Robert Walpole was the first to discover the real and the very serious nature of the Queen's malady. He was often alone with her for the purpose of arranging as to the course of action which they were to prevail upon the King to believe to be of his own inspiration, and accordingly to adopt. Shortly after the death of Walpole's wife he was closeted with the Queen. Her Majesty questioned him closely about the cause of his wife's death. She was evidently under the impression that Lady Walpole had died from the effects of a peculiar kind of rupture, and she put to Walpole a variety of very intimate questions as to the symptoms and progress of the disease. Walpole had long suspected, as many others had, that there was something seriously wrong with the Queen. He allowed her to go on with her questions, and he became satisfied in his own mind that the Queen herself was suffering from the disorder about which she was so anxious to be told.
On August 26, 1737, it was reported over London that the Queen was dead. The report was unfounded, or at least premature. Caroline had had a violent attack, but she rallied and was able to go about again at Hampton Court with the King. On Wednesday, November 9, 1737, she was suddenly stricken down, and this was her death-stroke. She did not die at once, but lingered and lingered.
There are few chapters of history more full of strange, sardonic contrast, and grim, ghastly humor, than those which describe these death-bed scenes. The Queen, undergoing a succession of painful operations; now groaning and fainting, now telling the doctors not to mind her foolish cries; now indulging in some chaff with them—"Is not Ranby [the surgeon] sorry it isn't his own cross old wife he is cutting up?"—the King sometimes blubbering, and sometimes telling his dying wife that her staring eyes {116} looked like those of a calf whose throat had been cut; the King, who, in his sudden tenderness and grief, would persist in lying outside the bed, and thereby giving the poor, perishing sufferer hardly room to move; the messages of affected condolence arriving from the Prince of Wales, with requests to be allowed to see his mother, which requests the mother rejects with bitterness and contempt—all this sets before us a picture such as seldom, happily for the human race, illustrates a death-bed in palace, garret, or prison cell. The King was undoubtedly sincere in his grief, at least for the time. He did love the Queen in a sort of way; and she had worked upon all his weaknesses and vices and made herself necessary to him. He did not see how life was to go on for him without her; and as he thought of this he cried like a child whose mother is about to leave him. Over and over again has the story been told of the dying Queen's appeal to her husband to take a new wife after her death, and the King's earnest disclaimer of any such purpose; the assurance that he would have mistresses, and then the Queen's cry of cruel conviction from hard experience, "Oh, mon Dieu, cela n'empêche pas!" "I know," says Lord Hervey, who tells the story, "that this episode will hardly be credited, but it is literally true." One does not see why the episode should hardly be credited, why it should not be taken at once as historical and true. It is not out of keeping with all other passages of the story, it is in the closest harmony and symmetry with them. The King always made his wife the confidante of his amours and intrigues. He had written to her once, asking her to bring to Court the wife of some nobleman or gentleman, and he told her frankly that he admired this lady and wanted to have her near him in order that he might have an intrigue with her, and he knew that she, his wife, would always be glad to do him a pleasure. Thackeray, in his lecture, often speaks of the King as "Sultan George." George had, in the matter of love-making, no other notions than those of a sultan. [Sidenote: 1737—George's settled belief] He had no more idea of his wife objecting to his mistresses than {117} a sultan would have about the chief sultana's taking offence at the presence of his concubines. The fact that the Queen lay dying did not put any restraint on any of George's ways. He could not be kept from talking loudly all the time; he could not be kept from bawling out observations about his wife's condition which, if they were made only in whispers, must have tended to alarm and distress an invalid. It is not the frank brutality of George's words which surprises us; it is rather the sort of cross-light they throw on what was after all a tender part of his coarse and selfish nature. Every reader of the history and the memoirs of that reign must be prepared to understand and to appreciate the absolute sincerity of the King's words; the settled belief that the Queen could not possibly have any objection to his taking to himself as many mistresses as he pleased. One is a little surprised at the uncouth sentimentality of the thought that nevertheless it might be a disrespect to her memory if he were to take another wife. What a light all this lets in upon the man, and the Court, and the time! As regards indiscriminate amours and connections, poor, stupid, besotted George was simply on a level with the lower animals. Charles the Second, Louis the Fourteenth, Louis the Fifteenth even—these at their worst of times were gentlemen. It was only at the Hanoverian Court of England that such an interchange of appeal and reassurance could take place as that which was murmured and blubbered over the death-bed of Queen Caroline. "Horror," says one of the great Elizabethan poets, "waits on the death-beds of princes." Horror in the truest sense waited on the death-bed of that poor, patient, faithful, unscrupulous, unselfish Queen.
The Queen kept rallying and sinking, and rallying again; and the King's moods went up and down with each passing change in his wife's condition. Now she sank, and he buried his face in the bedclothes and cried; now she recovered a little, and he rated at her and made rough jokes at her. At one moment he appeared to be all {118} tenderness to her, at another moment he went on as if the whole illness were a mere sham to worry him, and she might get up and be well if she would only act like a sensible woman. The Prince of Wales made an attempt to see the Queen. The King spoke of him as a puppy and a scoundrel; jeered at his impudent, affected airs of duty and affection, declared that neither he nor the Queen was in a condition to see him act his false, whining, cringing tricks now, and sent him orders to get out of the place at once. His Majesty continued all through the dying scenes to rave against the Prince of Wales, and call him rascal, knave, puppy, and scoundrel. The Queen herself, although she did not use language quite as strong, yet expressed just as resolute a dislike or detestation of her son, and an utter disbelief in his sincerity. She declared that she knew he only wanted to see her in order that he should have the joy of knowing she was dead five minutes sooner than if he had to wait in Pall Mall to hear the glad tidings. She told the listeners that if ever she should consent to see the prince they might be sure she had lost her senses. Princess Caroline was in constant attendance on the Queen. So was Lord Hervey. The princess, however, became unwell herself and the Princess Emily sat up with the Queen. But Caroline would not consent to be removed from her mother. A couch was fitted up for her in a room adjoining the Queen's; and Lord Hervey lay on a mattress on the floor at the foot of the princess's bed. The King occasionally went to his own rooms, and there was peace for the time in the dying woman's chamber. Probably the only two that truly and unselfishly loved the Queen were occupying the couch and the mattress in that outer room.
The Queen talked often to Princess Caroline, and commended to her the care of her two younger sisters. She talked to her son William, Duke of Cumberland, then little more than sixteen years old, admonished him to be a support to his father, and to "try to make up for the disappointment and vexation he must receive from your {119} profligate and worthless brother." But she also admonished him to attempt nothing against his brother, and only to mortify him by showing superior merit. She asked for her keys, and gave them to the King. She took off her finger a ruby ring which he had given her at her coronation, and put it on his finger, and said to him, almost as patient Grizzel does, "Naked I came to you, and naked I go from you." All who were present at this episode in the dying were in tears, except the Queen herself. She seemed absolutely composed; indeed she was anxious that the end should come. She had no belief in the possibility of her recovery, and she only wanted to be released now from "the fever called living." Except for the bitter outbursts of anger and hatred against the Prince of Wales, the poor Queen seems to have borne herself like a true-hearted, resigned, tender wife, kind mother, and Christian woman.
[Sidenote: 1737—A fatal mistake]
An operation was tried, with the consent of the King. Thereupon arises a controversy not unlike that which followed an imperial death in very modern European history. Lord Hervey insists that the surgeons showed utter incapacity, made a shocking and fatal mistake; cut away as mortified flesh that in which there was no mortification whatever. Then Sir Robert Walpole, who had been sent for, comes on the scene. The King ordered him to be brought in from the outer room, and Walpole came in and tried to drop on his knees to kiss the King's hand. It was not easy to do, Sir Robert was so bulky and unwieldy. He found it hard to get down, and harder still to get up again. However, the solemn duty was accomplished somehow, and then Sir Robert was conducted to the Queen's bedside. He dropped some tears, which we may be sure were sincere, even if by no means unselfish. He was in utter dread of losing all his power over the King if the Queen were to die. The Queen recommended the King, her children, and the kingdom to his care, and Sir Robert seems to have been much pleased with the implied compliment of the recommendation.
{120}
The moment Walpole got to private speech with Lord Hervey, he at once exhibited the nature of his grief and alarm. "My lord," he exclaimed, "if this woman should die, what a scene of confusion will there be! Who can tell into whose hands the King will fall, or who will have the management of him?" Lord Hervey tried to reassure him, and told him that his influence over the King would be stronger than ever. Walpole could not see it, and they argued the matter over for a long time. The talk lasted two or three hours, much to Lord Hervey's dissatisfaction, for it kept him out of bed, and this happened to be the first night since the Queen had fallen ill when he had any chance of a good night's rest; and now behold, with the Prime-minister's unseasonable anxiety about the affairs of State, Lord Hervey's chance is considerably diminished. Even this little episode has its fit and significant place in the death-bed story. The Prime-minister will insist on talking over the prospects—his own prospects or those of the nation—with the lord-in-waiting; and the lord-in-waiting is very sleepy, and, having had a hope of a night's rest, is only alarmed lest the hope should be disappointed. No one appears to have said a word as to what would be better or worse for the Queen.
The Queen was strongly under the belief that she would die on a Wednesday. She was born on a Wednesday, married on a Wednesday, crowned on a Wednesday, gave birth to her first child on a Wednesday; almost all the important events of her life had befallen her on Wednesday, and it seemed in the fitness of things that Wednesday should bring with it the close of that life. Wednesday came; and, as Lord Hervey puts it, "some wise, some pious, and a great many busy, meddling, impertinent people about the Court" began asking each other, and everybody else they met, whether the Queen had any clergyman to pray for her and minister to her. Hervey thought all this very offensive and absurd, and was of opinion that if the Queen cared about praying, and that sort of thing, she could pray for herself as well as any one else could do it. {121} Hervey, however, kept this free and easy view of things discreetly to himself. He was shocked at the rough cynicism of Sir Robert Walpole, who cared as little about prayer as Hervey or any other man living, but was perfectly willing that all the world should know his views on the subject. The talk of the people about the Court reached Walpole's ears, and he recommended the Princess Emily to propose to the King and Queen that the Archbishop of Canterbury should be sent for. The princess seemed to be a little afraid to make so audacious a proposal to the King, Defender of the Faith, as the suggestion that a minister of the Church should be allowed to pray by the bedside of the dying Queen. Sir Robert encouraged her in his characteristic way. In the presence of a dozen people, Hervey tells, Sir Robert said to the princess: "Pray, madam, let this farce be played; the archbishop will act it very well. You may bid him be as short as you will. It will do the Queen no hurt, no more than any good; and it will satisfy all the wise and good fools who will call us atheists if we don't pretend to be as great fools as they are."
[Sidenote: 1737—Praying with the Queen]
The advice of the statesman was taken. The wise and good fools were allowed to have it their own way. The archbishop was sent for, and he came and prayed with the Queen every morning and evening; the King always graciously bolting out of the room the moment the prelate came in. But the wise and good fools were not satisfied with the concession which enlightenment had condescended to make. Up to this time they kept asking, "Has the Queen no one to pray with her?" Now the whispered question was, "Has the Queen taken—will the Queen take—the sacrament?" Some people hinted that she could not receive the sacrament because she could not make up her mind to be reconciled to her son; others doubted whether she had religious feeling enough to consent to ask for the sacrament or to receive it. All this time the King chattered perpetually to Lord Hervey, to the physicians and surgeons, and to his children, about the virtues {122} and gifts of the Queen. He deplored in advance the lonely, dull life he would have to lead when she was taken from him. He was in frequent bursts of tears. He declared that he had never been tired one moment in her company; that he could never have been happy with any other woman in the world; and he paid her the graceful and delicate compliment of saying that if she had not been his wife he would rather have her for a mistress than any other woman with whom he had ever held such relationship. Yet he hardly ever went into her room, after one of these outpourings of tender affection, without being rough to her and shouting at her and bullying her. When her pains and her wounds made her move uneasily in her bed, he asked her how the devil she could sleep when she would never lie still a moment. He walked heavily about the room as if it were a chamber in a barrack; he talked incessantly; gave all manner of directions; made the unfortunate Queen swallow all manner of foods and drinks because he took it into his head that they would do her good; and she submitted, poor, patient, pitiable creature, and swallowed and vomited, swallowed again and vomited again, and uttered no complaint.
[Sidenote: 1737—Would not play second fiddle]
Even in his outbursts of grief the King's absurd personal vanity constantly came out; for he was always telling his listeners that the Queen was devoted to him because she was wildly enamoured of his person as well as his genius. Then he told long stories about his own indomitable courage, and went over and over again an account of the heroism he had displayed during a storm at sea. One night the King was in the outer room with the Princess Emily and Lord Hervey. The puffy little King wore his nightgown and nightcap, and was sitting in a great chair with his thick legs on a stool; a heroic figure, decidedly. The princess was lying on a couch. Lord Hervey sat by the fire. The King started the old story of the storm and his own bravery, and gave it to his companions in all its familiar details. The princess at last closed her eyes, and seemed to be fast asleep. The King presently went into {123} the Queen's room, and then the princess started up and asked, "Is he gone?" and added, fervently, "How tiresome he is!" Lord Hervey asked if she had not been asleep; she said no; she had only closed her eyes in order to escape taking part in the conversation, and that she very much wished she could close her ears as well. "I am sick to death," the dutiful princess said, "of hearing of his great courage every day of my life. One thinks now of mamma, and not of him. Who cares for his old storm? I believe, too, it is a great lie, and that he was as much afraid as I should have been, for all what he says now," and she added a good many more comments to the same effect. Then the King came back into the room, and his daughter ceased her comment on his bravery and his truthfulness.
"One thinks of mamma, and not of him." That was exactly what George would not have. He did dearly love the Queen after his own fashion; he was deeply grieved at the thought of losing her; but he did not choose to play second fiddle even to the dying. So in all his praises of her and his laments for her he never failed to endeavor to impress on his hearers the idea of his own immense superiority to her and to everybody else. There is hardly anything in fiction so touching, so pitiful, so painful, as this exposition of a naked, brutal, yet not quite selfish, not wholly unloving, egotism. The Queen did not die on the Wednesday. Thursday and Friday passed over in just the same way, with just the same incidents—with the King alternately blubbering and bullying, with the panegyrics of the dying woman, and the twenty times told tale of "his old storm." The Queen was growing weaker and weaker. Those who watched around her bed wondered how she was able to live so long in such a condition of utter weakness. On the evening of Sunday, November 20th, she asked Dr. Tesier quietly how long it was possible that her struggle could last. He told her that he was "of opinion that your Majesty will be soon relieved." She thanked him for telling her, and said in French, "So much the better." About {124} ten o'clock that same night the crisis came. The King was asleep in a bed laid on the floor at the foot of the Queen's bed. The Princess Emily was lying on a couch in a corner of the room. The Queen began to rattle in her throat. The nurse gave the alarm, and said the Queen was dying. The Princess Caroline was sent for, and Lord Hervey. The princess came in time; Lord Hervey was a moment too late. The Queen asked in a low, faint voice that the window might be opened, saying she felt an asthma. Then she spoke the one word, "Pray." The Princess Emily began to read some prayers, but had only got out a few words before the Queen shuddered and died. The Princess Caroline held a looking-glass to the Queen's lips, and, finding the surface undimmed, quietly said, "'Tis over"; and, according to Lord Hervey, "said not one word more, nor as yet shed one tear, on the arrival of a misfortune the dread of which had cost her so many."
"Pray!" That was the last word the Queen ever spoke, All the wisdom of the Court statesmen, all the proud, intellectual unbelief, all the cynical contempt for the weaknesses of intellect which allow ignorant people to believe their destiny linked with that of some other and higher life—all that Bolingbroke, Chesterfield, Walpole, would have taught and sworn oaths for—all was mocked by that one little word, "pray," which came last from the lips of Queen Caroline. Bring saucy Scepticism there; make her laugh at that!
The story would be incomplete if it were not added that while the Queen's body was yet unburied the King came to Hervey and told him, laughing and crying alternately, that he had just seen Horace Walpole, the brother of Robert, and that Walpole was weeping for the Queen with so bad a grace "that in the middle of my tears he forced me to burst into laughter." Amid this explosion of tears and laughter the story of the Queen's life comes fittingly to an end.
[Sidenote: 1737—Walpole strengthens his position]
The moment the breath was out of the Queen's body, {125} Walpole set about a course of action which should strengthen his position as Prime-minister of the King. At first his strong fear was that with the life of the Queen had passed away his own principal hold upon the confidence of George. He told Hervey that no one could know how often he had failed utterly by argument and effort of his own to bring the King to agree to some action which he considered absolutely necessary for the good of the State, and how after he had given up the attempt in mere despair the Queen had taken the matter in hand, and so managed the King that his Majesty at last became persuaded that the whole idea was his own original conception, and he bade her send for Walpole and explain it to him, and get Walpole to carry it into execution. Hervey endeavored to reassure him by many arguments, and among the rest by one which showed how well Hervey understood King George's weaknesses. Hervey said the one thing which was in Walpole's way while the Queen lived was the fear George had of people saying Walpole was the Queen's minister, not the King's, and suggesting that the King's policy was ruled by his wife. Now that the Queen was gone, George would be glad to prove to the world that Walpole had always been his minister, and that he retained Walpole's services because he himself valued them, and not because they had been pressed upon him by a woman. Hervey proved to be right.
Walpole, however, was for strengthening himself after the old fashion. He was determined to put the King into the hands of some woman who would play into the hands of the minister. The Duke of Grafton and the Duke of Newcastle tried to persuade Walpole to make use of the influence of the Princess Emily. They insisted that she was sure to succeed to the management of the King, but that if Walpole approached her at once he might easily make her believe that she owed it all to him, and that she might thus be induced to stand by him and to assist him. Walpole would have nothing of the kind. He only believed in the ruling power of a mistress now that the {126} Queen was gone. He gave his opinions in his blunt, characteristic way. He meant, he said, to bring over Madame de Walmoden, and would have nothing to do with "the girls." "I was for the wife against the mistress, but I will be for the mistress against the daughters." Accordingly he earnestly advised the King not to fret any longer with a vain sorrow, but to try to distract himself from grief, and urged him, for this purpose, to send over at once to Hanover for Madame Walmoden. Walpole's way of talking to the young princesses would seem absolutely beyond belief if we did not know that the reports of it are true. He told the princesses that they must try to divert their father's melancholy by bringing women round him; he talked of Madame Walmoden, and repeated to them what he had said to Lord Hervey, that, though he had been for the Queen against Lady Suffolk and every other woman, yet now he would be for Madame Walmoden, and advised them in the mean time to bring Lady Deloraine, a former mistress, to her father, adding with brutal indecency that "people must wear old gloves until they get new ones." He offended and disgusted the Princesses Caroline and Emily, and they hated him forever after. Walpole did not much care. He was not thinking much about "the girls," as he called them. He believed he saw his way.
{127} CHAPTER XXX.
THE WESLEYAN MOVEMENT.
[Sidenote: 1738—John Wesley]
In 1738 John Wesley returned to London from Georgia, in British North America. He had been absent more than two years. He had gone to Georgia to propagate the faith to which he was devoted; to convert the native Indians and to regenerate the British colonists. He did not accomplish much in either way. The colonists preferred to live their careless, joyous, often dissolute lives, and the stern spirit of Wesley had no charm for them. The Indians refused to be Christianized; one chief giving as his reason for the refusal a melancholy fact which has kept others as well as him from conversion to the true faith. He said he did not want to become a Christian because the Christians in Savannah got drunk, told lies, and beat men and women. Wesley had, before leaving England, founded a small religious brotherhood, and on his return he at once set to work to strengthen and enlarge it.
John Wesley was in every sense a remarkable man. If any one in the modern world can be said to have had a distinct religious mission, Wesley certainly can be thus described. He was born in 1703 at Epworth, in Lincolnshire. John Wesley came of a family distinguished for its Churchmen and ministers. His father was a clergyman of the Church of England, and rector of the parish of Epworth; his grandfather was also a clergyman, but became a Non-conformist minister, and seems to have been a good deal persecuted for his opinions on religious discipline. John Wesley's father was a sincere and devout man, with a certain literary repute and well read in {128} theology, but of narrow mind and dogmatic, unyielding temper. The right of King William to the Throne was an article of faith with him, and it came on him one day with the shock of a terrible surprise that his wife did not altogether share his conviction. He vowed that he would never live with her again unless or until she became of his way of thinking; and he straightway left the house, nor did he return to his home and his wife until after the death of the King, when the controversy might be considered as having closed. The King died so soon, however, that the pair were only separated for about a year; but it may fairly be assumed that, had the King lived twenty years, Wesley would not have returned to his wife unless she had signified to him that she had renounced her pestilent scepticism.
The same stern strength of resolve which Wesley, the father, showed in this extraordinary course was shown by the son at many a grave public crisis in his career. The birth of John Wesley was the result of the reconciliation between the elder Wesley and his wife. There were other children, elder and younger; one of whom, Charles, became in after-life the faithful companion and colleague of his brother. John and Charles Wesley were educated at Oxford, and were distinguished there by the fervor of their religious zeal and the austerity of their lives. There were other young men there at the time who grew into close affinity with the Wesleys. There was George Whitefield, the son of a Gloucester innkeeper, who at one time was employed as a drawer in his mother's tap-room; and there was James Hervey, afterwards author of the flowery and sentimental "Meditations," that became for a while so famous—a book which Southey describes "as laudable in purpose and vicious in style." These young men, with others, formed a sort of little religious association or companionship of their own. They used to hold meetings for their mutual instruction and improvement in religious faith and life. They shunned all amusement and all ordinary social intercourse. They were ridiculed {129} and laughed at, and various nicknames were bestowed on them. One of these nicknames they accepted and adopted; as the Flemish Gueux had done, and many another religious sect and political party as well. Those who chose to laugh at them saw especial absurdity in their formal and methodical way of managing their spiritual exercises and their daily lives. The jesters dubbed them Methodists; Wesley and his friends welcomed the title; and the fame of the Methodists now folds in the orb of the earth.
[Sidenote: 1738—Torpor of the English Church]
Wesley and his friends had in the beginning, and for long years after, no idea whatever of leaving the fold of the English Church. They had as little thought of that kind as in a later generation had the men who made the Free Church of Scotland. Probably their ideas were very vague in their earlier years. They were young men tremendously in earnest; they were aflame in spirit and conscience with religious zeal; and they saw that the Church of England was not doing the work that might have been and ought to have been expected of her. She had ceased utterly to be a missionary Church. She troubled herself in nowise about spreading the glad tidings of salvation among the heathen. At home she was absolutely out of touch with the great bulk of the people. The poor and the ignorant were left quietly to their own resources. The clergymen of the Church of England were not indeed by any means a body of men wanting in personal morality, or even in religious feeling, but they had as little or no religious activity because they had little or no religious zeal. They performed perfunctorily their perfunctory duties; and that, as a rule, was all they did.
Atterbury, Burnet, Swift, all manner of writers, who were themselves ministering in the Church of England, unite in bearing testimony to the torpid condition into which the Church had fallen. Decorum seemed to be the highest reach of the spiritual lives of most of the clergy. One finds curious confirmation of the statements {130} made publicly by men like Atterbury and Burnet in some of the appeals privately made by Swift to his powerful friends for the promotion of poor and deserving clergymen whose poverty and merit had been brought under his notice. The recommendation generally begins and ends in the fact that each particular man had led a decent, respectable life; that he was striving to bring up honestly a large family; and that his living or curacy was not enough to maintain him in comfort. We hardly ever hear of the work which the good man had been doing among the poor, the ignorant, and the sinful. Swift has said many hard and even terrible things about bishops and deans, and vicars and curates. But these stern accusations do not form anything like as formidable a testimony against the condition into which the Church had fallen as will be found in the exceptional praise which he gives to those whom he specially desires to recommend for promotion; and in the fact that the highest reach of that praise comes to nothing more than the assurance that the man had led a decent life, had a large family, and was very poor. Such a recommendation as that would not have counted for much with John Wesley. He would have wanted to know what work the clergyman had done outside his own domestic life; what ignorance had he enlightened, what sinners had he brought to repentance.
[Sidenote: 1738—An "archbishop of the slums"]
Things were still worse in the Established Church of Ireland. Hardly a pastor of that Church could speak three words of the language of the Irish people. Lord Stanhope, in his "History of England from the Peace of Utrecht," writes as if the Irish clergymen—the clergymen, that is, of the Established Church of Ireland—might have accomplished wonders in the way of converting the Irish peasantry to Protestantism if they only could have preached and controverted in the Irish language. We are convinced that they could have done nothing of the kind. The Irish Celtic population is in its very nature a Catholic population. Not all the preaching since Adam {131} could have made them other than that. Still it struck John Wesley very painfully later on that the effort was never made, and that the men who could not talk to the Irish people in their own tongue, and who did not take the trouble to learn the language, were not in a promising condition for the conversion of souls. The desire of Wesley and his brother, and Whitefield and the rest, seems only at first to have been an awakening of the Church in these islands to a sense of her duty. They do not appear to have had any very far-reaching hopes or plans. They saw that the work was left undone, and they labored to bring about a spirit which should lead men to the doing of it. At first they only held their little meetings on each succeeding Sunday; but they found themselves warming to the task, and they began to meet and confer very often. Their one thought was how to get at the people; how to get at the lowly, the ignorant, and the poor. Soon they began to see that the lowly, the ignorant, and the poor would not come to the Church, and that, therefore, the Church must go out to them. In a day much nearer to our own a prelate of the Established Church indulged in a very unlucky and unworthy sneer at the expense of the first Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. He called him an "Archbishop of the slums." The retort was easy and conclusive. It was an admission. "Exactly; that is just what I am. I am an archbishop of the slums; that is my business; that is what I desire to be. My ministry is among the hovels and the garrets and the slums; yours, I admit, is something very different."
This illustrates to the life the central idea which was forming itself gradually and slowly into shape in the mind of John Wesley and in the minds of his associates. They saw that archbishops of the slums were the very prelates whom England needed. Their souls revolted against the apparently accepted idea that the duties of a priest of the Church of England were fulfilled by the preaching of a chill, formal, written sermon once a week, and the attendance {132} on Court ceremonials, and the dining at the houses of those who would then have been called "the great." An institution which could do no more and strove to do no more than the Church of England was then doing did not seem to them to deserve the name of a Church. It was simply a branch of the Civil Service of the State. But Wesley and his brother, and Whitefield and the rest, fully believed at first that they could do something to quicken the Church into a real, a beneficent, and a religions activity. Most of them had for a long time a positive horror of open-air preaching and of the co-operation of lay preachers. Most of them for a long time clung to all the traditional forms and even formulas amid which they had grown up. What Wesley and the others did not see at first, or for long after, was that the Church of England was not then equal to the work which ought to have been hers. A great change was coming over the communities and the population of England. Small hamlets were turning into large towns. Great new manufacturing industries were creating new classes of working-men. Coal-mines were gathering together vast encampments of people where a little time before there had been idle heath or lonely hill-side. The Church of England, with her then hide-bound constitution and her traditional ways, was not equal to the new burdens which she was supposed to undertake. She suffered also from that lack of competition which is hurtful to so many institutions. The Church of Rome had been suppressed for the time in this country, and the most urgent means had been employed to keep the Dissenters down; therefore the Church of England had grown contented, sleek, inert, and was no longer equal to its work. This fact began after a while to impress itself more and more on the minds of the little band who worked with John Wesley. They resisted the idea to the very last; they hoped and believed and dreamed that they might still be part of the Church of England. They found themselves drawn outside the Church, and they found, too, that when once they had gone even a very little way out of the {133} fold, the gates were rudely closed against them, and they might not return. It was not that Wesley and his associates left the Church of England. The Church would not have them because they would persist in doing the work to which she would not even attempt to put a hand.
[Sidenote: 1738—John Wesley's Charity]
John Wesley had been profoundly impressed by William Law's pious and mystical book, "A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life," which was published in 1729. Law lived in London, and Wesley, who desired to be in frequent intercourse with him, used to walk to and from the metropolis for the purpose. The money he thus saved he gave to the poor. He wore his hair at one time very long in order to save the expense of cutting and dressing it, and thus have more money to give away in charity. He and his little band of associates, whose numbers swelled at one time up to twenty-five, but afterwards dropped down to five, imposed on themselves rules of discipline almost as harsh as those of a monastery of the Trappist order. They fasted every Wednesday and Friday, and they made it a duty to visit the prisons and hospitals. Wesley's father, who was growing old, was very anxious that his son should succeed him in the rectory of Epworth. John would not hear of it. In vain his father pressed and prayed; the son could not see his way in that direction. John Wesley has been blamed by some of his biographers for not accepting the task which his father desired and thought right to impose on him. But no one on earth could understand John Wesley's mission but John Wesley himself. When it was pressed upon him that in the living of Epworth he would have the charge of two thousand souls he said, "I see not how any man can take care of a hundred." It was pointed out to him that his little band of companions had been growing smaller and smaller; he only answered that he was purifying a fountain and not a stream. The illustration was effective and happy.
The truth is that the tremendous energies of John {134} Wesley could not possibly find employment within the narrow field of work adopted by the Established Church of his day. Wesley was a fighter; he had to go out into the broad living world and do battle there. He had originality as well as energy; he must do his work his own way; he could not be a minister of routine. He soon found it borne in upon him that he must speak to his fellow-man wherever he could find him. For a long time he held back from the thought of open-air preaching, but now he saw that it must be done. There was a period of his life, he says, when he would have thought the saving of a soul "a sin almost if it had not been done in a church." But from the first moment when he began to preach to crowds in the open air he must have felt that he had found his work at last. His friend and colleague Whitefield, who had more of the genius of an orator than Wesley, had preceded him in this path. One is a little surprised that such men as Wesley and Whitefield should ever have found any difficulty about preaching to a crowd in the open air. The Hill of Mars at Athens listened to an open-air sermon from an apostle, and Whitefield himself observed at a later date that the "Sermon on the Mount is a pretty remarkable precedent of field preaching."
[Sidenote: 1738—Wesley's superstition]
Meanwhile, however, Wesley's father died, and Wesley received an invitation to go out to Georgia with General Oglethorpe, the governor of that settlement, to preach to the Indians and the colonists. He sailed for the new colony on October 14, 1735. He was accompanied by his brother Charles and two other missionaries, and on board the vessel was a small band of men from "the meek Moravian Missions." The Moravian sect was then in its earliest working order. It had been founded—or perhaps it would be more fitting to say restored—not many years before, by the enthusiastic and devoted Count Von Zinzendorf. Wesley was greatly attracted by the ways and the spiritual life of the Moravians. It is worthy of note that when Count Zinzendorf began the formation or {135} restoration of Moravianism he had as little idea of departing from the fold of the Confession of Augsburg as Wesley had of leaving the Church of England. John Wesley did not, as we have said, accomplish much among the colonists and the Indians. Perhaps his ways were too dogmatic and dictatorial for the colonists. He departed altogether from the Church discipline in some of his religious exercises, while he clung to it pertinaciously in others. He offended local magnates by preaching at them from the pulpit, giving them pretty freely a piece of his mind as to their conduct and ways of life, and, indeed, turning them to public ridicule with rough and rasping sarcasms. With the Indians he could not do much, if only for the fact that he had to speak to them through an interpreter. The tongue, says Jean Paul Richter, is eloquent only in its own language, and the heart in its own religion. It certainly was not from lack of zeal and energy that Wesley failed to accomplish much among the Indians. He flung himself into the work with all his indomitable spirit and disregard for trouble and pain. One of his biographers tells us that "he exposed himself with the utmost indifference to every change of season and inclemency of weather; snow and hail, storm and tempest, had no effect on his iron body. He frequently lay down on the ground and slept all night with his hair frozen to the earth; he would swim over rivers with his clothes on and travel till they were dry, and all this without any apparent injury to his health." It is no wonder that Wesley soon began to regard himself as a man specially protected by divine power. He was deeply, romantically superstitious. He commonly guided his course by opening a page of the Bible and reading the first passage that met his eye. He saw visions; he believed in omens. He tells us himself of the instantaneous way in which some of his prayers for rescue from danger were answered from above. Those who believe that the work Wesley had to do was really great and beneficent work will hardly feel any regret that such a man should have allowed himself to be governed {136} by such ideas. It was necessary to the tasks he had to execute that he should believe himself to bear a charmed life.
Wesley was very near getting married in Georgia. A clever and pretty young woman in Savannah set herself at him. She consulted him about her spiritual salvation, she dressed always in white because she understood that he liked such simplicity of color, she nursed him when he was ill. The governor of the colony favored the young lady's intentions, which were indeed strictly honorable, being most distinctly matrimonial. At one time it seemed very likely that the marriage would take place, but Wesley's heart was evidently not in the affair. Some of his colleagues told him plainly enough that they believed the young lady to be merely playing a game, that she put on affection and devotion only that she might put on a wedding-dress. Wesley consulted some of the elders of the Moravian Church, and promised to abide by their decision. Their advice was that he should go no further with the young woman, and Wesley kept his word and refused to see her any more. She married, soon after, the chief magistrate of the colony, and before long we find Wesley publicly reprehending her for "something in her behavior of which he disapproved," and threatening even to exclude her from the communion of the Church until she should have signified her sincere repentance. Her family took legal proceedings against him. Wesley did not care; he was about to return to England, and he was called on to give bail for his reappearance in the colony. He contemptuously refused to do anything of the kind, and promptly sailed from Savannah.
This little episode of the Georgian girl is characteristic of the man. He did not care about marrying her, but it did not seem to him a matter of much importance either way, and he doubtless would have married her but that he thought it well to seek the advice of his Moravian friends, and bound himself to abide by their decision. That decision once given, he had no further wavering or {137} doubt, but the course he had taken and the manner in which he had completely thrown over the woman did not prevent him in the least from visiting her with a public rebuke when he saw something in her conduct of which he disapproved. He saw no reason why, because he refused to be her lover, he should fail in his duty as her minister.
[Sidenote: 1738—Wesley's unhappy marriage]
We may anticipate a little as to Wesley's personal history. Later in his life he married. He was not happy in his marriage. He took for his wife a widow who plagued him by her narrow-mindedness, her bitterness, and her jealousy. Wesley's care and kindness of the women who came under his ministrations set his wife wild with suspicion and anger. She could not believe that a man could be kind to a woman, even as a pastor, without having evil purpose in his heart. She had the temper of a virago; she stormed against her husband, she threatened him, she sometimes rushed at him and tore his hair; she repeatedly left his house, but was prevailed upon by him to return. At last after a fierce quarrel she flung out of the house, vowing that she would never come back. Wesley's comment, which he expressed in Latin, was stern and characteristic: "I have not left her, I have not put her away, I will never recall her." He kept his word.
Wesley started on his mission to preach to the people and to pray with them. Whitefield and Charles Wesley did the same. Charles Wesley was the hymn writer, the sweet singer, of the movement. The meetings began to grow larger, more enthusiastic, more impassioned, every day. John Wesley brought to his work "a frame of adamant" as well as "a soul of fire." No danger frighted him, and no labor tired. Rain, hail, snow, storm, were matters of indifference to him when he had any work to do. One reads the account of the toil he could cheerfully bear, the privations he could recklessly undergo, the physical obstacles he could surmount, with what would be a feeling of incredulity were it possible to doubt the unquestionable evidence of a whole cloud of {138} heterogeneous witnesses. Not Mark Antony, not Charles the Twelfth, not Napoleon, ever went through such physical suffering for the love of war, or for the conqueror's ambition, as Wesley was accustomed to undergo for the sake of preaching at the right time and in the right place to some crowd of ignorant and obscure men, the conversion of whom could bring him neither fame nor fortune.
All the phenomena with which we have been familiar in modern times of what are called "revivalist" meetings were common among the congregations to whom Wesley preached. Women especially were affected in this way. They raved, shrieked, struggled, flung themselves on the ground, fainted, cried out that they were possessed by evil spirits. Wesley rather encouraged these manifestations, and indeed quite believed in their genuineness. No doubt for the most part they were genuine: that is, they were the birth of hysterical, highly strung natures, stimulated into something like epilepsy or temporary insanity by the unbearable oppression of a wholly novel excitement. No such evidences of emotion were ever given in the parish church where the worthy clergyman read his duly prepared or perhaps thoughtfully purchased sermon. Sometimes a new form of hysteria possessed some of Wesley's congregations, and irrepressible peals of laughter broke from some of the brethren and sisters, who declared that they were forced to it by Satan. Wesley quite accepted this explanation, and so did most of his companions. Two ladies, however, refused to believe, and insisted that "any one might help laughing if she would." But very soon after these two sceptics were seized with the very same sort of irrepressible laughter. They continued for two days laughing almost without cessation, "a spectacle to all," as Wesley tells, "and were then upon prayer made for them delivered in a moment." It is almost needless now to say that bursts of irrepressible laughter are among the commonest forms of hysterical excitement.
[Sidenote: 1738—Whitefield's oratory]
The cooler common-sense of Charles Wesley, however, {139} saw these manifestations with different eyes. He felt sure that there was sometimes a good deal of affectation in them, and he publicly remonstrated with some women who, as it appeared to him, were needlessly making themselves ridiculous. He was probably right in these instances: the instinct of imitation is so strong among men and women that every genuine outburst of maniacal excitement is sure to be followed by some purely mimetic efforts of a similar demonstration. The novelty of the whole movement was enough to account for the genuine and the sham hysterics. It was an entirely new experience then for English men and women of the humblest class, and of that generation, to be addressed in great open-air masses by renowned and powerful preachers. Whitefield's first great effort at field-preaching was made for the benefit of the colliers at Kingswood, near Bristol. Before many weeks had gone by, he could gather round him some twenty thousand of these men. Whitefield had a marvellous fervor and force of oratory. His voice, his gestures, his sudden and startling appeals, his solemn pauses, the dramatic and even theatric energy which he threw into his attitudes and his action, his flights of lofty and sustained declamation, contrasting with sentences of homely colloquialism, were overwhelming in their effect on such an audience. "The first discovery," he says himself, "of their being affected was to see the white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their cheeks, black as they came out of the coal-pits." It was not only miners and other illiterate men whom Whitefield impressed by the fervor and passion of his eloquence. Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Walpole, and other men as well qualified to judge, and as little likely to fall under the spell of religions or sentimental enthusiasm, have borne willing testimony to the irresistible power of a sermon from Whitefield.
Wesley and Whitefield did not remain long in spiritual companionship. They could not agree as to the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. Wesley was opposed to {140} the doctrine; Whitefield willing to accept it. They discussed and discussed the question, but without drawing any nearer together. Indeed, as might naturally have been expected, they only fell more widely asunder, and after a while the difference of opinion grew to something like a personal estrangement. Wesley had already broken away from spiritual communion with some of his old friends, the Moravians. Probably he felt all the stronger for his own work now that he stood as a leader all but alone. He walked his own wild road; Whitefield took a path for himself. Wesley soon found that he was gaining more followers than he had lost. He had to adopt the practice of employing lay preachers; it was a matter of necessity to his task. He could not induce many clergymen to work under his guidance and after his fashion. The movement was spreading all over the country. Wesley became the centre and light of his wing of the campaign. The machinery of his organization was simple and strong. A conference was called together every year, which was composed of preachers selected by Wesley. These formed his cabinet or central board, and lent their authority to his decisions.
This was the germ of the great Wesleyan organization, which has since become so powerful, and has spread itself so widely over Great Britain and the American States. The preachers were sent by Wesley from one part of the country to another, just as he thought best; and it never occurred to any missionary to refuse, remonstrate, or even delay. The system was admirable; the discipline was perfect. Wesley was as completely in command of his body of missionaries as the general of the order of Jesuits is of those over whom he is called to exercise control. The humblest of the Wesleyan preachers caught something, caught indeed very much, of the energy, the courage, the devotion, the self-sacrifice, of their great leader. No doubt there were many errors and offences here and there. Good taste, sobriety of judgment, prudence, common-sense, were now and then offended. Most of the preachers were {141} ignorant men, who had nothing but an untaught enthusiasm and a rude, uncouth eloquence to carry them on. They had to preach to multitudes very often more ignorant and uncouth than themselves. It would be absolutely impossible under such conditions that there should not sometimes be offence, and, as Hamlet says, "much offence too." But there was no greater departure from the lines of propriety and good taste than any one who took a reasonable view of the whole work and its workers must have expected to find.
[Sidenote: 1738—Opposition to Wesleyanism]
Of course a strong opposition to the movement showed itself in many parts of the country. The Wesleyans were denounced; they were ridiculed; they were caricatured; they were threatened; they were set upon by ruffians; they were stoned by mobs. In some places it was said that the local magistrates actually connived with the attempt to drive them out by force. Projects are actually declared to have been formed for their complete extermination. Such projects, however, do not succeed. No amount of violence has ever yet exterminated religious zeal and impassioned, even let it be fanatical, enthusiasm. John Wesley went his way undismayed. He even appears to have positively enjoyed the excitement and the danger. The persecution began after a while to languish in its efforts, and the Wesleyans kept growing more and more numerous and strong. But the movement in growing grew away from the Church of England. Wesley had been drawn out of his original intent step after step. He could not help himself, once his movement had been started. He had had to take to field preaching, for the good reason that he could not otherwise reach the people whom it was his heart's warmest longing to reach. He had to take to employing lay preachers, because without them he could not have got his preaching done. At last he began to ordain ministers, and even, it is said, bishops, for the missions in America. He had, in fact, broken away altogether from the discipline of the Church of England, although he persisted to his dying day that he never had any design of {142} separating from the Church, "and had no such design now." Near to the close of his long life he declared, "I live and die a member of the Church of England, and none who regard my judgment or advice will ever separate from it." No one can doubt that Wesley spoke in full sincerity. When he stepped outside the pale of Church practice it was only to do what he believed ought to have been the work of the Church itself, but which the Church did not then care to attempt, and which, as he felt convinced, could not afford to wait for the indefinite time when the Church might have the spirit, the energy, and the resources needed for such an undertaking.
Wesley was a thorough despot; as much of a despot as Peter the Great or Napoleon. He took no trouble to disguise his despotic purpose. He did not shelter himself, as Napoleon once wished to do, under the draperies of a constitutional king. Wesley was satisfied in his own mind that he knew better than any other man how to guide his movements and govern his followers, and he told people that he knew it, and acted accordingly. The members of his conference, or what we have called his cabinet, were only like Clive's council of war; Wesley listened to their advice and their arguments, but acted according to his own judgment all the same. Late in his career it was charged against him that he was trying to turn himself into a sort of Methodist pope. He asked for some explanation of this, and was told that he had invested himself with arbitrary power. His answer was simple and straightforward. "If by arbitrary power you mean a power which I exercise singly, without any colleagues therein, this is certainly true; but I see no hurt in it." All the actions of his life show this complete faith in himself where the business of his mission was concerned. He was dogmatic, masterful, overbearing, very often far from amiable, sometimes all but unendurable, to those around him. But if he had not had these peculiar qualities or defects he would not have been the man that he was; he would not have been able to bear the charge of such a task at such a {143} time. It is probable that Hannibal did not cut through the Alps with vinegar; it is certain that he could not have pierced his way with honey.
[Sidenote: 1738—Religion out of fashion]
Nothing can better show than the rise and progress of the great Methodist movement how vast is the difference between a people and what is commonly called society. In society everywhere throughout England, in the great provincial cities as well as in the capital, religion seemed to have completely gone out of fashion. The Court cared nothing about it. The King had no real belief in his heart; he had as little faith in Divine guidance as he had in the honor of man or the chastity of woman. The Queen's devotional exercises were nothing but a mere performance carried on sometimes through a half-opened door, the attendant minister on one side of the door and the gossiping, chattering ladies on the other. The leading statesmen of the age were avowedly indifferent or professedly unbelieving. Bolingbroke was a preacher of unbelief. Walpole never seems to have cared to turn his thoughts for one moment to anything higher than his own political career, the upholding of his friends if they stood fast by him, and the downfall of his enemies. Chesterfield was not exactly the sort of man to be stirred into spiritual life. Morals were getting out of fashion as much as religion. Society had all the grossness without much of the wit which belonged to the days of the Restoration. Yet the mere fact that the Wesleyan movement made such sudden way among the poor and the lowly shows beyond question that the heart of the English people had not been corrupted. Conscience was asleep, but it was not dead. The first words of Wesley seemed to quicken it into a new life.
We have somewhat anticipated the actual course of events in order to show at once what the Wesleyan movement came to. During the lifetime of its founder it had grown into a great national and international institution. Since his time it has been spreading and growing all over the world where Christianity grows. It is the severest in {144} its discipline of all the Protestant churches, and yet it exercises a charm even over gentle and tender natures, and makes them its willing servants, while it teaches the wilder and fiercer spirits to bend their natures and tame their wild passions down. [Sidenote: 1738—The Wesleyan work] In the United States of America Wesleyanism is now one of the most popular and powerful of all the denominations of Christianity. It has since been divided up into many sections, both here and there, on questions of discipline, and even on questions of belief; but in its leading characteristics it has been faithful to the main purpose of its founder. Its success did not consist mainly in what it accomplished for its own people; it achieved a great work also by the impulse it gave to the Church of England. That Church for a while seemed to be filled with a reviving spiritual and ministerial activity. It appeared to take shame to itself that it had remained so long apathetic and perfunctory, and it flung itself into competition with the younger and more energetic mission. The English Church did not indeed retain this mood of ardor and of eagerness very long. After a time it relapsed into comparative inactivity; and a new and very different movement was needed at a period much nearer to our own to make it once again a ministering power to the people—to the poor. But for the time the revival of the Church was genuine and was beneficent. With the quickened religious vitality of the Wesleyan movement came also a quickened philanthropic spirit; a zeal for the instruction, the purification, and the better life of men and women. The common instinct of humanity always is to strive for higher and better ways of living, if only once the word of guidance is given and the soul of true manhood is roused to the work. Indeed, there is not much about this period of English history concerning which the modern Englishman can feel really proud except that great religious revival which began with the thoughts and the teachings of John Wesley. One turns in relief from the partisan struggles in Parliament and out of it, from the intrigues and counter-intrigues of selfish and perfidious statesmen, and {145} the alcove conspiracies of worthless women, to Wesley and his religious visions, to Whitefield and his colliers, to Charles Wesley and his sweet devotional hymns. Many of us are unable to have any manner of sympathy with the precise doctrines and the forms of faith which Wesley taught. But the man must have no sympathy with faith or religious feeling of any kind who does not recognize the unspeakable value of that great reform which Wesley and Whitefield introduced to the English people. They taught moral doctrines which we all accept in common, but they did not teach them after the cold and barren way of the plodding, mechanical instructor. They thundered them into the opening ears of thousands who had never been roused to moral sentiment before. They inspired the souls of poor and commonplace creatures with all the zealot's fire and all the martyr's endurance. They brought tears to penitent eyes which had never been moistened before by any but the selfish sense of personal pain or grief. They pierced through the dull, vulgar, contaminated hideousness of low and vicious life, and sent streaming in upon it the light of a higher world and a better law. Every new Wesleyan became a missionary of Wesleyanism. The son converted the father, the daughter won over the heart of the mother. There was much that was hard, much that was fierce, in the doctrine and the discipline of Methodism, but that time was not one in which gentler teachings could much prevail. Men and women had to be startled into a sense of the need of their spiritual regeneration. Wesley and the comrades who worked with him in the beginning, and with some of whom, like Whitefield, he ceased after a while to work, were just the men needed to call aloud to the people and make sure that their voices must be heard. They had to talk in a shout if they were to talk to any purpose. There was much in their style of eloquence against which a pure and cultured criticism would naturally protest. But they did not speak for the pure and cultured criticism. They came to call ignorant sinners to repentance. They have the one great abiding {146} merit, they have the one enduring fame—that they saw their real business in life; that they kept to it through whatever disadvantage, pain, and danger; and that they accomplished what they had gone out to do. Their monument lives to-day in the living history of England and of America.
{147}
CHAPTER XXXI.
ENGLAND'S HONOR AND JENKINS'S EAR.
[Sidenote: 1738—The passion of war]
"Madam, there are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe, and not one Englishman among them." This was the proud boast which, as has been already mentioned, Walpole was able to make to Queen Caroline not very long before her death, when she was trying to stir him up to a more agressive policy in the affairs of the Continent. Walpole's words sound almost like an anticipation of Prince Bismarck's famous declaration that the Eastern Question was not worth to Germany the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier. But Prince Bismarck was more fortunate than Walpole in his policy of peace. He had secured a position of advantage for himself in maintaining that policy which Walpole never had. Prince Bismarck had twice over made it clear to all the world that he could conduct to the most complete success a policy of uncompromising war. Walpole had all the difficulty in keeping to his policy of peace which a statesman always has who is suspected, rightly or wrongly, of a willingness to purchase peace at almost any price. It is melancholy to have to make the statement, but the statement is nevertheless true, that in the England of Walpole's day, and in the England of our own day as well, the statesman who is known to love peace is sure to have it shrieked at him in some crisis that he does not love the honor of his country. A periodical outbreak of the craving or lust for war seems to be one of the passions and one of the afflictions of almost every great commonwealth in Europe. A wise and just policy may have secured a peace that has lasted for years; but the mere fact that peace has lasted for years {148} seems to many unthinking people reason enough why the country should be favored with a taste of war. We are constantly declaring that England is not a military nation, and yet no statesman is ever so popular for the hour in England as the statesman who fires the people with the passion of war. Many a minister, weak and unpopular in his domestic policy, has suddenly made himself the hero and the darling of the moment by declaring that some foreign state has insulted England, and that the time has come when the sword must be drawn to defend the nation's honor. Then "away to heaven, respective lenity" indeed! The appeal acts like a charm to call out the passion and to silence the reason of vast masses of the population in all ranks and conditions. Even among the working-classes and the poor—who, one might imagine, have all to lose and nothing to gain by war—it is by no means certain that the war fever will not flame for the hour. There are seasons when, as Burke has said, "even the humblest of us are degraded into the vices and follies of kings."
[Sidenote: 1738—The patriots' war-cry]
War had no fascination for Walpole. He saw it only in its desolation, its cruelty, its folly, and its cost. At the time which we have now reached he looked with clear gaze over the European continent, and he saw nothing in the action of foreign Powers which concerned the honor and the interest of England enough to make it necessary for her to draw the sword. But, unfortunately for his country and for his fame, Walpole was not a statesman of firm and lofty principle. He was always willing to come to terms. In the domestic affairs of England he allowed grievances to exist which he had again and again condemned and deplored, and which every one knew he was sincerely desirous to remove; he allowed them to exist because it might have been a source of annoyance to the King if the minister had troubled him about such a subject. He acted on this policy with regard to the grievances of which the Dissenters complained, and, as he always admitted, very justly complained. Much as he detested a policy of war, he was not the minister who would {149} stand by a policy of peace at the risk of losing his popularity and his power. Much as he loved peace, he loved his place as Prime Minister still more. It is probable that his enemies gave him credit for greater fixity of purpose in regard to his peace policy than he really possessed. They believed, perhaps, that they had only to get up a good, popular war-cry in England, and that Walpole would have to go out of office. They told themselves that he would not make war. On this faith they based their schemes and founded their hopes. It would have been well for Walpole and for England if their belief had been justified by events.
The Patriots raised their war-cry. The honor of England had been insulted. Her claims had been rejected with insolent scorn. Her flag had been trampled on; her seamen had been imprisoned, mutilated, tortured; and all this by whom? By whom, indeed, but the old and implacable enemy of England, the Power which had sent the Armada to invade England's shores and to set up the Inquisition among the English people—by Spain, of course, by Spain! In Spanish dungeons brave Englishmen were wearing out their lives. In mid-ocean English ships were stopped and searched by arrogant officers of the King of Spain. Why did Spain venture on such acts? Because, the Patriots cried out, Spain believed that England's day of strength had gone, and that England could now be insulted with impunity. What wonder, they asked, in patriotic passion, if Spain or any other foreign state should believe such things? Was there not a Minister now at the head of affairs in England, now grasping all the various powers of the state in his own hands, who was notoriously willing to put up with any insult, to subject his country to any degradation, rather than venture on even a remonstrance that might lead to war? Let the flag of England be torn down and trailed in the dust—what then? What cared the Minister whose only fear was, not of dishonor, but of danger.
This was the fiery stuff which the Patriots kept {150} flooding the country with; which they poured out in speeches and pamphlets, and pasquinades and lampoons. Some of them probably came in the end to believe it all themselves. Walpole was assailed every hour—he was held up to public hatred and scorn as if he had betrayed his country. Bolingbroke from his exile contributed his share to the literature of blood, and soon came over from his exile to take a larger share in it. The Craftsman ran over with furious diatribes against the Minister of Peace. Caricatures of all kinds represented Walpole abasing himself before Spain and entering into secret engagements with her, to the prejudice and detriment of England. Ballads were hawked and sung through the streets which described Walpole as acknowledging to the Spanish Don that he hated the English merchants and traders just as much as the Don did, and that he was heartily glad when Spain applied her rod to them. The country became roused to the wildest passion; the Patriots were carrying it all their own way.
What was it all about? What was Spain doing? What ought England to do?
[Sidenote: 1738—The treaties with Spain]
The whole excitement arose out of certain long-standing trade disputes between England and Spain in the New World. These disputes had been referred to in the Treaty of Utrecht, which was supposed to have settled them in 1713; and again in the Treaty of Seville, which was believed to have finally settled them in 1729. England had recognized the right of Spain to regulate the trade with Spanish colonies. Spain agreed that England should have the privilege of supplying the Spanish colonies with slaves. This noble privilege English traders exercised to the full. It is not very gratifying to have to recollect that two of England's great disputes with Spain were about England's claim to an unlimited right to sell slaves to the Spanish colonies. To England, or at least to the English South Sea Company, was also conceded the permission to send one merchant vessel each year to the South Seas with as much English goods to sell to the Spanish colonies as a {151} ship of 500 tons could carry. As everybody might have expected, the provisions of the treaty were constantly broken through. The English traders were very eager to sell their goods; the Spanish colonists were very glad to get them to buy. All other commerce than that in slaves and the one annual shipload of English goods was strictly prohibited by Spain. The whole arrangement now seems in the highest degree artificial and absurd; but it was not an uncommon sort of international arrangement then. As was to be expected, the English traders set going a huge illicit trade in the South Seas. This was done partly by the old familiar smuggling process, and partly, too, by keeping little fleets of smaller vessels swarming off the coasts and reloading the one legitimate vessel as often as her contents were sent into a port. This ingenious device was said to have been detected by the Spanish authorities in various places. The Spaniards retaliated by stopping and searching English vessels cruising anywhere near the coast of a Spanish colony, and by arresting and imprisoning the officers and sailors of English merchantmen. The Spaniards asserted, and were able in many instances to make their assertions good, that whole squadrons of English trading vessels sometimes entered the Spanish ports under pretence of being driven there by stress of weather, or by the need of refitting and refreshing; and that, once in the port, they managed to get their cargoes safely ashore. Sometimes, too, it was said, the vessels lay off the shore without going into the harbor; and then smugglers came off in their long, low, swift boats, and received the English goods and carried them into the port. The fact undoubtedly was that the English merchants were driving a roaring trade with the Spanish colonies; just as the Spanish authorities might very well have known that they would be certain to do. Where one set of men are anxious to sell, and another set are just as anxious to buy, it needs very rigorous coastguard watching to prevent the goods being sent in and the money taken away.
This fact, however, does not say anything against the {152} right of Spain to enforce, if she could, the conditions of the treaties. On that point Spain was only asserting her indisputable right. But would it be reasonable to expect that Spain or any other country could endeavor to maintain her right in such a dispute, and under such conditions, without occasional rashness, violence, and injustice on the part of her officials? There can be no doubt that many high-handed and arbitrary acts were done against English subjects by the officers of Spanish authority. On every real and every reported and every imaginary act of Spanish harshness the Patriots seized with avidity. They presented petitions, moved for papers, moved that this injured person and that be allowed to appear and state his case at the bar of the House of Commons. Some English sailors and other Englishmen were thus allowed to appear at the bar, and did make statements of outrage and imprisonment. Some of these statements were doubtless true, some were probably exaggerated; the men who made them were not on oath; there was every temptation to exaggerate, because it had become apparently the duty of every true Patriot who loved old England to believe anything said by anybody against Spain. The same sort of thing has happened again and again in times nearer to our own, where some class of English traders have been trying to carry on a forbidden traffic with the subjects of a foreign sovereign. We see the same things, now in China, and now in Burmah; dress goods in one place, opium in another, slaves in another; reckless smuggling by the traders, overdone reprisals by the authorities; and then we hear the familiar appeal to England not to allow her sons to be insulted and imprisoned by some insolent foreign Power.
Walpole was not inclined to allow English subjects to be molested with impunity. But he saw no reason to believe that Spain intended anything of the kind. The advices he received from the British Minister at the Spanish Court spoke rather of delays and slow formalities, and various small disputes and misunderstandings, than of {153} wilful denial of justice. Walpole felt satisfied that by putting a little diplomatic pressure on the proceedings every satisfaction fairly due to England and English subjects could be obtained. He, therefore, refused for a long time to allow his hand to be forced by the Opposition, and was full of hope that the good sense of the country in general would sustain him against the united strength of his enemies, as it had so often done before.
[Sidenote: 1738—Alderman Perry's motion]
Walpole did not know how strong his enemies were this time. He did not know what a capital cry they had got, what a powerful appeal to national passion they could put into voice, and what a loud reply the national passion would make to the appeal. On Saturday, March 2, 1738, a petition was presented to the House of Commons from divers merchants, planters, and others trading to and interested in the British plantations in America. The petition was presented by Mr. Perry, one of the representatives of London, and an alderman of the City. The petition set forth a long history of the alleged grievances, and of the denial of redress, and prayed the House to "provide such timely and adequate remedy for putting an end to all insults and depredations on them and their fellow-subjects as to the House shall seem meet, as well as procure such relief for the unhappy sufferers as the nature of the case and the justice of their cause may require; and that they may be heard by themselves and counsel thereupon."