The Age of Voltaire Read online

  The suppression of the revolt had left a few nobles headless, but it had not reduced Jacobite sentiment in Britain. By the Triennial Acts of 1641 and 1694 no Parliament was to last over three years. Hence the first Parliament of George I faced in 1717 the prospect of an election in which a Tory and Jacobite majority might be returned. To guard against this the Parliament, by the Septennial Act of 1716, voted itself four additional years of life, and ruled that thereafter all Parliaments might continue for seven years. “This,” said Marlborough’s most brilliant descendant, “was the boldest and most complete assertion of Parliament’s sovereignty that England had yet seen.”13 George I, also fearful of a Tory victory, approved the new law; in effect the Hanoverians had to abdicate in order to reign.

  To further protect the new dynasty, Stanhope concluded with France and Holland (1717) a Triple Alliance that ended French support of Jacobite claims, and English support of Spain against France. In 1720 Spain signed a submissive peace, and George I could sit more securely, during his seven remaining years, on his alien throne. In 1726 his still imprisoned wife sent him a bitter letter, challenging him to meet her, within a year, at the judgment seat of God. Soon afterward she died of brain fever. Tradition represents a soothsayer as having predicted that George I would not outlive his wife by a year. In 1727 the King’s health began to fail. In June he left England to visit his beloved Hanover. Near Osnabrück a folded paper was thrown into his carriage; it was a dying curse left him by his wife. Reading it, the King fell into a fit, and on June 11 he died.14

  II. GEORGE II AND QUEEN CAROLINE

  His son and enemy received the news as an unreasonably delayed act of justice on the part of Providence. When the Archbishop of Canterbury presented George Augustus with the late King’s will, he stuffed it into his pocket, and he never let it be made public. Some said it was concealed because it proposed to put Hanover and England under separate heads; others claimed that it left to grandson Frederick Louis, to mistress or wife the Duchess of Kendal, and to his daughter the Queen of Prussia substantial sums that would thin the royal purse.15 History does not know.

  Like his father, George II was a good soldier. At twenty-five he had fought valiantly under Eugene and Marlborough at Audenaarde (1708); at sixty he was to lead his own troops to victory at Dettingen (1743). Often he carried the manners of the camp into the court, ranting irascibly; upon his ministers he lavished such terms as “scoundrels,” “stinking blockheads,” and “buffoons.”16 But he worked industriously at the king trade, spoke English correctly though with a thick Westphalian accent,17 observed impatiently but carefully the limits placed upon his powers and income by Parliament, and for thirteen years firmly supported Robert Walpole in keeping John Bull solvent and peaceful. Like his father, he retired frequently to Hanover, to the delight of all concerned. Like his father, he quarreled with the Prince of Wales, for “it ran a little in the family,” as Horace Walpole put it, “to hate the eldest son.”18 Like his father, he took mistresses, if only to be in the fashion; unlike his father, he dearly loved his wife.

  Caroline, daughter of Margrave John Frederick of Brandenburg-Ansbach, had been brought up at the Charlottenburg court of George I’s sister, Sophia Charlotte, first Queen of Prussia. There she had met Leibniz, had enjoyed the debates of philosophers, Jesuits, and Protestant divines, and had developed a scandalous degree of religious liberalism and tolerance. Charles VI, “Holy Roman” Emperor, offered her his hand and creed; she refused both, and married (1705) George Augustus, the “little red-faced”19 Electoral Prince of Hanover; to him, with all his temper and hers, through all his mishaps and mistresses, she remained faithful and devoted to the end. George treated her harshly, and wrote her long letters about his liaisons; but he respected her mind and character enough to let her rule England (with Walpole’s help) in his long absences, and to let her guide his policies when he returned.

  After her plump, fresh-colored youth she had no charms of body except lovely hands, and few graces of manner or speech, to hold her husband; however, he admired the architecture of her bust, and ordered her to expose it convincingly.20 She grew stouter with each pregnancy, her face was scarred with smallpox, her voice was loud and guttural, she loved intrigue and power. But gradually the English began to like her hearty humor; they came to understand what sacrifice she was making of health and happiness to be a good wife and queen; and the intellect of England saw with surprise that this blunt Brandenburger had an appreciative mind and ear for the literature, science, philosophy, and music of the age.

  Her court became almost a salon. There she welcomed Newton, Clarke, Berkeley, Butler, Pope, Chesterfield, Gay, and Lady Mary Montagu. She supported Lady Mary’s initiative in vaccination. She saved a daughter of Milton from poverty; she supported Handel through all the changing moods of the public and the King. She contributed from her private purse the means to encourage young and needy talent;21 she rescued the heretic Whiston with a pension; she secured religious liberty for the Scottish Jacobites. She arranged the appointment of Anglican bishops on the ground of their learning rather than their orthodoxy. She herself was a deist with a hesitant belief in immortality;22 but she thought that the Established Church should be financed by the government as an aide to popular morality and calm.23 “This princess,” said Voltaire, “is certainly born for the encouragement of the arts, and for the good of the human race.… She is an amiable philosopher seated on a throne.”24

  She had enough philosophy to see, even in her last hour, the humor in life’s tragedies. Suffering mortally from a rupture that she had long concealed from all but the King, she advised him, then fifty, to marry again after her death. His answer, sincere in his grief, revealed the time: “Non, j’aurai des maîtresses [No, I will have mistresses].” “Ah, mon Dieu,” she exclaimed, “cela n’empêche pas [that will not interfere]!”25 He mourned her loss with unwonted feeling: “I never yet saw a woman worthy to buckle her shoe.”26 Twenty-three years later, in pursuance of his will, her coffin in Westminster Abbey was opened so that his remains might lie by her side.

  III. ROBERT WALPOLE

  It was through her brave championship, against a pack of office-seeking, warmongering enemies, that Walpole was able to give England twenty years of prosperity and peace. He was no saint; he was probably the most corrupt minister that England has ever had, but he was also one of the best. In that corrupt age only through corruption could wisdom rule.

  As the youngest son of an old Norfolk family, Robert had been intended for the Church, and at Eton, where he was the contemporary of his future foe, Bolingbroke, this was the object of his studies. But the death of his older brothers made him heir to the family fortune; and as the family controlled three electoral boroughs, he had no trouble in turning successfully from theology to politics. Aged twenty-five, he entered the House of Commons as a Whig (1701). His connections, money, quick intelligence, and mastery of administrative finance won him appointment as secretary of war (1708). In 1712 the victorious Tories unseated him, and sent him to the Tower on a charge of corruption; but as the smell of sterling had become so constant and ubiquitous as to produce olfactory insensibility, he was soon released, soon re-elected, soon in office as first lord of the treasury (1715). Political complications led him to resign in 1717. In 1720 the collapse of the South Sea Company, and the justification of his warnings, convinced even his enemies that he was the man best equipped to lead England back to financial stability. As again first lord of the treasury (1721), he stopped the panic, as we have seen, by putting the Bank of England behind the company’s obligations; gradually the entire £7,000,000 owed by it to the public was repaid.27 The grateful gamblers rewarded Walpole with twenty-two years of power.

  The accession of George II briefly interrupted Walpole’s ascendancy. The new King had sworn unforgiving hostility to all who had served his father; he dismissed Walpole, and asked Sir Spencer Compton to form a new ministry. But Compton soon displayed and acknowledged the inadequacy of his talents;
Caroline advised her husband to recall Walpole, who clinched the argument by promising King and Queen a larger allowance; Sir Spencer gratefully accepted an earldom, and Walpole resumed his rule. To him first the title “prime minister” was applied, originally (as with Christian, Puritan, and Methodist) as a term of abuse. And he was the first chief minister to make 10 Downing Street his official home.

  His character sheds some light on the art of political success. He had only a year at university, and was weak in the educational equipment usual in British prime ministers. There was little elegance in his manners or his speech. “When he ceased to talk politics,” said Macaulay, “he could talk of nothing but women, and he dilated on his favorite theme with a freedom which shocked even that plain-spoken generation.”28 His son Horace did not hold it against him that he knew few books; “he knew mankind, not their writings; he consulted their interests, not their systems.”29 He had sufficient command of Latin to use it as his medium of communication with George I, for that king knew no English, and Walpole knew no German or French. He had all the qualities of John Bull except pugnacity: he was stout, bluff, hearty, good-natured, practical; he enjoyed dinners and drink, but would work hard when called upon; and perhaps it was also like John Bull that he rattled his purse instead of his sword.

  He had almost no morals. He lived for years in open adultery, showing little respect for the suave decorum of aristocratic vice. He jested with Queen Caroline on her husband’s mistresses; after her death he advised her daughters to summon these maids of honor to distract the mind of the grieving King. He laughed at religion. When Caroline was dying he sent for the Archbishop of Canterbury. “Let this farce be played,” he proposed; “the Archbishop will do it very well. You may bid him be as short as you wish. He will do the Queen no hurt, any 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.”30 He took no stock in noble motives or professions of unselfishness. Like Marlborough, he used public office to amass private wealth. He found political plums for his son Horace and other relatives. At a cost of £ 200,000 he built a magnificent mansion at his estate of Houghton, and adorned it with paintings valued by Horace at £40,000; he kept open house there for the entire county of Norfolk.31 He was as generous as John Bull because (if we credit his enemies) he could not clearly distinguish between John Bull’s funds and his own.

  He used money to buy M.P.s as Richelieu had used it to buy armies, as Henri Quatre had used it to immobilize foes. Walpole employed it as a last resort, after all softer arguments had failed. The parliamentary corruption that had taken form under Charles II had reached the point where the House of Commons could be managed, for good or evil, only by massive lubrication. Walpole kept a secret reserve—even a special room—for the purchase of seats and votes and editors; it was alleged that he spent £50,000 annually in subsidizing periodicals to expound his point of view.32 In 1725 he prompted George I to establish the Most Honorable Order of the Bath, to consist of the sovereign, a grand master, and thirty-six knights companions; to Walpole, as to Napoleon, it seemed more economical to rule men with ribbons than with currency.

  He used these corrupt methods to maintain England in prosperity and calm. His ends did not justify his means, but they revealed the better side of his character. He was a man of good will, resolved to keep his country on an even keel despite all the commotions of party politics, the crosswinds of class interests, the chauvinistic cries for war. It was his motto, he said, quieta (or tranquilla) non movere— to let sleeping dogs lie; and though this left his rule undistinguished by conquests or reforms, he earned the commendation of the judicious. His enemies had to admit that he was not vindictive or unforgiving, and that he was more trustworthy, even more trusting, in his friendships than could have been expected of one so familiar with the baser aspects of mankind.33 He had no far-flung schemes for glory, but he met each problem, as it arose, with such shrewdness, tolerance, and tact that England finally forgave him all his faults except his love of peace.

  His economic legislation struck a compromise between the landowning gentry and the business class. He sought to reduce taxes on land, and supported extreme penalties for offenses against property. At the same time he welcomed the rise of capitalism. He favored merchants and manufacturers with export bounties and import dues, and seemed insensitive to the poverty of landless laborers in the villages and the growing proletariat in the towns; he appears to have felt that the maldistribution of wealth was an inevitable result of nature’s maldistribution of ability. Excepting those bounties and dues, he advocated, long before the French physiocrats and Adam Smith, a policy of free trade; in a single year he reduced the duties on 106 articles of export, on thirty-eight articles of import; he removed many restraints on the commerce of the American colonies; and he argued that the English economy would prosper best under a minimum of state regulation. Time justified his view; the national wealth grew rapidly, however ill-distributed; governmental revenues rose; and by handling them with parsimony and efficiency Walpole won praise as “the best commercial minister the country ever produced.”34

  His most spectacular defeat came on his famous excise bill (1733). The smugglers of tobacco and wine were cheating the treasury of tariff dues, and burdening property with more than its share of taxes. To circumvent this form of private enterprise Walpole proposed an excise tax (a slice “cut out” for the government) to be levied on these articles wherever stored, and whenever sold, in England. Revenue officers (“excise men”) were authorized to search any house at any time, and persons found hiding dutiable goods were subjected to fines or imprisonment. Everybody concerned in the importation, smuggling, sale, or consumption of tobacco or wine rose in protest. Walpole’s opponents in the Commons denounced the tax, and the manner of its enforcement, as the arbitrary action of a tyrant, and a monstrous infringement of British liberty. “The members of Parliament,” as Frederick the Great put the matter, “told Walpole that he could pay them for their ordinary mischief, but that this proposal was beyond the limits of their corruption”35—or perhaps they hoped to replace him in control of public funds. Pamphlets in thousands of copies reviled the minister in enthusiastic billingsgate. Crowds surged around Westminster Hall, burned effigies of Walpole in dozens of bonfires, and tried to lynch him as he left St. Stephen’s Church; the nation was inflamed to the verge of revolution. Queen Caroline feared for the loyalty of the army, and trembled for the safety of the new dynasty. Walpole withdrew the measure, acknowledging defeat; and from that moment his power declined. His enemies gathered for the kill.

  IV. BOLINGBROKE

  They were many and diverse. One group, still Jacobite, plotted with the Old Pretender, and would soon thrill with the romance of young Bonnie Prince Charlie. One coterie danced around Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, foe and heir to the King. Against the minister were the greatest English writers of the age—Swift, Pope, Fielding, Arbuthnot, Thomson, Akenside, Gay; they ridiculed his manners, exposed his morals, censured his policies, and reproached him for discontinuing that lavish aid to authors which had distinguished the government under William III and Queen Anne. The Tories, thirsting for the ichor of office, pulled strings, manipulated poets, and roused the winds of Parliament in their resolve to replace the ministerial Falstaff at the national trough. William Pulteney, Chesterfield, and the upcoming Pitt voiced their cause, and Bolingbroke defended it unrelentingly with his lethal pen.

  Bolingbroke had received a royal pardon in 1723, allowing his return to England and his estates; but, by Walpole’s influence, he was excluded from office and Parliament as a man of many treasons and dubious fidelity. He remained a power none the less. In his town house the intelligentsia of England gathered, fascinated by his handsome figure, his sophisticated wit, and the aura of his name. There and in his country home he traded barbs with Swift, heresies with Pope, and ballads with Gay; there he labored to weld hungry Tories and inadequately lubricated Whig
s into a united opposition to Walpole; there he organized the staff and program of a magazine—called at first (1726) The Country Gentleman and then The Craftsman— which struck a blow, week after week for ten years, at everything that Walpole did or proposed to do. Bolingbroke himself wrote the most damaging articles, the most brilliant political prose of the age after the decline of Swift. A series of nineteen letters (1733–34)—! A Dissertation upon Parties—was mockingly dedicated to Walpole. “Till I read [them],” Chesterfield wrote to his son, “I did not know all the extent and power of the English language.”36

  Bolingbroke’s character was his defeat. His fine manners (which were his only code of morals) left him when his will was thwarted or his opinions were crossed. In June, 1735, he quarreled with Pulteney, nominal leader of the opposition, and returned in anger to France. There he settled with his Marquise near Fontainebleau, and salved his wounds with philosophy. His Letters on the Study and Use of History (written in 1735) described history as a vast laboratory in which events have made countless experiments with men, economics, and states; hence it is the best guide to the nature of man, and therefore to the interpretation of the present and the anticipation of the future. “History is philosophy teaching by examples.… We see men at their whole length in history.”37 We should “apply ourselves to it in a philosophical spirit,” aiming not merely to comprehend causes, effects, and uniform sequences, but to conduct ourselves in ways that have heretofore proved most propitious to human development and happiness.38 The difficulty in such studies is that “there are few histories without lies, and none without some mistakes.… The lying spirit has gone forth from ecclesiastical to other historians”;39 but the resolute student, by confronting liar with liar, may wriggle his way between them to the truth.