CHAP. III.] CORONATION OF GEORGE IV.-DEATH OF NAPOLEON. of July, George IV., for the time, looked the king. There was hollowness there too. The blaze of jewels, the splendour of the robes, the pealing of the music, the cry of God save the king,' the smiles and loyal eagerness, all looked like rejoicing; but 133 the king's chancellor, the keeper of his conscience and slave of his prerogative, admits: 'Everybody went in the morning under very uncomfortable feelings and dread.' The reason why was known to all. There was one outside knocking for admission, 'trying every door in the Abbey in vain.' This phantom of an injured queen was felt, though not seen, amidst the festivities; and how dreaded it was, we perceive from the triumph of the pious Lord Eldon in her mortification. It is all over, quite safe and well. . . . . A gentleman in the hall told us, that when her majesty got into the carriage again, she wept..... John Bull spared us; indeed, his family were very civil to me, in the course of my transit from the hall to the Abbey. The business is certainly over in a way nobody could have hoped.' Another business' was 'certainly over' just at this time, which must have caused relief to the king and his ministers, even greater than that the coronation passed off well. It may be hoped that they also felt something of the solemn and mournful emotion which ran through the heart of the civilised world at the news. While the pageantry of our great regal festival was preparing-while the gems were burnishing, and the tapestries unrolling, and the throne erecting, and the choir practising, the Chamber of Deputies at Paris were receiving the following petition : 'Napoleon is no more. We claim his remains. The honour of France requires this restitution; and what the honour of France requires will be accomplished. She cannot endure that he who was her chief that he whom she saluted with the title of Great, and the designation of Emperor, should remain as a trophy in the hands of foreigners; and that every Englishman may say, on shewing an insolent monument: "Here is the Emperor of the French."' The temper of this petition may be excused when it is considered that it is from the officers and adherents of Napoleon, who saw him pine and die, far from home, and in captivity. At such a moment, they had the sympathy even of those who had most urgently demanded that the world should be secured by the rigid seclusion of him who had troubled it so long and so severely. Now that it was over, and that that restless spirit could trouble his race no more, the natural feelings of compassion and regret arose strongly and universally. His fellow-men began at once to look back upon him as a man, and not only as a conqueror and disturber who had humbled the pride of nations, and broken up the peace of continents. He was at once regarded as a suffering man-all pitying him for the dreadful fate of his closing years, spent in chafing against his bonds, and sinking under the burden of ignominious idleness; while the most thoughtful had a still deeper compassion for him, as one who had failed in the true objects of human life by the pursuit of personal aims. Looking back, they saw how one endowed with noble powers could have known but little of the peace of the soul; and how, in the crowning moments of his triumphs, his life had been a failure. Looking forward, they saw how, throughout the whole future of human experience, he would stand dishonourably distinguished from the humblest servant of the race who had ministered to its real good. Many, throughout all time, who have apparently been baffled in their aims, and laboured in vain to work out their schemes, have, visibly or invisibly, attained the truest and highest success by an unwavering fidelity to the right and the true, and have enjoyed their natural recompense in the exaltation of their own being. This one man, before whose powers the nations quailed, and whose will seemed to be, for the time, the law of his kind, was, in his very triumphs, a sufferer-a wanderer from the home of human affections-a powerless and defeated soldier in the conflict of human life. And he could not retrieve himself in adversity. Leisure and solitude brought no healing to him. He had no moral force which could respond to the appeal of adverse circumstance. He had in him nothing of the man which could, in a season of rest, look back with wonder or a smile on the turbulence of its childish vanity and pride; nothing of the sage which could draw from the vicissitudes of experience any aliment of present wisdom and peace. He remained to the last morally a child and a sufferer-a baffled child, and an unconscious sufferer from worse woes than his mortifications, his bondage, and his privations. It might be a question whether all was done for him, or done in the best way, which his vast powers, and his misfortunes, and his appeal as an enemy, might claim; but if all had been done which the highest wisdom and magnanimity could suggest, it could have really availed him nothing. His misery lay too deep for healing by human hands: it was wrought into his very being; and it could be dissolved by no touch short of that which took out the life from the clay, and gave back the dust to dust. That time had now come. The dulled eye no longer wandered over the boundless ocean which surrounded his island-prison; his aching mind no longer gazed abroad listlessly over the heaving sea of human affairs; his spent heart had ceased its beating; and his dust lay under the willows in that nook at St Helena, where strangers came from the east and the west, to feel and wonder at the silence which had settled down on one who had made the world echo with the wail of the widow and the orphan, the groans of dying multitudes, the tramp of hosts, and the crash of falling empires. In this nook of the world there had been no peace to his soul; and it was, perhaps, all the more soothing to find quietness about his grave. He died on the 5th of May 1821, after a painful and lingering decline. The news of his death reached England while London was preparing for the coronation of the sovereign who had had him in charge, and who was to follow him, after the lapse of a few years, to that bed of rest where foes lie down side by side-comrades at last. We The ministry were not strong with the king. have seen how nearly they were going out immediately after his accession. Again, when the king went to Hanover, there existed an uncomfortable state of feeling between himself and his primeminister,' which was afterwards accommodated; but not for long. In December, he was anxious and ill-humoured about a new création of baronets, on which Lord Sidmouth observes, in a note to the premier, 'and really the matter is not worth a gale of wind, much less a storm.' However trifling the subject of these royal discontents, their frequency was by this time affecting the strength of the ministry. The administration was not strong in itself. Lord Sidmouth had long been wishing to retire; and there was perpetual apprehension of the lord chancellor being compelled to do so. Lord Londonderry shewed at times symptoms of fatigue and nervousness which made his colleagues uneasy, and caused the king to advise rest and change of scene; and CHAP. IV.] COALITION WITH THE GRENVILLE PARTY. the anxieties and toils of office were wearing down the frame of the premier himself. The administration was not strong with the country, though its weakness was not perceived by everybody. The distress of the agriculturists was pressing; and the return to cash-payments had so lowered prices, and for the time destroyed the ordinary relation between money and other commodities, that the embarrassment created extreme discontent. While the ignorant and impatient of both the moneyed and the landed classes threatened each other with confiscation of the funds or of estates, both united in claims for relief from the government which no government could grant. The ministry preserved their attitude of grave sufficiency; but they looked about for aid and support. Above all, the administration was not strong in regard to the times. It spent a good deal of leisure and energy in bemoaning the changes in the spirit of the times; but it could not prevent them, and it could not cope with them. It would fain have strengthened continually the policy of the Holy Alliance abroad; it would have kept a good old Protestant Tory, with underlings like himself, in power in Ireland; it would have gone on imposing the same taxes, and following the same routine in England for another term of years; but it could do none of these things. Amelioration drew on, in spite of their fears and endeavours. England was about to will a more liberal continental policy, Ireland was about to have rulers well disposed towards the Catholics. A remission of taxation was becoming necessary, and the principles of commerce were brought more and more into question every year, Something must be done. What should it be? To keep the Whigs not only out of office, but out of all thoughts of office, was the first thing necessary. The Whigs were not trained for office, and were supposed to be so incompetent to its business that it would be the greatest of misfortunes to the country if their brilliancy and moral force in parliament should carry them into work for which they were unfit. They were supposed to be aware of this unfitness, and to rely for its reparation on the Grenville party, in alliance with whose practical ability they could undertake to govern the country. The thing to be done, therefore, was to separate the Grenvilles from all sympathy with the Whigs. It was a sore necessity, that of proposing a coalition with the Grenvilles; but it was done. The lord chancellor mourned over it. This coalition, I think, will have consequences very different from those expected by the members of administration who brought it about. I hate coalitions.' The inconveniences were indeed great. The Grenville party of course agreed in the main in the political principles of the Liverpool cabinet, or the coalition could not have taken place; but they were friendly to the Catholic claims, differing in this important matter from every member of the cabinet except Lord Londonderry; and on the whole, there was an inclination towards liberalism in them which was disturbing to official men who had so long thought alike, and had all their own way. Lord Liverpool and his colleagues had to reconcile themselves to the 135 changes which they had found themselves compelled to make, by the consideration that they had materially damaged the opposition. It was not only the opposition that was damaged by the change. The supporters of government were made as angry as the opposition leaders were made ironical by the sight of the lavish gifts made to the new allies on their own demand. The Whig Lords wrote and said that 'everything had fallen in price except the Grenvilles; and the adherents of the ministry did not conceal their opinion that the good things given to the Grenvilles would have been more righteously and usefully bestowed upon themselves. The accession was not great, either as to numbers or ability. Lord Grenville had retired from public life, and would not be tempted out of his retreat. The Marquis of Buckingham was made a duke; one of the Wynns went to the head of the Board of Control; and another was sent as envoy to the Swiss cantons, with appointments of the value of about £4000 a year. In return, they brought a few votes to the government, lessened their own dignity and estimation in the eyes of men, and removed to a greater distance the prospect of the accession of the Whigs to power. One other function they unconsciously fulfilled that of a signal to the nation that a change was occurring in the spirit of government which must bring on a new and better time. A more important circumstance than that of the coming over of any number of Grenville officials and voters was that Mr Peel at this juncture took the office from which Lord Sidmouth retired. There was little noise made about this at the time. The friends and admirers of Lord Sidmouth once more congratulated him on the number of plots which he had detected, and the energy with which he had frustrated them; and all agreed that there was so substantial an accordance between the views, principles, and aims of himself and Mr Peel, that the country would not feel the change of men. Such was really the belief and sentiment a quarter of a century ago; but how strange does it appear now! It seems scarcely possible that these men should have been regarded as, except in point of years, alike-alike to the destinies of the country; while now the elder is regarded as a conscientious and complacent bigot, a man of one idea, and that idea one which must unfit him for wise administration; while the other, then in the first full vigour of intellectual life, was preparing for an administration of affairs which should be signalised by perpetual extension and boundless fertility of resource. Lord Sidmouth watched for sedition from day to day, and dreamed of plots in all seasons of repose. His duty was, in his own eyes, to discover and quell sedition, which he called preserving the monarchy; his triumph was to frustrate conspiracy and hang the conspirators. His hope was to root up sedition, and leave the field of politics clear; and his solace in retirement was to be, that he had caught the wicked in their own snares, and in so far protected the good. 'The truth is,' he observes, 'that it was because my official bed was become comparatively a bed of roses that I determined to withdraw from it. When strewn with thorns, I would not have left it.' While his sense of responsibility to expand in proportion to that observation, till he has risen to the head of statesmanship, as statesmanship is in our age. He has been the watchman and steersman of an empire -almost of a world-while Lord Sidmouth was but its rat-catcher. A sober, industrious, vigilant ratcatcher was he, whose heart was truly in his duty; but he could not rise above that function; and it is striking to read now, in the registers of the time, concerning these two men, 'that the substitution of the one for the other could have no effect in the course of administration.' It is striking, too, to mark how lesser men speak of greater-the lesser men being unable to see beyond the circle filled by themselves. Lord Sidmouth writes approvingly of the demeanour of his successor, declaring that 'nothing could have been more becoming and creditable-language which is called by his biographer 'an almost prophetic anticipation' of Mr Peel's 'future eminence.' No; Lord Sidmouth was disturbed by no such stirrings of prophecy, or he would have remained on his 'bed of roses,' and have died on it sooner than recognise as a successor such a redeemer of malcontents as Mr Peel has since become. It was at present impossible for Mr Canning to be invited into the administration. Men were not agreed as to the ground of the evident impossibility; but the general belief was that it was on account of his refusal to act against the queen. He had been an early and influential adviser of the princess: he would not join in any of the proceedings of her adversaries, and offered to resign, but was not permitted; so he went abroad. When, on his return from the foreign travel with which he had occupied the time of the prosecution, he found the discussion of her affairs unavoidably mixed up with that of all the doings of the administration, he peremptorily resigned his place at the Board of Control. By this step he was supposed to have incurred the royal displeasure; and he was not now one of the new members of the government. But his time was coming, and the nation did not long inquire for him in vain. Meanwhile there occurred, in regard to him, CHAP. IV.] MR CANNING-LORD WELLESLEY IN IRELAND. one of those striking instances of which history is full-of how, while 'man proposes, God disposes.' The India Company were not inclined to dispense with such a man, if the government could do without him. They offered him the post of governor-general of India; and soon after parliament met in 1822, it was announced that Mr Canning was to succeed Lord Hastings in that office. During the spring and summer, Mr Canning continued his preparations for India; and the nation found time, amidst its pressure of business and of distress, to watch them with regret. Many of the multitude feared and disliked the aristocratic tendencies of the man, and the political bias of the statesman: the members of the administration disliked and cavilled at him; and there was much jealousy of him in the House of Commons: but still, the eyes of the nation were upon him; he was generally regarded as the foremost man in public life; and there was a prevalent feeling of sorrow and shame that he was allowed to go so far away. Still, his preparations went on. Mr Ward wrote: It will be a singular and unsatisfactory termination to the career of the greatest orator in either House of parliament; of a man, too, whose talents have always been directed towards the support of a system of policy which has succeeded beyond the most sanguine hopes of its promoters.' Lord Londonderry was watching the outbreaks and repressions of rebellion in Italy, under the despotism of the Holy Alliance-not unconscious, perhaps, of the deep curses with which his name was proscribed through all the secret societies, and most of the homes of the continent: Ireland was on her trial again under the wise and mild administration of Lord Wellesley, who this spring succeeded Lord Talbot as viceroy: 'Vansittart's crest was elevated' on account of an improved report of the revenue; and Lord Sidmouth was hoping that 'perilous and merciless retrenchments' would be no more heard of; and this hope was so far disappointed as that £3,000,000 of taxes were taken off: the agricultural interest obtained a loan of a million, to support them till the first difficulties of a return to cash-payments were over all these interests were in full career for the months of that spring and summer; yet Canning was never lost sight of for a moment. When his preparations were made, and the hour of sailing drew nigh, he went to Liverpool, to take his farewell of his constituents; and there we see him, 'at Seaforth House, the residence of his friend Mr Gladstone (the father of the Right Hon. W. Gladstone), situated on a flat, stretching north of the town, and overlooking the sea. The room which he occupied looked out upon the ocean, and here he would sit for hours, gazing on the open expanse, while young Gladstone, who has subsequently obtained such distinction in the councils of his sovereign, used to be playing on the strand below.' On this occasion, as he sat 'for hours,' he was revolving in his mind news which had reached him on his journey down, and which would penetrate, and fill with his name, every corner of Europe, as fast as the winds could carry the tidings. : Of all the interests presenting themselves at this important season, none was more engrossing at the 137 time than the state of Ireland. Alas! when was it otherwise? and when will it be otherwise? There is some satisfaction, however, in contemplating this period, because in this direction, as in others, some promise of a better government, and more social welfare, was dawning. It must always be long, and seem yet longer, before the good results of an improved policy can appear in a reliable form in a society so disorganised as that of Ireland; but the institution of the improvement is meanwhile a cheering spectacle in itself. Lord Talbot was a viceroy whose mind was full of ideas of Protestant ascendency; and it was little that his humane and sensible secretary, Charles Grant, could do to ameliorate his rule; and at that time, the bigot Saurin, the unrelenting foe of the Catholics, was attorney-general for Ireland. Now, the viceroy and the attorney-general, Mr Plunket, were in favour of the Catholic claims; and though the usual method was still pursued of appointing men of mutually counteracting tendencies, Mr Goulburn being sent as secretary with the Marquis of Wellesley, the gain to the liberal cause was, on the whole, very great. The effect of the king's visit was over almost as soon as he was out of sight; and then the heartburnings among fellow-citizens in the towns, and outrages in the country, went on as virulently as before. The conciliation dinner, which was to celebrate the king's visit, was given up, and the committee publicly resigned their trust, on the ground of the dissensions of the parties who were to conciliate. The Catholics offered addresses of affectionate congratulation to the incoming viceroy; while the corporation of Dublin offered an address of affectionate condolence to the outgoing attorney-general. An attempt to introduce Catholics into corporations was defeated at a guild of Dublin merchants; and the majority made ostentatious rejoicings under the eyes of their new ruler. In the country, no man's house was secure; and those of the gentry were so many garrisons. Bands of Whiteboys-hundreds in a band-besieged these garrisons, fought, plundered, murdered, in defiance of police and soldiery. The soldiers, indeed, found themselves powerless against a foe so light-footed, so familiar with the country, and so utterly reckless and desperate as the peasantry of the south of Ireland. In the north, as usual, all was comparatively quiet; but at length symptoms of disorder appeared there also. It became necessary to empower the viceroy to proclaim any part of the country which might be disturbed; and in February two bills were passed, one to reimpose the Insurrection Act, and the other to suspend the Habeas Corpus till the ensuing 1st of August. In the course of the month of April, after a dreadful season of disorder and its punishments, comparative quiet seemed to settle down on that unhappy country; but to rebellion and its retribution now succeeded famine. As in later times, excessive rains rotted the potatoes in the ground; and, as in later times, the people were taken unprepared. They ate their potatoes till no more were to be had; and then they took to oatmeal, till they had no means of purchase left; and then they crowded the roads and towns to beg, or stole away into hiding-places, to die of |