tions, and the chief business of factions is, to annoy one another, those men have always most merit with their party, who contribute most to this humour: and to that, as this was designed to affect the tories, must this silly zeal of the whiggs then in parliament be imputed: and it is most certain, that on too many occasions it has been thought, he was the honest whigg-friend to the government, who did most to make the tories enemies to it, which many of them from resentment to the whiggs, and being deprived of power, did but too much incline, and give into. But however distasteful this was to several serious meh among the whiggs, Mr. Walpole enjoyed and encouraged it all, as pursuing his plan of having every body to be deemed a jacobite who was not a profest and known whigg. When he had thus, by the unravelling of this plot, and punishing the principal offenders, established his own credit with the party in general, and as he hoped with his master too, he believed himself to have a fair prospect of establishing his own power, which, as he built upon a whigg-party bottom only, he laboured all he could to unite those to him who had been peculiarly dependant on my lord Sunderland. Some he succeeded with, but not with all, and of them several remained in their employments whom he could not remove, or did not dare to attempt, because of the interest they had with the king, thro' the means of the Germans; and this body of people, small, but of considerable rank, remained his enemies to the time of the king's death, waiting and watching for every opportu nity to ruin him, which, however, it is most undoubted they could not have done, without ruining at the same time, the whigg cause and party. But they thought otherwise; and now began something of the whigg opposition to his power, which grew afterwards to be so troublesome and formidable to him. It was at first made up chiefly of such of my lord Sunderland's creatures as he could not attach to him; but it had very soon the addition of some others from various motives and views. Since that opposition to him makes so great part of his history, and from whence so much of his character arises, it will not be improper for the better illustration of that, to give you some description of the persons who undertook, or had the principal management of it. He who first endeavoured to form this opposition into a system, or regular method of proceeding, with a view only to ruin Mr. Walpole, and for that purpose to unite people of every character and principle, and in which he took the most indefatigable pains, was Mr. Daniel Poulteney,* in all other respects almost, a very worthy man, very knowing, and laborious in business, especially in foreign affairs, of strong, but not lively parts, a clear and weighty speaker, grace in his deportment, and of great virtue and decorum in his private life, generous and friendly. But, with all this, of most implacable hatred where he did hate, violent, keen, and most bitter in his resentments, gave up all pleasures and comforts, and every other consideration to his anger, and fell at last a martyr to it in his quarrel with Mr. Walpole; for his not succeeding in it prey'd upon his spirits, which, and with his living much with the lord Bolingbroke (as an enemy to Mr. Walpole) threw him into an irregularity of drinking that occasioned his death, to the great loss and regret of those * Daniel Pulteney was envoy at Copenhagen during the reign of queen Anne, a commissioner of trade in 1717, and a lord of the admiralty in 1721. He came first into parliament in 1721, on the death of secretary Craggs. He married Margaret Deering, daughter of Benjamin Tichbourne, brother to Henry viscount Tichbourne. Daniel died in 1731, leaving three daughters, two of whom died unmarried, the third, by failure of the male issue in William and Harry Pulteney, became heiress at law to their large fortunes. She married Mr. Johnstone, son of sir James Johnstone, bart. now sir William Pulteney, and by him left an only daughter Henrietta Laura, the present lady Bath. See the genealogical table in the note to the 39th chapter. who were now joyned with him, to whom he was a sort of magazine for all the materials necessary to the work he principally had engaged them in. This animosity to Mr. Walpole arose from his intimacy with my lord Sunderland, to whom he was brotherin-law, by having married the sister of my lord Sunderland's last wife. He was in the depth of all that lord's political secrets, as far at least as he trusted any body, and was designed by him to be secretary of state in the scheme he formed of a new administration, if he had lived long enough to have once more overset Mr. Walpole and my lord Townshend. But my lord Sunderland's death putting an end to the other's hopes, so sower'd his mind, that from the moment of his disappointment, I verily believe, he scarcely thought of any thing else, but to revenge it in an opposition to him who had been the chief opponent of his friend and patron. This was at first carried on in whispers and insinuations, and raising private prejudices against Mr. Walpole; for he still continued one of the commissioners of the admiralty, and so still voted with the administration; but resigning that office, which he had great joy in being disentangled from, that he might, as he soon did, act openly and without reserve against the ministry in every thing; and was the person chiefly who settled his kinsman Mr. Poulteney (afterwards earl of Bath) in this opposition, tho' they little agreed, or indeed conversed with one another before, nay rather personally disliked one another, even to the last, and they were in truth, of very different characters. Whatever suspicions Mr. Daniel Poulteney might lie under of entering into some dark and dangerous designs against the government itself, it is most certain the other had never any thoughts that led to jacobitism; * The insinuation hinted at by speaker Onslow, that Daniel Pulteney was engaged in designs contrary to the protestant succession, seems to have been urged without sufficient foundation. and if there was any thing relating to the publick, that he was constant to, it was his fears of the pretender, his abhorrence to that cause, and his attachment to the king and his family. And it was from this, and not a little too, because of his great fortune, which might be at stake, that he had often some checks of conscience, and very melancholy apprehensions, least his violence against the administration of sir Robert Walpole, and joining for that purpose with those supposed to be the enemies to the government, might not weaken the foundations of it, and give too much advantage to them who were thought to mean its destruction. He was, without dispute, a person of very eminent endowments, rather natural than acquired, altho' not without the last, but with a mixture of such natural defects and weaknesses too, that no time, I believe, can produce an instance of a man of so variable and uncertain a mind, who knew not that he was so, and never designed to be so. I am persuaded he thought his life was one continued scene of uniformity in principles and actings; and as those who knew him best, wondered at the popularity he once had, so he who knew himself least, wondered as much that he ever lost it. He had indeed the most popular parts for public speaking, that I ever knew; animating every subject of popularity, with the spirit and fire that the orators of the ancient commonwealths govern'd the people by; was as classical and as elegant in the speeches he did not prepare as they were in their most studied compositions, mingling wit and pleasantry, and the application even of little stories so properly to affect his hearers, that he would overset the best argumentation in the world, and win people to his side, often against their own convictions, by making ridiculous that truth they were influenced by before, and making some men to be afraid and ashamed of being thought within the virulence of some bitter expression of his, or within the laugh that generally went thro' the town at any memorable stroke of his wit. And, altho' this never got him a majority in the house of commons, yet he usually had the occasional hearers that were there; and to that audience he generally spoke, and by them established his general fame, as long, I mean, as his talents were employed against ministers, courtiers, power, and corruption. He certainly hurt sir Robert more than any of those who oppos'd him. What his motives were to this opposition, and what happened to him afterwards, I leave to other accounts of him, which are various. He was undoubtedly a very extraordinary person; and in his private life free from common vices, with a sense of religion even to devotion. Another person who acted a very considerable part in this opposition, was sir William Wyndham,* as a Sir William Wyndham was descended † from an ancient family of that name, which seems to have taken its surname from Wymondham, or Wyndham in Norfolk, and which afterwards settled at Felbrigge in the same county. By the marriage of sir John Wyndham in the reign of Edward the sixth, with the daughter of John Sydenham of Orchard, the elder line was established at Orchard, hence called Orchard Wyndham, in the county of Somerset. Sir Wm. Wyndham, the person under consideration, was lineally descended from this line. He was born in 1686, and on the death of his father sir Edward, succeeded to the title of baronet, to a very considerable estate, and to the distinction and influence which his family had possessed in the western counties of England. He increased his consequence by espousing in 1708, lady Catherine Seymour, second daughter of Charles, duke of Somerset. Born of a tory family, and imbued from his early infancy with notions of divine and indefeasible right, he was adverse to the interruption of the lineal descent, and uniformly opposed the establishment of the succession in the house of Brunswick. In the reign of queen Anne, he was brought forwards into public employment at a very early age by his friend Bolingbroke, with whom he lived in habits of the strictest intimacy, and by whose brilliant talents he was seduced into similar excesses of pleasure and gallantry. Under the administration of Harley, he was made successively master of the buck hounds, VOL. I. + Collins, Edmonson's Baronegium, Ꮓ |