XXII. CHAP. as destructive not only of the people's health, but of their morals. The bill passed, but out of twenty-four protesting peers, ten wore the lawn sleeves. It was in allusion to this act that Chesterfield, not without a hit at Carteret's convivial habits, dubbed his government "the drunken administration”. During the year 1736, partly owing to the spread of drunkenness, partly to the measures taken for its suppression, and partly to economic causes, there were sundry popular disturbances throughout the country. A riot of another origin, which attracted attention even on the continent and revived the hopes of the exiled Jacobites, was that which has come down to us as the Porteous riot at Edinburgh. The origin of this was the execution on April 14 of a smuggler named Andrew Wilson. Stones were thrown at the city guard, and its captain, John Porteous, who himself carried a musket, fired a shot into the crowd and, without any reading of the riot act, ordered the guard to fire also. At least fourteen of them fired.1 Six of the onlookers were killed and eleven wounded. Porteous was arrested and tried for murder. He was found guilty and ordered for execution on September 8. He obtained a respite, but a mob broke into the jail on the 7th and hanged him; after which they dispersed.2 The king's speech at the opening of the next session of parliament on February 1, 1737, adverted to the numerous riots during the previous year. Carteret jumped at the opportunity of embarrassing the ministry in its Scottish administration. He pressed for strong measures, and Walpole found himself at issue with his own colleagues, the chancellor Hardwicke and Newcastle, who advocated the forfeiture of the charter of Edinburgh. With wise moderation, however, Walpole reduced the pains and penalties proposed to an act of two articles, one for incapacitating the Lord Provost Wilson from office, the other for inflicting upon the corporation of Edinburgh a fine of £2,000, which was assigned to the widow of Porteous. Mention has been made of the systematic practice of smuggling, the natural consequence of high protective tariffs, 1 So the lord provost said, but upon this the evidence was conflicting, and Porteous denied having fired at all. State Trials, xii., 968. 2 Details of these proceedings are to be found in a letter from Lord Drummore to Lord Grange, March 22, 1736-37, Mar and Kellie MSS., p. 549, and in the letters of Lord Provost Wilson in Hist. MSS. Comm., 8th Rep., App., pp. 311-12. 1736-37 SOCIAL REFORMS. XXII. 353 and of Walpole's hope of repressing it by excise. Baffled in CHAP. this, he determined to sharpen the laws against smugglers, of whose exploits at this time there are numerous records in the Treasury Papers. Smuggling was made punishable by transportation for life. The appearance of the bill in the house of lords in May, 1736, was marked by an opposition of which, since Walpole's supremacy, examples have been rare. The bill contained a clause by which a magistrate was empowered to arrest and imprison three or more persons armed with fire-arms upon information that they were intending to run goods. This clause amongst others was opposed by the chancellor, Lord Talbot, and by Lord Hardwicke, then chief justice, upon the ground that a presumption of criminal intention could not be legally made from an act innocent in itself. A revolt of the two heads of the judicature on constitutional grounds against a principal clause in a government bill would in these days be decisive of its fate. The house, however, while making concessions upon other points objected to by the two law lords, passed the offending clause by fifty-four to forty-six votes, an example, according to Hallam, of dereliction of constitutional principle "to be counted as a set-off against the advantages of a Revolution". The effect of these severities appears to have been to render the smugglers more violent. Pitched battles with customs officers, aided by soldiers, continued of frequent occurrence. In one such, near Pevensey in 1744, a hundred mounted smugglers were victorious. Another measure of social reform was an act of 1737 entrusting to the lord chamberlain the regulation of stage plays. That public opinion was favourable to this measure is apparent from the celerity with which it passed through parliament, the only recorded opposition to it being that of Pulteney in the commons and Chesterfield in the lords. During the general election of 1734 the dissenters all over the country had thrown in their lot with the ministry. Two years before Walpole had given proof of his goodwill towards them, and perhaps endeavoured to pave the way for an English measure by instructing the Duke of Dorset, as lord-lieutenant of Ireland, "if it could be done, to get the test repealed".2 1 10 G. II., c. 28. "For Walpole's private feelings on the subject, see Stopford-Sackville MSS., i., 147, December 30, 1731, Hist. MSS. Comm., 1904. XXII. CHAP. There was a prospect of the bill for the repeal passing the Irish commons, but the certain hostility of the bishops in the Irish house of lords made an attempt hopeless. Shortly after the election, the leaders of the English dissenters approached Walpole. His private opinion, he told them, would have to give way to his duty as a minister: to provoke the clergy would be to wreck the administration. The dissenting leaders turned to the patriots. A bill for the repeal of the test act was introduced in March, 1736, but the tories opposed, and Walpole's criticism that it was "ill-timed" was justified, for it was lost by 251 to 123 votes. The hostility of the Church to the dissenters was shewn in the course of the same session by the rejection by the lords of a bill for the relief of the Quakers, though actively supported by Walpole himself. From that time forward, he renounced all projects of change affecting the interests of the Church. When after the secession from parliament of Wyndham and his followers in the session of 1739, Dr. Chandler, as spokesman for the dissenters, solicited his support for the repeal of the test act, Walpole repeated his former answer that the time had not arrived. To the question, "When will the time come?" he replied, "If you require a specific answer, I will give it you in a word, 'Never"". It was the conclusion forced upon him by a mortifying experience and by the attitude of Pulteney and the dissentient whigs. When the dissenters brought in their bill on March 30, 1739, it was defeated in the house of commons by 188 to 89 votes. On the other hand, the passing of the stringent mortmain bill in 1736 appears to have been facilitated by the resentment of the laity at the oppressive conduct of the clergy in the matter of Quakers' tithes.2 The king's denunciation of the bishops as "a parcel of black, canting, hypocritical rascals" was not without its echoes. Bathurst the tory joined with Carteret the whig "patriot" in the chorus against the bench. The tide had turned since the days when the Church was a political rallying cry. Its prelates, as conservative guardians of its temporal 1 The date of this negotiation has hitherto been left doubtful by historians, but the correspondence printed by Coxe, Memoirs of Sir R. Walpole (ed. 1798), ii., 515, 520, suggests this as the probable occasion. 2 Sir Thomas Robinson to Lord Carlisle, April 24, 1736, Carlisle MSS., p. 1734 FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. 355 XXII. interests, were in conflict with the whig principles of toleration CHAP. and comprehension; as nominees and supporters of whig administrations, latitudinarian in their theology and often remiss in their duties, they were no longer revered by the tory laity for the sake of their office nor by the tory clergy for the sake of their doctrine. While the repudiation of all fresh proposals for excise left the opposition without a cry for the election of 1734, the retirement of the king's confidante, Lady Suffolk, in August of that year deprived them for a while of a centre at court round which to group themselves. The effect was to bring the Prince of Wales into greater prominence. His policy, if his conduct can be dignified with such a name, was a policy of pin-pricks. He had some fancied and some substantial grievances. The constant postponement of his marriage was a real wrong on the part of the king. A final rupture of the negotiations, which had been resumed in 1730, was followed by the betrothal of the Prussian princess to the Margrave of Baireuth. His natural chagrin was heightened by the marriage on March 14, 1733-34, of his sister Anne, the princess royal, to the Prince of Orange with a grant from parliament of £5,000 a year for life. The princess, the king and queen were ardent admirers of Handel, then at the head of an opera house in the Haymarket. Frederick posed as patron of Buononcini, at the head of a rival opera in Lincoln's Inn Fields. To fill this house he himself touted among the ladies of the court. His chief political adviser was Chesterfield. He talked "violently and publicly" against Walpole. In answer to his demand for permission to marry, the king made choice of the Princess Augusta, daughter of Frederick Duke of Saxe-Gotha, a girl of seventeen, whom George saw when at Herrenhausen in the summer of 1735. She is described by a lady of her bedchamber as being at the time of her arrival in England, “a very agreeable woman, very affable in her behaviour, a good deal of address, and her person what may be called a pretty woman . . . the prince seemed vastly pleased ".2 1 Lady Betty Germain to the Duke of Dorset, Jan. or Feb., 1734, StopfordSackville MSS., i., 55, Hist. MSS. Comm., 1904. 2 Lady A. Irwin to Lord Carlisle, April 26, 1736, Carlisle MSS., p. 170. Hervey is more critical. Memoirs, ii., 290. СНАР. XXII. His marriage to the Princess Augusta on April 27, 1736, tranquillised resentments but for a short time. Upon the mar riage the king had increased his allowance from £24,000 to £50,000. This with £9,000 from Wales and Cornwall made up a net income of something less than £59,000 a year. But as the establishment appointed for him by the king amounted to £63,000 a year, "exclusive of his own private expenses," and no jointure had been allowed for the princess, he naturally complained of insufficiency of income. The idea of appealing from the niggardliness of the king to the justice of parliament is said to have been a legacy of Bolingbroke on the eve of his departure for France. Its "chief stimulators" were the younger men of the opposition, the "boys" as it became the fashion for Walpole and his friends to call them, John Russell, fourth Duke of Bedford, who in October, 1731, had married Lady Diana Spencer; his brother-in-law Charles Spencer, third Duke of Marlborough, Richard and George Grenville, their cousin George Lyttelton, and his friend William Pitt, with Chesterfield as their counsellor. Pulteney, not without hesitation, undertook to move the matter in the house of commons and Wyndham, as the leader of the tories, to support it. By dint of "closeting," "personal intercession," and "offering carte blanche for promissory notes of payment when he came to the crown," the prince had succeeded, shortly after the opening of the session, in securing a majority in the house of commons. On February 21, 1737, the day before that on which the question was to come before the house of commons, Walpole persuaded the king to send the prince a proposal for accommodation: the king would execute a settlement of the £50,000 hitherto paid the prince as an allowance, and would at once settle a jointure on the princess. The king was chagrined at the failure of the offer. Walpole replied to his reproaches that "he had proposed to bring the house of commons to reason by it, not the prince". His foresight was justified by the event. The motion, introduced by Pulteney, was defeated by 234 to 204 votes, but with a bad grace the king assented to a bill settling £50,000 a year on the prince, with a jointure of the same amount on the prin 1 Lady A. Irwin to (Lord Carlisle), March 15, 1736-37, Carlisle MSS., p. 181. Horatio Walpole to Robert Trevor, Feb. 25, 1736-37, Trevor MSS., p. 5 (in the Earl of Buckinghamshire's MSS.), Hist. MSS. Comm., 1895. |