—T. B. MACAULAY on Walpole,
Critical and Historical Essays
INVITED IN APRIL 1763 to take the post, Francis Seymour Conway, earl of Hertford, was the first British ambassador to France after the Treaty of Paris put an end to the Seven Years’ War. Historians have dismissed Hertford as a mediocrity, though Hume described him as “the most amiable nobleman of the Court of England.” Quite why Hertford asked the Scottish philosopher to accompany him to the Paris embassy remains obscure. Hume was Hertford’s second choice, and the most likely explanation is that his name originally came up among mutual Scottish friends in London, supported by an undersecretary of state and classical scholar, Robert Wood, whom Hume had met in 1758. Wood had studied at Glasgow University.
Why Hume said yes is clearer, for the call afforded an escape from his frustrations in Britain. His own account, in the Life, carries little conviction: “This offer, however inviting, I at first declined, both because I was reluctant to begin connections with the great, and because I was afraid that the civilities and gay company of Paris would prove disagreeable to a person of my age and humour; but on his Lordship’s repeating the invitation, I accepted it.”
As so often before in his life, the prize was flawed. The invitation was to be Hertford’s secretary, a position with £1,000 a year and the prospect of still higher office. However, officially the position was already filled—by Charles Bunbury, later Sir Charles, twenty-three years old and married to the beautiful, wild Lady Sarah Lennox. To some Bunbury was a “somewhat vain and ignorant” rake, to others an affable devotee of horse racing. (His horse won the first Derby in 1780.) The upright Hertford thought him distasteful and proposed that Hume would be his undersecretary with the promise of his taking over when Bunbury could be enticed away from the post. How the skeptical philosopher might accommodate to the pious earl was the subject of some amused speculation. In Paris, another English diplomat observed that Hertford’s choice of secretary “has occasioned much laughing here. Questions are being asked whether Mr. Hume as part of the family will be obliged to attend prayers twice a day.”
A web of family and social ties connected many of those who were now setting the course of Hume’s life. Thus, on the British side, there were Hertford’s brother, General Henry Seymour Conway, and their cousin Horace Walpole. Lady Hertford should not be forgotten: she was a granddaughter of Charles II, and cousin of the Duke of Grafton, a future prime minister. Their various roles also demonstrate how Hume had now mortgaged his career to London politicians and to the court.
Conway, in particular, was a leading figure on the national stage, central to this politically messy, pre-party period of cabals, nepotism, patronage, and royal influence. A staple of three contemporary governments, all weak and shaky, he nonetheless preserved a reputation as a conscientious monument to integrity and honor—so much so that he was always on the verge of resignation, with Walpole in the background urgently counseling him to stand his ground.
A member of the House of Commons from 1741 to 1784, Conway started his career in the military and rose to lieutenant general. He was handsome, with a mellifluous voice and a gracious manner, thoughtful and well read. He was also courageous, and ready to suffer for his beliefs. When he voted against George Grenville’s government in February 1764 on the issue of general warrants, under which people could be arrested and property seized without prior evidence of their guilt or any personal identification (for example, the warrant could be for the arrest of “the authors of a seditious paper”), he was dismissed from his post as gentleman of the bedchamber and as the colonel of his regiment. It was seen as foul play that he should be deprived of both.
Soon after, in July 1765, when Grenville fell and the Marquess of Rockingham (known to his peers for his laziness and to the public for his zeal for horse racing) became prime minister, Conway received one of the two key offices outside the Treasury, secretary of state for the southern department, though his irresolution made him unsuitable for office and the dark skills of managing the Commons. He served under a series of fragile administrations, switching to the northern department in 1766. The king had come to depend on him. Walpole recorded that George III told Conway, “he hoped never to have an administration of which he should not be one.”
Conway’s elder brother, the Earl of Hertford, was also a confidant of George III. Religious and good-natured, he was, thought Horace Walpole, a man of “unblemished morals.” But others disparaged him as self-interested, avaricious, and ambitious. A contemporary described him in 1767 as having a “constant appetite for all preferments for himself and family, with the quickest digestion and the shortest memory of past favours of any of the present noblemen.” He was swift to distance himself from his brother’s stand on general warrants; shortly after, he supplicated the king (unsuccessfully) for elevation from earl to marquess.
To their cousin Horace Walpole, fourth and youngest son, and fierce defender, of Sir Robert Walpole, we could apply the phrase used by Walter Bagehot to describe Charles Dickens: “a special correspondent for posterity.” His letters and journals provide an invaluable insider’s commentary on the period—busy, well informed, unsentimental. He was a man of many parts: dilettante, wit and gossip, placeholder and M.P., a consummate expert in corridor intrigues. His father left him well provided with sinecures—to the tune of £3,400 a year—and a parliamentary seat: he is said to have visited his constituency and spoken in the House only once.
His interests and accomplishments were multifarious. He invented the gothic novel with The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764; he was a diarist and scholar, and a printer. He had an acute, though narrow, taste for the arts and was a jackdaw collector—everything from the country’s finest collection of miniatures to a vulcanized date from Herculaneum to Cardinal Wolsey’s red hat. And, of course, he created his lasting monument as the decorator and gardener of his true love, his “little Gothick castle,” Strawberry Hill, the small box of a house in Twickenham, southwest of London, that he bought in 1747, adding Gothic features over the years.
Walpole was warm, lively, generous and humane, and constantly fascinated by the ways of the world. He was patriotic, though he opined that “a good patriot is a bad citizen.” “Paris revived in me that natural passion, the love of my country’s glory. I must put it out: it is a wicked passion and breathes war.” He was also a man of causes. He spoke out against the execution of Admiral Byng in 1757 for “losing” Minorca to the French (or pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire quipped); he was a critic of general warrants, supported a free press, was for the American colonists, and rejected slavery—”that horrid trade … it chills the blood.”
Despite these attributes, the picture that emerges of him from Parisian soirées in the freezing winter of 1765–66 is not altogether flattering. He comes across as gossipy and malicious, treating society, particularly when it involved intellectuals, as a source of sour amusement. Nonetheless, aged forty-eight, Walpole became the passion of the most formidable of Paris hostesses, his “blind, old, débauchée of wit,” seventy-year-old Mme du Deffand, with whom he had a correspondence of over eight hundred letters. She bequeathed him her dog, Tonton (who was not house-trained). She had an apt description of Walpole as le fou moqueur (madcap jester). Walpole quoted this with relish.
THE COSMOPOLITAN NATURE of Anglo-French elite society is reflected in the fact that there was little hostility in France toward the embassy or visitors like Walpole, although Britain had just fought, and won, the Seven Years’ War, the latest in a bloody series that punctuated relations between these two global competitors.
The Seven Years’ War culminated triumphantly for Britain in the Treaty of Paris in 1763. This was Britain’s hour. The British navy had carried all before it. In Canada, India, and the West Indies, French possessions fell to British arms. So did Havana, the key to Spain’s West Indian empire. It seemed that Britain could outsail, outfight, and out-trade any of its European rivals.
For Brit
ish merchants, alive with patriotic fervor, there were commercial spoils of victory: the colonies would supply raw materials and buy British goods. But as traders rejoiced, for the nation as a whole there were also costs. Freed from fear of a French invasion, the American colonists began to assert themselves. The expense of warfare required postwar economies, including in the navy, and forced the government to look for new sources of taxation that in turn stirred discontent in America. Inflation at home, the escalating cost of corn, and the fear of famine provoked bouts of disorder.
The Treaty of Paris, negotiated by Bute and signed on February 10, 1763, was politically contentious. The British retained most of their gains, though Bute handed back some conquests to France and Spain on the principle that such a gesture would lay the basis for future peace. It was still a major blow to French power, but George III called it a “noble treaty.” Bute’s enemies, meanwhile, denounced it as “having saved England from the ruin of certain success.” Hopes that it would lead to some kind of détente took no account of the hostility embedded in the DNA of relations between France and Britain (though some Scots felt the ties of the “auld alliance” and were more comfortable in the French capital than in London). As Hume settled into Paris, the agonistic brew of fright, contempt, and admiration that permeated cross-Channel attitudes would be familiar today.
In fact, that farsighted politician and subtle diplomat, the Duc de Choiseul, then responsible for the fleet and shortly to be minister of war, was already pushing ahead with rebuilding French military power with the aim of recouping France’s losses. Walpole was one of those sounding the alarm. “At my return from France, where I had perceived how much it behoved us to be on our guard against the designed hostilities of that court, as soon as their finances should enable them to renew the war, I laboured to infuse attention to our situation.”
None of this held the English nobility back from visiting Paris. Walpole went for a six-month stay in the French capital in September 1765, and in a letter to a friend in England, he commented on the throng of his fellow citizens keeping him company: “If there is no talk in England of politics and parliaments, I can send your ladyship as much as you please from hence—or if you want English themselves, I can send you about fifty head; and I can assure you we will still be well stocked. There were three card-tables full of lords, ladies, gentlemen, and gentlewomen, the other night at Lady Berkeley’s, who keeps Tuesdays.”
It was just as well that Walpole had a slice of the London beau monde to entertain him. He found Parisian society humorless, though he appreciated French manners: “It may not be more sincere (and why should it?) than our cold and bare civility; but it is better dressed, and looks natural; one asks no more.” In a letter of October 19, 1765, to his intimate friend Sir Thomas Brand he complained about his boredom. He had been confined to bed with gout in both legs, and declared that he had not laughed since Lady Hertford went away: “Good folks, they have no time to laugh. There is God and the king to be pulled down first; and men and women, one and all are devoutly employed in the demolition. They think me quite profane for having any belief left.”
Traffic was not all in one direction. The French, too, flocked to England. And, notwithstanding their cherished differences, the two sides peered at each other across the Channel to spot the latest trends in fashion. What was à la mode in Paris immediately became le dernier cri in London—and vice versa.
Grimm listed the objects of mutual desire:
We in France now set as high a value upon English postillions as the English ever placed upon our poor Huguenot waiting maids; we have the same taste for their horses, their punch, and their philosophers, as they have for our wines, our liqueurs, and our opera dancers; … we are mad for their steel, they are eager for our silver; we can no longer support anything but English carriages, gardens, and swords, they cannot admire anything but our workmen, particularly our cabinetmakers and our cooks. We send them our fashions and in return bring back theirs. … In short we seem reciprocally to have imposed upon ourselves the tasks of copying each other, so as to efface entirely all vestiges of our ancient hatred.
In that, at least, Grimm was an optimist.
Grimm also noted the French partiality for English translations, which appeared with great rapidity, evidence of the impressive degree of cultural exchange. They included Hume’s philosophical papers. There had been a cult following for Samuel Richardson ever since the publication of his Clarissa (1747). French pilgrims sought out English locations described in Clarissa. Rousseau’s opinion was that “in no other language is there a novel equal to Clarisse, or even approaching it.”
HERTFORD HAD TAKEN the monumental Hôtel de Lassay for his personal use; a visitor said she had never seen a house as beautiful, but the rooms were inconvenient and dirty. There, according to a British visitor, Hume made “a good honest droll good-natured sort of figure at their table, and really puts you in mind of the mastiff-dog at the fire side.”
Away from the piety of the Hertfords’ somewhat spare table, Hume’s embassy position and his association with Lord Hertford ensured his entrée to the luxurious divertissements of the court and the drawing rooms of the aristocratic elite. However, many of Hume’s tasks must have seemed insufferably mundane. The neophyte assistant secretary had among his official duties the issuing of embassy news to the London press. On June 6, 1765, he sent a report to the London Chronicle on the king’s birthday celebrations in Paris:
Paris. On Tuesday the fourth of June, being the anniversary of his Majesty’s birthday, the Earl of Hertford, Ambassador from England, invited all the English of rank and condition in the place, to the number of seventy persons, who dined with him and celebrated that solemnity. The company appeared very splendid, being almost all dressed in new and rich cloaths on this occasion; the entertainment was magnificent, and the usual healths were drunk with great loyalty and alacrity by all present.
Then, between July 21, 1765, when Hertford left Paris having given up his appointment; and November 17, 1765, when the Duke of Richmond took his place, Hume was chargé d’affaires and his responsibilities became more serious. In these four months he handled negotiations on various detailed problems left over from the Treaty of Paris, such as the demolition of the fortifications of Dunkirk. Hume solved none of these issues, but Conway praised his negotiating skills.
HUME SHOULD HAVE been cheerier than ever before. He had a challenging job and sufficient remuneration. Yet, beneath the jocund surface, anger was curdling. One reason for this was the politically inspired delay in his confirmation as embassy secretary. Since his arrival, his fate had been in the hands of Prime Minister George Grenville. And, throughout 1764 and the first half of 1765, Grenville was content for Bunbury to stay away from Paris (leaving Hume to do all his work), though he plainly had no intention of confirming the Scottish historian in his embassy post if Sir Charles took another.
Hume was no self-seeker, but in March 1764, Hertford persuaded him to contact his friends who might have influence. Hume portrayed himself as insouciant when the attempt failed: “The king has promised it; all the ministers have promised it; Lord Hertford earnestly solicits it. Yet have I been in this condition about six months, and I never trouble my head about the matter.”
According to Walpole, Hertford was not liked either by the Earl of Bute or by the Grenville government, and it was indicative of the poor relations between Hertford and the administration that when he had put in for the expenses of his going to Paris, these were turned down though normally paid. Hertford suspected that his brother’s opposition in parliament had caused the denial. If so, the same bad blood might have been behind the refusal to confirm Hume. However, the Grenville correspondence also shows that the prime minister and his close allies were contemptuous of Hertford’s dealings with the French and wished he would come home. Discussing how to replace the ambassador, they were not likely to promote his assistant.
By the summer of 1764, nettled by French insinuations of his im
potence in London, Hertford dispatched a querulous letter to Grenville, pointing out, first, that in the absence of a secretary he trusted, he could not leave his post or be ill; and second, that Hume was very well suited to act as his deputy if he was confirmed: “I am desirous, in friendship to Mr. Hume and for His Majesty’s future service, to see so able a man invested in [the post].” Grenville ignored the letter. In February 1765, his diary records him upbraiding the king for appointing a secretary to the embassy in Spain, “apprehending that Lord Hertford might require the same appointment for Mr. Hume in Paris.”
FINALLY, THE POLITICAL wheel of fortune rotated in Hume’s favor, if only briefly.
Exasperated by Grenville, the king sought and failed to find a successor, leaving Grenville stronger than before. As Walpole put it, “the king is reduced to the mortification, and it is extreme, of taking his old ministers again. … Grenville has treated his master in the most impertinent manner, and they are now actually digesting the terms that they mean to impose on their captive.”
Their captive and master, the king, was in no position to resist concessions, chief among them the complete exclusion of Bute. In the subsequent shuffling of posts, Bunbury was appointed secretary to the new lord lieutenant of Ireland. Hertford predicted that Bunbury’s departure for Dublin would finally result in Hume’s confirmation. Hume fancied it would not happen, that “I, a philosopher, a man of letters, no wise a courtier, of the most independent spirit, who has given offence to every sect and every party, that I, I say, such as I have described myself, should obtain an employment of dignity and a thousand a year.”
But, at last, he did. Politically, Grenville might have won a short-term political battle but his relations with the king, vital to matters of patronage, were irrevocably breaking down and the monarch was scheming to topple him for good. Possibly because it was politically convenient, the prime minister gave way on Hume. Hertford’s confidence was justified.
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