his country, whose pardon would have been accepted with gratitude, whose pardon would have healed all divisions. "Have you quite forgotten that this man was once your Grace's friend? Or is it to murderers only that you will extend the mercy of the Crown?"

The attack thus daringly begun was steadily maintained. Wilkes had no keener, no acuter champion than Junius. With great skill Junius avoided all appearance of violent partisanship. He was careful to censure much in Wilkes's conduct, careful to discriminate between Wilkes's private character and Wilkes's public conduct. The unjustifiable action of the House of Commons in forcing Colonel Luttrell upon the electors of Middlesex gave Junius the opportunity of assailing Wilkes's enemies without appearing to champion Wilkes to the utterance. Junius admitted that the Duke of Grafton might have had some excuse in his opposition to Wilkes on account of Wilkes's character, and might have earned the approval of men who, looking no further than to the object before them, were not dissatisfied with seeing Mr. Wilkes excluded from Parliament. But, Junius went on to argue, "you have now taken care to shift the question; or, rather, you have created a new one, in which Mr. Wilkes is no more concerned than any other English gentleman. You have united the country against you on one grand constitutional point, on the decision of which our existence as a free people absolutely depends. You have asserted, not in words but in fact, that representation in Parliament does not depend upon the choice of the freeholders."

[Sidenote: 1769—The identity of Junius]

The authorship of the letters of Junius is one of those problems, like the problems of the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, which have never been settled with absolute certainty and which probably never will be settled {131} with absolute certainty. But between absolute certainty and the highest degree of probability there is no very great gulf fixed, and it is in the highest degree probable that the author of the letters was Philip Francis. The letters have been attributed to all manner of men. They were ascribed, absurdly enough, to Wilkes. Wilkes could write bitterly and he could write well, but he could write neither so well nor so bitterly as Mr. Woodfall's correspondent. Dr. Johnson, who ought to have known better, thought they were written by Burke. It is his excuse that there did not seem at the time any man of the same ability as the writer of the letters except Burke. But Dr. Johnson, who had been quick enough to recognize the genius of the anonymous author of the essay on "The Sublime and the Beautiful," erred when he thought that the same hand penned the anonymous letters. The prose of Burke was as far above the prose of Junius as the prose of Junius was above the prose of Wilkes. None of the letters surpasses in ferocity, none approaches in excellence the letter which Burke wrote to the noble Duke who had slandered him. The letters were attributed to Barre; they were attributed to Lee, who was yet to earn another kind of fame; they were attributed to many hands. To us, at least, it seems clear that they were the work of Philip Francis.

The electors of Middlesex did petition against the substitution of the despised Luttrell for the adored Wilkes. The consideration of the petition was the occasion for one of the most memorable debates that can be recorded of an age rich in memorable debates. On the one side the influence of the Ministry and the influence of the King induced Blackstone to deny himself and to falsify those principles of constitutional law with which his name is associated. On the other side principles as little honorable but a far acuter political perception urged Wedderburn, who was nominally a King's man, to go over to the popular cause with the air of a Coriolanus. On the one side Fletcher Norton upheld the authority of the resolution. On the other side George Grenville argued against it with an acumen which showed that an able lawyer might have {132} been a great lawyer. In that famous debate Burke spoke at his best, and yet the event of that debate was not the speech of Burke, was not the speech of the experienced politician, of the seasoned statesman, of the famous man of letters, but the speech of a young man who was almost a boy, the speech of Charles James Fox. All who have written on the debate agree in their admiration of the speech of one who, as far as Parliament was concerned, was but a raw lad and who nevertheless held his own on a point of law against experienced lawyers, in statesmanship against Grenville, and in eloquence against Burke.