The Eve of the Revolution | Page 7

CHAPTER II.
The Burden Of Empire
Nothing of note in Parliament, except one slight day on the American
taxes.--Horace Walpole.
There were plenty of men in England, any time before 1763, who found
that an excellent arrangement which permitted them to hold office in
the colonies while continuing to reside in London. They were thereby
enabled to make debts, and sometimes even to pay them, without
troubling much about their duties; and one may easily think of them,
over their claret, as Mr. Trevelyan says, lamenting the cruelty of a
secretary of state who hinted that, for form's sake at least, they had best

show themselves once in a while in America. They might have replied
with Junius: "It was not Virginia that wanted a governor, but a court
favorite that wanted a salary." Certainly Virginia could do with a
minimum of royal officials; but most court favorites wanted salaries,
for without salaries unendowed gentlemen could not conveniently live
in London.
One of these gentlemen, in the year 1763, was Mr. Grosvenor Bedford.
He was not, to be sure, a court favorite, but a man, now well along in
years, who had long ago been appointed to be Collector of the Customs
at the port of Philadelphia. The appointment had been made by the
great minister, Robert Walpole, for whom Mr. Bedford had
unquestionably done some service or other, and of whose son, Horace
Walpole, the letter-writer, he had continued from that day to be a kind
of dependent or protege, being precisely the sort of unobtrusive
factotum which that fastidious eccentric needed to manage his mundane
affairs. But now, after this long time, when the King's business was
placed in the hands of George Grenville, who entertained the odd
notion that a Collector of the Customs should reside at the port of entry
where the customs were collected rather than in London where he drew
his salary, it was being noised about, and was presently reported at
Strawberry Hill, that Mr. Bedford, along with many other estimable
gentlemen, was forthwith to be turned out of his office.
To Horace Walpole it was a point of more than academic importance to
know whether gentlemen were to be unceremoniously turned out of
their offices. As far back as 1738, while still a lad, he had himself been
appointed to be Usher of the Exchequer; and as soon as he came of age,
he says, "I took possession of two other little patent places in the
Exchequer, called Comptroller of the Pipe, and Clerk of the
Estreats"--all these places having been procured for him through the
generosity of his father. The duties of these offices, one may suppose,
were not arduous, for it seems that they were competently administered
by Mr. Grosvenor Bedford, in addition to his duties as Collector of the
Customs at the port of Philadelphia; so well administered, indeed, that
Horace Walpole's income from them, which in 1740 was perhaps not
more than 1500 pounds a year, nearly doubled in the course of a

generation. And this income, together with another thousand which he
had annually from the Collector's place in the Custom House, added to
the interest of 20,000 pounds which he had inherited, enabled him to
live very well, with immense leisure for writing odd books, and letters
full of extremely interesting comment on the levity and low aims of his
contemporaries.
And so Horace Walpole, good patron that he was and competent
letter-writer, very naturally, hearing that Mr. Bedford was to lose an
office to which in the course of years he had become much accustomed,
sat down and wrote a letter to Mr. George Grenville in behalf of his
friend and servant. "Though I am sensible I have no pretensions for
asking you a favour, ...yet I flatter myself I shall not be thought quite
impertinent in interceding for a person, who I can answer has neither
been to blame nor any way deserved punishment, and therefore I think
you, Sir, will be ready to save him from prejudice. The person I mean
is my deputy, Mr. Grosvenor Bedford, who, above five and twenty
years ago, was appointed Collector of the Customs in Philadelphia by
my father. I hear he is threatened to be turned out. If the least fault can
be laid to his charge, I do not desire to have him protected. If there
cannot, I am too well persuaded, Sir, of your justice not to be sure you
will be pleased to protect him."
George Grenville, a dry, precise man of great knowledge and industry,
almost always right in little matters and very patient of the
misapprehensions of less exact people, wrote in reply a letter which
many would think entirely adequate to the matter in hand: "I have never
heard [he began] of