SIR ROBERT WALPOLE.

orators of shining parts and of the highest promise, whose eager ambition was baffled by his arrogance of power; partisans of the banished family, whose sanguine expectations had been baulked by his vigilance and sagacity; men who could agree on no other point-were firmly united in the one object of destroying Walpole, as the common enemy. Every variety of invective which faction, jealousy, and personal hatred could suggest, was heaped upon his head; but the topics principally relied upon, and which could not be disputed, so far from being a reproach, are the very grounds on which his reputation as a wise and faithful minister must ever rest. That he was not scrupulous in the application of public money is undoubted; but the charge of personal peculation, by which the vindictive rage of his enemies sought his life as well as his honour, not only failed, but is discredited by the fact that he died largely in debt. The really vulnerable parts of his character were never attacked. The evil example of his private life; his utter contempt of decorum; the proverbial grossness of his conversation, and the periodical debaucheries of Houghton, which were the talk of the whole countyall these passed uncensured. It would have been impossible, indeed, for such men as Bolingbroke,

P His debts were fifty thousand pounds.-CoxE's Walpole; H. WALPOLE'S Correspondence.

Ch. 14.

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PROFLIGACY OF MINISTERS IN THE

Ch. 14. Yonge, Carteret, and Chesterfield, to have vindicated the cause of insulted morality; but there were among the foremost assailants of Walpole, some who might have ventured on such ground, without being hooted for their impudence and hypocrisy. Shippen and Barnard, Pulteney and Pitt, were men whose moral characters were fair; but though the delicacy and forbearance which in modern times mitigate the asperity of political conflict were then unknown, I am not aware that, during twenty years of party warfare unparalleled in virulence, any allusion was made to these scandals. The truth is, that the habits and manners of Walpole were congenial to the coarseness and depravity of the times.

Profligacy of ministers in

the first years

of George III.

Among a series of ministers, contemporaries and successors of Walpole, who either filled high offices, or played conspicuous parts in public life, there were few who, in these times, would not have been thought wholly disqualified for such positions. I will refer only to three men who were leading ministers during the early part of the reign of George the Third; but neither of whom would have been tolerated in any responsible posts under either of his successors. The Duke of Grafton, some time at the head of His Majesty's Government, was in the habit of appearing in public with his mistress, a common woman of the town. Lord Sandwich and Sir Francis Dashwood, the one successively Secretary of State and First

EARLY YEARS OF GEORGE THE THIRD.

Lord of the Admiralty-the other, Chancellor of Ch. 14. the Exchequer, were the most notoriously profligate men of their day. They were the founders of the Franciscan Club, an association of a few audacious men of fashion, for the purpose of celebrating a blasphemous burlesque upon the monastic system and the rites of the Church of Rome. They took a ruinous building in Buckinghamshire, called Medmenham Abbey, which, as its name implies, had once been a religious house. Here they fitted up cells, assumed the habit of the order of St. Francis, and with grave mockery performed the ceremonies and observances of the conventual service. I need not describe the quality of the nuns who were admitted to participation in these solemnities, nor of the choruses which were chanted, nor of the images which represented the Virgin and the saints. Nor was this the passing freak of a few thoughtless young men of wit and fashion. The Franciscan Club was for some time the wonder and scandal of the town. It assembled several times; and comprised, besides Sandwich and Dashwood, such men as Wilkes, Potter, and Selwyn, most of whom were men of mature age.

levees.

It was a custom of those days, for the principal Ministerial ministers of state to hold daily levees, which were attended by people who had public business to transact, who had favours to ask, and who sought to keep themselves in the eye of the great man. Bishops and reverend aspirants of every class,

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Ch. 14.

MINISTERIAL LEVEES.

members of both Houses who wanted their jobs done, men about town who wanted a place or a borough, mayors and corporations who had boroughs to sell, agents, pamphleteers, coffee-house politicians ordinarily composed this motley assemblage. And as each principal minister usually stood upon his own credit, independently of, and sometimes in open opposition to, his colleagues, a First Lord of the Treasury, or a Secretary of State, could collect from the daily attendance at his receptions, a pretty accurate opinion as to the stability of his position. After any mark of court favour had been shewn him, or after a successful struggle in Parliament, his saloons were thronged. And it often happened that the first significant intimation a minister received of his declining power, was in the absence of some vigilant and far-sighted jobber or place-hunter, who had gone over to a rival. For many years, the levees of Sir Robert Walpole were always crowded; the attendance diminished after the failure of the Excise scheme, and the death of his firm and faithful patroness, Queen Caroline. But the Duke of Newcastle had the largest number of clients. The well-known mansion in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields was, during a succession of years, resorted to as the most extensive mart of patronage that had ever been opened in this country; and probably Newcastle gave, or rather bartered away, more places than any minister before or since. It was said, that almost the whole of the bench of

POWER OF THE CROWN.

bishops had been filled by him; and every depart- Ch. 14. ment of the public service was crowded with his

creatures.

of power by

When government by the Crown, independently Resumption of the great families, was adopted as the principle the crown. of the new reign, the first step taken towards the accomplishment of this object was the disgrace of the Duke of Newcastle. This was effected without much difficulty; and the man who for fifteen years had been the dictator of ministries, and whose jealous vigilance had hardly ever suffered any statesman but himself to approach the closet of the sovereign, was hurled from power by the first vigorous effort of a strong will. None of the great party leaders were thenceforth suffered to acquire any considerable portion of the power and patronage which Walpole and Newcastle and other ministers in a less degree, had possessed. The King himself, after the ten years' struggle with the Whig houses had terminated in his triumph, assumed the management of that great engine of corruption, the control of which had made a subject more powerful than his sovereign, and now enabled the King to be the real master of his people. After the new system had been adopted, the tribe of time-servers and sycophants ceased to frequent the levees of ministers. The levees of the sovereign, which had hitherto been attended only the members of the court, were now thrown open; and persons who could hardly have hoped for more than a distant glimpse of regal state,

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