George Savile, first Marquis and Earl of Halifax, was born 11th November 1633. He was descended from an ancient Yorkshire family, and succeeded to the paternal baronetcy in 1641. In the year of the Restoration he entered Parliament as member for Pontefract. In 1668 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Savile of Eland and Viscount Halifax, and in the following year he began, as a Commissioner of the Board of Trade, an official career of unusual diversity, including a joint ambassadorship at the Hague. In 1675 his name was struck off the Privy Council, during the ascendancy of Danby, but it was restored in 1679, when he became a member of Shaftesbury’s administration and was created Earl of Halifax. He remained in office after Shaftesbury’s dismissal, and in 1680 was mainly instrumental in bringing about the rejection of the Exclusion Bill by the House of Lords. In 1682 he was created Marquis of Halifax and appointed Lord Privy Seal. He was, however, out of sympathy with the Court and in favour of the recall of Monmouth; and on the accession of James II., after being removed to the Presidency of the Council, he was in December 1685 dismissed from office. He took an active part in the operations which led to the overthrow of James II., and in the Convention Parliament of 1689 acted as Speaker of the House of Lords. He held office under the new régime as Lord Privy Seal from March 1689 to February 1690; but after this he withdrew from public life, and spent the remainder of his days chiefly in his country-seat of Rufford in Nottinghamshire, to which he was deeply attached. He died 5th April 1695, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Halifax’s first wife, Lady Dorothy Spencer, was a daughter of the first Earl of Sunderland and his Countess (“Sacharissa”).
| Jotham of piercing wit and pregnant thought, | |
| Endued by nature and by learning taught | |
| To move assemblies, who but only tried | |
| The worse a while, then chose the better side, | |
| Nor chose alone, but turned the balance too, | |
| So much the weight of one brave man can do. |
He passed for a bold and determined atheist, though he often protested to me he was not one, and said he believed there was not one in the World.
A man more remarkable for his wit than his steadiness.
Among the statesmen of that age, Halifax was, in genius, the first. His intellect was fertile, subtle, and capacious. His polished, luminous, and animated eloquence, set off by the silver tones of his voice, was the delight of the House of Lords. His conversation overflowed with thought, fancy, and wit. His political tracts well deserve to be studied for their literary merit, and fully entitle him to a place among English classics. To the weight derived from talents so great and various, he united all the influence which belongs to rank and ample possessions. Yet he was less successful in politics than many who enjoyed smaller advantages. Indeed, those intellectual peculiarities which make his writings valuable, frequently impeded him in the contests of active life; for he always saw passing events, not in the point of view in which they commonly appear to one who bears a part in them, but in the point of view in which, after the lapse of many years, they appear to the philosophic historian.
He was, to use his own word, a Trimmer, nor was he ashamed to profess its creed. Among the statesmen of our country the name of Halifax will always occupy a conspicuous position. He was more a speculative philosopher than a man of action: he lacked decision; he was so anxious to be neutral, that his views were sometimes colourless and sophistical; but it was to his sound judgment, his finely balanced intellect, his exquisite tact, that we owe much of the freedom and the moderation of the constitution under which we have the happiness to live.
In private life Lord Halifax appears to have shown himself both amiable and deserving of respect. Fascinating and witty in conversation, during youth conspicuous among the brilliant dissolute society which surrounded the Duke of Buckingham, his personal morality seems to have been unusually high. For wine and cards, the fashionable excesses of the time, he expressed a lively contempt, while from other yet more fashionable vices he seems to have been singularly exempt. It is, of course, improbable that his austerity was quite unremitting; indeed (as Macaulay reminds us), posterity believed him to have left in Henry Carey, the musician, an illegitimate son; which hypothesis, however, appears somewhat dubious. An affectionate husband to a wife whose virtues and accomplishments were distinguished as her beauty; a careful, if not a very sympathetic father, the statesman was by no means deficient in the graceful “art d’être grand-père.”… In one respect alone does the personal disposition of Lord Halifax appear singularly deficient. Exempt from the foppery, moral, intellectual, and social, to which the virile understanding of his grandson, the celebrated Earl of Chesterfield, too often stooped; superior, by political and family sympathies, to the purely individualistic tendencies of Chesterfieldian morality—he yet showed something of Chesterfield’s serene, unconscious cynicism.
General
His letters are remarkable for the calmness and solidity of their impartial arguments.
He was a politician who had a difficult path to pursue across an ocean of battling factions, and who employed his literary skill usually anonymously, to trim the boat as well as he might…. Halifax is as simple and as vernacular as Temple, and he has almost as much grace. His “Character of a Trimmer” … is a piece of brilliant writing which can never become obsolete…. A modern reprint of the political tracts of Halifax would be welcome, and would do much to give popularity to one who is at present little but a name to all except professional students of history.
The effect of this remarkable breadth of view was not with Halifax, as so frequently the case, to paralyze energy, and render the comprehensive mind unfit for practical action. He was not retained in equilibrium by the difficulty of deciding between two courses, but was an enthusiast for the via media, as great a zealot for compromise as zealots commonly are for strong measures; and, though sometimes too yielding or too speculative for the unquiet times in which his lot was cast, would have made an almost ideal prime minister for the nineteenth century. His praise of trimming, which to more fiery spirits must have seemed an ignoble policy, rings with the eloquence and passion of the most genuine conviction.
They are all exceedingly important documents, showing first that inclination to the essay—to the short, forcible, not inelegant, and yet first of all popular, treatment of manageably limited subjects, which was such a feature of the time; and secondly, the progress which was being made in the elaboration of a style suitable to such treatment in the special department of politics. It may be observed, from a comparison of many instances, that irony is an almost inseparable accompaniment and ornament of the plainer styles. For it not only does not require, but is positively repugnant to, flowing and florid periods, involved constructions, and the like, and it gives the salt and savour of which the plain style is in especial need. Accordingly there is irony in Cowley, and plenty of it in Dryden. But Halifax’s variety is different from that of either of his forerunners—drier, more antithetic with a quiet antithesis, more suggestive of a “word to the wise.” Not that Halifax by any means seems a flight now and then—there is in the “Character of a Trimmer” a passage on Truth beyond doubt suggested by the famous text on that subject in the “Areopagitica” (which Halifax was almost or quite old enough to have read at the time of its publication), and very well worth comparing with it. But these things are not his staple; that is the statement of the case to the plain man in a plain way, yet with such a shrewdness and pungency as may give satisfaction to those whose wits, though plain, are not absolutely sluggish. For political purposes such a style is the most valuable of all, and Halifax, beyond all doubt, showed the way to the greater but fiercer and less equable genius of Swift.
Halifax had none of Swift’s brutality and none of Burke’s magniloquence. He wrote as a highly cultivated man of his day would talk—with more correctness, indeed, but with the same absence of formality and the same dignified ease. He had not Burke’s earnestness. If he hated anything except the Church of Rome, he hated a bore. Burke, as we know, emptied the House of Commons, and his pamphlets are very like his speeches. Both are now regarded as standards of classic oratory and storehouses of political wisdom. In his lifetime he had less influence than Halifax, until he hit the temper of the middle class by his diatribes against the French Revolution. Halifax knew exactly what people would read and what they would not. He always amused them, he never wearied them, he did not leave them for a moment in doubt of his meaning. He had the art, essential to a good advocate, of making readers or jurors think that they have arrived at their conclusions for themselves. Burke lectures and scolds even while he is reasoning with consummate force; Halifax smiles and persuades…. If Halifax had a fault as a controversialist, it was that he indulged with too much freedom in the priceless and permanent luxury of intellectual contempt, which money cannot purchase and custom cannot stale…. The combination of terseness and fulness, of wit and sense, of logic and fancy, are the principal characteristics of Halifax…. As a political philosopher, Halifax stands a head and shoulders above all his contemporaries except Locke.
