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In 1731, Lord Lovel being Grand Master, he "formed an occasional lodge at Houghton Hall, Sir Robert Walpole's House in Norfolk," and there made the Duke of Lorraine, afterwards Emperor of Germany, and the Duke of Newcastle, Master Masons. I do not quote the case of the initiation, passing, and raising of Frederick, Prince of Wales, in 1737, which was done in "an occasional lodge," over which Dr.
As if it were not a settled thing, specially arranged by Providence, that one Englishman is a match for at least any six Spaniards, Frenchmen, or other contemptible foreigners! Walpole's great intellectual want was the lack of imagination. If he had possessed more imagination, he would have been not only a greater orator, but a greater debater.
At the same time we may remark in passing that his opinions and prejudices were not so invincible as to blind him to real genius and eminent public services; and the admirers of Lord Chatham may fairly draw an argument in favour of his policy from Walpole's admission of its value in raising the spirit of the people; an admission which, it may be supposed, it must have gone against his grain to make in favour of a follower of Pulteney.
Either their wages did not rise at all or did not advance commensurately with the increase of the cost of living and the decline in the value of the currency. Walpole's detailed and thorough treatment of this subject is historic work of high value. In the third volume I was much impressed with his account of the Reform Act of 1832.
When only twenty-seven he was already a leader among the Whigs; at thirty-two he was Secretary for War; and before he was forty he had become Prime Minister, a post which he really created and was the first Englishman to hold. Friendship with France marked a new phase of British policy. Walpole's baffled enemies said that he was bribed by France.
It cannot be questioned that there is much to be said in favor of the principle of short Parliaments, but in Walpole's time the one great object of true statesmanship was to strengthen the power of the House of Commons; to enable it to stand up against the Crown and the House of Lords.
It was acknowledged to be true in part by Warbeck himself, who, it has been shown since Walpole's time, in personating the Duke of York, admitted that his brother Edward had been murdered, though he asserted that he himself had providentially escaped. It is evident that no one dreamed in those days that the story of the murder was altogether a fiction.
And not even Walpole's show to quite the same degree, that extraordinary power of making anything interesting of entirely transcending the subject which belongs to the letter-writer in probably a greater measure than to any man-of-letters in the other sense, except the poet. The matter which these letters have to chronicle is often the very smallest of small beer.
He found new and fruitful modes of taxation, but when urged to tax the colonies he preferred, as he said, to leave that to a bolder man. It is a pity that anyone was ever found bold enough to do it. Walpole's policy endured for a quarter of a century. He abandoned it only after a bitter struggle in which he was attacked as sacrificing the national honor for the sake of peace.
Again Walpole's policy abroad which really treated warfare as the evil it appears in other men's professions condemned my father, a born soldier, to seek his line in diplomacy; wherein he had no sooner built a reputation by services at two or three of the Italian courts than, with a knighthood in hand and an ambassadorship in prospect, he suddenly abandoned all, cast off the world, and retired into Cornwall, to make a humdrum marriage and practise fishing for trout.
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