The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  You should by no means seem to approve, encourage, or applaud those libertine notions which strike at religions equally, and which are the poor threadbare topics of half-wits and minute philosophers. Even those who are silly enough to laugh at their jokes are still wise enough to distrust and detest their characters; for, putting moral virtues at their highest, and religion at the lowest, religion must still be allowed to be a collateral security, at least, to virtue, and every prudent man will sooner trust to two securities than to one. Whenever, therefore, you happen to be in company with these pretended esprits forts, or with thoughtless libertines who laugh at all religion to show their wit, … let no word or look of yours intimate the least approbation; on the contrary, let a silent gravity express your dislike; but enter not the subject, and decline such unprofitable and indecent controversies.116

  In 1752 Chesterfield recognized in the attack upon religion the first stages of a social revolution. “I foresee that before the end of this century the trade of both king and priest will not be half so good a one as it has been.”117 And in 1753, two years after the appearance of the anticlerical Encyclopédie he wrote to his son:

  The affairs of France … grow serious, and in my opinion will grow more and more so every day. The King is despised.… The French nation reasons freely, which they never did before, upon matters of religion and government, and begin to be spregiudicati [unprejudiced]; the officers do too; in short, all the symptoms, which I have ever met with in history previous to great changes and revolutions in government, now exist, and daily increase, in France.118

  A delighted study of Chesterfield’s eight hundred pages has given two readers a high opinion of his mind, if not of his morals. His English contemporaries, not having read his letters, tended too readily to classify him as a wit rather than a philosopher. They relished his remark, in the upper house, that “we, my lords, may thank Heaven that we have something better than our brains to depend upon.”119 They saw him gamble like any rake or fool, and they knew (what he confessed to his son) that he had not been a model of chastity. The irate Johnson described the Letters as inculcating “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master.”120 This, like so many of the Great Cham’s decrees, was somewhat one-sided; Chesterfield was teaching the youth the morals of his time and class, and the manners of the polite political world; we must bear in mind that he was grooming his son for diplomacy; and no diplomat dares to practice Christianity across frontiers.

  Even so, much of the moral doctrine offered to Philip was excellent. “I have often told you in my former letters (and it is most certainly true) that the strictest and most scrupulous honor and virtue can alone make you esteemed and valued by mankind.”121 The advice about mistresses was probably an attempt to steer the boy away from promiscuity; note the warning: “As to running after women, the consequences of that vice are only the loss of one’s nose, the total destruction of health, and, not infrequently, the being run through the body.”122 Johnson himself, in a forgiving moment, thought that “Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son might be made a very pretty book; take out the immorality, and it should be put into the hands of every young gentleman.”123 Perhaps the Letters inadequately inculcated honor, decency, courage, and fidelity, but it is not true that Chesterfield mistook wealth or place for virtue or wisdom. He lauded Milton, Newton, and Locke far above the politicians of the time. We have seen him cultivating the friendship of the best writers of his day. He had a warm appreciation of good literature, even if he was not fascinated by a dictionary. He himself wrote an English unsurpassed in contemporary prose: simple, vigorous, clear, with just enough lightness to float the burden of his thought. Despite his polyglot and classic range, he preferred the short and racy words of Anglo-Saxon speech. Voltaire ranked the Letters as “the best book on education ever written,”124 and Sainte-Beuve called it “a rich book, not a page of which can be read without our having to remember some happy observation.”125

  If we judge a work by its immediate fruits, the Letters failed. Young Philip Stanhope never overcame his sluggish spirit, his careless habits, his awkward manner, his hesitating speech; after all those exhortations, he had, reported Fanny Burney, “as little good breeding as any man I met with.”126 Apparently some quirk of birth or circumstance nullified five pounds of precept. Philip suffered the handicap of having a rich parent and an assured and comfortable place; neither the fear of hunger nor the resentment of subordination stirred him to ambition or enterprise; as the frustrated father told him, he lacked “that vivida vis animi” that living force of soul, “which spurs and excites young men to please, to shine, to excel.”127 It is touching to see the aging Earl lavish so much sage counsel and paternal affection to so little result. “Be persuaded,” he wrote when the boy was fourteen, “that I shall love you extremely while you deserve it, but not one moment longer”;128 however, his final letter to his son, twenty-two years afterward,129 is warm with affection and solicitude. A month later Philip died in Paris (1768), aged thirty-six, leaving a widow and two sons. He had married without his father’s knowledge, but Chesterfield had forgiven him; and now the Earl wrote to the bereaved wife letters that are models of courtesy and consideration.130

  He himself, at that time, was frequently at Bath, incapacitated with gout and sadly deaf. “I crawl about this place upon my three legs, but am kept in countenance by my fellow crawlers; the last part of the Sphinx’s riddle approaches, and I shall soon end, as I began, on all fours.”131 He interested himself in the education of his grandchildren; hope springs eternal in the aging breast. Returning to his estate at Blackheath, he took Voltaire’s advice and cultivated his garden, proud of his melons and apples; he was content, he said, to “vegetate in company with them.”132 Voltaire wrote him consolatory letters, reminding him that a good digestion (which the Earl retained) was more conducive to pleasure than good ears. He faced the end with unfailing humor. Of himself and his friend Lord Tyrawley, also old and infirm, he said (perhaps recalling Fontenelle), “Tyrawley and I have been dead these two years, but we do not wish it to be known.”133 He died March 24, 1773, aged seventy-nine, unaware that his letters, whose publication he had forbidden, had been preserved and bequeathed by his son, and would, when printed in the following year, place him at once among the masters of worldly wisdom and English prose.

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  I. The famous club was burned down in 1733, but was soon restored.

  CHAPTER III

  The Rulers

  I. GEORGE I: 1714–27

  THE English, as Voltaire and Montesquieu were soon to perceive, were much cleverer than the French in the matter of government. Having beheaded one sovereign and sent another scurrying in fright across the Channel, they now imported a king who had left his heart and mind in Germany, who took long leaves of absence in his native Hanover, and who could readily be ruled by a Parliament whose ways and language he could never understand.

  The house of Hanover had its roots in medieval Germany, tracing its princely lineage through the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg to Henry the Lion (1129–95), and beyond him to his Welf, or Guelph, ancestry. Hanover itself became an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire in 1692. Its first Elector, Ernest Augustus, married Sophia, granddaughter of James I of England. After the death of Ernest his widow, by Parliament’s Act of Settlement (1701), became heiress to the English throne.

  Her son George Louis, second Elector of Hanover, clouded this happy heritage by an unhappy marriage. His wife, Sophia Dorothea, resented his infidelities, and planned elopement with Count Philipp von Königsmarck, handsome colonel of the guards. George discovered the plot; the Count was never heard of again, and was presumably put to death (1694). Sophia Dorothea was arrested and tried, her marriage was annulled, and she was imprisoned for the remaining thirty-two years of her life in the castle of Ahlden. She had borne to her husband a daughter who became the mother of Frederick the Great, and a son who became George II of England.

  Sophia, Dowager Elec
tress of Hanover, died in 1714, two months before the passing of Queen Anne; therefore she missed royalty, but her son was at once proclaimed George I of Great Britain and Ireland. On September 18 he reached England, beginning a new epoch in English history. He brought with him his son and daughter-in-law, a number of German aides, and two mistresses: Charlotte von Kielmannsegge, whom he made Countess of Darlington, and Countess Melusina von der Schulenburg, whom he made Duchess of Kendal and perhaps his wife. England might have accepted this arrangement as in accord with the morals of the time, but both ladies, to British eyes and purse, were ugly and costly. Melusina sold her influence for such fat sums that even Walpole, superintendent of corruption, complained; whereupon George asked had not Walpole himself received fees for his recommendations to office?1

  In 1714 George I was fifty-four years old, tall and soldierly, a “plain, blunt man” who cared not a pfennig for books, but had shown his courage on more than one battlefield. Lady Mary Montagu called him “an honest blockhead,”2 but he was not as dull as he seemed; and she admitted that “he was passively good-natured, and wished all mankind enjoyed quiet, if they would let him do so.”3 He could not be expected to feel at home in so unfamiliar an environment, so uncertain an employment. He had been hired by the British oligarchy to forestall a second Stuart restoration; he had no “divine right” or personal claim to the throne; he saw that these masterly Englishmen who ruled Parliament were bent on ruling him too; and he could scarcely forgive them for speaking English. He thought them inferior to his Hanoverian associates. He withdrew into the recesses of St. James’s Palace, fled to Hanover almost annually, and did all that he could to divert English funds and policy to the protection of his beloved electorate.

  To make matters worse, his own son hated him as a murderer. George Augustus, now Prince of Wales, denounced the continuing imprisonment of his mother, rebelled against the ascendancy and airs of the regal mistresses, quarreled with the King’s ministers, and made his views so clear that his father excluded him from the palace. The Prince and his wife, Caroline, separated by royal order from their children, retired to form a rival court at Leicester House (1717). To them came Newton, Chesterfield, Hervey, Swift, Pope, and the livelier ladies of Vanity Fair, only to find the Prince even surlier and duller than the King.

  This schism in the reigning family accorded more or less with the division of the ruling minority and the Parliament into Tories and Whigs. Voltaire estimated that some eight hundred men controlled municipal government, elections to Parliament, national legislation, administration, and the judiciary.4 There was no longer any troublesome talk about democracy, such as had been raised by Cromwell’s Independents and the Levellers. Voting for Parliament was limited to property owners—some 160,000 in this period5—and these normally accepted the candidate recommended by the local squire or lord.6 Politicians were Tory or Whig according as they favored either the titled nobility or the gentry (lesser landowners) and the commercial interests. “Church of England men” followed the Tory line; Dissenters supported the Whigs. The Tories had opposed the subordination of the monarch to the Parliament; they clung, with the Established Church, to the theory of divine right in kings; in the last days of Queen Anne they had thought of recalling the exiled Stuarts to power; naturally, now that the house of Hanover was enthroned, they were displaced by the anti-Jacobite Whigs. Whereas heretofore the ministries had usually included men from both parties, George I called only Whigs to high office, and so established government by party through a cabinet. And since, not understanding English, he soon ceased to preside over cabinet meetings, the dominant member became “prime minister,” and took over more and more of the functions and powers of the king.

  The ministry was led for seven years by James Stanhope. One of his first and most popular acts was to restore John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough—who had been impeached by the Tories—to all his former offices, especially as captain general of the army. Returning from exile, the Duke retired to Blenheim Palace; there he suffered a long illness, and died on June 16, 1722. The nation, forgiving his acquisitions and remembering his uninterrupted victories, accepted Bolingbroke’s verdict—“He was so great a man that I do not recollect whether he had any faults or not.”7 His widow, the Sarah Churchill who had for a decade ruled a queen, spent twenty-two years cherishing and defending his memory. When the Duke of Somerset asked her in marriage, she answered, “If I was young and handsome as I was, instead of old and faded as I am, and you could lay the empire of the world at my feet, you should never share the heart and hand that once belonged to John Churchill.”8 In 1743, a year before her death at eighty-four, she proposed to burn her early love letters, but reading them again she felt “I could not do it,” and let them survive.9 There must have been much good in a woman who could so faithfully love, and in a man who could win such devotion from so difficult a woman.

  Bolingbroke replaced Marlborough in exile. Dismissed from the government by George I, threatened with impeachment for secretly negotiating with the fallen dynasty, hated by the Whigs and Dissenters whom he stung with his wit, and shunned by churchmen as a scorner of Christian theology, he fled to France (March, 1715), joined James III, became his secretary of stateless state, helped to organize a Jacobite rebellion in England, and proposed an invasion of England from France. Parliament declared him guilty of treason, confiscated his property, and condemned him to death.

  The movement to restore the Stuarts almost toppled George I. The Tories, hating the Hanoverians as usurpers and boors; the common people of England, rooted in old loyalties, and secretly longing for the banished dynasty; the upper and lower classes of Scotland, proud of having given a Scottish king to England, and fretting under the Act of Union (1707) which had ended the Scottish Parliament—all were ready to abet an invasion by the youth whom Louis XIV had recognized as the only legitimate king of England.

  James Francis Edward Stuart was now (1715) twenty-seven, though history knows him as “the Old Pretender.” He had been brought up in France, and so steeped in the Catholic faith by monastic teachers and the sufferings of his father, James II, that he rejected Bolingbroke’s plea that he should strengthen the Jacobite sentiment in England by promising conversion to Protestantism. How, Bolingbroke argued, could the Presbyterian Scots and the Tory Anglicans be roused to the support of a man bringing to their throne the religion that they had through a century of turmoil fought to overthrow? James was obdurate; he declared that he would rather be a throneless Catholic than a Protestant king. Bolingbroke, free from faith and principles, pronounced him fitter to be a monk than a king.10 Meanwhile (August, 1714) Parliament had offered £100,000 for the capture of James III in case he should land on British soil.

  A personal factor appeared to turn events to the Pretender’s cause. John Erskine, Earl of Mar, had been secretary of state for Scotland in the final years of Queen Anne. Dismissed by George I, he laid plans for a Jacobite rising in England, then sailed to Scotland and called upon the Scots to join his standard of revolt (September 6, 1715). Several nobles rallied to him, raising his forces to six thousand foot and six hundred horses; but Edinburgh, Glasgow, and the southern Lowlands adhered to the Hanoverian. The British government decreed death for treason, and confiscation of property, against all rebels; it mobilized thirteen thousand men, and called six thousand more to the fleet; and it ordered the Duke of Argyll, commanding the garrisons at Edinburgh and Stirling, to suppress the rebellion. He met Mar’s forces at Sheriffmuir (November 13, 1715) in an engagement from which neither side could claim a decisive victory. Another Scottish force of two thousand, instead of joining Mar, advanced recklessly to within thirty miles of Liverpool, vainly hoping to inspire and protect Jacobite uprisings in the English towns. At Preston a government army surrounded it and compelled its unconditional surrender (November 14).

  James III must have known of these events before he sailed from Dunkirk on December 27. Bolingbroke had warned him that no Jacobite revolt would rise in England. Th
e Pretender was carried on by faith in the divine legitimacy of his cause, plus 100,000 crowns from the French government, and thirty thousand from the Vatican. Landing in Scotland, he joined Mar’s army at Perth, and made plans for a solemn coronation at Scone. But his taciturnity and melancholy countenance, and his complaint that he had been deceived about the extent of the rebellion, added nothing to the enthusiasm of the Scots; they complained in their turn that they never saw him smile, and rarely heard him speak;11 moreover, he was shaking from the ague, and bore the northern winter hardly. Mar judged his troops unfit for battle; he ordered them to retreat to Montrose, and to burn all towns, villages, and crops in their wake as a measure to halt Argyll’s pursuit. James lamented the destruction, and left money in part compensation for those whose property had suffered. Then, as Argyll’s greatly superior army approached Montrose, James, Mar, and other leaders of the revolt fled precipitately to the coast, and took ship to France (February 4, 1716). Everywhere the rebel forces surrendered or dispersed.

  Most of the prisoners were transported to servitude in the colonies; fifty-seven were executed, and a dozen Scottish nobles, now refugees in France, were marked for death if ever they returned. James had hoped that Philippe d’Orléans would send troops to his rescue in Scotland; but France was now contemplating an alliance with England, and urged James to leave French soil. He settled for a time at papal Avignon, and then in Rome.

  Bolingbroke remained in France till 1723, and, knowing French well, made himself at home in the salons and among the philosophers. Clever in everything but politics, he bought shares in Law’s System, and sold at great profit before the bubble burst. Having left his wife in England, he formed an almost honorable attachment with Marie Deschamps de Marcilly, the widowed Marquise de Villette. She was forty, he was thirty-eight. Like so many Frenchwomen, she had kept her charm even while losing some of her beauty; perhaps it was her grace, vivacity, and wit that drew him. He became her lover, and when Lady Bolingbroke died he married the Marquise and went to live with her at La Source. There, as we have seen, Voltaire visited him (1721). “I have found in this illustrious Englishman,” reported the young philosopher, “all the erudition of his own nation, and all the politeness of ours.”12