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Sir Robert Peel to Lord Mahon.

MY DEAR LORD MAHON,

Drayton Manor,
Dec. 23, 1833.

You will consider me, from the length of my letter, a very prolix, and, from the tenor of it, a very severe and unsparing critic. Let me, however, propitiate you by the remark, that I would not have written so long a letter to any one for whom I had not the highest respect; and that if I am anxious that you should place the character of Sir Robert Walpole in a less unfavourable light than that in which you appear to have viewed it, it is because I am sensible of the weight and authority which will attach to the judgment of so dispassionate and accomplished an historian. As I sit down to write, I am conscious that from the impression that your views of the character and conduct of Walpole withhold from him his just meed of praise, I shall probably exaggerate his merits; and as I begin by impeaching my own impartiality, I give you every right to reject my testimony.

Ever most faithfully yours,

ROBERT PEEL.

Memorandum by Sir Robert Peel.

It appears to me that your general estimate of the qualities and public services of Walpole is too low; that you have not made sufficient allowance for the

difficulties with which he had to contend; that you have not given him sufficient credit for the complete success with which he surmounted them; and that you have attached too much weight to the accusations which party rancour and disappointment preferred against him.

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To say of Walpole "that there remains, after every allowance, a vast load of guilt upon his memory; that he shocked and exceeded his age in venality; that even when he had no immediate interest to serve, he attempted to lower the tone of public morals,” are weighty charges against his memory, which, being proved, must consign him to execration and contempt, if he had no redeeming virtues save those which you assign to him. There must surely have been something very extraordinary in the character and powers of that man who, being the son of a private gentleman, without any advantage from a distinguished name, or services of illustrious ancestors, was Prime Minister of England amid great public difficulties for a period of twenty years, who mainly by his personal exertions contributed to establish and confirm without severity, without bloodshed, a new and unpopular dynasty,—who tolerated no competitor for power,-was emphatically the Minister of England,-and who seems to have rebuked the genius of every adversary; having had for his adversaries men of the greatest talents and of the highest attainments.

Of what public man can it be said with any assurance of certainty, that, placed in the situation of Walpole, he would in the course of an administration of twenty

years have committed so few errors, and would have left at the close of it the House of Hanover in equal security, and the finances in equal order?—that he would have secured to England more of the blessings of peace, or would have defeated the machinations of internal enemies with less of vindictive severity, or fewer encroachments on the liberty of the subject?

You attribute Walpole's success mainly to corruption. You consider the revival of expiring and almost extinguished corruption to have been the strength, and that it should be the shame, of Walpole. You assume that public men were disposed to be virtuous, and that Walpole set the example, at least was the author and parent, of renewed venality. Now, what is the evidence, where are the proofs of this?

If Walpole did really corrupt the age,-if the foundation of his strength was the systematic misapplication of the public money to the purposes of bribery, or the prostitution of public honours and rewards to the same end, why, when these charges were daily preferred against him for the purpose of inflaming the public mind, why is it that a Select Committee of twenty-one Members-nineteen of them his bitter enemies--appointed after his fall, commissioned to lay a siege to his past life, equal in duration to the siege of Troy, produced no details of bribery,-no specific facts to support the confident allegations of Walpole's powerful and inveterate enemies? It does seem marvellous that if bribery was so systematic, and corruption so shameless and notorious; if elections were unduly influenced to so novel and extraordinary a degree; if fraudulent con

tracts were granted so lavishly; that the specific instances of these misdeeds on the part of a fallen and most unpopular Minister should be so very meagre, and supported by such imperfect proofs.

When one recollects what other Ministers, the predecessors of Walpole, had so recently done; the shameful bribes which had been taken by Cabinet Ministers-by Sunderland, and Aislabie, and Craggs-for the furtherance of the South Sea scheme; and when one reads the Report of that Committee, the bitter enemies of Walpole, their horror at his attempts on the virtue of the Mayor of Weymouth, their indignation that in order to secure a favourable returning officer he had promised the Mayor a place in the Revenue; that he had committed the shocking atrocity of dismissing some Excise officers who voted against the Government candidate, one cannot help smiling at the virtuous rage of these incensed patriots, who seem, like the giants in Rabelais, after having swallowed windmills for their daily fare, to have been choked by a pound of butter.

You say that the knowledge of Walpole was incredibly scanty; and you repeat the story, which appears to rest on the authority of Yorke, the Attorney-General, that in the course of a debate in the House of Commons Walpole heard for the first time of Empson and Dudley.

If this be so, it serves to increase the miracle of the natural powers of Walpole's intellect. But is it credible that he could be so deficient in literature and acquired knowledge? Is it consistent with the known facts respecting him, and the reports of disinterested and

very competent judges? When Steele was threatened with expulsion, and when Addison was commissioned to write the speech that Steele was to make in his own defence, the speech actually delivered by Steele was not the elaborate composition of Addison, but the extemporaneous suggestion of Walpole, who the next day, says Bishop Newton, on the authority of Pulteney, made another speech, as good or better, on the same subject, but totally different from the former, "which particulars are mentioned as illustrious proofs of his uncommon eloquence."

Lord Hardwicke describes him as "a great master of the commercial and political interests of this country; a character which it is not very easy to reconcile with utter ignorance of the main facts of English history. Walpole's speech on the Peerage Bill is the speech of an accomplished scholar. Speaker Onslow mentions it as a speech of as much natural eloquence and genius as had ever been heard within those walls. Onslow repeats the striking passage in it, "that the usual path to the Temple of Honour had been through the Temple of Virtue; but by this Bill it was now to be only through the sepulchre of a dead ancestor;" and adds that in this strain Walpole bore down everything before him.

I have no doubt that in the general tenor of his speeches he accommodated himself to the audience which it was his business to convince. He depreciated to his sons the flowing harangues of Pitt, Lyttelton, and Pulteney; and said to them that when he had answered Sir John Barnard and Lord Polwarth he considered that he had concluded the debate.

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