The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [13]
It is somewhat curious, that his literary career appears to have been almost totally suspended in the years 1745 and 1746, those years which were marked by a civil war in Great-Britain, when a rash attempt was made to restore the House of Stuart to the throne. That he had a tenderness for that unfortunate House, is well known; and some may fancifully imagine, that a sympathetick anxiety impeded the exertion of his intellectual powers: but I am inclined to think, that he was, during this time, sketching the outlines of his great philological work.103
Boswell’s calming supposition, that Johnson in fact spent the months of the ‘45 planning the Dictionary, is surely salutary. For there is much evidence to complicate the simple picture of Johnson’s political opinions which I have just sketched. In the first place, it is clear that Johnson’s political ideas were not static throughout his life, but moved steadily away from the emphatic Toryism of his youth. London: A Poem, published in 1738, was, like Marmor Norfolciense (1739), impregnated with anti-Walpolean sentiment; but later in life Johnson would praise Walpole as a ‘fixed star’, comparing him to his benefit with the elder Pitt.104 Despite his tenderness for the Stuarts, Johnson seems never to have entertained very cordial feelings towards the Nonjurors, seeing them as hypocrites, denying to them the power of reasoning, and himself refraining from ever entering a Nonjuring meeting-house.105 Johnson’s comment on the unexpectedness of his pension – ‘Here, Sir, was a man avowedly no friend to Government at the time, who got a pension without asking for it’ – hints at the migration of his political sentiments towards reconciliation with the fact of the Hanoverian dynasty.106 Like many others of his generation, Johnson seems eventually to have subscribed to the sane doctrine that a claim to the throne, questionable at its first assertion, might nevertheless improve over time as a result of successful, settled, tenure:
Talking of the family of Stuart, he said, ‘It should seem that the family at present on the throne has now established as good a right as the former family, by the long consent of the people; and that to disturb this right might be considered as culpable. At the same time I own, that it is a very difficult question, when considered with respect to the house of Stuart. To oblige people to take oaths as to the disputed right, is wrong. I know not whether I could take them: but I do not blame those who do.’ So conscientious and so delicate was he upon this subject, which has occasioned so much clamour against him.107
In the same vein, when Johnson fancifully supposed the existence of a club ‘to drink confusion to King George the Third, and a happy restoration to Charles the Third’, he was in no doubt that this club ‘would be very bad with respect to the State’.108
There is a similar weighing of contrary benefits and evils evident in Johnson’s conversation in 1783 with General Oglethorpe about the Glorious Revolution. Oglethorpe maintained that government ‘is now carried on by corrupt influence, instead of the inherent right in the King’, to which Johnson replied, ‘Sir, the want of inherent right in the King occasions all this disturbance. What we did at the Revolution was necessary: but it broke our constitution.’109 But inherent right may not be the only kind of right, particularly in the mind of one who was able to balance political necessity and consequent destructiveness.