March 2, 1797

 

Horace Walpole (September 24, 1717 to March 2, 1797) was the son of the British prime minister Sir Robert Walpole (1676 to 1745). They were Whigs, and concerned to permanently ensure a limited monarchy in Great Britain. The parliamentary system was not solidified yet in the18th century. Horace kept a copy of the execution orders for the Stuart king, Charles I, on his study wall, to remember an event he called the least bad kind of murder. 

In 1745, with soldiers on the ground intent on retaking the throne for the Stuarts, Horace Walpole saw a picture of his life without the privilege. He wrote

Now comes the Pretender's boy, and promises all my comfortable apartments in the Exchequer and Custom House to some forlorn Irish peer, who chooses to remove his pride and poverty out of some large old unfurnished gallery at St. Germain's [home of the exiled family]. .... [T]his is not pleasant! I shall wonderfully dislike being a loyal sufferer in a threadbare coat, and shivering in an antechamber at Hanover, [ancestral home of the Protestants who assumed the English throne] or reduced to teach Latin and English to the young princes at Copenhagen.

We see in Walpole's career, spanning decades as an author and MP, an argument for inherited privilege. For Walpole was a kind and creative person with a humility which if rare in the rich, is certainly not common in the poor. I wonder if the flowering of his life is not an argument for the benefits of an upper class liberty. Most people of that background may be dopes, but a few flowers could be worth it in a world where true genius is so rare. 

His Whiggish sympathies were a middle ground, and it is not surprising that he found the French Revolution a horror. He wrote on January 29, 1793 to a friend regarding the execution of the French King:

....there is not a word left in my Dictionary that can express what I feel. Savages, barbarians, ...were terms for poor ignorant Indians ...or...for Spaniards in Peru ... or for Enthusiasts of every breed in religious wars. It remained for the enlightened eighteenth century to baffle language and invent horrors that can be found in no vocabulary. What tongue could be prepared to paint a Nation that should avow Atheism, profess Assassination, and practice Massacres on Massacres for four years together: and who, as if they had destroyed God as well as their King, and established Incredulity by law, give no symptoms of repentance! ....

Quite a different kind of loss for Horace Walpole, this specter of disorder, in his last decade of life,  than that of the loss of his cat Selima, in 1747, who drowned trying to catch gold fish, and was immortalized by the great poet, Thomas Gray.