by Will Durant
Bound with Burke and Fox in leading the liberal factor of the Whigs was a second Irishman, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. His grandfather, Thomas Sheridan I, published translations from Greek and Latin, and an Art of Punning which may have infected the grandson. The father, Thomas Sheridan II, was by some ranked second only to Garrick as actor and theatrical manager. He married Frances Chamberlaine, a successful playwright and novelist. He received degrees from Dublin, Oxford, and Cambridge; lectured at Cambridge on education; was instrumental in getting Johnson a royal pension, and got one for himself. He wrote an entertaining Life of Swift, and dared to publish a General Dictionary of the English Language (1780) only twenty-five years after Johnson’s. He helped his son manage Drury Lane Theatre, and saw him rise in romance, literature, and Parliament.
So Richard had wit and drama in his milieu, if not in his blood. Born in Dublin (1751), he was sent to Harrow at the age of eleven, stayed there six years, and acquired a good classical education; at twenty he echoed his grandfather by publishing translations from the Greek. In that year 1771, while living at Bath with his parents, he fell into raptures over the lovely face and voice of Elizabeth Ann Linley, seventeen, who sang in the concerts presented by her father, composer Thomas Linley. Those who have seen any of Gainsborough’s portraits of her55 will understand that Richard had no alternative but rapture. Neither had she, if we may believe his sister, who thought him irresistibly handsome and lovable. “His cheeks had the glow of health; his eyes the finest in the world.... A tender and affectionate heart. … The same playful fancy, the same sterling and innoxious wit, that was shown afterwards in his writings, cheered and delighted the family circle. I admired—I almost adored—him. I would most willingly have sacrificed my life for him.”56
Elizabeth Ann had many suitors, including Richard’s elder brother Charles. One of them, Major Mathews, rich but married, annoyed her to such aggravation that she took laudanum to kill herself. She recovered, but lost all desire for life until Richard’s devotion revived her spirits. Mathews threatened to force her; half in fear, half in love, she eloped with Sheridan to France, married him (1772), and then took refuge in a convent near Lille while Richard returned to England to conciliate his father and hers. He fought two duels with Mathews; victor in the first, he spared Mathews’ life; drunk in the second, he disarmed his adversary, allowed the duel to degenerate into a wrestling match, and returned to Bath smeared with blood, wine, and mud. His father disowned him, but Thomas Linley brought Elizabeth Ann back from France, and sanctioned her marriage (1773).
Too proud to let his wife support him by public singing, Richard, twentytwo, undertook to make a fortune by writing plays. On January 17, 1775, his first comedy, The Rivals, was produced at Covent Garden. It was poorly acted and poorly received; Sheridan secured a better actor for the leading role, and a second performance (January 28) began a series of dramatic successes that brought Sheridan fame and wealth. Soon all London was talking about Sir Anthony Absolute, Sir Lucius O’Trigger, and Miss Lydia Languish, and was imitating Mrs. Malaprop’s mangling of words (“Forget this fellow, illiterate him quite from your memory”;57 “as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.”).58 Sheridan had a mint of sallies in his brain, scattering them on every page, dowering lackeys with wit, and making fools talk like philosophers. Critics complained that the characters were not always consistent with their speech, and that the wit, crackling in every scene, bubbling in almost every mouth, dulled its point by excess; no matter; audiences relished the merriment, and relish it to this day.
Even greater was the success of The Duenna, which had its première at Covent Garden on November 2, 1775; it ran for seventy-five nights in its first season, breaking the record of sixty-three nights set by The Beggar’s Opera in 1728. David Garrick, at the Drury Lane Theatre, was alarmed by this lively competition, but could find no better riposte than to revive The Discovery, a play by Sheridan’s lately deceased mother. Flushed with success, Sheridan offered to buy Garrick’s half share of the Drury Lane; Garrick, feeling his years, agreed for £ 35,000; Sheridan persuaded his fatherin-law and a friend to contribute £ 10,000 each; he himself invested £ 1,300 in cash; the remainder he raised on a loan (1776). Two years later he gathered together another, £ 35,000, took ownership of the theater with his partners, and assumed the management.
Many thought that his confidence had overreached itself, but Sheridan went on to another triumph by producing (May 8, 1777) The School for Scandal, the greatest dramatic success of the century. The author’s father, who had been pouting ever since Richard’s elopement five years before, was now reconciled with his son. After these victories there was a pause in Sheridan’s ascent. The offerings at the Drury Lane proved unpopular, and the specter of bankruptcy frightened the partners. Sheridan saved the situation with a farce, The Critic, a satire of tragic dramas and dramatic pundits. However, his wonted dilatoriness intervened, and two days before the scheduled opening he had not yet written the final scene. By some ruse his father-in-law and others lured him to a room in the theater, gave him paper, pen, ink, and wine, bade him finish the play, and locked him in. He emerged with the desired denouement; it was rehearsed and found adequate; the première (October 29, 1779) was another smile of fortune for the ebullient Irishman.
He looked around for new worlds to conquer, and decided to enter Parliament. He paid the burgesses of Stafford five guineas for their vote, and in 1780 he took his seat in the House of Commons as an ardent liberal. He shared with Fox and Burke in prosecuting Warren Hastings, and in one brilliant day outshone them both. Meanwhile he lived with his accomplished wife in happiness and luxury, famed for his conversation, his wit, his exuberance, his kindness, and his debts. Lord Byron summed up the marvel: “Whatsoever Sheridan has done, or chooses to do, has been par excellence, always the best of its kind. He has written the best comedy, the best drama, … the best farce, … the best address [a Monologue on Garrick ], and, to crown all, delivered the very best oration … ever conceived or heard in this country.”59 And he had won and kept the love of the loveliest woman in England.
Sheridan was all romance; it is hard to picture him in the same world and generation as William Pitt II, who recognized only reality, stood above sentiment, and ruled without eloquence. He was born (1759) at the height of his father’s career; his mother was sister to George Grenville, chief minister 1763-65; he was nursed on politics, and grew up in the odor of Parliament. Frail and sickly in childhood, he was kept from the rigors and socializing contacts of “public” school; he was tutored at home under the careful supervision of his father, who taught him elocution by making him recite Shakespeare or Milton every day. By the age of ten he was a classical scholar and had written a tragedy. At fourteen he was sent to Cambridge, soon fell ill, returned home; a year later he went again, and, being a peer’s son, he was graduated as Master of Arts in 1776 without examination. He studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, practiced law briefly, and was projected into Parliament at the age of twenty-one from a pocket borough controlled by Sir James Lowther. His maiden speech so well supported Burke’s proposal for economic reforms that Burke called him “not a chip of the old block but the old block itself.”60
Being a second son, he was allowed only £ 300 a year, with occasional help from his mother and uncles; these conditions encouraged a stoic simplicity in his conduct and character. He avoided marriage, having pledged himself indivisibly to the pursuit of power. He took no pleasure in gambling or the theater. Though he later used liquor in excess to dull his nerves after the tumult of politics, he earned a reputation for purity of life and incorruptibility of purpose; he could buy, but he could not be bought. He never sought wealth, and seldom made concessions to friendship; only an intimate few discovered, behind his cold aloofness and self-control, a friendly gaiety, even at times an affectionate tenderness.
Early in 1782, when Lord North’s ministry was about to resign, “the boy,” as some members condescendingly called Pitt, included in
one of his speeches a rather unusual announcement: “For myself, I could not expect to form part of a new administration; but were my doing so within my reach, I feel myself bound to declare that I never would accept a subordinate position”;61 that is, he would accept no place lower than the six or seven seats that constituted what came to be called the cabinet. When the new ministry offered to appoint him vice-treasurer of Ireland at £ 5,000 a year, he declined, and continued to live on his £ 300. He was confident of advancement, and hoped to win it on his own merits; he worked hard, and became the best-informed man in the House on domestic politics, industry, and finance. A year after his proud pronouncement the King turned to him not merely to join but to head the government. No man before him had ever been chief minister at the age of twenty-four; and few ministers have left a deeper mark on English history.
III. THE KING VERSUS PARLIAMENT
George II completed his reign of thirty-three years with a decided distaste for English politics. “I am sick to death of all this foolish stuff, and wish with all my heart that the Devil may take all your bishops, and the Devil take your ministers, and the Devil take your Parliament, and the Devil take the whole island, provided I can get out of it and go to Hanover.”62 He found peace on October 25, 1760, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
The accession of George III on the day of his grandfather’s death was welcomed enthusiastically by nearly all Englishmen except a few who still hankered after the Stuarts. He was twenty-two, handsome, industrious, and modest. (He was the first English king since Henry VI to omit in his title a claim to the sovereignty over France.) In his first address to Parliament he added, to the text prepared for him by his ministers, words that neither of his Hanoverian predecessors could have spoken: “Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Briton.” “The young King,” wrote Horace Walpole, “has all the appearance of being amiable. There is great grace to temper much dignity, and extreme good nature, which breaks out on all occasions.”63 He added to his popularity by the proclamation that he issued on October 31 “for the encouragement of piety and virtue, and for preventing and punishing of vice, profaneness, and immorality.” In 1761 he married Princess Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz; adjusting himself to her charmlessness, he begot fifteen children by her, and found no time for adultery. This was unprecedented for a Hanoverian king.
He did not like the Seven Years’ War, then four years old, and felt that some adjustment could be made with France. William Pitt I, secretary of state for the Southern Department, and the dominant figure in the ministry of the Duke of Newcastle, insisted on continuing the war until France should be weakened beyond any likelihood of her challenging the empire that had been created by British victories in Canada and India; moreover, he urged, no peace should be made except in concert with England’s ally, Frederick the Great. In March, 1761, the Earl of Bute was made secretary of state for the Northern Department, and proceeded with the plan for a separate peace. Pitt resisted in vain, and on October 5 he resigned. George mollified him with a pension of £ 3,000 for himself and his heir, and a peerage for his wife, who became Baroness of Chatham. Pitt (till 1766) refused a peerage for himself, since this would have excluded him from his favorite battlefield, the House of Commons. As he had spoken of pensions with scorn, he was severely criticized for accepting these emoluments, but they were less than he had earned, and others who had earned far less received far more.
On May 26, 1762, the Duke of Newcastle gave up his post after forty-five years of prominence in politics. Three days later Bute succeeded him as chief minister. Now the purposes of the young King took form and drive. He and Bute considered it part of the royal prerogative to determine the major lines of policy, especially in foreign affairs. Furthermore, he was eager to break the hold which a few rich families had taken on the government. In 1761 an old Whig, William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, in an anonymous pamphlet, urged the King not to be content with the “shadow of royalty,” but to use his “legal prerogatives” to check the “illegal claims of factious oligarchy.”64
The majority in the House of Commons held that the King should choose his ministers from the acknowledged leaders of the party or faction victorious in the elections; George insisted on his legal right to choose his ministers regardless of party, with no restrictions except his responsibility to the nation.65 The Whigs had engineered the accession of the Hanoverian Elector to the throne of England; some Tories had negotiated with the exiled Stuarts; inevitably the first two Georges had taken only Whigs into their government; most of the Tories had retired to their estates. But in 1760 they accepted the new dynasty, and came in considerable number to offer their homage to the British-born King. George welcomed them, and saw no reason why he should not appoint able Tories, as well as able Whigs, to office. The Whigs protested that if the King were free to choose ministers and determine policy without responsibility to Parliament, the “Bill of Rights” of 1689 would be violated, the authority of the King would remount to the level claimed by Charles I, and the revolutions of 1642 and 1688 would be nullified. The party system had its faults, but (the leaders argued) it was indispensable to responsible government; it offered to each ministry an opposition that watched it, criticized it, and (when the electors so desired) could replace it with men equipped to alter the direction of policy without disturbing the stability of the state. So the lines formed for the first major conflict of powers in the new reign.
Bute bore the brunt of the battle. Criticism mostly spared the King, but not his mother; lampoons accused her of being Bute’s mistress; this calumny roused the King to uncompromising wrath. Bute concluded a separate peace with France, and to force Frederick’s acquiescence he ended England’s subsidies to Prussia; Frederick called him a scoundrel, and fought on. The English people, though glad to have the war ended, denounced the peace as too lenient to defeated France; Pitt fulminated against it, and predicted that France, with her navy left intact, would soon resume war on England—which she did in 1778. The House of Commons ratified the treaty, 319 to 65. George’s mother rejoiced that the royal will had prevailed; “Now,” she said, “my son is really King of England.”66
Hitherto the new sovereign had enjoyed a reputation for integrity. But when he saw that the Whigs were buying parliamentary votes, and were engaging journalists to attack his policies, he resolved to better the instruction. He used his funds and his power of patronage to induce authors like Smollett to defend the aims and actions of the ministry. Perhaps Bute had such services in view when, in July, 1762, he persuaded the King to give a pension to Samuel Johnson, and he was not disappointed. But no partisan of the minister could offset the clever diatribes of John Wilkes, the savage satires of Charles Churchill, or the anonymous vituperation of “Junius.” “Libels on the court, exceeding in audacity and rancor any that had been published for many years, now appeared daily, in both prose and verse.”67
Parliament took the King’s money and gave him votes, but it disliked his chief minister as a Scot who had not risen to power through long service to some party in the House. Feeling against Scotland ran high in an England that still remembered the Scottish invasion of 1745. Moreover, Bute had given political plums to his countrymen: he had made Robert Adam court architect and Allan Ramsay court painter (ignoring Reynolds); he had pensioned John Home, the Scottish playwright, while refusing a professorship to Thomas Gray. The London populace expressed its feelings by hanging or burning a jackboot (as a pun for Bute), and by attacking the minister’s carriage; he had to hide his face when he attended the theater. A tax on cider alienated the rural population, and left Bute the most unpopular minister in English history. Unable to breast the torrent, broken in health and spirits, and realizing his unfitness for the agitation and intrigues of politics, Bute resigned (April 8, 1763), after less than a year as chief minister to the King.
His successor, George Grenville, suffered three misfortunes: he was attacked in the press by the invincible John Wilkes (1763 f.); he p
ut through Parliament (March, 1765) the Stamp Act that began the alienation of the American colonies; and George III had his first fit of insanity. The failure and resignation of Bute had broken the King’s nerves and resolution; his marriage had brought him no happiness; and Grenville was painfully independent, almost domineering. George soon recovered, but he no longer felt strong enough to resist the Whig oligarchy that controlled most of Parliament and the press. He compromised by inviting a Whig, the Marquis of Rockingham, to form a new ministry.
Perhaps on suggestions from his secretary, Edmund Burke, the Marquis in a year put through Parliament several mollifying measures. The cider tax was abolished or modified; the stamp tax was repealed; a treaty with Russia furthered trade; the agitation over Wilkes was subdued; and apparently no bribery was used to advance this legislation. The King resented the repeal of the tax, and the concessions to Wilkes. On July 12, 1766, he dismissed the Rockingham ministry, offered a peerage to Pitt, and asked him to take charge of the government. Pitt agreed.
But the “Great Commoner” had lost his health, almost his mind. Now he sacrificed what remained of his popularity by accepting ennoblement as Earl of Chatham, thereby abandoning his place in the House. He had some excuse: he felt too weak to bear the tensions and conflicts of the Commons; in the Lords he would have more leisure and less strain. He took a relatively quiet post as lord of the privy seal, and allowed his friend, the Duke of Grafton, to fill the nominally pre-eminent post as first lord of the treasury. His colleagues, however, noted that he determined policy without consulting them, or over their opposition, and many were relieved when he went to Bath to seek some easing of his gout. He achieved this, but with drugs that disordered his mind. When he returned to London he was in no condition to attend to politics. In October, 1768, he resigned, and Grafton became chief minister.