CHAPTER VI.

1770.

l'he effect produced upon the political world by the re-appearance of Lord Chatham-His speech upon the Address-Camden and Granby separate themselves from their colleagues-Savile rebukes the House of Commons -Charles Yorke and the Great Seal-The Duke of Grafton resigns-David Hume-Lord North goes to the Treasury-George the Third, his Ministers, and his policy-George Grenville on Election Petitions and the Civil ListChatham denounces the corruption of Parliament-Symptoms of popular discontent-The City's Remonstrance presented to the King, and condemned by Parliament-Imminent danger of a collision between the nation and its rulers-The Letter to the King-Horace Walpole on the situation-The personal character of Wilkes, and its influence upon the history of the country-Wilkes regains his liberty-His subsequent career, and the final solution of the controversy about the Middlesex Election.

EVEN Chatham's love of a stage effect must have been gratified to the full by the commotion which his political resurrection excited. Nothing resembling it can be quoted from Parliamentary history, though the theatre supplies a sufficiently close parallel in the situation where Lucio, in Measure for Measure, pulls aside the cowl of the friar, and discloses the features of the ruler who has returned, at the moment when he is least expected, to call his deputy to account for the evil deeds that had been done in his name. Grafton, the Angelo of the piece, accepted his fate as submissively, and almost as promptly, as his dramatic prototype. Still loyal at heart to the great man whose authority he had abused,-or, rather, permitted others to abuse, he was dumbfoundered when Chatham, emerging from the Royal closet, met his greeting with the frigid politeness of a redoubted swordsman who salutes before a mortal duel. The

unfortunate Prime Minister knew that he had sinned too conspicuously to be forgiven, and envied in his heart those less prominent members of his own Government who could meet their old lord and master in the confidence that he would not be too hard on the political frailties of such humble personages as a Lord Chancellor, or a Commander-in-Chief of the Forces. Every one who had served under Chatham was as restless as an Austerlitz veteran who had just heard of the landing from Elba. Granby, the English Murat, could hardly be kept from at once resigning his immense appointments, rendered necessary to him by a profuse and ill-ordered generosity which would have been a blot on any character but that of a brave, an uncultured, and an unassuming soldier. Lord Camden, who so little approved the policy of his colleagues that he had absented himself from the Cabinet whenever the business on hand related to the coercion of America or the suppression of Wilkes, and who for two years past had never opened his mouth in the House of Peers except to put the question from the Woolsack, viewed the re-appearance of Chatham as a tacit but irresistible appeal to a friendship which, from his school-days onwards, had been the ornament and delight of his life, and the mainstay of his professional advancement.

And yet, though all that was best in the Ministry already hankered to be out of it, the Bedfords had still fair ground for hoping that a crisis might be averted. Horribly frightened, (to use Burke's energetic metaphor,) lest the table they had so well covered, and at which they had sat down with so good an appetite, should be kicked over in the scuffle, they still could not bring themselves to believe that Chatham would adopt the cause of the Middlesex electors. For when, during the first months of the late government, Wilkes applied to the Secretary of State for permission to live unmolested in England, the Duke of Grafton, clever in small things, had contrived to shift the

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odium of a refusal from himself to the Prime Minister. The unhappy exile stole back to France, persuaded that he had a vindictive personal enemy in Lord Chatham; who, as a matter of fact, had never been informed of his petition; and who, if he thought about him at all, regarded him as a cosmopolitan, able and willing to make himself at home in a country where claret was, and sheriff's officers were not. In the anguish of his disappointment Wilkes attacked his fancied oppressor with an audacious and observant bitterness, admirably calculated to wound a man whom just then none dared to assail except with remonstrances against his overweening pride and predominating power, which were compliments more to the taste of their object than so many set panegyrics. The Bedfords, in January 1768, had been chuckling over the novel sensation which Chatham must have experienced at finding himself described, in a pamphlet that sold like wildfire, as the warming-pan for Lord Bute, as the first comedian of the age, as so puffed up by the idea of his own importance that he was blind to the superior merit of a brother-in-law with whom he was on the worst of terms;1 and the motives which, in January 1770, induced the great Earl to stand forth in defence of one who had never written so ingeniously as when he was trying to hurt the feelings of his advocate, were altogether outside the range of their comprehension. To forgive those who had something to give, and to forget where anything was to be got, was a form of magnanimity to which they themselves were at all times equal; but not even Sandwich, writing confidentially to Weymouth, would

1 "A proud, insolent, overbearing, ambitious man is always full of the ideas of his own importance, and vainly imagines himself superior to the equality necessary among real friends. Lord Chatham declared in Parliament the strongest attachment to Lord Temple, one of the greatest characters our country can boast, and said he would live and die with his noble brother. He has received obligations of the first magnitude from that noble brother: yet what trace of gratitude was ever found in any part of his conduct?"

have suggested that Chatham had any longer an eye to office. They accounted for his conduct after the fashion of their tribe. When it began to dawn upon them that a statesman who, if he played a selfish game, might have been in power for the rest of his natural life, deliberately preferred, at the bidding of his conscience, to brave the anger of a sovereign whom he adored, on behalf of a penniless adventurer who had libelled him, they gratified their malice, and preserved inviolate their theory of the springs of human action, by spreading a report that the most impassioned of speakers had at last harangued himself out of his senses. As, one after another, resolutions were laid on the table of the House of Lords expounding, in correct yet stirring phrases, the principles of freedom and justice for which, time out of mind, all Englishmen worthy of the name had striven; and as each successive declaration of public right was enforced by outbursts of majestic eloquence which have had the rare fortune to obtain a place in the familiar literature of a nation that ordinarily dwells but little upon the oratory of the past; Rigby and his fellows hardened themselves against the voice of reason, and the disapprobation of posterity, by reminding each other that they had only to do with another "mad motion of the mad Earl of Chatham."

1

Till Parliament met, (and the Ministry, anxious to postpone the evil hour, took the unusual course of dispensing with a winter session,) Lord Chatham, said Burke, kept hovering in the air, waiting to souse down upon his prey. And, indeed, nothing short of an Homeric simile could depict the panic and the scurry which ensued upon the first swoop of the eagle whose beak and talons were henceforward to be exercised on a new hunt

1 Any one, who has been behind the scenes during the preparations for Speech-day at a public school, knows that, though a well-read master may insist on an extract from Canning or Grattan, a boy, if left to himself, will choose something of Chatham's, and in most cases something which Chatham spoke in the spring of 1770.

ing field. For the House of Lords had never really heard Chatham. During the short period that he sate there as Prime Minister he had not been himself either in body or in intellect. With breaking health, and a bad cause, he had been confronted, not unsuccessfully, by men who were armed for the unequal combat with no weapon except the knowledge that they were in the right. When, borrowing the jargon which was fashionable at the Palace, he declaimed against the most modest and long suffering set of statesmen that ever did the King's business as "the proudest connection in the country," he had been plainly told by the Duke of Richmond that the nobility would not be browbeaten by an insolent Minister. But no one ventured to rebuke him now. On the afternoon of the ninth of January, the first of the session of 1770, when the King had read his Speech and had returned to St. James's, the Lords were invited humbly to assure His Majesty that they would dutifully assist him in doing as much mischief, in either hemisphere, as in his wisdom he thought advisable. As soon as the noble seconder had stammered through his last sentence, Chatham rose to his feet, and informed the members of the Government that he was, and had the best of reasons to be, as loyal as any of them, and that he should give substantial evidence of his loyalty by telling the truth to his royal master. And then,after a few sentences of goodwill towards his fellow-subjects in America, which Americans still quote with gratitude,—he discoursed briefly and calmly of the question of the day, and concluded by calling on the peers to inform the mind of their Sovereign, and pacify the just irritation of his people, by declaring that the House of Commons, in proceeding of its own authority to incapacitate Wilkes from serving in Parliament, had usurped a power which belonged to all the three branches of the legislature. He had never spoken more quietly, or with

1 The best point in Chatham's first speech on this occasion was his allusion