This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  1727–46

  At three o’clock in the afternoon on 14 June 1727 a messenger arrived from the Continent at a house in Chelsea with news for the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole. Walpole hurried to Richmond to the King’s son, the Prince of Wales, and his wife, Caroline of Ansbach. It was the news they had all been waiting for: George, the first Hanoverian King of Great Britain and Ireland, was dead. George Augustus, Elector of Hanover, Prince of Wales, became George II. That night the new King made his solemn declaration to his people. Note the style and tone of the address. It is almost as if this were not an eighteenth century moment in our history, but something from the middle of the twentieth century. It could have been a statement eagerly awaited by the population as they clustered around their wireless sets. But this was June 1727.

  The sudden and unexpected death of the King, my dear father, has filled my heart with so much concern and surprise, that I am at a loss how to express myself upon this great and melancholy occasion; but my love and affection to this country, from my knowledge and experience of you, makes me resolve cheerfully to undergo all difficulties for the sake and good of my people.

  In reality George II detested everything about the British and Britain. And he was not some latterday Prince Hal, impatient for the power the Crown would bring. That kind of power no longer existed, and he knew it – which was part of his frustration. By the end of the seventeenth century the constitutional power of the monarch had been limited by an increasingly influential Parliament. Traditionally, the Crown’s greatest power was and remained patronage. The King’s constitutional right to control who got what job in government, in Parliament and in the Church continued. Thus the new King continued to need the government, the government needed the King and they both needed Parliament.

  The keeper of the government’s influence was still Walpole who was strengthened by the patronage of the new Queen, the very clever Caroline of Ansbach. Clearly, Walpole was not a favourite of George II. The King went as far as to dismiss Walpole and offer his job to Sir Spencer Compton. But only Walpole and his powerful political army of Whigs could maintain the balance of power between monarch, government and Parliament. There was powerful opposition in Parliament and more importantly, Queen Caroline convinced her husband that he had not been particularly wise when he dismissed Walpole. The King did his Queen’s bidding and Walpole was called back. This royal retreat hardly improved George II’s short-temper and determination to use whatever powers he had.

  To get some idea of the main restrictions on royal rule we have to remember that the King was a constitutionally appointed monarch whose first qualification was his Protestantism and his second an agreement to rule within the boundaries drawn by legislators. For example, the 1689 Bill of Rights that followed the Glorious Revolution may not have controlled the prerogatives of the Crown, but it most certainly set the ideals of so-called Parliamentary supremacy over the sovereign. Equally, we must not think that Parliament and government were united. Even Walpole was proving to be unpopular because he was determined to maintain his priority of putting the nation’s difficulties in good order. He wanted to avoid foreign ventures, especially those dear to the King and many of Walpole’s own ministers, including his brother-in-law Charles Townshend whom Walpole regarded as being dangerously adventurous in foreign affairs. Walpole could not be doing with opposition. So in 1730, Townshend had to go. He retreated to his Norfolk farm, developed a new system of root crop rotation and that was when he earned the nickname ‘Turnip’ Townshend. Walpole took over his portfolio.

  As unpopular as Walpole appeared to some in opposition, there was no one who could command enough support to truly threaten his position. Even Henry Bolingbroke, who had become a gathering point for opposition figures, was not so effectual as he might have been considering the wide range of political and literary figures who gathered at his house, including Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Swift, the Irish clergyman, pamphleteer and author of Gulliver’s Travels, was also a marshal of Irish patriots, a Tory, and therefore against Walpole. Bolingbroke at last saw little interest in being in opposition and so departed back to France. England held little personal interest for him and, in truth, a major cause of the opposition’s failure lay in Bolingbroke himself. He had not reformed: he was still the unprincipled rascal so scorned by Harley and Queen Anne. It was discovered that he had been passing political intelligence to the French ambassador, which, considering the popular belief that France could at any time support a Jacobite rising, was unwise. Even worse was to come when it was known that he had taken money from the French to support the opposition cause against Walpole. But Walpole’s skill as a political manager, his pragmatism and shrewdness served him well. Bolingbroke and his friends could never agree among themselves for long enough to sustain the pressure against Walpole and, no matter how much they mocked him as the ‘prime minister’, that’s exactly what Walpole was.

  It’s generally thought that Caroline of Ansbach, George II’s wife, was Walpole’s strongest ally. Sometimes she might suggest policy to the King which Walpole couldn’t put forward without sparking one of their not infrequent quarrels. George II and his Prime Minister could never agree the constitutional restraints imposed on the monarchy by Parliament. Worse, the King often, especially in matters of foreign policy, tried to go against Parliament and always had to give in – which didn’t improve his political temper. So Walpole spent much time trying to placate the King, his ultimate patron.

  But if the Queen, Walpole’s ally, died and the young Prince of Wales, who was no friend to his father and mother, set himself against Walpole and came out for the opposition, then Walpole’s authority might well be weakened. Maybe a more colourful figure than Walpole would have given the opposition more opportunity. But Walpole was so often dull and his style of administration was deliberately lacking drama. ‘A safe pair of hands’ would be a modern description. Frederick, Prince of Wales, was central to the opposition’s cause. Princes of Wales would always be a disturbance in the pond-life of court and political life in London. Within that princely set were good minds, not simply social limpets, and they attracted political minnows waiting to be noticed. One was a young cavalry officer, William Pitt. In 1736 Pitt was twenty-eight. He was a member of a group known as Cobham’s Cubs, the young followers of one of Walpole’s critics, Viscount Cobham. He’d become part of the so-called Leicester House set, named after the place where the Prince of Wales held court. Walpole, who could not stand any public opposition, made sure Pitt lost his commission in Viscount Cobham’s regiment of dragoons. But within a year, Pitt had a salary of £400 a year as the Prince of Wales’s Groom of the Bedchamber. Pitt’s polemics and his rhetoric excited the nation. Here was a young man to watch and Walpole knew it.

  The next year, 1737, the King and Queen once more fell out with their son, Frederick, whom they disliked intensely. This time, Walpole was not able to bring about a royal reconciliation. A few months later his ally, Queen Caroline, died. She had been one of the few who understood the advantages of his tight political management and the importance to the King of maintaining his support. Under Walpole’s dull routine of stability, the British thrived but were uninspired. The eighteenth-century British were supposedly confident, even arrogant in the Protestant sense of superiority; in over-simplified terms, what the British wanted was a fight.

  Of course, Walpole began his ministry by avoiding confrontation. He was a quiet fixer. He had smoothed over the financial scandals of the South Sea Company rather than risking the outcome of a Parliamentary inquiry. He had withdrawn a patent for making halfpennies to be distributed to Ireland, not because it was a bad idea, but because there was well-organized public resentment of it. And he pulled back from excise on wines and tobaccos. More dramatically, but very telling was Walpole’s reaction to the Porteous affair. Captain John Porteous, the Commander of the Edinburgh City Guard, had fired on a crowd watching the public execution of four smugglers. Po
rteous was sentenced to death, reprieved and then strung up by the Scottish mob. London called the Scots judges to the bar of the House, humiliated them and proposed fines on Edinburgh. The protest was loud, and not only from Scotland: Walpole backed down, again.

  The prosperity of Britain suggests that Walpole’s eighteenth-century pragmatism worked. But in foreign relations his belief that all disputes should be settled by negotiation, rather than after hopeless fighting, was perhaps naive. What Walpole, for all his skills, didn’t understand was that France did not see things his way. France believed that the differences of France, Spain, Austria and Britain could be settled only by war. France was right. By the mid-1730s, Austria (Britain’s ally) was fighting Spain and France (also Britain’s allies). And very shortly Britain too would be at war. By the late 1720s the British who, in 1714, had forced the French and the Spanish to make trading concessions under the Treaties of Utrecht at the end of the War of Spanish Succession, had turned these limited treaty concessions into a complete trading invasion of the Spanish-American colonies. It amounted to economic piracy. But by this time Spain was once again stronger and started to take action. Spanish ships stopped and searched British vessels (admittedly illegally trading) and British merchants demanded retaliation. And also, by this point, Britain believed unswervingly in its Protestant right and these were Catholics interrupting British passages on the high seas. Even so, Walpole avoided every possibility of overseas confrontation. He saw no future in getting involved in conflicts which would unbalance the British domestic economy and political system. In 1731 Walpole decided negotiation was the best way to resolve the matter. It may have stayed that way if a certain British captain had not claimed that he had his ear cut off by a Spaniard. Unlikely? Yes, but it started a nine-year war.

  Captain Robert Jenkins was in command of the English brig, the Rebecca, in 1731 when it was boarded by the Spanish, who were said to have sliced off one of the ears of Jenkins (perhaps for the gold earring). Seven years later, with many in Parliament looking for war with the Spanish, Jenkins was taken to Parliament were he recounted the ‘insult’ and supposedly displayed a bottle with his pickled ear. Taken with other matters both political and military, this was considered enough to go to war with Spain. The confrontation, which was really about far more, was known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear. The war was absorbed into the much wider conflict, the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48). Before its outbreak, Walpole had achieved at least an outline agreement, the Convention of Prado – a much discredited protocol that was supposed to settle disagreements between Spain and England. True, Spain agreed to compensations but it certainly refused demands that it gave up its rights to stop and search British vessels. Britain at first said it would withdraw its vessels from the disputed area. The Spanish were happy at this. The British decided they were not and changed their mind. They broke the treaty almost before the ink was dry.

  Clearly the Convention of Prado would not let Pitt keep Britain from war; nor would it put off the so-called Patriots. They were a Whig opposition group which included Pulteney, a former ally of Walpole, as well as Carteret, whom Walpole had dispatched to Ireland, Viscount Cobham, and the young William Pitt. On 6 March 1740, Pitt got up in the Commons and verbally ripped the Treaty of Prado to pieces. He told Walpole that Britain must defend her trading rights or ‘perish’: ‘Is this any longer an English Parliament, if with more ships in your harbours than in all the navies of Europe; with above two millions of people in your American colonies, you will bear to hear of the expediency of receiving from Spain an insecure, unsatisfactory, dishonourable Convention?’

  More ships than anyone else? Mostly, that was true. Certainly the British believed that they should rule the waves. It was their right as Protestants to rule whatever and whomsoever they wished. They thought so and they would learn to sing so in perhaps the most famous song of all British time. James Thomson had written a masque, called Alfred, about Alfred the Great, the father of the navy. And the opening lines fitted perfectly the mood of the year 1740:

  When Britain first, at heaven’s command,

  Arose from out of the azure main,

  This was the charter of the land,

  And guardian angels sung this strain:

  Rule Britannia, rule the waves;

  Britons never will be slaves.

  Note that it is not ‘Britannia rules the waves’ as is sometimes sung in the Albert Hall, but ‘Rule Britannia, rule the waves’. It was not a statement: it was a declaration that Protestant Britons were chosen by heaven to rule. Walpole was sound on ruling the British economy. He was not perfect. He was a manager of peace, not of military conflict, and his Parliamentary support was deserting him. In 1741 the opposition had rarely felt so sure of itself. On 13 February the MP for Worcester, Samuel Sandys, rose in the Commons to speak for the motion to remove Walpole from office.

  According to our constitution, we can have no sole and prime minister: but it is publicly known that this minister, having obtained sole influence over all our public counsels, has not only assumed to sole direction of all public affairs, but has got every officer of state removed that would not follow his direction . . . He has made a blind submission to his direction the only ground for hope for honours or preferments. Has not this minister himself not only confessed it, but boasted of it? Has he not said, and in this House too, that he would be a pitiful fellow of a minister who did not displace any officer that opposed his measure in Parliament?

  It was in this same Parliamentary debate that Walpole declared that he was not the ‘Prime’ Minister.

  While I unequivocally deny that I am the sole and prime minister, and that to my influence and direction all the measures of government must be attributed, yet I will not shrink from the responsibility which attaches to the post I have the honour to hold. And should, during the long period in which I have sat upon this bench, any one step taken by government be proved to be either disgraceful or disadvantageous to the nation, I am ready to hold myself accountable.

  Once again Walpole outwitted his opponents and the House voted for him. But it was his last victory. In February 1742, the first Prime Minister of Britain, Sir Robert Walpole, resigned. In the vanguard of the opposition to Walpole was the Prince of Wales, the heir to the throne. The Prince had left George II’s court in the summer of 1737 and set up his own court. Now he and the other political dissenters, including Pitt, attacked. The prince had as much money as he needed and he used it ruthlessly and, in the times, quite legitimately, to buy seats for his followers. Walpole, after twenty-one years as the first Prime Minister and so the first to occupy 10 Downing Street, the master of patronage and the prime figure of eighteenth-century Parliamentary politics, was to go but not into obscurity. He was created Earl of Orford and soon set about making sure that the Whigs continued to rule and that the weaknesses in the opposition were exploited. And he had a personal battle to fight. During his two decades of office, Walpole had made his fortune. This point is usually dismissed as unimportant to the story of Britain’s first Prime Minister. But when Walpole was accused of making money out of being head of government, men who had expected reward for their time in opposition and didn’t get it were the first to demand Walpole’s prosecution. For example, Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773) had wanted to be Secretary of State but was to wait until 1746 for that honour. Cobham wanted more power than the command of his regiment. Pitt felt aggrieved that he was ignored. The paradox was that while most accept that favour was a reasonable way of maintaining stability and improving office, that only worked if one were favoured. Certainly, most at Westminster were convinced that political patronage for high and medium office was the best way to stay in power. Everyone did it, and everyone made money out of office, especially the nobility. Walpole wasn’t the only one who understood the workings of political corruption. At the time, not many more than 1,000 rich people influenced the governance of Britain. Little wonder few would have questioned Henry Fielding’s definition of
a Nobody as, ‘All the people in Britain except about twelve hundred’.

  About 25 per cent of the peerage had some form of official office and with them came salaries and pensions. Walpole, for example, had given his son Horace three sinecures. He was one of the Tellers of the Exchequer (that was worth £1,200 a year alone); also he was Comptroller of the Pipe and Clerk of Escheats. An escheat was land or property that was supposed to revert to the Crown, and there were profits and percentages to be made from those transactions. A Secretary of State could make perhaps £7,000–£8,000 a year. Walpole had been Paymaster General and had made his fortune from it. Commissions (backhanders might be a twentieth-century description) from contractors and suppliers alone could set up the office-holder for life. One Lord Chancellor, when fined £30,000 for misappropriating government funds, paid it within six weeks and still made a 60 per cent profit. But many of them, probably all of them, needed the money. For example, it cost Walpole £15 a day in candles to light his home, Houghton Hall. He spent £30 a week on wine.

  None of this was the concern of the King. He simply needed a government capable of supporting (that meant with funds) his view that the real dangers lay not in the counting houses of Westminster, but in the ambitions of the new order in Europe. George II’s particular concern was with his nephew Frederick, now King of Prussia. Frederick’s accession made George II extremely nervous. He was still a Hanoverian and Frederick could well decide to invade the King’s estates. And George had no doubts about Frederick’s ambitions because he knew him very well.