LORD PETERBOROUGH.*
Mx. STEBBING has done the very best he could for the " famous," the " great " Lord Peterborough. He has stated
the oase as it appeared to him, and on the whole fairly, often eloquently, and has deliberately left his readers to form their own opinion. It is not a eulogistic sketch, being shaded with many qualifications ; but the author has a sneaking kindness for a hero who, whatever he might or might not have been, was never dull. The difficulty is, that no one can say what he was, or tell exactly what he did. The opening sentences of the book tell us that for sixty years he was " an enigma to his contemporaries," and that he has remained so for a century and a half since. And the reason is plain.
Nearly every step in his agitated career is a subject of con- troversy, not the least of the burning questions being those connected with the few months of his military and naval life. All he did, or is supposed to have done, came to nothing, and the impression produced by the contemplation of his conduct from beginning to end is, that he was a man of talent who missed being a man of genius because he had little principle and less judgment. "A person of great talents, but dashed with something restless and capricious, and a sort of person which [sic] may give good advice which wise men may reasonably refuse to follow," is Mr. Stebbing's quotation from Swift. " There," the author adds, " we have his character and the whole moral of his career." Restless he was, and in that respect pre-eminently a Man of Action. On his return from
the Continent, over which he had impetuously wandered, he boasted that he had seen more Kings-and postillions than any one else in Europe. " He can go to any climate," says his
friend Pope, " but can never stay in any." " I remember," says Horace Walpole, " when I was a boy, hearing that it had been a great joke in Queen Anne's war, that Lord Peterborough was galloping about inquiring for his army." The joke was a travesty of his excessive mobility. All his life, he lacked bodily and mental repose. " His mind changes so often," wrote Marlborough, " that there is not much weight to be laid on his motions." He would send forward a courier to announce his coming, and then hurried on before his harbinger. He was swift, vehement, versatile, and never trustworthy. The last thing anybody would dare to say of him was that he had a faculty for business. He could dictate to nine secretaries, we are told, but he could not do the hard and constant work necessary to success. He was flighty, and laboured incessantly at something, but if he sweated in forging links, he could never make a chain. He was one of those rare beings who seem never to grow old, and who are always delighted with their own actions, and complacently satisfied that what- ever they did was the right thing to do. With his sharp tongue, prolific invention, talent for intrigue, and audacity, it is not wonderful that such a Proteus should be admired as well as feared when alive, and made a hero of romance when
he was dead. He is a capital subject for delineation. By picking and choosing, he can be made to appear everything—
but a saint. In a brilliant passage setting out some of the problems of a career in which, according to Peterborough's complaint, " whenever he was fool enough to take pains, be had always met with some will able to undo his labours," Mr. Stebbing says :—
" There are men who enter the region of legend while they are yet living, and he (Peterborough) was one of them. Acts and intentions, as they issued from the red-hot cauldron of his career, or of his fancy, turned into vapour. The world has long made up its mind that all connected with him must be licensed as romance, and nobody has ever dared or cared to treat him and his achieve- ments as entirely serious. He has been measured by a special standard applicable to heroes of historical novels. There has been no alternative ; for his biography was, and remains, sown through- out with debateable performances and detestable motives. Pos- terity and his contemporaries have been equally at a loss to decide which of a hundred circumstantial particulars told of him are facts and which are fictions. Was he a profligate of the dye of Rochester and Buckingham, or a kind and faithful husband ? Did he forge the letters to M. Coutenay ? Did he perjure himself at Fenwick's trial ? Was his object to tear a veil from the eyes of his deceived Sovereign, or to trip up inconvenient rivals ? Did he conceive the capture of Monjuich, or, cuckoo-like, steal into a manoeuvre another had devised ? Did he play the game of war with chessmen or with dice Was he a greedy peculator, or did he fight his country's battles half at his own cost ? Was he the conqueror of Valencia, or did others do the work and he wear the laurels ? Did he lie to Mahoni, or did he lie when he said he lied ? Did he or Leake relieve Barcelona by sea ? Did he or Cifuentes • Peterborough. By William Stebbing. "English Men of Action" Series. London : Macmillan and Co. and Prince Henry guard it by land and rout the besiegers ? Did he, or did he not, provide for King Charles a safe and short road to Madrid, with a certain crown at its end ? Were the Campilio tragedy and his vengeance inventions ? Were the Charing Cross Canary, the fair lady of Huete, the truant nuns of Valencia, the bevies of adoring dames, Parisians, Spaniards, Venetians, all creatures of imagination ? Was he ever robbed by a highway- man ? Did he scatter five guineas among a mob ? Did he chase a dancing master through the Strand at the point of a drawn sword ? Was he pillaged by Voltaire, and would he have retaliated by quenching the light of eighteenth-century scepti- cism ? Did he officiate as cook at his own dinner-parties ? Did he wed Anastasia Robinson first in 1722 or in 1735 ? Was he ever in love with Mrs. Howard ? What was Galway's, Swift's, Pope's, St. John's, Harley's, his two wives' sincere opinion of him, and his own of himself ?"
The mere enumeration of these questions by a biographer who has loyally tried to be impartial, justifies him in saying that " Peterborough will continue, as statesman, soldier, courtier, lover, to occupy his old place on the borderland of
fable." That bewildering uncertainty is the source of attrac- tion to some and repulsion to others. But despite the uncertainty which has gathered like a cloud over his erratic career, it is plain enough that Lord Peterborough lived mainly to work the will and gratify the passions of Lord Peter- borough, alike in love, such as it was, in politics, and in war.
A man of that stamp, so vivacious and so gifted, was one who had to be reckoned with, employed, rewarded, or sequestered if possible ; so that, as no one could trust him, his incalculable course might produce a minimum of mischief to his colleagues as well as to the commonweal. Mr. Stebbing calls him an "accomplished egotist," and the phrase is just. His notion of public and private duty was to please himself, and he con- cealed his marriage with Anastasia Robinson until he wanted her as a nurse, in the wilful spirit of having his own way, just as he wore boots in the pump-room at Bath, and did his own.
marketing. " It is a comical sight," writes Lady Hervey, in a passage quoted by Mr. Stebbing, "to see him with his blue ribbon and star, and a cabbage under each arm, or a chicken in his hand, which, after be himself has purchased at market, he carries home for his dinner." He flouted the etiquette and the habits of his order, just as he paid little attention to his in- structions as an official, and as a non-official tried to negotiate without any commission at all. No wonder he was regarded as eccentric and dangerous, nor that a steady politician like Godolphin should have been horrified to get a letter from " my Lord Peterborough from Barcelona, full of extraordinary flights and artificial turns." The words epitomise the greater part of his life. It must be said of him, however, that though a poor Peer, he was not avaricions,—that fame and power were his idols, not money ; and it is something in his favour that he took Berkeley for his chaplain, and that he was the friend
of Locke as well as of ,Swift and Pope. After all, we come back to the point that his character, as described, is an enigma,
and that Mr. Stebbing has very ably described the astonishing personage the elements of whose being were unkindly, and in no wise " kindly, mixed," and whose chief merit, perhaps, is that he has been a source of entertainment, and has given occasion for much splendid rhetoric, some of which may be found in this little volume.
Lord Peterborough was such a lively gentleman that he would probably have been famous, or at least conspicuous, if he had not been sent to the Peninsula ; still, it is the glamour thrown around his " campaigns " that has made him seductive to the lovers of romantic heroes. But what is the value of his military exploits and ideas of warfare ? Admitting all that is claimed for him on the score of the former, it does not come to much. Strictly considered, he can never be got beyond the limits of the dashing partisan. Scores of officers could be found who have done more and done better even in that line ; and nobody, we suppose, would ever think of comparing him with dashing leaders like John de Werth or Rupert, still less with soldiers like Henri de Rohan andTorstenson, or the British and French in the Peninsular campaigns. Barcelona would not have been taken had his ideas been adopted, nor relieved when besieged by Tease ; but granting that he took and relieved Barcelona, those feats would not give him a high rank compared with the doings of others about whom no fuss is made. If we come to his military " views," which are styled vast and grand, as if vastness and grandeur in themselves were virtues, we find on inspection that they are based on no solid judgment or sound military principle. His proposed march on Madrid from Valencia was showy, but not sane in the cir- =instances. The occupation of Madrid is not the conquest of Spain. Galway actually reached Madrid ; no did Wellington ; but both had to give it up in haste because the hostile force in the field was too strong for them, and would have been too strong for Peterborough. The Spaniards were for Wellington ; three-fourths of them were against Peterborough, or rather Charles; and France was near. His wildest project was the proposal that Charles should ship himself from Barcelona, then besieged, for Portugal, and march from that side ; and he says of his notion, characteristically, to Charles,—" This, Sir, perhaps were the finest stroke in politics that any age has produced, and the least expected." Well may Mr. Stebbing say that if any one asserted he played at war as he did at politics, only an absolute apologist would protest. The truth is, he was a dashing partisan, but a mediocre General ; yet we quite agree with those who hold that, despite adverse criticism, the legend about him will maintain its ground. Nothing dies so hard as a myth, especially when there is behind it a personality so wild and fascinating to the wearied as that of my Lord Peterborough.
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