Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/406

386 high treason ; and he displayed in these conferences such tact and debating power that he was made one of the com missioners of the treasury and called to the privy council. It was during these debates that he had recourse to the peculiar oratorical device of losing his presence of mind, in order to give a practical illustration of the necessity of allowing the privilege of counsel to criminals before a court of justice. But his success as a politician was less due to his oratorical gifts than to his skill in finance, and in this respect he soon began to manifest such brilliant talents as completely eclipsed the painstaking abilities of Godolphin. Indeed it may be affirmed that no other statesman has initiated schemes which have left a more permanent mark on the financial history of England. Although perhaps it was inevitable that England should sooner or later adopt the Continental custom of lightening the annual taxation in times of war by contracting a national debt, the actual introduction of the expedient was due to Montague, who on the 15th December 1692 proposed to raise a million of money by way of loan. Previous to this a Scotchman named William Paterson had submitted to the Government his plan of a national bank, and when in the spring of 1694 the prolonged contest with France had rendered another large loan absolutely necessary, Montague intro duced a Bill for the incorporation of the Bank of England. The bill after some opposition passed the House of Lords in May, and immediately after the prorogation of parlia ment Montague was rewarded by the chancellorship of the exchequer. In the following year he was triumphantly returned for the borough of Westminster to the new parlia ment, and succeeded in passing his celebrated measure to remedy the depreciation which had taken place in the currency on accouut of dishonest manipulations. To..pro- vide for the expense of recoinage, Montague, instead of reviving the old tax of hearth money, introduced the window tax, and the difficulties caused by the temporary abssnce of a metallic currency were avoided by the issue for ths first time of exchequer bills. His other expedients for meeting the emergencies of the financial crisis were equally successful, and the rapid restoration of public credit secured him a commanding influence both in the House of Commons and at the board of the treasury ; but although Godolphin resigned office in October 1696, the king hesitated for some time between Montague and Sir Stephen Fox as his suc cessor, and it was not till 1697 that the former was appointed first lord. In 1698 and 1699 he acted as one of the council of regency during the king s absence from England. When in February of the former year he had been accused of peculation in connexion with the issue of exchequer bills, not only had he been triumphantly acquitted but the House had declared that for his good services to the Government he had deserved his Majesty s favour ; and his reputation was still further increased in the same year by the extraordinary popularity of his project for a new East India Company. With the accumulation of his political successes his vanity and arrogance became, however, so offensive that latterly they utterly lost him the influence he had acquired by his administrative ability and his masterly eloquence ; and when his power began to be on tb.9 wane he set the seal to his political overthrow by conferring the lucrative sinecure office of auditor of the exchequer on his brother in trust for himself should he be compelled to retire from power. For some time after this i:i attempting to lead the House of Commons he had to submit to constant mortifications, often verging on personal insults, and after the return of the king in 1699 he resigned his offices in the Government and succeeded his brother in the auditorship. On the accession of the Tories to power he was removed in 1701 to the House of Lords by the title of Lord Halifax. In the same year he was impeached for malpractices along with Lord Somers and the earls of Portland and Orford, but all the charges were dismissed by the Lords ; and in 1703 a second attempt to impeach him was still more unsuccessful. He continued out of office during the reign of Queen Anne, but in 1706 he was named one of the commissioners to negotiate the union with Scotland ; and after the passing of the Act of Settlement in favour of the house of Hanover, he was appointed ambassador to the elector s court to convey the insignia of order of the garter to George I. On the death of Anne (1714) he was appointed one of the council of regency until the arrival of the king from Hanover ; and after the corona tion he received the office of first lord of the treasury in the new ministry, being at the same time created Earl of Halifax and Viscount Sunbury. He died on the 15th May of the following year, and left no issue. His nephew succeeded to the barony, and was raised to the earldom ; he left it to his son George Dunk, a statesman of some eminence, with whose death without issue in 1771 the Halifax titles became extinct. Montague s association with Prior in the travesty of Dryden s Hind and Panther has no doubt largely aided in preserving his literary reputation ; but he is perhaps indebted for it chiefly to his subsequent influential position and to the fulsome flattery of the men of letters who en joyed his friendship, and who, in return for his liberal dona tions and the splendid banqueting which they occasionally enjoyed at his villa on the Thames, &quot; fed him,&quot; as Pope says, &quot; all day long with dedications.&quot; That, however, his beneficence to needy talent, if sometimes attributable to an itching ear for adulation, was at others prompted by a sincere appreciation of intellectual merit, is sufficiently attested by the manner in which he procured from Godol phin a commissionership for Addison, and also by his life long intimacy with Newton, for whom he obtained the mastership of the mint. The small fragments of poetry which he left behind him, and which were almost solely the composition of his early years, display a certain facility and vigour of diction, but their thought and fancy are never more than commonplace, and not unfrequently in striving to be eloquent and impressive he is only grotesquely and extravagantly absurd. In administrative talent he was the superior of all his contemporaries, and his only rival in parliamentary eloquence was Somers ; but the skill with which he managed measures was superior to his tact in dealing with men, and the effect of his brilliant financial successes on his reputation was gradually almost nullified by the affected arrogance of his manner and by the eccen tricities of his sensitive vanity. So eager latterly was his thirst for fame and power that perhaps Marlborough did not exaggerate when he said that &quot;he had no other principle but his ambition, so that he would put all in distraction rather than not gain his point.&quot;

1em  HALIFAX,, (c.1630–1695), English statesman and author, son of Sir William Savile, a Yorkshire baronet of ancient family, and of Anne, daughter of the lord-keeper Coventry and sister of the wife of the first earl of Shaftesbury, was born about 1630. 