A.D. 1822.] LORD JOHN RUSSELL'S MOTION ON PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. trumpery formalities?-that they might bend the knee and kiss the hand, that they might bear the train or rear the canopy, might discharge the offices assigned by Roman pride to their barbarian ancestors— 'Purpurea tollant aulæa Britanni; but that with the pageantry of the hour their importance faded away?-that as their distinction vanished, their humiliation returned?-and that he who headed the procession of peers to-day could not sit among them as their cqual on the morrow?" The debates were very animated, and excited the liveliest 61 His plan was to add one hundred members to the housesixty for counties, and forty for large towns. He argued that this enlargement of the representation was rendered just and politic by increasing intelligence among the people, especially the middle classes, of whom large numbers were unrepresented in parliament. His motion was negatived, on the 29th of April, by two hundred and sixtynine to one hundred and sixty-four, Mr. Canning having led the opposition of the conservatives, and defended the constitution as it stood. The complaints of agricultural distress prevalent in interest. The bill was read the first time by a majority of five. On the 10th of May the house divided on the second reading, which was carried by a majority of twelve, the numbers being, for the bill, two hundred and thirtyfive; noes, two hundred and twenty-three. The exertions made to defeat this bill were extraordinary. There were twenty-seven pairs of members who appeared in the house. The duke of York canvassed against it in all directions with the utmost zeal and activity. It was felt that if it passed into law, the admission of Roman catholics into the lower house must follow as a matter of course. The bill, however, was thrown out by the lords. This session is memorable for the introduction of the subject of parliamentary reform by lord John Russell. VOL. VII.-No. 318. England, with the sudden reaction from war prices at the establishment of peace, had become so loud and general this year, that parliament undertook to find a remedy. An agricultural committee had been appointed to inquire into the subject, and had produced a report which was far from satisfactory. On the 29th of April the house of commons resolved itself into a committee to consider the report. Three different schemes were proposed for the relief of the farmers and landlords-the first by the marquis of Londonderry, the second by Mr. Ricardo, and the third by Mr. Huskisson. There was no scarcity of produce in England; on the contrary, it was very abundant, and the evil that oppressed the farmers was excessive cheapness, by which they were disabled from paying the incurring a useless expense for management; whereas the sinking fund, amounting at the time to about five millions, might have been applied to existing exigencies, and a real saving effected. high rents and heavy taxation entailed by the war. Some tion on the next. It had the further disadvantage of of the remedies proposed were sufficiently radical in their character. The most natural was the reduction of taxation by means of retrenchment in the public expenditure. Some proposed that the tithes should be alienated from the church, and used for the purpose of reducing the national burdens. The largest party insisted upon the reduction of the interest of the national debt, which was defended as an equitable measure, on the ground of the increased value of the currency since the passing of Peel's bill for the resumption of cash payments. The plan of relief proposed by lord Londonderry consisted of the repeal of the annual malt tax, and the loan of a million by exchequer bills to the landed interest upon the security of warehoused corn. A question was opened in the house of commons, on a motion of Mr. Western, which often subsequently occupied its attention. It referred to the effect on prices of Mr. Peel's act of 1819, for the resumption of cash payments. According to the views of Mr. Western and Mr. Attwood, the value of money had been enormously increased by the resumption of payments in specie by the bank, and its necessary preliminary, a diminution of the circulation. Prices had in consequence fallen; rents, taxes, annuities, and all fixed payments become more onerous. They were opposed by Messrs. Huskisson, Peel, and Ricardo, and, on the motion of the former, a resolution was carried, by one hundred and ninety-four to thirty, "That this house will not alter the standard of gold or silver in fineness, weight, or denomination." On the 25th of June Mr. Abercrombie moved for a committee of the house of commons, to inquire into the conduct of the law officers of the crown in Scotland, with respect to the public press. It was stated that the lordadvocate, Sir Walter Scott, and other ministerial partisans, had been instrumental in setting up certain scurrilous newspapers, that were made the vehicles of attacks on their political opponents. The exposure by Mr. Abercrombie drew from Messrs. Hope and Menzies, two of the parties implicated, letters of remonstrance, which were deemed by the house a breach of privilege, and they were summoned to the bar. They appeared there; but no ulterior proceedings followed, and the business was got rid of. The legislation of the session comprised five acts on the navigation laws, the main purposes of which were to repeal obsolete commercial statutes, to relax the strictness of the laws enacted for the encouragement of British shipping, and to afford to our colonies a more direct intercourse with foreigners. Mr. Vansittart introduced some financial measures, which effected a material saving. He proposed a plan for reducing the interest of the navy five per cents to four per cent. Holders not signifying their dissent were to have one hundred and five pounds in a new four per cent. stock, and persons dissenting were to be paid off in numerical order. By this scheme, an annual saving to the public of one million one hundred and forty thousand pounds would be effected; besides a further saving of upwards of ninety thousand pounds of annual charge, which would be gained by similar reduction of the Irish five per cents. The high prices of the public funds obviated all difficulty in the execution of this financial operation, and the holders of the five per cent. stock found it expedient to acquiesce in the ministers' terms. The dissentients were in number only one thousand seven hundred and seventy-eight, and the stock held by them amounted to two millions six hundred and fifteen thousand nine hundred and seventy-eight pounds, not a fifteenth part of the five per cent. capital. Another operation related to what was called "The Dead Weight Annuity." The amount of military and naval pensions and civil supernumeraries was about five millions annually. On the 24th Mr. Vansittart brought forward his amended scheme for relieving the immediate pressure of this dead weight by extending it over a longer term of years than the natural lives of the annuitants. A church question, which had been brought before For this purpose an annuity of two millions eight hundred parliament during the previous year, was again debated in thousand pounds was appropriated out of the existing re- the house of lords towards the close of this session. Lord venue for forty-five years, invested in trustees for the dis- King had presented a petition from the Rev. Henry charge of the then payments, which for that year were W. Neville, a rector in the diocese of Peterborough, estimated at four millions nine hundred thousand pounds, who had presented as curate to a living the Rev. John subject to a yearly diminution by deaths. It was com- Green, a clergyman every way unexceptionable, who had puted that, according to the ordinary duration of human signed the thirty-nine articles, and given his assent life, the annuities for the lives of the then holders would be to all the formularies of the church. The bishop of Peterequal to the annuity of two millions eight hundred borough, Dr. Herbert Marsh, refused to give him a licence thousand pounds for forty-five years. The trustees unless he subscribed to a new creed, which he had framed were therefore empowered to sell from time to time himself, containing eighty-seven articles, in the form of such portions of this annuity as would provide the questions, which were to be answered categorically by the funds required for the payment of the dead weight, candidate, in the fewest words possible, without liberty of according to a computation made of the amount which explanation or qualification. This was manifestly a gross would probably be due in each year. The bank of invasion of the liberty of the clergy. It was creating a England became the contractor for a portion of the new test, imposed with an assumption of infallibility by a annuity. There was no novelty of principle in the single bishop, who undertook to determine for his clergy project; it was only the old one of anticipating distant what was the exact interpretation of the church's articles, resources by throwing the burden of the existing genera-creeds, and formularies, and to bind their consciences to A.D. 1822.] ALTERATION IN THE LAW OF MARRIAGE. his personal opinion, thus depriving them of the right of private judgment. The object was to exclude from the ministry of the church clergymen holding evangelical sentiments, and to restrain the reviving spirit of scriptural protestantism which had originated in the missionary movements of Whitfield and Wesley. Mr. Green having declined the test sought to be imposed, an unsuccessful appeal was made to the archbishop of Canterbury. Another petition was presented this year by the Rev. Mr. Grimshaw, on behalf of a curate named Thurtell, who refused to give the bishop the "short, plain, and positive answers" which he required to his seventy-two questions, in order that he might know "whether the opinions of the persons examined accorded with those of the church," the bishop himself being the infallible judge. Of course, every other bishop might claim the same right of imposing a new and voluminous test, and there might be as many creeds in the church as bishops. The lords, however, were unable or unwilling to afford any remedy. The bishops were profoundly silent; not one of them could be provoked to utter a word on the subject, even by the taunts of the lay peers. The question was left to be decided by the tribunal of public opinion, before which the bishop of Peterborough had no chance of sustaining his attempt to impose fetters of his own forging on the consciences of the clergy. Marriage is one of the fundamental principles of the social system; it is the basis of the family institution; it is the source of the sanctities of home, around which cluster all the sacred associations which support and shelter the moral principles and domestic habits, without which society could not be held together. The law of marriage, therefore, ought to be plain and simple, intelligible to all, and guarded in every possible way against fraud and abuse. The state has to do with it as a civil contract, securing civil rights, leaving the parties free to have it solemnised by whatever religious ceremonies are most binding upon their consciences. Yet the marriage laws of the United Kingdom were 1ong in the most confused, unintelligible, and unsettled state, leading often to ruinous and almost endless litigation; and even yet the legal tribunals of the country may take years to determine whether any particular marriage has been valid or not, as we saw in the "Yelverton case," which, though before the superior courts of Ireland and Scotland, had after all to come before the house of lords. A new marriage act was passed in the session now under review, which, like many acts of the kind, originated in personal interests affecting the aristocracy. It was said to have mainly originated in the marriage of the marquis of Donegal with Miss May, who was the daughter of a gentleman celebrated for assisting persons of fashion with loans of money. The brother of the marquis sought to set this marriage aside, and to render the children illegitimate, in order that he might himself, should the marquis die without lawful issue, be heir to his title and estates. In law the marriage was invalid; but it was now protected by a retrospective clause in the new act. By the marriage act of 1754, all marriages of minors certified without the assent of certain *** Annual Register," lxiv., p 236, 63 specified persons are declared null. A bill was passed the commons, giving validity to marriages which, according to the existing law, were null, and providing that the marriages of minors, celebrated without due notice, should not be void, but merely voidable, and liable to be annulled only during the minority of the parties, and at the suit of parents or guardians. On the 20th of June, when the bill was in committee of the house of lords, the chancellor urged his objection to the retrospective clause, as unsettling the rights of property. The report being brought up on the 25th, he repeated his objections, and moved that the retrospective clause should be omitted. The motion was negatived. On the 2nd of July, the day fixed for the third reading, his brother, lord Stowell, made a similar motion, which was also defeated. The chancellor moved the insertion of a clause for giving validity to deeds, assignments, and settlements, made by persons having claims on any property affected by the bill. The marquis of Lansdowne opposed this clause, which, he said, would give the bill the effect of declaring children legitimate, and yet disin heriting them-" of peopling the house of lords with titled beggars." This clause having been negatived on a division, the chancellor proposed another to the same effect, with the addition of the words, "for good and valuable consideration." This also was rejected by a considerable majority. This was too much for the temper of lord Eldon, so long accustomed to have his way in that house. Irritated at being repeatedly thwarted in his efforts, on declaring the numbers, he exclaimed, with vehemence, "My lords, ten days ago I believed this house possessed the good opinion of the public, as the mediator between them and the laws of the country; if this bill pass tonight, I hope in God that this house may still have that good opinion ten days hence. But to say the best of this measure, I consider it neither more nor less than a legal robbery, so help me God! I have but a short time to remain with you, but I trust it will be hereafter known that I used every means in my power to prevent its passing into law." became sulky with his colleagues, feeling himself dragged on by their too rapid progress. He was very reluctant to attend their cabinet meetings, and absented himself whenever he could make any excuse. In reply to a summons from Mr. Peel, the home secretary, to attend a meeting on the alien act, he answered, that he could not possibly attend, adding, "My absence, however, can be of little, and possibly of no consequence." Thenceforth the venerable chancellor The session ended on the 6th of August; the parliament being prorogued by the king in person. A parliamentary paper, which had been laid before the house of commons, stated that there were eighty-nine of its members, not including those who had naval or military commissions, who held offices or pensions, either in possession or reversion, to the amount of one hundred and seventy thousand three hundred and forty-three pounds. The members holding naval or military commissions were seventy-nine; so that one hundred and sixty-eight members of the house of commons were dependent upon the crown, and naturally its creatures, Lord Londonderry, wearied with the labours of the session, had retired to his country seat at North Cray Farm, near Bexley, in Kent, to recruit his strength, and prepare to take his part as the representative of England at the forthcoming congress of Verona, which was to be held in October. There, on the 12th of August, he committed suicide by cutting the carotid artery with a penknife. Lord Eldon, in a letter on the subject, says :-"I learn, upon the best authority, that for two or three days he was perfectly insane; and the medical men attribute that fact to the operation upon his head of the unceasing attention to business which the last harassing session (to him) called for." The disease would appear to have been coming on for some time before; he had got the idea that he was beset by secret enemies-that he was the object of conspiracies. He was full of apprehension of being waylaid in the Park, and he felt that his life was every hour in danger. His mind gave way under the pressure of these morbid fears, and he put an end to his existence in the fifty-third year of his age-an event which excited profound grief throughout the conservative party at home and abroad, but which was regarded in a very different light by the friends of freedom, both here and on the Continent. Perhaps no public character ever presented two aspects so completely the opposite of one another, according to the point of view from which it was regarded. According to the tory view, no English statesman had ever accomplished such a series of important services to his country. They believed that the legislative union of Great Britain and Ireland entitled him to rank with the ablest ministers of his time. But eminently beneficial as that measure was regarded, it was thrown into the shade by the subsequent calculations of lord Castlereagh-first as secretary at war, and then as foreign secretary—which effected the overthrow of the mighty military despot by whom his country had been so long menaced. In the eyes of his party, nothing could exceed the manliness of his bearing in the unequal conflict in which every session he found himself engaged, "unless it is to be looked for in the inexhaustible amicability that characterised his relations with the most implacable of his foes." “As a statesman, as a gentleman, as a man," says the duke of Buckingham, "the marquis of Londonderry was the Bayard of political chivalry-sans peur et sans reproche; and it reflects no slight disgrace on this monument-rearing age that, neither in the land of his nativity, nor in that of his adoption, has any memorial been raised worthy of A still more ardent eulogist declares that his whole life was a continual struggle with the majority in his own or foreign lands. He combated to subdue or to bless them. He began his career by rescuing his native country from the incapable legislature by which its energies had been so long repressed. His mature strength was exerted in a long and desperate conflict with the despotism of revolutionary France, which his firmness, as well as the arm of Wellington, brought to a triumphant issue. His latter days were spent in a ceaseless conflict with the revolutionary spirit in his own country, and in anxious efforts to uphold the dignity of his fame." 11 * "Memoirs of the Court of George IV." vol. i, p. 357. Great Britain, which he had been preparing to assert at Verona as he had done in the congresses of Laybach and Troppau. His policy in domestic affairs was marked by the same far-seeing wisdom, the same intrepid resistance to clamour. He made the most strenuous efforts to uphold the sinking fund-" that noble monument of Mr. Pitt's patriotic foresight. Had those efforts been successful, the whole national debt would have been paid off in the year 1845, and the nation for ever have been freed from the payment of thirty million pounds a-year for its interest." The firm friend of freedom, he was, on that very account, the resolute opponent of democracy, the insidious enemy which, under the guise of a friend, has in every age blasted its progress. "Elegant and courteous in his manners, with a noble figure and finely-chiselled countenance, he was beloved in his family circle and by all his friends, not less than respected by the wide circle of sovereigns and statesmen with whom he had so worthily upheld the honour and dignity of England.” Such in substance is the estimate formed by Sir Archibald Alison, and which the party of which he is the champion would not consider exaggerated. Lord Eldon expressed the feeling of that party produced at the time by this melancholy event. "Our own country and Europe," he wrote, “have suffered a loss in my opinion irreparable. I had a great affection for him, and he deserved it from me, for to me he showed a uniform kindness, of which no other colleague's conduct forms an example.” † Very different from this is the picture drawn by the Irish nationalists. Lord Londonderry, then viscount Castlereagh, was appointed chief secretary of Ireland in November, 1798, under his uncle, lord Camden, then lord-lieutenant; but neither he nor Mr. Pitt seemed aware of the amazing elements of power then laten in the young minister. "Who, indeed, could have believed," asks an Irish writer, "that under that bland, adolescent air, that lithe and dazzling front, and, stranger still, that tongue so awkward and mal-adroit, were hidden a heart as subtle, a will as truculent, a courage as cold, a conscience as unscrupulous as Cæsar Borgia's? For a model of Castlereagh's character we naturally refer, not to the generous ambition and the gallant rivalries of the British parliament, but to the crafty, impassable, and implacable ideal of Machiavelli's prince, or the inexorable volition, passionless wisdom, and atrocious cold blood of the first Napoleon. He was then not quite thirty years of age, and wore them with such a blooming, patrician beauty, that it was the custom of the opposition to speak of the secretary as a smooth-faced minion of Mr. Pitt. To the last days of his life Castlereagh's mixed metaphors were the sport of the wits of opposition; but sneer, stricture, and invective alike glanced aside from his impertur bable, polite placidity and his callous pluck. Few men have ever possessed such extraordinary executive faculties, such reticence, tact, and duplicity, such skill in deceiving, and such address in managing men, and so intense and even an energy in the conduct of great affairs. In a few months he earned a name the most hateful in Ireland since * Alison's "History of Europe," vol. ii., p. 526. A.D. 1822.] ་ DEATH OF THE MARQUIS OF LONDONDERRY. 65 Cromwell's time. During the last months of the re- from them, by taxes on their wants and miseries, the bellion, as secretary ad interim, he had served a rapid enormous sum of a million and a half, to reward the noviciate in the corrupt system of the Castle, at one of betrayers of their rights and liberties?"* its worst periods. Bloody Carhampton, domineering Clare, and Toler, a ferocious vampire, composed the real executive of the country at the time. At such a council board he learned to dabble his sleek young hands in Erin's gore,' and learned the lesson with all the rancorous zeal of a renegade; for, a very few years before, his lordship had been a very ultra-democratic northern whig. Already an audacious and unscrupulous ambition possessed him. It was said that he even ventured to emulate the fame and imitate the methods of Mr. Pitt; but perhaps the brilliant success which another young Irish noble, lord Mornington, had rapidly won in the wider field of imperial politics, obtained a more natural incentive for him. Fifteen years afterwards, he and the two brothers Wellesley concluded that awful contest in which Pitt himself had succumbed. Its secret history is that of an alliance between these three Irish adventurers. It was Castlereagh who appointed and maintained the duke of Wellington as British generalissimo; Wellesley who suggested, and Castlereagh who conducted the diplomatic arrangements which banded all Europe against Napoleon at the congress of Vienna." * This was the Irish view of lord Castlereagh's statesmanship; twenty years later the English liberals did not regard it in a much more favourable light. Under the foreign policy, which he directed, the British government confined itself to passive protests or vain declarations of abstract principles, while the Holy Alliance was strangling the new-born liberty of Italy and Spain. A contemporary writer observes, that the degeneracy in the foreign policy of England resulted from the political career and character of lord Londonderry :-" No government, even that of ancient Rome, ever held a more commanding position than England upon the fall of the French empire. Aggrieved individuals and oppressed nations appealed to her as the arbitress, like Rome, of public right and political dominion over the civilised world. She had proffered to her the high and heroic part in the drama of European politics, and lord Londonderry condemned her to play a subordinate and mean one. His ignorance of the social intellect of Europe, past and present, in arts, literature, and policy; his silly adoption of the aristocratic tone and despotic principles of ministers and monarchs with whom he associated abroad; his impertinent false shame of the plebeian liberty of England; his openness to the hollow flatteries of courtiers and their sovereigns; his total want of continental experience in public affairs-enabled men possessing an accurate topical knowledge of Europe, physical and moral, and trained in negotiation, artifice, and intrigue, to practice upon his incapacity and weakness, and led him beyond his depth. In 1815-16 he actually co-operated with the relentless despotism which trampled on the rights of ancient and free states and independent nations. In the interval, however, between the congresses of Vienna and Verona, he became sensible of the false position into which he had brought his government, his country, and himself. When the holy allies, grouped in congress at Troppau, and by adjournment at Laybach, issued an infamous proscription of human rights, liberty, and reason, declaring that every change in legislation and government should emanate from those alone (themselves) whom God had rendered responsible for power, lord Londonderry protested, but with equivocal epithets and neutralising qualifications; and the emperor of Austria, without a shadow of right except that of tyranny and brute force, destroyed the constitutional governments, and restored the imbecile tyranny of Naples and Piedmont, with the additional pressure of his own barbarous yoke upon the whole of ill-fated, illustrious Italy.” † Nothing could exceed the vehemence with which Irish orators denounced the means by which Castlereagh carried the union. On the bribing of the Irish parliament to put an end to its own existence, for which one million five hundred thousand pounds was openly set apart to be levied of the Irish people, Plunket expressed himself with the utmost indignation. On the 10th of March, 1800, he stood up in the Irish house of commons and demanded of lord Castlereagh whether he meant to abandon "such an abomination, so irritating to their feelings, so insulting to the honour of the country, that no base miscreant, however powerful his influence, who had the meanness and criminality to listen to the corrupt and degrading proposal of purchasing from him the representative rights of his country for fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, or forty thousand pounds, should continue to exult in his infamous and corrupt triumph over every principle of national honour and justice." Castlereagh having coolly answered that he was only waiting till the articles of union were adopted by both houses to propose the exact quantum and mode of compensation, Plunket continued, "Here, then, is a poor country, that has travelled, according to the noble lord's account, so rapidly in the career of bankruptcy, that her finances are unequal to her war establishment or her civil establishment-a nation almost engulfed in the jaws of beggary and ruin-yet this poor country is now told by the minister she must find a million and a half of money to be raffled for by the members of this house; but that every man who takes the dice-box in his hand to throw for his share of the plunder must first pledge himself to vote for the union. What will the people of Ireland say to so base and flagitious a piece of plunder as this juggling * Memoir of Lord Plunket, by J. C. Hoey, p. 10. His disappointment at the results of his policy; the disregard to English remonstrances on the part of the Holy Alliance, for which English arms and English money had prepared the way; the odium which attached to his name with the people of Europe, from their belief that he had betrayed the cause of freedom, and made himself the instrument of royal despots; the fact that secret societies abounded throughout the continent, and the disquieting Plunket's Speeches, p. 75. + Life and Reign of George IV., vol. iii., p. 251. |