WALPOLE, SIR Robert, Earl of Orford, was born at Houghton in Norfolk, September 6th, 1674, and was educated on the foundation at Eton school. Thence he was elected to King’s College in Cambridge; but on the death of his elder brother, he resigned his scholarship. He was elected member for Castle-Rising, and represented that borough in the two short parliaments assembled during the last two years of William’s reign. In 1702 he was elected for King’s Lynn, and represented that borough in several succeeding parliaments. In 1705, he was nominated one of the council to Prince George of Denmark, lord high admiral of England; in 1707, was appointed secretary at war; and in 1709, treasurer of the navy. In 1710, upon the change of the ministry, he was removed from all his posts, and held no place during the remainder of the queen’s reign. In 1711 he was expelled from the House of Commons for what they called notorious corruption in his office as secretary at. war. The borough of Lynn however re-elected him in 1714; and though the house declared the election void, yet they persisted in the choice. In the well-known debate relating to Steele for publishing the Crisis, he greatly distinguished himself in behalf of liberty, and added to the popularity which he had previously acquired.

On the death of the queen, a revolution of politics took place, and the Whig party prevailed both at court and in the senate. Walpole had before recommended himself to the house of Hanover, by his zeal for its cause, when the commons considered the state of the nation with regard to the Protestant succession; and it is not surprising that his promotion soon took place after the king’s arrival. In a few days he was appointed receiver and paymaster-general of all the guards and garrisons, and of all the other land forces in Great Britain, paymaster of the royal hospital at Chelsea, and likewise a privy counsellor. On the opening of a new parliament, a committee of secrecy was chosen to inquire into the conduct of the late ministry, of which Walpole was appointed chairman; and, by his management, articles of impeachment were read against the earl of Oxford, Lord Bolingbroke, the duke of Ormond, and the earl of Strafford. The eminent service which he was thought to have rendered the crown, by the vigorous prosecution of those ministers who were deemed the chief instruments of the peace, was soon rewarded by the extraordinary promotions to the offices of first commissioner of the treasury, and chancellor and under treasurer of the exchequer.

In two years time he resigned all his offices, on account of a misunderstanding which took place between him and the rest of the ministry about certain supplies demanded for the support of his majesty’s German dominions. On the day of his resignation he brought in the famous sinking-fund bill, which he presented as a country gentleman, saying that he hoped it would not fare the worse for having two fathers; and that his successor Mr Stanhope would [7:21:728]bring it to perfection. His calling himself the father of a project, which has since been so often employed to other purposes than were at first declared, gave his enemies frequent opportunity for satire and ridicule; and it has been sarcastically observed, that the father of this fund appeared in a very bad light when viewed in the capacity of a nurse. In the next session of parliament, Walpole opposed the ministry in every thing; and even Wyndham or Shippen did not exceed him in patriotism. Upon a motion in the house for continuing the army, he made a speech of above an hour long, and displayed the danger of a standing army in a free country, with all the powers of eloquence. Early in 1720 the rigour of the patriot began to soften, and the complaisance of the courtier to appear; and he was again appointed paymaster of the forces, and several of his friends were found soon after in the list of promotions. No doubt now remained of his entire conversion to court-measures; for before the end of the year, we find him pleading as strongly for the forces required by the war-office as he had before declaimed against them, even though at this time the same pretences for keeping them on foot did not exist.

It was not long before he acquired full ministerial power, being appointed first lord commissioner of the treasury, and chancellor of the exchequer; and when the king went abroad in 1723, he was nominated one of the lords justices for the administration of government, and was sworn sole secretary of state. About this time he received another distinguished mark of the royal favour; his eldest son, then on his travels, being created a peer, by the title of Baron Walpole of Walpole. In 1725 he was made knight of the Bath, and the year after knight of the Garter. The measures of his administration, during the long time he remained prime or rather sole minister, have been often canvassed with all the severity of critical inquiry. It is difficult to discern the truth through the exaggerations and misrepresentations of party. He has indeed been accused of employing the sinking fund for the purposes of corruption, of which it was long the fashion to call him the father; but the man who reflects on the transactions of Charles II. and his infamous cabal, will acquit him of the latter part of this charge. He was an enemy to war, and the friend of commerce; and because he did not resent some petty insults of the court of Spain so suddenly as the fiery part of the nation thought he should have done, a formidable opposition was formed against him in the house, which had influence enough to employ in its cause almost all the wit of the nation. Pulteney and Pitt were the great leaders of the party in the House of Commons; while Bolingbroke, and Pope, and Johnson, and almost every man of genius, exerted themselves without doors to enlighten, by pamphlets in prose and verse, the minds of the people, and show the necessity of a Spanish war. This he strenuously opposed, because he knew that the foreign settlements of that power are very remote, and in a climate destructive to Englishmen; and that such of them as we might be able to take, we could not possibly retain. The opposition however prevailed. The nation was indulged in a war. of which it surely had no cause to boast of the success; and it is now universally known, that the greater part of those who with honest intentions had, either in parliament or out of it, been engaged to run down the minister, lived to repent of their conduct, and do justice to the man whom they had so pertinaciously vilified.

In order to encourage commerce and improve the revenue, Walpole projected a scheme for an extension of the excise, as the only means of putting a stop to the frauds of merchants and illicit traders. This was another ground of clamour to the orators within and the wits without doors; and while the opposition represented it as a measure big with public mischief, Swift and Pope occasionally alluded to it as an oppression calculated to deprive private life of all its comforts. The minister was therefore obliged to abandon the scheme; but in a succeeding administration it was partly carried into execution, at the express solicitation of the principal persons concerned in that article of trade which it was suggested would be most affected by it; and afterwards the most popular minister that ever directed the councils of this country declared in full senate, that if a time should ever arrive which was likely to render the project feasible, he would himself recommend an extension of the excise laws, as a measure of the greatest advantage to commerce, to the revenue, and to the general interests of the kingdom.

In 1742 the opposition prevailed; and Walpole, being no longer able to carry a majority in the House of Commons, resigned all his places, and fled for shelter behind the throne. He was soon afterwards created earl of Orford; and the king, in consideration of his long and faithful services, granted him a pension of L.4000 per annum. The remainder of his life he spent in tranquillity and retirement, and died in 1745, in the 71st year of his age.^[1. Coxe’s Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford. Lond. 1798, 3 vols. 4to. An admirable view of the character and policy of thia illustrious statesman will be found in the Edinburgh Review, No. cxliii. ]

He wrote the following pamphlets. 1. The Sovereign’s Answer to the Gloucestershire Address. The sovereign meant Charles duke of Somerset, so nicknamed by the Whigs. 2. Answer to the Representation of the House of Lords on the State of the Navy, 1709. 3. The Debts of the Nation stated and considered, in four Papers, 1710. 4. The thirty-five Millions accounted for, 1710. 5. A

Letter from a Foreign Minister in England to Monsieur Petteeum, 1710. 6. Four Letters to a Friend in Scot land upon Sacheverell’s Trial; falsely attributed in the General Dictionary to Mr Maynwaring. 7. A short History of the Parliament. It is an account of the last session of the queen. 8. The South Sea Scheme considered. 9. A pamphlet against the Peerage Bill, 1719. 10. The

Report of the Secret Committee, June 9th, 1715.

Walpole, Horace, the third son of Sir Robert, was born in 1717, became fourth earl of Orford in 1791, and died on the 2d of March 1797, in the eightieth year of his age.

After having been educated at Eton and Cambridge, Horace Walpole passed two years on the continent, the greater part of the time being devoted to Italy, where he acquired that taste for art which afterwards furnished the main employment of his life. In the autumn of 1741, he returned to England; and he took his seat in the parliament which, meeting in the end of that year, drove his father from power before the close of its first session. He continued to be a member of the House of Commons for twenty-six years, retiring at the age of fifty-one. His political career was by no means distinguished. We do not hear of his having delivered more than three speeches in all, and of these the two that have been preserved exhibit no great talent for oratory. For political business he possessed neither industry nor ambition; and the character in which he appeared throughout was little more than that of a spectator, who took greater pleasure in watching the acts of others, and recording his own impressions in regard to them, than in endeavouring himself to act either for his own benefit or for that of others.

As an observer of public men, however, he never allowed his attention to flag; and his observations were most diligently set down in a multifarious correspondence with friends, and, for a part of his life, in political memoirs, avowedly intended for publication when the writer and his contemporaries should have quitted the scene. Politics, however, like all things else, were for Horace Walpole nothing[7:21:729] more than an amusement. Literature, art, and antiquities ministered by turns to the same end, although all these pursuits were followed in the same careless and Epicurean spirit. But his pen never lay long idle; few themes that demanded but little study for their treatment proved alien to it; and among his works there gradually accumulated, not only an immense mass of letters, as evidently calculated for publication as any thing else he ever wrote, but specimens of his aptitude for the composition of novels, of dramas serious and comic, of political tracts and satires, of grave historical disquisitions, of memoirs for the history of English art and of English aristocratic literature, and of those light verses which may be written by gentlemen having but slender pretensions to the name of poets.

Walpole’s circumstances however allowed him to indulge, in a more dignified fashion, his taste for art and literature. One who was ashamed of writing plays and poems, had no need to be ashamed of collecting books and antiques, or of building baronial castles, and designing romantic gardens. Although Sir Robert Walpole himself left his affairs exceedingly embarrassed, he had carefully provided for the younger branches of his family by grants of public posts. Several sinecure offices conferred on Horace made up his income, during the greater part of his life, to L.4000 at least, or perhaps considerably more. To a bachelor, sufficiently methodical and cautious in money-matters, a sum like this offered no inconsiderable facilities for the indulgence of one or two expensive tastes. Walpole began to collect a few antiques while in Italy; but his passion for collecting did not arrive at its height till much later. In 1747, when he was thirty years old, he purchased a cottage and piece of ground at one end of the village of Twickenham. Subsequent purchases increased the domain to an extent of several acres, the whole of which was laid out as pleasure-grounds; and the “little plaything house,” incessantly altered and enlarged, grew at length into the Gothic castle of Strawberry Hill. Its owner’s taste had received, partly perhaps from his friend Gray, an early direction towards this style of architecture, as well as to the branches of antiquarian study connected with it.

In the erection and decoration of his mansion, in desultory study and composition, in the enjoyments of society which embraced many of the aristocracy, and a very few of the literary men of the country, and in several excursions to Paris, which introduced him to the philosophical precursors of the revolution,—in employments such as these, varied only by his retirement from parliament, passed the life of Horace Walpole, till he had attained his seventy-fourth year. The death of his unfortunate nephew then gave him his father’s earldom, an honour unaccompanied by any substantial accession of fortune. He had for many years been a victim of gout, and the short remainder of his life was spent in utter helplessness of body. But the mind was unshaken to the last.

The works in which Walpole exhibits most characteristically all his qualities of mind, both moral and intellectual, are his Letters, especially those in which the politics of the country are the matters chiefly handled. Accordingly his correspondence with Sir Horace Mann (which was prudently suppressed till the present generation) may be most advantageously studied as a likeness of the writer; and to this interesting series other sets of letters, such as those to the Conways, and even the posthumous Memoirs, may be regarded as little else than supplementary. The dissection of motives, which is the task undertaken with the greatest readiness, is that which is performed least satisfactorily. The analysis of the springs of action is often evidently just; but as often it is clearly performed by one who was incapable alike of believing that men whom he disliked could act patriotically or nobly, and of even conceiving that any party or any individual could be actuated by motives of a higher class than those by which, unconsciously in part, he himself was led. The selfishness of Strawberry Hill, though not its refinement, was indeed a fair enough measure by which to estimate such statesmen as the Pelhams: but both the selfish indolence and the confined though acute intellect were utterly alien to the mind of Pitt, and utterly incapable of estimating him and the few other spirits which in that age of intrigue and detail possessed real strength and elevation. Akin to this temper of universal censoriousness, and indeed springing from the same source, is another distinctive peculiarity of all Walpole’s political sketches; namely, his incapacity for determining the relative importance either of principles or actions. An intrigue which substitutes in the ministry a Holdernesse for a Pelham, possesses in his eyes equal consequence with the agitation which decides whether the foreign policy of the nation is to be swayed by strength and patriotism or by weakness and corruption—hy William Pitt, or by the creatures who, during the greater part of his life, thwarted and crippled his exertions. Nay, the politics of the day themselves appear, in Walpole’s eyes, as standing on the same level with the amusements, the family history, the debauchery of the fashionable world: Lady Orford is satirized in the same breath with the Chancellor Hardwicke, and the king of Prussia is not less a theme of merriment than “Prince Pigwiggin" or the duchess of Kingston.

These very qualities, which at once bear unfavourable witness to the state of the writer’s mind, and diminish the value of the writings as historical documents, do nevertheless give a peculiar attraction to them as literary compositions of a certain class. The class is not a high one, but in it the best parts of this Correspondence occupy the very foremost place. The Letters are inimitable pictures of society and of human character, drawn by the hand of one who was a master in the delineation of scenes from familiar life; not, it is true, inspiring his figures with poetic truth or serious significance, but shedding over all of them a gaily comic light. They are a kind of satires, and few compositions claiming that name are equal to them in lively wit, in striking grasp of character, in picturesque colouring of incidents, and in apposite, epigrammatic, vigorous language. They have been criticised at great length, and with consummate talent, in the Edinburgh Review, vol. lviii.