1752.

LORD BUTE.

23

racter, having married in 1736 the only daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an excellent wife and mother, with whom he had quietly resided at his seat of Caen Wood near London, and moderately and prudently, yet not parsimoniously, maintained a large family from a scanty income.* In 1750 he had received an appointment in the household of Prince Frederick, who used frequently to say: "Bute is a fine showy man, and "would make an excellent Ambassador in any Court "where there was no business." But he was little noticed by the public until it was perceived that the widowed Princess honoured him with her highest trust and confidence. So sudden an elevation, in a scandalloving age, produced, as might have been foreseen, rumours by no means favourable to the fame of the Princess. Such rumours in such a case are always easy to circulate, and hard to disprove. Without attaching the slightest weight to them, it must, however, be owned that the abilities of Bute were by no means such as to justify his rapid rise. He had indeed several elegant accomplishments, some taste for literature, and some knowledge of science. But he could gain no reputation either in council or debate. Proud and sensitive in his temper, he was easily elated, and as easily depressed, and ill qualified for the fierce encounters of the political Arena. Like most men flushed by power unexpected and unearned, the people thought him prone to arbitrary measures as apparently the shortest road to his objects. Besides the resentment which such tendencies, real or supposed, commonly create, he had but little skill in conciliating adherents, being at least to his inferiors, cold, reserved, and haughty in his manners. Whatever the subject, whether grave or trifling, he was equally slow and solemn in his tone. Once as he was speaking in the House of Lords, and as the words fell from him one by one, his kinsman, Charles Townshend, who was present, could not forbear exclaiming "Minute Guns!"

The Session of 1753 was distinguished by two im

* See Lady Mary Wortley's letters of July 17. 1748, and July 17.

1758.

† Lord Waldegrave's Memoirs, p. 36.

portant Acts; the first, to permit persons professing the Jewish religion to be naturalized by Parliament; the second, for the better preventing Clandestine Marriages. The first did not pass without some sharp debates, nor without a general ferment in the country. It was urged that such facilities to the Jews would tend to dishonour the Christian faith. to promote the purchase of advowsons by unbelievers, thus leading at length to the downfal of the Church- to deluge the kingdom with usurers, brokers, and beggars-to rob the lower classes of their birth-right by foreign and undue competition with their labour. Nay, more; several persons did not scruple to argue that such an Act was directly to fly in the face of the prophecy which declares that the Jews shall be a scattered people, without country or fixed abode. These expounders of Scripture did not consider, that if such a prediction has really, in the sense in which they understood it, been made in Holy Writ, it is not in the power of any man or any body of men by any act of theirs to falsify it. Still less were they imbued with the sentiment which was nobly expressed by Lyttleton in one of these debates: "He who hates another man for not being 16 a Christian is himself not a Christian." *

The ferment, however, once raised amongst the people, was headlong and unreasoning. "No Jews! No Jews! "No Wooden Shoes!" became a favourite cry—or, as many thought, a weighty argument. Thus, for example, a vote in behalf of this Bill lost Mr. Sydenham all support from his constituents at Exeter. It was in vain that he published a hand-bill denying that he had any predilection for the Jewish doctrines, and pleading, in proof, that he had often travelled on Saturdays.† In the diocese of Norwich the Bishop, having supported the measure, was insulted throughout all his ensuing circuit for confirmation. At Ipswich, especially, the boys followed his Lordship in the streets, calling on him to come and make them Jews, according to the usual Jewish rite; and a paper was affixed to one of the church doors,

*Parl. Hist. vol. xv. p. 130.

Rev. Dr. Birch to the Hon. Philip Yorke. September 29. 1753. Hardwicke Papers.

1753.

THE JEWS' BILL.

25

to state that the next day, being Saturday, his Lordship would confirm the Jews, and on the day following the Christians.* Bishops, in fact, were the especial aim of the popular outcry; a pamphlet of some note in that day goes so far as to assert that "the present set of prelates "is the only one since the time of Christ that would have "countenanced so anti-Christian a measure."† In short, so loud and general were the murmurs against this enactment that the Ministers determined to recede from it. On the very first day of the next Session the Duke of Newcastle brought in a Bill for its repeal, and this Bill was rapidly carried through both Houses.

The Marriage Act was rendered necessary by the uncertainty of the law. Several instances of great hardship and oppression resulting from that uncertainty had lately been disclosed-instances of persons living together as husband and wife for many years, and becoming the parents of a numerous family, until it suddenly appeared, to the father's astonishment, that he had formerly entangled himself with certain forms which amounted to a pre-contract, and which dissolved his subsequent marriage. Such cases could scarcely take place without some imprudence at the least on the part of one or sometimes both the parents; but in the result their innocent offspring became branded with bastardy, and shut out from inheritance. On the other hand, from the facilities of solemnizing a marriage at the spur of the moment, young heirs and heiresses, scarcely grown out of infancy, were often inveigled to unwary and disgraceful matches, which they had to repent, but unavailingly, during the remainder of their lives. To profit by their indiscretion there was ever ready a band of degraded and outcast clergymen, prisoners for debt or for crime, who hovered. about the verge of the Fleet Prison, soliciting customers, and plying like porters for employment. These men were willing to perform the required ceremony, without question, licence, or delay, in cellars or in garrets, in alehouses or in brothels, to the scandal of religion and to

* Rev Dr. Birch to the Hon. Philip. Yorke. June 23. 1753. + "An Answer to the Considerations on the Jews' Bill," October 1753. Ascribed to Mr. Romaine..

the ruin of families. One of these wretches, named Keith, had gained a kind of pre-eminence of infamy. On being told that there was a scheme on foot to stop his lucrative traffic, he declared, with many oaths, that he would still be revenged of the Bishops; that he would

buy a piece of ground and outbury them!*

One of the crying evils of this system having come prominently before the House of Peers on a case of Appeal, Lord Bath moved that the framing of a legislative remedy should be referred to the twelve Judges. The Bill, however, which they brought in proved to be fraught with difficulties and defects. The Lord Chancellor was compelled to remould it, and then with parental fondness adopted the bantling as his own. It enacted that banns for every marriage should be for three successive Sundays published in the parish church—that licences, dispensing with banns, but still requiring the marriage in the parish church, should not be granted to a minor without the consent of the parent or the guardian-that the power of granting special licences to perform the ceremony at any place or any hour should still be reserved to the Archbishop, but guarded from abuse by his discretion, and from frequency by a heavy payment in each case that any marriage solemnized contrary to the provisions of this law should be null and void-and that the person solemnizing it should be liable to transportation for seven years. Lord Hardwicke's Bill (for so it was now termed) passed the House of Peers after a faint opposition from the Duke of Bedford, but in the Commons encountered a more formidable adversary in Mr. Fox, whose zeal in opposing it was quickened, perhaps, by the recollection of his own clandestine marriage with Lady Caroline Lennox, eldest daughter of the Duke of Richmond.† Many others. joined in the outcry without sharing the motive. And, as too often happens in our history, predictions which appear most extravagant after the result were thought most judicious before it. Some members feared lest all the wealth of the country should by constant intermarriages be confined

* Lord Orford's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 295. Keith used to marry on an average 6,000 couples every year (Parl. Hist. vol. xv. p. 19.). † Coxe's Pelham, vol. ii. p. 269.

1753.

THE MARRIAGE ACT.

27

to a small knot of grasping families. Others declared that the checks and delays imposed upon the marriage ceremony would soon tend to its disuse, and that the bulk of the people would have only an illegitimate posterity. Fox went even further; he seems to have dreaded that they would have no posterity at all! "It will endanger," he said, "our very existence, for without a "continual supply of industrious and laborious poor no "nation can long exist, which supply can be got only by promoting marriage among such people.'

66

66

A more lively attack upon the Bill was made in the same debate by Charles Townshend, a young man now first rising into public notice. He was second son of Lord Townshend, a grandson of the Secretary of State under George the First, and a grand-nephew of the Duke of Newcastle. Though at this time but twenty-eight years of age he had already distinguished himself in office at the Board of Trade. "His figure," says Horace Walpole, was tall and advantageous, his action vehe"ment, his voice loud, his laugh louder." In eloquence he gradually rose to a high and, to the period of his untimely end, still growing renown. His application was great, his ambition unbounded. No man had more quickness of wit, or less reserve in displaying it, whether in familiar conversation or public debate. But it was not free from that drawback by which great wit is so commonly attended, a fickleness and unsteadiness of purpose, as rather attracted by the varying gleams upon the surface than held fast by the settled foundations of truth and conviction.

In this debate upon the Marriage Bill Charles Townshend drew a picture, with more humour than discretion, of himself and his own situation, as the younger son of a capricious father, who had already debarred him from one advantageous match. "Are new shackles to be forged," said he, "to keep young men of abilities from rising to a "level with their elder brothers?"-I may remark, in passing, that the Bill proved no such obstruction in the way of Townshend's own career. Only a year afterwards

*Parl. Hist. vol. xv. p. 69.

† Lord Orford's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 296.