XXV.

isplaying his curls and his embroidery in Saint James's CHAP. Park on a midsummer evening, after indulging too freely n wine, when a young officer of the Blues named Kirke, 1699. who was as tipsy as himself, passed near him. "There joes Beau Seymour," said Kirke. Seymour flew into a age. Angry words were exchanged between the foolish oys. They immediately went beyond the precincts of the Court, drew, and exchanged some pushes. Seymour was wounded in the neck. The wound was not very serious; but, when his cure was only half completed, he revelled in fruit, ice and Burgundy till he threw himself into a violent fever. Though a coxcomb and a voluptuary, he seems to have had some fine qualities. On the last day of his life he saw Kirke. Kirke implored forgiveness; and the dying man declared that he forgave as he hoped to be forgiven. There can be no doubt that a person who kills another in a duel is, according to law, guilty of murder. But the law had never been strictly enforced against gentlemen in such cases; and in this case there was no peculiar atrocity, no deep seated malice, no suspicion of foul play. Sir Edward, however, vehemently declared that he would have life for life. Much indulgence is due to the resentment of an affectionate father maddened by the loss of a son. But there is but too much reason to believe that the implacability of Seymour was the implacability, not of an affectionate father, but of a factious and malignant agitator. He tried to make what is, in the jargon of our time, called political capital out of the desolation of his house and the blood of his first born. A brawl between two dissolute youths, a brawl distinguished by nothing but its unhappy result from the hundred brawls which took place every month in theatres and taverns, he magnified into an attack on the liberties of the nation, an attempt to introduce a military tyranny. The question

CHAP.

XXV.

1699.

Discontent of the nation.

was whether a soldier was to be permitted to insult
English gentlemen, and, if they murmured, to cut ther
throats? It was moved in the Court of King's Be
that Kirke should either be brought to immediate tri
or admitted to bail. Shower, as counsel for Seymour.
opposed the motion. But Seymour was not content t
leave the case in Shower's hands. In defiance of
decency, he went to Westminster Hall, demanded a
hearing, and pronounced a harangue against standing
armies. Here," he said, "is a man who lives of
money taken out of our pockets. The plea set up for
taxing us in order to support him is that his sword pro-
tects us, and enables us to live in peace and security.
And is he to be suffered to use that sword to destroy
us?"
Kirke was tried and found guilty of man-
slaughter. In his case, as in the case of Spencer Cow-
per, an attempt was made to obtain a writ of appeal.
The attempt failed; and Seymour was disappointed of
his revenge: but he was not left without consolation.
If he had lost a son, he had found, what he seems to
have prized quite as much, a fertile theme for invec
tive.

The King, on his return from the Continent, found
his subjects in no bland humour. All Scotland, exas
perated by the fate of the first expedition to Darien, and
anxiously waiting for news of the second, called loudly
for a Parliament. Several of the Scottish
peers carried
to Kensington an address which was subscribed by
thirty six of their body, and which earnestly pressed
William to convoke the Estates at Edinburgh, and to
redress the wrongs which had been done to the colony
of New Caledonia. A petition to the same effect was
widely circulated among the commonalty of his Northern
kingdom, and received, if report could be trusted, not
less than thirty thousand signatures. Discontent was

far from being as violent in England as in Scotland.
Yet in England there was discontent enough to make
even a resolute prince uneasy. The time drew near
at which the Houses must reassemble; and how were
the Commons to be managed? Montague, enraged,
mortified, and intimidated by the baiting of the last
session, was fully determined not again to appear in
the character of chief minister of finance. The secure
and luxurious retreat which he had, some months ago,
prepared for himself was awaiting him. He took the
Auditorship, and resigned his other places. Smith be-
came Chancellor of the Exchequer. A new commission
of Treasury issued; and the first name was that of
Tankerville. He had entered on his career, more than
twenty years before, with the fairest hopes, young,
noble, nobly allied, of distinguished abilities, of grace-
ful manners. There was no more brilliant man of
fashion in the theatre and in the ring. There was no
more popular tribune in Guildhall. Such was the com-
mencement of a life so miserable that all the indignation
excited by great faults is overpowered by pity. A
guilty passion, amounting to a madness, left on the moral
character of the unhappy man a stain at which even
libertines looked grave. He tried to make the errors of
his private life forgotten by splendid and perilous services
to a public cause; and, having endured in that cause
penury
and exile, the gloom of a dungeon, the prospect
of a scaffold, the ruin of a noble estate, he was so un-
fortunate as to be regarded by the party for which he
had sacrificed everything as a coward, if not a traitor.
Yet,
even against such accumulated disasters and dis-
graces, his vigorous and aspiring mind bore up. His
parts and eloquence gained for him the ear of the House
of Lords; and at length, though not till his constitution
was so broken that he was fitter for flannel and cushions

CHAP.

XXV.

1699.

XXV.

1699.

any

CHAP. than for a laborious office at Whitehall, he was put at the head of one of the most important departments of the administration. It might have been expected that this appointment would call forth clamours from widely different quarters; that the Tories would be offended by the elevation of a rebel; that the Whigs would set up a cry against the captain to whose treachery or faintheartedness they had been in the habit of imputing the rout of Sedgemoor; and that the whole of that great body of Englishmen which cannot be said to be steadily Whig or Tory, but which is zealous for decency and the domestic virtues, would see with indignation a signal mark of royal favour bestowed on one who had been convicted of debauching a noble damsel, the sister of his own wife. But so capricious is public feeling that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to find, in of the letters, essays, dialogues, and poems which bear the date of 1699 or of 1700, a single allusion to the vices or misfortunes of the new First Lord of the Treasury. It is probable that his infirm health and his isolated position were his protection. The chiefs of the opposition did not fear him enough to hate him. The Whig Junto was still their terror and their abhorrence. They continued to assail Montague and Orford, though with somewhat less ferocity than while Montague had the direction of the finances, and Orford of the marine. But the utmost spite of all the leading malecontents was concentrated on one object, the great magistrate who still held the highest civil post in the realm, and who was evidently determined to hold it in defiance of them. It was not so easy to get rid of him as it had been to drive his colleagues from office. His abilities the most intolerant Tories were forced grudgingly to acknowledge. His integrity might be questioned in nameless libels and in coffeehouse tattle, but was certain

to come forth bright and pure from the most severe Parliamentary investigation. Nor was he guilty of those faults of temper and of manner to which, more than to any grave delinquency, the unpopularity of his associates is to be ascribed. He had as little of the insolence and perverseness of Orford as of the petulance and vain-gloriousness of Montague. One of the most severe trials to which the head and heart of man can be put is great and rapid elevation. To that trial both Montague and Somers were put. It was too much for Montague. But Somers was found equal to it. He was the son of a country attorney. At thirty seven he had been sitting in a stuff gown on a back bench in the Court of King's Bench. At forty two he was the first lay dignitary of the realm, and took precedence of the Archbishop of York, and of the Duke of Norfolk. He had risen from a lower point than Montague, had risen as fast as Montague, had risen as high as Montague, and yet had not excited envy such as dogged Montague through a long career. Garreteers, who were never weary of calling the cousin of the Earls of Manchester and Sandwich an upstart, could not, without an unwonted sense of shame, apply those words to the Chancellor, who, without one drop of patrician blood in his veins, had taken his place at the head of the patrician order with the quiet dignity of a man ennobled by nature. His serenity, his modesty, his selfcommand, proof even against the most sudden surprises of passion, his selfrespect, which forced the proudest grandees of the kingdom to respect him, his urbanity, which won the hearts of the youngest lawyers of the Chancery Bar, gained for him many private friends and admirers among the most respectable members of the opposition. But such men as Howe and Seymour hated him implacably: they hated his commanding genius much: they hated

CHAP.

XXV.

1699.