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A HISTORY OF THE FOUR GEORGES

AND OF WILLIAM IV.

by

JUSTIN MCCARTHY

and

JUSTIN HUNTLY MCCARTHY

In Four Volumes

VOL. IV.

Harper & Brothers Publishers New York and London 1901

Copyright, 1901, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.

CONTENTS OF THE FOURTH VOLUME.

CHAPTER PAGE

LXIII. "OPENS AMID ILL OMENS" . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 LXIV. POPULAR ALARMS—ROYAL EXCURSIONS . . . . . . . . 15 LXV. GEORGE CANNING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 LXVI. THE CLOSE OF CANNING'S CAREER . . . . . . . . . 46 LXVII. "THE CHAINS OF THE CATHOLIC" . . . . . . . . . . 65 LXVIII. THE LAST OF THE GEORGES . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 LXIX. KING WILLIAM THE FOURTH . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 LXX. LE ROI D'YVETOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 LXXI. REFORM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 LXXII. THE GREAT DEBATE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 LXXIII. THE TRIUMPH OF REFORM . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 LXXIV. THE EMANCIPATION OF LABOUR . . . . . . . . . . . 188 LXXV. THE STATE CHURCH IN IRELAND . . . . . . . . . . 205 LXXVI. "ONLY A PAUPER" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 LXXVII. PEEL'S FORLORN HOPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 LXXVIII. STILL THE REIGN OF REFORM . . . . . . . . . . . 261 LXXIX. THE CLOSE OF A REIGN AND THE OPENING OF AN ERA 280 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295

{1}

A HISTORY OF THE FOUR GEORGES.

CHAPTER LXIII.

"OPENS AMID ILL OMENS."

The closest student of history would find it hard indeed to turn to the account of any other royal reign which opened under conditions so peculiar and so unpropitious as those which accompanied the succession of George the Fourth to the English throne. Even in the pages of Gibbon one might look in vain for the story of a reign thus singularly darkened in its earliest chapters. George the Fourth had hardly gone through the State ceremonials which asserted his royal position when he was seized by a sudden illness so severe that, for a while, the nerves of the country were strained by the alarm which seemed to tell that a grave would have to be dug for the new King before the body of the late sovereign had grown quite cold in the royal vault. It would be idle, at this time of day, to affect any serious belief that the grief of the British people at this sudden taking off, had it come to pass, would have exceeded any possibility of consolation. George the Fourth was an elderly personage when he came to the throne, he had been known to his subjects as a deputy King for many years, his mode of living had long been a familiar subject of scandal among all classes of his people, and no one could have supposed that the prosperity of the country {2} depended to any measurable extent on the continuance of his life.

[Sidenote: 1820—Lord Liverpool's Administration]

George, however, recovered. His illness proved therefore to be only one among the unpropitious conditions which accompanied the dawn of his reign. Almost the next thing that was heard of him by the outer world was that he had inaugurated his work of government by calling on his ministers to assist him in obtaining a divorce from his wife. Not often, it must be admitted, has a sovereign just succeeding to a throne thus celebrated his attainment of regal rank. Then, again, the beginning of George the Fourth's reign was immediately followed by the explosion of a conspiracy belonging to an order uncommon indeed in the England of those days, almost wholly unknown to the England of our own time, and resembling in its principal characteristics some of the Nihilist or Anarchist enterprises common even still in certain parts of the European continent. Thus opened the first chapter of the reign of King George the Fourth. We shall have to go more fully into details, and we only print these few lines as what used to be called in former days the argument of our first chapters.

George was too unwell to stand by his father's bedside when the poor old King was passing, at last, out of that life which had so long been one of utter darkness to him. George, the son, had taken cold in his beloved pavilion at Brighton, and the cold soon developed into an illness so serious that for some days it was believed the now King was destined to succeed his father in the grave almost as soon as he had succeeded him in the sovereignty. George's life of excesses had not, however, completely worn out the fine constitution with which nature had originally endowed him, and despite the kind of medical treatment favored at that time, the old familiar panacea, which consisted mainly in incessant bleeding, the King recovered. He was soon able to receive the official addresses of loyalty, to despatch to Louis the Eighteenth and other European sovereigns his formal announcement of the fact that he had succeeded to the throne, his formal expressions of grief at {3} the loss of his beloved father, and his formal assurances of his resolve to do all he could to maintain harmonious relations with the rulers of foreign States. He retained the ministers whom he had found in office, and who were, of course, his own ministers. Lord Liverpool was Prime Minister, Lord Eldon was Lord Chancellor, Lord Palmerston was one of the younger members of the administration.

The times were troublous. Lord Liverpool's long tenure of office had been marked, so far as foreign affairs were concerned, by a resolute hostility to every policy and all movements which tended in a revolutionary direction, and to Lord Liverpool and his closest colleagues the whole principle of popular liberty was merely the principle of revolution. In home affairs Lord Liverpool had always identified himself with systems of political repression, systems which were established on the theory that whenever there was any talk of popular grievance the only wise and just course was to put in prison the men from whose mouths such talk came forth. On financial questions Lord Liverpool appears to have entertained some enlightened views, views that were certainly in advance of the political economy professed by most of his colleagues, but where distinctly political controversy came up he may be taken as a fair illustration of the old-fashioned Tory statesmanship. Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, had a great deal of shrewdness in his mental constitution, a shrewdness which very often took the form of selfishness; and although he exhibited himself for the most part as a genuine Tory, one is inclined to doubt whether he did not now and then indulge in a secret chuckle at the expense of those among his colleagues who really believed that the principles of old-fashioned Toryism were the only sound principles of government.

The first business of State into which the new sovereign threw his whole heart and soul was the endeavor to solemnize the opening of his reign by obtaining a divorce from his wife. He went to work at once with the set purpose of inducing his ministers to lend him their aid in the {4} attainment of this great object. Lord Eldon was more especially in his confidence, and with him George had many private interviews and much exchange of letters on the subject which then engrossed his attention. He accomplished his object so far that it was arranged to leave the name of his wife out of the Royal Liturgy. But even to set on foot the formal proceedings for a divorce proved a much more difficult piece of business. Pliant as the ministers were, inclined to be abject as some of them were in their anxiety to please their royal master, yet the men with whom George especially consulted could not shrink from impressing on his notice some of the obstacles which stood in the way of his obtaining his heart's desire. One of the main difficulties consisted in the fact that a great part of the evidence given against George's unhappy consort during the former investigations had been given by a class of witnesses upon whose statement it would be impossible for any regularly constituted court of law to place much reliance. Again and again in the correspondence which passed between the King and some of his ministers this weakness of his case is pointed out, and it is somewhat curious to find so complete a recognition of it by his advisers when we bear in mind what they had sanctioned before and were to sanction later on.

[Sidenote: 1820—Queen Caroline]

The Queen herself was on the Continent, and was threatening her immediate return to her husband's country unless some settlement was made with her which should secure her ample means of living and allow her to be formally recognized abroad as the wife of King George. Henry Brougham was acting as the Queen's principal adviser at home, and was doing his best to bring about some sort of compromise which might result in the Queen's accepting a quiet and informal separation on fair and reasonable terms. George, however, was not inclined to listen to conditions of compromise. He wanted to get rid of his Queen once for all, to be publicly and completely divorced from her, to be free from even a nominal association with her; and he was not inclined to accept any terms which merely secured him against the chance of her {5} ever again appearing within his sight. Brougham was disposed, and even determined, to do all he could for the unhappy Caroline, although now and then in one of his characteristic bursts of ill-temper he used to rail against the trouble she gave him by her impatient desire to rush back to England and make her appeal to public opinion there. There was a great deal of negotiation between the advisers on both sides, and the final offer made on the part of the King was that the Queen should have an allowance of 52,000 pounds a year—not, one would have thought, a very illiberal allowance for the daughter of a small German prince—and that she should be allowed to retain her titles, and should be authorized to use them at foreign courts, but that her name was not to appear in the Liturgy, and that she was not to appear officially in England as the wife of the sovereign. These terms were offered much against the will of the King himself, who still yearned for the divorce, the whole divorce, and nothing but the divorce. George yielded, however, to the urgent advice of his ministers, with the strong hope and belief still in his own heart that Caroline would not accept the conditions, and would insist upon presenting herself in England and asserting her position as Queen.

The Queen, meanwhile, had left Rome, where she had been staying for some time and where she complained of the want of deference shown to her by the Papal authorities. She was hurrying back to England, and had written to Brougham requesting him to meet her at Saint Omer, and there accordingly Brougham met her. Whether he was very urgent in his advice to her to accept the terms it is not easy to know; but, at all events, it is quite certain that she refused point-blank to make any concessions, that she left Brougham with positive abruptness, and hastened on her way to England. Among her most confidential advisers was Alderman Wood, the head of a great firm in the City of London, a leading man in the corporation of the City, and a member of the House of Commons. Many eminent Englishmen—among whom were Wilberforce, Canning, and Denman, afterwards Lord Chief Justice—were {6} were warm supporters of her cause, for the good reason that they sincerely believed her to be innocent of the more serious charges against her and deeply wronged by the conduct of the King. Even her most resolute enemies had to admit that whether her conduct in thus rushing back to England and forcing herself on public notice were wise or unwise, from the worldly point of view, it certainly seemed at least like the conduct of a woman proudly conscious of her own innocence, and determined to accept no compromise which might put her in the position of a pardoned sinner. The nearer she came to England the more cordial were the expressions of sympathy she received, and from the moment she landed on English shores her way to London became like a triumphal procession.

[Sidenote: 1820—The King's divorce proceedings]

In the mean time the King and his ministers had come to an agreement which was exactly what the King had struggled for from the first, an agreement that steps should be taken in the ordinary way, according to the legal conditions then existing, for the purpose of obtaining a divorce. The course to be adopted was to bring in a Divorce Bill, and endeavor to have it passed through both Houses of Parliament. The proceedings were to open in the House of Lords, and the Queen's leading defenders—for her cause was of course to be defended by counsel as in an ordinary court of law—were Brougham and Denman. The Queen's arrival in London was a signal for the most tumultuous demonstrations of popular devotion and favor towards her, and popular anger, and even fury, against all who were supposed to be her enemies. The house in which she took up her abode was constantly surrounded by vast throngs of her sympathizers, and she used to have to make her appearance at the windows at frequent intervals and bow her acknowledgments to the crowds below. Sometimes the zeal of her admirers found a different way of expressing itself, and the window-panes of many houses were broken because the residents were known to be on the side of the King and not of the Queen. Conspicuous public men who were known, or were believed, to have taken part against her were mobbed in the streets, and even the Duke {7} of Wellington himself was more than once the object of a hostile demonstration. So widely spread, so deeply penetrating was the feeling in favor of the Queen that it was said to have found its way even into the ranks of the army, and it was believed that some soldiers of regiments quartered in London itself were to be found carousing to the health of Queen Caroline. A crowd of Italian witnesses had been brought over to bear evidence against the Queen, and these foreign invaders, nearly all of humble rank, had to be sheltered in buildings specially erected for their protection in the near neighborhood of Westminster Hall, and had to be immured and guarded as if they were malefactors awaiting trial and likely to escape, in order that they might be safe from the outbreaks of popular indignation.

It told heavily for the case of the Queen, in the minds of all reasonable and impartial people, that while the King's foreign witnesses were drawn for the most part from a class of persons who might be supposed easily open to subornation and corruption, a great number of distinguished men and women came from various parts of Europe in which the Queen had resided to give evidence in her favor, and to speak highly of her character and her conduct. The manner in which the proceedings against the Queen were pressed on by the Ministry had one immediate result to their disadvantage by depriving them of the services of George Canning, then one of the most rising of European statesmen. Canning was strongly impressed with a belief in the Queen's innocence and he could not consent to become one of her formal public accusers, which he must have done were he to remain a member of the administration. Canning, therefore, after a time, gave up his place as a member of the Government, and he left the work of the prosecution, as it may be called, to be carried on by men less chivalrous and less scrupulous. It is not necessary to go at any length into the story of the proceedings before the House of Lords. These proceedings would have been made memorable, if there were nothing else to make them so, by the speeches which Brougham and {8} Denman delivered in defence of the Queen. Never perhaps in the course of history have the ears of a monarch's advisers been made to tingle by such sentences of magnificent and scathing denunciation poured out in arraignment of the monarch's personal conduct. Denman, indeed, incurred the implacable hostility of George because, in the course of his speech, he introduced a famous citation from Roman history which, although intended to tell heavily against the King, was mistakenly believed by some of the King's friends to convey a much darker and deeper imputation on the sovereign than that which was really in Denman's mind.

[Sidenote: 1821—Queen Caroline and the King's coronation]

The case may be briefly said to have broken down. In the House of Lords, where the friends of the sovereign were most powerful, there was only a majority of nine for the third reading of the Bill of Divorce, and the Bill if persevered in would yet have to encounter the House of Commons. The Government, therefore, made up their minds to abandon the proceedings, and thereupon the friends of the Queen exulted tumultuously over the victory they had won. But the struggle was not by any means at an end. The royal coronation had yet to come, and the King was anxious that the ceremonial should be got through at as early a date as possible. The Queen announced her determination to present herself on the Day of Coronation and claim her right to be crowned as Queen Consort of George the Fourth. Then the advisers on both sides went to work anew with the vain hope of bringing about something like a compromise which might save the sovereign, the Court, and the country from scandalous and tumultuous scenes. Again the Queen was offered the allowance which had been tendered to her before, on the old conditions that she would behave quietly and keep herself out of sight. Again she insisted that her name must be included in the Royal Liturgy, and again the King announced his resolve to make no such concession. Then the Queen once more made it known that her resolve was final, and that she would present herself at Westminster Abbey on the Coronation Day. George had been advised {9} that all historical precedents warranted him in maintaining that the King had an absolute right to direct the forms of the ceremonial to be used on such an occasion, and he declared that he would not allow the Queen to take any part in the solemnity or even to be present during its performance. The Queen wrote letters to the King which she sent to him through his Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool. George sent back the letters unopened to Lord Liverpool, with the announcement that the King would read no letter addressed to him by the Queen, and would only communicate with her through the ordinary official medium of one of his ministers.

The letters thus written on both sides have long since been published, and the perusal of them will probably impress most readers with the idea of a certain sincerity on the part of both the principal writers, the King and Queen. Let us speak as harshly and as justly as we may of the King's general conduct, of his mode of living, and of the manner in which he had always treated the Queen, we shall find it hard not to believe that there was in the depth of George's mind a fixed conviction that he had real cause of complaint against his unhappy wife. Let us, on the other hand, give the fullest recognition to the fact that although the scandalous levities in the conduct of the Queen abroad told heavily against her, we are none the less compelled to admit that her letters to the King, and her demand to be included in the Coronation ceremonies, seemed to be part of the conduct of a woman who will not and cannot admit that she has done anything to forfeit her place at her husband's side.

The whole story seems now so preposterously out of keeping with all the associations of a modern Court that it startles our sense of historical credibility when we find by the actual dates that men and women are still living who might have been carried by their nurses to see the crowds round Westminster Abbey on the Coronation Day of King George the Fourth. The Coronation took place on July 19, 1821, and the whole ceremony was got up in the most costly, the most gorgeous, and, as it would seem now {10} to a calm and critical reader of history, in the most theatrical style. The poor Queen did, indeed, make an attempt to take the place which she claimed in the performances at Westminster Abbey. "It was natural," says Miss Martineau, "that one so long an outcast and at length borne back into social life by the sympathies of a nation should expect too much from these sympathies and fail to stop at the right point in her demands." Miss Martineau adds, however, and her words will carry with them the feelings of every reader now, "It would have been well if the Queen had retired into silence after the grant of her annuity and the final refusal to insert her name in the Liturgy." The Queen, of course, failed to obtain an entrance to Westminster Abbey. It had been arranged by orders of the King that no one was to be allowed admission, even to look on at the ceremonial, without a ticket officially issued and properly accredited with the name of the bearer. The Queen, therefore, was allowed to pass through the crowded streets, but when she came to the doors of the Abbey the soldiers on guard asked for her ticket of admission, and of course she had none to present. Some of the friends who accompanied her indignantly asked the soldiers whether they did not recognize their Queen, the Queen of England; but the officers in command replied that their orders were strict, and the unhappy Caroline Amelia was literally turned away from the Abbey door. The King had accomplished his object.

[Sidenote: 1821—Death of Queen Caroline]

The poor woman's story comes to an end very soon. On August 2, only a few days after the Coronation, it was made known to the public that the Queen was seriously ill. She was suffering, it appears, from internal inflammation, and the anxieties, the excitements, the heart burnings, the various agonies of emotion she had lately been undergoing must have left her poorly prepared. On August 7 her condition became so alarming to those around her that it was thought right to warn her of her danger. She quietly said that she had no wish to live, that she hoped not to suffer much bodily pain in dying, but that she could leave life without the least regret. She {11} died that day, having lived more than fifty-two years. It was her singular fate, however, that even in her death, which otherwise must have brought so much relief, she became a new source of trouble to her royal husband. George had made up his mind to pay a visit after his coronation to his subjects in Ireland, to "the long cherished isle which he loved," as Byron says, "like his bride." He had got as far as Holyhead on his way when the news reached him of the Queen's illness, and he thought that it would be hardly becoming for him to make his first public appearance in Ireland at such a moment, and to run the risk, perhaps, of having his royal entrance into Dublin accompanied by the news that his Queen had just died. Then, when the news of her death did actually reach him, it was still necessary to make some little delay—joy bells and funeral bells do not ring well together—and thus George, even as a widower, found his wife still a little in the way. The remains of Caroline Amelia were carried back to her native Brunswick, and there ended her melancholy story. It is impossible not to regard this unhappy woman as the victim, in great measure, of the customs which so often compel princes and princesses to leave reciprocal love out of the conditions of marriage. "The birds which live in the air," says Webster's immortal "Duchess of Malfi,"

On the wild benefit of nature, live
Happier than we, for they can choose their mates.

Other women, indeed, might have struggled far better against the adverse conditions of an unsuitable marriage and have borne themselves far better amid its worst trials than the clever, impulsive, light-hearted, light-headed Caroline Amelia was able to do. There seems no reason to doubt that she had a good heart, a loving nature, and the wish to lead a pure and honorable life. But she was too often thoughtless, careless, wilful, and headstrong, and, like many others who might have done well under fair conditions, she allowed the worst qualities of her nature to take the command just at the very moment when there {12} was most need for the exercise of all that was best in her. Even with regard to George himself, it seems only fair and reasonable to assume that he, too, might have done better if his marriage had not been merely an arrangement of State. Perhaps the whole history of State marriages contains no chapter at once more fantastic and more tragic than that which closed with the death of Caroline Amelia, wife of George the Fourth.

[Sidenote: Death of Napoleon Bonaparte]

While the joy-bells of London were already chiming for the coronation of George the Fourth, the most powerful enemy George's country had ever had was passing quietly away in St. Helena. On May 5, 1821, the Emperor Napoleon died in his island exile. No words could exaggerate the sensation produced through the whole world by the close of this marvellous career. He was unquestionably one of the greatest figures in history. As a conquering soldier he has no rival in the modern world, and indeed all the history we know of, ancient or modern, can give but very few names which may bear comparison with his. Unlike Caesar and Alexander, he had made his way from the humble obscurity of common life, and, unlike Caesar, he did not seem to have had in him the intellectual greatness which must have made him, under any conditions, a master of men and of hemispheres. So far as mere dramatic effect is concerned, he was less fortunate than Caesar in his disappearance from the world's stage. Napoleon was doomed to pine and wither away on a lonely island in the South Atlantic for years and years, and there was something like an anticlimax in the closing scenes of that marvellous life-drama. It is pitiful and saddening now to read of the trumpery annoyances and humiliations to which his days of exile were subjected, and to read, too, of the unceasing complaints with which he resented what he regarded as the insults offered to him by his jailers. There was, indeed, much that was ignoble in the manner of his treatment by those who had him in charge, in the paltry indignities which he had to endure, and which he could not endure in the patient dignity of silence. The mere refusal to allow to him his title of Emperor, and to insist {13} that he should only be addressed as General Bonaparte, was as illogical as it was ungenerous; for if revolutionary France had not the right to make him an Emperor, she certainly could not have had the right to make him a General. Every movement he made and every movement made by any of his friends on the island was watched as jealously and as closely as if he had been some vulgar Jack Sheppard plotting with his pals for an escape through the windows or the cellars of his prison.

One cannot but regret that Napoleon could not have folded himself in the majestic mantle of his dignity and his fame, could not even, if it were needed, have eaten out his own heart in silence, and left his captors to work their worst upon him without giving them the satisfaction of extorting a word of querulous remonstrance. His captors, no doubt, were perpetually haunted by the dread that he might somehow contrive to make his escape, and that if he once got away from St. Helena the whole struggle might have to begin all over again. No doubt, too, his captors would have said, speaking in the spirit of the times, that Napoleon was not to be trusted like an honorable prisoner on parole, and that there was no way of securing the peace of the world but by holding him under close and constant guard. The whole story of those years of captivity is profoundly sad, and is one which may probably be read with less pain even by Frenchmen than by high-minded Englishmen. There has lately been given to the world in the pages of an American magazine, The Century, a continuation of the record once made by Dr. Barry E. O'Meara of his conversations with Napoleon during Napoleon's exile in St. Helena. Dr. O'Meara was a surgeon in the English navy, and was serving in the Bellerophon when Napoleon came on board. He was allowed to take care of Napoleon by the British Government, and, as he was an Irishman, he felt a certain sympathy with Napoleon and came to be treated by the fallen Emperor as a friend. He published a volume called "A Voice from St. Helena," in which he gave a detailed account of his talks with the great Emperor. The book was much read {14} at the time of its publication, and created a deep interest wherever it was read. From this work O'Meara left out many of the memoranda he had written down, probably because he thought they might give offence needlessly to living persons; but the withheld memoranda were all carefully preserved and passed into the hands of some of his descendants in New Jersey, and have after this long lapse of time been published at last. They tell us with painful accuracy of the petty annoyances constantly inflicted upon Napoleon, and of the impatience and fretfulness with which, day after day, he resented them and complained of them. We seem to live with the great dethroned Emperor in his hours of homeliest complainings, when every little grievance that burns in his heart finds repeated expression on his lips. Few chapters in the history of fallen greatness can be more touching than these pages.

Not all that Napoleon said about England, however, was mere complaint and disparagement. The world of London may be interested in learning from these reminiscences how Napoleon told Dr. Barry O'Meara that if he, Napoleon, had had any authority over the English Metropolis, he would have long ago taken measures for constructing an embankment on both sides of the Thames as it passed between Middlesex and Surrey. If Dr. O'Meara had embodied this suggestion in his public volume, Napoleon might unconsciously have become the projector of the Thames Embankment. Fas est ab hoste—the proverb is somewhat musty.

{15}

CHAPTER LXIV.

POPULAR ALARMS—ROYAL EXCURSIONS.

[Sidenote: 1820—The Cato Street conspiracy]

The plot which has been already mentioned as one of the unpropitious events that marked the opening of George the Fourth's reign was the famous Cato Street conspiracy. The conspiracy was nothing less than a plot for the assassination, all at once, of the whole of his Majesty's ministers. The principal conspirator was a man named Thistlewood, a compound of half-crazy fanaticism and desperate villany—a creature who believed that he had private vengeance to satisfy, and who had, at the same time, persuaded himself that no good could come to the people of England until an example had been made of the King's official advisers by the avenging hand of the lover of liberty. The novelty as well as the audacity of the plot created a perfect consternation all through England, and it became, for a while, the sincere conviction of a vast number of reasonable Englishmen that the whole political and social system of the kingdom was undermined by such plots, and that only the most strenuous exertions made by the champions of law and order could protect the realm from an outbreak of horrors far transcending any of those that had convulsed France during the worst days of the Revolution. It was soon made clear enough that Thistlewood's plot was a conspiracy which included only a very small number of men, and it has never been quite certain whether it was not originally put in motion by the machination of some of the paid spies and informers whom it was believed, at that time, to be the duty of the Ministry to keep in its service for the detection and the frustration of revolutionary conspiracy. It was the common practice of spies and informers, in those days, to go {16} about secretly in quarters where revolutionary conspiracy was believed to be in existence, to represent themselves to some of the suspected plotters as fellow-revolutionists and brother-conspirators, and thus to get into their confidence, and even to suggest to them some new form of conspiracy, in order that their willingness to accept the suggestion might mark them out as proper subjects for a Government prosecution and obtain for the informers the credit of the detection.

[Sidenote: 1820—Origin of the conspiracy]

Thistlewood had been engaged in popular agitation for some sort of reconstitution of political society, and he had been once put on his trial for some alleged offence arising out of such an agitation. More lucky than many other of his contemporaries under similar conditions, he was brought before a jury who found him not guilty of the charge made against him. Now, if Thistlewood had been a sane member of even an Anarchist organization, he might have been softened in his feelings towards the existing order of things by finding that a jury had actually recognized the possibility of his being formally charged with an offence against the Crown and yet not being guilty. But Thistlewood regarded the bare fact that a charge had been made against him as a crime calling out for vengeance, and in his frenzy he got the idea into his head that Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, was the person on whom he was bound to take revenge. Accordingly, the unfortunate creature actually sent a challenge to Lord Sidmouth, inviting and defying him to mortal combat. Perhaps Lord Sidmouth would have acted wisely if he had taken no notice whatever of this preposterous challenge, but, at the same time, it is only fair to remember that Lord Sidmouth might think it dangerous to the public peace to allow a person to go unrebuked who had sent a challenge to a Minister of the Crown. Criminal proceedings were, therefore, taken against Thistlewood, and, instead of being committed to the protection of a lunatic asylum, the author of the challenge was sentenced to a year's imprisonment. When his prison time was over, Thistlewood came out a man inflamed with a desire for vengeance on all the ruling classes {17} in general, and on Ministers of the Crown in particular. Like the murderer in "Macbeth," he thought himself one whom the vile blows and buffets of the world had so incensed that he was reckless what he did to spite the world. He soon got around him a small gang of agitators as ignorant and almost as crazy as himself, and he initiated them into a grand scheme for dealing a death-blow to all the ministers at once, and then seizing on the Bank, Mansion House, and Tower of London, and from these strongholds proclaiming the existence of a provisional government.

Now the whole notion of such a plot as this, and any possible success coming out of it, may seem, at first sight, too crazy to be accepted by any set of men, however ignorant or however wicked, who were not downright lunatics. But it is certain that Thistlewood did find a small number of men who were not actually lunatics, and who yet were ready to join with him and to risk their lives in his enterprise. The first act in the plot was to be the assassination of the King's ministers. One of the professional spies in the employment of the authorities, a man named Edwards, was already in communication with Thistlewood and his friends. The plot had been for a considerable time in preparation, and it was put off for a while because of the death of George the Third, and the hopes entertained by the conspirators that the new King might go back to the political principles of his earlier years, discard Lord Liverpool, Lord Sidmouth, and his other Tory advisers, and thus render it unnecessary for patriotic men to put them to death in order to save the country.

When, however, it became apparent that George the Fourth was to keep around him the ministers who had served him when he was Prince Regent, it was determined that the work must go on. Edwards, the spy, was able to make it known to Thistlewood that there was to be a dinner of the members of the Cabinet on February 23, 1820, and the opportunity was thought to be placed by a kindly fate in the hands of the conspirators. Meanwhile the minister at whose house the dinner was to take place, Lord {18} Harrowby, was kept fully informed of all that was going on, and he wisely resolved to take no public notice of the scheme until the day for the dinner should arrive, when the instruments of the wholesale murder-plot could be suddenly arrested at the moment of their attempt to carry out their design. Thistlewood and most of his companions had their headquarters in the garrets of a house in Cato Street, Edgware Road, and there it was arranged among them that they should remain until one or two of their accomplices, who were kept at watch for the purpose, should come to them and report that the doomed dinner-guests had assembled. Then the conspirators were to repair to the neighborhood of Lord Harrowby's house in Grosvenor Square. One of the outpost men was to knock at Lord Harrowby's door, and the moment the door was opened all the gang were to rush in and put the ministers to death. Lord Harrowby took good care not to have any guests that evening, but the outpost men of the conspiracy were deceived by the fact that a dinner-party was actually going on at the house of the Archbishop of York next door, and when they saw carriages arriving there they felt sure this was the dinner-party for which they were waiting. They waited there until the last of the guests appeared to have arrived, and then set out to give notice to Thistlewood and his companions. Before the outpost men had got back to Cato Street the police were already there, and an attempt was made to arrest the whole of the conspirators. A scuffle took place, in which Thistlewood stabbed one of the policemen to the heart. The constituted authorities had contrived to make almost as much of a bungle as the conspirators had done; the military force did not arrive in time, and Thistlewood and some of his accomplices succeeded, for the moment, in making their escape. It was only for the moment. Thistlewood was arrested next day. There was nothing heroic or dramatic about the manner of his capture. He had sought refuge at the house of a friend in Moorfields, and he was comfortably asleep in bed when the house was surrounded and he was made prisoner. He was put on trial soon after, and, {19} with four of his accomplices, was sentenced to death, and on May 1 the five were executed.

[Sidenote: 1820—The government and the conspiracy]

The evidence at the trial made it clear to any reasonable mind that the plot was confined altogether to the small knot of ignorant desperadoes who held their councils in Cato Street, and to the informer Edwards, who had been in communication with them. The public were never allowed to know what had become of this man Edwards. Had he been pensioned by the Government and been allowed to pass into honorable and comfortable retirement, or was he to be arrested and put on his trial like other conspirators? Several attempts were made to get at the truth by means of questions to the ministers in the House of Commons, but no satisfactory reply could be extracted or extorted. Indeed, it seemed quite probable that the general feeling among the ruling classes at the time would have been that the Government had done a very good thing by employing a man to help in working up murderous conspiracies in order that such conspiracies should be frightened out of existence, and that it was quite right to protect and reward the emissaries who had rendered such faithful service. For a time there was a widespread and sincere belief that the Cato Street conspiracy was only one in a vast network of conspiracies from which nothing but the severest measures of repression could save England. The King himself in his royal message to Parliament was careful to make use of the Cato Street conspiracy as another and a crowning evidence of the necessity which existed for the wholesale application of the criminal law in order to save the State from the triumph of anarchy. A season of absolute panic set in and the most trivial political disturbance arising in any part of the country was magnified into another attempt of the emissaries of revolution to upset the Throne, pull down the Church, and turn the State into the republic of a rabble.

It is quite clear now to all readers of history that such attempts as those planned by the Cato Street conspirators can only exist at a time when stern and savage restrictions are set upon all efforts to obtain a free public hearing for {20} the discussion of political and social grievances. Where political wrongs can be arraigned in the open day, there is no occasion for the work of the midnight conspirator. Already in England public men were coming forward who were filled with the noble and patriotic desire to give the philosophy of history some share in the guidance of political life. Popular education had been totally neglected in England, and, indeed, the too common impression among the ruling classes was that the lower orders of the people could never be kept in due obedience to their superiors if they were permitted to make themselves unfit for their station by learning how to read and write. Even the criminal laws themselves bore terrible testimony to the prevailing ideas, by the fact that property was proclaimed as sacred a possession as life itself.

[Sidenote: 1820—Offences that entailed the death penalty]

In the early days of George the Fourth's reign Sir James Mackintosh, the famous historian, philosopher, and philanthropist, brought into the House of Commons a measure for abolishing the punishment of death in cases of the stealing of property to the value of five shillings, and he succeeded in carrying his measure through Parliament. Up to that time men and women had been executed, year after year, for stealing from a shop any goods of the value of five shillings, were the goods but a few loaves of high-priced bread carried off for the purpose of relieving the sufferings of a hungry family. Sir James Mackintosh's measure aimed at the abolition of the death penalty in a large number of other minor offences, but he only succeeded in robbing the gallows of its victims in two other classes of small offences as well as that which has just been mentioned.

At this time of day one reads with amazement the arguments which men like Lord Chancellor Eldon directed against the humane measures introduced by Sir James Mackintosh. Parliament and the country were solemnly warned that if such relaxation of the death punishment were sanctioned by law, the smaller class of tradesmen would have to give up their shops and their business altogether, because it would be utterly impossible for them {21} to keep any goods in their windows or on their shelves if the punishment of death were not maintained for the theft of a shawl or a snuff-box. At the same time it was well known to everybody who had eyes to see or ears to hear that numbers of shoplifters escaped punishment altogether because humane juries refused, even on the plainest evidence, to find a verdict of guilty where such a verdict would send the prisoner from the dock to the gallows. Many a jury, too, when it was impossible to doubt that a theft had been committed, acted on the ingenious plan of declaring in their verdict that the articles stolen, whatever their obvious market worth, were under the value of five shillings, thereby saving the offender from the doom of death. Thus the repressive power of the law was necessarily diminished by the uncertainty which common humanity put in the way of its regular enforcement, and that very barbarity of punishment which was intended to keep men back from crime by its mere terrors gave to the criminal only another chance of escape.

Sir James Mackintosh had brought in his measures as successor, in that line of philanthropic reform, to the lamented Sir Samuel Romilly, whose melancholy death, already referred to, had created a profound sensation throughout England and abroad towards the close of the late reign. About the time when Mackintosh was thus making his partly successful attempt to put some check on the application of the death penalty, Henry Brougham was arousing the attention of Parliament and the country to the lamentable and disgraceful absence of anything like a system of national education. On June 28, 1820, Brougham brought forward the first definite proposal submitted to the House of Commons for a scheme of national education designed to apply to England and Wales. A parliamentary committee had been sitting for some time to make inquiries and receive evidence as to the state of education in the poorer districts of the land. This, too, was owing almost altogether to the energy and the efforts of Brougham, but the inquiries of the committee were resulting in nothing very practical, and Brougham therefore {22} went a step further than he had previously gone and brought forward his definite scheme for national education. It is hardly necessary to say that he did not succeed in carrying his measure, and that generations had yet to pass away before any real and comprehensive effort wag made by the State to establish such a system of popular education in these countries as had been known to Prussia and other European nations almost for time out of mind. But Brougham had at least started the question, and he never ceased to keep it moving during his long life. Other reformers, too, as well as Mackintosh and Brougham, were making their voices heard above, or at all events through, the din and clamor of the controversy between the friends of the King and the champions of the Queen. Lord John Russell may be said to have then begun his noble career as reformer of the system of parliamentary representation, and Mr. Lambton, afterwards to be better known as Lord Durham, made more than one bold effort in the same direction.

[Sidenote: 1821—George the Fourth visits Ireland]

Russell and Lambton were both unsuccessful just then. The time had not yet come when the question of parliamentary reform was to break up ministries, set the country aflame with agitation, and put a thick-witted Sovereign to the necessity of choosing between submission to the popular demand or facing the risk of revolution. But it might have been clear to reflective men that the days of unconditional loyalty to the will of a monarch had nearly run their course in England, and that the demand for a reform in the criminal law, a relaxation of the repression of free speech, the establishment of some system of popular education, and the adoption of a really representative principle in the construction of Parliament was destined before long to prove irresistible. The case of the reformers was emphasized by the widespread agricultural distress from which the country had long been suffering. The inevitable reaction had set in, too, after the spasmodic inflation of trade and commerce which had accompanied the long period of war. Even if the governing system of England had been as wise and humane as it was {23} unenlightened and harsh, the condition of the country would, of itself, have favored almost any demand for reform. As the Government system actually was, only a national prosperity of universal and impossible sleekness could have kept the people of England much longer indifferent to the necessity for reform in almost every department of the political and social system.

Meanwhile the new King was paying his round of State visits to Ireland, to Hanover, and to Scotland. We have seen already how the royal progress to Ireland was delayed by the inconvenient occurrence of the Queen's death. George soon, however, felt it proper to put away all affectation of grief, and to pay his visit to Ireland. Great hopes were entertained there for the beneficent results of the royal visit. George had been during his earlier days in political sympathy as well as boon companionship with Fox and with Sheridan. Fox had always shown himself a true friend to Ireland. The Irish national poet, Thomas Moore, had, in one of his songs, described the Banshee as wailing over the grave of him "on whose burning tongue truth, peace, and freedom hung." It was fondly believed in Ireland that the King was returning to the sympathies of his earlier days, and that his coming to the island must bring blessings with it. Daniel O'Connell, the orator and tribune of the Irish people, appears to have been thoroughly impressed with the same hopes and the same conviction, and he brought on himself some satirical lines from Byron in scorn of his credulity and his confidence. We shall soon have occasion to see what return O'Connell got for his loyalty and his devotion.

The last of the great Irish patriots of the past age, Henry Grattan, had been buried in Westminster Abbey the year before George's visit to Ireland. It was well that so pure-minded and austere a lover of his country should have been spared the necessity of taking any part in the ceremonials of welcome which attended the arrival of the new Sovereign in Ireland. George undoubtedly received what seemed to be a thoroughly national welcome, for it was fully believed all through the country that his visit was {24} to open a new era of peace, prosperity, and well-merited loyalty to Ireland. King George threw himself thoroughly into the spirit of the occasion. He acted his part with admirable effect. He was sympathetic, he was convivial, he was pathetic, he was boisterous, exactly as the theatrical effect of the moment seemed to call for the display of this or that emotion. In truth, the character of George the Fourth never can be thoroughly understood unless we are able to see how much of the artistic, in a certain sense, there was in his temperament. He had that peculiar gift which has lately come to be called "artistic"—sincerely by some critics, satirically by others—the gift which enables a man to throw his whole soul and spirit into any part which the occasion calls on him to act. George was almost always playing a part, but it was his artistic temperament which enabled him to believe that he actually felt at the moment the very emotions which he tried to express. The favorite dramatic type of the conscious hypocrite and the deliberate self-recognized deceiver is much less common in real life than it was believed to be at one period of our literary history. We may take it for granted that George fully believed himself to be acting with perfect sincerity on most of the occasions in his life when he had to utter eloquent sentiments appropriate to the scene and the hour, or to fling himself into the different humors of those whom, at different times, he was anxious to please.

[Sidenote: 1821—The King's reception in Ireland]

During his public performances—for thus they may properly be called—in Ireland, George was sometimes grave, sometimes gay; shed tears in some places, indulged in touches of buffoonery in others; and wherever he went seemed to be giving to those around him only the most sincere outpouring of his own humor and of his own heart. He appears thoroughly to have enjoyed his popularity, and to have regarded himself, for the hour, as the justly idolized hero of the land which he had come to redeem and to bless. The harbor where he first landed in Ireland, which was called Dunleary then, has been called Kingstown ever since, for its name was changed in honor of the monarch's {25} visit to his Irish subjects. The tourist who has just arrived at Kingstown by the steamer from Holyhead, and who takes his seat in the train for Dublin, may see from the window of the railway carriage an obelisk, not very imposing either in its height or in its sculptured form, which seems a little out of place amid the ordinary accessories of a railway and steamboat station. This is the monument which the grateful authorities of the Irish capital erected to commemorate the spot on which George the Fourth had set his august feet when he landed on the shores of Ireland. Except for the obelisk and the change of name there was not much done to keep the memory of the King green in the recollections of the Irish people.

On August 12 George landed at Dunleary, where anxious and enthusiastic crowds had long been waiting to welcome him. He was received with universal cries of "The King! God bless him!" to which he replied by waving the foraging-cap which he had been wearing, and crying out, "God bless you all; I thank you from my heart." Then he got into his carriage, and with a cavalcade of his attendants and a concourse of admiring followers he drove to the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park, some eight or nine miles' distance. When he arrived at the Lodge he alighted from the carriage and proclaimed to the crowd, "In addressing you I conceive that I am addressing the nobility, gentry, and yeomen of Ireland. This is one of the happiest moments of my life. I feel pleased being the first of my family that set foot on Irish ground. Early in my life I loved Ireland, and I rejoice at being among my beloved Irish friends. I always considered them such, and this day proves to me I am beloved by them." Then he went on to say that "circumstances of a delicate nature," to which it was needless to advert, had prevented him from visiting them earlier. Rank, station, and honor were nothing to him, but "to feel that I live in the hearts of my Irish subjects is to me the most exalted happiness." He wound up with the touching words, "I assure you, my dear friends, I have an Irish heart, and will this night give a proof of my affection towards you, as I am sure you will towards {26} me, by drinking your health in a bumper of whiskey punch."

[Sidenote: 1821—The King and the Primacy of all Ireland]

This speech may be taken as the keynote of George's behavior throughout the entire visit. On the 17th of the month he made his grand state entrance into Dublin in an open carriage drawn by eight horses, and he wore in his hat an enormous bunch of shamrocks, to which, by repeated gestures, he kept incessantly calling the attention of the crowd. More than once as he gazed upon his admiring followers he was observed to shed tears. Afterwards he attended reviews, showed himself at the theatre, was present at a great ball at the Mansion House, received an entertainment at Trinity College, and visited the residences of some of the Irish nobility. He talked to everybody, and sometimes in his conversation showed much of the good sense and shrewdness which really belonged to him, but in his demeanor towards the general multitude he always enacted the part of an enthusiastic Sovereign whose enthusiasm sometimes showed itself in the form of what might have been called, if he were not a Sovereign, outrageous mountebankcry. On Monday, September 3, he quitted the shores of Ireland. Just before his departure he received a deputation headed by Daniel O'Connell, who fell upon his knees, and in that attitude of loyal devotion presented his Majesty with a laurel crown. The King was particularly gracious to O'Connell, shook him warmly by the hand, and accepted gratefully the gift offered to him, and, for the time, O'Connell divided the applause of the crowd with the monarch. There was a renewed interchange of good wishes and blessings, and then the King got into his barge to be conveyed to the steamer, and several loyal Irishmen, in their enthusiasm, rushing to see the last of him, tumbled into the sea, and with some difficulty rescued themselves, or were rescued, from drowning.

This may be said to have ended the royal visit so far as history is concerned, for, although the King's return to England was delayed for several days by contrary winds, he had nothing more to do with his Irish subjects. Byron {27} wrote some satirical verses, which he prefaced with the words of Curran, the great Irish advocate and orator, describing Ireland like "a bastinadoed elephant kneeling to receive the paltry rider," and in which he made mockery of O'Connell's loyalty, paid a just and generous tribute to Grattan, and proclaimed sincerely his own love for Ireland and his thorough appreciation of her national cause. Then the royal visit was over, and the Irish people were soon to learn the value of the King's profession of sympathy with the wishes and the wants of his devoted Irish subjects. A curious illustration of the sincerity of these royal sentiments may be found in a letter written by the King not very long after to his Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, and marked "Most secret and confidential." The letter had reference to the appointment of a new occupant to the exalted office of Primate of All Ireland, and the King says, "I do not like, I cannot reconcile myself to have the Primacy of Ireland filled by an Irishman." The King, when writing this letter, appears to have been in one of his deeply religious moods. "I am too far advanced in life," he says, "not to give subjects of this description the most serious and attentive consideration. It is, alas! but too true that policy is too often obliged to interfere with our best intentions, but I do think where the head of the Church is concerned, especially at such a moment, we ought alone to be influenced by religious duty. Do not be surprised at this scrupulous language, for I am quite sincere." Very likely King George was quite sincere in this momentary burst of religious emotion. It was a part of his artistic nature to be able thus to fill himself with any emotion which helped out the performance he had in hand; but it is at least an odd comment on his recent emotions of love for the Irish people and absolute trust in their loyal devotion, that he could not reconcile himself to the idea of allowing any Irishman to occupy the position of Primate of All Ireland. There was no question in this of Protestant against Roman Catholic, and that Coronation Oath, which had in the former reign proved so formidable an obstacle to the recognition of any Catholic {28} claims, was in no wise brought into question. Nobody suggested that a Roman Catholic bishop should be made Primate of All Ireland, but it was strange that soon after George's reiterated professions of love for his Irish people, and absolute trust in them, he could not reconcile himself to the idea of any Protestant bishop, however meritorious, being raised to such an office if the Protestant bishop happened to be an Irishman.

[Sidenote: 1822—George the Fourth visits Scotland]

King George had to leave his capital again in order to visit other lands where he had subjects to gratify with the pleasure of his presence. He paid a visit to Hanover, and then to Scotland. George, it need hardly be said, was King of Hanover as well as of England, and he thought it right that he should illumine the Hanoverians with the light of his royal countenance. So he made his way to Hanover, taking Brussels in his course. He was accompanied thus far by the Duke of Wellington and other eminent persons, and he took the opportunity of surveying the field of Waterloo, and having all the striking points of the battle-field pointed out and explained to him by the Duke of Wellington. It would appear that the sovereign's personal survey of the field on which Napoleon's last great battle had been fought only served to strengthen the impression on his mind that he had himself taken a part, and even a distinguished and heroic part, in that immortal struggle. Here again the artistic nature asserted itself. No doubt it had long seemed to George that the heir to the English throne ought to have taken a leading part in a battle which was a turning-point in the history of England, and by degrees he had contrived to persuade himself into the belief that he had actually done the deeds required by the dramatic fitness of things, for it was well known that, at certain seasons of inspiration, he had described himself as leading a desperate charge at Waterloo. Then he pursued his way to Hanover, and he made much the same demonstrations of deep emotion as those which had delighted the crowds at Dunleary and in Dublin. Again and again he protested his love and his devotion for his Hanoverian subjects, again and again he accompanied {29} with voice and with gesture the singing of patriotic hymns, and on more than one occasion the royal eyes were seen to be streaming over with sympathetic tears.

All this, however, did not prevent him from sometimes making it known to the more intimate companions of his journey that he was greatly bored by the Germans in general, and that he was particularly disgusted with the Hanoverians. George had always some chosen favorite holding important personal office in his courtly retinue, and to him, in moments of relaxation, he occasionally let out his real feelings with regard to the ceremonial performances which he believed it his duty to get through. Then he visited Scotland, and was welcomed by enthusiastic crowds at Leith and in Edinburgh. While he was still on board the royal vessel at Leith he was waited on by several distinguished representatives of Scottish feeling, and among others by no less a personage than Sir Walter Scott. George was very gracious in his reception of the great novelist, and assured Sir Walter that he was the one man in Scotland whom he most wished to see. As had been the fashion during his visit to Ireland, there was a good deal of spirit-drinking when the King came to testify his gratitude for the loyal welcome given to him by his Scottish subjects. His Majesty poured out with his own hand some cherry brandy into a glass, which he tendered to Sir Walter Scott, and Sir Walter not merely drank off the liquid thus commended to him, but asked permission to keep the glass as a perpetual relic of the royal giver and of the august occasion. Thackeray tells the story of the incident in his lecture on George the Fourth, and we cannot do better than describe it in his own words: "When George the Fourth came to Edinburgh," says Thackeray, "a better man than he went on board the royal yacht to welcome the King to his kingdom of Scotland, seized a goblet from which his Majesty had just drunk, vowed it should remain forever as an heirloom in his family, clapped the precious glass in his pocket, and sat down on it and broke it when he got home." One can easily imagine how the sudden fate of the precious relic must have amused {30} and delighted the satirical genius of Thackeray, who could not quite forgive even Sir Walter Scott for having lent himself to the fulsome adulation which it was thought proper to offer to George the Fourth on the occasion of his visit to his kingdom of Scotland.

Thackeray, indeed, seems to have been a little too hard upon George, and to have regarded him merely as a worthless profligate and buffoon, who never really felt any of the generous emotions which the sovereign found it convenient to summon up at the appropriate seasons. Our own study of the character leads us to the opinion already expressed, that George did actually believe for the time in the full sincerity of the feelings he thought proper to call into action on the occasion of an important ceremonial, and that the feelings were no less genuine at the moment than those which came on him when the performance was over, and he had an opportunity of showing the new state of his mind in the reaction of weariness caused by the whole tiresome proceedings. George went through the usual rounds of visits in Scotland, and put on an appearance of absolute enjoyment during the public entertainments and popular acclamations which he had brought upon himself. He displayed himself frequently in a suit of Stuart tartan when he did not array himself in his costume as a field-marshal. We read that during the singing of royal songs he not only beat time to the chorus, but actually accompanied it with his voice. His parting words when he was leaving the shores of Scotland were the deep-toned and thrilling benediction, "God bless you all!" The loyal chroniclers of the time proclaimed that the visit to Scotland was a perfect success, and if the loyal chroniclers at the time were not in a position to know, how can we of a later date, who had not the advantage of being present at the scene, or even of being alive at the time, pretend to dispute the accuracy of their estimate?

{31}

CHAPTER LXV.

GEORGE CANNING.

[Sidenote: 1720-87—Canning and the King]

[Transcriber's note: the above dates are what were in the book, but 1820-37 would seem more logical.]

We have seen how the course of the proceedings taken against the Queen deprived the Liverpool Ministry of the services of its most brilliant member, George Canning. Canning had made up his mind from the beginning that he could not appear as one of the Queen's accusers, although he had consented, as a compromise, to the omission of her name from the Royal Liturgy. He had consented to this compromise because, although he did not believe in the worst of the charges against the Queen, he could not help admitting that there was much in her conduct which rendered her unsuitable as the reigning consort of the King; and at the time he did not understand that the King's disapproval of her actions was to take the form of a prosecution and a demand for divorce. He had applied to the King for leave to resign his office in the Ministry, and had only been induced to remain on the understanding that he was not expected to take any part in the public proceedings against the unhappy Caroline. When, however, it became evident that the whole question would be raised in the House of Commons, and that he must either give a silent assent to the course taken by the King's advisers or publicly condemn it there, he felt it his duty to send in his resignation of his place in the Ministry and to stand by his resolve. Canning withdrew from office and became, for the time, merely a private member of the House of Commons. King George got it into his mind that his former minister had deserted his cause at an anxious and critical moment, and the King, who was flighty enough in most of his purposes, seldom forgot what he regarded as an injury. He never forgave Canning, {32} although the time was now coming when hardly any choice was left him but to take Canning back into his service again, and under conditions that gave Canning a greater influence over public affairs than he had ever had before.

[Sidenote: 1720-87—The early life of Canning]

[Transcriber's note: see the note on page 31.]

After the group of illustrious men, which included the elder and the younger Pitt, Fox, Burke, and Sheridan, had disappeared from English public life, Canning was through the whole of his career the greatest Parliamentary orator and leader in England. Up to the time at which we have now arrived, he had not yet won his highest reputation as a statesman. He was born under conditions which might have been depressing and disheartening to one of different mould. His father was a man of old family and well connected, who had in his earlier years developed some taste for literature, and was regarded by most of his relatives as one who merely brought discredit on his kindred by his mean ambition to devote himself to the profession of letters. The elder Canning does not seem, however, to have had a capacity for making a real success in that way, and, indeed, it would appear as if he had too much of the often fatal gift of the amateur in his composition to allow him to concentrate his energies on any one pursuit. He sought for success in various fields and never found it, and he died soon after his son, George Canning, was born. The mother of the future statesman was thus left a widow while she was still young, and, as she had great beauty and believed that she had a vocation for the stage, she did her best to make a living for herself and her child by becoming a professional actress. She was not much of an actress, however, and, being unable to make any mark in London, she passed for a time into the provinces, and at last married an actor and disappeared from historical notice.

Meanwhile, the education of George Canning the son had been provided for by his uncle, a wealthy merchant and banker, Stratford Canning, whose son was afterwards famous as Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the "great Elchi" of Kinglake. This uncle seemed anxious to make reparation for the manner in which his dead brother had been {33} treated by the family in general. The young Canning was sent to Eton and to Oxford, and began to study for the bar, but he displayed such distinct talents for literature and for politics that there seemed little likelihood of his devoting himself to the business of law. He soon became known at Oxford as a charming poet, a keen and brilliant satirist, and a public speaker endowed with a voice of marvellous intonation and an exquisite choice of words. He made the acquaintance of Sheridan and of Burke; by Burke he was introduced to Pitt, and by Sheridan to Fox, and it is believed to have been on the suggestion of Pitt that he resolved to devote himself to a Parliamentary career. He married a woman who had a large fortune, and he obtained a seat in the House of Commons. In that House he remained silent for a whole session after his election, and devoted himself to a close study of the rules, the usages, and the manners of the representative chamber. In those far-off days it was considered becoming on the part of a young member of the House to observe a modest silence for a great part of his first session, and to make himself familiar with the assembly before he ventured on any public display of his eloquence. The time had not yet come when it was considered humanly possible for a member of Parliament to make his first speech on the very day of his first introduction to the House of Commons.

Canning's first speech was a distinct success. He was thought by some critics to have imitated too closely the magnificent rhetorical style of Burke, but the exquisite voice and the noble elocution of Canning were all his own and certainly could not have been improved by any imitation of the voice and manner of Burke. Many of Canning's friends took it for granted that the young member would ally himself with the Whig Opposition, but Canning at once presented himself as the devoted follower of Pitt. Canning was afterwards the foremost among the creators of the Anti-Jacobin, a famous satirical periodical set up to throw ridicule on the principles and sentiments of the French Revolution, and of all those who encouraged its levelling theories or who aped its exalted professions of {34} humanity and of universal brotherhood. Canning made his way rapidly in public life, and became an Under-Secretary of State three years after his election to the House of Commons. His next appointment was that of Treasurer to the Navy, and in 1807 he became Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. A quarrel began between him and Lord Castlereagh, one of his colleagues, arising out of the unfortunate Walcheren expedition, and the quarrel resulted in a duel, after the fashion of the day, in which Canning received a wound.

[Sidenote: 1822—Canning and the governorship of India]

The policy of Castlereagh made as strong a contrast with the policy of Canning as even the contrast which was brought under the notice of every listener by the Parliamentary speeches of the two men. Canning was master of a polished eloquence which, at the time, had no rival in either House of Parliament. Castlereagh was one of the most singular and striking illustrations of the fact that a man may sometimes become a power in the House of Commons without the slightest gift of eloquence. Canning was a master of phrase, tone, and gesture. Castlereagh's language was commonplace, uncouth, and sometimes even ridiculous, and it happened only too often that in his anxiety to get his words out he became positively inarticulate. His policy represented the ideas of the Holy Alliance in their narrowest and most reactionary meaning; while Canning, although entirely opposed to the principles of mere revolution, had an utter contempt for the notion that a conclave of European sovereigns could lay down limits and laws for the growth and the government of all the European nationalities. The policy of Castlereagh has long since ceased to have any believers even among the advisers of autocratic sovereigns, while the policy of Canning is the recognized creed of statesmanship all over the civilized world.

Canning resigned his office as Foreign Secretary in 1809, and was for a short time sent on a special embassy to the Court of Lisbon. Then he became President of the Board of Control, which may be said to have divided at that time the management of our Indian possessions with the East {35} India Company, and he held this important office for about four years. Meanwhile he had resigned his seat for Newport, in the Isle of Wight, and had been elected as representative of the great and growing port of Liverpool in the House of Commons. The visitor to Liverpool at the present day can hardly go far through the great city without meeting some memorial of the veneration in which the illustrious name of Canning is held by the dwellers on the Mersey. A vacancy arose in the office of Governor-General of India, and the directors of the East India Company invited Canning to accept the splendid and commanding position. Canning at once made up his mind to close with the offer. The position would in many ways have suited his genius, his deep interest in the government of states, and the freshness of his ideas on all subjects connected with the growth of the Empire. Moreover, he knew that he had offended the King, and that George was not a man likely to forgive such an offence, and he thought he had reason to believe that, for the present at least, there was not much prospect for him of advancement in English political life. Many of his friends endeavored to persuade him against accepting a position which would make him an exile from England at a time when England's interests on the European continent required just such a genius as his to guide her foreign policy, and they felt sure that the time could not be far distant when he must be invited to resume his former place in the Administration. Canning, however, held to his purpose, accepted the offer of the East India Company, and went to Liverpool in order to take farewell of his constituency before setting out on his voyage to the scene of his new duties.

He stayed while in Liverpool at Seaforth House, the residence of Mr. John Gladstone, one of the merchant princes of Liverpool, whose son William Ewart Gladstone was afterwards to make the name of the family famous in history. During his stay at Seaforth House, Canning used to spend much of his time gazing out upon the sea, while the little boy William Ewart Gladstone played on the lawn near him. It was here that Canning heard the news {36} which led to an entire change in his purpose, and opened the way to his greatest success. His late colleague, his late rival, Castlereagh, was dead—had died by his own hand. Castlereagh had lately succeeded to his father's title, and had become Marquis of Londonderry; but as the marquisate was only an Irish peerage, he could still sit in the House of Commons as the chosen representative of an English constituency. His mind had seemed, for some time, to be darkened by troubles of which he gave no account to his friends, and he suddenly committed suicide. There are many conjectures and suggested explanations as to the immediate cause of the act, but all we know for certain is that the strong mind seemed suddenly to give way, and that Castlereagh could endure life no longer. Seldom, indeed, has the death of a public man in modern times been received with any such demonstrations as those which in many places followed the news that Castlereagh had done himself to death. In every community all over the country, and indeed all over Europe and the civilized world, there were those who proclaimed that the death of such a man was a positive blessing to the human race. Wherever men were struggling against despotism and suffering from tyranny, there were those who felt and who declared that the departure of Castlereagh from this world was a benefit to humanity at large.

[Sidenote: 1822—Canning as Foreign Secretary]

Yet the man himself had not a cruel or an ignoble nature. He had through all his life friends who loved him, and whose love his private character and conduct had well deserved. But he had made himself the English representative of the policy of the Holy Alliance at a time when every lover of liberty, and every believer in the development of free institutions and the beneficent results of their working, must have felt that even the excesses of the French Revolution gave no excuse for the deliberate setting-up of the doctrine of combined despotism. Men of liberal opinions were in an especially angry mood just then because England seemed to have gone in deliberately for the policy which authorized the "crowned conspirators," as Sydney Smith called them, to impose their edicts {37} on the whole continent of Europe. This condition of things may help to explain the cry of rejoicing with which the news of Castlereagh's suicide was received in so many places. The London crowd who followed the funeral procession to Westminster Abbey greeted the removal of the coffin with yells of execration. Byron wrote verses of savage bitterness about the dead man and his deed of self-murder—wrote some verses which no English publisher now would put into print.

The death of Castlereagh became a turning-point in the career of Canning. The whole voice of Liberal public opinion at once proclaimed that Canning was the only man left in the country who was capable of redeeming England's foreign policy from the discredit and disgrace brought upon it by Castlereagh's Administration. Even Lord Liverpool himself soon came to see that there was no other course left to him than to recommend the King to offer to Canning the place of Foreign Secretary. The King at first fought hard against the advice of his Prime Minister. The letters which passed between him and Lord Liverpool are a curiosity in their way. George had evidently persuaded himself that Canning was a monster of ingratitude, who had committed a positively unpardonable offence against his lord and master. Indeed, it was only by playing upon the King's personal vanity that Lord Liverpool at last brought him to accept the wholesome advice tendered to him. Lord Liverpool reminded George again and again that one of the noblest of a monarch's prerogatives was his power to grant forgiveness to any repentant sinner. George was probably beginning to be weary of the discussion, and perhaps had natural shrewdness enough to see that it could only end in one way. He therefore seemed to be taken by the appeal made to his generosity for pardon to a penitent offender, and he consented to make approaches to Canning with regard to the office of Foreign Secretary. At first, however, the King made so ostentatious a profession of his magnanimous desire to pardon the remorseful wrong-doer that Canning could not bring himself to accept the abject position which {38} his sovereign was arranging for him. He therefore declined at first to take any office under such conditions, and the King had to come down from his high horse and treat with his subject in less arrogant fashion. The King, at last, so far modified his language as to leave the prerogative of mercy out of the question, and Canning, by the advice of all his friends and supporters, consented to become once more a member of the Administration and to undertake the duties of Foreign Secretary.

[Sidenote: 1822-27—Canning's fitness for Foreign Minister]

This, we have said, was the turning-point in the career of Canning. It was also a turning-point in the modern history of England. The violence of the reaction against the principles of the French Revolution had spent itself, and the public mind of this country was beginning to see that the turbulence of democracy was not likely to be safely dealt with by the setting-up of despotism. Canning himself was a living illustration of the manner in which many great intellects had been affected by the course of events between the fall of Napoleon and the death of Castlereagh. Canning in his earlier days was in sympathy with the theories and doctrines of popular liberty, and we have seen that up to the time of his actually entering Parliament it was generally believed he would rank himself with the Whig Opposition. But, like many other men who loved liberty too, he had been alarmed by the aggressive policy of Napoleon, and he believed that the position of England was best guaranteed by the later policy of Pitt. Then came the Congress of Vienna, and the deliberate attempt to reconstruct the map of continental Europe, and to decree the destinies of nations according to the despotic principles of the Holy Alliance.

Canning soon recognized the fact, obvious enough, one might have thought, even to a man of intellect far lower than that of Canning, that the traditions, the instincts, and the feelings of a people must count for something in the form and manner of their government, and that there are forces at work in the hearts and minds of peoples which can no more be governed by imperial and royal decrees than can the forces of physical nature itself. He {39} had unconsciously anticipated in his own mind that doctrine of nationalities which afterwards came to play so momentous and so clearly recognized a part in the politics of the world. He saw how the policy of Castlereagh had made England the recognized ally of all the old-world theories of divine right and unconditional loyalty, and had made her a fellow-worker with the sovereigns of the Holy Alliance for the restoration of tyranny all over the European continent. He understood the nature and the meaning of the new forces which were coming up in political life; he saw that the French Revolution was not destined to end in the mere restoration of mediaeval despotism. He saw that the American Revolution had opened a new chapter in the history of the modern world, and that no man, whether he called himself Tory or Whig, was fit to be intrusted with the administration of England's foreign policy who had not learned the lessons taught by the closing years of the eighteenth and the opening years of the nineteenth century. Canning had much of that imaginative faculty without which there can hardly be any real statesmanship. Even his gift of humor helped him in this way. He was able to understand the feelings, the tempers, and the conditions of men with whom he had little opportunity of personal contact. He could bring himself into sympathy with the aspirations of peoples who were wholly foreign in race to him, and who would have been mere foreigners and nothing else in the eyes of many of his political colleagues.

If Lord Londonderry had lived and had continued, as no doubt he would have done, to hold the Foreign Office, he would have been England's representative at the Congress of Verona. The new chances opened by his death inspired that demand for the services of Canning which compelled the King at last to yield and invite Canning back to his old place. The Congress of Verona was in fact a reassembling of the Holy Alliance for the purpose of taking once more into consideration the disturbed state of Europe, and laying down once more the lines of the only policy which, according to the judgment of the despotic {40} sovereigns and their ministers, could restore peace to the Continent. The disturbances arose simply from the fact that some of the European populations were rising up against the policy of the Holy Alliance, and were agitating for the principles of constitutional government. The immediate and ostensible object for the summoning of the Congress was the fact that Greece had been trying to throw off the yoke of Turkey, and that the leading members of the Holy Alliance believed it was their business and their right to say what was to be done with Greece, and whether or not it was for their convenience that she should be held in perpetual bondage.

[Sidenote: 1822-27—England and the Congress of Verona]

But there were troubles also in Spain, because the Spanish sovereign had been giving way to the desire of his people for a system of constitutional government and for the recognition of the principle that a people has something to do with the making as well as with the obeying of laws. The restored Bourbon Government in France declared that it saw dangers to its own rights and its own security in these concessions to popular demand, made in a country which was only divided from French territory by the barrier of the Pyrenees. It was intimated in the clearest manner that the Bourbon Government of France would be prepared, if necessary, to undertake armed intervention in the affairs of Spain in order to prevent the Spaniards from thus setting a bad example to the subjects of the Bourbon dynasty. Then the condition of Poland was giving some alarm to the despotic monarchs of the Continent everywhere; for, if Poland were to rise and were allowed to assert its liberty, who could tell on what soil, sacred to despotism, other rebellious movements might not also break out. Therefore, the monarchs of the Holy Alliance were much perturbed, and came to the conclusion that, as the Congress of Vienna had not succeeded in enforcing all its edicts, the only wise thing would be to call together another Congress, to be held this time at Verona, and there go over all the work again with greater vigor and determination.

Now it was unavoidable that England should be invited {41} to take part in this Congress, seeing that, but for the assistance given by England, there would never have been a chance for even the Congress of Vienna to make any attempt at the regulation of Europe. Besides, it was well known that Lord Londonderry had been a main instrument in the formation and execution of the plans laid down by the Congress of Vienna, and although England, on that occasion, had not been able to go quite as far as her allies would have wished her to accompany them, yet it was not thought possible to leave England without an invitation to be represented at the Congress of Verona. On the death of Lord Londonderry it was resolved by the English Government to send the Duke of Wellington to Verona. The Duke had never professed any particular ideas of his own with regard to foreign policy, but he was the most loyal of men in obeying the instructions of those who were properly authorized to direct his movements, and in whom he could place his confidence. When Canning consented to accept office the Duke at once put himself into communication with the new Foreign Secretary, and wrote to him from Paris informing Canning of his belief that the Spanish question would be brought, in some shape or other, under the consideration of the Congress, and asking Canning for instructions as to the course which he ought to adopt. Canning despatched a reply to the Duke, one passage of which may be regarded as a full illustration of the new principle which he had determined to establish in England's foreign policy. The words of the great statesman cannot be read with too close an attention. Canning declares that, "If there be a determined project to interfere by force or by menace in the present struggle in Spain, so convinced are his Majesty's Government of the uselessness and danger of any such interference, so objectionable does it appear to them in principle as well as in practical execution, that when the necessity arises—or, I would rather say, when the opportunity offers—I am to instruct your Grace at once frankly and peremptorily to declare that to any such interference, come what may, his Majesty will not be a party."

{42}

[Sidenote: 1822-27—Canning and the Bourbons]

The Duke of Wellington faithfully obeyed the instructions which had been given to him. He made it clear to the Congress of Verona that England would not sanction any project for the interference of foreign sovereigns with the domestic affairs of Spain. When the Duke found that his arguments and his remonstrances were of no avail, he withdrew from the Congress altogether and left the members of the Holy Alliance to take on themselves the full responsibility of their own policy. Now it would be hardly possible to overrate the importance of the step thus taken by England at a great crisis in the public affairs of Europe. The reign of George the Fourth would be memorable in history if it had been consecrated by nothing but this event. The utter disruption between the old state policy and the new was proclaimed by the instructions which Canning sent to the Duke of Wellington, and which were faithfully carried out by the Duke. No English Government has, in later days, ventured to profess openly any other foreign policy than that announced by Canning. Other ministers in later times may have attempted, now and then, to swerve from it in this direction and in that, and to cover their evasion of it by specious pleas, but the new doctrine set up by Canning has never since his time found avowed apostates among English statesmen. It would have been well if such a principle could have inspired the foreign policy of England in the days when the French Revolution broke out, and if England had then proclaimed that she would be no party to any attempt made by foreign States to prevent the people of France from settling their own systems of government for themselves. Europe might have been saved a series of disastrous wars. France might have been relieved from counter-revolutions, seasons of anarchy, and seasons of military despotism. England might long have had friendly neighbors where even yet she has perhaps only concealed enemies.

The designs of the Holy Alliance soon made themselves manifest. The French Government had brought so much pressure to bear on the feeble King of Spain that he revoked the Constitution which, at a better moment, he had {43} granted to his people. There was an attempt at revolution in Spain, and the attempt was put down by the strong hand with the assistance of France, and the leading rebels were at once conducted to the scaffold. Portugal still kept those free institutions which England had enabled her to preserve, and still retained her sympathy with freedom. Canning soon saw that a part of the policy of the French Government was to bring Portugal also into subjection, and against this danger he provided by a bold announcement of policy. He declared in the House of Commons that if Portugal were, of her own accord, to engage herself in a war with France, the English Government would not feel bound to take any active part in the struggle, but that if the King of Spain were to accept or call in the assistance of the King of France to suppress Portugal, the Government of England would put its armies into the field to maintain its ancient ally. Then there arose a great question concerning the Spanish colonies and possessions across the Atlantic. The policy of France was to enable Spain to reconquer some of her American colonies which had long been withdrawing themselves from their condition of subjection, and the scheme of French statesmen evidently was that Spain would hand over some of her American possessions as a tribute of gratitude to France for the services she had rendered to the cause of absolutism in Spain.

On this question, too, Canning announced to the House of Commons a determination on the part of the English Government which put an effectual stop to this audacious policy. Canning declared that, although Spain had long since lost any real control over her transatlantic colonies, yet if she were to attempt their actual reconquest for herself England, however little in sympathy with such a purpose, might not feel that it was any part of her business to interfere by force of arms. But he went on to tell the House that, if Spain should claim the right to hand over any of those colonies to France as a part of the policy arranged between France and Spain, the English Government would then intervene directly and at once on behalf {44} of the Spanish-American colonies. This was the course of action which Canning described to the House of Commons in an immortal phrase when he told the House "that he had called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old." No words employed by an English minister during the last century have been more often quoted, and none have ever more thoroughly justified themselves in history. The schemes of the French and the Spanish Bourbons were blighted in the bud by Canning's memorable declaration.

[Sidenote: 1822-27—The Monroe Doctrine]

Canning had indeed called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old in a sense more complete than the accepted meaning of his words, at the time, appeared to signify. He had secured for his policy the moral co-operation of the New World's greatest power—the Republic of the United States. It was on the inspiration of Canning that the President of the United States embodied in a message to Congress that declaration of principle which has ever since been known as the Monroe doctrine. President Monroe, who knew well that he was proclaiming no doctrine which his influence and his authority with his country would not enable him to carry out, made known to Congress that it was his intention to warn European sovereigns against the danger of setting up their systems in any part of the New World. The United States, according to President Monroe's declaration, had no idea of interfering with existing systems, but if European sovereigns were to set up governments of their own on any other part of the American continents and against the wishes of the populations, the United States must regard any such attempt as a menace and a danger to the American Republic. This is in substance the meaning of that Monroe doctrine which has often been criticised unfairly or ignorantly on this side of the Atlantic, and its proclamation was undoubtedly due, at the time, to the advice which came from George Canning. President Monroe never meant to say that the Government of the United States had any idea of interfering with British North America or with the Empire of Brazil. The {45} Canadian provinces of Great Britain were, of course, perfectly free to remain a loyal part of the British Empire so long as it suited the interests and the inclinations of the Canadians. If the people of Brazil chose to be governed by an emperor, the United States Government did not assert any right to interfere with their choice. But what the Monroe doctrine did declare was that if any foreign sovereigns attempted to bring liberated American colonies again under their sway, or to set up by force new subject colonies on American shores against the wishes of the populations concerned, the United States must regard such action as a menace and a danger to the American Republic, and must not be expected to look quietly on without any attempt at intervention. This was, in the truest sense, the announcement of a policy of peace, for it frankly made known to the despotic rulers of the Old World what their risk must be if they ventured on the futile experiment of setting up despotic states on the shores of the New World.

It would have been well indeed if European monarchs at a later day had always remembered the warning and rightly estimated its weight. It would have been well for Louis Napoleon if at the zenith of his imperial success he had studied that message of President Monroe and properly interpreted its meaning. Such a course would have prevented him from making his ill-starred attempt to set up a Mexican Empire by the force of French arms on the ruins of a subjugated Mexican Republic. It would have saved him from defeat and disaster, and would have saved the unhappy, ill-advised, and gallant Maximilian, his puppet emperor, from a tragic fate. The attempt to retrieve the disgrace of his enforced withdrawal from Mexico led Louis Napoleon into that policy of the desperate gambler's last throw which ended in the occupation of Paris and the fall of the Second Empire.

Meanwhile the policy of Canning had accomplished its purpose. The Congress of Verona had been an idle piece of business, the sovereigns of the Holy Alliance had found that their day was done, and the New World had been successfully called in to redress the balance of the Old.

{46}

CHAPTER LXVI.

THE CLOSE OF CANNING'S CAREER.

[Sidenote: 1820-30—Sir William Knighton]

The King was at first disposed to show some alarm at the bold policy of Canning. George, to do him justice, was in general a lover of peace, and for a while he did not see how the declarations of his Foreign Minister could lead to anything less than an outbreak of war on the part of the Continental sovereigns, who thus seemed to be challenged to assert what they believed to be their rights. His doubt and dread took the form of more or less concealed grumblings against Canning, and efforts to induce his other ministers to make a common cause with him against the adventurous Foreign Minister. Canning, however, saw that the crisis which he had to face was one which makes a bold and resolute policy, frankly avowed on the part of a strong Government, the best or the only means of securing peace. He was able, after a while, to impress his royal master with the justice of his belief, and the King graciously received the envoy accredited to his Court on behalf of one of the new American Republics. Then the rest of the work went on smoothly, the lines of the new policy were laid down, and the sovereigns of the Holy Alliance did not venture to transgress them.

The King was, at all times, much in the habit of attempting to make encroachments on the proper domain of any minister who had the courage and the strength to oppose him, and Canning had to endure a good deal of interference of this kind. The Foreign Minister patiently and steadfastly held his own, and George did not see his way to come to any open rupture. The King found it hard to make up his mind to settle down to the part of a purely constitutional sovereign. Perhaps the part had not yet {47} been clearly enough evolved from the conditions of the time, and George, even when he had the best intentions, was always lapsing back into the way of his predecessors. George was a great letter-writer. To adopt a modern phrase, he "fancied himself" as a composer of State papers. It seems marvellous now that a man so lazy by nature should have found the time to pen so many documents of the kind. Perhaps even in the most commonplace ways of life we are often compelled to wonder at the amount of work a man habitually lazy can sometimes contrive to cram into his day's doings. George was now as much addicted to indolence, to mere amusement, and to pleasures as he had been during earlier seasons of his career. He was just as fond of the society of his intimates and of all the pastimes and social enjoyments in which he and they delighted. He had not reformed any of his habits, and his growing years did not bring him any steady resolve to apply himself to the actual business of his position. Yet he seemed to be frequently inspired by fitful desires to display himself as the genuine ruler of a State and to let his ministers know they must not attempt to do without him.

One of the King's prime favorites was Sir William Knighton, who had begun by being a physician, had made his way into Court circles, and become the private and confidential adviser of the King. Sir William Knighton had been appointed to the office of Keeper of the Royal Purse, and in that capacity he had rendered much service to George by endeavoring with skill and pertinacity to keep income and expenditure on something more nearly approaching to a balance than had been the way in former days. Knighton's was not exactly a State office and it gave him no position among ministers, but the King constantly used him as a go-between when he desired to have private dealings with any of his recognized advisers, and Knighton was the recipient of his most confidential communications. From the letters and memoranda which belong to this time we are enabled to learn much of the real feelings of King George towards some of his ministers, and to {48} understand the difficulties with which Canning had to deal while endeavoring to make his enlightened policy the accepted and recognized policy of England.

[Sidenote: 1822-27—The war of Greek independence]

The condition of Greece began to be a serious trouble to the statesmen of Europe. Greece was under the sway of the Sultan of Turkey, and its people may fairly be described as in a state of chronic insurrection. The Greeks, even in their lowest degree of national decadence, were far too intelligent, too ready-witted, and too persevering ever to become the mere slaves of an Ottoman ruler. There was something inextinguishable in the national life of the country, and it seemed as if no pressure of tyranny, no amount of humiliation, could make the Greeks forget the history of their glorious days and the deeds of their ancestry, or compel them to stifle, even for a season, their hopes of national independence. A great struggle broke out against the Ottoman rule, and it roused the passionate sympathy of the lovers of freedom all over the world. Byron threw his whole soul into the cause, and stirred the hearts of his countrymen by his appeals on behalf of the Greek struggle for independence. Numbers of brave Englishmen gladly risked their lives to help the Greeks. Lord Cochrane, who was afterwards described as the last of the English sea-kings, rushed over to Greece to give his genius and his daring to the help of the Greeks in their struggle against overwhelming odds. A speech of Lord John Russell's which he delivered in the House of Commons within the hearing of living men described with admirable effect the enthusiasm which was aroused in England for the cause of Greece and the efforts which were openly made even by members of the ruling class to raise money and to send out soldiers and sailors to enable the Greeks to hold their own against the Ottoman enemy. Many Englishmen bearing historic names joined with Byron and Cochrane in giving their personal help to the struggling Greeks, and indeed from every civilized country in the world such volunteers poured in to stand by Bozzaris and Kanaris in their desperate fight for the rescue of Greece. The odds, however, were heavily against the Greeks. Their {49} supply of arms, ammunition, and general commissariat for the field was poor and inadequate, and they were sadly wanting in drill and organization. Splendid feats of bravery were displayed on land and on sea, but it seemed only too certain that if the Greeks were left to their own resources, or even if they were not sustained by the open support of some great foreign State, the Ottoman Power must triumph before long.

The best part of the war on the side of Turkey was carried on by Ibrahim Pasha, the adopted son of Mehemet Ali, who ruled over Egypt as a vassal sovereign to the Sultan of Turkey. Ibrahim Pasha had great military capacity; he was full of energy, resource, and perseverance, and the Turkish Sultan could not have had a better man to undertake the task of conducting the campaign. The sympathies of Russia went strongly with the Greeks, or perhaps it might be more correct to say that the policy of Russia was directed against the Turks. At that time, as in later days, the public opinion of Western Europe was not always certain whether the movements of Russian statesmanship were governed more by the desire to strengthen Greece or by the desire to weaken Turkey. Canning had always been a sympathizer with the cause of Greece. In his early days his sympathy had taken poetic form, and now at last it had an opportunity of assuming a more practical shape. He would have wished well to any effort made by Russia for the emancipation of Greece, but he feared that if the effort were to be left to Russia alone the result might be a great European war, and his policy was above all things a policy of peace. His idea was to form an alliance which should exercise so commanding an influence as to render any prolonged resistance impossible. He succeeded in impressing his ideas and his arguments so effectively upon the Governments of France and Russia as to induce them to enter into a treaty with England for the avowed purpose of watching events in Eastern Europe, endeavoring to keep the conduct of the war within the limits of humanity, and bringing it to as early a close as possible.

{50}

[Sidenote: 1824—Death of Lord Byron]

The combined fleets of the three Powers were sent into the Mediterranean for the purpose of watching the movements of the Turkish and Egyptian fleets, which were threatening the shores of Greece. Sir Edward Codrington, the British Admiral, was in command of the expedition, and his instructions enjoined on him, in the usual official way, the necessity of caution and circumspection in all his movements. Something happened which brought the policy of caution to a speedy end. A report, which found some credit at the time, gave out that Sir Edward Codrington had received an unofficial hint that there was no necessity for carrying caution too far; but, however the event may have been brought about, it is certain that a collision did take place between the allied fleets and those which were championing the authority of the Sultan, and the result was that the Turkish and Egyptian war vessels were destroyed. This was the battle of Navarino, which was afterwards described in the language of British authority as "an untoward event." Untoward, in fact, it was not, for the purposes which Canning had in view, because it put an end to all the resistance of the Ottoman Power, and the independence of Greece as a self-governing nation was established, and recognized. We have been somewhat anticipating events in order not to break up the story of the Greek struggle for independence, but it has to be said that Canning did not live to see the success of his own policy. Before the battle of Navarino had been fought, the career of the great statesman had come to an end. We shall have to retrace our steps, for there is much still left untold in the story of Canning's career.

That struggle for Greek independence will always be remembered in the history of English literature. It cost England the life of one of her greatest modern poets. Lord Byron died of fever in the swamps of Missolonghi on April 19, 1824, not long after he had left the Greek Islands to conduct his part of the campaign on the mainland of Greece. It was not his good fortune to die sword in hand fighting on the battle-field for the cause which he loved so well. It was not his good fortune even to have had a {51} chance of doing much of a soldier's work in that cause. There can be no doubt that if he had been graced with opportunity he would have shown that he had a leader's capacity as well as a soldier's courage—that, as Fortinbras says of Hamlet, "He was likely had he been put on to have proved most royally." He had only completed his thirty-sixth year shortly before his death, and the poem in which he commemorated his birthday can never be read without feelings of genuine emotion. His death created a profound sensation, not only in England, but all through the civilized world. Not long since we were all favored with an opportunity of hearing how the boy, afterwards to be famous as Alfred Tennyson, was thrilled by the news of Byron's death, and how it seemed to him to be like the ending of the world. The passion of partisanship for and against Byron as a poet and as a man has long since died away, and indeed it might perhaps be said that the reaction which, for a time, followed the outburst of his fame has spent itself as well. It may be taken now as the common judgment of the world that Byron was one of the great forces of modern poetry, and that his political sympathies sometimes had, as well as his poetic efforts, the inspiration of genius to guide them.

We must now return to the career of Canning as we left it at the time when he had made his great declaration of policy with regard to the revolted colonies of Spain on the American shores, and when he was as yet engaged in shaping the policy which was destined to end in the emancipation of Greece. There were questions of home government coming more and more to the front every day, which much disturbed the mind of King George, and made the business of keeping an Administration together more and more difficult for his advisers. The financial policy of the country had been gradually undergoing a change, owing to the foresight and enlightenment of some few among English statesmen. Lord Liverpool, to do him justice, was always a man of somewhat advanced views on questions of finance, although an inveterate Tory in all that related to popular representation and freedom of speech. Canning and his {52} friend William Huskisson were leading the way in the movement towards an enlightened financial system. Huskisson had done more than any other man, with the exception of Canning himself, to improve the systems of taxation. What may perhaps be called the scientific principle in the raising of revenue was only in process of development, and to many statesmen no better idea of increasing supplies seemed to have occurred than the simple plan of increasing the rate of custom or excise duty on the first article of general consumption which came under notice. Huskisson represented the new ideas, and put them into action whenever he was allowed a fair chance of making such an experiment. He had often held administrative office, had been Secretary of the Treasury, President of the Board of Trade, and Secretary for the Colonies, and had accomplished the removal of many restrictions on the commercial dealings of the colonies with foreign countries and the reduction of many antiquated and embarrassing import duties.

[Sidenote: 1770-1830—Daniel O'Connell]

Canning and Huskisson were always close friends and often ministerial colleagues, and they two may be said to have led the way towards the system of free trade to which the time had not yet come for Robert Peel to give his complete adhesion. The great question of electoral reform was coming up, and Charles Grey and Henry Brougham were among its most conspicuous leaders. Canning did not take to Parliamentary reform, although he was what might be described as an advanced Liberal on most other questions of national importance. The Duke of Wellington was strongly opposed to any proposals for a change in the Parliamentary system, and this was one of the few great questions on which Canning and he were in habitual agreement. Then there was the still more pressing question of political equality for the Catholics of the three kingdoms. Lord John Russell succeeded later on in carrying the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts which precluded Protestant Dissenters from holding political or municipal office, but the attempt to obtain the rights of equal citizenship for subjects of the King who belonged {53} to the Church of Rome had to encounter much greater difficulties.

As might easily be expected, Ireland became the main battle-field of this struggle. We have already recorded the fact that Pitt had been greatly assisted in passing the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland and abolishing Grattan's Parliament by the hopes which he held out that the union of the legislatures would be followed by a complete measure of Catholic emancipation. George the Third refused point-blank to give his assent to any such measure, or even to listen to any proposal for its introduction, declaring again and again that his coronation oath absolutely forbade him to entertain an idea of the kind. In the end, as we have seen, Pitt gave in and undertook never again to worry the mind of his conscientious sovereign by any talk about relief to George the Third's Roman Catholic subjects. But it soon became evident that in this as in other instances the resolve of the most headstrong monarch, and the promise of the most yielding Prime Minister, cannot always induce a population to put up passively with a manifest grievance. In Ireland, where six out of every seven of the people belonged to the Church of Rome, and where the demand for Catholic Emancipation had long been championed by the greatest and the most patriotic of Protestant Irishmen, it was utterly impossible that any King and any minister could impose submission on such a question. By the time at which we have now arrived the Catholics of Ireland had found a political leader of their own faith.

Daniel O'Connell was undoubtedly one of the greatest advocates a popular cause has ever had in modern times. He was an Irishman who had become one of the most successful advocates in the Irish law courts, and as a popular orator he had no rival in his own country. He had made himself the leader in Ireland of the movement for Catholic Emancipation, and he had kindled an enthusiasm there which any English statesman of ordinary intelligence and foresight might easily have seen it would be impossible to extinguish so long as there was a struggle to be fought. {54} Canning had always been in favor of Catholic Emancipation. Lord Liverpool was, of course, entirely opposed to it, and almost until the last the Duke of Wellington held out against it. George the Fourth, for all his earlier associations with Fox and Sheridan, declared himself now to have inherited to the full his father's indomitable conscientious objection to any measure of Catholic Emancipation. George seemed, in fact, to have suddenly become filled with a passionate fervor of Protestant piety when any one talked to him about political equality for his Catholic subjects. He declared again and again that no earthly consideration could induce him to fall away from the religious convictions of his father on this subject, and the coronation oath had again become, to use Erskine's satirical phrase, "one of the four orders of the State." When reading some of George's letters and discourses on the subject, it is almost impossible not to believe that he really must have fancied himself in earnest when he made such protestations. In private life he frequently delivered long speeches, sometimes with astonishing fluency, sometimes with occasional interruptions of stammering, in vindication of his hostility to any proposal for Catholic Emancipation.

[Sidenote: 1827—Lord Liverpool's successor]

In the common language of the political world of that time the members of a Government who opposed the Catholic claims were called Protestant ministers, and the members in favor of the Catholic claims were described as Catholic ministers. In fact, it has had to be explained, for the sake of clearness, by some recent writers, that the word "Catholic" was constantly used in George the Fourth's time merely to signify pro-Catholic. When Canning was spoken of as a Catholic statesman there was not the least idea of describing him as a member of the Church of Rome, and, indeed, the words "Roman Catholic" hardly come up in the controversies of those days. When Mr. Lecky spoke during a recent Parliamentary debate of Catholics and Protestants, he was gravely rebuked by some divines of the Established Church who were under the impression that he was in some way or other truckling to the {55} claims of the Papacy when he used the word "Catholic" to describe the worshippers in the Church of Rome. Mr. Lecky was put to the trouble of explaining that he used the words "Protestant" and "Catholic" in the ordinary significance given to them during long generations of political controversy.

A crisis was suddenly brought about by the illness of Lord Liverpool. The Protestant statesman was stricken down by an attack which for a time deprived him of consciousness, and even after his partial recovery left him in a state which made it clear to all his friends that his work as an administrator was done. There was no hope whatever of his resuming official work, and the question which mainly occupied the mind of the King and of those around him was not what was to become of Lord Liverpool, but whom it would be most convenient for the King to appoint as his successor. Naturally every eye was turned on Canning, whether in hope or in fear. As Lord Palmerston said of himself many years later, so it might be said of Canning, he was the "inevitable man." The whole civilized world was filled with his fame. His course of policy had made England stronger than she had ever been since the death of the younger Pitt. Even King George could not venture to believe in the possibility of passing him over, and King George's chief objection to him was found in the fact that Canning was in favor of the Catholic claims. George thought the matter over a few days, consulted Lord Eldon and other advisers, and found that nobody could inspire him with any real hope of being able to form an enduring Ministry without Canning.

Then the King sent for Canning, and Canning made his own course quite clear. He came to the point at once. He assumed that the great difficulty was to be found in the pressure of the Catholic question, and he advised the King to form a Ministry of his own way of thinking on that subject and to do the best he could. The King, however, explained that it would be futile for him to think that any Ministry so composed could carry on the work of administration just then, and he gave Canning many {56} assurances of his own entire approval of his foreign policy, and declared that no one knew better than he did how much the power of England had increased with Continental States since Canning had obtained the conduct of her foreign affairs. Thus urged, Canning consented to undertake the formation of a Ministry, but he did so on the express condition that he should not only have the King's full confidence and be free to take his own course, but that he should be known to hold such a position and to have the absolute authority of the sovereign to sustain him. Canning's mind was, in fact, clearly made up. He would either be a real Prime Minister, or he would have no place in the new Administration, and would become once again an independent member. There was nothing else to be done, and the King gave Canning full authority to make his own arrangements.

[Sidenote: 1827—Defection among Canning's supporters]

The task which Canning had nominally undertaken was the reconstruction of the Ministry, but no one knew better than he did that it really amounted to the formation of a new Ministry. Canning was well aware that the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel would not consent to serve under him in any Administration. The Duke of Wellington was at this time entirely opposed to any recognition of the Catholic claims, and, more than that, he had never been in favor of the principles of foreign policy adopted and proclaimed by Canning. Between the two men, indeed, there was very little political sympathy, and Canning had got it into his mind, rightly or wrongly, that the Duke of Wellington had done his best to disparage him and to weaken his authority as Foreign Minister. Sir Robert Peel occupied a somewhat different position. He, too, was opposed to the Catholic claims; but he was a statesman of a far higher order than the Duke of Wellington, and it might always safely be assumed of him that he would rightly estimate the force of public opinion, and that when a great movement of political reform had proved itself to be irresistible Peel would never encourage a policy of futile resistance.

Peel's attitude is well described in the admirable life of {57} George Canning published by Mr. Frank Harrison Hill in 1887. "Peel," says Mr. Hill, "did not believe in governing against Parliamentary and public opinion." "To him the art of government was the measurement of social forces, and the adaptation of policy to their direction and intensity. When it was clear to him that a thing must be done, and that his help was essential to the doing of it, his duty was plainly marked out." Up to this time, however, Peel did not see that the Catholic question had reached such a stage, and he probably did not believe that it would ever reach such a stage. He had opposed Catholic claims thus far whenever the opportunity arose, and he could not undertake to serve under a Prime Minister who was openly in favor of recognizing those claims. We shall have to tell, before long, in the course of this history, how Peel came to see that Canning was right in his policy, and how he came to be the Prime Minister by whom it was carried to success, and how he brought the Duke of Wellington along with him. But at the time which we have now reached Peel still believed his own policy on the subject of Roman Catholic Emancipation to be the rightful policy for the guidance of the sovereign and the State, and he therefore found it impossible to serve in the new Administration. Five other members of the existing Government, besides Sir Robert Peel, resigned their places on the same grounds. One was, of course, the Duke of Wellington, and another was Lord Chancellor Eldon. Some influential peers who were not members of the Government made it known that they could not give their support to any Administration which admitted the possibility of recognizing the Catholic claims.

Canning's heart might well have sunk within him for a time when he found himself abandoned by such colleagues and thrown over by such supporters. He actually waited upon the King, and asked his permission to give up the undertaking for the formation of a new Ministry. The King, however, probably felt that he had gone too far in his support of Canning to draw back at such a moment. It is very likely that he was displeased by the pertinacity of {58} the resistance which men like Wellington and Peel and Eldon offered to any act of policy approved by him, and he had undoubtedly by this time come to have a strong faith, not only in Canning's capacity, but also in Canning's good fortune. Whatever may have been his chief inspiration, he certainly had an opportune season of enlightenment, and he refused to allow Canning to withdraw from the task assigned to him. Accordingly Canning became Prime Minister, and united in his own person the offices of First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

[Sidenote: 1827—Canning and Lord Grey]

Sir John Copley, raised to the peerage under the title of Lord Lyndhurst, became Lord Chancellor in succession to Lord Eldon, and the House of Lords thus obtained a member who was destined to be one of its foremost orators, to maintain a rivalry in Parliamentary debate with Brougham and the great Tory orator and leader, Lord Derby, and to be listened to with admiration by men still living, who are proud to remember that they heard some of his great speeches. It may be observed that Lord Eldon, whose retirement made way for Lord Lyndhurst, had been Lord Chancellor for twenty-six years, with the exception of one year when he was out of office. Huskisson became Treasurer of the Navy and President of the Board of Trade in the new Administration. Lord Palmerston was Secretary at War, and Frederick Robinson, now made Lord Goderich, who was in thorough sympathy with Canning and Huskisson on questions of financial policy, was Colonial and War Secretary, the latter office according to the arrangements of that time a position having quite different functions from those of the Secretary of War. The arrangements for the new Ministry were completed in April, 1827. Canning had now reached the highest point of his career. His policy had already been marked out for him, for England, and for Europe. The treaty between England, France, and Russia for the protection of Greece, which became a formal instrument after his accession to the office of Prime Minister, was the result of the efforts which he had made before Lord Liverpool's sudden illness {59} led to the break-up of the Liverpool Administration. Canning had little time left him to turn his new and great position to account. Fame, as Mr. Hill well says, was a sucked orange to George Canning when he accepted the office of Prime Minister.

The difficulties against which the new Ministry had to contend were many and great. Canning had the support of such Whigs as Brougham in the House of Commons, but in the House of Lords he had many powerful opponents, and the influence of the House of Lords then counted for more than it does at present. In the House of Lords, too, Lord Grey bitterly and pertinaciously opposed him. Grey was then one of the leading advocates of Parliamentary reform, and Canning could not see his way to ally himself with the Parliamentary reformers. Lord Grey, moreover, seems to have distrusted the sincerity of Canning's support of Catholic emancipation, a distrust for which no possible reason can be suggested; and, indeed, Grey would appear to have had a feeling of personal dislike to the great statesman. Accordingly he made several attacks on Canning and Canning's policy in the House of Lords, and Grey was an eloquent speaker, whose style as well as his character carried command with it. Canning was a man of singularly sensitive nature. Like many other brilliant humorists and satirists, he was somewhat thin-skinned and very quick of temper. He could bear a brilliant and even a splendid part in the Parliamentary battle, but it was a pain to him to endure in silence when he had no chance of making a retort. The attacks of Lord Grey exasperated him beyond measure, and it is believed that he had at one time a strong inclination to accept a peerage and take a seat in the House of Lords, thereby withdrawing forever from the inspiriting battle-ground of the House of Commons for the mere sake of having an opportunity of replying to the attacks of Lord Grey, and measuring his strength against that of the great Whig leader. The fates, however, denied to Canning any chance of making this curious anticlimax in his great political career. His health had always been more or less delicate, and he was {60} never very careful or sparing in the use of his physical powers. He was intensely nervous by constitution, and was liable to all manner of nervous seizures and maladies. In the early days of 1827 he caught a severe cold while attending the public funeral of the Duke of York in the Chapel Royal, Windsor.

[Sidenote: 1827—Death of Canning]

The Duke of York was the second son of George the Third, and for some time had been regarded as heir-presumptive to the crown. The Duke's public career was in almost every way ignoble. He had proved himself an utterly incapable commander, although a good War Office administrator, and his personal character was about on a level with his military capacity. His death in January, 1827, may be said to have had two serious consequences at least—it made the Duke of Clarence the next heir to the crown, and it brought on Canning the severe cold from which he never recovered. It may be mentioned here, although the fact is of little political importance, that Canning when he became Prime Minister made the Duke of Clarence Lord High Admiral. The office was probably bestowed as a token of Canning's gratitude to the King who had stood by him, not indeed to the last, but at the last. It certainly could not have been given because of any conviction in Canning's mind that the Duke of Clarence was likely to render signal benefit to the royal navy, to the State, or to the country by his services in such an office.

Canning seemed for a while to rally from the cold which he had caught at the Duke of York's funeral, but the months of incessant anxiety which followed cast too heavy a burden on his shattered nerves and feeble physical frame. It was hoped by his friends that the adjournment of the Houses of Parliament, which took place after the Ministry had been formed, might give him rest enough from official work to allow him to repair his strength. But Canning's was not a nature which admitted of rest. The happy faculty which he had once possessed of getting easily to sleep when the day's work was done had long since deserted him, and of late he took his official cares to bed with him, and they kept him long awake. The early {61} summer of 1827 brought him no improvement, and his friends already began to fear for the worst. He suffered from intense agonies of nervous pain, and the agonies seemed to grow worse and worse with each return. The Duke of Devonshire offered him the use of a summer residence which he had at Chiswick, and Canning gladly accepted the offer. It was remarked at the time by some of his friends that an evil omen hung over this summer retreat. The former Duke of Devonshire, father of Canning's friend, had offered the same villa as a temporary retreat to Charles James Fox; the offer was accepted by him, and Fox actually died in the bedroom which was now occupied by Canning.

The omen soon made good its warning. Canning gradually sank under the influence of his fatal illness. He said to a friend that during three days he had suffered more pain than all that had been compressed into his life up to that time, and we know that his was a frame which was always liable to acute pain. He sank and sank, and on August 7 he talked for the last time coherently and composedly to those who were around him. Then he met his approaching death with a resigned and cheerful spirit, and his latest words showed that he knew where to repose his trust for the great change which was so near. Shortly before four o'clock on the morning of August 8, 1827, the struggle was over and the great statesman was at rest. Even at that early hour the villa was surrounded by a large crowd of anxious watchers, who could not leave the grounds until they heard the last tidings that were to come from the sick-chamber. The funeral of Canning in Westminster Abbey, although it was in name a private ceremonial, was followed by a throng of sorrowing admirers, among whom were princes and nobles, statesmen and prelates, politicians of all orders, and men and women of all ranks down to the very poorest, who thus bore their spontaneous tribute to the services and the memory of the great Prime Minister, and expressed in the only way left to them their sense of the loss which his country and the cause of peace and freedom had sustained by his death.

{62}

[Sidenote: 1827—Canning and the English ministers]

Canning had only just completed his fifty-seventh year when his career came to a close. He died before his old friend and colleague whose sudden illness had left open to him the place of Prime Minister, for Lord Liverpool did not die until December 4 of the following year. The place of Canning in English history is more clear to us now than it was to the world even when the anxious crowd was watching round the villa at Chiswick and when the throng followed his remains to Westminster Abbey. He was, as we have already said, the founder of that system of foreign policy which English statesmanship has professed ever since his time. His was that doctrine of conditional non-intervention for which, in later days, men like John Stuart Mill contended as the doctrine which ought to be the governing principle of a great council of European States, if such could be established. Canning's idea was not that England should proclaim such a principle of non-intervention as that which Cobden and Bright, and other men equally sincere and patriotic, endeavored to impress on public opinion at a later day. Canning's principle was that England should not intervene even on the right side of any Continental struggle in which she had no direct concern, unless some other State equally free from any direct share in the controversy were making preparation to intervene on the wrong side. Then, according to his doctrine, England was bound to say to the interposing State: "If you, an outsider to this controversy, are making up your mind to intervene on what we believe to be the wrong side, then it may become our duty to intervene on what we believe to be the right side." It was in accordance with this principle that Canning prevailed upon the Governments of France and Russia to enter into that engagement with England which secured the independence of Greece, as it was in accordance with this principle that he had made the proclamation of policy which secured the independence of the Spanish-American colonies, and thus called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old.

Canning must, on the whole, be ranked among great Liberal statesmen, although there were some passages in {63} his career which showed that he had not advanced quite so far in Liberal principles as some of the statesmen of his own day. It is hard now to understand how such a man could have stood out against the principle of Parliamentary reform and popular suffrage, and could have resisted the efforts to give full rights of citizenship to the members of dissenting denominations. It is especially hard to understand why a man who was in favor of abolishing religious disqualifications in the case of Roman Catholics should have thought it right to maintain them in the case of Protestant Dissenters. The explanation of this latter inconsistency may be found, perhaps, in the assumption that when Canning thought of the grievance to Roman Catholics he had in his mind the grievances to the Roman Catholics of Ireland, a separate country with a nationality and traditions of her own, and a country in which the vast majority of the population belonged to the one religious faith. He may have thought that the English Protestant Dissenters who did not see their way to class themselves with the Protestants of the English State Church had not so distinct a claim to the recognition of their grievance. It may seem strange that a mind like Canning's could have been beguiled from the acceptance of a great principle by a curious distinction of this kind, but it must be remembered that down to a much later day many of the professed supporters of religious equality contended for some limitation of the principle where political privileges were concerned, and that only in our own time has admission to the House of Commons been left open to the professors of every religious faith, and even to those who profess no religious faith at all. So far as Parliamentary reform in the ordinary sense of the words is concerned, we may feel quite sure that if Canning had lived a few years longer his mind would have accepted the growth of public opinion and the evidences which justified that growth, and he would not have been found among the unteachable opponents of popular suffrage and a well-adjusted Parliamentary representation.

As a financial reformer he was distinctly in advance of {64} his time, and even such men as Sir Robert Peel only followed slowly in the path which Canning and Huskisson had opened. Canning's fame as a Parliamentary orator is now well assured. He has been unduly praised, and he has been unduly disparaged. He has been described as the greatest Parliamentary orator since the days of Bolingbroke, and he has been described as a brilliant and theatric declaimer who never rose to the height of genuine political oratory. The common judgment of educated men now regards him as only inferior, if inferior at all, to the two Pitts and Fox among great Parliamentary orators, and the rival of any others belonging to his own, or an earlier, or a later day in the history of the English Parliament. Of him it may fairly be said that his career made an era in England's political life, and that the great principles which he asserted are still guiding the country even at this hour.

{65}

CHAPTER LXVII.

"THE CHAINS OF THE CATHOLIC."

[Sidenote: 1827—Lord Goderich]

During the closing days of Canning's life he was speaking to Sir William Knighton of the approaching end, and he said, quietly: "This may be hard upon me, but it is still harder upon the King." There was something characteristic in the saying. Canning had been greatly touched by the manner in which the King had, at last, come round to him and stood by him against all who endeavored to interpose between him and his sovereign; and to a man of Canning's half-poetic temperament the sovereign typified the State and the people, to whom the Prime Minister was but a devoted servant. It was certainly hard upon the King, at least for the time. George must have had moments of better feelings and better inspirations than those which governed the ordinary course of his life, and he had lately come to realize the value of the services which Canning had rendered to England. We shall see, before long, that a secession of Canning's followers from the party in power took place, and that the seceding men were called, and called themselves, the "Canningites." George already appears to have become a Canningite.

The King had a good deal of trouble in forming an Administration. Lord Goderich became Prime Minister, with Lyndhurst again as Lord Chancellor, and Huskisson in Goderich's former place at the War and Colonial Office. Lord Goderich, as we have seen, had been sent into the House of Lords when Canning became Prime Minister. Up to that time he was Mr. Frederick John Robinson, generally known by the nickname of "Prosperity Robinson." This satirical designation he obtained from the fact that while he was President of the Board of Trade, and {66} still later when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had always made it his business in each session to describe the country as in a condition of unparalleled prosperity. More than that, he always insisted on declaring that the particular schemes of taxation that he brought forward were destined, beyond all possibility of doubt, to increase still further that hitherto unexampled prosperity. It had been his fortune, in his early official career, to propose and carry some schemes of taxation which met with such passionate opposition in some parts of the country as to lead to serious rioting and even to loss of life. But all the time he saw only prosperity as the result of his financial enterprises, and hence the nickname, which is still remembered in England's Parliamentary history.

[Sidenote: 1828—The struggle for religious equality]

Lord Goderich was not a man of remarkable political capacity, and he was a poor, ineffective, and even uninteresting speaker, except when the audacity of his statements, and his prophecies, and the tumult of interruptions and laughter that they created, lent a certain Parliamentary interest to his orations. He had an immense amount of that sort of courage which, in the colloquial language of our times, would probably be described as bumptiousness. He had an unlimited faith in his own capacity, and he saw nothing but success, personal and national, where observers in general could discern only failure. He was one of a class of men who are to be found at all times of Parliamentary history, and who manage somehow, nobody quite knows how, to make themselves appear indispensable to their political party. He was not, however, without any faculty for improvement, and of late years he had derived some instruction from Canning's teaching and example in politics and in finance. Such as he was, his appointment as Prime Minister in succession to Canning seemed about the safest compromise the King could make under all the existing conditions. His position as a stop-gap was maintained but a very short time. During his Administration, or perhaps it ought rather to be called his nominal Administration, the substantial result of Canning's recent foreign policy was seen in the destruction {67} of the Turkish and Egyptian fleets at the battle of Navarino, which led almost immediately to the Sultan's acknowledgment of the independence of Greece.

Some differences of opinion on financial questions soon broke out in the Cabinet, and Huskisson and certain of his colleagues threatened to resign; and Lord Goderich, seeing little or no chance of maintaining himself long in his position, got out of the difficulty by tendering his own resignation. The King accepted the resignation, and there was then really only one man, the Duke of Wellington, to whom George could look for the construction of a Government. Accordingly, the Duke became First Lord of the Treasury, and Huskisson retained, for the time, his former position. During this Administration Lord John Russell brought forward his motion for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts; the object of the motion being to abolish all the conditions which rendered it impossible for the members of any Protestant dissenting denomination to hold State or municipal office, unless they were willing to accept a test-oath, which acknowledged the spiritual supremacy of the Church of England. Lord John Russell's motion was carried in the House of Commons by a majority of 237 to 193, and a Bill founded on the principle of the motion was passed through both Houses of Parliament. This may be described as the first of the great measures accepted by Parliament for the purpose of establishing the principle of religious equality, in admission to the rights of citizenship, among the inhabitants of these countries. Of course, the establishment of religious equality was yet a good long way off, and it is a curious fact that the measure that was founded on Lord John Russell's motion did something very distinct in itself to make new battle-grounds for those who advocated the full recognition of the principle.

The new measure proposed to admit the members of all recognized Protestant denominations, whether inside or outside the Church of England, to the rights of citizenship, but it took good care to affirm that it had no intention of admitting any one else. The Act provided that all {68} persons presenting themselves as candidates for election to political or municipal office should subscribe a declaration "on the true faith of a Christian." This, of course, excluded Jews and Freethinkers, while the Roman Catholics were shut out by a special oath, directed exclusively against themselves, and to which it was impossible that any professing Catholic could subscribe. Lord John Russell, however, had begun his great career well when he carried the Legislature with him, even thus far, on the way to religious equality, although he was not himself destined to see the last fight which had to be fought before the principle had been completely established. It is almost needless to say that the new form of pledge introduced by the measure was no part of Lord John Russell's plan, but he accepted the Bill as amended in the House of Lords rather than sacrifice, for the time, the whole purpose of his motion. The motion, it may be added, was strongly opposed in the House of Commons, not only by Robert Peel, but by Huskisson. Peel's opposition is easily to be understood, because up to this time he had not risen above the convictions with which he started in public life in favor of the general practice of making the political and civic rights of citizenship conditional upon what he believed to be religious orthodoxy. In the case of Huskisson, who was a strong supporter of the admission of Roman Catholics to full equality of political and civic rights with the members of the State Church, the explanation probably was that he feared if the Dissenters received their rights in advance they might become less zealous than many of them had been for the full recognition of the Catholic claims. Some of the archbishops and bishops in the House of Lords were liberal enough to give their support to the Bill, much to the consternation of Lord Eldon, who could not understand how any prelate of the State Church could be so far led away from the sacred duties of his position as to lend any countenance to a measure admitting the unorthodox to the place in society which ought to be the right only of orthodox believers.

[Sidenote: 1828—The Catholic Association]

It is interesting to notice that a protest was entered {69} against the introduction of the words "on the true faith of a Christian" by Lord Holland, who represented the principles of Charles James Fox. The peers, it should be said, enjoy the privilege, which is not allowed to members of the representative chamber, of recording their formal protest on the books of their House against any motion or measure which has been carried in spite of their opposition, and of setting forth reasons on which their objection is founded. Many of the protests thus recorded form important contributions to political history. Lord Holland vindicates his protest in words which are well worth quoting: "Because the introduction of the words 'upon the true faith of a Christian' implies an opinion in which I cannot conscientiously concur, namely, that a particular faith in matters of religion is necessary to the proper discharge of duties purely political or temporal." Lord Eldon strongly condemned the action of the prelates who had voted in favor of the measure, and he used some words which showed that, however obtuse his bigotry may have been, he clearly saw what must inevitably come from the concession to religious liberty which was made by the passing of such a measure. "Sooner or later," he said, "perhaps in this very year, almost certainly in the next, the concessions to the Dissenters must be followed by the like concessions to the Roman Catholics." The Roman Catholic claims were already asserting themselves with a force which appealed irresistibly to the minds of all enlightened men.

The Catholic Association had been formed in Ireland for the purpose of advocating the claims of the vast majority of the Irish people, and it had found for its leader a man who must have made a great figure in the political life of any era, and who was especially qualified to take a leading place in such an agitation. Daniel O'Connell was one of the most remarkable men of his time. He was the first Irish political leader of modern days who professed the faith which may be called the national creed of his people. The leaders of great Irish movements just before his time—the Fitzgeralds, the Tones, and the Emmets—had {70} had been, like Grattan himself, members of the Established Church. O'Connell had, moreover, no sympathy whatever with the sentiments of the French Revolution. He had passed a few of his early years in France, he had seen some of the later excesses of the revolutionary period, and he had been inspired with a horror as great as that felt by Edmund Burke for the extravagances of the revolutionary era. He belonged to the landlord class, but his sympathies had always been with the popular and national movements of his countrymen. He had practised at the Irish bar, and had become the greatest advocate in the Irish law courts, and was thus enabled to combine with all the fire and energy of a born popular leader the subtlety and craft of a trained and practised lawyer. O'Connell was one of the greatest orators of a day when political oratory could display some of its most splendid illustrations. He had a commanding presence, indeed a colossal form, and a voice which was marvellous alike for the strength and the music of its varied intonations. Such men as Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton have borne enthusiastic tribute to the magic of that voice, and have declared it to be unrivalled in the political eloquence of the time. O'Connell made his voice heard at many great public meetings in England and in Scotland, as well as in Ireland, and his political views had, indeed, much in common with those of English and Scottish advanced Liberals.

[Sidenote: O'Connell and the Parliamentary Oath]

The Catholic Association was made, at one period of its career, the subject of an Act of Parliament which declared it to be, for a certain time, an illegal organization, and the period was now approaching when the prohibitory Act would have to be renewed or allowed to drop out of existence. In consequence of some ministerial rearrangements a vacancy had arisen in the Parliamentary representation of the county of Clare in Ireland, and O'Connell resolved on taking a bold and what then seemed to many a positively desperate step. He announced himself as a candidate for the vacancy in opposition to its former occupant, who, having been appointed to ministerial office, was compelled to resign his place in the House of {71} Commons and offer himself to his former constituents for re-election. O'Connell was not disqualified by positive enactment from becoming a candidate for a seat in Parliament; that is to say, there was no law actually declaring that a Roman Catholic, as such, could not enter the House of Commons. But, as we have explained already, it was the law of the land that no man could take his seat in that House until he had subscribed an oath which it was perfectly impossible for any Roman Catholic to accept, an oath disavowing and denouncing the very opinions which are an essential part of the Roman Catholic's faith. O'Connell, therefore, could not be prevented from becoming a candidate for the representation of Clare, and when the contest came on it ended in his being triumphantly returned by an overwhelming majority. O'Connell presented himself at the table of the House of Commons, and was called upon to subscribe the usual oath, which, of course, he absolutely refused to do. He was then ordered to withdraw, and he did withdraw, and the seat was declared vacant. O'Connell returned to Clare, again offered himself as candidate, and was again elected by a triumphant majority. Then, indeed, men like Lord Eldon must have begun to think that the old world was really coming to an end. King George and the Government found themselves face to face with a crisis to which there had been no parallel in the memory of living statesmen.

The progress of events was, meanwhile, making a deep impression on the receptive mind of Sir Robert Peel, now Home Secretary, and by far the most rising and powerful member of the Administration. Huskisson, it should be said, had by this time ceased to belong to the Duke of Wellington's Government. There had been some misunderstanding between him and the Duke, arising out of a speech made by Huskisson in Liverpool, which was understood to contain a declaration that Huskisson had only accepted office on the express understanding that the policy of the Duke's Government was to be the policy of Canning. The Duke took exception to this, and declared that he had entered into no understanding as to his general {72} policy, but that what Huskisson probably had said was that he had accepted the composition of the Government as a guarantee in itself that a sound national policy was to be carried out.

[Sidenote: 1828—Demand for Catholic emancipation]

Huskisson accepted the explanation, and explained that this was what he really had said, and no doubt this was really the purpose of that passage in his speech; but the incident led to some friction between the two men, and was the beginning of other misunderstandings. Some difference of opinion afterwards arose on minor questions of policy, and Huskisson sent to the Duke a somewhat hasty letter announcing his resignation. The letter was intended to be only a conditional intimation of his purpose, but the Duke took it as positive and final, and announced it as such to the King. There was no course left open to Huskisson but to resign. The incident created much talk at the time, and gave rise to a good deal of satirical comment. Several other members of the Government, among whom was Lord Palmerston, resigned along with Huskisson, and they formed themselves into an independent party, bearing the name of the Canningites. It is curious to notice that the reconstructions caused in the Government by these resignations, and the new appointments which had to be made, led to that vacancy in the county of Clare which gave O'Connell an opportunity of coming forward as a candidate for the seat and being elected.

Peel saw that the Duke of Wellington's Government had lost some of its most influential members. Other events, too, had been turning his attention towards the growth of the agitation in Ireland. The Marquis of Wellesley, elder brother of the Duke of Wellington, had been Viceroy of Ireland. Wellesley had been a distinguished statesman, and as Viceroy of India had conducted to a successful issue, with the help of his younger brother, the great Mahratta war. When he became Viceroy of Ireland he had gone over to that country as a strong opponent of the Catholic claims, but his experience there soon convinced him that it would be impossible to resist those claims much longer, and at the same time {73} to keep Ireland in tranquillity. Therefore, when the Duke of Wellington, on coming into office as Prime Minister, refused to recognize the Catholic claims, Lord Wellesley resigned his place. He was succeeded by the Marquis of Anglesey, a soldier who had done brilliant service in the wars against Napoleon, and was well known as a determined opponent of the demands made by the advocates of Catholic emancipation. Lord Anglesey, too, became satisfied during his time of office in Ireland that there was no alternative between emancipation and an armed rebellion among the Irish Catholics, a large number of whom were actually serving in the ranks of the army. His opinions were again and again impressed on the Government, and the course he took only led to his recall from the Viceroyalty.

In the House of Commons an event took place which had a great effect on the mind of Peel. Early in 1828 Sir Francis Burdett, who held a very prominent place among the more advanced reformers of the time, and who represented Westminster in the House of Commons, brought forward a resolution inviting the House to consider the state of the laws affecting the Roman Catholics of the two islands, "with a view to such a final and conciliatory settlement as may be conducive to the peace and strength of the United Kingdom, to the stability of the Protestant Establishment, and to the general satisfaction and concord of all classes of his Majesty's subjects." The resolution was supported by a powerful speech from Brougham, in which he dwelt on the fact that not one of those who opposed the motion had expressed any conviction that the existing state of things could long continue, and that it was impossible to overlook or deny the great advance which the movement for Catholic Emancipation had been making in and out of Parliament. Peel was greatly impressed by this argument, and also by the fact that the men who supported Burdett and Brougham in the House of Commons represented the best part of the intellect and statesmanship of that House. The resolution was carried by 272 votes against 266 on the other side, a small majority, {74} indeed, but a majority that at such a time was large enough to show a man of Peel's intellect the practical progress which the demand for Catholic Emancipation had already made.

[Sidenote: 1828—Peel and Catholic emancipation]

We find in Peel's own correspondence the most interesting evidences of the influence which all these events were making on his clear and thoughtful mind. The man whom O'Connell had defeated in Clare, Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald, had represented the constituency for many years, had always supported by speeches and votes the claims of the Catholics, and was the son of one who had stood by the side of Grattan and Sir John Parnell in resisting the Act of Union. No one could have been more popular up to that time among Irishmen, and the election of O'Connell was obviously due to the fact that O'Connell had made himself the leader of a movement which had for its object to bring about a great crisis, and to compel the Parliament and the Government to surrender at once or encounter a civil war. Peel asked himself—we quote his own words—"whether it may not be possible that the fever of political and religious excitement which was quickening the pulse and fluttering the bosom of the whole Catholic population—which had inspired the serf of Clare with the resolution and the energy of a free man—which had in the twinkling of an eye made all considerations of personal gratitude, ancient family connections, local preferences, the fear of worldly injury, the hope of worldly advantage subordinate to the one absorbing sense of religious obligation and public duty—whether, I say, it might not be possible that the contagion of that feverish excitement might spread beyond the barriers which under ordinary circumstances the habits of military obedience and the strictness of military discipline opposed to all such external influences?"

Peel became gradually convinced that the Marquis of Anglesey was right in his views, and that there was no choice between a recognition of the Catholic claims and the outbreak of a civil war in Ireland. The more he thought over the question, the more he became convinced that it would not be possible to rely on the loyalty of all {75} the Catholic soldiers in the ranks of the army in Ireland if they were called upon to join in shooting down their own brothers and friends because these had risen in rebellion against the oppressive laws which excluded a Catholic from the full rights of citizenship. Peel was not a philosopher or a dreamer, but above all things a practical statesman, and when he had to choose between civil war and the concession of a claim which was admitted to be right and just by some of the most enlightened Englishmen and Scotchmen who sat near him on the benches of the House of Commons, and by some of the most enlightened Englishmen and Scotchmen outside the House, he could not bring himself to believe that claims thus advocated could be so essentially unjust or unreasonable as to make their continued refusal worth the cost of so terrible a struggle.

Peel made up his mind to the fact that Catholic Emancipation must, as soon as possible, become the work of Parliament. But he did not yet believe that he was the right man to undertake the task. It seemed to him that one who had always been regarded as the determined opponent of Emancipation would not be likely to win over many supporters among his Tory friends for such a sudden change of policy. He did not think himself well suited, and he was not inclined, to conduct the negotiations which would be necessary between any Government attempting such a task and the Irish advocates of Emancipation. His idea was that Lord Grey, as the head of the reforming party, would be the statesman best qualified to undertake such an enterprise and most likely to carry it to an early success. His first business, however, would clearly be to convince the Duke of Wellington that Catholic Emancipation was inevitable, and this work he at once set himself to accomplish. He had some trouble in bringing the Duke over to his own opinions, but the Duke became convinced in the end, and, indeed, both at that time and after, the Duke was always inclined to follow Peel's guidance, on the plain, practical, soldierly principle that Peel understood political affairs much better than he did, {76} and that Peel's advice was always sure to be sound and safe. So the Duke, too, became convinced that Catholic Emancipation must be accepted as inevitable, and that the sooner it was carried through the better. But Wellington was strongly opposed to the idea of handing over the work to Lord Grey. He showed that it would be hardly possible to induce King George to accept the services of Lord Grey for such a purpose. The King was known to dislike Lord Grey, whose stern, unbending manners could not be welcome to a sovereign unaccustomed to the dictation of so uncourtierlike an adviser as the leader of the Whig party.

[Sidenote: 1828—The Oath of Supremacy]

Wellington's idea was that, as the thing had to be done, it had better be done by Peel and himself, and he almost implored Peel not to desert him at such a crisis. Peel could not resist the personal and brotherly appeal thus made to him by one for whom he had so profound a respect, and the result was that the two agreed to work together as they had been doing, and to make Catholic Emancipation the business of their Government. But then the King had to be won over, and nobody knew better than Wellington did how difficult this task must be. Yet he did not despair. He had had some experience of the King's resistance and the only means by which it could be got over. Again and again he had had occasion to urge on the sovereign the adoption of some course to which George, at first, was obstinately opposed, and he knew that quiet persistence was the only way of carrying his point. His plan was to avoid argument as much as possible, to state his case concisely to the King, and allow the King to take his full time in pouring forth his protestations that he never could and never would consent to such a policy. The King was very fond of hearing himself talk, and loved on such occasions to display all that eloquence which he fully believed himself to possess, and which he had no opportunity of letting out on any Parliamentary or public platform. Then, when the King had exhausted himself in repeating over and over again his reasons for refusing the demands made upon him, Wellington would quietly return to the fact that there was no practical way out of the difficulty but to assent to {77} the proposition. The King usually gave way, and the interview had a satisfactory close. The King was appeased by the sound of his own eloquence, and the taciturn minister had his way.

This course of policy Wellington resolved to adopt with regard to the question of Catholic Emancipation. He listened to all the talk about the coronation oath and the declaration that George would rather retire to his kingdom of Hanover, abdicate the throne of England, and leave the English people to find a Catholic—that is, a pro-Catholic—king in the Duke of Clarence, and then merely pointed out to the sovereign that something had to be done, and that his Majesty's advisers could think of nothing else but the course which they proposed for his acceptance. The King gave way to a certain extent, but he put his foot down, as the modern phrase goes, on the maintenance of the Oath of Supremacy in its existing form.

There is an interesting account given of the final interview which the Duke of Wellington, Lord Lyndhurst, and Robert Peel had with their royal master on this subject. Without an alteration in the terms of the Oath of Supremacy it was absolutely impossible that Roman Catholics could enter the House of Commons, for the oath contained the very words no Catholic could possibly consent to utter or subscribe. The King absolutely and vehemently refused to give his consent to any alteration of the oath, and he then asked his three ministers what, under the circumstances, they proposed to do. The ministers informed the sovereign that they proposed to ask his permission for them to make announcement in the two Houses of Parliament that they had ceased to hold office and were no longer responsible for the work of administration. George took the announcement at first with gracious composure, and told them he supposed he could not find any fault with them for their act of resignation. He carried his kindness even further, for, as we learn on the authority of one of the three ministers, "the King took leave of us with great composure and great kindness, gave to each of us a salute on each cheek, and accepted our resignation of office."

{78} Thackeray, in his lecture on George the Fourth, turned this record to most amusing account, and delighted his audience by a comical description of the King's paternal benediction imprinted in kisses on the cheeks of Wellington, Lyndhurst, and Peel. But when the kissing was over and the three statesmen had departed, the King began to find that he was left practically without a Government. What was to be done? It would be impossible to form a Government after his own heart without such men as Wellington, Lyndhurst, and Peel, and even if he could have got over his own personal dislike to Lord Grey, it was impossible to suppose that Lord Grey would become the head of any Government which did not undertake Catholic Emancipation. The King found himself in the awkward position of having either to announce to his subjects that he intended to govern without any ministers, and to direct the affairs of the State entirely out of his own head, or to call back to office the men whom he had kissed and sent away. Even George the Fourth could not hesitate when such a choice was forced upon him. He wrote to the Duke of Wellington, telling him that he must once more put himself in the hands of the Duke and his colleagues, and let them deal as they thought best with Catholic Emancipation.

[Sidenote: 1829—The Forty-shilling Freeholders]

The Catholic Relief Bill was at once brought in, and consisted in substance of the enactment of a new oath, which admitted Roman Catholics to Parliament and to all political and civil offices excepting merely those of Regent, Lord Chancellor, and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The Bill was passed rapidly through both Houses of Parliament. The third reading was carried in the House of Commons by 320 votes to 142, and in the House of Lords by 213 to 109, and the great controversy was happily at an end. The settlement, however, was not effected with as complete and liberal a spirit as Peel would certainly have infused into it if he could have had his way.

O'Connell, who had been twice elected for Clare, was not allowed to take his seat under the new measure until he had returned to his constituents and submitted himself for {79} re-election—a ceremonial absolutely unnecessary, and only impressing the civilized world as an evidence of the ungenerous and ungracious manner in which the inevitable had been accepted. Then, again, an Act of Parliament was passed disfranchising the class of voters in Ireland who were called the Forty-shilling Freeholders, who formed a large proportion of O'Connell's constituents. This was done no doubt to put some obstacles, at all events, in the way of the Irish Catholic population if they should hope ever again to make the representation of any national claims as effective as they had done in the Clare election. It may be taken for granted that Peel would not have marred the effect of an act of mere justice by niggardly qualifications of any kind, but he knew he had to deal with a Tory House of Lords, and was content to accept some compromise as long as he could carry the main object of his policy. The first great chapter in the modern history of political reform had come to a thrilling close.

{80}

CHAPTER LXVIII.

THE LAST OF THE GEORGES.

[Sidenote: 1829—Wellington fights Lord Winchilsea]

One incident connected more or less directly with the Catholic Emancipation question deserves historical record, if only for the curious light it throws upon the contrast between the manners of that day and the manners of more recent times. Shortly before the passing of the Catholic Relief Bill, the Earl of Winchilsea wrote a letter which was published in one of the newspapers strongly denouncing the conduct of the Duke of Wellington, and declaring him guilty of having joined in a conspiracy to overthrow the Church and the Constitution of England under false pretences. This letter was addressed to the secretary of a committee formed for the establishment of King's College in London, and Lord Winchilsea had apparently assumed that the subject under consideration warranted him in expressing his views with regard to the conduct of the Prime Minister on the Catholic relief question. In more recent times, of course, such a letter might have been written by anybody, whether peer or commoner, and published in all the newspapers of the country without calling for the slightest notice on the part of a Prime Minister. The Duke of Wellington, however, lived at a time when a different code of honor and etiquette prevailed. He wrote to Lord Winchilsea a letter, the principal passage of which is worth quoting to illustrate the peculiar sense of duty which could, at the time, direct the conduct of a man like the Duke of Wellington. "The question for me now to decide is this: Is a gentleman who happens to be the King's Minister to submit to be insulted by any gentleman who thinks proper to attribute to him disgraceful or criminal motives for his conduct as an individual? I cannot {81} doubt of the decision which I ought to make on this question. Your Lordship is alone responsible for the consequences." This was, of course, a challenge to Lord Winchilsea to withdraw his accusation or to fight a duel forthwith.

Now, to the cool, philosophic mind, at least in later times, it might well seem obvious that whether Lord Winchilsea's charge against the Duke of Wellington was just or unjust, its justice or injustice could not in any way be made clear by the discharge of bullets from the pistols of the challenger and the challenged. The cool, philosophic observer of a later time might wonder also how the Duke's sense of public responsibility could allow him to peril a life which he must have known to be of the highest value to his country, for the sake of taking part in a combat with an antagonist whose personal opinion of the Duke and of the Duke's conduct could not be of the slightest importance to the vast majority of the Duke's countrymen. But the Duke of Wellington was not in any case a cool, philosophic observer, and he lived at a time when the established or tolerated code of what was called personal honor seemed to have nothing to do either with Christian morals, with political expediency, or with ordinary common-sense. Wellington accepted without question the dictates of the supposed code of honor, and he sent his challenge. Lord Winchilsea, it will be seen, did not intend to stand by his gross and preposterous charge against the Duke, but he did not think that the code of honor allowed him to say so like a man, and tender an apology like what we should now call a gentleman, without first subjecting himself to the fire of his wrongfully accused antagonist. So the Duke and the Earl went out with their seconds and met at Wimbledon. The victor of Waterloo was not destined to kill or be killed in this absurd contest. When the parties to the duel were placed on the ground and the word was given. Lord Winchilsea reserved his fire, the bullet from the Duke's pistol passed him without doing any harm, and Lord Winchilsea then discharged his pistol in the air, and authorized his second to make known his retraction of his {82} charge against the Duke, and his apology for having made such a charge. The retraction and the apology were published in the newspapers, and there, to use a form of words which was very common at the time after such an incident, the affair ended with equal honor to both parties.

[Sidenote: 1829—Comments upon Wellington's duel]

It seems hard now to understand how any man, in the position and with the responsibilities of the Duke of Wellington, could bring himself to think that he was called upon to risk his life for the mere sake of resenting an imputation which no rational man in his senses could possibly have regarded as of any consequence to the Duke's public or private character. The whole incident seems to us now one more properly belonging to comic opera than to serious political life. We can hardly conceive the possibility of the Marquis of Salisbury insisting on fighting a duel with some hot-headed member of the House of Lords who had chosen to describe him as a conspirator against the Constitution and the Church of England. The Duke of Wellington, however, must be judged according to the ways of his own time, and the code of political and personal honor in which he had been nurtured. There has not been in modern political history a more conscientious and high-minded statesman than Robert Peel, and yet not very long before the Winchilsea business Robert Peel had only been prevented by the interference of the law from going out to fight a duel with Daniel O'Connell, and O'Connell himself had killed his man in another affair of honor, as it was called. We who live in these islands at the present time may be excused if we indulge in a certain feeling of self-complacency when we contemplate the advance towards a better code of personal honor and a better recognition of the teachings of Christianity which has been made here since the days when the Duke of Wellington thought that for him, as a gentleman, there was no other course to take than to risk his life because an insignificant person had made a ridiculous charge against him.

Still, it is something to know that there were cool observers even at the time who thought the Duke of Wellington had done wrong. Charles Greville, in commenting on {83} the duel, says that "everybody, of course, sees the matter in a different light; all blame Lord Winchilsea, but they are divided as to whether the Duke ought to have fought or not." "Lord Winchilsea is such a maniac, and has so lost his head, that everybody imagined the Duke would treat what he said with silent contempt." Greville utterly condemns Lord Winchilsea for having made the attack on the Duke, and for not having sent an apology when it was first required of him, but he adds: "I think, having committed the folly of writing so outrageous a letter, he did the only thing a man of honor could do in going out and receiving a shot and then making an apology, which he was all this time prepared to do, for he had it ready written in his pocket." Most of us at this time of day would be inclined to think that if Lord Winchilsea was willing to make the apology and had it ready written in his pocket, he might have acted according to a better code of honor by not exposing the Duke to the chance of killing him. However, we must not expect too much from Greville, and it is well to know, as his final verdict on the whole affair, that "I think the Duke ought not to have challenged him; it was very juvenile, and he stands in far too high a position, and his life is so much publica cura that he should have treated him and his letter with the contempt they merited." The King, it seems, approved of the Duke of Wellington's conduct in making the letter the subject of a challenge and meeting his opponent in a duel. Greville goes on to remark that somebody said "the King would be wanting to fight a duel himself," whereupon some one else observed, "He will be sure to think that he has fought one."

The Duke of Wellington had a great deal to trouble him after the passing of the Catholic Relief Bill. There was great distress all over the country, and the discontent was naturally in proportion to the distress. Wellington had lost much of his popularity with the more extreme members of his own party, who could not lift their minds to an understanding of the reasons which had compelled him to change his old opinions on the Catholic question. It cannot be doubted, too, that he sometimes felt disappointed {84} with the results which were following from his policy towards Ireland. Members of his own party were continually dinning into his ears their declaration that the measure passed in favor of the Roman Catholics had not put a stop to agitation in Ireland, and that, on the contrary, O'Connell was now beginning to agitate for a repeal of the Act of Union. At that time, as at all times, the opponents of any great act of justice were eager to make out that its concession must have been an utter failure, because instead of satisfying everybody forever it had only led other people to demand that other acts of justice should also be done. Some members of Wellington's own party were now inclined for the first time to become advocates of Parliamentary reform, on the ground that nothing but a reduced franchise in England could save the State Church from being overthrown by the emancipated Roman Catholics. Those who had trembled before at the possibility of revolutionary sentiments leading to the subversion of the throne, now declared themselves in terror lest the spread of Roman Catholic doctrine should lead to the subversion of the Protestant altar. The truth is, and it is a truth of which governments have to be reminded even in our own times, that the long delay of justice was alone answerable for any alarm which might have been caused by its sudden concession. The arguments in favor of Catholic Emancipation were just as strong, and ought to have been just as clear, to all rational men before it became evident to Wellington and Peel that there was no choice but between emancipation and civil war. The plain duty of a civilized government is to redress injustice at the earliest possible moment, and not to wait idly or ignorantly until the danger of a popular uprising makes instant redress inevitable.

[Sidenote: 1829—Need for radical reforms]

The great distress in many parts of the country was in the mean time leading to new forms of crime. The burning of corn-ricks and farm-houses was becoming in many districts the terrible form in which hunger and want of work made wild war against property. The Game Laws, which were then at their highest pitch of severity, led to {85} ferocious and frequent struggles between the patrons and the enemies of legalized monopoly. Poachers were killed by game preservers, and game preservers were killed by poachers. Every assize court told this same story. An entirely new form of crime broke out in the murders which were committed for the sake of obtaining bodies to be sold for the purposes of dissection. The price of food was often made enormously high by the purely artificial restrictions imposed upon its importation, and even in some cases on its mere production, and in ordinary human society increase of poverty always means increase of crime. A large proportion of the population was sunk in absolute ignorance, and as yet no systematic attempt whatever was made to establish any form of national education. The luxury and the extravagance of the rich were enormous, and were greatly stimulated by the example of the sovereign and the Court. Under the influence of the spasmodic and unreal impulse given to commercial activity by the late wars the rich seemed to be growing richer, while by the increased taxation which was the result of these wars the poor were certainly made to grow poorer. The demand for Parliamentary reform was beginning to express itself in systematic movements. Lord John Russell and Henry Brougham made their voices heard in the House of Commons and throughout the country. Daniel O'Connell went so far as to declare that nothing would satisfy him short of universal suffrage—manhood suffrage, that is to say—vote by ballot, and triennial Parliaments. This was thought at the time by most people to be the mere raving of a madman or the wild outcry of a revolutionary demagogue. We are not very far from the full accomplishment of the programme just now. The agitation against slavery and the slave trade was becoming an important movement. The time, in fact, was one of storm and high pressure. The shapes of great coming changes were daily seen upon the horizon, and part of the community regarded as the portents of coming national destruction what others welcomed as the bright signs of approaching prosperity, education, and peace.

{86}

[Sidenote: 1830—Death of George the Fourth]

One coming change all men looked forward to with the conviction that it was near. The end of the reign was close at hand. The King's health and strength had wholly given way of late years, and it was beyond the reach of medical science to do much for the prolongation of his life, even if George had been the sort of man to give medical science any chance of doing much for him. Preparations, however, were still being made for his birthday celebration in April, and nothing was done by any official announcement to give strength to the general prevailing impression that the end was near at hand. When, on April 15, a bulletin was at last issued, it merely announced that the King was suffering from a bilious attack accompanied by a slight difficulty in breathing, but nothing was said to intimate that the King's physicians were in any alarm for the result. The royal physicians still kept issuing bulletins, but they were so vague in their terms that it is impossible to believe they were not made purposely deceptive. It would appear that King George, like many braver and better men, had a nervous objection to any admission by himself or on his behalf that there was the slightest reason for alarm as to the state of his health. Greville, who was then in Rome, notes on May 12 that: "Everybody here is in great alarm about the King, who I have no doubt is very ill." Then Greville adds, in characteristic fashion: "I am afraid he will die before I get home, and I should like to be in at the death, and see all the proceedings of a new reign." But he makes up his mind that he must not hurry his departure on the ground that "I shall probably never see Rome again, and I have a good chance of seeing at least one king more leave us."

Days and days went on and the public were still kept in doubt, until on May 24 a message was sent in the King's name to both Houses of Parliament to say that the King no longer found it convenient to sign State papers with his own hand, and hoped some means might be found for relieving him from the necessity of making any attempt to discharge the painful duty. This announcement made it clear enough to everybody that the King was in a very {87} weak condition, but there was naturally some difficulty about devising an entirely satisfactory method of dispensing him from the duty of appending his sign-manual to important documents. Not a very long time had passed away since the throne of England was nominally occupied by an insane sovereign. It was thought quite possible that insanity might show itself in the present King, and it was absolutely necessary that the utmost care should be taken to provide against any chance of the royal authority being misused by those who surrounded the sovereign. It was arranged, therefore, that the sign-manual should be affixed in the King's presence, and in obedience to his order given by word of mouth, and that the document thus stamped must be endorsed by three members of the Privy Council. All this was to be provided for by an Act of Parliament, and the Act was only to be in operation during the session then going on, in order that if the King's malady should last the renewal of the regular authority must be formally sought from the Legislature. The Bill for this purpose became law on May 28, and it remained in operation but for a very short time. On June 26, about three in the morning, the reign of George the Fourth came to an end. The death was sudden, even when we consider that there had been for some time no hope left of the King's recovery. George was sitting up in bed, and to all outward appearance was not any worse than he had been for some days before, when suddenly a startled expression came over his face, he leaned his head on the shoulder of one of his attendants, was heard to say, "O God, this is death," and then all was over.

The rupture of a blood-vessel proved to have been the immediate cause of death, but ossification of some of the vessels near the heart had begun years before and a complication of disorders had been gradually setting in. The King's mode of life was not one which gave him any chance of rallying against such disorders. He was reckless in his food and drink, and had long been in the way of cheering and stimulating himself by glasses of cherry-brandy taken at any moment of the day when the impulse came upon {88} him. Shortly before his death George made an earnest request to the Duke of Wellington, who was in constant attendance, that he should be buried in the night-shirt which he was wearing at the time. The Duke was somewhat surprised at this request, for one reason among others that the garment in question did not seem likely to commend itself as a shroud even to a sovereign less particular as to costume than George the Fourth had been. During his later years, however, as we learn from the testimony of Wellington himself, the King, who used to be the very prince of dandies where his outer garments were concerned, had got into the way of sleeping in uncleanly nightshirts and particularly dirty night-caps. When the King was dead, Wellington noticed that there was a red silk ribbon round his neck beneath the shirt. The ribbon was found to have attached to it a locket containing a tiny portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert, perhaps the one only woman he had ever loved, perhaps, too, the woman he had most deeply wronged. It seemed that at one period of their love story the King and Mrs. Fitzherbert had exchanged small portraits, each covered by half a cut diamond, and no doubt there was an understanding that each should rest forever on the breast of its wearer.

[Sidenote: 1830—The character of George the Fourth]

Nothing in the story of George the Fourth's worthless and erring life is more discreditable and dishonorable to him than the manner in which he behaved to Mrs. Fitzherbert, and the utter falsehood of the denial which he had given to the reports that a marriage ceremony had taken place between them—a falsehood which, be it remembered, he had declared to Charles Fox upon his honor to be a truthful statement. The moralist may be a little puzzled how to make up his mind as to the bearing of this incident upon the character of George the Fourth. Does it relieve the murky gloom of George's life by one streak of light if we find that, after all, he did love Mrs. Fitzherbert to the last, and that in his dying moments he wished her portrait to go with him to the tomb? Or does it darken the stain upon the man's life to know that he really did love the woman whom nevertheless he could deliberately consign {89} to an infamous imputation? We do not know whether any writer of romance has ventured to introduce into his pages an incident and a problem such as those which are thus associated with the death-bed of George the Fourth. It is something to know that the King's brother, the Duke of Clarence, whom that death-bed had made King of England, was kind and generous to Mrs. Fitzherbert, and did all in his power to atone to her for the trials which her love and her royal lover had brought upon her life.

George was in his sixty-eighth year when he died. It would not be easy to find anywhere the story of a life which left so little of good to be remembered. George seems to have had some generous impulses now and then, and he probably did some kindly acts which could be set off against his many errors, imperfections, ignoble selfishnesses, and grave offences. But the record of his career as history gives it to us is that of a life almost absolutely surrendered to self-indulgence. It is only fair to remember when we consider all the unworthy acts of his manhood that the unwise and harsh restraints imposed upon him in his early years are accountable, at least to a certain extent, for the follies and the vices to which he yielded himself up when he became, as Byron says of one of his characters, "Lord of himself, that heritage of woe." Heritage of woe it certainly was in the case of George the Fourth. In his early manhood he appears to have had the gift of forming close friendships with men of genius and of noble impulse, but their example never told upon him, and as one cause or other removed them from his side his career bore with it no trace of their influence or their inspiration. No one ever seems to have loved him except Mrs. Fitzherbert alone, and we have seen how that love was repaid. Even those who were most devoted to him in his later years, because of their devotion to the royal house and to the State of which he was the representative, found themselves compelled to bear the heaviest testimony against his levity, his selfishness, his lack of conscience, his utter indifference to all the higher objects and purposes of life.

George must have had some natural talents and some {90} gifts of intellect, for he would otherwise not have chosen such friends as those whom in his better days he chose out and brought around him. We are told that he had marvellous powers of conversation, that he had a ready wit, and a keen insight into the humors and the weaknesses of those with whom he was compelled to associate. We are told that he could compete in repartee with the recognized wits of his time, and that he could shine as a talker even among men whose names still live in history because of their reputations as talkers. Of course it will naturally occur to the mind that the guests of the Prince Regent might be easily inclined to discover genuine wit in any repartee which came from the Prince Regent, but it is certain that some at least of the men who surrounded him were not likely to have been betrayed into admiration merely because of the rank of their royal entertainer. Burke was held to have spoken disparagingly of George when he described him as "brilliant but superficial." To one of Burke's deep thought and wide information a man might well have seemed superficial in whom others nevertheless believed that they saw evidences of intellect and understanding, but if Burke thought a man brilliant it is only reasonable to assume that that man's conversation must have had frequent flashes of brilliancy.

[Sidenote: 1830—The Third and Fourth Georges contrasted]

Undoubtedly George was capable sometimes of appreciating thoroughly the qualities of greatness in other men, but the appreciation never left any abiding influence upon his character or his career. He certainly did not make himself the cause of so much injury to the best interests of the State as George the Third had done, but it has also to be observed that when George the Third went wrong and obstinately maintained a wrongful course he was acting in dogged obedience to what he believed to be his conscience and the teachings of his creed. George the Fourth had absolutely no conscience and no law of life, and when he talked most vehemently and loudly about his coronation oath those who were accustomed to deal with him knew quite well from experience that when he had exhausted his humor by a {91} sufficient outpouring of eloquence he would be sure to take the advice given to him and to trouble himself no more about the question of conscience. In this way, of course, George the Fourth did less harm to the State than his father had done, but when we come to compare the moral character of the two men we must admit that the obstinacy of the father deserves the recognition which we cannot give to the spasmodic and ephemeral self-assertion of the son. Nobody for a moment believed that George the Fourth had the slightest idea of actually abdicating his royal position in England and betaking himself to perpetual boredom in Hanover rather than consent to the passing of Catholic Emancipation. But at times of trial those who were around George the Third had good reason to believe that if he were driven to choose between his throne and his conscience he would have come down deliberately from the throne and followed his conscience whithersoever it might lead him. With George the Fourth the only question was how long he would stand the wear and tear of having to defend his position, and how soon he would begin to feel that the inconvenience of giving in would be less troublesome than the inconvenience of holding out. Even the most courtly historian would be hard put to it if he were set to find out any passage in the whole of George the Fourth's matured life which compels admiration.

George seems to have been an absolutely self-centred man. He was to all appearance constitutionally unable to import into his mind any considerations but those which affected his own personal comforts and likings and indulgences and occasional love of display. There were times when he evidently thought he was acting a great part, and when it filled him with joy to believe that he was thus making himself an object of public admiration; but no higher consideration, no thought beyond him and the applause he believed himself to be winning, appear to have entered his mind even at such moments of exaltation. We read in history of princes who believed themselves qualified by nature to be great actors or great singers, and who made absurd exhibitions of themselves accordingly and accepted {92} the courtly and venal applause as genuine tributes to artistic genius. In the same way, and only in the same way, George the Fourth sometimes believed himself to be playing a great part, and it gratified his vanity to act the part out until it became tiresome to him and he found it a relief to go back to the ordinary delights of his easy, lazy, and sensuous nature. Perhaps the best that can be said of him is that he had possibly some gifts which under other conditions might have been turned to better account. Perhaps if he had had to work for a living, to make a career in life for himself, to depend for his success entirely on the steady use of his own best qualities, and to avoid the idleness and self-indulgence which would have condemned him to perpetual stint and poverty, he might have made a respectable name in some career where intelligence and application count for much. But a hard fortune had condemned him to be a king, and to begin by being the son of a king, and thus to find as the years went on increasing opportunity of gratifying all his meanest tastes and finding always around him the ready homage which accords its applause to the most ignoble caprices and the most wanton self-indulgence. The reign of George the Fourth saw great deeds and great men; it could have seen few men in all his realm less deserving a word of praise than George the Fourth.

[Sidenote: 1830—Events in the reign of George the Fourth]

The reign saw the beginning of many great enterprises in practical science, the uprising of many philanthropic combinations, and the first movements of political and social reform. It saw the earliest attempts made in a systematic way towards the spread of education among the multitude, and the close of many a bright career in literature and the arts. Bishop Heber died in 1826. The death of Byron has already been recorded in these pages, and at even an earlier period of the reign two other stars of the first magnitude in the firmament of literature ceased to shine upon the earth in bodily presence with the deaths of Keats and Shelley. John Kemble, probably the greatest English tragic actor from the days of Garrick to the uprising of Edmund Kean, died while George the Fourth was {93} King. Sir Thomas Lawrence, Flaxman, Fuseli, and Nollekens ceased to work for art. Sir Humphry Davy, Dugald Stewart, and Pestalozzi were lost to science. The reign saw the foundation of the Royal Society of Literature, which, to do him justice, George the Fourth helped to establish; the beginning of Mechanics' Institute, and the opening of some new parks and the Zoological Gardens. It is doubtful if the Thames Tunnel can be described as a really valuable addition to the triumphs of engineering, and it will perhaps be generally admitted that Buckingham Palace was not an artistic addition to the architectural ornaments of the metropolis. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was set on foot owing chiefly to the energy and the instincts of Henry Brougham.

We have seen how the foreign policy of Canning opened a distinctly new chapter in English history, and it may be observed that owing to the influence of that policy the principle of neutrality was maintained under difficult conditions, and even where the general sympathy of England went distinctly with one of the parties to a foreign dispute. This policy might well have been followed with credit and advantage to England on more than one critical occasion at a much later time. The reign saw the beginning of the movement towards free trade as a distinct international policy, and saw the removal of some of the most cramping and antiquated restrictions on the commerce of the kingdom and the colonies. The crusade against slavery and the slave-trade may be said to have begun its march in anything like organized form during this reign. The political principles which we now describe as Liberal became a new force in the State during the same time. The idea that even beneficent despotism can be counted on as an enduring or an endurable form of government began to die out, and the principle came to be more and more distinctly and loudly proclaimed that the best form of government must be not only for, but by, the people.

These things are in themselves enough to show that in the sphere of political and social reform as well as in that {94} of practical science the reign of George the Fourth was at least a reign of great beginnings. The student of history may perhaps draw an instructive and a moral lesson from the knowledge forced upon him of the fact which seems lamentable in itself that to the ruler of the State little or nothing was due for the achievements which give the reign its best claim to be honored in history. The reign of George the Fourth teaches us that in a country like modern England, while a good sovereign may do much to forward the intellectual, political, and social progress of the people, even the worst sovereign could no longer do much to retard it.

[Sidenote: 1830: The Georges and the Stuarts]

The Four Georges had come and gone. A famous epoch in English history had ended. Four princes of the same race, of the same name, had ruled in succession over the English people. Practically, the reigns of the four namesakes may be said to coincide with, to comprehend, and to represent the history of the eighteenth century in England. The reign of George the Fourth may be regarded as a survival from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, as the reign of Anne was a survival from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century. In all the changes of that long and eventful age one change is very memorable and significant. The position of the dynasty was very different when George the Fourth died from what it was when his great-great-grandfather came over unwillingly from Germany to grasp the sceptre. When the Elector of Hanover became King of England, the Stuart party was still a power in political life and the Stuart cause the dearest hope of a very large number of devoted Englishmen. It might well be hard for men to realize in the days of George the Fourth that in the reign of the first George and in the reign of the second George the throne reeled beneath the blows which the armed adherents of the exiled Stuart princes struck at the supremacy of the sovereigns of the House of Brunswick. Even when the third George came to the throne there were still desperate dreamers who hoped against hope that something, anything, might happen which would allow the King—the King over the {95} water—to enjoy his own again. When the last of the Georges passed away, the Stuart cause had been buried for nearly half a century in that grave in Rome which encloses the remains of the last and perhaps the most unhappy of the Stuart princes.

{96}

WILLIAM THE FOURTH.

CHAPTER LXIX.

KING WILLIAM THE FOURTH.

[Sidenote: 1830—The career of William the Fourth]

William the Fourth, as the Duke of Clarence had now become, was nearing the completion of his sixty-fifth year when the death of his brother raised him to the throne. He had surely had full time in which to prepare himself for the business of a monarch, for during a long period it was well known that nothing was likely to stand between him and the succession except the life of his elder brother, the Duke of York. But William's tastes did not allure him to any study of the duties which belonged to a throne. The Navy was assigned to him as a profession, and he actually saw some service in America and in the West Indies, but he obtained his promotion as a matter of course until he reached the position of Lord High Admiral, which may be described as the main-top of his naval career. The story is told of him, and will probably, whether it be accurate or not, be told as long as his history comes under public recollection, that he had something to do with the promotion of the great naval battle of Navarino, which led to the emancipation of Greece. The combined fleets of England, France, and Russia, under command of Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, were watching the Turkish and Egyptian fleets, in order to protect Greece against them. But the actual course to be taken by the allies was supposed to depend upon many serious political considerations. The British Admiralty issued a solemn official despatch to Sir Edward Codrington, enjoining on him the necessity of great care and caution in any action he might take. This {97} document was forwarded in due course by the Lord High Admiral, and the story goes that the Duke of Clarence scribbled at the end of it in his own hand the encouraging words, "Go it, Ned." Whether it was fought under this inspiration or not, it is certain that the battle was fought, that the Turkish and Egyptian fleets were destroyed, and that the independence of Greece was won.

The English public generally would have been none the less inclined to welcome the accession of the Duke of Clarence as William the Fourth even although it had been part of authentic history that the new King had lately borne an important, if an underhand, part in the rescue of Greece from Ottoman oppression. But there was little else in the career of the Duke of Clarence to command popular respect or affection. He had lived openly, or almost openly, for many years with the celebrated actress Mrs. Jordan, who had borne him ten children, and this connection had been made the subject of free and frank allusion in some of the verses of Robert Burns. The British public, however, were inclined, as Robert Burns was, to look forgivingly on the doings of the Prince, for he was still a young man when his acquaintance with Mrs. Jordan began. The British public liked him because he was a sailor, if for nothing else, and men's eyes turned hopefully to him when it became apparent that not much good was any longer to be looked for from George the Fourth. In 1818 William married the eldest daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and had two daughters, both of whom died in their infancy. The Duke of Clarence had been noted, during the greater part of his career, for his roughness of manner, and many anecdotes of him were spread about which might have suited well the fun of some historian belonging to the school of Brantôme, or some compiler of memoirs after the fashion of Saint-Simon. Still he was the Sailor King, and England had always, and naturally, loved sailors; and "go to then," as might have been said in the days of Shakespeare, what further explanation could be needed of the fact that William the Fourth opened his career of royalty under favoring {98} auspices? It might seem to the mind of some philosophical observer rather hard to get into transports of enthusiasm about a new monarch aged sixty-five who during all his previous career had done nothing of which to be particularly proud, and had done many things of which a respectable person in private life would have felt heartily ashamed. Still, the Duke of Clarence had become William the Fourth, and was on the throne, and great things might possibly be expected from him even yet, although he was pretty well stricken in years. At all events, he was not George the Fourth. So the public of these countries was in the mood to make the best of him, and give him a loyal welcome, and wait for events with the comfortable faith that even at sixty-five a man may begin a new life, and find time and heart and intellect to do things of which no promise whatever had been given during all his earlier years.

[Sidenote: 1830—The pocket boroughs]

William had been supposed up to the time of his accession to lean towards the Whig, or what we should now call the Liberal party. His manners were frank, familiar, and even rough. He cared little for Court ceremonial of any kind, and was in the habit of walking about the streets with his umbrella tucked under his arm, like any ordinary Londoner. All this told rather in his favor, so far as the outer public were concerned. There was supposed to be something rather English, something rather typical of John Bull in the easy-going manners of the new sovereign, which gave people an additional reason for welcoming him. The new sovereign, however, had come in for times of popular excitement, and even of trouble. There came a new revolution in France—only a dynastic revolution, to be sure, and not a national upheaval, but still it was a change which dethroned the newly restored legitimate line of sovereigns. The elder branch of the Bourbons was torn away and flung aside. There were to be no more kings of France, but only kings of the French. Charles the Tenth was deposed, and Louis Philippe, son of Philippe Egalité, was placed on the throne. Charles the Tenth was the last of the legitimate kings of France so far, and there does not {99} seem much chance in the immediate future for any restoration of the fallen dynasty.

The overthrow of legitimacy in France had a strong effect on popular opinion in England. It was plain that Charles the Tenth and his system had come to ruin because the sovereign and his ministers would not move with the common movement of the times over the greater part of the European continent, and popular reformers in England took care that the lesson should not be thrown away over here. Great changes had been accomplished by popular movements even during the enfeebling and disheartening reign of George the Fourth. Great progress had been made towards the establishment of religious equality, or at all events towards the removal of religious disqualifications among the Dissenters and the Roman Catholics. There was a loud cry almost everywhere for some measure of political reform. The conditions of the country had been gradually undergoing a great change. England had been becoming less and less dependent for her prosperity on her mere agricultural resources, and had been growing more and more into a great manufacturing community. Huge towns like Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, and Sheffield were arising in the Northern and Midland regions. Liverpool was superseding Bristol as the great seaport of commercial traffic. Yet in most cases the old-fashioned principle still prevailed which in practice confined the Parliamentary representation of the country to the members who sat for the counties, and for what were called the pocket boroughs. The theory of the Constitution, as it was understood, held that the sovereign summoned at his own discretion and pleasure the persons whom he thought best qualified to form a House of Commons, to consult with him as to the government of the empire. The sovereign for this purpose conferred the right of representation on this or that town, or district, or county, according as he thought fit, and this arrangement had gone on from generation to generation. Now it sometimes happened that a place that had been comparatively popular and prosperous at the period when it obtained the {100} right of representation had seen its prosperity and its population gradually ebb away from it, and leave it little better than a bare hill-side, and yet the bare hill-side retained the right of representation, and its owner could send any one he pleased into the House of Commons. There were numberless illustrations of this curious anomaly all over the country. The great families of landed proprietors naturally monopolized among them the representation of the counties, and many of them enjoyed also the ownership of the small decaying or totally decayed boroughs which still retained the right of returning members to Parliament. On the other hand, the development of manufacturing energy had caused the growth of great and populous towns and cities, and most of these towns and cities were actually without representation or the right of representation in the House of Commons. Thus a condition of things had arisen which was certain to prove itself incompatible with the spread of education and the growth of public interest in all great questions of domestic reform.

[Sidenote: 1830—The Princess Victoria]

We have already seen in this history how the Whig party in Parliament, and the popular agitators out of Parliament, had long been rousing the national intelligence and the national conscience to a sense of the growing necessity for some complete change in all that concerned the representation of the people. The Duke of Wellington was at the head of the Administration when George the Fourth died and William came to the throne. The new King, as has been said, was supposed to have Liberal inclinations as regarded political questions, and there was a common expectation that he might begin his reign by summoning a new set of ministers. The King, however, did nothing of the kind. He sent messages to the Duke of Wellington telling him, in his usual familiar and uncouth way, that he had always liked the Duke uncommonly well, and did not see any reason why he should not keep him on as his Prime Minister. This was, to begin with, a disappointment to the majority of the public. The first royal speech from the throne contained other matter of disappointment. There was great distress all over the {101} country. The enormous expense of the long wars was still making itself felt in huge taxation. The condition of agriculture was low, and many districts were threatened with something like famine. Trade was suffering from the reaction which always follows a long and exhausting war. It was confidently expected that the royal speech would take some account of the widespread national distress and would foreshadow some measures to deal with it. The speech, however, said nothing on the subject. Then there was another omission which created much dissatisfaction and even some alarm. The speech made no mention of any measures to be taken for the establishment of a regency in the event of the King's death. The King was sixty-five years old, and had led a life which even the most loyal and hopeful of his subjects could not regard with confidence as likely to give promise of a long reign. Now the heir-presumptive to the throne was the Princess Alexandrina Victoria, a child then only eleven years old. The Princess Victoria, as she was commonly called, was the daughter of the Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George the Third. Any attack of illness, any serious accident, might bring the life of King William to a sudden close, and then if no previous arrangement had been made for a regency Parliament and the country might be involved in some confusion.

There was one very grave and even ominous condition which had to be taken into account. If the King were to die suddenly, and with no provision made for a regency, the girl, perhaps the child, who succeeded him would in the ordinary course of things be left under the guardianship of her eldest uncle, the Duke of Cumberland. Now it is only stating a simple fact to say that the Duke of Cumberland was then the most unpopular man in England. He was not merely unpopular, he was an object of common dread and detestation. He was regarded as a reckless profligate and an unprincipled schemer. There must have been much exaggeration about some of the tales that were told and accepted concerning him, for it is hard to believe that at a time so near to our own a prince of {102} the Royal House of England could have lived a life the story of which might seem to have belonged to the worst days of the Lower Empire. But, whatever allowance be made for exaggeration, it is certain that the Duke of Cumberland was almost universally hated, and that many people seriously considered him quite capable of any plot or any crime which might secure his own advancement to the throne. Sanguine persons, indeed, saw a gleam of hope in the fact that the Duke of Cumberland was in any case the heir to the crown of Hanover. In the House of Hanover the succession is confined to the male line, and the Princess Victoria had nothing to do with it. The hope, therefore, was that the Duke of Cumberland would be content with the prospect of his succession to the throne of Hanover, and that when the time arrived for him to become King of Hanover he would betake himself to his new kingdom and trouble England no more. Still the fact remained that just as yet he was not King of Hanover, and that if no proper provisions were made against a contingency he might become the guardian of the girl, or the child, who was to succeed William the Fourth on the English throne.

[Sidenote: 1830—The death of Huskisson]

King William, however, did not trouble himself much about all these considerations. He did not see any reason why people should expect him to die all of a sudden, and he could hardly be got to give any serious attention to the question of a regency. It was then part of the constitutional practice of the monarchy that a dissolution of Parliament should take place when a new sovereign had come to the throne. The practice has since ceased to be a part of our constitutional usages, but in the days when William the Fourth came to the throne it was a matter of course. The King, for some reason or other, was anxious that a dissolution should take place as soon as possible. It may be that he was merely desirous to find out how far the existing Ministry had the support of the country, although it does not seem quite likely that William's intelligence could have carried him so near to the level of statesmanship as to make this elementary question a {103} matter of consideration in his mind. The King's principal ministers were the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel. The most powerful among the leaders of Opposition were Charles, Earl Grey, in the House of Lords and Henry Brougham and Lord John Russell in the House of Commons. There was some doubt as to the position which might be taken up by Canning and Huskisson and their friends. Some of the Tories believed that they might be won over to support the Duke of Wellington, in order to assist him in counteracting the efforts of the more ardent and liberal reformers, like Grey and Brougham and Russell. Fate soon settled the question so far at least as Huskisson was concerned. The opening of the line of railway from Liverpool to Manchester, the first line of any considerable length completed in England, took place on September 15, 1830. The Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, and Huskisson were among the distinguished visitors who were present at the opening of the railway. The friends alike of the Prime Minister and of the great expert in finance were anxious that the two should come together on this occasion, and make a personal if not a political reconciliation. The train stopped at a station; the Duke and Huskisson both got out, and were approaching to meet each other, the Duke holding out his hand, when an alarm was raised about the approach of a locomotive. A rush was made for the carriages, and in the confusion Huskisson was struck down by an open door in the moving train, and suffered such injuries that his death almost immediately followed. Huskisson was, beyond doubt, one of the most enlightened statesmen of his time in all that concerned the financial arrangements of the country. He might have been called a Liberal, just as we might call Canning a Liberal, when we think of the general direction taken by the policy of either man.

The dissatisfaction with which the speech from the throne was received found its expression in no severer form, so far at least as Parliament was concerned, than a motion by Lord Grey in the one House, and Lord Althorp in the other, for a short delay to enable both Houses to {104} consider the address in reply to the royal speech. It was made evident that the delay sought for had to do with the question of a regency, concerning which, as has been said, the King had not troubled himself to make any announcement. Now the constitutional system of England had taken no account, except through the provision of a regency, of the fact that a child might become sovereign of the realm. Therefore, if Parliament did not establish a regency during the lifetime of King William, and if the King were soon to die through any accident or malady, the child Princess would come to the throne under no further constitutional restraints than those which belonged to the position of a full-grown sovereign. There was another trouble, however, and one of still graver political importance, awaiting the Ministry of the Duke of Wellington.

[Sidenote: 1830—Brougham and Reform]

Henry Brougham gave notice in the House of Commons that on an early day he would bring forward a motion to raise the whole question of reform in the representative system of the country. Brougham, at this time, was regarded as the most strenuous and powerful champion of reform in the House of Commons. Lord John Russell had not yet had an opportunity of proving how steadfast were his principles as a reformer, and how great were the Parliamentary gifts which he had brought to the main purpose of his life. Moreover, Lord John Russell never had any of the kind of eloquence which made Brougham so powerful in and out of Parliament. Brougham on a popular platform could outdo the most stormy mob orator of the time. He was impassioned, boisterous, overwhelming to a degree of which we can find no adequate illustration even in the most tumultuous Trafalgar Square demonstrations of our later days. Even in the House of Commons, and afterwards in what might be regarded as the deadening atmosphere of the House of Lords, Brougham was accustomed to shout and storm and gesticulate, to shake his fist and stamp, after a fashion which was startling even in those days, and of which now we have no living illustration. Brougham was at this time almost at the very zenith of his popularity among the reformers all over the country, {105} and more especially in the North of England. When, therefore, Brougham announced that he was determined at the earliest opportunity to raise the whole question of reform in the House of Commons it became evident that the new reign was destined to open with a momentous and long constitutional struggle, a struggle that might be counted upon to mark an epoch in the history of England. The news that the French legitimate monarchy had fallen and that Louis Philippe reigned as King of the French—King of the barricades he was commonly called—came in time to quicken men's hopes and animate their passions for the approaching trial of strength between the old forms and the new spirit.

The Government refused to agree to the one day's delay which was asked for by the leaders of Opposition. On a division being taken there was a majority for Ministers in both Houses, and the Duke of Wellington had scored thus far. He had shown that he was personally determined not to concede any point to the Opposition, and he had secured a victory. Parliament was dissolved within a few days and the country was plunged into a general election. At that time, it should be remembered, an election was a very different sort of event from that which bears the same name at the present day. An election contest could then, according to the extent and nature of the constituency, run on for a time not exceeding fifteen days, and it was accompanied by a practice of bribery, lavish, open, shameless, and profligate, such as is totally unknown to our more modern times, and such as our habits and feelings, no more than our laws, would tolerate. Intimidation and violence were also parts of every fiercely contested election, and those whom the law excluded from any part in the struggle as electors were apt to find, in that very exclusion, only another reason for taking part in it by the use of physical force. Just at the time which we are now describing there are many conditions which made a general election likely to be especially stormy and turbulent.

The distress which prevailed throughout the country had in many districts called up a spirit of something like {106} desperation, which exhibited itself in a crime of almost entire novelty, the burning of hayricks on farms. This offence became so widespread throughout large parts of the country that it gave rise to theories about an organized conspiracy against property which was supposed to be, in some vague sort of way, an outcome of the socialistic excesses which had taken place during the French Revolution and had been revived by the more recent commotions in France. The probability is that the rick-burning offences were, in the first instance, the outcome of sheer despair seeking vengeance anywhere and anyhow for its own sufferings, and then of the mere passion for imitation in crime which finds some manner of illustration here and there at all periods of history. However that may be, it is certain that the offences became very common, that they were punished with merciless severity, and that the gallows was kept in constant operation.

[Sidenote: 1830—A change in constitutional systems]

Now, it may be taken almost as a political axiom that whenever there is great distress at the time of a general election it is certain to give rise to some feeling of hostility against a Ministry, especially if the Ministry had been for any length of time in power. A considerable portion of the Tories had been turned against the Duke of Wellington because, under the advice of Sir Robert Peel, he had yielded at last to the demand for Catholic Emancipation, even although, as Peel and the Duke himself declared, the concession had been made merely as a choice between Catholic Emancipation and civil war. Some influential Tories all over the country were asking whether Ireland had been pacified or had shown herself in the least degree grateful because an instalment of religious freedom had been granted to the Roman Catholics, and they insisted that the Duke had surrendered the supremacy of the Established Church to no purpose. It was certain, indeed, that O'Connell had not, in the slightest degree, slackened the energy of his political movement because the emancipating Act had been passed. Among the opponents of reform, at all times, there are some who seem to hold that the granting of one reform ought to be enough to put a stop to all demands for any {107} other, and that it is mere ingratitude on the part of a man who has just obtained permission to follow his own form of worship if he wants also to be put on an equality with his neighbors as regards the assertion of his political opinions. Therefore, the Ministry found, as the elections went on, that they had not merely all the reformers against them, but that a certain proportion of those who, in the ordinary condition of things, would have been their supporters were estranged from them merely because they had, under whatever pressure, consented to introduce any manner of reform.

When the elections were over it seemed to reasonable observers very doubtful indeed whether King William, however well inclined, would be able to retain for any length of time the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel as the leading advisers of the Crown. The country just then may be described as in a state of transition from one constitutional system to another. It was growing more clear, day by day, that the time had gone by when the sovereign could hold to any one particular minister, or set of ministers, in defiance of the majority in the representative chamber and the strength of public opinion out-of-doors. On the other hand, the time had not yet arrived when the system introduced and established by the present reign could be relied upon as part of the Constitution, and the sovereign could be trusted to accept, without demur, the judgment of the House of Commons as to the choice of his ministers. The new Parliament was opened on November 5, and the Royal Speech gave but little satisfaction to reformers of any class. It contained no recommendation of constitutional reform, and indeed congratulated the whole population on having the advantage of living under so faultless a political system. It concerned itself in no wise about the distress that existed in the country, except that it expressed much satisfaction at the manner in which the criminal laws had been called into severe action for the repression of offences against property.

The King conceded so much to public opinion as to recommend the appointment of a regency, in order to {108} make provision for the possibility of his life being cut short; but even this was only done in a fashion that seemed to say, "If you really will have it that I am likely to die soon you may humor yourselves by taking any course that seems to satisfy your scruples—it is not worth my while to interfere with your whims." The reformers therefore had clearly nothing to expect so far as the Royal Speech could deal with expectations. But they found that they had still less to expect from the intentions of the Ministry.

[Sidenote: 1830—Wellington as a politician]

In the debate on the address, in reply to the speech from the throne, Lord Grey took occasion to ask for some exposition of Ministerial policy with regard to reform of the representative system. Then the Duke of Wellington delivered a speech which may be described as unique in its way. It would be impossible to put into words any statement more frankly opposed to all Parliamentary reform. The greatest orator that ever lived, the profoundest judge who ever laid down the law to a jury, could not have prepared a statement more comprehensive and more exact as a condemnation of all reform than that which the victor of Waterloo was able to enunciate with all confidence and satisfaction. He laid it down that it would be utterly beyond the power of the wisest political philosopher to devise a Constitution so near to absolute perfection as that with which Englishmen living in the reign of his present Majesty, William the Fourth, had been endowed by the wisdom of their ancestors. He affirmed that he had never heard any suggestion which contained the slightest promise of an improvement on that Constitution. He repeated, in various forms of repetition, that Englishmen already possessed all the freedom that it was good for men to have, that the rights of all classes were equally maintained, that the happiness of every one was secured, so far as law could secure it, and that the only thing for reasonable Englishmen to do was to open their eyes and recognize the advantages conferred upon them by the Constitution under which they were happy enough to live.

The Duke of Wellington probably knew nothing of {109} Voltaire's philosopher who maintained that everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds, but he seemed to be pervaded by the same sentiment of complete satisfaction when he contemplated the British Constitution. Finally, he declared that, so far from having any intention to touch with irreverent hand that sacred political structure for the vain purpose of improvement, he was determined to resist to the uttermost of his power every effort to interfere with the constitutional arrangements which had done so much for the prosperity and the glory of the empire. We do not quote the exact words of the Duke of Wellington's speech, but we feel sure we are giving a faithful version of the meaning which he intended to convey and succeeded very clearly in conveying. The Duke of Wellington was undoubtedly one of the greatest soldiers the world has ever seen. As a soldier of conquest he was not indeed to be compared with an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon, but as a soldier of defence he has probably never had a superior. As an administrator, too, he had shown immense capacity both in India and in Europe, and had more than once brought what seemed absolute chaos into order and shape. But he had no gift for the understanding of politics, and it was happy for him, at more than one crisis of his career, that he was quite aware of his own political incapacity and was ready to defer to the judgment of other men who understood such things better than he did. We have already seen how he accepted the guidance of Peel when it became necessary to yield the claim for Catholic Emancipation, and he was commonly in the habit of saying that Peel understood all such matters better than he could pretend to. He was not, therefore, the minister who would ruin a State or bring a State into revolution by obstinate adhesion to his own views in despite of every advice and every warning, and no doubt when he was delivering his harangue against all possible schemes of reform he felt still convinced that he was merely expressing the unalterable opinion of Peel and every other loyal subject whose judgment ought to prevail with a law-abiding people.

{110}

In the House of Commons Brougham gave notice that on an early day he would bring forward a motion on the subject of political reform. Thus, therefore, the trumpet of battle was sounded on both sides. The struggle must now be fought out to the end. Nothing, however, could be done until the Ministry had been driven from office, and it was not by any means certain that in the House of Commons, as it was then constituted, a direct vote on the question of reform would end in a defeat of the Duke of Wellington's Government. Something that seemed almost like an accident brought about a crisis sooner than had been anticipated. Sir Henry Parnell brought forward a motion for the appointment of a select committee to inquire into, and report upon, the estimates and amounts submitted by his Majesty with regard to the civil service. This motion had the support of the Liberal leaders and was strongly opposed by the Government. No one could have been surprised at the opposition offered by the Government, for Sir Henry Parnell's was just the sort of motion which every Ministry is sure to oppose. A government prepares its own estimates, and is not apt to be in favor of the appointment of an outside committee to inquire into their amount and their appropriation. Still, the whole question was not one to be regarded as of capital importance in ordinary times, and therefore, although the debate was one of great interest both inside and outside the House of Commons, it did not seem likely to lead to any momentous and immediate consequences.

[Sidenote: 1830—Ministerial resignations]

Sir Henry Parnell was a man of ability and character, and was regarded in the House as an authority on financial questions. He belonged to the family of Parnell the poet, the friend of Swift and Pope, and he afterwards became the first Lord Congleton, taking his title from that part of Cheshire where the poet and his ancestors had lived. In years, much later years, that belonged to our own times another member of the Parnell family made for himself a conspicuous place in the House of Commons and in Imperial politics, the late Charles Stewart Parnell, the famous leader of the Irish National party. Sir Henry {111} Parnell carried his motion by a majority of twenty-nine in the House of Commons.

Now in the ordinary course of things there was nothing in such an event to compel the resignation of a Ministry. It would have been quite reasonable for any Government to express a willingness to meet the wishes of the House on such a subject, to agree to the appointment of a committee, and then go on as if nothing particular had occurred. But it sometimes happens that a Government is willing, or even anxious, to accept defeat on a side issue, although of minor importance, in order to escape from, or at all events to postpone, a decision on some question of vital import. Sometimes, too, there are reasons, well known to all members of a Government but not yet in the knowledge of the public, which incline a Ministry to find a reason for resigning office in the result of some casual division which cannot be said to amount to a vote of want of confidence. Not many years have passed since a Liberal Government, which might have seemed to ordinary observers to be secure in its position, thought it well to accept a vote on the supply of cordite in the army stores as a vote of want of confidence, and accordingly went out of office. The Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel appear to have come to the conclusion that the success of Sir Henry Parnell's motion would furnish them with a plausible excuse for withdrawing at a convenient moment from an unpromising position. Henry Brougham, as we have already said, had given formal notice in the House of Commons that he would bring forward a motion for leave to introduce a definite scheme of Parliamentary reform. Now everybody knew that Brougham was at that time thoroughly earnest on the subject of reform, and that he had, during the recent general election, the best possible reasons for knowing that the great majority in the North of England, at all events, was behind him. On the other hand, ministers themselves had had ample opportunities of finding out, during the elections, that a large number of those whom at other times they might have regarded as their own supporters were estranged from them or had actually turned {112} against them. The Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel probably thought that their wisest course would be to let Lord Grey and Brougham and their friends try what they could do with the monstrous spectre of reform which they had conjured up, and wait till the country had recovered its senses before again undertaking to act as ministers of the Crown.

[Sidenote: 1830—Wellington and Peel resign]

An odd and rather absurd incident, which created much scandal and alarm at the time, and soon passed out of public recollection, had helped no doubt to bring the Duke of Wellington and Peel to their decision. The King and Queen had been invited to dine with the Lord Mayor and the Corporation at the Guildhall on November 9, and had accepted the invitation. The Duke of Wellington and the other ministers were to be among the guests.

Shortly before the appointed day the Duke of Wellington got a letter from the Lord Mayor-elect, telling him that he had received private information about some mysterious organized attempt to be made against the Duke himself on the occasion of his visit to the City, and urging the Duke to have the streets well guarded with soldiers, in order to prevent the success of any such lawless and atrocious enterprise. Now the Duke was not a man to care much, personally, about an alarm of this kind, but he thought it would be rather an unseemly spectacle if the streets of the City had to be guarded by troops when the new sovereign went to be the guest of the Lord Mayor at the Guildhall. The attempt, to be sure, was said to be directed against the Duke himself and not against the King; but still it would hardly do, it would scarcely have a happy effect on public opinion at home and abroad, if the first visit of the Sailor King, the popular William, to the City were to be made the occasion of a murderous attack on the King's Prime Minister. It might get into the public mind that what had happened in Paris was likely to happen in London, and the effect on Europe might be most damaging to the credit of the country. So the banquet was put off; the sovereign and his Prime Minister did not visit the City. A vague panic raged everywhere, {113} and the Funds went alarmingly down. The story which had impressed the Lord Mayor-elect was in all likelihood only a mere scare. But it had, no doubt, some effect in deciding the action of the Ministry. At all events, the Duke of Wellington and his colleagues determined to try what strength the reformers had behind them. They tendered their resignation; the King was prevailed upon to accept it, and it was announced to Parliament and the public that the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel were no longer in office.

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CHAPTER LXX.

LE ROI D'YVETOT.

[Sidenote: 1830-37—Eccentricities of William the Fourth]

We may turn for a moment from the path of politics to mention a fact that is worth mentioning, if only because of the immense difference between the accepted usages of that time and any usages that would be possible in our days. King William shortly after his accession created his eldest son Earl of Munster, and conferred upon all his other sons and daughters the rank that belongs to the younger children of a marquis. The King's living children, as has been said before, were all illegitimate. In raising them to the rank of the peerage King William was only following the example of many or most of his predecessors. People thought none the less of him, at the time, because he had bestowed such honor upon his progeny. Charles Greville, the famous Clerk of the Council to George the Fourth and William the Fourth, describes the new sovereign with characteristic frankness and lack of reverence. "Altogether," says Greville, writing about a fortnight after the King's accession, "he seems a kind-hearted, well-meaning, not stupid, burlesque, bustling old fellow, and if he doesn't go mad may make a very decent king, but he exhibits oddities."

The early bringing-up of the new King had certainly not tended much to fill him with the highest aspirations or to qualify him for the most dignified duties of royalty. "Never," says Greville, "was elevation like that of King William the Fourth. His life has hitherto been passed in obscurity and neglect, in miserable poverty, surrounded by a numerous progeny of bastards, without consideration or friends, and he was ridiculous from his grotesque ways and little, meddling curiosity."

{115}

He appears to have been a man of rather kindly, and certainly not ungenerous, disposition, and it is decidedly to his credit, in one sense, that the expectations of most of the Whigs were disappointed when he came to the throne. During his career in the Navy he had a way of disregarding orders, and when in command of a squadron would sometimes take his own vessel on an expedition according to his own fancy, and leave the remainder of the vessels under his charge to do as well as they could without him until it pleased him to return. Some of his later exploits in this way drew down on him a marked expression of disapproval from the Duke of Wellington, then at the head of the Government, and for this reason it was thought by many, when William came to the throne, that he would be sure to dismiss from his service the Prime Minister who once had offended him so deeply. A man with a more malevolent turn of mind would very likely have acted as public expectation seemed to foreshadow, but William, as we have seen, soon made it clear that he had no fault to find with the Duke of Wellington, that he cherished no ill-will and was quite ready to let bygones be bygones. There can be no doubt that William, although he had no great defects of any deep or serious nature, no defects at least which are not common enough among the sovereigns of his time, was yet as undignified a figure for a throne as even the modern comic opera itself could imagine.

He was eccentric to a degree that sometimes seemed to suggest a lurking tendency to insanity. He was fussy, garrulous, excitable, noisy, overbearing, apt to take strong likes and dislikes and to express his likings and his dislikings with an utter disregard for the accepted conventionalities of social life.

He could explode at a moment's notice into a burst of rage which sometimes made itself felt for hours, and perhaps when the next day came he had forgotten all about it and greeted those who were its especial objects with hilarious good-humor. There were many anecdotes told about him in the days not long before his accession to the throne which were commonly believed by those who knew him, {116} and which it would not be possible to reproduce in the modest pages suitable to our own times.

[Sidenote: 1830-37—Some strange doings of the King]

Now it would certainly be most unfair to accept every story told by gossip about some exalted personage as a story worthy of credit and qualified to take its place in authentic history, but, at the same time, it is quite fair and reasonable when forming an estimate of the exalted personage's character to take some account of the sayings of contemporary gossip. We may be sure that there were stories told about the father of Frederick the Great, about Catherine of Russia, about a late King of Bavaria, which were not true, but none the less the historian is undoubtedly helped to form an estimate of the ways and doings of these exalted personages by the collective testimony of the stories that are told about them and believed in their own time. William the Fourth could not, when he ascended the throne, suddenly shake off all the rough manners and odd ways which he had allowed himself to foster during his long career as a Prince of the Blood Royal, as a sailor, and as a man much given to the full indulgence of his humors, whatever they might happen to be.

After he had become King, and it was part of his royal duty to give great State dinners, it was sometimes his way to behave himself on the occasions of those festivities after a fashion which even W. S. Gilbert never could have caricatured in any "Mikado" or other such piece of delightful burlesque. The King was fond of making speeches at his State dinners, and it was his way to ramble along on all manner of subjects in the same oration. Whatever idea happened to come uppermost in his mind he usually blurted out, without the slightest regard for time, place, or company. This habit of his became very embarrassing now and then when some of the ambassadors of great European States happened to be guests at his dinner-table. In the presence of the French Ambassador, for instance, the King, while delivering his after-dinner speech, would suddenly recall some of his recollections of the days when the great Napoleon held the Imperial throne of France, and he would then, perhaps, close a sentence {117} with an exultant reference to the glorious triumphs we had obtained over our enemies the French.

On one occasion when Leopold, King of the Belgians, was dining with him the King suddenly observed that his royal guest was drinking water, and he called to him with an oath and demanded what he was drinking that sort of stuff for; and not content with the poor King's plea that he drank water because he liked it better than wine, William insisted that, in his house at least, his royal brother must swallow the juice of the grape. One day when Talleyrand was among his guests King William favored the company with a very peculiar sort of speech, and he concluded the speech by proposing a toast which is described by those who heard it as utterly unsuited for publication. One of the guests was Charles Greville. He was anxious to know what impression this extraordinary performance had made upon Talleyrand. He asked Talleyrand in a whisper if he had ever heard anything like that before. But Talleyrand, who had listened to the oration and the toast with unmoved composure, was not to be thrown off his balance or drawn into any expression of opinion by an indiscreet question. He merely answered that it was certainly "bien remarquable."

The Duchess of Kent and the young Princess Victoria were dining with the King one day, and some of the guests, although not all, were well aware that there had been differences of opinion lately between William and his sister-in-law. The guests, however, were amazed indeed when the King rose and delivered a speech in which he raked up all his old grievances against the Duchess of Kent, and complained of her and denounced her as if he were the barrister, the hero of the old familiar story, who, having no case, is advised to abuse the plaintiff's attorney. The child Princess Victoria is said to have been so distressed by some parts of this unexpected oration that she burst into tears; but the Duchess, her mother, retained self-control, and sat as composedly silent as if the King had been taking his part in some dignified State ceremonial.

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King William sometimes broke the conventionalities of royal deportment in a quite different sort of way, in a way which undoubtedly shocked the traditional sensibilities of the older officials of the Court, but with which the lovers of modern and more simple manners are inclined sometimes, perhaps, to have a sort of wilful sympathy. He would sometimes insist on dropping some great royal visitor from abroad at the door of his hotel, just as if he were an ordinary London resident giving a lift in his carriage to a friend from the country. At the most solemn State ceremonial he would bustle about irresponsibly, and talk in a loud voice to any one who might seem to him at the moment to be an attractive person with whom to have a pleasant chat. It might happen that some great State functionary or some dignified ambassador from a foreign capital, who ought to have been spoken to long before, was kept waiting until the unconcerned sovereign had had his talk out with some comparatively insignificant personage who had been known to the King in former days, and whose appearance brought with it certain early and jovial associations. Many of the King's minor offences in this way seem now to the unconcerned reader about as venial as that by which Marie Antoinette in her early Court days broke through the established rules of etiquette among the ladies of her bedchamber by snatching her chemise one morning with her own hands instead of allowing it to pass in its regular order from the lowest to the highest degree of the attendant women. But it certainly was perhaps a little too much of a departure from the usages of a Court when the monarch, about to sign an important document in the presence of his State Council, flung down the quill with which he had begun to write and proclaimed it to be a damned bad pen.

[Sidenote: 1830-37—Béranger's King of Yvetot]

Every day the King was sure to astonish those around him by some breach of Court conventionality, little or great. He was liable to strong likings and dislikings, and he took no pains to conceal his sentiments in either case. He seems to have had an affectionate regard for his young niece, the Princess Victoria, and a strong dislike to her {119} mother. The Duchess of Kent would appear to have had no particular liking for him, and she very much objected to be brought into familiar association with the sons and daughters of the eccentric sovereign. Perhaps it is not to William's discredit that he always treated these children as if they were his legitimate descendants. It was no fault of theirs if the ceremony of marriage had not preceded their coming into the world, and the King apparently did not see why even the most righteous person should feel any objection to their frequent presence. But one can understand that the Duchess of Kent must have often wished that the sense of public decorum, which was even already growing up in English society, should not be shocked by the too frequent reminder that the King had several children who were not born in wedlock. Béranger, the once popular French lyric poet, satirized a certain royal personage, a contemporary of William the Fourth, as the King of Yvetot. There was a French legend which told of the conditions under which the descendants of a certain lord of the manor in Brittany had been created by Clotaire kings of Yvetot. Béranger's monarch is described by him as one having made little mark of his own in history, who could live very comfortably without troubling himself about glory, and who liked to be crowned with a simple cotton nightcap. This monarch, the poet tells us, could enjoy his four meals a day, and liked very often to lift his glass to his lips.

There are many reasons, we are told, why some of his subjects might have called him a father to his people, but the name was not applied by the poet in the ordinary metaphorical sense of the word. He never desired to trouble his neighbors, and never disturbed his mind with any projects for the increase of his dominions, and, like a true model to all potentates, found his ambition quite satisfied in the indulgence of his own pleasures while desiring as little as possible to interfere with the pastimes of his people. Every verse of the ballad ends by telling us what a good little king was this sovereign of Yvetot. With certain slight alterations Béranger's satirical verses might {120} have served as a picture of William the Fourth. But our good little King of Yvetot was not destined altogether to have quite an easy time of it, although he was more successful in that way than the monarch for whom Béranger intended his satire. William had come in for the age of reform. The whole course of English history hardly tells us of any reign, of anything like equal length, into which so many reforms were crowded. William the Fourth, we may be sure, would never have troubled himself or any of his subjects about any projects of improvement in the political or social conditions of his realm. He would have been quite content to let things go on just as they had been going in the days before he came to the throne, and would probably have asked no higher title of affection from the loyalty of his subjects than the familiar name that they gave him of the Sailor King. When for a while he began to be called the Patriot King he must have associated the title with a sense of all the worry and trouble brought upon him by the incessant preparation of patriotic projects for the improvement of everything all over the country.

[Sidenote: 1830-37—Lord Grey and William the Fourth]

It seems like a curious freak of fate that such a sovereign, at such a time, should have had to get rid of the Duke of Wellington and accept Lord Grey as his Prime Minister. The Duke of Wellington was himself simple, plain, and occasionally rough in manners, with little taste for Court ceremonial and little inclination for the exchange of stately phrase and inflated language. There are many anecdotes told of Wellington which show that he had no more liking or aptitude for the ways dear to a Court functionary than King William himself had. Lord Grey was a man of the most stately bearing and the most refined style. His manner was courtly without the slightest affectation; he was courtly by nature, and dignity was an element of his every-day demeanor. He had been in constant companionship with some of the greatest statesmen and orators of his time, but even his devotion to Charles James Fox had never beguiled him into any of Fox's careless, free-and-easy ways. He was sorely tried, as all {121} contemporary accounts tell us, by the abrupt and overbearing manners of his son-in-law, Lord Durham, but he always contrived, in public at least, to bear Durham's eccentricities with unruffled temper and undisturbed dignity. Such a statesman must have had a hard time of it with King William of Yvetot; but let it be freely admitted that King William of Yvetot must have had a hard time of it with such a minister as Lord Grey. William would probably, if left to his own inclinations, have made up his mind to hold on to the Duke of Wellington, join with the Duke in opposing all schemes of reform, and face the music, if we may adopt a familiar modern phrase. But there was good sense enough in William's head, for all his odd ways and his unkingly humors, to teach him that he had better not begin his reign by setting himself against the public opinion of the great majority of his subjects, and therefore our good King of Yvetot consented to become, if not the head, at least the figure-head of a great historical movement.

{122}

CHAPTER LXXI.

REFORM.

[Sidenote: 1830—Brougham and the ministry]

The King had no other course left open to him than to send for Lord Grey and invite him to form an Administration. Lord Grey was quite ready for the task, and must, for some time back, have had his mind constantly occupied with plans for such an arrangement. About some of the appointments there was no difficulty whatever. It was obvious that Lord Melbourne, Lord Althorp, and Lord John Russell would be invited to take office, but there was a certain difficulty about Brougham. The difficulty, however, was not about offering a place to Brougham; the only trouble was to find the place which would suit him, and his acceptance of which would also suit his leaders and his colleagues. Nothing could be more certain than the fact that Brougham must be invited to a place in the new Administration. He was a strong man with the country, and he now had a distinct following of his own.

Among the yet unenfranchised districts, especially in the North of England, Brougham probably counted for more, so far as the question of reform was concerned, than all the other reformers in Parliament put together. It would be idle to think of creating a Reform Ministry just then without Henry Brougham. The new Administration could not possibly get on without him. But then it was by no means certain that the new Administration could get on with him, and no one could understand this difficulty better than the stately and aristocratic Lord Grey. Grey had simply to choose between encountering an uncertainty or undertaking an impossibility, and of course he chose the former alternative. He had to invite Brougham to take office, but the question was what office it was {123} most advisable to ask him to take. Brougham was offered the position of Attorney-General, the acceptance of which allows a man to retain his seat in the House of Commons, while it puts him directly on the way to a high promotion to the judicial bench. Brougham flatly declined the offer, and seemed to be somewhat offended that it should have been made to him. Then Lord Grey thought of offering him the dignified position of Master of the Rolls, coupled with the exceptional arrangement that he was still to retain his seat in the House of Commons. Lord Grey was naturally very anxious to conciliate Brougham, and looked with much dread to the prospect of Brougham breaking off from the negotiations altogether and retaining his seat in the House as an independent critic of the Ministry. Nothing could well be more alarming to the head of the new Administration than the thought of Brougham thus sitting as an independent critic, prepared at any minute to come down with the force and fury of his eloquence on this or that section of the new Reform Bill, and to denounce it to the country as utterly inadequate to satisfy the just demands of the people. The King, however, suggested, with some good sense, that Brougham as a dissatisfied Master of the Rolls still sitting in the House of Commons might prove an inconvenient and dangerous colleague.

Lord Grey thought the matter over once more, and began to see another way of getting out of the difficulty. Why not give to Brougham the highest legal appointment in the service of the Crown, and thus promote him completely out of the House of Commons? Why not make him Lord Chancellor at once? This offer could not but satisfy even Brougham's well-known self-conceit, and it would transplant his eloquence to the quieter atmosphere of the House of Lords, where little harm could be done to the surrounding vegetation by its too luxuriant growth. In plain words, it might be taken for granted that the House of Lords would reject any reform measure, however moderate, when it was first introduced to the notice of the peers, and therefore no particular harm could come from Brougham's presence in the hereditary assembly. But {124} Brougham in the House of Commons might, at any time, be so far carried away by his own emotions, and his own eloquence, and his own masterful temperament as to bring his colleagues into many a difficulty, and force on them the unpleasant alternative of having to choose between going further than they had intended to go or failing to keep up with Brougham as the accredited and popular promoter of reform.

[Sidenote: 1830—Brougham as Lord Chancellor]

When Lord Grey next conferred with the King he was not a little surprised to hear from the sovereign's own lips a suggestion that Brougham might be offered the position of Lord Chancellor. Grey told the King that he had been almost afraid to start such a proposition, inasmuch as William had discouraged the idea of making Brougham Master of the Rolls; but the King with shrewd good sense directed Grey's attention to the fact, which had been already an operative force in Grey's own mind, that to make Brougham Master of the Rolls, and yet keep him in the House of Commons, might still leave him a very dangerous colleague, while by making him Lord Chancellor the King and his Prime Minister could get him practically out of the way altogether.

So it was agreed between the King and his Prime Minister that Lord Brougham should be made Lord Chancellor, and thus forfeit his right to sit in the House of Commons. If we speak with literal accuracy it is not quite correct to say that a man by becoming Lord Chancellor becomes necessarily, and at once, a member of the House of Lords. The Lord Chancellor of course presides over the sittings of the House of Lords, but he is not necessarily, from the first, a member of the hereditary assembly. He sits on the woolsack, which, though actually in the House of Lords, is not technically to be described as occupying such a position. If a Lord Chancellor who is actually a peer desires to take part in a debate he has to leave the woolsack and stand on some part of the floor which is technically within the Chamber. On more than one historic occasion some inconvenience has arisen from the fact that a newly created Lord Chancellor had not yet been {125} made a peer, and therefore was not entitled to take part in a debate, or even to speak for some ceremonial purpose within the Chamber on behalf of the House of Lords. Brougham as a matter of fact was not made a peer until a little time after he had become Lord Chancellor.

All this, however, is only mentioned here as a matter of curious and technical interest to the reader of Parliamentary history. Brougham was made a peer soon enough for all purposes, and in the mean time he was removed altogether from the House of Commons. Brougham did not accept his new position without some grumbling. Probably he had the idea that Lord Grey and others of his colleagues were glad to have him safely provided for out of the range of the representative assembly, where his eloquence might now and then become an inconvenient influence. He accepted the position, however, and became a member of the House of Lords. From that time his real influence over the country may be said to have come to an end. After he ceased to be Lord Chancellor he remained simply an eloquent, overbearing member of the House of Lords, often delighting the galleries and the public with his meteoric flashes of eloquence; but his power as a reformer was gone, and for the greater part of his remaining career, when one or two important questions to which he was pledged had been disposed of, he took little interest in any movement of reform.

Lord Althorp became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lord Althorp, who was leader of the House of Commons as well as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was an influential person in those days, but is almost forgotten in our time. He was a model country gentleman, devoted to the duties and the delights of such a position; had a natural gift for farming and no natural inclination whatever for politics. Not merely did he make no pretensions to oratory, but, even for a country gentleman, he could not be regarded as a particularly good speaker. Yet he undoubtedly was a man of much weight in the Parliamentary life of his time. He was thoroughly straightforward and disinterested; he was absolutely truthful and honorable; his word was his bond, {126} and the House of Commons and the country in general could always feel sure that any advice given by Lord Althorp was guided by the light of his own judgment and his own conscience, and that he was never unduly swayed by fear, favor, or affection, whether towards sovereign or party. Lord Melbourne was Home Secretary.

[Sidenote: 1830—The Reform Administration]

If we glance down the list of this Reform Administration to-day we shall all probably be struck by the fact that the men who were regarded as juniors and something like beginners have come to occupy, in many cases, a higher position in political history than their elders and leaders. Lord John Russell, for instance, was not a member of Lord Grey's Cabinet; he only held the office of Paymaster of the Forces. From his first entrance into the House of Commons Lord John Russell had distinguished himself as a reformer. In 1819 he had brought forward a motion for a reform in the Parliamentary system, and he had renewed the motion in almost every succeeding year. He had been a steady supporter of the movement for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which imposed an unjust and utterly irrational disqualification on Dissenters, and had been a zealous advocate of the measures for the emancipation of Roman Catholics. All his early life had been a training for statesmanship. He had been associated with scholars and thinkers, with poets and historians. He had gone through Spain while the war with Napoleon was still going on, and had been welcomed by the Duke of Wellington in his camp. He had visited Napoleon at Elba, and had talked over politics and war with the fallen Emperor. As Disraeli said of him many years later, he had sat at the feet of Fox and had measured swords with Canning. Lord Palmerston became for the first time Foreign Secretary in the Grey Administration. He had been a junior Lord of the Admiralty in a former Government, and he had more lately been Secretary at War; but at the time that he first became Foreign Secretary under Lord Grey few indeed could have anticipated that he was destined to become one of the most powerful English statesmen known to the century. Sir James Graham became First Lord of the Admiralty, and {127} some of us can still remember him as one of the foremost debaters in the House of Commons. Lord Durham, Grey's son-in-law, accepted what may almost be called the nominal office of Lord Privy Seal.

At that time Durham was regarded as a brilliant, eccentric sort of man, a perfervid reformer on whose perseverance or consistency no one could reckon for a moment—perhaps the comet of a season, but if so then surely a comet of a season only. We now recognize Durham as the man of statesmanlike foresight and genius who converted, at a great crisis, a Canada burning with internal hatred between race and sect, and the one common hatred of Imperial rule, into the Canada which we now know as one of the most peaceful, prosperous, and loyal parts of the British Empire. Mr. Stanley, afterwards Lord Derby, the famous "Rupert of debate," became Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. Grey appointed Lord Plunket Lord Chancellor for Ireland, and the name of Lord Plunket will always be remembered as that of one of the greatest Parliamentary orators known to modern times.

The new Ministry was, therefore, well prepared to carry on the battle of reform. Lord Grey had made up his mind that Lord John Russell, although not in the Cabinet, was the most fitting member of the Administration to conduct the Reform Bill through the House of Commons. As soon as Grey had completed his arrangements for the construction of a Ministry, Lord Durham put himself into communication with Lord John Russell. Durham told Lord John Russell that Lord Grey wished him to consult with Russell as to the formation of a small private committee whose task should be to create and put into shape some definite scheme as the foundation of the great constitutional change which the new Government had been called into power to establish. Lord John Russell of course accepted the suggestion, and after some consideration it was agreed by Lord Durham and himself that Sir James Graham and Lord Duncannon, then Commissioner of Woods and Forests, should be invited to join them, and make a committee of four for the purpose of devising a {128} comprehensive and practicable measure of reform. Durham then asked Lord John to put on paper at once his own idea with regard to the outlines of such a plan, so that it might be taken into consideration by the committee at their earliest meeting.

[Sidenote: 1830—The Reform Bill]

Lord John Russell's book, "The English Government and Constitution," tells us all what was the central idea in his mind when he set himself to construct the groundwork of a Reform Bill. He tells us, alluding to the task assigned to him, "It was not my duty to cut the body of our old parent into pieces, and to throw it into a Medea's caldron, with the hope of reviving the vigor of youth." He thought it his duty not to turn aside "from the track of the Constitution into the maze of fancy or the wilderness of abstract rights." "It was desirable, in short, as it appeared to me, while sweeping away gross abuses, to avail ourselves, as far as possible, of the existing frame and body of our Constitution. Thus, if the due weight and influence of property could be maintained, by preserving the representation of a proportion of the small boroughs with an improved franchise, it was desirable rather to build on the old foundations than to indulge our fancy or our conceit in choosing a new site and erecting on new soil—perhaps on sand—an edifice entirely different from all that had hitherto existed."

No Reformer who understood the general character of the English people, and who had studied the development of political growth in England, could have gone more prudently and wisely about the work of bringing the existing Constitution into harmony with the altering conditions, and removing out of its way all difficulties that might interfere with its gradual and safe development in the future. But Russell was clearly of opinion, and in this he was entirely in accordance with Lord Grey, that nothing but a large and comprehensive measure would be of any real use, and that "to nibble at disfranchisement and cramp reform by pedantic adherence to existing rights would be to deceive expectation, to whet appetite, and to bring about that revolution which it was our object to {129} avert." Russell drew up a sketch of his proposed Reform Bill, which he submitted to Lord Durham, and on the draft of the measure thus submitted to him Lord Durham offered some suggestions and alterations of his own. Russell's speech was written on a single piece of letter-paper, and is reproduced with Lord Durham's notes in Russell's book, "The English Government and Constitution." The opening paragraph proposes that "the fifty boroughs having the smallest population according to the latest census should be disfranchised altogether." This proposal had Lord Durham's full approval, and he noted the fact that according to his calculation it would disfranchise all boroughs having a population of not more than 1400. The second paragraph proposed that fifty other boroughs of the least considerable population, above the line already drawn, should be allowed to send only one member each to the House of Commons. This proposal also had the approval of Lord Durham, and he notes it would apply to boroughs not having more than 3000 inhabitants each.

Then came a paragraph which proposed that all persons qualified to serve on juries should have the right of voting, and to this clause Lord Durham objected, regarding it probably as an embodiment of the principle of what were called in later days "fancy franchises." The fourth paragraph recommended that no person should be entitled to vote in cities or boroughs, except in the City of London, in Westminster, and in Southwark, unless he were a householder rated at ten pounds a year, and unless, moreover, he had paid his parochial taxes for three years, within three months after they became due, and had lived in the constituency for six months previous to the election at which he claimed to vote. The fifth clause proposed that the unrepresented parts of London should have among them four or six additional members, that eighteen large towns should have representation—and let the reader try to realize for himself what the supposed representation of the country could have been when at least eighteen large towns were, up to that time, wholly unrepresented—and that twenty counties should send two additional members {130} each to the House of Commons. Another paragraph limited the right of voting in the newly enfranchised towns to householders rated at ten pounds a year or persons qualified to serve on juries. Lord Durham approved of the rating qualification, but, consistently with his objection already mentioned, struck out the words which connected the right to vote with the right to serve on a jury. It is not necessary to go through the whole list of the proposals set out in the sketch drawn up by Lord John Russell. Those which we have already mentioned possess a peculiar historical interest and illustrate in the most precise and effective manner the whole nature of the system which, up to that time, had passed off as constitutional government.

[Sidenote: 1831—Vote by ballot]

It will be seen that, on the whole, Lord Durham was a more advanced reformer than even Lord John Russell. The entire scheme, as drawn out by Russell, consisted of ten paragraphs or clauses, and it was at once submitted to the consideration of the four men who formed the committee. There was much discussion as to the borough qualification for voters, and the committee finally agreed to recommend that it should be uniform, and thus get rid of what were called the freemen and the scot-and-lot voters, a class of persons endowed with antiquated and eccentric qualifications which possibly might have had some meaning in them and some justification under the conditions of a much earlier day, but which had since grown into a system enabling wealthier men to create in constituencies a body of thoroughly dependent or positively corrupt voters. The desire of the committee was to extend the voting privilege as far as possible consistently with due regard for the principle that the voters ought to be men of substance enough to insure their independence. This security they believed they could attain by establishing the ten-pound franchise. This seems, no doubt, to modern eyes a somewhat eccentric and haphazard line of demarkation; but it must be remembered that even until much later days the ten pounds rating principle in boroughs held its own, and was believed to be absolutely essential to the {131} maintenance of an independent and upright body of voters, and to the securing of such a body against the danger of being "swamped," according to the once familiar word, by the votes of the dependent and the corrupt.

There were some slight differences of opinion between Lord John Russell and Lord Durham as to the extent to which the total or partial disfranchisement of the small boroughs ought to go, but the scheme, as finally shaped, had on the whole the thorough approval of the committee. One important proposal, brought forward, it was understood, by Lord Durham, was agreed to and formally adopted by the committee, but not without strong opposition on the part of Lord John Russell. This was the proposal for the introduction of the vote by ballot. When Lord Grey's Cabinet came to consider the draft scheme the proposal for the introduction of the vote by ballot was struck out altogether. The time, in fact, had not come for the adoption of so great a reform. Forty years had to pass before the mind of the English public could be brought to recognize the necessity for such a change. Statesmanship had still to learn how much the value of a popular suffrage was diminished or disparaged by the system which left the voter at the absolute mercy of some landlord or some patron who desired that the vote should be given for the candidate whom he favored. The ballot even then was demanded by the whole body of the Chartists. Orator Hunt, one of the most popular heroes of the Chartist agitation, had only just defeated Mr. Stanley at Preston. Daniel O'Connell was in favor of the ballot, because he saw that without its protection the Irish tenant farmer would have to vote for his landlord's candidate or would be turned out of his farm. But the general feeling among statesmen, as well as among the outer public, was that there was something un-English about the ballot system, and it was contended that the true Englishman ought to have the courage of his opinion and to vote as his conscience told him, without caring whom he offended. Edmund Burke in one of his speeches tells us that the system which is founded on the heroic virtues is sure to have its {132} superstructure in failure and disappointment, meaning thereby that every system is doomed to failure which assumes as its principle the idea that all men can at all times be up to the level of the heroic mood. Some of us can well remember the days when English statesmen still declared that the compulsion of education was un-English, and that it ought to be left to the free choice of the English parent whether he would have his children taught or leave them untaught.

[Sidenote: 1831—Lord John Russell and the Reform Bill]

Lord Grey's Cabinet would have nothing to do with the ballot. With this exception the draft scheme as submitted by Lord John Russell was accepted by Lord Grey and his colleagues. Then it was laid before the King, and the King, according to Lord John Russell, gave it his ready and cheerful sanction. There were indeed some observers at the time who believed that the King had cheerfully sanctioned the whole scheme of reform as proposed, because he still confidently believed that nothing but the wreck of the Ministry was to come of it. However that may have been, it is certain that the King did give his full sanction to the measure, and the Government prepared to introduce the first Reform Bill.

It was arranged that the conduct of the Bill in the House of Commons should be placed in the hands of Lord John Russell. This arrangement created, when the Bill was actually brought forward, a good deal of adverse criticism in the House and in the country. Some prominent members of the Opposition in the House of Commons persuaded themselves, and tried to persuade their listeners, that Lord Grey's Cabinet, by adopting such an arrangement, showed that there was no sincerity in the professed desire for reform. If the members of the Cabinet, it was argued, are such believers in the virtue of reform, why do they not select one of their own body to introduce the measure? Lord John Russell was only Paymaster of the Forces, and had not a seat in the Cabinet, and if he was taken out of his place and put into the most prominent position it could only be because no member of the Cabinet could be found who was willing to undertake the task. {133} The answer was very clear, even at the time, and it is obvious indeed to the generations that had an opportunity of knowing how eminently Lord John Russell was qualified for the work which had been entrusted to his hands. He was a member of one of the greatest aristocratic families in the land, and one of the practical dangers threatening the Reform Bill was the alarm that might spread among the wealthier classes at the thought of a wild democratic movement upsetting the whole principle of aristocratic predominance in the English constitutional system. Still more important was the fact that Lord John Russell, who had distinguished himself already as the most devoted promoter of constitutional reform, was a man peculiarly qualified by intellect and by his skill in exposition to pilot such a measure through the House of Commons.

Lord John Russell had not yet won reputation as a great Parliamentary orator; nor did he, during the whole of his long career, succeed in acquiring such a fame. But he was a master of the art which consists in making a perfectly clear statement of the most complicated case, and in defending his measure point by point with never-failing readiness and skill throughout the most perplexing series of debates. It was pointed out also, at the time, that if Lord John Russell was selected to introduce the Reform Bill, although he was only Paymaster of the Forces and had not a seat in the Cabinet, thus too had Edmund Burke been selected to introduce the East India Bill, although he, like Lord John Russell, was only Paymaster of the Forces and had not a seat in the Cabinet. Indeed, to us, who now look back on the events from a long distance of time, the impression would rather be that Lord Grey had little or no choice in the matter. He was not himself a member of the House of Commons, and therefore could not introduce the Bill there. Brougham had ceased to be a member of the House of Commons, and was therefore out of the question. Lord Althorp, who had not yet succeeded to the peerage, and had a seat in the representative chamber, was, as we have already said, the poorest of {134} speakers, and utterly unsuited for the difficult task of steering so important a measure through the troublous sea of Parliamentary debate. Lord Grey, of course, was thoroughly well acquainted with Russell's great abilities and his peculiar fitness for the task assigned to him, and could, under no circumstances, have made a better choice. But our only possible difficulty now would be to say what other choice, under the existing conditions, he could possibly have made.

[Sidenote: 1831—Need for secrecy about the Reform Bill]

Tuesday, March 1, 1831, was the day fixed for the introduction of the Reform Bill in the House of Commons. In the mean time, as we learn from all who can be considered authorities on the subject, the nature and the plan of the proposed reforms were kept a profound secret, not only from the public at large, but even from members of the House of Commons itself, with the exception of those who belonged to the Administration. Ministerial secrets, it is only fair to say, are generally well kept in England, but instances have undoubtedly occurred in which the nature of some approaching measure, which ought to have been held in the profoundest secrecy until the time came for its official revelation, has leaked out and become fully known to the public in advance. There is, of course, great difficulty in preventing some inkling of the truth getting prematurely out. Cabinet Ministers generally have wives, and there are stories of such wives having caught stray words from their husbands which put them on a track of discovery, and not having the grace to keep strictly to themselves the discovery when made. No such mischance, however, appears to have attended the preparation of the Reform Bill. It is said that there must have been more than thirty persons who had official knowledge of the Ministerial plans, and yet it does not appear that any definite idea as to their nature was obtained by the public.

It may perhaps be asked whether there was any solid reason for attaching so much importance to the keeping of a secret which on a certain fixed and near-approaching day must, as a matter of fact, be a secret no more. Of course the imperative necessity of secrecy would be obvious {135} in all cases where some policy was in preparation which might directly affect the interests of foreign States. In such a case it is clear that it might be of essential importance to a Government not to let its plans become known to the world before it had put itself into a condition to maintain its policy. In measures that had to do with commercial and financial interests it might often be of paramount importance that no false alarm or false expectations of any kind should be allowed to disturb the business of the country before the fitting time came for a full declaration. But in the case of such a measure as the Reform Bill it may be asked if any great advantage was to be gained by keeping the nature of the measure a complete secret until the hour came for its full and official explanation. With regard to this Reform Bill there were many good reasons for maintaining the profoundest possible secrecy. If any premature reports got out at all they would be sure to be imperfect reports, indiscreet or haphazard revelations of this or that particular part of the Bill, utterly wanting in balance, symmetry, and comprehensiveness. The whole thing was new to the country, and there would have been much danger in fixing public attention upon some one part of the proposed reform until the public could be in a position to judge the scheme as a complete measure.

Lord Grey's Government had to deal with two classes of men who were naturally and almost relentlessly opposed to each other—the more clamorous reformers and the enemies of all reform. It was of immense importance that the latter class should, if possible, be prevailed upon to see—at least the more intelligent and reasonable among them—that the Government had not gone so far in the direction of reform as to make it seem a threatened revolution. It was, on the other hand, of immense importance to prevail upon the former class to see that the Government had not so stunted and dwarfed its proposed reform as to render it incapable of anything like a political and constitutional revolution. Any sudden explosion of feeling on either side brought about by some premature {136} and imperfect revelation might have caused the most serious trouble in the country.

[Sidenote: 1831—Introduction of the Reform Bill]