Background
Charles Montagu was born on 16 April 1661 in Horton, Northamptonshire. He was the fourth son of the Hon. George Montague, fifth son of the first earl of Manchester, was born at Horton, Northamptonshire, on the 16th of April 1661.
Charles Montagu was born on 16 April 1661 in Horton, Northamptonshire. He was the fourth son of the Hon. George Montague, fifth son of the first earl of Manchester, was born at Horton, Northamptonshire, on the 16th of April 1661.
In 1679 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he acquired a solid knowledge of the classics and surpassed all his contemporaries at the university in logic and ethics.
But it was his facility in verse-writing, and neither his scholarship nor his practical ability, that first opened up to him the Way to fortune.
Lat terly, however, he preferred to the abstractions of Descartes the practical philosophy of Sir Isaac Newton; and he was one of the small band of students who assisted Newton in forming the Philosophical Society of Cambridge.
On being introduced by Earl Dorset to King William, after the publication of his poetical Epistle occasioned by his Majesty's Victory in Ireland, he was ordered to receive an immediate pension of £500 per annum, until an opportunity should present itself of "making a man of him. "
The bill after some opposition passed the House of Lords in May, and immediately after the prorogation of parliament Montague was rewarded by the chancellorship of the exchequer.
In 1695 he was triumphantly returned for the borough of Westminster to the new parliament, and succeeded in passing his celebrated measure to remedy the depreciation which had taken place in the currency on account of dishonest manipulations.
To provide 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 absence of a metallic currency were avoided by the issue for the first time of exchequer bills.
In 1697 he was accused by Charles Duncombe, and in 1698 by a Colonel Granville, of fraud, but both charges broke down, and Duncombe was shown to have been guilty of extreme dishonesty himself.
In 1698 and 1699 he acted as one of the council of regency during the king's absence from England.
This action earned him the offensive nickname of " Filcher, " and for some time afterwards, in attempting to lead the House of Commons, he had to submit to constant mortifications, often verging on personal insults.
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 LordSomers and the earls of Portland and Oxford, but all the charges were dismissed by the Lords; and in 1703 a second attempt to impeach him was still more unsuccessful.
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 enjoyed his friendship, and who, in return for his liberal donations and the splendid banqueting which they occasionally enjoyed at his villa on the Thames, " fed him, " as Pope says, " all day iong with dedications. "
Swift says he gave them nothing but " good words, and good dinners. "
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 Godolphin 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 eccentricities of his sensitive vanity.
So eager latterly was his thirst for fame and power that perhaps Marlborough did not exaggerate when he said that " he had no other principle but his ambition, so that he would put all in distraction rather than not gain his point.
Various allusions to him are to be found in Swift's works and in Marlborough's Letters.
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 the 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.
In 1691 he became a member of the House of Commons and a member of the Privy Council.
Quotes from others about the person
"Among the numerous notices of Halifax by contemporaries may be mentioned the eulogistic reference which concludes Addison's account of the " greatest of English poets "; the dedications by Steel to the second volume of the Spectator and to the fourth of the Tatter Pope's laudatory mention of him in the epilogue to his Satires and in the preface to the Iliad, and his portrait of him as " Full-blown Bufo" in the Epistle to Arbuthnot.
". .. But as all courtiers, who rise too quick, as he did, are envied, so his great Favour with the King, and powerful Interest in the House, raised a great Party against him, which he strengthened, by seeming to despise them. The Deficiency of Parliamentary Funds, and the growing Debts of the Nation, by the great Interest of Paper Credit, laid him but too much open to these Attacks, he having the whole Administration of the Revenue. When he saw the Party growing too strong for him in the House of Commons, he prudently got himself made a Lord; and as a Screen from all Objections against his Administration, quitted his Management of Commissioner, to serve as Auditor: But his Enemies did not quit him so, they followed him into the House of Peers with an Impeachment, and so left no Stone unturned, to get him out of his Employ, bespattering him every Day with Pamphlets. "
He married the Countess Dowager of Manchester, and it would appear, according to Johnson, that it was still his intention to take orders; but after the coronation he purchased a clerkship to the council.