and his tenure of the Great Seal is precarious. In a few
weeks he may be dismissed from office, and may find that he has lost a
lucrative profession, that he has got nothing but a costly dignity, that
he has been transformed from a prosperous barrister into a mendicant
lord. Such a risk no wise man will run. If, therefore, the state is to
be well served in the highest civil post, it is absolutely necessary
that a provision should be made for retired Chancellors. The Sovereign
is now empowered by Act of Parliament to make such a provision out of
the public revenue. In old times such a provision was ordinarily made
out of the hereditary domain of the Crown. What had been bestowed on
Somers appears to have amounted, after all deductions, to a net income
of about sixteen hundred a year, a sum which will hardly shock us who
have seen at one time five retired Chancellors enjoying pensions of five
thousand a year each. For the crime, however, of accepting this grant
the leaders of the opposition hoped that they should be able to punish
Somers with disgrace and ruin. One difficulty stood in the way. All that
he had received was but a pittance when compared with the wealth with
which some of his persecutors had been loaded by the last two kings of
the House of Stuart. It was not easy to pass any censure on him which
should not imply a still more severe censure on two generations of
Granvilles, on two generations of Hydes, and on two generations of
Finches. At last some ingenious Tory thought of a device by which it
might be possible to strike the enemy without wounding friends.
The grants of Charles and James had been made in time of peace; and
William's grant to Somers had been made in time of war. Malice eagerly
caught at this childish distinction. It was moved that any minister
who had been concerned in passing a grant for his own benefit while the
nation was under the heavy taxes of the late war had violated his trust;
as if the expenditure which is necessary to secure to the country a good
administration of justice ought to be suspended by war; or as if it were
not criminal in a government to squander the resources of the state in
time of peace. The motion was made by James Brydges, eldest son of the
Lord Chandos, the James Brydges who afterwards became Duke of Chandos,
who raised a gigantic fortune out of war taxes, to squander it in
comfortless and tasteless ostentation, and who is still remembered
as the Timon of Pope's ke