THE Walpole retains his position. HE ascendancy of Walpole was in great jeopardy on the death of George I. Bolingbroke's intrigues against him, backed by all the influence of the Duchess of Kendal, had indeed been thwarted by the straightforward manner in which George I. had put all complaints against him into the minister's own hands-a striking instance of that love of justice and fidelity to old friends which were the redeeming traits of his otherwise uninteresting character. But Walpole had now to do with a sovereign whom as Prince of Wales he had always opposed, and who had been known to use strong expressions of disapprobation with regard to him. George II., a little, dry man, gifted with the hereditary bravery and obstinacy of his family, but with very limited abilities, and a mind far more easily touched by little things than by broad interests, could not be expected to forget Walpole's opposition, nor to appreciate his calm, tolerant wisdom. When Walpole brought him the news of his father's death, he was at once directed to apply to Sir Spencer Compton, a dull, orderly man, Speaker of the House of Commons and Treasurer to the Prince of Wales. Walpole was wise enough to profess friendship for the new favourite, who even employed the ability of his predecessor to draw up the speech which the King was to deliver to the Council. For some days it was believed that Walpole's power was gone. His usual throng of followers deserted him and crowded to Sir Spencer Compton's levée. But before any definite arrangements had been made, Sir Spencer unwisely gave Walpole opportunities for personally explaining himself to the King. He was thus able to remove the bad impression the King had received as to his foreign policy, and to outbid his rivals in the arrangements he proposed to make for the Civil List, a point very close to the King's heart. He completely succeeded in winning the Queen to his interests; and when she heard that Compton had had to appeal to his assistance in arranging the speech from the throne, she took the opportunity of impressing upon George the absurdity of employing a minister who was obliged to lean for support upon his rival. The Queen's influence, which was very great, turned the scale in his favour. The ministry continued unchanged. Compton, feeling his brief importance at an end, withdrew from the contest, and shortly afterwards accepted the position of President of the Council as Lord Wilmington. The offer which had proved so effective a means for securing Increase of the Walpole's power consisted of £130,000 to the Civil List, and a jointure of £100,000 to Queen Caroline. The Civil Civil List. 1727] WALPOLE'S MINISTRY 967 List, which had been settled after the Revolution at £700,000 a year from all sources, had proved insufficient, saddled as it then was with a variety of expenses, such as the judges' and ambassadors' salaries, beyond the mere expenses of the Court. Anne had been £1,200,000 in debt, George I. £1,000,000 Walpole now offered to induce the House to raise it to £800,000 a year, allowing the King to claim anything beyond that sum which should arise from the hereditary revenues. Before long Walpole won the entire confidence of the King himself, but it was at first chiefly on the friendship of the Queen that he relied. She was a woman of very considerable ability. Her intellectual fault indeed was an attempt to know too much. The influence She collected around her men of learning of all sorts, of the Queen. dabbled in divinity, dabbled in metaphysics, patronized poetry, and delighted in listening to theological discussions, in which she kept the part of strict neutrality, believing it is thought but little on either side. But her influence in bringing forward men of ability, especially in the Church, was very great. Her sense was excellent, and by means of it, in spite of the King's royal immorality, she contrived to rule him absolutely. She thoroughly appreciated Walpole, and together they pursued that policy, which was no doubt the right one for the maintenance of the Hanoverian succession. This consisted in the pursuit of peace in every direction- Walpole's peace abroad, peace at home. If any point was strongly contested it was given up; if any abuse was unobserved it was suffered to rest untouched; and in general their object was to let the nation learn by its material prosperity the advantages of an orderly and settled Government. As a consequence of this policy the period of Walpole's government was uneventful, and was occupied rather with the great Parliamentary struggle between himself and the Opposition under Pulteney than by any great national affairs. Character of ministry. The chief strength of that Opposition consisted of the discontented Whigs, most of whom were driven to oppose Walpole character of by his insatiable love of power. We have already seen the Opposition. Pulteney and Carteret forced from the ranks of the Government, and all overtures with Bolingbroke rejected. In 1730, Walpole quarrelled with his old friend and brother-in-law Townshend, who was only restrained by his patriotism from joining the Opposition. In 1733, Lord Chesterfield was added to the list. These leaders had behind them a certain quantity of supporters who took the name of Patriots, and wished to be regarded as the true old Whigs, looking upon Walpole with his large majority as seceders from them. There was much plausibility in this view: for the Whig party under Walpole seemed to have become closely attached to the Crown, and was supported principally by Crown influence. As the original principle of the Whigs had been antagonism to the over-great power of the Crown, it could be plausibly urged that they had now assumed the position of their former enemies. The Hanoverian line had ascended the throne with a parliamentary as contrasted with a hereditary title; it had therefore naturally found its chief supporters among the Whigs. With the Hanoverians that party had entered upon power. But the Revolution, while practically subordinating the power of the King to that of Parliament, had constitutionally left it untouched. The Hanoverian kings did not indeed employ it to its full, but placed it in the hands of the minister, who, by means of the royal influence, practically ruled England with as unquestioned a sway as any great minister of the Stuarts. The difference lay in this, that the power of the Crown consisted in the immense influence it possessed by means of pensions, places, and the command of the public money, and worked through the House of Commons, and not in opposition to it. The patriot Whigs were conscious of the power of the Crown, and were true to their principles in opposing it. Their error lay in this, that they did not understand that that power was formidable only so long as there was a venal House of Commons. Eager as they thought for liberty, they formed a close connection with the High Tories and Jacobites, the greatest enemies of liberty; and in their eagerness for office did their best to oppose that Government, which for the present, at all events, was the only safeguard against the restoration of the Stuarts, for the events of 1745 render it plain that danger from the Jacobites was as yet by no means over. In fact, however, principle had little to do with the matter, it was personal animosity to the minister, and anger at exclusion from office, which inspired the Opposition. Even the party names "Whig" and "Tory" were beginning to lose their meaning. By far the greater portion of the House was thoroughly attached to the Hanoverian succession. Some fifty Jacobites sat in it under the guidance of Shippen, and a certain number of country gentlemen, with Wyndham at their head, still retained the title of Hanoverian Tories. But the Parliamentary struggle lay in fact between different sections of the Whigs, either of which, whatever their pretensions may have been wh f office, would probably have acted in 1727] CHARACTER of the oppoSITION 969 much the same way had they succeeded in obtaining it. It was not till the close of this reign and the beginning of the next that the old party names began again to acquire significance. It had become evident that the power and influence of the Crown, but little diminished, as has been said, at the Revolution, had as it were been placed in commission in the hands of the great leaders of the Whig party, who by means of their own Parliamentary influence, added to the King's power which they wielded, had assumed a monopoly of the Government antagonistic at once to the Crown and to the people. Those who regarded this condition of things as a disturbance of the old balance of the Constitution began to rally round the King, and when George III. resumed into his own hands the power of the Crown and broke with the Whig oligarchy, he found his support in this new Tory party. To oppose the many able men whom enmity to the ministers had driven into the ranks of the Patriots, the Government strength of had little more than the inert strength of an unfailing the Government. majority to show. Besides Walpole himself, whose talents were unquestioned, the Government consisted of somewhat second-rate men, such as Newcastle, whose fussy silliness was a constant theme of jest, Stanhope, Lord Harrington, an excellent diplomatist but no politician, and Lord Harvey, a clever but bitter and effeminate courtier. But the Government was supported on almost every question of importance by a vast majority of the House, whose votes the surpassing skill of Walpole as a manager secured-many of them by small places and pensions, or other "considerations," as bribes were then called. That Walpole reduced the purchase of a majority, a practice by no means unknown, to a system must be allowed. It may be urged in his favour, that he used, but did not cause, the venality, prevalent among all public men of the time, and employed it so as to secure what was upon the whole the government most advantageous for England at the time. The folly of the Pretender spared the minister all trouble with regard to the Jacobites, for James had succeeded in Depression of alienating his ablest partisans. He had quarrelled the Jacobites. with Atterbury as he quarrelled with Bolingbroke, he had excited scandal by his quarrel with his wife, and had suffered an unworthy favourite, Colonel Hay, or Lord Inverness as he called himself, to supplant all his better partisans in his favour. And when the death of Lord Mar was followed by that of the Duke of Wharton and of Atterbury in 1732, the Jacobite cause fell into the hands of very |