← catalogue

A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV

by Justin McCarthy · English · Gutenberg #23472 · 755,490 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV

Author: Justin McCarthy
        Justin H. McCarthy


        
Release date: November 13, 2007 [eBook #23472]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23472

Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF THE FOUR GEORGES AND OF WILLIAM IV, VOLUME IV ***


E-text prepared by Al Haines



Transcriber's note:

   Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in
   curly braces, e.g. {99}.  They have been located where page
   breaks occurred in the original book.  For its Index, a page
   number has been placed only at the start of that section.

   In the original volumes in this set, each even-numbered page
   had a header consisting of the page number, the volume title,
   and the chapter number.  The odd-numbered page header consisted
   of the year with which the page deals, a subject phrase, and
   the page number.  In this set of e-books, the odd-page year
   and subject phrase have been converted to sidenotes, usually
   positioned between the first two paragraphs of the even-odd
   page pair.  If such positioning was not possible for a given
   sidenote, it was positioned where it seemed most logical.

   In the original book set, consisting of four volumes, the
   master index was in Volume 4.  In this set of e-books, the
   index has been duplicated into each of the other volumes, with
   its first page re-numbered as necessary, and an Index item
   added to each volume's Table of Contents.





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 instinct

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/23472