BOOK THE FOURTH 1815-1821 (continued 2)

The Parliament, however, as then constituted, had no sympathy with the sufferers; and when convened in November passed several angry and restrictive laws without repugnance and even without the formality of inquiry. The Whigs in the Lords resisted these unconstitutional laws in speeches and protests (several of which I wrote); but Lord Wellesley, who on recent occasions had taken a popular view of all such questions, somewhat abruptly reverted to his old anti-Jacobin courses, and Lord Grenville vindicated the exercise of authority against democratic and tumultuous agitation with an earnestness and gravity which too plainly indicated an entire separation from the party with whom he had acted for fifteen years. His speech was elaborate and able—one of his best: and among the last he ever delivered. He touched with feeling on the differences subsisting between him and the reforming Whigs, and rescued himself with great spirit and close logic from all imputation of inconsistency, acknowledging and lamenting that he foresaw that practices would be resorted to and defended by the eager friends of liberty, to which he could never reconcile himself as compatible either with the institutions of the country or the preservation of necessary authority. It was, in short, clear that there subsisted a fundamental difference of principle between the Fox and Grenville schools of politics, and the course of events had brought into action these conflicting opinions.

This was virtually the close of Lord Grenville’s public life, though he lived many years. It was painful that so honourable a career should end by a separation from many connected with and attached to him. The termination, however, like the course of it, was manly and direct. There was nothing sordid, nothing personal, nothing even inconsistent in it on either side. I, for one, feel that among the rare gratifications of a public life the reflection of having known and acted with such a man as Lord Grenville is not the least. Soon after a reluctant attendance on Queen Caroline’s Bill and a speech upon it that added little to his reputation as an orator, logician, or judge, his health declined; he lived chiefly in the country, and devoted himself almost exclusively to literature, philosophy, and gardening. I had the satisfaction of occasional correspondence with him on these topics, and also of giving his proxy for the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts in 1828. He died in 1833.⁠[283]⁠

Non potui ejus mortem non dolere. Hominem enim, castum, integrum, et gravem cognovi.

Mr. Fox gave me his true character in one word, in 1805, when he said, “I like Lord Grenville very much indeed. He is a direct man.”

The object of the early meeting being accomplished by the enactment of the Restrictive Laws, the Parliament was adjourned over the month of January, 1820. On the 23rd of that month died Edward, Duke of Kent. He, as well as his brothers, had been married on the suggestion of Government in the year 1818, with the view of securing the succession. The pregnancy of his Duchess, who was a Princess of Saxe-Coburg and widow of Duke of Leiningen, was announced early in 1819, when he and she were in Germany. They were desirous, for obvious reasons, that their child should be born in England; but the Prince Regent had no inclination to facilitate that object by offering any pecuniary assistance. They had not enough for their journey, and a generous loan of several thousands from Lord Fitzwilliam (not repaid, I believe, till Victoria’s accession) extricated them from their dilemma. To that circumstance the present Queen and her subjects are indebted for the satisfaction of maintaining a native, as well as parliamentary and constitutional, sovereignty. The Regent, not content with the above gratification of malice rather than stinginess, perversely objected to the child, when born, receiving the name of Charlotte. The Emperor Alexander was to be godfather. But the Regent discovered some rule of etiquette which forbade the combination of his mother’s name with that of a foreign Crowned Prince. He wished the name to be Alexandrina, only from a spiteful hope that it might be unpopular; but such a design was successfully frustrated by that of Victoria being also adopted.

Living as we are, while I am writing this, under the Princess of that name, there may be some increased curiosity concerning the character her father bore among his contemporaries. I can furnish little to satisfy it, from such slight communication as I had personally with him, and I fear such report of his peculiarities as I can conscientiously repeat from others, will not augment any regret at an untimely death, which bequeathed to others the duty of forming the character of his far more illustrious daughter. His exercise of authority both in Canada and Gibraltar was liable to no exception on the score of negligence, but it was deemed so harsh and vexatious that it rendered his removal from both desirable.⁠[284] His domestic life, though far from being dissolute or indecorous, was not exemplary nor abounding in any very amiable traits of disposition.

The state of the Royal Family at the period of Princess Charlotte’s death had been singular enough. We had a King and Queen greatly advanced in years, and with no less than seven sons and five daughters alive, and all beyond forty years of age; and yet from the want of grandchildren there was no small prospect of the succession devolving on some foreign Prince. While the means of supplying this defect by marrying the King’s sons was in contemplation, it was, no doubt, remarked in every company throughout the kingdom that the robust frame and abstemious diet of the Duke of Kent marked him out as the survivor of all his Royal relatives then living. Yet he died before them all, leaving an infant daughter, destined to succeed to the Crown, in the cradle. He was, indeed, if such terms can agree, regular to excess in all his habits. Household and family were more strictly disciplined than a regiment or a convent, and the duties, the occupations, and the amusements of every branch of his establishment recorded, docketed, and preserved, with a minuteness I hardly venture to recount. His life was clockwork, and some ludicrous instances which his brother, George IV., loved to relate were such as might have rescued Sterne in his delineation of Mr. Shandy from all charge of extreme improbability. This observance of form and details, and above [all] this restless love of business which it caused, produced other results less creditable to his memory and far more vexatious to those connected or acquainted with him. It involved him in correspondence with many low characters of doubtful repute, and he was suspected (I fear with too much reason) of having indirectly countenanced and disseminated the calumnies, and even fomented the plots, against the Duke of York in the memorable business of Mrs. Clarke.

He certainly kept up a mysterious intercourse with almost every discontented officer in the army, and he is much belied if he did not secretly remunerate clerks in public offices, and inmates and servants in private families, for what he deemed curious information. It is to be hoped that he never earned, but he certainly obtained from his brothers, the nickname of Joseph Surface: and the practices I have mentioned, combined with assiduous attendance at public dinners, a specious talent of speaking there, a plausible manner in society, and a formal and dignified demeanour everywhere, gave some colour to uncharitable imputations of very mischievous designs. Some certainly have thought it fortunate that he did not live long enough to dabble in the troubled waters, and prosecute the mysterious cabals which shortly after his death harassed and degraded the Royal family, and went nigh to disturb the peace of the country.

Of course, I do not allude to the horrid plot for murdering the Ministry, which was about this time conceived and nearly perpetrated by a ferocious enthusiast and resolute assassin of the name of Thistlewood.⁠[285] That was detected and punished in the ensuing month, but had no countenance nor connection with any man of rank or indeed of public character whatever. But there were certain consequences resulting from the death of his father, in which the Duke of Kent, had he been alive, might have acted, if not a conspicuous, a very important part.

George III. expired on January 30,⁠[286] the anniversary of the execution of Charles I., to whom he had been so often compared. It might have been expected that after a King had reached the age of eighty-one, and had been secluded for near ten years both from affairs and society, nothing but a mere change of titles and names would have marked his descent to the grave. But his son who was actually possessed, as well as successor, of his prerogatives was so childishly averse to admitting of some formal consequences of the demise of the Crown that he involved himself, his Ministry, Parliament, and country in perplexity; which diverted all attention from the real interests of the nation, threatened much internal disturbance and calamity, and ripened, if it did not sow, seeds of what fortunately became wholesome reforms, but might well have been confusion, vengeance, and disorder. The reports of all that led to, and all that occurred on, what is called the Queen’s Trial are so voluminous and for the most part so correct, and the subject is altogether so revolting to good taste and so discreditable to the Government and the nation, that I may be spared the mortification and disgust of doing more than touching on such effects as it had on the state of political parties, and on a circumstance here or there relating [to] the individuals, which escaped the scrutinising curiosity awakened by that scandalous scene.

The Prince Regent had all along dreaded lest, on his Accession, the wife whom he detested would return to England, claim her dignity and station, and expose him to mortification and embarrassment. Long before his father’s death he would willingly have instituted proceedings for separation and divorce. He was constantly nibbling at that bait, but he found no man of influence in his councils or in Parliament bold enough to engage in so hazardous an undertaking.

It was thought, indeed, by several that the Princess might be persuaded, cajoled, bribed, or intimidated into some deed of separation and a promise never to return. This would, it was thought, spare the Prince her presence on his Accession, and his Ministers many embarrassing questions on which it would be difficult for them to steer a course, neither discreditable to their consistency and shocking to the sense of justice and decorum, nor, on the other hand, offensive to the King and fatal to their ascendancy at Court. Brougham was not at all unwilling to lend himself to such a scheme. With his usual confidence in his own dexterity, and with more than his usual effrontery, he obtruded some such suggestion on the Prince Regent and his Ministry, implying and much exaggerating his influence with the Princess. The basis of the arrangement was to secure to her an ample income and a recognition of rank and title on the demise of the Crown,⁠[287] and to the successor to it the certainty and comfort of her perpetual absence.

Of these proposals he had consented, if not offered, to be the bearer. When reminded of it in the House of Commons, he did not simply deny it, but by vehement declamation and argumentative contradiction of collateral points endeavoured to involve all that had passed between him, his client, or the Government, in obscurity.⁠[288]⁠

How far he was authorised by her, how far invited or accepted by Prince Regent or Ministers to take the steps, it would perhaps be difficult for the parties themselves to explain, and is certainly so for the historian to ascertain. It all came to nothing. Some accused Brougham of a plot to betray his client and ingratiate himself with her enemies, others, of a wish to inveigle the latter into concessions and offers which would enable him to expose them afterwards and to place himself at the head of a popular party. Perhaps each side suspected him of such designs upon them respectively. Certain it is that though he repelled those charges with great ability and force, and some parts of them with obvious truth, yet there remained a strong suspicion on the minds of many that the entire failure of all agreement was mainly owing to the want of confidence, on both sides, in the honesty and judgment of the proposed agent (termed, by a bad joke, rather an officious than official adviser), and not from any reluctance on his part to make himself subservient to the views of either. Whatever was the effect of his interposition, nothing had been settled at the Accession of George IV.; and the Queen seemed retrospectively to approve of all Brougham’s proceedings by appointing him without loss of time her Attorney-General.⁠[289]⁠

One of the first public acts which the King in the ordinary course of things was called upon to perform, was to sign an order for the omission of the names of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and for the insertion of himself as reigning King, and Queen Caroline as his Consort, in the Liturgy. This he positively refused to do, and thereby astounded his Ministers. An altercation ensued, which had wellnigh ended in the dissolution of the Ministry. How exactly the matter was settled I do not recollect; but the Royal Family including the Queen, and not naming her, appeared in the Gazette, and the King, as the price of submitting to such a compromise, exacted from his Ministers a promise that unless the Queen were prevailed upon to remain abroad they would institute proceedings against her immediately on her arrival in England. It was, no doubt, foreseen by the King and by everybody else, the Ministers excepted, that the Queen would consider the omission of her name and title as an indignity, and hurry home to resent it. Even at this early period some vague and indistinct communications were conveyed from the King to leading individuals in Opposition. They betrayed the uneasy footing on which he stood with his Cabinet, and must have shown him the firm adherence of the Whig party to the public principles which they professed; but they did no more.

The King was proclaimed on a very cold day at Carlton House, by the same person (Sir Isaac Heard)⁠[290] who had officiated at his father’s proclamation sixty years before. The new Sovereign was so affected by the weather that he was near giving old Sir Isaac an opportunity of proclaiming a third King. His life, however, was saved by the bold practice of Sir Matthew Tierney, who resorted, without hesitation, to profuse bleeding.

The Parliament was dissolved on February 28, and the atrocious plot of Thistlewood and his accomplices was adroitly alluded to in the Speech as substantiating the grounds on which the Coercive Acts had been passed. Yet surely they rather confirmed the adverse remark, that penal laws and precautionary measures of severity against sedition tend to provoke schemes of assassination and to substitute the secret dagger for the open tumult or riot. There was nothing in the character or conduct of the criminals on this occasion to raise either sympathy or curiosity; nor could the fate of men meditating such atrocities excite the slightest commiseration. Yet the spectacle of the barbarous parts of the execution was unsuited to the times; and the Government and Parliament felt that they were more likely to disgust than to intimidate the public, and to promote than to deter disaffection and conspiracy. They were soon after silently abrogated by Act of Parliament in cases of high treason as well as felony, although the yet more iniquitous consequence of that sentence, the corruption of blood, was left unaltered.

Fortunately for the Ministry, the returns of the new Parliament were completed before the ulterior proceedings regarding the Queen were announced or the intentions respecting her had transpired or been clearly understood. Her resentment at the omission of her name was not positively known till Parliament met, and with equal good fortune the Civil List was voted before she arrived in the country, and before the discussions arising upon it had perplexed the House of Commons and inflamed their constituents. The dissolution had given the Government a majority adequate to ordinary purposes. The Civil List, having been settled as recently as 1816, and being in some degree exonerated by the death of Queen Charlotte as well as the King, passed rapidly and smoothly through Parliament. Had the temper of the House been as much ruffled as it was six weeks afterwards, its passage would probably have been much rougher and much of its valuable cargo have been thrown overboard to lighten the vessel before it reached its destination.

The address also passed unanimously on April 17. There seemed, indeed, sufficient in foreign and domestic events to occupy the Parliament and the public during the Session. In Spain, insurrectionary movements and military mutinies had compelled the ever base and cowardly Ferdinand to proclaim that Constitution of 1812, which his treachery and ingratitude had subverted.⁠[291] This revolution produced a mighty sensation throughout the Continent, and it was obvious either the infection of liberty would spread or an endeavour be made to crush it by the Holy Alliance and the restored Bourbons of France.

At home the great oracles on currency and bullion—such as that consistent and philosophical observer, Lord King—pronounced some legislative measures and some further approach to perfect liberty of trade and currency necessary to avert impending embarrassments, and to establish a wholesome condition of things. The trials of Mr. Hunt and Sir Francis Burdett, the first, for sedition and riot at Manchester,⁠[292] the latter, for a seditious libel upon it, involved many questions on which the public, at any other time, would have been apt to take fire and some of a nice nature on the construction of Statute and the principles of Common Law. The Irish Roman Catholics, too, often over sanguine, began to speculate on the consequences of the Accession, and of a King who, though lately estranged from their cause, had been long supposed to be a friend, and might, as they fondly imagined, revert to his early predilections. Mr. Grattan, though in a feeble state of health, was hurrying over at their earnest instigation, and in fervent hope of closing his glorious career by a striking, if not successful, effort of expressing eloquence on behalf of his countrymen. But he breathed his last the day after he reached London, almost at the moment when the Queen’s triumphant arrival extinguished for a time all interest about that great question more effectually than the death of its ablest advocate, overwhelmed the Government with consternation, adjourned all incipient reform on the business of Grampound,⁠[293] and obliterated the consideration of all topics of public concern; thereby furnishing a beautiful comment on the institution of monarchy, which can render the personal and disgusting squabbles between a man and his wife, neither remarkable for their talents nor respectable for their virtues, a much keener object of solicitude to an enlightened people than the fate of surrounding nations or the improvement and welfare of their own!

Lord Grey did not attend the early part of the Session. He intrusted to me a petition from a parson of the name of Pike Jones,⁠[294] a man of coarse manners, but not deficient in learning or understanding, whom the Bishop of Exeter, Dr. Pelham, the weakest sycophant on the Bench, had refused to induct to a living. The pretext was that he had spoken irreverently of the Articles and the Athanasian Creed at a public meeting; the real motive was to pay his court to George IV., by persecuting a clergyman who had at that meeting manfully and charitably maintained the principles of universal toleration.

My case was strong. I endeavoured, not without success, I believe, to demonstrate that were the Church of England to be judged, as the Anti-Catholics among them judge of the Papist, by such maxims and professions as she is unwilling to renounce but does not practically act up to, she might, through her Articles, Homilies, and Creeds, be convicted of bigotry, if not perhaps so extensive, full as inveterate and odious as that of the Roman Catholic Church. The Bishop, however callous to reproach, was scared at the severity with which several grave and church-going peers, especially Lord Carnarvon and Lord Lansdowne, stigmatised the transaction; and though the Bishop of Durham,⁠[295] the highest Churchman on the Bench, censured the language both of Mr. Jones and Lord Carnarvon, it was obvious enough that he, as well as Ministers and the other Spiritual Lords, if compelled to pronounce a verdict on the subject, would have condemned his conduct as intemperate and illegal.

The Queen, with an intrepidity defying legal advice as well as King, Cabinet, and Parliament, made a strange and triumphant entry into London, with Alderman Wood⁠[296] at her side and her ladies opposite, on June [7], 1820. The Ministers redeemed their pledge to the King, and on the 6th brought down a message to Parliament, accompanied by papers in a green bag relating “to the conduct of the Queen since her departure.” The negotiations preceding her determination to come to London were all brought in great detail before the public.

I have already stated my reasons for not recounting or commenting on them, or upon those, with a like failure, which were instituted by the Commons to induce Her Majesty to acquiesce in some arrangement which would avert the necessity of any public investigation. In some of the preliminary steps to the inquiry I took a part, with a view that the whole proceeding might be quashed in the earliest stages, and stifled without casting blame on either party. I was even induced, by an idle hope of abrogating an unjust and unnatural law (from which I apprehended future mischief to monarchy), to propose the Repeal of the Royal Marriage Act, which passed in the year 1772 to gratify the malice and feed the pride of George III.⁠[297] I had no view, retrospective or immediate, to the squabble, then existing in the Royal Family and disturbing at once business of Parliament and the peace of the country; but I vainly imagined that a sense of those inconveniences, arising from the constraints under which Royal marriages are contracted, might dispose men’s minds to relax or remove such constraints in future. Friend and foe scouted the proposition, and seemed to suspect it to be a manœuvre to answer some immediate but concealed purpose. The fact is, all minds were intent on giving a triumph to one of the contending parties on the matter before them, and reckless of everything else. I, of course, let my bill drop after the first reading.

Lord Liverpool asked me in private if I would sit on the second Committee about to be appointed for an examination of the papers; I declined, but I did so, as I told him, on private rather than public grounds, thinking my name by no means an advantageous one to be selected for judicial inquiry on a matter connected with divorce. Lansdowne consented to be named, but he afterwards publicly withdrew; and as in the interim the Commons had shown their distaste and the public their resentment of the proceeding, his change of conduct, though judicious, natural, and prudent, was for that very reason, by the promoters of the measure, stigmatised as irresolute and unhandsome. Most of our party, and all who had been of Cabinet in 1806, were, in truth, at first very unwilling to espouse the cause of the Queen. We had no great confidence in its merit and none whatever in her character; and we thought such a line of conduct would expose us to the charge of faction or revenge. On the other hand, we were as little disposed, after the treatment we had received, to identify ourselves a second time with the King, and to brave unpopularity by encouraging him in an ungenerous and unnecessary vexation of a half-crazy woman.

Several, however, of our friends, Lords Donoughmore and Hutchinson, Sir John Leach,⁠[298] Lord Lauderdale, and perhaps the whole Cavendish connection, either felt disgusted with the Queen or deemed it in their hearts a good opportunity for recovering Court favour, and possibly for outbidding those who were in possession of office. But some few in the Lords, very many in the Commons, and nearly all out of doors, wrought upon by Brougham and either sincerely biassed by indignation at what they deemed persecution or stimulated by faction and revenge, were panting for the exposure of the King and ready to exalt the Queen as their heroine and to inflict mortification and defeat upon him.

We were not the only party perplexed at the position we had assumed. Mr. Canning was in a yet more awkward predicament. He had been intimate, scandal said, too intimate, with the Queen. The rumour was countenanced by the King’s marked aversion to him; and the notoriety of her consultations with him, before she quitted, had served to confirm the suspicion. Yet he had acquiesced in the exclusion of her name from the Liturgy. He did not appear either in Council or in Parliament to have made any very strenuous exertions to screen her from prosecution or aspersion. But when that provocation was determined and announced, he lamented it loudly, spoke in warm terms of his obligations and of the charms of her society. He asked an audience of the King, and stated to him the impossibility of taking any part in the proceedings against her. The King commanded him to remain in his service, but permitted him to state that he did so exclusively in consequence of that command, and allowed him to adhere to his resolution of taking no part. This he considered as a postponement of his resignation, which was tendered and accepted in the winter of 1820.⁠[299]⁠

Surely this was a strange course. It afforded her no assistance or protection. It must have grievously offended his colleagues and the King, and so far from rescuing her character from reproach, it seemed to imply some secret and mysterious reason that disqualified him for a judge or an accuser....

In the meanwhile, the negotiations of the Commons with the Queen (though much to the mortification of Mr. Wilberforce and other grave members who conducted them, they ended in nothing) gave strong colour to the apprehension that, even if a bill of Pains and Penalties should pass the Lords, it would, by direct vote or by delay, be inevitably lost in the Commons. The thought of this animated and inflamed the public. Reports, perhaps unfounded, of murmurs among the soldiery were afloat.⁠[300] They were said to confound the authority of a Queen with that of a King, and, conceiving them to be co-equal and co-ordinate, to imagine it left to their option which to obey. Certain it is that the lowest orders of the community and the fanatic sects of the middle ranks were both, for different and even opposite reasons, stirring partizans of the Queen.

The clergy incurred great odium by their ready and over-zealous acquiescence in the views of a Court which was neither moral nor decorous. They could not disobey the injunctions of their superiors about the Liturgy; but their industry in disseminating the filthiest tales about the Queen and their haughty displeasure at every popular movement on her behalf, disgusted and irritated their flocks exceedingly. Never since the period of Charles I. were the English people so estranged from the Established clergy as on this occasion. Many useful reforms effected since, as well as many less sensible but not less certain symptoms of the declining influence of the hierarchy, may be traced to that epoch. They have been slowly and indirectly, but not unjustly, mulcted and reduced for abetting the petty malice, and conniving at the ill-assumed hypocrisy, of an unprincipled and revengeful Prince.

The report of the Committee of the House of Lords recommending a bill of Pains and Penalties was read on July 4, and Lord Liverpool presented the bill on the next day. It had been settled by an understanding, not, I believe, by a vote of the House, that Her Majesty’s legal advisers, even though members of the other House, should be allowed to be heard and to conduct her defence at the bar; although members of the House of Commons are not usually admitted as counsel for or against any legislative proceeding. However, the whole proceeding was anomalous, and the counsel on both sides were members of Parliament. The proceedings on the bill were to be resumed, or as in common parlance it was described, the Queen’s trial was to begin, on August 17, and on that day Parliament Street was lined by a crowd whose aspect was far more formidable than their numbers. Unlike English multitudes, their countenances seemed to indicate design, determination, and revenge. They hissed some and applauded other peers as they passed; but they performed both those tasks with such marked indifference that it was difficult not to suspect that they had some more serious undertaking in view. One man quitted his companions, and, placing himself at the head of the Duke of Wellington’s horse (as he was riding down to the House), clenched his fist, and repeated the word Ney three times with great emphasis and anger—an exclamation which surprised the bystanders exceedingly, and is said to have disconcerted the Duke himself not a little. Soon afterwards the railing which barricaded the street was broken down by mere pressure, and advantage was taken of this incident to augment both the military and the police. Owing to such precautions or to other accidents, the appearance of the people in the streets, though in numbers always considerable, gradually improved in character, and they became, as English mobs generally are, as manageable and good-humoured as at an election or a fair.

As I had taken some part in the preliminary discussions, chiefly to mark my disapprobation of so unusual, hazardous, and unnecessary a proceeding, so I voted for the Duke of Leinster’s motion to rescind the whole and reject the bill without any inquiry at the bar. But during the inquiry itself, I was for the most part employed in writing nonsensical puns and epigrams on the various indecencies which occurred, and tossing them across the table to the Chancellor for his diversion, and I believe I was the only Lord practised in public speaking who asked not a single question during the inquiry. Once or twice, before the Order of the Day was read, I endeavoured, but in vain, to rouse the attention of the House to the grave events passing in Europe. I also spoke on occasions which seemed to me opportune for dismissing the subject altogether, and I occasionally expressed my opinion on matters of form which arose in the course of it. Upon these latter points I acquired, chiefly during that period, a very undeserved reputation for a knowledge of the rules and orders of the House, which I do not possess. I have, however, frequently, though not perhaps without laughing or at least smiling in my sleeve, taken some credit for it, and availed myself of the delusion to facilitate public business or possibly to give a friendly party a lift. Form is so necessary in an assembly as large as the House of Lords is become, that perhaps where there is neither code nor individual vested with authority, it is pardonable to counterfeit more wisdom than one possesses and lay down some law in an authoritative tone. Lords of order, like yet greater beings, may be worshipped because some worship is convenient, rather than because their oracles are infallible.

Lord Grey earnestly wished to give to this bill all the outward dignity of an impeachment, and asked, on his legs, if there were not a more solemn way of voting than is usually practised on a division. I stated to him and the House that the regular and orderly, though generally neglected, method of taking votes on bills and motions much more nearly resembled that of taking individual judgments on a trial than from the common practice might be supposed. On a question being put, every Lord should in strict form be called, and should stand up in his place and say Content or Not Content, in the same manner as he answers Guilty or Not Guilty in Westminster Hall on an impeachment. What was called a division of the House, by the Contents going below and the Not Contents staying within the bar, was a convenient device for ascertaining the number of votes that had been given on each side, but does not strictly or technically constitute the act of voting; which was presumed to have been done in obedience to the injunction from the Woolsack, “Those who are for the motion will say Content, and those who are against it will say Not Content.” The strict form was accordingly, on this solitary occasion, observed. We stood up and voted seriatim. We then divided, and were told, as usual, to ascertain the number who had said Content or Not Content. This proceeding, from the long disuse of it, was imposing enough; and I not improbably owe the character and the authority of a profound Lord of order chiefly to the accident of having suggested it.

The questions on the various stages after the examination of witnesses were preceded by long debates. In the course of them I shortly stated my reasons against the form, expediency, or necessity of such a bill, but studiously avoided giving the character of a verdict of Not Guilty to that opinion. Others were not so cautious. Many on both sides displayed great subtleness and eloquence. But yet there was a certain lack of earnestness, sincerity, and truth in all that was said, and, in my judgment, individuals and parties, as well as our monarchy and institutions, appeared to sad disadvantage throughout the performance. It was a farce, and a sorry, disgusting, and dangerous one. The manner in which Lord Liverpool dropped the curtain after the third reading is well known. His pretext was that slender majority of nine, which voted for that last reading, did not exceed the number of Cabinet Ministers who had already given a previous and extra-judicial opinion by advising the bill; but his real motive was a conviction that, if he persisted, the bill would be lost in the Commons, or, passing, produce some convulsion in the country.

The relinquishment of the bill was hailed almost instantaneously in the purlieus and adjoining streets with loud shouts of triumph. Within the walls there were, no doubt, many much mortified at so lame and impotent a conclusion; but, though some few protested, the Duke of Montrose alone ventured to raise his voice against an ignominious withdrawal of so grave and, as he thought, so well substantiated a charge. He acted honestly, no doubt. But as he had been by no means a pattern of purity in his youth, he could gain no credit for virtuous abhorrence of female frailty; and having been celebrated in verse and prose as a specimen of that brood which cackles around the Capitol, he must have hissed at the sorry catastrophe of the drama, more from aristocratical disdain of the low character of the paramour than from puritanical horror at the heinousness of the offence. However gloomy and even awful had been the commencement of the business, the fulness of the town at an unusual and agreeable season of the year, the entire close of business after four o’clock in the day, and perhaps some circumstances connected with the nature of the inquiry, rendered the period of its progress singularly festive and gay. Its permanent effect on the House was not so fortunate. It, in some degree, verified Lord Egremont’s prediction that the habit of putting questions to witnesses would familiarise every blockhead to hearing his own voice in public, and he would hereafter weary the House with his silly remarks on various occasions. The Lords, if not more unmanageable, became from this period a more loquacious assembly than heretofore.

The King must have been sorely nettled at the result. He taxed his Ministers with pusillanimity, and sometimes affected to suspect them of treachery. He authorised various persons, such as Lord Donoughmore, Lord Hutchinson, Sir John Leach,⁠[301] and others, to make half-confidences to Lord Grey, Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Tierney, and myself. If there was really any further design in such communication than to feel our pulse and alarm his Ministers at the possibility of a change, that design proved quite abortive. Lord Grey justly remarked in a letter, November 21, 1820, that it was impossible for the King and his Ministers to separate, however much they might hate one another.

The Queen’s advisers and partizans, miscalling the cessation of all proceedings an acquittal, were busily endeavouring to set up her Court in rivalry to that of her husband. She gave dinners and had parties; but she had neither a case, a character, nor friends, to enable her to play that game with success; and some ladies of rank and character wrote their names at her door, or even on invitation dined at Brandenburg House, but none took office in her household. It was manifest that her station in fashionable society could never be made either brilliant or comfortable to herself or her visitors.

Whatever might be her failure in London society the agitation in the country continued. Numberless meetings were held, which passed petitions for the introduction of her name in the Liturgy, and pointed more or less directly to the removal of Ministers who advised the prosecution. If I may judge from the two which I was prevailed upon to attend—those of Bedfordshire and Oxfordshire—the enthusiasm in her cause had not abated in the country for several months after the failure of the bill. Yet perhaps in the course of the winter, and yet more manifestly during the early part of the ensuing year, the tide of popularity was on the turn. Her exhibition at St. Paul’s and the King’s re-appearance at the public theatres had very opposite effects. The first weakened the interest engaged in her cause, and the latter softened in some degree the displeasure felt against him. She, on November 29, proceeded to St. Paul’s to return thanks and take the Sacrament. She thereby scandalised many religious persons, who deemed it a profanation of a holy rite, and she disgusted the indifferent, who regarded it as a piece of needless hypocrisy. The King, three months afterwards, mustered courage to show himself in public, and his reception at the theatres in February, though neither brilliant nor striking, indicated plainly enough that the popular frenzy was subsiding.⁠[302]⁠

All this preceded and accounted for the comparative flatness with which her subsequent endeavours to revive popular feeling at the Coronation, and even her death and funeral, with all their exciting circumstances, were received in the course of a short year from the period of her prosecution. The King’s asperity was not so speedily mitigated as the people’s disrelish of it; for when in the ensuing year the intelligence of the death of Napoleon, which arrived before the Queen was taken ill, was announced to him in the ambiguous terms—“I have, Sir, to congratulate you: your greatest enemy is dead,” he unguardedly exclaimed, “Is she, by God?” thus betraying the gradation in which personal spite ranged above political enmity in his narrow and pitiful mind.

In 1820 died Sir Arthur Pigott,⁠[303] a high-minded man and sound lawyer, who combined real philosophy with considerable eloquence, acuteness, and learning; and who, although in all exigencies, public and private, singularly serviceable to his friends and party, was too unobtrusive to acquire the celebrity to which his rare attainments and elevated mind certainly entitled him. His appearance was indeed uncouth; and both in figure and his face it was said that anatomists could trace affinity to the African race.⁠[304] If so, he afforded practical proof that the narrow theory which denies capacity to that affectionate people is as erroneous as it is uncharitable. I have heard that, at an early period of his professional life, he had been a solitary instance of a contemporary or rival at the Bar unfairly treated by Lord Erskine. He was certainly among the many whom that extraordinary advocate, by bursting out into a sudden blaze, eclipsed and for a while seemed to extinguish.

About the time of his death, Lord Erskine, who had involved himself in many embarrassments, pecuniary and domestic, was making the last exhibition in public worthy of his former fame. He moved on July 24, on the eve of the examination relating to the Queen, that a list of the witnesses should be forthwith delivered to the Queen to enable her to prepare her defence; but in his subsequent attempt to sum up the evidence he was interrupted in his speech by a loss of recollection, the consequence, as he thought, of sudden and severe illness. He recovered, however, to all appearance. The two or three years he survived added little to his happiness and less to his reputation.

Here then in 1820 closed his singular career, and here a friendly chronicler may feel pleasure in retracing the lines of his character. Few lives have been more useful to the laws of his country, and none more serviceable to his contemporaries, and, indeed, to the liberties of mankind, than Lord Erskine’s. His wonderful exertions in the trials of 1794⁠[305] stemmed the torrent of political violence, which was rapidly rising. In my conscience I believe, that had Horne Tooke and his associates fallen victims to a charge of constructive treason, it would not have been long ere the first men in the country, and among them perhaps the very individuals who instituted the proceedings, would have followed their fate; for a system of political vengeance and persecution as merciless, though in an opposite direction from Robespierre’s, would have been inevitably established. From such scenes I believe we were protected chiefly by the successful genius of Erskine. His character was as extraordinary as his career. Who ever attained so suddenly such celebrity at the Bar? Who ever held it longer? Who owed it more undeniably to brilliant talents and amiable virtues? Who, above all, ever exercised in that profession such superiority, with such uniform amenity of manners, such magnanimity to young and old, to inferiors and followers, to equals and rivals—in short, to all who approached him?

In a career whose very essence is contention, it is marvellous how little angry passion of any kind he either betrayed or provoked. His triumphs (and who had more?) wounded nobody. His disappointments (and he had his share) never fretted and hardly ruffled him. It is said he has left memoirs of his early and professional life. If they relate exclusively to passages in his professional career (to which I earnestly exhorted him to confine himself), they will be not only curious but invaluable. If they embrace politics and private life, they must, I fear, disappoint the world; and they will certainly surprise and divert rather than instruct or enlighten his readers. Yet he was a clear and pleasant writer, when the subject he treated of was such as suited his powers. Even in politics, in which he was anything but sedate or wise, what was miscalled his failure in Parliament should not have occasioned a neglect of his printed speeches. They were often very finished performances; but those delivered at the bar, and afterwards edited by himself, are absolute models of forensic eloquence. They abound in beauties. They have pathos, vehemence, wit, and fancy, and, above all, an originality of mind which they who knew him little and late could hardly imagine to have been in him. Truth is, he was a phenomenon throughout. Well might Mr. Robert Smith say that he knew not why God Almighty should have been at the pains of making a nisi prius lawyer, but he certainly had been and succeeded, when Erskine was formed. Vain even to a proverb, he seldom, very seldom, mortified the vanity, and he never grudged or envied the success, of any other man.

Destitute of all classical education, and consequently debarred from all familiarity with the great models of poetry and oratory, he was yet remarkable in public and private for the taste and purity of his diction. After serving in two active professions, the Navy and the Army, and speaking broad Scotch at the age of 22, he, in the course of five years from that time, was scarcely more distinguished for any other branch of oratory than the grace of his delivery and the beauty and correctness of his elocution. His sagacity and discretion in a cause were unrivalled, but they scarcely exceeded his levity and impudence out of it. His judgment and dexterity in other men’s affairs equalled, but it could not surpass, his simplicity and childishness, not to say silliness, in the management of his own. No one gave him credit for much sensibility or very strong affections. Yet the zeal, the earnestness, the energy, with which he espoused the interests of a client, the light-hearted playfulness with which he enlivened the gravest deliberations, his sweetness of temper and gracefulness of manner, made him a welcome associate in all companies and the intimate friend of some of the wisest and best of his contemporaries. His public principles were unquestionably of no very inflexible kind. They had, perhaps, never been very deeply considered, and yet honour or accident, the recollections of early life, and an unaffected deference for the more comprehensive genius of Mr. Fox, which, vain as he was, he never disputed or regretted, rendered him one of the most consistent party men of our days, at least, among those who from lawyers have become politicians.

In short, in drawing his character one might go on with one endless antithesis; and it is not the least remarkable circumstance about him that, in spite of apparent contradictions in his composition, there scarcely ever was a man on the great theatre of the world about whose qualities, moral and intellectual, all persons and parties were more generally agreed. I have chosen to close his character here, for there was nothing in the last years of his life on which a friend could dwell with any satisfaction, though there was nothing on which a biographer or historian could be called upon to dilate. He died in very embarrassed, not to say indigent, circumstances in 1823.

Though the Session of 1820, of which I am now speaking, was engrossed with the Queen’s business, time was found by the Ministers to pass an Act for continuing that odious and unconstitutional law called the Alien Bill. I did my best, but in vain, to rouse some feeling against it. I was left in a minority of seven. On the other hand, a just and necessary amendment of the Marriage [Act] was, after some discussion, lost in the Lords,⁠[306] though the earnestness and home truths of Lord Westmorland and the eloquence of Lord Ellenborough in its favour made an impression which ensured some success in that work of mercy and justice on a future occasion.

But though the legislation of this country was torpid during 1820, the Continent of Europe was not so inert. The Spanish Constitution of 1812 ran like wildfire through the south of Europe.⁠[307] It was proclaimed at Naples, where no copy of it was to be found, and within a month it was adopted in Portugal likewise. The Emperor of Russia and the other members of the Holy Alliance were not unmindful of these events. They signified their apprehension of such revolutionary movements, and, obliquely threatening some efforts to suppress them, called on their Allies to meet at Laybach to take the state of affairs in Italy into serious consideration. Accordingly, at the commencement of 1821, and on the opening of Parliament in January, the Government and the two Houses seemed once more occupied with questions affecting the interests of Europe. They were, indeed, diversified by the county meetings praying for the restoration of the Queen’s name to the Liturgy, to which I have already adverted.

The Duke of Wellington began to take a greater part in debate than hitherto, and, I suspect, in Council, too, after Mr. Canning had withdrawn. In a speech in the House of Lords he ventured on a paradox which shocked the friends of freedom exceedingly. He maintained that open public meetings were an absolute farce, and pretended that resolutions and addresses got up in private, which had been pretty generally resorted to with a view to counteract the impression of those voted in public, and which were much branded as hole-and-corner petitions, were more deserving the attention of Parliament.

Mr. Canning, who had absented himself while the Queen’s Bill was pending, actually resigned in December. He had received the King’s permission to do so. It may be said to have been matter of agreement with him and the King, as appears from a letter written by him to one of his constituents.⁠[308] But the publication of that letter was not agreed to or permitted, and gave His Majesty much umbrage. So much so, that Mr. Canning was obliged to explain and to accuse the poet Campbell, in whose magazine it first appeared,⁠[309] of a breach of confidence or, at least, of discourtesy for printing it without his authority. It is possible that Mr. Canning’s retirement from the Cabinet at that critical moment in some degree facilitated the measures of the Holy Alliance, who then or shortly afterwards determined to trample on the rising liberties of Italy, and succeeded in their iniquitous projects through the pusillanimous treachery of the King of Naples and the irresolute, if not insidious, connivance of the French and English Cabinets.⁠[310] It is true, however, that Lord Liverpool and Lord Castlereagh, both in speeches and public papers, unequivocally disclaimed all participation in the proceedings against Naples, and all sanction or approbation of the principles of the Congress of Laybach.

Their efforts, however, to prevent the interference they thus affected to lament were very faint indeed, and their distribution of naval force, far from impeding, seemed to assist the views of the Holy Alliance. It was, however, confidently asserted by some well-informed persons that it was the real wish of the Duke of Wellington, and yet more of Lord Castlereagh, even at that time to discountenance all armed interference with the revolutions of countries nominally independent. Some even maintain that had the negotiations remained in the hands of Lord Stewart, the present Lord Londonderry,⁠[311] the aggressive measures against Naples would never have been resorted to. Accident or personal caprice occasioned Lord Stewart’s absence at the time; and the conduct of the affairs devolved on Robert Gordon,⁠[312] who, deeply imbued with his brother Lord Aberdeen’s predilection for the Austrians, was easily cajoled by their arts to depart from the spirit of his instructions.

George IV. no doubt rejoiced in secret at the failure of any endeavours to check the anti-revolutionary intervention of Austria; and is it uncharitable to surmise that a Cabinet, weakened in numbers, talents, and popularity by the secession of Mr. Canning and by the unsatisfactory results of the proceedings against the Queen, were disposed to pacify the King by injurious compliances with his passions, or at least by the faintness of their resistance to his ruling prejudices and prepossessions?

In February and March there were many animated debates on these topics. In the course of them I took an active and, as some thought, an intemperate and imprudent part. In one of them, when called to order by Lord Harrowby, I disdained to have the appearance of qualifying by finishing my sentence as I had intended; and, so interrupted, it seemed to charge the Emperor Alexander with a participation or at least connivance at the murder of his father, whereas my meaning was to utter a much less disputable, as well as less offensive, allegation, namely, that it ill became him to charge those who derived their power from insurrection or mutiny with being necessarily accessories after the fact to the perpetration of a crime, for he was himself sitting on the throne reeking with the blood of his own father, and would consequently, by a parity of reasoning, be exposed to the unfounded or, at least, questionable imputation of being cognisant of and responsible for the murder. The diplomatic agents of Russia felt or affected great indignation. Up to the period of Alexander’s death they pointedly avoided my society. It was whispered that Count Lieven,⁠[313] a very gentlemanlike man, had some thoughts of making it a personal quarrel; and my old friend Pozzo di Borgo soon after, at Paris, though not unwilling to meet me, conveyed his regret that he could neither exchange visits nor invite me to his house.

I was in France for five or six months in the summer of 1821; but before I set out, I had the satisfaction of getting an act through Parliament, which in turbulent times may have the beneficial effect of saving the lives of many persecuted and obnoxious men. Availing myself of an admission of Lord Eldon that the laws relating to treason should be alike in all parts of the United Kingdom, I pointed out to him the fact that the just and benevolent statute which requires two witnesses to an overt act of treason was not in force in Ireland; and that men there, in our own time, had been convicted and executed on the testimony of one only. He promised not to oppose a bill to amend this defect; and when I introduced it, [it] glided almost imperceptibly through both Houses of Parliament, to my great satisfaction. Is it vanity to say that when one has succeeded in enacting such an improvement one feels that one has not lived in vain, and that one has done something to rescue from reproach that anomaly which confers for birth alone an undue share in making laws for the community to which one belongs? The bill for the relief of Roman Catholics, having passed the House of Commons, was thrown out in the Lords.

I soon after went to France. Such English intelligence as reached me there may be better found in Parliamentary Reports, Annual Registers, and other printed works. To them I refer my reader. He will, no doubt, remark in the debates [on] the Grampound Enfranchisement Bill the gradual but sure tokens of a rising statesman and philosopher in Lord Russell, and in the measure itself the progress of the principle of Reform in the public, as well as some indication of the effects likely to be produced on that question by the shortsighted resistance of the High Tory party to every improvement, however small.

The death of Napoleon was one of the events of this year. The manner it reached me, and many other particulars relating to that extraordinary man, are recorded in a separate book of this work, and require no repetition here.⁠[314]⁠

The Queen’s attempt to force herself into the presence at the Coronation was unsuccessful and undignified. It outraged the feelings of the country, and was deprecated by a large portion of her friends and advisers. Even Sir Robert Wilson, not the least zealous or rash of her counsellors, vehemently protested against it, and absented himself purposely on the occasion. The imputations cast upon him afterwards of planning a mutiny and insurrection were utterly groundless. He was at Paris when news of her death and the projected procession arrived, and he consulted me on the propriety of attending it, after having so recently parted with Her Majesty on a difference respecting her attempt to appear at the Coronation. That gorgeous ceremony, though far less gratifying to the people than those which have subsequently occurred, was lavishly expensive and splendid; but it was very pernicious in its effects both on the Royal and the public mind. George IV. acted the farce of deriving his authority from Heaven with so much complacency that he almost persuaded himself that it was true, and the people, though hardly the dupes of such mummery, surrendered their better judgment and more reasonable feelings of distrust to the glitter of pageantry and show. To disseminate this disposition for parade the King exhibited himself shortly afterwards in Ireland, and even in that nation, whose wrongs he was so intent upon perpetuating, found a gentry and a populace base enough to greet his arrival with shouts and adulation. So predominant is a childish love of Princes in all parts of the British dominions.

It was during his absence on that excursion that Queen Caroline died. The death of this luckless Princess, the consequence of an accidental obstruction in her bowels, was rather a relief than loss to all parties in the State. The King was overjoyed, the Ministers pleased, and perhaps those hitherto politically and professionally connected with her were, on reflection, not sorry at the event. Few could have adhered to her Court without either discredit or disadvantage, and yet none could have held entirely aloof without incurring the imputation of base servility to the King and great want of generosity and feeling. To none was the release greater than to Mr. Canning. It did not entirely efface the resentment of the King against those who had espoused her cause, or those, including the Ministers, whom he thought had by mismanagement given her a triumph; but it removed the object which perpetually reminded him of his mortification, as well as all occasions which might revive his wrath.

END OF THE MEMOIR