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OUR PRIME MINISTERS.* Ma. CLIVE BIGHAM has found a gap in our historical records and filled it with a very useful and entertaining book. Curiously enough, up till now there has been no historical work devoted to the remarkable series of men who have held the office of Prime Minister. We have had lives of the Kings of England ; lives of the Queens ; lives of the Lord Chancellors ; lives of the Lord Chief Justices ; lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury; and, as Thackeray tells us, the immortal Timmins actually compiled "Lives of the Sheriffs' Officers," though he lost his MS. in the hurly-burly of " the little dinner " in Lilliput Street !

Mr. Clive Bigham gives us not only amusing sketches, packed with anecdote and quotation, but also supplies well selected and well reproduced portraits of each of the thirty-six men who filled the great and mysterious office with which he deals. Of that tremendous list, there are only three or four men who have been forgotten by the public. Of the rest, it may be truly said that they have left their mark on our history. The founder of the office (if I may be allowed to use the word, in spite of its constitutional and legal inaccuracy—you cannot found what does not in fact exist) was, of course, Sir Robert Walpole. There had been plenty of all-powerful Ministers before his time, but no one before him who discharged what may be called Grand Vizier functions, as does the Prime Minister, under a veil of mystery if not of actual secrecy. Even now the public does not know how the Prime Minister makes his supremacy actual and operative. They merely know that he is supreme. Sir Robert Walpole was succeeded by Lord Wilmington. He is one of the forgotten Prime Ministers, and was the dull, almost impotent successor of Walpole. Indeed, it might be said that Wilmington's Administration was the shade of. Walpole's Cabinet. Walpole, with the aid of Carteret, still controlled public affairs. Even in his ashes lived the wonted fire. But though Wilmington was so nearly a nonentity, Mr. Clive Bigham in his short sketch contrives to make him interesting. Wilmington, like Addington sixty years later, had been Speaker of the House of Commons, and during his Speakership made at least one excellent Ina A member who was being talked down complained to Speaker Compton that he had a right to be heard. " No, sir," said the Speaker, " you have a right to speak, but the House has the right to judge whether it will hear you." He is also alleged to have been the author of the famous remark about the Duke • Prime Ministers of Great Britain. By the lion. Clive Hinhani. London : Tohn Hurray. plej of Newcastle, i.e., " He always lost half an hour in the morning, which he was running after for the rest of the day without being able to overtake it." Horace Walpole, Mr. Bigham reminds us, said that Wilmington was the most solemn, formal man in the world, but a great lover of private debauchery, and Lord Hervey described him as having great application but no talents. " He had vast complaisance for a court without any address ; he was always more concerned for the manner and form in which a thing was to be done than about the propriety or expediency of the thing itself . . . his only pleasures were money and eating ; his only knowledge, forms and precedences ; his only manner, insinuous bows and smiles." Certainly Lord Hervey knew how to draw word-portraits. Yet Wilmington, though he filled for about eighteen months the highest place in the State to which a layman can aspire, stands the shadow of a name. It is inter- esting to note that his great town house stood where the Army and Navy Club is now.

Though not particularly appropriate to the context, Mr. Bigham's account of Wilmington supplies what I confess is to me a new detail as to the Battle of Dettingen—one of the quaintest combats in all history. Into that battle all the military oddities and absurdities of the middle eighteenth century were crowded. George II., then in his sixtieth year, after cursing his sagacious and reasonable horse as " a cowardly brute " because it would not face at close quarters a battery of artillery, led " his brave English," sword in hand, in a sort of chaotic charge. If I remember rightly the said charge was directed against the French cavalry. These not unnaturally turned and fled in horror at so singular a portent. French soldiers, in spite of their élan and brilliant courage, are always liable to be genuinely shocked by our muddled way of conducting battles. Mr. Bigham makes another delightful addition to the scene. He tells us that while the fighting was going on, Carteret drove about the battlefield in a Coach. That is a really glorious touch. Coaches in those days were closed. Landaus had not yet been invented. We must picture, then, a great bewigged head stuck out of the small window with the bullets and cannon balls whizzing by. As it was Carteret's the coach, no doubt, had in it a copy of Horace, or a Greek Play. What an age, and how delightfully inconsequent and spirited !

The next " dud " Prime Minister was the Duke of Devonshire, and after him the Duke of Portland. These great little men had another duke sandwiched between them, the Duke of Grafton. But he, thanks to Junius and Chatham, cannot quite be called a nonentity. The Duke of Devonshire, of whom we get a characteristic portrait by Ramsay, was one of those Magnificos of whom Lord Rosebery was thinking when he said in his Chatham that " in those days an industrious duke could have almost what he chose." Pelham's Administration, it may be remembered, contained five dukes. Horresco referent+. Pelham, indeed, was the only commoner in this glorious strawberry-bed, and he was a duke's brother. Devonshire was a man of strict honour, great courage and unaffected affability. He was also universally regarded as sincere, humane and generous. Plain in his manners, he was, we are told, negligent in his dress. He had " common sense, learning and modesty, with solid rather than showy parts." In fact, he was a typical Cavendish.

It is the glory of that patriotic and estimable house to supply men for the safety, honour and welfare of the British people when and if required. Long may Chatsworth and Hardwicke retain this noble proof of pre-eminence. The Cavendishes, as Pope said, " care nothing but to serve and save the State." Though always thoroughly good Party men, they have never been disliked by their Party opponents. Mr. Bigham's account of the Premier Duke reads exactly like an account of the late Duke of Devonshire. Again, according to Waldegrave, the Duke would not accept the Premiership until the King had given him his word ".that in case he disliked his employment, he should be at full liberty to resign "—a condition just like the things which used to be said about office by the late Duke. Over and again the analogy comes to mind.

When, however, the Cavendish Premier did undertake the job, he did it with zeal and sincerity. Our author quotes the charming letter addressed by him to Legge, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, It was written in 1756. The Duke's Ministry, however, proved short and precarious, and the result was that he held office only for a brief period. Largely because George II. respected and liked him, the Prince of Wales and George III. loathed him. The King's mother, indeed, is said to have nicknamed him the " Prince of the Whigs," which

of course he was. When he went to the Palace to pay his duty to the new Sovereign, the story runs that the King said to a page, " Tell him that I will not see him." The page hesitated, upon which the King added, " Go to him and tell him those very words." Not much is known about the Duke's private life, but Mr. Bigham tells us one interesting detail. It appears that " he did not read the newspapers, but that he went a good deal to the play "—an excellent disposition. He was a friend of Garrick's, and when Lord Chamberlain he used to invoke the great actor-manager's aid as to his duties, which we are told " he treated with considerable humour." Is the Duke of Atholl, we wonder, finding a similar adviser ?

It was this Duke of Devonshire who received from Dr. Johnson perhaps the finest compliment ever paid by a man of letters to a statesman:—" If he had promised you an acorn and none had grown that year in his woods, he would not have contented himself with such an excuse : he would have sent to Denmark for it, so unconditional was he in his word, so high his point of honour." A very good summing-up of Devonshire's character by our author is as follows : " Pitt did not appeal to him as a man, nor Fox as a politician ; the former's views were too ideal—ho wanted power ; the latter's were too material—he wanted place."

The Duke of Portland—who, by the way, was the son of Prior's "noble and lovely Peggy "—was said to have been one of the best educated men in Britain, as well as one of the wealthiest. He spent, however, a terrible amount of money in contested elections, which were really battles royal between the Portland and the Lowther families. "Ultimately he is described as living in Burlington House, in a kind of impecunious splendour. Horace Walpole describes him deliciously : " He has lived in ducal dudgeon with half a dozen toad-eaters, secluded from mankind between the ramparts of Burlington wall, overwhelmed by debts, without visible expense, on £2,000 a year." Portland, it will be remembered, became Prime Minister when Lord North went out of office, broken by the failure of the attempt to suppress the American revolt. His Ministry lasted for only eight months. He was, indeed, little more than a Lepidus in the triumvirate formed with North and Charles James Fox. When the oppo- sition to the India Bill killed the Coalition, he, of course, fell with it. One would not have thought that such a political fiasco could have led to a second term of office. Yet when Lord Grenville's Ministry collapsed in the year 1807, Portland was again offered the Premiership and took it. He was, however, much too old for the work, and not long after a paralytic stroke saved him and the country from an impossible experiment. He was no orator : indeed, it was said of him " he possessed in an eminent degree the talent of silence." Lord Fitzmaurice, in his life of his great ancestor Loth Shelburne, summed up Portland well when he said : " He had the singular distinction of being twice Prime Minister of England, first as the leader of the narrowest section of the Whigs, and afterwards as the chief of the most Tory of all Tory Administrations. Yet he was not the least a popularity-hunter of the Duke of Newcastle type, but a sincere and honourable man."

As my readers have seen, Mr. Clive Bigham is an admirable quoter and recounter, and I for one shall not quarrel with but applaud his habit when he has got a good thing to say of bringing it in, whether in a footnote or in brackets, somehow or other. For example, in his short study of Portland he mentions Dyson, who was a politician of the age—a creature of Bute—and then gives us the following stinging description of the man written by Lord Albemarle :—" He was one of those parasitical persons who serve Governments a little and disgrace them much ; by birth a tailor, by education a Dissenter, and from interest or vanity in his earlier years a Republican." After that I want someone to give us a study of this memorable M.P. What kind of Dissenter was he, we wonder—a Cameronian or a Muggletonian or what ?

Following out my plan of dealing with the " dud " Prime Ministers, rather than with the better-known holders of office, come next to Lord Rockingham. Lord Rockingham is, of course, in one sense not unknown. Burke was his private secretary and embalmed him in a well-known eulogy. Also he very nearly happened to be the last of the Marquises. He was at one time the sole representative of the breed. He was not a man of any distinction. Indeed, I am not sure that his highest claim to fame is not the fact that he bred a horse which beat the immortal Gimcrack. Sir Joshua Reynolds' picture of him

here displayed gives the effect of an eager, intelligent, but slightly irascible bird.

But I do him wrong. At any rate, I cannot help liking him greatly for one thing. During his schoolboy days (he was an Etonian) he did a really sporting thing. While home for the winter holidays in 1745, and only fifteen years of age, he redo off from Wentworth with a single servant to join the Duke of Cuthberland's forces against the Young Pretender. His letter of apology to his mother is a charming piece of boyhood, happily not thrown away. It would have given Stevenson an ecstasy of delight. Like a true boy, when he repents he does it thoroughly. He tells his mother that when he thinks of the concern which " my wild expedition " must have given her and how his whole life " has afforded you only a continued series of affiictiOns, it grieves me excessively that I did not think of the concern I was going to give you and" my father before such an undertaking." The desire of serving his King and country, however, did not, he tells us, give him time to think of the undutifulness of his actions. As his father has been so kind as entirely to forgive his breach of duty, he hopes that his mother will be equally kind. " I hope I may and shall have your forgiveness, which will render me quite happy." By the way, Mr. Bigham gives us a good piece of incidental quotation. The Wentworth family rose so rapidly and so constantly in the peerage that the great Sir Robert Walpole remarked of the Prime Minister's father : " I suppose we shall soon see our friend Mahon in opposition, for he has had no promotion in the peerage for the last fortnight."

Rockingham, though not a great man, certainly held sound views, not only about commerce but about America. He was, we may remind our readers, " twice Prime Minister, but only for short periods." In his second Administration the reduction of expense and the abolition of political " places " were among his first projects. His letter to the King, here quoted, in regard to the abolition of Palace sinecures is so good that one is perhaps inclined to attribute it to Burke. Rockingham died in harness.

Lord Albemarle said of him : " Had George III. possessed common sincerity, Lord Rockingham's effort to preserve the American colonies would probably have been effectual." Junius, speaking of " his mild but determined integrity," has to admit a certain amount of " debility in his virtue."

Burke wrote the epitaph which is engraved beneath his statue in Wentworth Park. One sentence is worth recording : " His virtues were his arts." That is probably the shortest sentence that can be " led off " from the tempestuous torrent of Burke's written and spoken works. In Mr. Spencer Pereeval we reach another " dud " Prime Minister. I will not say that he only became known to history because he perished by the hand of a mad assassin. Mr. Fortescue's admirable apology for Pereeval forbids one to say that. Still, he remains a prime non-conductor of historical sympathy.

The greatest of the " dud " Prime Ministers was, of course, Lord Goderich. He has become almost famous through Dis- raeli's often-quoted words : " It was now that the transient and embarrassed phantom of Lord Goderich crossed the scene." Frederick Robinson Viscount Goderich, afterwards Earl of Ripon, as depicted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, looks what one would expect him to look—weak, mildly handsome, soft, un- distinguished. Though he played so wretched a part as Prime Minister and literally put the extinguisher upon himself, there appears to be no particular reason why he should have failed. He was obviously a good official and well acquainted with the way in which our Parliamentary and Ministerial business is managed. Perhaps, however, it is explained by his nicknames —the " Duke of Bordotradovitch " and the " Duke of Fuss and Bustle." He was specially connected with the Board of Trade.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer he used to be nicknamed " Prosperity Robinson," for he was always prophesying pros- perities which did not materialize. Nobody could exactly tell why he was selected as Prime Minister when Canning died. There is an equally notable lack of explanation as to why he left office. " He was, indeed, hardly a Prime Minister at all," says Mr. Bigham. He used to say himself in this eontext, " On the contrary, quite the reverse."

I have left myself no space to deal with recent Prime Minister/ who, even including Mr. Lloyd George, are described in the book

before me. Also, I can say nothing here upon the exact Consti- tutional position of the Prime Minister and of how recent develop- ments have affected the office. That is a fascinating theme, but it must wait for another time. I must not however, leave

Mr. Bighorn's book without expressing a very real sense of gratitude for his political anthology. His volume is a perfect treasure-house of good things, well and appositely set forth, in regard to the leading statesmen of the last two centuries. The bibliography at the end is a formidable list, but unlike the compilers of some lists of the sort, the author has read and re-read the books he schedules.

If anybody with a sense of history wants a truly delightful piece of historical writing, plenteous without being stodgy, here is his chance. Prime Ministers of Great Britain does not contain