Meanwhile some changes were taking place in political affairs at home which were full of importance to the coming time. William Pitt had taken office; not, indeed, an office important enough for his genius, but still one which gave him an opportunity of making his power felt. The King still detested him; all the more, perhaps, because it was now becoming more and more evident that the King would have to reckon with him as Prime-minister before very long. The stately form of Pitt was, indeed, already throwing a gigantic shadow before it. Henry Fox, too, was beginning to show himself an administrator and a debater, and, it may be added, a political intriguer, of all but consummate ability. Murray was beginning to be recognized as a great advocate, and even a great man. Lyttelton was still making brilliant way in politics, but was even yet hovering somewhat uncertain between politics and literature, destined in the end to become another illustration of the career marred for both fields by the effort to work in both fields. On the other hand, Chesterfield had given up office. He had had a dispute with his colleagues when he was strongly in favor of making a peace, and they would not have it, and he left them to go their own way. He refused the title of duke which the King offered him. He withdrew for the remainder of his years to private life, saying: “I have been behind the scenes both of pleasure and business; I have seen all the coarse pulleys and dirty ropes which exhibit and move all the gaudy machines; and I have seen and smelt the tallow candles which illuminate the whole decoration to the astonishment and admiration of the ignorant multitude.” He seldom spoke in Parliament afterwards; he was growing deaf and weary. In 1751 he broke silence, and with success, when he delivered his celebrated speech on the reform of the calendar. He was “coached,” as we should say now, by two able mathematicians, the Earl of Macclesfield and Mr. Bradley. The ignorant portion of the public were greatly excited by what they considered the loss of eleven days, and were strongly opposed to the whole scheme. Years later, when Mr. Bradley was sinking under mortal disease, many people ascribed his sufferings to a judgment from Heaven for having taken part in that “impious undertaking.”

The “impious undertaking” was a very needed scientific reform in the calendar, which had long before been adopted in some other countries. Julius Cæsar was the first great regulator of the calendar; his work in that way was not the least wonderful of his achievements. The calculations of his astronomers, however, were discovered in much later times to be “out” by eleven minutes in each year. When Pope Gregory the Thirteenth came to the throne of the papacy, in 1572, he found that the eleven minutes had grown by mere process of time to eleven days. He started a new reform of the calendar, which was adopted at once in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. It gradually commended itself to France and Germany, and it was adopted by Denmark and Sweden in 1700. England only came into line with the reform of the calendar in 1751. The Act of Parliament which sanctioned the change brought in the use of the words “new style” and “old style.” Only Russia and Greece now of European countries cling to the old style. But the new style, as we have said, was bitterly resented by the mob in England, and every one remembers Hogarth’s picture of the patriot drunk in the gutter with his banner near him bearing the inscription, “Give us back our eleven days.”

Chesterfield laughed at the success of his speech on the reform of the calendar, and made little of it. Perhaps he helped thus to explain the comparative failure of his whole career. Life was to him too much of a gibe and a sarcasm, and life will not be taken on those terms.

Lord Chesterfield was then out of the running, and Lord Granville’s active career had closed. The men of the older school had had their day; the new men had pushed them from their stools. The age of Walpole is closed. The age of Chatham is about to open.

Early in the year 1751 death removed one of the elements of discord from the family circle of George the Second. The end had come for Frederick, Prince of Wales. The long, unnatural struggle was brought very suddenly to a close. On the 12th of March, 1751, the prince, who had been suffering from pleurisy, went to the House of Lords, and caught a chill which brought on a relapse. “Je sens la mort,” he cried out on the 20th of March, and the princess, hearing the cry, ran towards him, and found that he was indeed dead. The general feeling of the country was perhaps not unfairly represented in the famous epigram which became the talk of the town:

“Here lies Fred,
Who was alive and is dead.
Had it been his father,
I had much rather;
Had it been his brother,
Still better than another;
Had it been his sister,
No one would have missed her;
Had it been the whole generation,
Still better for the nation.
But since it is only Fred,
Who was alive and is dead,
There’s no more to be said.”

It is curious to contrast this grim suggestion for an epitaph on the dead prince with the stately volume which the University of Oxford issued from the Clarendon Press: “Epicedia Oxoniensia in obitum celsissimi et desideratissimi Frederici Principis Walliae.” Here an obsequious vice-chancellor displayed all the splendors of a tinsel Latinity in the affectation of offering a despairing king and father such consolations for his loss as the Oxonian Muses might offer. Here Lord Viscount Stormont, in desperate imitation of Milton, did his best to teach

“The mimic Nymph that haunts the winding Verge
And oozy current of Parisian Seine”

to weep for Frederick.

“For well was Fred’rick loved and well deserv’d,
His voice was ever sweet, and on his lips
Attended ever the alluring grace
Of gentle lowliness and social zeal.”

The hind who labored was to weep for him, and the artificer to ply his varied woof in sullen sadness, and the mariner,

“Who many moons
Has counted, beating still the foamy Surge,
And treads at last the wish’d-for beach, shall stand
Appall’d at the sad tale.”

Here all the learned languages, and not the learned languages alone, contributed their syllables of simulated despair. Many scholastic gentlemen mourned in Greek; James Stillingfleet found vent in Hebrew; Mr. Betts concealed his tears under the cloak of the Syriac speech; George Costard sorrowed in Arabic that might have amazed Abu l’Atahiyeh; Mr. Swinton’s learned sock stirred him to Phoenician and Etruscan; and Mr. Evans, full of national fire and the traditions of the bards, delivered himself, and at great length too, in Welsh. The wail of this “Welsh fairy” is the fine flower of this funeral wreath of pedantic and unconscious irony.

Poor Frederick had played a little with literature in his idle time. He had amused himself with letters as he had amused himself with literary men, and sometimes with rallying a bevy of the maids of honor to the bombardment of a pasteboard citadel and a cannonade of sugar-plums. He had written verses; among the rest, a love tribute to his wife, full of rapture and enriched with the most outspoken description of her various charms of person, which, however, he assures us, were nothing to her charms of mind. Probably he was very fond of his wife; we have already said that it is likely he carried on his amours with other women chiefly because he thought it one of the duties of his princely station. Perhaps we may assume that he must have had some good qualities of his own; he certainly got little teaching or example of goodness from most of those who surrounded him in the days when he could yet have been taught.

The new heir to the throne was George, Frederick’s eldest son, who was born in London on June 4, 1738, and was now, therefore, in his thirteenth year. Frederick’s wife had already given birth to eight children, and was expected very soon to bring forth another. George was a seven-months’ child. His health was so miserably delicate that it was believed he could not live. It was doubted at first whether it would be physically possible to rear him; and it would not have been possible if the ordinary Court customs were to be followed. But the infant George was wisely handed over to the charge of a robust and healthy young peasant woman, a gardener’s wife, who took fondest care of him and adored him, and by whose early nursing he lived to be George the Third.

The year 1751, which may be said to have opened with the death of poor Frederick, closed with the death of a man greater by far than any prince of the House of Hanover. On December 12th Bolingbroke passed away. He had settled himself quietly down in his old home at Battersea, and there he died. He had outlived his closest friends and his keenest enemies. The wife the second wife to whom, with all his faults, he had been much devoted was long dead. Pope and Gay, and Arbuthnot, and “Matt” Prior and Swift were dead. Walpole, his great opponent, was dead. All chance of a return to public life had faded years before. New conditions and new men had arisen. He was old was in his seventy-fourth year; there was not much left to him to live for. There had been a good deal of the spirit of the classic philosopher about him the school of Epictetus, not the school of Aristotle or Plato. He was a Georgian Epictetus with a dash of Gallicized grace about him. He made the most out of everything as it came, and probably got some comfort out of disappointment as well as out of success. Life had been for him one long dramatic performance, and he played it out consistently to the end. He had long believed himself a formidable enemy to Christianity at least to revealed religion. He made arrangements by his will for the publication, among other writings, of certain essays which were designed to give Christianity its death-blow, and, having satisfactorily settled that business and disposed in advance of the faith of coming ages, he turned his face to the wall and died.

The reign of George the Second was not a great era of reform; but there was accomplished about this time a measure of reform which we cannot omit to mention. This was the Marriage Act, brought in and passed by Lord Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor, in 1753. The Marriage Act provided that no marriage should be legal in England unless the banns had been put up in the parish church for three successive Sundays previously, or a special license had been obtained from the archbishop, and unless the marriage were celebrated in the parish church. The Bill provided that any clergyman celebrating a marriage without these formalities should be liable to penal servitude for seven years. This piece of legislation put a stop to some of the most shocking and disgraceful abuses in certain classes of English social life. With other abuses went the infamous Fleet marriages marriages performed by broken-down and disreputable clergymen whose headquarters were very commonly the Fleet prison “couple-beggars” who would perform the marriage ceremony between any man and woman without asking questions, sometimes not even asking their names, provided they got a fee for the performance. Men of this class, a scandal to their order, and still more to the system of law which allowed them to flourish, were to be found at almost every pothouse in the populous neighborhoods, ready to ply their trade at any moment. Perhaps a drunken young lad was brought up to be married in a half unconscious state to some elderly prostitute, perhaps some rich young woman was carried off against her will to be married forcibly to some man who wanted her money. The Fleet parson asked no questions, did his work, and pocketed his fee and the marriage was legal. Lord Hardwicke’s Act stopped the business and relegated the Fleet parson to the pages of romance.

Years went on years of quiet at home, save for little ministerial wrangles years of almost uninterrupted war abroad. The peace that was patched up at Aix-la-Chapelle was evidently a peace that could not last that was not meant to last. If no other European power would have broken it, England herself probably would, for the arrangements were believed at home to be very much to her disadvantage, and were highly unpopular. But there was no need for England to begin. The Family Compact was in full force. The Bourbons of France were determined to gain more than they had got; the Bourbons of Spain were eager to recover what they had lost. The genius and daring of Frederick of Prussia were not likely to remain inactive. As we have seen, the war between England and France raged on in India without regard to treaties and truces on the European continent. There was, in fact, a great trial of strength going on, and it had to be fought out. England and France had yet another stage to struggle on as well as Europe and India. They had the continent of North America. There were always some disputes about boundaries going on there; and a dispute concerning a boundary between two States which are mistrustful of one another is like a flickering flame close to a train of gunpowder. The renewal of war on the Continent gave for the first time its full chance to the genius of William Pitt as a great war minister. The breaking out of war in North America established England as the controlling power there, and settled forever the pretensions of France and of Spain. It is not necessary for us in this history to follow the course of the continental wars. The great results of these to England were worked out on other soil.