Lord 1767. aiming to effect, under cover of his own great name. Charlemont, describing the state of things to Flood Et. 39. ("Charles Townshend is at open war, Conway is angry, "Lord Shelburne out of humour, the Duke of Grafton by 66 no means pleased, and Lord Bute's friends have at length "positively declared themselves"), implies little further concealment of the palace plot; one of Chatham's first remarks on his subsequent re-appearance in public, to the effect that "the late good King had something about him by which "it was possible to know whether he liked you or disliked you," was pointedly levelled at the good king's grandson; and there can hardly be a doubt but that the reigning monarch was now fencing only to obtain time, had already resolved upon a fresh arrangement of the offices, and, even from the moment of the new America-taxation scheme, had turned with decisive favour to Charles Townshend himself. The failure of the cry for help to the Rockinghams, however, so well kept together by Burke (whose lately published Correspondence explains many things before obscure), had been accompanied by a failure as decisive in respect to the Bedfords, whom the resolute Rigby held together; before significant honours began to gather round Townshend. His brother, Lord Townshend, was made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland ("I am told," writes Hume to Sir Gilbert Elliot, "Lord Townshend openly ascribes his promotion entirely to Lord Bute"); his wife was dignified with a peerage, as Pitt's had heretofore been, and the common talk had fixed upon himself for First Minister: when suddenly, on the 4th of September, 1767, being then only forty-two, he died of a neglected fever; in the changes consequent on his death, the compact confederacy of Bedfords, leaving George Grenville in the lurch, marched boldly into office; and the 1767. manœuvrings and intrigues so long in progress, to the Et. 39. disgrace of every one concerned, received their shameless. consummation in what was called the Grafton Ministry. 66 It was a triumph for royalty, in spite of the Bedfords. "In a great meeting lately," writes Hume to Sir Gilbert Elliot, "Lord Bute's health was proposed in a bumper. It "will be a surprise to you certainly, if that noble lord should again come into fashion, and openly avow his share "of influence, and be openly courted by all the world!" Chatham had once more retired to Bath, and was in no respect consulted. Conway was to hold office till the beginning of the following year, and then make way for the Bedford nominee, Lord Weymouth; Lord Sandwich and his old friend Dashwood, now Lord Le Despencer, were to be joint Postmasters-General, Rigby to be Paymaster, and Lord Gower President of the Council: while, with these men, so long as the name of Chatham could be kept to conjure with, Camden was to continue to be associated as Chancellor, and Shelburne as Secretary of State. Such illomened arrangements, which every other man with a sense of public decency execrated, were precisely what the King desired; and when the Chancellorship of the Exchequer was accepted by Lord North, and Mr. Charles Jenkinson (many years later created Lord Liverpool) was made a Lord of the Treasury, the royal satisfaction may be supposed to have been complete. North was the son of the princess dowager's intimate friend Lord Guildford: and scandal had not hesitated to find a reason for the extraordinary resemblance he presented to the King, in his clumsy figure, homely face, thick lips, light complexion and hair, bushy eye-brows, and protruding large grey eyes; which, as Walpole says, rolled about to no purpose, for he was utterly short-sighted.* But he was an abler man than the King, and had too many good as well as amiable qualities for the service in which he now consented to enlist them. He was a man of wit and very various knowledge; underneath his heavy exterior, singularly awkward manners, and what seemed to be a perpetual tendency to fall asleep, he concealed great promptness of parts, and an aptitude for business not a little extraordinary; while the personal disinterestedness of his character, and the unalterable sweetness of his temper, carried him undoubtedly through more public faults and miscarriages, with less of private hatred or dislike, than fell to any minister's lot before or since his time. If he helped to ruin his country, he did it with the most perfect good humour; and was always ready to surrender the profit as well as the credit of it, to "the King's private junto." Of that private junto Charles Jenkinson was the most active member. He had belonged to every ministry of the reign, except Lord Rockingham's. Now a year older than Goldsmith, he had started his public career as Goldsmith did, by writing in the Monthly Review; but, tiring of the patronage of a bookseller, and discovering that whiggery was not the way to court, he wheeled suddenly round to toryism, offered his services to Lord Bute, and became the favourite's private secretary. Men grievously belied him, if he was not thenceforward the secret fetcher and carrier * Lord Mahon remarks upon this defect of sight in Lord North as "a great "obstacle in the way of parliamentary eminence, which has never perhaps been "wholly overcome, except by himself, and in our own time by Lord Derby." History, v. 254. "The noble lord who spoke last," says Burke, not many days before North obtained the highest place in the government, "after extending his right leg a full "yard before his left, rolling his flaming eyes, and moving his ponderous frame, "has at length opened his mouth!" Parl. Hist. xvi. 720, Imagine a leading orator venturing on such a sally in our present House of Commons ! 1767. Æt. 39. 1767. Æt. 39. between Bute, the Princess, the House of Commons, and the King: nor did they scruple to say, that, by the lines of prudent caution in his face, by his stealthy, inscrutable, down-looking eyes (people who had read Gil Blas would call him pious signor Ordonnez), by the twinkling darklanthorn motion of his half-closed eye-lids while he spoke, and by the absence of everything that savoured of imagination in him,* nature had seemed to mark him out for precisely such a service. His principles were simply what I have stated those of the junto to be; and were now most pithily expressed by Lord Barrington, the existing Secretary at War, who, while Lord North yet hesitated on the brink of the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, had eagerly volunteered to take the office. "The King has long known," said the worthy Secretary, "that I am entirely devoted "to him; having no political connexion with any man, "being determined never to form one, and conceiving that "in this age the country and its constitution are best served 'by an unbiassed attachment to the crown." Amen, amen! The Monarch is great and we are his Prophets, cried Mr. Jenkinson and his followers. 66 And this was the close. To establish such a system as this, had cost the many public scandals of the last seven years; the disgrace of eminent men, the disruptions of useful friendships, the violations of private as of public honour. For this, the country had been deluged with libels; and men of station had put forth against their quondam * See Wraxall's Hist. Memoirs, ii. 209-10. The story is preserved of his having said, in answer to some one who had called him "that evil genius who "lurks behind the throne," "Mr. Speaker, I am not an evil genius; I am not "lurking behind the throne. I again repeat, I am not an evil genius, but the "member for Rye in every respect whatsoever" (this last a familiar phrase of his). Moore's Diary, iv. 39. Æt. 39. associates, lampoons unapproachable in scurril violence by 1767. the lowest gazetteers of Grub-street or the Fleet. Nor was that part of the mischief to end with the mischief it helped to create. The poisoned chalice was to have its ingredients commended to other lips; and already had significant indication been given that the lesson of libellous instruction would be taught to a wider school. One of Lord Sandwich's hired and paid libellers, parson Scott, had by the pungent slang of his letters (signed Anti-Sejanus) raised the sale of the Public Advertiser from fifteen hundred to three thousand a-day; but letters of higher and more piquant strain had succeeded his in that respectable journal, and seemed to threaten no quiet possession to the power so lately seized. This new writer had as yet taken no settled signature, nor were his compositions so finished or powerful as those which made memorable the signature he took some twelve months later; but there was something in his writing, even now, which marked it out from the class it belonged to. There was a strong individual grasp of the matters on which he wrote, a familiar scorn of the men he talked about, and a special hatred of the junto of king's-friends. His fervent abuse of the statesmen, such as Chatham, whom he afterwards exalted, has not been sufficiently referred to their existing relations with that faction which he hated with a private as well as public hatred; and which also at this time as bitterly arrayed against Chatham, the brothers-in-law with whom he afterwards so cordially acted. It was as clear, from the first three letters of this writer, that he knew the "atoms" and their "original creating cause," and that in the thick of "its own webs" he had seen "the venomous spider;" as it seems to me now to be proved, if the strongest circumstantial as well as internal evidence can be held to prove |