FullReads

My Lord,
Your Lordship’s
Most Obliged,
Most Obedient, and
Most Humble Servant,
THE SPECTATOR.

[Footnote 1: When the ‘Spectators’ were reissued in volumes, Vol. I. ended with No. 80, and to the second volume, containing the next 89 numbers, this Dedication was prefixed.

Charles Montague, at the time of the dedication fifty years old, and within four years of the end of his life, was born, in 1661, at Horton, in Northamptonshire. His father was a younger son of the first Earl of Manchester. He was educated at Westminster School and at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Apt for wit and verse, he joined with his friend Prior in writing a burlesque on Dryden’s ‘Hind and Panther’, ‘Transversed to the Story of the Country and the City Mouse.’ In Parliament in James the Second’s reign, he joined in the invitation of William of Orange, and rose rapidly, a self-made man, after the Revolution. In 1691 he was a Lord of the Treasury; in April, 1694, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in May, 1697, First Lord of the Treasury, retaining the Chancellorship and holding both offices till near the close of 1699. Of his dealing with the currency, see note on p. 19. In 1700 he was made Baron Halifax, and had secured the office of Auditor of the Exchequer, which was worth at least L4000 a year, and in war time twice as much. The Tories, on coming to power, made two unsuccessful attempts to fix on him charges of fraud. In October, 1714, George I made him Earl of Halifax and Viscount Sunbury. Then also he again became Prime Minister. He was married, but died childless, in May, 1715. In 1699, when Somers and Halifax were the great chiefs of the Whig Ministry, they joined in befriending Addison, then 27 years old, who had pleased Somers with a piece of English verse and Montague with Latin lines upon the Peace of Ryswick.

Now, therefore, having dedicated the First volume of the ‘Spectator’ to Somers, it is to Halifax that Steele and he inscribe the Second.

Of the defect in Charles Montague’s character, Lord Macaulay writes that, when at the height of his fortune,

“He became proud even to insolence. Old companions … hardly knew their friend Charles in the great man who could not forget for one moment that he was First Lord of the Treasury, that he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, that he had been a Regent of the kingdom, that he had founded the Bank of England, and the new East India Company, that he had restored the Currency, that he had invented the Exchequer Bills, that he had planned the General Mortgage, and that he had been pronounced, by a solemn vote of the Commons, to have deserved all the favours which he had received from the Crown. It was said that admiration of himself and contempt of others were indicated by all his gestures, and written in all the lines of his face.”]