Chapter XIV: Part 14

The French monarchy was to him what the Roman republic was to Hannibal, what the Ottoman power was to Scanderbeg, what the Southron domination was to Wallace. Religion gave her sanction to that intense and unquenchable animosity. Hundreds of Calvinistic preachers proclaimed that the same power which had set apart Samson from the womb to be the scourge of the Philistine, and which had called Gideon from the threshing-floor to smite the Midianite, had raised up William of Orange to be the champion of all free nations and of all pure Churches; nor was this notion without influence on his own mind. To the confidence which the heroic fatalist placed in his high destiny and in his sacred cause is to be partly attributed his singular indifference to danger. He had a great work to do; and till it was done nothing could harm him. Therefore it was that, in spite of the prognostications of physicians, he recovered from maladies which seemed hopeless, that bands of assassins conspired in vain against his life, that the open skiff to which he trusted himself on a starless night, amid raging waves, and near a treacherous shore, brought him safe to land, and that, on twenty fields of battle, the cannon balls passed him by to right and left. The ardor and perseverance with which he devoted himself to his mission have scarcely any parallel in history.

PETER THE GREAT, CZAR OF RUSSIA.

BY THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.

[Creator of the modern Russian empire, born 1672; died 1725.
Shortly after assuming the throne of a nation of barbarians, and
vigorously repressing internal disturbances, he began that series
of reforms by which he hoped to civilize his people. He spent
seventeen months traveling and studying the arts and sciences,
which had made other nations great. On returning to Russia he
enforced many revolutionary changes with the strictness of a
despot, and introduced institutions before unknown to Russia. He
built St. Petersburg in the marshes at the mouth of the Neva, and
displayed extraordinary energy in recasting the whole military and
civil polity of the nation. He displayed marked ability as a
soldier in his wars with his neighbors, but his genius shone most
brightly in civil administration, though he never ceased to be a
barbarian and the sternest of despots.]

Our ancestors were not a little surprised to learn that a young barbarian, who had, at seventeen years of age, become the autocrat of the immense region stretching from the confines of Sweden to those of China, and whose education had been inferior to that of an English farmer or shopman, had planned gigantic improvements, had learned enough of some languages of Western Europe to enable him to communicate with civilized men, had begun to surround himself with able adventurers from various parts of the world, had sent many of his young subjects to study languages, arts, and sciences in foreign cities, and finally had determined to travel as a private man, and to discover, by personal observation, the secret of the immense prosperity and power enjoyed by some communities whose whole territory was far less than the hundredth part of his dominions.

It might have been expected that France would have been the first object of his curiosity. For the grace and dignity of the French Court, the splendor of the French Court, the discipline of the French armies, and the genius and learning of the French writers, were then renowned all over the world. But the Czar’s mind had early taken a strange ply which it retained to the last. His empire was of all empires the least capable of being made a great naval power. The Swedish provinces lay between his states and the Baltic. The Bosphorus and the Dardanelles lay between his states and the Mediterranean. He had access to the ocean only in a latitude in which navigation is, during a great part of every year, perilous and difficult. On the ocean he had only a single port, Archangel; and the whole shipping of Archangel was foreign. There did not exist a Russian vessel larger than a fishing boat. Yet, from some cause which can not now be traced, he had a taste for maritime pursuits which amounted to a passion, indeed almost to a monomania. His imagination was full of sails, yardarms, and rudders. That large mind, equal to the highest duties of the general and the statesman, contracted itself to the most minute details of naval architecture and naval discipline.

The chief ambition of the great conqueror and legislator was to be a good boatswain and a good ship’s carpenter. Holland and England therefore had for him an attraction which was wanting to the galleries and terraces of Versailles. He repaired to Amsterdam, took a lodging in the dockyard, assumed the garb of a pilot, put down his name on the list of workmen, wielded with his own hand the caulking iron and the mallet, fixed the pumps, and twisted the ropes. Ambassadors who came to pay their respects to him were forced, much against their will, to clamber up the rigging of a man-of-war, and found him enthroned on the cross-trees.

Such was the prince whom the populace of London now crowded to behold. His stately form, his intellectual forehead, his piercing black eye, his Tartar nose and mouth, his gracious smile, his frown black with all the stormy rage and hate of a barbarian tyrant, and above all a strange nervous convulsion which sometimes transformed his countenance, during a few moments, into an object on which it was impossible to look without terror, the immense quantities of meat which he devoured, the pints of brandy which he swallowed, and which, it was said, he had carefully distilled with his own hands, the fool who jabbered at his feet, the monkey which grinned at the back of his chair, were, during some weeks, popular topics of conversation. He meanwhile shunned the public gaze with a haughty shyness which inflamed curiosity. He went to a play; but as soon as he perceived that pit, boxes, and gallery were staring, not at the stage, but at him, he retired to a back bench where he was screened from observation by his attendants. He was desirous to see a sitting of the House of Lords; but, as he was determined not to be seen, he was forced to climb up to the leads, and to peep through a small window. He heard with great interest the royal assent given to a bill for raising fifteen hundred thousand pounds by land-tax, and learned with amazement that this sum, though larger by one half than the whole revenue which he could wring from the population of the immense empire of which he was absolute master, was but a small part of what the Commons of England voluntarily granted every year to their constitutional king.

William judiciously humored the whims of his illustrious guest, and stole to Norfolk Street so quietly that nobody in the neighborhood recognized his Majesty in the thin gentleman who got out of the modest-looking coach at the czar’s lodgings. The czar returned the visit with the same precautions, and was admitted into Kensington House by a back door. It was afterward known that he took no notice of the fine pictures with which the palace was adorned. But over the chimney of the royal sitting-room was a plate which, by an ingenious machinery, indicated the direction of the wind, and with this plate he was in raptures.

He soon became weary of his residence. He found that he was too far from the objects of his curiosity, and too near to the crowds to which he was himself an object of curiosity. He accordingly removed to Deptford, and was there lodged in the house of John Evelyn, a house which had long been a favorite resort of men of letters, men of taste, and men of science. Here Peter gave himself up to his favorite pursuits. He navigated a yacht every day up and down the river. His apartment was crowded with models of three-deckers and two-deckers, frigates, sloops, and fire-ships. The only Englishman of rank in whose society he seemed to take much pleasure was the eccentric Caermarthen, whose passion for the sea bore some resemblance to his own, and who was very competent to give an opinion about every part of a ship from the stem to the stern. Caermarthen, indeed, became so great a favorite that he prevailed on the czar to consent to the admission of a limited quantity of tobacco into Russia. There was reason to apprehend that the Russian clergy would cry out against any relaxation of the ancient rule, and would strenuously maintain that the practice of smoking was condemned by that text which declares that man is defiled, not by those things which enter in at the mouth, but by those things which proceed out of it. This apprehension was expressed by a deputation of merchants who were admitted to an audience of the czar; but they were reassured by the air with which he told them that he knew how to keep priests in order.

He was indeed so free from any bigoted attachment to the religion in which he had been brought up that both Papists and Protestants hoped at different times to make him a proselyte. Burnet, commissioned by his brethren, and impelled, no doubt, by his own restless curiosity and love of meddling, repaired to Deptford and was honored with several audiences. The czar could not be persuaded to exhibit himself at St. Paul’s, but he was induced to visit Lambeth Palace. There he saw the ceremony of ordination performed, and expressed warm approbation of the Anglican ritual. Nothing in England astonished him so much as the archiepiscopal library. It was the first good collection of books that he had seen; and he declared that he had never imagined that there were so many printed volumes in the world.

The impression which he made on Burnet was not favorable. The good bishop could not understand that a mind which seemed to be chiefly occupied with questions about the best place for a capstan and the best way of rigging a jury-mast might be capable, not merely of ruling an empire, but of creating a nation. He claimed that he had gone to see a great prince, and had found only an industrious shipwright. Nor does Evelyn seem to have formed a much more favorable opinion of his august tenant. It was, indeed, not in the character of tenant that the czar was likely to gain the good word of civilized men. With all the high qualities which were peculiar to himself, he had all the filthy habits which were then common among his countrymen. To the end of his life, while disciplining armies, founding schools, framing codes, organizing tribunals, building cities in deserts, joining distant seas by artificial rivers, he lived in his palace like a hog in a sty; and, when he was entertained by other sovereigns, never failed to leave on their tapestried walls and velvet state beds unequivocal proof that a savage had been there. Evelyn’s house was left in such a state that the Treasury quieted his complaints with a considerable sum of money.

Toward the close of March the czar visited Portsmouth, saw a sham sea-fight at Spithead, watched every movement of the contending fleets with intense interest, and expressed in warm terms his gratitude to the hospitable government which had provided so delightful a spectacle for his amusement and instruction. After passing more than three months in England, he departed in high good-humor.

DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH.

BY WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY.

[John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, born 1650, died 1722. All his
early fortunes were due to the favor of James II, but he deserted
his patron, and his intrigues carried over a large following of the
English nobility to the cause of the Prince of Orange. For this he
was rewarded with the dukedom of Marlborough. Politically
Marlborough was a traitor to nearly every cause he served, and was
continually plotting to undermine William as he had done in the
case of James. To Anne, under whom he reaped his great military
glory, though he had distinguished himself at an earlier period, he
was probably loyal. The victories which established his place among
the leading soldiers of modern times were Blenheim, in 1704;
Ramillies, in 1706; Oudenarde, in 1708; Malplaquet, in 1709; and
the capture of Bouchain, in 1711. He achieved eminence as a
statesman and administrator as well as a soldier, but it is in the
latter capacity that he ranks among the great men of the world.]

Beyond comparison the greatest of English generals, Marlborough raised his country to a height of military glory such as it had never attained since the days of Poitiers and of Agincourt, and his victories appeared all the more dazzling after the ignominious reigns of the last two Stuarts, and after the many failures that checkered the enterprises of William. His military genius, though once bitterly decried by party malignity, will now be universally acknowledged, and it was sufficient to place him among the greatest captains who have ever lived. Hardly any other modern general combined to an equal degree the three great attributes of daring, caution, and sagacity, or conducted military enterprises of equal magnitude and duration without losing a single battle or failing in a single siege. He was one of the very few commanders who appear to have shown equal skill in directing a campaign, in winning a battle, and in improving a victory. It can not, indeed, be said of him, as it may be said of Frederick the Great, that he was at the head of a small power, with almost all Europe in arms against it, and that nearly every victory he won was snatched from an army enormously outnumbering his own. At Blenheim and Oudenarde the French exceeded by a few thousands the armies of the allies. At Ramillies the army of Marlborough was slightly superior. At Malplaquet the opposing forces were almost equal. Nor did the circumstances of Marlborough admit of a military career of the same brilliancy, variety, and magnitude of enterprise as that of Napoleon.

But both Frederick and Napoleon experienced crushing disasters, and both of them had some advantages which Marlborough did not possess. Frederick was the absolute ruler of a state which had for many years been governed exclusively on the military principle, in which the first and almost the sole object of the government had been to train and discipline the largest and most perfect army the nation could support. Napoleon was the absolute ruler of the foremost military power on the Continent at a time when the enthusiasm of a great revolution had given it an unparalleled energy, when the destruction of the whole hierarchy of rank and the opening of all posts to talent had brought an extraordinary amount of ability to the forefront, and when the military administrations of surrounding nations were singularly decrepit and corrupt. Marlborough, on the other hand, commanded armies consisting in a great degree of confederates and mercenaries of many different nationalities, and under many different rulers. He was thwarted at every step by political obstacles, and by the much graver obstacles arising from divided command and personal or national jealousies; he contended against the first military nation of the Continent, at a time when its military organization had attained the highest perfection, and when a long succession of brilliant wars had given it a school of officers of consummate skill.

But great as were his military gifts, they would have been insufficient had they not been allied with other qualities well fitted to win the admiration of men. Adam Smith has said, with scarcely an exaggeration, that “it is a characteristic almost peculiar to the great Duke of Marlborough, that ten years of such uninterrupted and such splendid successes as scarce any other general could boast of, never betrayed him into a single rash action, scarcely into a single rash word or expression.” Nothing in his career is more admirable than the unwearied patience, the inimitable skill, the courtesy, the tact, the self-command with which he employed himself during many years in reconciling the incessant differences, overcoming the incessant opposition, and soothing the incessant jealousies of those with whom he was compelled to co-operate. His private correspondence abundantly shows how gross was the provocation he endured, how keenly he felt it, how nobly he bore it.

As a negotiator he ranks with the most skillful diplomatists of his age, and it was no doubt his great tact in managing men that induced his old rival Bolingbroke, in one of his latest writings, to describe him as not only the greatest general, but also “the greatest minister our country or any other has produced.” Chesterfield, while absurdly depreciating his intellect, admitted that “his manner was irresistible,” and he added that, of all men he had ever known, Marlborough “possessed the graces in the highest degree.” Nor was his character without its softer side. Though he can not, I think, be acquitted of a desire to prolong war in the interests of his personal or political ambition, it is at least true that no general ever studied more, by admirable discipline and by uniform humanity, to mitigate its horrors. Very few friendships among great political or military leaders have been as constant or as unclouded by any shade of jealousy as the friendship between Marlborough and Godolphin, and between Marlborough and Eugene.

His conjugal fidelity, in a time of great laxity and under temptations and provocations of no common order, was beyond reproach. His attachment to the Church of England was at one time the great obstacle to his advancement. It appears never to have wavered through all the vicissitudes of his life; and no one who reads his most private letters with candor can fail to perceive that a certain vein of genuine piety ran through his nature, however inconsistent it may appear with some portions of his career.

Yet it may be questioned whether, even in the zenith of his fame, he was really popular. He had grave vices, and they were precisely of that kind which is most fatal to public men. His extreme rapacity in acquiring and his extreme avarice in hoarding money contrasted forcibly with the lavish generosity of Ormond, and alone gave weight to the charges of peculation that were brought against him. It is true that this, like all his passions, was under control. Torcy soon found that it was useless to attempt to bribe him, and he declined, as we have seen, with little hesitation, the enormously lucrative post of governor of the Austrian Netherlands when he found that the appointment aroused the strong and dangerous hostility of the Dutch. In these cases his keen and far-seeing judgment perceived clearly his true interest, and he had sufficient resolution to follow it. Yet still, like many men who have risen from great poverty to great wealth, avarice was the passion of his life, and the rapacity both of himself and of his wife was insatiable. Besides immense grants from Blenheim and marriage portions given by the queen to their daughters, they at one time received between them an annual income of public money of more than sixty-four thousand pounds.

Nor can he be acquitted of very gross and aggravated treachery to those he served. It is, indeed, not easy to form a fair estimate in this respect of the conduct of public men at the period of the revolution. Historians rarely make sufficient allowance for the degree in which the judgments and dispositions even of the best men are colored by the moral tone of the age, society, or profession in which they live, or for the temptations of men of great genius and of natural ambition in times when no highly scrupulous man could possibly succeed in public life. Marlborough struggled into greatness from a very humble position, in one of the most profligate periods of English politics, and he lived through a long period when the ultimate succession of the crown was very doubtful. A very large proportion of the leading statesmen during this long season of suspense made such overtures to the deposed dynasty as would at least secure them from absolute ruin in the event of a change, and their conduct is surely susceptible of much palliation.

The apparent interests and the apparent wishes of the nation hung so evenly and oscillated so frequently that strong convictions were rare, and even good men might often be in doubt. But the obligations of Churchill to James were of no common order, and his treachery was of no common dye. He had been raised by the special favor of his sovereign from the position of a page to the peerage, to great wealth, to high command in the army. He had been trusted by him with the most absolute trust. He not only abandoned him in the crisis of his fate, with circumstances of the most deliberate and aggravated treachery, but also employed his influence over the daughter of his benefactor to induce her to fly from her father and to array herself with his enemies. Such conduct, if it had indeed been dictated, as he alleged, solely by a regard for the interests of Protestantism, would have been certainly, in the words of Hume, “a signal sacrifice to public virtue of every duty in private life”; and it “required ever after the most upright, disinterested, and public-spirited behavior, to render it justifiable.” How little the later career of Marlborough fulfilled this condition is well known.

When we find that, having been loaded under the new Government with titles, honors, and wealth, having been placed in the inner council and intrusted with the most important state secrets, he was one of the first Englishmen to enter into negotiations with St. Germain’s; that he purchased his pardon from James by betraying important military secrets to the enemies of his country, and that, during a great part of his subsequent career, while holding office under the Government, he was secretly negotiating with the Pretender, it is difficult not to place the worst construction upon his public life. It is probable, indeed, that his negotiations with the Jacobites were never sincere, that he had no real desire for a restoration, and that his guiding motive was much less ambition than a desire to secure what he possessed; but these considerations only slightly palliate his conduct. At the period of his downfall his later acts of treason were for the most part unknown, but his conduct toward James weighed heavily upon his reputation, and his intercourse with the Pretender, though not proved, was at least suspected by many. Neither Hanoverians nor Jacobites trusted him, neither Whigs nor Tories could regard him without reserve as their own.

And with this feeling of distrust there was mingled a strong element of fear. In the latter years of Queen Anne the shadow of Cromwell fell darkly across the path of Marlborough. To those who prefer the violent methods of a reforming despotism to the slow process of parliamentary amelioration, to those who despise the wisdom of following public opinion and respecting the prejudices and the associations of a nation, there can be no better lesson than is furnished by the history of Cromwell. Of his high and commanding abilities it is not here necessary to speak, nor yet of the traits of magnanimity that may, no doubt, be found in his character. Everything that great genius and the most passionate sympathy could do to magnify these has in this century been done, and a long period of unqualified depreciation has been followed by a reaction of extravagant eulogy.

But the more the qualities of the man are exalted the more significant are the lessons of his life. Despising the national sentiment of loyalty, he and his party dethroned and beheaded the king. Despising the ecclesiastical sentiment, they destroyed the Church. Despising the deep reverence for the constitution, they subverted the Parliament. Despising the oldest and most cherished customs of the people, they sought to mold the whole social life of England in the die of an austere Puritanism. They seemed for a time to have succeeded, but the result soon appeared. Republican equality was followed by the period of most obsequious, servile loyalty England has ever known. The age when every amusement was denounced as a crime was followed by the age when all virtue was treated as hypocrisy, and when the sense of shame seemed to have almost vanished from the land. The prostration of the Church was followed, with the full approbation of the bulk of the nation, by the bitter, prolonged persecution of Dissenters. The hated memory of the Commonwealth was for more than a century appealed to by every statesman who desired to prevent reform or discredit liberty, and the name of Cromwell gathered around it an intensity of hatred approached by no other in the history of England. This was the single sentiment common in all its vehemence to the Episcopalians of England, the Presbyterians of Scotland, and the Catholics of Ireland, and it had more than once considerable political effects. The profound horror of military despotism, which is one of the strongest and most salutary of English sentiments, has been, perhaps, the most valuable legacy of the Commonwealth. In Marlborough, for the first time since the restoration, men saw a possible Cromwell, and they looked forward with alarm to the death of the queen as a period peculiarly propitious to military usurpation. Bolingbroke never represented more happily the feelings of the people than in the well-known scene at the first representation of the “Cato” of Addison. Written by a great Whig writer, the play was intended to advocate Whig sentiments; but when the Whig audience had made the theatre ring with applause at every speech on the evil of despotism and arbitrary principles, the Tory leader availed himself of the pause between the acts to summon the chief actor, to present him with a purse of money, and to thank him publicly for having defended the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual military dictator.

SIR ROBERT WALPOLE.

BY WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY.

[Afterward Earl of Orford, born 1676, died 1745; one of the most
powerful forces in the history of English politics. Without
brilliancy of talent, and utterly corrupt both as man and
statesman, he was in many ways a patriot and a far-sighted
supporter of the best interests of his country. He was first made
prime minister in 1715, and in 1717 brought forward a scheme for
the reduction of the public debt, which may be regarded as the
earliest germ of a national sinking fund. After the accession of
George II he became the foremost political figure of his time, and
kept his position against all attacks by great political dexterity
and the favor of Queen Caroline. He held the premiership for
twenty-one years, and was the first of the great English finance
ministers.]

It is worthy of notice that the long ascendency of Walpole was in no degree owing to any extraordinary brilliancy of eloquency. He was a clear and forcible reasoner, ready in reply, and peculiarly successful in financial exposition, but he had little or nothing of the temperament or the talent of an orator. It is the custom of some writers to decry parliamentary institutions as being simply government by talking, and to assert that when they exist mere rhetorical skill will always be more valued than judgment, knowledge, or character. The enormous exaggeration of such charges may be easily established. It is, no doubt, inevitable that where business is transacted chiefly by debate, the talent of a debater should be highly prized; but it is perfectly untrue that British legislatures have shown less skill than ordinary sovereigns in distinguishing solid talent from mere showy accomplishments, or that parliamentary weight has in England been usually proportioned to oratorical power.

St. John was a far greater orator than Harley; Pulteney was probably a greater orator than Walpole; Stanley in mere rhetorical skill was undoubtedly the superior of Peel. Godolphin, Pelham, Castlereagh, Liverpool, Melbourne, Althorpe, Wellington, Lord J. Russell, and Lord Palmerston are all examples of men who, either as statesmen or as successful leaders of the House of Commons, have taken a foremost place in English politics without any oratorical brilliancy. Sheridan, Plunket, and Brougham, though orators of almost the highest class, left no deep impression on English public life; the ascendancy of Grey and Canning was very transient, and no Opposition since the early Hanoverian period sank so low as that which was guided by Fox. The two Pitts and Mr. Gladstone are the three examples of speakers of transcendent power exercising for a considerable time a commanding influence over English politics. The younger Pitt is, I believe, a real instance of a man whose solid ability bore no kind of proportion to his oratorical skill, and who, by an almost preternatural dexterity in debate, accompanied by great decision of character, and assisted by the favor of the king, by the magic of an illustrious name, and by a great national panic, maintained an authority immensely greater than his deserts. But in this respect he stands alone. The pinnacle of glory to which the elder Pitt raised his country is a sufficient proof of the almost unequaled administrative genius which he displayed in the conduct of a war; and in the sphere of domestic policy it may be questioned whether any other English minister since the accession of the house of Brunswick has carried so many measures of magnitude and difficulty or exhibited so perfect a mastery over the financial system of the country as the great living statesman.

The qualities of Walpole were very different, but it is impossible, I think, to consider his career with adequate attention without recognizing in him a great minister, although the merits of his administration were often rather negative than positive, and although it exhibits few of those dramatic incidents, and is but little susceptible of that rhetorical coloring on which the reputation of statesmen largely depends.

Without any remarkable originality of thought or creative genius, he possessed in a high degree one quality of a great statesman--the power of judging new and startling events in the moments of excitement or of panic as they would be judged by ordinary men when the excitement, the novelty, and the panic had passed. He was eminently true to the character of his countrymen. He discerned with a rare sagacity the lines of policy most suited to their genius and to their needs, and he had a sufficient ascendency in English politics to form its traditions, to give a character and a bias to its institutions. The Whig party, under his guidance, retained, though with diminished energy, its old love of civil and of religious liberty, but it lost its foreign sympathies, its tendency to extravagance, its military restlessness. The landed gentry, and in a great degree the Church, were reconciled to the new dynasty. The dangerous fissures which divided the English nation were filled up. Parliamentary government lost its old violence, it entered into a period of normal and pacific action, and the habits of compromise, of moderation, and of practical good sense, which are most essential to its success, were greatly strengthened.

These were the great merits of Walpole. His faults were very manifest, and are to be attributed in part to his own character, but in a great degree to the moral atmosphere of his time. He was an honest man in the sense of desiring sincerely the welfare of his country and serving his sovereign with fidelity; but he was intensely wedded to power, exceedingly unscrupulous about the means of grasping or retaining it, and entirely destitute of that delicacy of honor which marks a high-minded man. In the opinion of most of his contemporaries, Townshend and Walpole had good reason to complain of the intrigues by which Sunderland and Stanhope obtained the supreme power in 1717; but this does not justify the factious manner in which Walpole opposed every measure the new ministry brought forward--even the Mutiny Act, which was plainly necessary to keep the army in discipline; even the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts, though he had himself denounced those acts as more like laws of Julian the Apostate than of a Christian legislature.

He was sincerely tolerant in his disposition, and probably did as much for the benefit of the Dissenters as could have been done without producing a violent and dangerous reaction of opinion; but he took no measure to lighten the burden of the Irish penal code, and he had no scruple in availing himself of the strong feeling against the English Catholics and non-jurors to raise one hundred thousand pounds, by a special tax upon their estates, or in promising the Dissenters that he would obtain the repeal of the Test Act, when he had no serious intention of doing so. He warned the country faithfully against the South Sea scheme, but when his warning was disregarded he proceeded to speculate skillfully and successfully in it himself. He labored long and earnestly to prevent the Spanish war, which he knew to be eminently impolitic; but when the clamors of his opponents had made it inevitable he determined that he would still remain at the helm, and he accordingly declared it himself. He governed the country mildly and wisely, but he was resolved at all hazards to secure for himself a complete monopoly of power; he steadily opposed the reconciliation of the Tories with the Hanoverian dynasty, lest it should impair his ascendancy, surrounded himself with colleagues whose faculties rarely rose above the tamest mediocrity, drove from power every man of real talent who might possibly become his rival, and especially repelled young men of promise, character, and ambition, whom a provident statesman, desirous of perpetuating his policy beyond his lifetime, would especially seek to attract.

The scandal and also the evil effects of his political vices were greatly increased by that total want of decorum which Burke has justly noted as the weakest point of his character. In this respect his public and private life resembled one another. That he lived for many years in open adultery and indulged to excess in the pleasures of the table were facts which in the early part of the eighteenth century were in themselves not likely to excite much attention; but his boisterous revelries at Houghton exceeded even the ordinary license of the country squires of his time, and the gross sensuality of his conversation was conspicuous in one of the coarsest periods of English history. When he did not talk of business, it was said, he talked of women; politics and obscenity were his tastes. There seldom was a court less addicted to prudery than that of George II, but even its tolerance was somewhat strained by a minister who jested with the queen upon the infidelity of her husband; who advised her on one occasion to bring to court a beautiful but silly woman as a “safe fool” for the king to fall in love with; who, on the death of the queen, urged her daughters to summon without delay the two mistresses of the king in order to distract the mind of their father; who at the same time avowed, with a brutal frankness, as the scheme of his future policy, that though he had been for the wife against the mistress, he would be henceforth for the mistress against the daughters.

In society he had the weakness of wishing to be thought a man of gallantry and fashion, and his awkward addresses, rendered the more ludicrous by a singularly corpulent and ungraceful person, as well as the extreme coarseness into which he usually glided when speaking to and of women, drew down upon him much ridicule and some contempt. His estimate of political integrity was very similar to his estimate of female virtue. He governed by means of an assembly which was saturated with corruption, and he fully acquiesced in its conditions and resisted every attempt to improve it. He appears to have cordially accepted the maxim that government must be carried on by corruption or by force, and he deliberately made the former the basis of his rule. He bribed George II by obtaining for him a civil list exceeding by more than one hundred thousand pounds a year that of his father. He bribed the queen by securing for her a jointure of one hundred thousand pounds a year, when his rival, Sir Spencer Compton, could only venture to promise sixty thousand pounds. He bribed the dissenting ministers to silence by the Regium Donum for the benefit of their widows. He employed the vast patronage of the crown uniformly and steadily with the single view of sustaining his political position, and there can be no doubt that a large proportion of the immense expenditure of secret-service money during his administration was devoted to the direct purchase of members of Parliament.

His influence upon young men appears to have been peculiarly pernicious. If we may believe Chesterfield, he was accustomed to ask them in a tone of irony upon their entrance into Parliament whether they too were going to be saints or Romans, and he employed all the weight of his position to make them regard purity and patriotism as ridiculous or unmanly. Of the next generation of statesmen, Fox, the first Lord Holland,[28] was the only man of remarkable ability who can be said to have been his disciple, and he was, perhaps, the most corrupt and unscrupulous of the statesmen of his age.

FREDERICK THE GREAT.

BY THOMAS CARLYLE.

[Otherwise Frederick II, third king of Prussia, son of Frederick
William I, and grandson of George I of England, born 1712, died
1786. Regarded in his youth, before his accession to the throne, as
a spendthrift and voluptuary or as a prince of weak and vacillating
character, his accession to the throne in 1740 instantly brought
out his true character as the most able and masterful of rulers.
His protracted wars with odds against him, often of four to one, in
which he fought the banded armies of Europe, stamped him as a
soldier of splendid genius and iron tenacity of endurance and
purpose. During the Seven Years’ War he stood with only five
million subjects against a hundred million. On the declaration of
peace he devoted himself, with the same energy, to the restoration
of the commerce, agriculture, and industries of Prussia as that
with which he had fought her enemies, and with as much success.
Frederick was not only a great soldier and civil administrator,
though on somewhat despotic lines, but keenly sympathetic with
literature, art, and science. All these he encouraged and fostered
by every means. He was the true founder of the Prussian monarchy.]

About fourscore years ago there used to be seen sauntering on the terraces of Sans Souci, for a short time in the afternoon, or you might have met him elsewhere at an earlier hour, riding or driving in a rapid business manner on the open roads or through the scraggy woods and avenues of that intricate amphibious Potsdam region, a highly interesting lean little old man, of alert though slightly stooping figure, whose name among strangers was King _Friedrich the Second_, or Frederick the Great of Prussia, and at home among the common people, who much loved and esteemed him, was _Vater Fritz_--Father Fred--a name of familiarity which had not bred contempt in that instance. He is a king, every inch of him, though without the trappings of a king. Presents himself in a Spartan simplicity of vesture; no crown but an old military cocked hat--generally old, or trampled and kneaded into absolute _softness_ if new--no scepter but one like Agamemnon’s, a walking-stick cut from the woods, which serves also as a riding-stick (with which he hits the horse “between the ears,” say authors)--and for royal robes, a mere soldier’s blue coat with red facings, coat likely to be old, and sure to have a good deal of Spanish snuff on the breast of it; rest of the apparel dim, unobtrusive in color or cut, ending in high overknee military boots, which may be brushed (and, I hope, kept soft with an underhand suspicion of oil), but are not permitted to be blackened or varnished; Day and Martin with their soot-pots forbidden to approach.

The man is not of godlike physiognomy, any more than of imposing stature or costume; close-shut mouth with thin lips, prominent jaws and nose, receding brow, by no means of Olympian height; head, however, is of long form, and has superlative gray eyes in it. Not what is called a beautiful man; nor yet, by all appearance, what is called a happy. On the contrary, the face bears evidence of many sorrows, as they are termed, of much hard labor done in this world, and seems to anticipate nothing but more still coming. Quiet stoicism, capable enough of what joys there were, but not expecting any worth mention; great unconscious and some conscious pride, well tempered with a cheery mockery of humor--are written on that old face, which carries its chin well forward, in spite of the slight stoop about the neck; snuffy nose, rather flung into the air, under its old cocked hat--like an old snuffy lion on the watch; and such a pair of eyes as no man or lion or lynx of that century bore elsewhere, according to all the testimony we have.

“Those eyes,” says Mirabeau, “which, at the bidding of his great soul, fascinated you with seduction or with terror (_portaient, au gré de son âme héroïque, la séduction ou la terreur_).” Most excellent potent brilliant eyes, swift-darting as the stars, steadfast as the sun; gray, we said, of the azure-gray color; large enough, not of glaring size; the habitual expression of them vigilance and penetrating sense, rapidity resting on depth, which is an excellent combination, and gives us the notion of a lambent outer radiance springing from some great inner sea of light and fire in the man.

The voice, if he speak to you, is of similar physiognomy--clear, melodious, and sonorous; all tones are in it, from that of ingenuous inquiry, graceful sociality, light-flowing banter (rather prickly for most part), up to definite word of command, up to desolating word of rebuke and reprobation; a voice “the clearest and most agreeable in conversation I ever heard,” says witty Dr. Moore. “He speaks a great deal,” continues the doctor, “yet those who hear him regret that he does not speak a good deal more. His observations are always lively, very often just, and few men possess the talent of repartee in greater perfection.”

This was a man of infinite mark to his contemporaries, who had witnessed surprising feats from him in the world; very questionable notions and ways, which he had contrived to maintain against the world and its criticisms, as an original man has always to do, much more an original ruler of men. The world, in fact, had tried hard to put him down, as it does, unconsciously or consciously, with all such, and after the most conscious exertions, and at one time a dead-lift spasm of all its energies for seven years, had not been able. Principalities and powers, imperial, royal, czarish, papal, enemies innumerable as the sea-sand, had risen against him, only one helper left among the world’s potentates (and that one only while there should be help rendered in return), and he led them all such a dance as had astonished mankind and them.

No wonder they thought him worthy of notice! Every original man of any magnitude is--nay, in the long run, who or what else is? But how much more if your original man was a king over men; whose movements were polar, and carried from day to day those of the world along with them. The Samson Agonistes--were his life passed like that of Samuel Johnson in dirty garrets, and the produce of it only some bits of written paper--the Agonistes, and how he will comport himself in the Philistine mill; this is always a spectacle of truly epic and tragic nature, the rather if your Samson, royal or other, is not yet blinded or subdued to the wheel, much more if he vanquish his enemies, _not_ by suicidal methods, but march out at last flourishing his miraculous fighting implement, and leaving their mill and them in quite ruinous circumstances, as this King Friedrich fairly managed to do.

For he left the world all bankrupt, we may say; fallen into bottomless abysses of destruction; he still in a paying condition, and with footing capable to carry his affairs and him. When he died, in 1786, the enormous phenomenon since called FRENCH REVOLUTION was already growling audibly in the depths of the world, meteoric-electric coruscations heralding it all round the horizon. Strange enough to note, one of Friedrich’s last visitors was Gabriel Honoré Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau. These two saw one another; twice, for half an hour each time. The last of the old gods and the first of the modern Titans--before Pelion leaped on Ossa, and the foul earth taking fire at last, its vile mephitic elements went up in volcanic thunder. This also is one of the peculiarities of Friedrich, that he is hitherto the last of the kings; that he ushers in the French Revolution, and closes an epoch of world-history. Finishing off forever the trade of king, think many, who have grown profoundly dark as to kingship and him.

The French Revolution may be said to have, for about half a century, quite submerged Friedrich, abolished him from the memories of men; and now, on coming to light again, he is found defaced under strange mud incrustations, and the eyes of mankind look at him from a singularly changed, what we must call oblique and perverse point of vision. This is one of the difficulties in dealing with his history--especially if you happen to believe both in the French Revolution and in him--that is to say, both that real kingship is eternally indispensable, and also that the destruction of sham kingship (a frightful process) is occasionally so.

On the breaking out of the formidable explosion and suicide of his century, Friedrich sank into comparative obscurity, eclipsed amid the ruins of that universal earthquake, the very dust of which darkened all the air, and made of day a disastrous midnight--black midnight, broken only by the blaze of conflagrations--wherein, to our terrified imaginations, were seen, not men, French and other, but ghastly portents, stalking wrathful, and shapes of avenging gods.

It must be owned the figure of Napoleon was titanic; especially to the generation that looked on him, and that waited shuddering to be devoured by him. In general, in that French Revolution, all was on a huge scale; if not greater than anything in human experience, at least more grandiose. All was recorded in bulletins, too, addressed to the shilling gallery; and there were fellows on the stage with such a breadth of saber, extent of whiskerage, strength of windpipe, and command of men and gunpowder as had never been seen before. How they bellowed, stalked, and flourished about, counterfeiting Jove’s thunder to an amazing degree! Terrific Drawcansir figures of enormous whiskerage, unlimited command of gunpowder; not without sufficient ferocity, and even a certain heroism, stage heroism, in them; compared with whom, to the shilling gallery, and frightened, excited theatre at large, it seemed as if there had been no generals or sovereigns before; as if Friedrich, Gustavus, Cromwell, William Conqueror, and Alexander the Great were not worth speaking of henceforth.

All this, however, in half a century is considerably altered. The Drawcansir equipments getting gradually torn off, the natural size is seen better; translated from the bulletin style into that of fact and history, miracles, even to the shilling gallery, are not so miraculous. It begins to be apparent that there lived great men before the era of bulletins and Agamemnon. Austerlitz and Wagram shot away more gunpowder--gunpowder, probably, in the proportion of ten to one, or a hundred to one; but neither of them was tenth part such a beating to your enemy as that of Rossbach, brought about by strategic art, human ingenuity and intrepidity, and the loss of one hundred and sixty-five men. Leuthen, too, the battle of Leuthen (though so few English readers ever heard of it) may very well hold up its head beside any victory gained by Napoleon or another. For the odds were not far from three to one; the soldiers were of not far from equal quality; and only the general was consummately superior, and the defeat a destruction.

Napoleon did, indeed, by immense expenditure of men and gunpowder, overrun Europe for a time; but Napoleon never, by husbanding and wisely expending his men and gunpowder, defended a little Prussia against all Europe, year after year for seven years long, till Europe had enough, and gave up the enterprise as one it could not manage. So soon as the Drawcansir equipments are well torn off and the shilling gallery got to silence, it will be found that there were great kings before Napoleon, and likewise an art of war, grounded on veracity and human courage and insight, not upon Drawcansir rodomontade, grandiose Dick-Turpinism, revolutionary madness, and unlimited expenditure of men and gunpowder. “You may paint with a very big brush, and yet not be a great painter,” says a satirical friend of mine. This is becoming more and more apparent, as the dust-whirlwind and huge uproar of the last generation gradually dies away again.

Friedrich is by no means one of the perfect demigods; and there are various things to be said against him with good ground. To the last, a questionable hero; with much in him which one could have wished not there, and much wanting which one could have wished. But there is one feature which strikes you at an early period of the inquiry. That in his way he is a reality; that he always means what he speaks; grounds his actions, too, on what he recognizes for the truth; and, in short, has nothing whatever of the hypocrite or phantasm. Which some readers will admit to be an extremely rare phenomenon.

We perceive that this man was far indeed from trying to deal swindler-like with the facts around him; that he honestly recognized said facts wherever they disclosed themselves, and was very anxious also to ascertain their existence where still hidden or dubious. For he knew well, to a quite uncommon degree, and with a merit all the higher as it was an unconscious one, how entirely inexorable is the nature of facts, whether recognized or not, ascertained or not; how vain all cunning of diplomacy, management and sophistry, to save any mortal who does _not_ stand on the truth of things, from sinking in the long run. Sinking to the very mudgods, with all his diplomacies, possessions, achievements; and becoming an unnamable object, hidden deep in the cesspools of the universe. This I hope to make manifest; this which I long ago discerned for myself, with pleasure, in the physiognomy of Friedrich and his life. Which, indeed, was the first real sanction, and has all along been my inducement and encouragement, to study his life and him. How this man, officially a king withal, comported himself in the eighteenth century, and managed _not_ to be a liar and charlatan as his century was, deserves to be seen a little by men and kings, and may silently have didactic meanings in it.

He that was honest with his existence has always meaning for us, be he king or peasant. He that merely shammed and grimaced with it however much, and with whatever noise and trumpet-blowing, he may have cooked and eaten in this world, can not long have any. Some men do _cook_ enormously (let us call it _cooking_, what a man does in obedience to his _hunger_ merely, to his desires and passions merely)--roasting whole continents and populations, in the flames of war or other discord; witness the Napoleon above spoken of. For the appetite of man in that respect is unlimited; in truth, infinite; and the smallest of us could eat the entire solar system, had we the chance given, and then cry, like Alexander of Macedon, because we had no more solar systems to cook and eat. It is not the extent of the man’s cookery that can much attach me to him; but only the man himself, and what of strength he had to wrestle with the mud-elements, and what of victory he got for his own benefit and mine.

WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM.

BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.