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Memoirs of the Life, Works, and Correspondence of Sir William Temple. By the
Right Hon. Thomas Peregrine Courtenay. Two vols. 8vo. London: 1836.
Mr. Courtenay has long been well known to politicians as an industrious and
useful official man, and as an upright and consistent member of Parliament. He
has been one of the most moderate, and, at the same time, one of the least
pliant members of the Conservative party. His conduct has, indeed, on some
questions been so Whiggish, that both those who applauded and those who
condemned it have questioned his claim to be considered as a Tory. But his
Toryism, such as it is, he has held fast through all changes of fortune and
fashion; and he has at last retired from public life, leaving behind him, to the
best of our belief, no personal enemy, and carrying with him the respect and
goodwill of many who strongly dissent from his opinions.
This book, the fruit of Mr. Courtenay's leisure, is introduced by a preface in
which he informs us that the assistance furnished to him from various quarters
"has taught him the superiority of literature to politics for developing the
kindlier feelings, and conducing to an agreeable life." We are truly glad that
Mr. Courtenay is so well satisfied with his new employment, and we heartily
congratulate him on having been driven by events to make an exchange which,
advantageous as it is, few people make while they can avoid it. He has little
reason, in our opinion, to envy any of those who are still engaged in a pursuit
from which, at most, they can only expect that, by relinquishing liberal studies
and social pleasures, by passing nights without sleep and summers without one
glimpse of the beauty of nature, they may attain that laborious, that invidious,
that closely watched slavery which is mocked with the name of power.
The volumes before us are fairly entitled to the praise of diligence, care, good
sense, and impartiality; and these qualities are sufficient to make a book
valuable, but not quite sufficient to make it readable. Mr. Courtenay has not
sufficiently studied the arts of selection and compression. The information with
which he furnishes us, must still, we apprehend, be considered as so much raw
material. To manufacturers it will be highly useful; but it is not yet in such a
form that it can be enjoyed by the idle consumer. To drop metaphor, we are
afraid that this work will be less acceptable to those who read for the sake of
reading, than to those who read in order to write.
We cannot help adding, though we are extremely unwilling to quarrel with Mr.
Courtenay about politics, that the book would not be at all the worse if it
contained fewer snarls against the Whigs of the present day. Not only are these
passages out of place in a historical work, but some of them are intrinsically
such that they would become the editor of a third-rate party newspaper better
than a gentleman of Mr. Courtenay's talents and knowledge. For example, we are
told that, "it is a remarkable circumstance, familiar to those who are
acquainted with history, but suppressed by the new Whigs, that the liberal
politicians of the seventeenth century and the greater part of the eighteenth,
never extended their liberality to the native Irish, or the professors of the
ancient religion." What schoolboy of fourteen is ignorant of this remarkable
circumstance? What Whig, new or old, was ever such an idiot as to think that it
could be suppressed? Really we might as well say that it is a remarkable
circumstance, familiar to people well read in history, but carefully suppressed
by the Clergy of the Established Church, that in the fifteenth century England
was in communion with Rome. We are tempted to make some remarks on another
passage, which seems to be the peroration of a speech intended to have been
spoken against the Reform Bill: but we forbear.
We doubt whether it will be found that the memory of Sir William Temple owes
much to Mr. Courtenay's researches. Temple is one of those men whom the world
has agreed to praise highly without knowing much about them, and who are
therefore more likely to lose than to gain by a close examination. Yet he is not
without fair pretensions to the most honorable place among the statesmen of his
time. A few of them equaled or surpassed him in talents; but they were men of no
good repute for honesty. A few may be named whose patriotism was purer, nobler,
and more disinterested than his; but they were of no eminent ability. Morally,
he was above Shaftesbury; intellectually, he was above Russell.
To say of a man that he occupied a high position in times of misgovernment, of
corruption, of civil and religious faction, that nevertheless he contracted no
great stain and bore no part in any great crime, that he won the esteem of a
profligate Court and of a turbulent people, without being guilty of any
disgraceful subserviency to either, seems to be very high praise; and all this
may with truth be said of Temple.
Yet Temple is not a man to our taste. A temper not naturally good, but under
strict command; a constant regard to decorum; a rare caution in playing that
mixed game of skill and hazard, human life; a disposition to be content with
small and certain winnings rather than to go on doubling the stake; these seem
to us to be the most remarkable features of his character. This sort of
moderation, when united, as in him it was, with very considerable abilities, is,
under ordinary circumstances, scarcely to be distinguished from the highest and
purest integrity, and yet may be perfectly compatible with laxity of principle,
with coldness of heart, and with the most intense selfishness. Temple, we fear,
had not sufficient warmth and elevation of sentiment to deserve the name of a
virtuous man. He did not betray or oppress his country: nay, he rendered
considerable services to her; but he risked nothing for her. No temptation which
either the King or the Opposition could hold out ever induced him to come
forward as the supporter either of arbitrary or of factious measures. But he was
most careful not to give offence by strenuously opposing such measures. He never
put himself prominently before the public eye, except at conjunctures when he
was almost certain to gain, and could not possibly lose, at conjunctures when
the interest of the State, the views of the Court, and the passions of the
multitude, all appeared for an instant to coincide. By judiciously availing
himself of several of these rare moments, he succeeded in establishing a high
character for wisdom and patriotism. When the favorable crisis was passed, he
never risked the reputation which he had won. He avoided the great offices of
State with a caution almost pusillanimous, and confined himself to quiet and
secluded departments of public business, in which he could enjoy moderate but
certain advantages without incurring envy. If the circumstances of the country
became such that it was impossible to take any part in politics without some
danger, he retired to his library and his orchard, and, while the nation groaned
under oppression, or resounded with tumult and with the din of civil arms,
amused himself by writing memoirs and tying up apricots. His political career
bore some resemblance to the military career of Lewis the Fourteenth. Lewis,
lest his royal dignity should be compromised by failure, never repaired to a
siege, till it had been reported to him by the most skilful officers in his
service, that nothing could prevent the fall of the place. When this was
ascertained, the monarch, in his helmet and cuirass, appeared among the tents,
held councils of war, dictated the capitulation, received the keys, and then
returned to Versailles to hear his flatterers repeat that Turenne had been
beaten at Mariendal, that Conde had been forced to raise the siege of Arras, and
that the only warrior whose glory had never been obscured by a single check was
Lewis the Great. Yet Conde and Turenne will always be considered as captains of
a very different order from the invincible Lewis; and we must own that many
statesmen who have committed great faults, appear to us to be deserving of more
esteem than the faultless Temple. For in truth his faultlessness is chiefly to
be ascribed to his extreme dread of all responsibility, to his determination
rather to leave his country in a scrape than to run any chance of being in a
scrape himself. He seems to have been averse from danger; and it must be
admitted that the dangers to which a public man was exposed, in those days of
conflicting tyranny and sedition, were of a most serious kind. He could not bear
discomfort, bodily or mental. His lamentations, when in the course of his
diplomatic journeys he was put a little out of his way, and forced, in the
vulgar phrase, to rough it, are quite amusing. He talks of riding a day or two
on a bad Westphalian road, of sleeping on straw for one night, of traveling in
winter when the snow lay on the ground, as if he had gone on an expedition to
the North Pole or to the source of the Nile. This kind of valetudinarian
effeminacy, this habit of coddling himself, appears in all parts of his conduct.
He loved fame, but not with the love of an exalted and generous mind. He loved
it as an end, not at all as a means; as a personal luxury, not at all as an
instrument of advantage to others. He scraped it together and treasured it up
with a timid and niggardly thrift; and never employed the hoard in any
enterprise, however virtuous and useful, in which there was hazard of losing one
particle. No wonder if such a person did little or nothing which deserves
positive blame. But much more than this may justly be demanded of a man
possessed of such abilities, and placed in such a situation. Had Temple been
brought before Dante's infernal tribunal, he would not have been condemned to
the deeper recesses of the abyss. He would not have been boiled with Dundee in
the crimson pool of Bulicame, or hurled with Danby into the seething pitch of
Malebolge, or congealed with Churchill in the eternal ice of Giudecca; but he
would perhaps have been placed in the dark vestibule next to the shade of that
inglorious pontiff
"Che fece per viltate il gran rifiuto."
Of course a man is not bound to be a politician any more than he is bound to be
a soldier; and there are perfectly honorable ways of quitting both politics and
the military profession. But neither in the one way of life, nor in the other,
is any man entitled to take all the sweet and leave all the sour. A man who
belongs to the army only in time of peace, who appears at reviews in Hyde Park,
escorts the Sovereign with the utmost valor and fidelity to and from the House
of Lords, and retires as soon as he thinks it likely that he may be ordered on
an expedition, is justly thought to have disgraced himself. Some portion of the
censure due to, such a holiday-soldier may justly fall on the mere
holiday-politician, who flinches from his duties as soon as those duties become
difficult and disagreeable, that is to say, as soon as it becomes peculiarly
important that he should resolutely perform them.
But though we are far indeed from considering Temple as a perfect statesman,
though we place him below many statesmen who have committed very great errors,
we cannot deny that, when compared with his contemporaries, he makes a highly
respectable appearance. The reaction which followed the victory of the popular
party over Charles the First, had produced a hurtful effect on the national
character; and this effect was most discernible in the classes and in the places
which had been most strongly excited by the recent revolution. The deterioration
was greater in London than in the country, and was greatest of all in the
courtly and official circles. Almost all that remained of what had been good and
noble in the Cavaliers and Roundheads of 1642, was now to be found in the
middling orders. The principles and feelings which prompted the Grand
Remonstrance were still strong among the sturdy yeomen, and the decent
God-fearing merchants. The spirit of Derby and Capel still glowed in many
sequestered manor-houses; but among those political leaders who, at the time of
the Restoration, were still young or in the vigor of manhood, there was neither
a Southampton nor a Vane, neither a Falkland nor a Hampden. The pure, fervent,
and constant loyalty which, in the preceding reign, had remained unshaken on
fields of disastrous battle, in foreign garrets and cellars, and at the bar of
the High Court of justice, was scarcely to be found among the rising courtiers.
As little, or still less, could the new chiefs of parties lay claim to the great
qualities of the statesmen who had stood at the head of the Long Parliament.
Hampden, Pym, Vane, Cromwell, are discriminated from the ablest politicians of
the succeeding generation, by all the strong lineaments which distinguish the
men who produce revolutions from the men whom revolutions produce. The leader in
a great change, the man who stirs up a reposing community, and overthrows a
deeply-rooted system, may be a very depraved man; but he can scarcely be
destitute of some moral qualities, which extort even from enemies a reluctant
admiration, fixedness of purpose, intensity of will, enthusiasm, which is not
the less fierce or persevering because it is sometimes disguised under the
semblance of composure, and which bears down before it the force of
circumstances and the opposition of reluctant minds. These qualities, variously
combined with all sorts of virtues and vices, may be found, we think, in most of
the authors of great civil and religious movements, in Caesar, in Mahomet, in
Hildebrand, in Dominic, in Luther, in Robespierre; and these qualities were
found, in no scanty measure, among the chiefs of the party which opposed Charles
the First. The character of the men whose minds are formed in the midst of the
confusion which follows a great revolution is generally very different. Heat,
the natural philosophers tell us, produces rarefaction of the air; and
rarefaction of the air produces cold. So zeal makes revolutions; and revolutions
make men zealous for nothing. The politicians of whom we speak, whatever may be
their natural capacity or courage, are almost always characterized by a peculiar
levity, a peculiar inconstancy, an easy, apathetic way of looking at the most
solemn questions, a willingness to leave the direction of their course to
fortune and popular opinion, a notion that one public cause is nearly as good as
another, and a firm conviction that it is much better to be the hireling of the
worst cause than to be a martyr to the best.
This was most strikingly the case with the English statesmen of the generation
which followed the Restoration. They had neither the enthusiasm of the Cavalier
nor the enthusiasm of the Republican. They had been early emancipated from the
dominion of old usages and feelings; yet they had not acquired a strong passion
for innovation. Accustomed to see old establishments shaking, falling, lying in
ruins all around them, accustomed to live under a succession of constitutions of
which the average duration was about a twelvemonth, they had no religious
reverence for prescription, nothing of that frame of mind which naturally
springs from the habitual contemplation of immemorial antiquity and immovable
stability. Accustomed, on the other hand, to see change after change welcomed
with eager hope and ending in disappointment, to see shame and confusion of face
follow the extravagant hopes and predictions of rash and fanatical innovators,
they had learned to look on professions of public spirit, and on schemes of
reform, with distrust and contempt. They sometimes talked the language of
devoted subjects, sometimes that of ardent lovers of their country. But their
secret creed seems to have been, that loyalty was one great delusion and
patriotism another. If they really entertained any predilection for the
monarchical or for the popular part of the constitution, for episcopacy or for
Presbyterianism, that predilection was feeble and languid, and instead of
overcoming, as in the times of their fathers, the dread of exile, confiscation,
and death, was rarely of power to resist the slightest impulse of selfish
ambition or of selfish fear. Such was the texture of the Presbyterianism of
Lauderdale, and of the speculative republicanism of Halifax. The sense of
political honor seemed to be extinct. With the great mass of mankind, the test
of integrity in a public man is consistency. This test, though very defective,
is perhaps the best that any, except very acute or very near observers, are
capable of applying; and does undoubtedly enable the people to form an estimate
of the characters of the great, which on the whole approximates to correctness.
But during the latter part of the seventeenth century, inconsistency had
necessarily ceased to be a disgrace; and a man was no more taunted with it, than
he is taunted with being black at Timbuctoo. Nobody was ashamed of avowing what
was common between him and the whole nation. In the short space of about seven
years, the supreme power had been held by the Long Parliament, by a Council of
Officers, by Barebones' Parliament, by a Council of Officers again, by a
Protector according to the Instrument of Government, by a Protector according to
the Humble Petition and Advice, by the Long Parliament again, by a third Council
of Officers, by the Long Parliament a third time, by the Convention, and by the
King. In such times, consistency is so inconvenient to a man who affects it, and
to all who are connected with him, that it ceases to be regarded as a virtue,
and is considered as impracticable obstinacy and idle scrupulosity. Indeed, in
such times, a good citizen may be bound in duty to serve a succession of
Governments. Blake did so in one profession, and Hale in another; and the
conduct of both has been approved by posterity. But it is clear that when
inconsistency with respect to the most important public questions has ceased to
be a reproach, inconsistency with respect to questions of minor importance is
not likely to be regarded as dishonorable. In a country in which many very
honest people had, within the space of a few months, supported the government of
the Protector, that of the Rump, and that of the King, a man was not likely to
be ashamed of abandoning his party for a place, or of voting for a bill which he
had opposed.
The public men of the times which followed the Restoration were by no means
deficient in courage or ability; and some kinds of talent appear to have been
developed amongst them to a remarkable, we might almost say, to a morbid and
unnatural degree. Neither Theramenes in ancient, nor Talleyrand in modern times,
had a finer perception of all the peculiarities of character, and of all the
indications of coming change, than some of our countrymen in that age. Their
power of reading things of high import, in signs which to others were invisible
or unintelligible, resembled magic. But the curse of Reuben was upon them all:
"Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel."
This character is susceptible of innumerable modifications, according to the
innumerable varieties of intellect and temper in which it may be found. Men of
unquiet minds and violent ambition followed a fearfully eccentric course, darted
wildly from one extreme to another, served and betrayed all parties in turn,
showed their unblushing foreheads alternately in the van of the most corrupt
administrations and of the most factious oppositions, were privy to the most
guilty mysteries, first of the Cabal, and then of the Rye-House Plot, abjured
their religion to win their sovereign's favor while they were secretly planning
his overthrow, shrived themselves to Jesuits, with letters in cipher from the
Prince of Orange in their pockets, corresponded with the Hague whilst in office
under James, and began to correspond with St. Germain's as soon as they had
kissed hands for office under William. But Temple was not one of these. He was
not destitute of ambition. But his was not one of those souls in which
unsatisfied ambition anticipates the tortures of hell, gnaws like the worm which
dieth not, and burns like the fire which is not quenched. His principle was to
make sure of safety and comfort, and to let greatness come if it would. It came:
he enjoyed it: and, in the very first moment in which it could no longer be
enjoyed without danger and vexation, he contentedly let it go. He was not
exempt, we think, from the prevailing political immorality. His mind took the
contagion, but took it ad modum recipientis, in a form so mild that an
undiscerning judge might doubt whether it were indeed the same fierce pestilence
that was raging all around. The malady partook of the constitutional languor of
the patient. The general corruption, mitigated by his calm and unadventurous
temperament, showed itself in omissions and desertions, not in positive crimes;
and his inactivity, though sometimes timorous and selfish, becomes respectable
when compared with the malevolent and perfidious restlessness of Shaftesbury and
Sunderland.
Temple sprang from a family which, though ancient and honorable, had, before his
time, been scarcely mentioned in our history, but which, long after his death,
produced so many eminent men, and formed such distinguished alliances, that it
exercised, in a regular and constitutional manner, an influence in the state
scarcely inferior to that which, in widely different times, and by widely
different arts, the house of Neville attained in England, and that of Douglas in
Scotland. During the latter years of George the Second, and through the whole
reign of George the Third, members of that widely spread and powerful connection
were almost constantly at the head either of the Government or of the
Opposition. There were times when the cousinhood, as it was once nicknamed,
would of itself have furnished almost all the materials necessary for the
construction of an efficient Cabinet. Within the space of fifty years, three
First Lords of the Treasury, three Secretaries of State, two Keepers of the
Privy Seal, and four First Lords of the Admiralty were appointed from among the
sons and grandsons of the Countess Temple.
So splendid have been the fortunes of the main stock of the Temple family,
continued by female succession. William Temple, the first of the line who
attained to any great historical eminence, was of a younger branch. His father,
Sir John Temple, was Master of the Rolls in Ireland, and distinguished himself
among the Privy Councilors of that kingdom by the zeal with which, at the
commencement of the struggle between the Crown and the Long Parliament, he
supported the popular cause. He was arrested by order of the Duke of Ormond, but
regained his liberty by an exchange, repaired to England, and there sate in the
House of Commons as burgess for Chichester. He attached himself to the
Presbyterian party, and was one of those moderate members who, at the close of
the year 1648, voted for treating with Charles on the basis to which that Prince
had himself agreed, and who were, in consequence, turned out of the House, with
small ceremony, by Colonel Pride. Sir John seems, however, to have made his
peace with the victorious Independents; for, in 1653, he resumed his office in
Ireland.
Sir John Temple was married to a sister of the celebrated Henry Hammond, a
learned and pious divine, who took the side of the King with very conspicuous
zeal during the Civil War, and was deprived of his preferment in the church
after the victory of the Parliament. On account of the loss which Hammond
sustained on this occasion, he has the honor of being designated, in the cant of
that new brood of Oxonian sectaries who unite the worst parts of the Jesuit to
the worst parts of the Orangeman, as Hammond, Presbyter, Doctor, and Confessor.
William Temple, Sir John's eldest son, was born in London in the year 1628. He
received his early education under his maternal uncle, was subsequently sent to
school at Bishop-Stortford, and, at seventeen, began to reside at Emmanuel
College, Cambridge, where the celebrated Cudworth was his tutor. The times were
not favorable to study. The Civil War disturbed even the quiet cloisters and
bowling-greens of Cambridge, produced violent revolutions in the government and
discipline of the colleges, and unsettled the minds of the students. Temple
forgot at Emmanuel all the little Greek which he had brought from
Bishop-Stortford, and never retrieved the loss; a circumstance which would
hardly be worth noticing but for the almost incredible fact that, fifty years
later, he was so absurd as to set up his own authority against that of Bentley
on questions of Greek history and philology. He made no proficiency either in
the old philosophy which still lingered in the schools of Cambridge, or in the
new philosophy of which Lord Bacon was the founder. But to the end of his life
he continued to speak of the former with ignorant admiration, and of the latter
with equally ignorant contempt.
After residing at Cambridge two years, he departed without taking a degree, and
set out upon his travels. He seems to have been then a lively, agreeable young
man of fashion, not by any means deeply read, but versed in all the superficial
accomplishments of a gentleman, and acceptable in all polite societies. In
politics he professed himself a Royalist. His opinions on religious subjects
seem to have been such as might be expected from a young man of quick parts, who
had received a rambling education, who had not thought deeply, who had been
disgusted by the morose austerity of the Puritans, and who, surrounded from
childhood by the hubbub of conflicting sects, might easily learn to feel an
impartial contempt for them all.
On his road to France he fell in with the son and daughter of Sir Peter Osborne.
Sir Peter held Guernsey for the King, and the young people were, like their
father, warm for the royal cause. At an inn where they stopped in the Isle of
Wight, the brother amused himself with inscribing on the windows his opinion of
the ruling powers. For this instance of malignancy the whole party were
arrested, and brought before the governor. The sister, trusting to the
tenderness which, even in those troubled times, scarcely any gentleman of any
party ever failed to show where a woman was concerned, took the crime on
herself, and was immediately set at liberty with her fellow-travelers.
This incident, as was natural, made a deep impression on Temple. He was only
twenty. Dorothy Osborne was twenty-one. She is said to have been handsome; and
there remains abundant proof that she possessed an ample share of the dexterity,
the vivacity, and the tenderness of her sex. Temple soon became, in the phrase
of that time, her servant, and she returned his regard. But difficulties, as
great as ever expanded a novel to the fifth volume, opposed their wishes. When
the courtship commenced, the father of the hero was sitting in the Long
Parliament; the father of the heroine was commanding in Guernsey for King
Charles. Even when the war ended, and Sir Peter Osborne returned to his seat at
Chicksands, the prospects of the lovers were scarcely less gloomy. Sir John
Temple had a more advantageous alliance in view for his son. Dorothy Osborne was
in the meantime besieged by as many suitors as were drawn to Belmont by the fame
of Portia. The most distinguished on the list was Henry Cromwell. Destitute of
the capacity, the energy, the magnanimity of his illustrious father, destitute
also of the meek and placid virtues of his elder brother, this young man was
perhaps a more formidable rival in love than either of them would have been.
Mrs. Hutchinson, speaking the sentiments of the grave and aged, describes him as
an "insolent foole," and a "debauched ungodly cavalier." These expressions
probably mean that he was one who, among young and dissipated people, would pass
for a fine gentleman. Dorothy was fond of dogs of larger and more formidable
breed than those which lie on modern hearth-rugs; and Henry Cromwell promised
that the highest functionaries at Dublin should be set to work to procure her a
fine Irish greyhound. She seems to have felt his attentions as very flattering,
though his father was then only Lord-General, and not yet Protector. Love,
however, triumphed over ambition, and the young lady appears never to have
regretted her decision; though, in a letter written just at the time when all
England was ringing with the news of the violent dissolution of the Long
Parliament, she could not refrain from reminding Temple, with pardonable vanity,
"how great she might have been, if she had been so wise as to have taken hold of
the offer of H. C."
Nor was it only the influence of rivals that Temple had to dread. The relations
of his mistress regarded him with personal dislike, and spoke of him as an
unprincipled adventurer, without honor or religion, ready to render service to
any party for the sake of preferment. This is, indeed, a very distorted view of
Temple's character. Yet a character, even in the most distorted view taken of it
by the most angry and prejudiced minds, generally retains something of its
outline. No caricaturist ever represented Mr. Pitt as a Falstaff, or Mr. Fox as
a skeleton; nor did any libeler ever impute parsimony to Sheridan, or profusion
to Marlborough. It must be allowed that the turn of mind which the eulogists of
Temple have dignified with the appellation of philosophical indifference, and
which, however becoming it may be in an old and experienced statesman, has a
somewhat ungraceful appearance in youth, might easily appear shocking to a
family who were ready to fight or to suffer martyrdom for their exiled King and
their persecuted church. The poor girl was exceedingly hurt and irritated by
these imputations on her lover, defended him warmly behind his back, and
addressed to himself some very tender and anxious admonitions, mingled with
assurances of her confidence in his honor and virtue. On one occasion she was
most highly provoked by the way in which one of her brothers spoke of Temple.
"We talked ourselves weary," she says; "he renounced me, and I defied him."
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