Egremont was the younger brother of an English earl, whose nobilitybeing of nearly three centuries' date, ranked him among our high andancient peers, although its origin was more memorable than illustrious.The founder of the family had been a confidential domestic of one of thefavourites of Henry the Eighth, and had contrived to be appointed oneof the commissioners for "visiting and taking the surrenders of diversreligious houses." It came to pass that divers of these religious housessurrendered themselves eventually to the use and benefit of honestBaldwin Greymount. The king was touched with the activity and zealof his commissioner. Not one of them whose reports were so ample andsatisfactory, who could baffle a wily prior with more dexterity, orcontrol a proud abbot with more firmness. Nor were they well-digestedreports alone that were transmitted to the sovereign: they cameaccompanied with many rare and curious articles, grateful to the tasteof one who was not only a religious reformer but a dilettante; goldencandlesticks and costly chalices; sometimes a jewelled pix; fantasticspoons and patens, rings for the fingers and the ear; occasionally afair-written and blazoned manuscript--suitable offering to the royalscholar. Greymount was noticed; sent for; promoted in the household;knighted; might doubtless have been sworn of the council, and in duetime have become a minister; but his was a discreet ambition--of anaccumulative rather than an aspiring character. He served the kingfaithfully in all domestic matters that required an unimpassioned,unscrupulous agent; fashioned his creed and conscience according to theroyal model in all its freaks; seized the right moment to get sundrygrants of abbey lands, and contrived in that dangerous age to save bothhis head and his estate.
The Greymount family having planted themselves in the land, faithful tothe policy of the founder, avoided the public gaze during the troubledperiod that followed the reformation and even during the more orderlyreign of Elizabeth, rather sought their increase in alliances than incourt favour. But at the commencement of the seventeenth century, theirabbey lands infinitely advanced in value, and their rental swollen bythe prudent accumulation of more than seventy years, a Greymount, whowas then a county member, was elevated to the peerage as Baron Marney.The heralds furnished his pedigree, and assured the world that althoughthe exalted rank and extensive possessions enjoyed at present bythe Greymounts, had their origin immediately in great territorialrevolutions of a recent reign, it was not for a moment to be supposed,that the remote ancestors of the Ecclesiastical Commissioner of 1530were by any means obscure. On the contrary, it appeared that they wereboth Norman and baronial, their real name Egremont, which, in theirpatent of peerage the family now resumed.
In the civil wars, the Egremonts pricked by their Norman blood, werecavaliers and fought pretty well. But in 1688, alarmed at the prevalentimpression that King James intended to insist on the restitution of thechurch estates to their original purposes, to wit, the education of thepeople and the maintenance of the poor, the Lord of Marney Abbey becamea warm adherent of "civil and religious liberty,"--the cause for whichHampden had died in the field, and Russell on the scaffold,--and joinedthe other whig lords, and great lay impropriators, in calling over thePrince of Orange and a Dutch army, to vindicate those popular principleswhich, somehow or other, the people would never support. Profiting bythis last pregnant circumstance, the lay Abbot of Marney also in thisinstance like the other whig lords, was careful to maintain, while hevindicated the cause of civil and religious liberty, a very loyal anddutiful though secret correspondence with the court of St Germains.
The great deliverer King William the Third, to whom Lord Marney wasa systematic traitor, made the descendant of the EcclesiasticalCommissioner of Henry the Eighth an English earl; and from that timeuntil the period of our history, though the Marney family had neverproduced one individual eminent for civil or military abilities, thoughthe country was not indebted to them for a single statesman, orator,successful warrior, great lawyer, learned divine, eminent author,illustrious man of science, they had contrived, if not to engross anygreat share of public admiration and love, at least to monopolise nocontemptible portion of public money and public dignities. During theseventy years of almost unbroken whig rule, from the accession of theHouse of Hanover to the fall of Mr Fox, Marney Abbey had furnisheda never-failing crop of lord privy seals, lord presidents, andlord lieutenants. The family had had their due quota of garters andgovernments and bishoprics; admirals without fleets, and generals whofought only in America. They had glittered in great embassies withclever secretaries at their elbow, and had once governed Ireland whento govern Ireland was only to apportion the public plunder to a corruptsenate.
Notwithstanding however this prolonged enjoyment of undeservedprosperity, the lay abbots of Marney were not content. Not that it wassatiety that induced dissatisfaction. The Egremonts could feed on.They wanted something more. Not to be prime ministers or secretaries ofstate, for they were a shrewd race who knew the length of their tether,and notwithstanding the encouraging example of his grace of Newcastle,they could not resist the persuasion that some knowledge of theinterests and resources of nations, some power of expressing opinionswith propriety, some degree of respect for the public and for himself,were not altogether indispensable qualifications, even under a Venetianconstitution, in an individual who aspired to a post so eminent andresponsible. Satisfied with the stars and mitres and official seals,which were periodically apportioned to them, the Marney family did notaspire to the somewhat graceless office of being their distributor. Whatthey aimed at was promotion in their order; and promotion to the highestclass. They observed that more than one of the other great "civil andreligious liberty" families,--the families who in one century plunderedthe church to gain the property of the people, and in another centurychanged the dynasty to gain the power of the crown,--had their browscircled with the strawberry leaf. And why should not this distinction bethe high lot also of the descendants of the old gentleman usher of oneof King Henry's plundering vicar-generals? Why not? True it is, thata grateful sovereign in our days has deemed such distinction the onlyreward for half a hundred victories. True it is, that Nelson, afterconquering the Mediterranean, died only a Viscount! But the house ofMarney had risen to high rank; counted themselves ancient nobility; andturned up their noses at the Pratts and the Smiths, the Jenkinsons andthe Robinsons of our degenerate days; and never had done anythingfor the nation or for their honours. And why should they now? It wasunreasonable to expect it. Civil and religious liberty, that hadgiven them a broad estate and a glittering coronet, to say nothingof half-a-dozen close seats in parliament, ought clearly to make themdukes.
But the other great whig families who had obtained this honour, and whohad done something more for it than spoliate their church and betraytheir king, set up their backs against this claim of the Egremonts.The Egremonts had done none of the work of the last hundred yearsof political mystification, during which a people without power oreducation, had been induced to believe themselves the freest and mostenlightened nation in the world, and had submitted to lavish their bloodand treasure, to see their industry crippled and their labour mortgaged,in order to maintain an oligarchy, that had neither ancient memories tosoften nor present services to justify their unprecedented usurpation.
How had the Egremonts contributed to this prodigious result? Theirfamily had furnished none of those artful orators whose bewilderingphrase had fascinated the public intelligence; none of those toilsomepatricians whose assiduity in affairs had convinced their unprivilegedfellow-subjects that government was a science, and administration anart, which demanded the devotion of a peculiar class in the state fortheir fulfilment and pursuit. The Egremonts had never said anything thatwas remembered, or done anything that could be recalled. It was decidedby the Great Revolution families, that they should not be dukes.Infinite was the indignation of the lay Abbot of Marney. He counted hisboroughs, consulted his cousins, and muttered revenge. The opportunitysoon offered for the gratification of his passion.
The situation of the Venetian party in the wane of the eighteenthc
entury had become extremely critical. A young king was making oftenfruitless, but always energetic, struggles to emancipate his nationalroyalty from the trammels of the factious dogeship. More than sixtyyears of a government of singular corruption had alienated all heartsfrom the oligarchy; never indeed much affected by the great body of thepeople. It could no longer be concealed, that by virtue of a plausiblephrase power had been transferred from the crown to a parliament, themembers of which were appointed by an extremely limited and exclusiveclass, who owned no responsibility to the country, who debated andvoted in secret, and who were regularly paid by the small knot of greatfamilies that by this machinery had secured the permanent possessionof the king's treasury. Whiggism was putrescent in the nostrils ofthe nation we were probably on the eve of a bloodless yet importantrevolution when Rockingham, a virtuous magnifico, alarmed anddisgusted, resolved to revive something of the pristine purity andhigh-toned energy of the old whig connection appealed to his "newgeneration" from a degenerate age, arrayed under his banner the generousyouth of the whig families, and was fortunate to enlist in the servicethe supreme genius of Edmund Burke.
Burke effected for the whigs what Bolingbroke in a preceding age haddone for the tories: he restored the moral existence of the party. Hetaught them to recur to the ancient principles of their connection,and suffused those principles with all the delusive splendour of hisimagination. He raised the tone of their public discourse; he breatheda high spirit into their public acts. It was in his power to do more forthe whigs than St John could do for his party. The oligarchy, who hadfound it convenient to attaint Bolingbroke for being the avowedminister of the English Prince with whom they were always in secretcommunication, when opinion forced them to consent to hisrestitution, had tacked to the amnesty a clause as cowardly as it wasunconstitutional, and declared his incompetence to sit in the parliamentof his country. Burke on the contrary fought the whig fight witha two-edged weapon: he was a great writer; as an orator he wastranscendent. In a dearth of that public talent for the possession ofwhich the whigs have generally been distinguished, Burke came forwardand established them alike in the parliament and the country. And whatwas his reward? No sooner had a young and dissolute noble, who withsome of the aspirations of a Caesar oftener realised the conduct ofa Catiline, appeared on the stage, and after some inglorioustergiversation adopted their colours, than they transferred to himthe command which had been won by wisdom and genius, vindicated byunrivalled knowledge, and adorned by accomplished eloquence. When thehour arrived for the triumph which he had prepared, he was not evenadmitted into the Cabinet, virtually presided over by his gracelesspupil, and who, in the profuse suggestions of his teeming converse,had found the principles and the information which were among the chiefclaims to public confidence of Mr Fox.
Hard necessity made Mr Burke submit to the yoke, but the humiliationcould never be forgotten. Nemesis favours genius: the inevitable hourat length arrived. A voice like the Apocalypse sounded over England andeven echoed in all the courts of Europe. Burke poured forth the vialsof his hoarded vengeance into the agitated heart of Christendom; hestimulated the panic of a world by the wild pictures of his inspiredimagination he dashed to the ground the rival who had robbed him ofhis hard-earned greatness; rended in twain the proud oligarchy thathad dared to use and to insult him; and followed with servility bythe haughtiest and the most timid of its members, amid the franticexultation of his country, he placed his heel upon the neck of theancient serpent.
Among the whig followers of Mr Burke in this memorable defection, amongthe Devonshires and the Portlands, the Spencers and the Fitzwilliams,was the Earl of Marney, whom the whigs would not make a duke.
What was his chance of success from Mr Pitt?
If the history of England be ever written by one who has the knowledgeand the courage, and both qualities are equally requisite for theundertaking, the world would be more astonished than when reading theRoman annals by Niebuhr. Generally speaking, all the great events havebeen distorted, most of the important causes concealed, some ofthe principal characters never appear, and all who figure are somisunderstood and misrepresented, that the result is a completemystification, and the perusal of the narrative about as profitable toan Englishman as reading the Republic of Plato or the Utopia of More,the pages of Gaudentio di Lucca or the adventures of Peter Wilkins.
The influence of races in our early ages, of the church in our middle,and of parties in our modern history, are three great moving andmodifying powers, that must be pursued and analyzed with an untiring,profound, and unimpassioned spirit, before a guiding ray can be secured.A remarkable feature of our written history is the absence in its pagesof some of the most influential personages. Not one man in a thousandfor instance has ever heard of Major Wildman: yet he was the soul ofEnglish politics in the most eventful period of this kingdom, and onemost interesting to this age, from 1640 to 1688; and seemed more thanonce to hold the balance which was to decide the permanent form ofour government. But he was the leader of an unsuccessful party. Even,comparatively speaking, in our own times, the same mysterious oblivionis sometimes encouraged to creep over personages of great socialdistinction as well as political importance.
The name of the second Pitt remains, fresh after forty years of greatevents, a parliamentary beacon. He was the Chatterton of politics; the"marvellous boy." Some have a vague impression that he was mysteriouslymoulded by his great father: that he inherited the genius, theeloquence, the state craft of Chatham. His genius was of a differentbent, his eloquence of a different class, his state craft of a differentschool. To understand Mr Pitt, one must understand one of the suppressedcharacters of English history, and that is Lord Shelburne.
When the fine genius of the injured Bolingbroke, the only peer of hiscentury who was educated, and proscribed by the oligarchy because theywere afraid of his eloquence, "the glory of his order and the shame,"shut out from Parliament, found vent in those writings which recalledto the English people the inherent blessings of their old free monarchy,and painted in immortal hues his picture of a patriot king, the spiritthat he raised at length touched the heart of Carteret, born a whig, yetsceptical of the advantages of that patrician constitution which madethe Duke of Newcastle, the most incompetent of men, but the chosen leaderof the Venetian party, virtually sovereign of England. Lord Carteret hadmany brilliant qualities: he was undaunted, enterprising, eloquent; hadconsiderable knowledge of continental politics, was a great linguist,a master of public law; and though he failed in his premature effort toterminate the dogeship of George the Second, he succeeded in maintaininga considerable though secondary position in public life. The youngShelburne married his daughter. Of him it is singular we know less thanof his father-in-law, yet from the scattered traits some idea may beformed of the ablest and most accomplished minister of the eighteenthcentury. Lord Shelburne, influenced probably by the example and thetraditionary precepts of his eminent father-in-law, appears early tohave held himself aloof from the patrician connection, and enteredpublic life as the follower of Bute in the first great effort of Georgethe Third to rescue the sovereignty from what Lord Chatham called "theGreat Revolution families." He became in time a member of Lord Chatham'slast administration: one of the strangest and most unsuccessful effortsto aid the grandson of George the Second in his struggle for politicalemancipation. Lord Shelburne adopted from the first the Bolingbrokesystem: a real royalty, in lieu of the chief magistracy; a permanentalliance with France, instead of the whig scheme of viewing in thatpower the natural enemy of England: and, above all, a plan ofcommercial freedom, the germ of which may be found in the long-malignednegotiations of Utrecht, but which in the instance of Lord Shelburnewere soon in time matured by all the economical science of Europe,in which he was a proficient. Lord Shelburne seems to have been ofa reserved and somewhat astute disposition: deep and adroit, he washowever brave and firm. His knowledge was extensive and even profound.He was a great linguist; he pursued both literary and scientificinvestigations; his house was
frequented by men of letters, especiallythose distinguished by their political abilities or economicalattainments. He maintained the most extensive private correspondence ofany public man of his time. The earliest and most authentic informationreached him from all courts and quarters of Europe: and it was a commonphrase, that the minister of the day sent to him often for the importantinformation which the cabinet could not itself command. Lord Shelburnewas the first great minister who comprehended the rising importanceof the middle class; and foresaw in its future power a bulwark for thethrone against "the Great Revolution families." Of his qualitiesin council we have no record; there is reason to believe that hisadministrative ability was conspicuous: his speeches prove that, if notsupreme, he was eminent, in the art of parliamentary disputation, whilethey show on all the questions discussed a richness and variety ofinformation with which the speeches of no statesman of that age exceptMr Burke can compare.
Such was the man selected by George the Third as his champion againstthe Venetian party after the termination of the American war. Theprosecution of that war they had violently opposed, though it hadoriginated in their own policy. First minister in the House of Lords,Shelburne entrusted the lead in the House of Commons to his Chancellorof the Exchequer, the youthful Pitt. The administration was brief, butit was not inglorious. It obtained peace, and for the first time sincethe Revolution introduced into modern debate the legitimate principleson which commerce should be conducted. It fell before the famousCoalition with which "the Great Revolution families" commenced theirfiercest and their last contention for the patrician government of royalEngland.
In the heat of that great strife, the king in the second hazardousexercise of his prerogative entrusted the perilous command to Pitt.Why Lord Shelburne on that occasion was set aside, will perhaps alwaysremain a mysterious passage of our political history, nor have we spaceon the present occasion to attempt to penetrate its motives. Perhapsthe monarch, with a sense of the rising sympathies of his people, wasprescient of the magic power of youth in touching the heart of a nation.Yet it would not be an unprofitable speculation if for a moment wepaused to consider what might have been the consequences to our countryif Mr Pitt had been content for a season again to lead the Commons underLord Shelburne, and have secured for England the unrivalled knowledgeand dexterity of that statesman in the conduct of our affairs during theconfounding fortunes of the French revolution. Lord Shelburne was theonly English minister competent to the task; he was the only public manwho had the previous knowledge requisite to form accurate conclusionson such a conjuncture: his remaining speeches on the subject attest theamplitude of his knowledge and the accuracy of his views: and in therout of Jena, or the agony of Austerlitz, one cannot refrain frompicturing the shade of Shelburne haunting the cabinet of Pitt, as theghost of Canning is said occasionally to linger about the speaker'schair, and smile sarcastically on the conscientious mediocrities whopilfered his hard-earned honours.
But during the happier years of Mr Pitt, the influence of the mind ofShelburne may be traced throughout his policy. It was Lansdowne Housethat made Pitt acquainted with Dr Price, a dissenting minister, whomLord Shelburne when at the head of affairs courageously offered tomake his private secretary, and who furnished Mr Pitt, among many otherimportant suggestions, with his original plan of the sinking fund. Thecommercial treaties of '87 were struck in the same mint, and are notableas the first effort made by the English government to emancipate thecountry from the restrictive policy which had been introduced by the"glorious revolution" memorable epoch, that presented England at thesame time with a corn law and a public debt. But on no subject was themagnetic influence of the descendant of Sir William Petty more decided,than in the resolution of his pupil to curb the power of the patricianparty by an infusion from the middle classes into the government ofthe country. Hence the origin of Mr Pitt's famous and long-misconceivedplans of parliamentary reform. Was he sincere, is often asked by thosewho neither seek to discover the causes nor are capable of calculatingthe effects of public transactions. Sincere! Why, he was strugglingfor his existence! And when baffled, first by the Venetian party, andafterwards by the panic of Jacobinism, he was forced to forego hisdirect purpose, he still endeavoured partially to effect it by acircuitous process. He created a plebeian aristocracy and blended itwith the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of second-rate squiresand fat graziers. He caught them in the alleys of Lombard Street, andclutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill. When Mr Pitt in anage of bank restriction declared that every man with an estate of tenthousand a-year had a right to be a peer, he sounded the knell of"the cause for which Hampden had died on the field, and Sydney on thescaffold."
In ordinary times the pupil of Shelburne would have raised this countryto a state of great material prosperity, and removed or avoided manyof those anomalies which now perplex us; but he was not destined forordinary times; and though his capacity was vast and his spirit lofty,he had not that passionate and creative genius required by an age ofrevolution. The French outbreak was his evil daemon: he had not themeans of calculating its effects upon Europe. He had but a meagreknowledge himself of continental politics: he was assisted by a veryinefficient diplomacy. His mind was lost in a convulsion of which heneither could comprehend the causes nor calculate the consequences; andforced to act, he acted not only violently, but in exact opposition tothe very system he was called into political existence to combat; heappealed to the fears, the prejudices, and the passions of a privilegedclass, revived the old policy of the oligarchy he had extinguished, andplunged into all the ruinous excesses of French war and Dutch finance.
If it be a salutary principle in the investigation of historicaltransactions to be careful in discriminating the cause from thepretext, there is scarcely any instance in which the application of thisprinciple is more fertile in results, than in that of the Dutch invasionof 1688. The real cause of this invasion was financial. The Prince ofOrange had found that the resources of Holland, however considerable,were inadequate to sustain him in his internecine rivalry with the greatsovereign of France. In an authentic conversation which has descended tous, held by William at the Hague with one of the prime abettors of theinvasion, the prince did not disguise his motives; he said, "nothing butsuch a constitution as you have in England can have the credit that isnecessary to raise such sums as a great war requires." The prince came,and used our constitution for his purpose: he introduced into Englandthe system of Dutch finance. The principle of that system was tomortgage industry in order to protect property: abstractedly, nothingcan be conceived more unjust; its practice in England has been equallyinjurious. In Holland, with a small population engaged in the samepursuits, in fact a nation of bankers, the system was adapted to thecircumstances which had created it. All shared in the present spoil, andtherefore could endure the future burthen. And so to this day Hollandis sustained, almost solely sustained, by the vast capital thus createdwhich still lingers amongst its dykes. But applied to a country inwhich the circumstances were entirely different; to a considerable andrapidly-increasing population where there was a numerous peasantry,a trading middle class struggling into existence; the system of Dutchfinance, pursued more or less for nearly a century and a half, has endedin the degradation of a fettered and burthened multitude. Nor have thedemoralizing consequences of the funding system on the more favouredclasses been less decided. It has made debt a national habit; it hasmade credit the ruling power, not the exceptional auxiliary, of alltransactions; it has introduced a loose, inexact, haphazard, anddishonest spirit in the conduct of both public and private life; aspirit dazzling and yet dastardly: reckless of consequences and yetshrinking from responsibility. And in the end, it has so overstimulatedthe energies of the population to maintain the material engagementsof the state, and of society at large, that the moral condition of thepeople has been entirely lost sight of.
A mortgaged aristocracy, a gambling foreign commerce, a home tradefounded on a morbid competition, and a degraded people; these are gre
atevils, but ought perhaps cheerfully to be encountered for the greaterblessings of civil and religious liberty. Yet the first would seem insome degree to depend upon our Saxon mode of trial by our peers, uponthe stipulations of the great Norman charters, upon the practice andthe statute of Habeas Corpus,--a principle native to our common law,but established by the Stuarts; nor in a careful perusal of the Billof Rights, or in an impartial scrutiny of the subsequent legislation ofthose times, though some diminution of our political franchises must beconfessed, is it easy to discover any increase of our civil privileges.To those indeed who believe that the English nation,--at all timesa religious and Catholic people, but who even in the days of thePlantagenets were anti-papal,--were in any danger of again falling underthe yoke of the Pope of Rome in the reign of James the Second, religiousliberty was perhaps acceptable, though it took the shape of a disciplinewhich at once anathematized a great portion of the nation, and virtuallyestablishing Puritanism in Ireland, laid the foundation of thosemischiefs which are now endangering the empire.
That the last of the Stuarts had any other object in his impoliticmanoeuvres, than an impracticable scheme to blend the two churches,there is now authority to disbelieve. He certainly was guilty ofthe offence of sending an envoy openly to Rome, who, by the bye, wasreceived by the Pope with great discourtesy; and her Majesty QueenVictoria, whose Protestantism cannot be doubted, for it is one of herchief titles to our homage, has at this time a secret envoy at the samecourt: and that is the difference between them: both ministers doubtlessworking however fruitlessly for the same object: the termination ofthose terrible misconceptions, political and religious, that haveoccasioned so many martyrdoms, and so many crimes alike to sovereignsand to subjects.
If James the Second had really attempted to re-establish Popery in thiscountry, the English people, who had no hand in his overthrow, woulddoubtless soon have stirred and secured their "Catholic and Apostolicchurch," independent of any foreign dictation the church to which theystill regularly profess their adherence; and being a practical people,it is possible that they might have achieved their object and yetretained their native princes; under which circumstances we mighthave been saved from the triple blessings of Venetian politics, Dutchfinance, and French wars: against which, in their happiest days, andwith their happiest powers, struggled the three greatest of Englishstatesmen,--Bolingbroke, Shelburne, and lastly the son of Chatham.
We have endeavoured in another work, not we hope without something ofthe impartiality of the future, to sketch the character and career ofhis successors. From his death to 1825, the political history of Englandis a history of great events and little men. The rise of Mr Canning,long kept down by the plebeian aristocracy of Mr Pitt as an adventurer,had shaken parties to their centre. His rapid disappearance from thescene left both whigs and tories in a state of disorganization. Thedistinctive principles of these connexions were now difficult to trace.That period of public languor which intervenes between the breaking upof parties and the formation of factions now transpired in England. Anexhausted sensualist on the throne, who only demanded from his ministersrepose, a voluptuous aristocracy, and a listless people, were content,in the absence of all public conviction and national passion, to consignthe government of the country to a great man, whose decision relievedthe sovereign, whose prejudices pleased the nobles, and whoseachievements dazzled the multitude.
The DUKE OF WELLINGTON brought to the post of first minister immortalfame; a quality of success which would almost seem to include allothers. His public knowledge was such as might be expected from onewhose conduct already formed an important portion of the history of hiscountry. He had a personal and intimate acquaintance with the sovereignsand chief statesmen of Europe, a kind of information in which Englishministers have generally been deficient, but without which themanagement of our external affairs must at the best be haphazard. Hepossessed administrative talents of the highest order.
The tone of the age, the temper of the country, the great qualitiesand the high character of the minister, indicated a long and prosperousadministration. The only individual in his cabinet who, from acombination of circumstances rather than from any intellectual supremacyover his colleagues, was competent to be his rival, was content to behis successor. In his most aspiring moments, Mr Peel in all probabilityaimed at no higher reach; and with youth and the leadership of the Houseof Commons, one has no reason to be surprised at his moderation.The conviction that the duke's government would only cease with thetermination of his public career was so general, that the moment he wasinstalled in office, the whigs smiled on him; political conciliationbecame the slang of the day, and the fusion of parties the babble ofclubs and the tattle of boudoirs.
How comes it then that so great a man, in so great a position, shouldhave so signally failed? Should have broken up his government, wreckedhis party, and so completely annihilated his political position, that,even with his historical reputation to sustain him, he can since onlyre-appear in the councils of his sovereign in a subordinate, not to sayequivocal, character?
With all those great qualities which will secure him a place in ourhistory not perhaps inferior even to Marlborough, the Duke of Wellingtonhas one deficiency which has been the stumbling-block of his civilcareer. Bishop Burnet, in speculating on the extraordinary influence ofLord Shaftesbury, and accounting how a statesman, so inconsistent inhis conduct and so false to his confederates, should have so powerfullycontrolled his country, observes, "HIS STRENGTH LAY IN HIS KNOWLEDGE OFENGLAND."
Now that is exactly the kind of knowledge which the Duke of Wellingtonnever possessed.
When the king, finding that in Lord Goderich he had a minister who,instead of deciding, asked his royal master for advice, sent for theDuke of Wellington to undertake the government, a change in the carriageof his grace was perceived by some who had the opportunity to form anopinion on such a subject. If one might venture to use such a wordin reference to such a man, we might remark, that the duke had beensomewhat daunted by the selection of Mr Canning. It disappointed greathopes, it baffled great plans, and dispelled for a season the convictionthat, it is believed, had been long maturing in his grace's mind; thathe was the man of the age, that his military career had been only apreparation for a civil course not less illustrious; and that it wasreserved for him to control for the rest of his life undisputed thedestinies of a country, which was indebted to him in no slight degreefor its European pre-eminence. The death of Mr Canning revived, the routof Lord Goderich restored, these views.
Napoleon, at St Helena, speculating in conversation on the future careerof his conqueror, asked, "What will Wellington do? After all he hasdone, he will not be content to be quiet. He will change the dynasty."
Had the great exile been better acquainted with the real character ofour Venetian constitution, he would have known that to govern Englandin 1820, it was not necessary to change its dynasty. But the Emperor,though wrong in the main, was right by the bye. It was clear that theenergies that had twice entered Paris as a conqueror, and had made kingsand mediatised princes at Vienna, would not be content to subside intoermined insignificance. The duke commenced his political tactics early.The cabinet of Lord Liverpool, especially during its latter term, wasthe hot-bed of many intrigues; but the obstacles were numerous, thoughthe appointing fate, in which his grace believed, removed them. Thedisappearance of Lord Castlereagh and Mr Canning from the scene wasalike unexpected. The Duke of Wellington was at length prime minister,and no individual ever occupied that post more conscious of its power,and more determined to exercise it.
This is not the occasion on which we shall attempt to do justice to atheme so instructive as the administration of his grace. Treated withimpartiality and sufficient information, it would be an invaluablecontribution to the stores of our political knowledge and nationalexperience. Throughout its brief but eccentric and tumultuous annals wesee continual proof, how important is that knowledge "in which lay LordShaftesbury's strength." In twenty-four months we find an a
ristocracyestranged, without a people being conciliated; while on two severaloccasions, first, the prejudices, and then the pretensions of the middleclass, were alike treated with contumely. The public was astonishedat hearing of statesmen of long parliamentary fame, men round whom theintelligence of the nation had gathered for years with confidence, orat least with interest, being expelled from the cabinet in a manner notunworthy of Colonel Joyce, while their places were filled by second-ratesoldiers, whose very names were unknown to the great body of the people,and who under no circumstances should have aspired beyond the governmentof a colony. This administration which commenced in arrogance endedin panic. There was an interval of perplexity; when occurred the mostludicrous instance extant of an attempt at coalition subordinates werepromoted, while negotiations were still pending with their chiefs; andthese negotiations, undertaken so crudely, were terminated in pique; ina manner which added to political disappointment personal offence. Wheneven his parasites began to look gloomy, the duke had a specific thatwas to restore all, and having allowed every element of power to escapehis grasp, he believed he could balance everything by a beer bill. Thegrowl of reform was heard but it was not very fierce. There was yet timeto save himself. His grace precipitated a revolution which might havebeen delayed for half a century, and never need have occurred inso aggravated a form. He rather fled than retired. He commenced hisministry like Brennus, and finished it like the tall Gaul sent to murderthe rival of Sylla, but who dropped his weapon before the undaunted gazeof his intended victim.
Lord Marney was spared the pang of the catastrophe. Promoted to a highoffice in the household, and still hoping that, by the aid of his party,it was yet destined for him to achieve the hereditary purpose of hisfamily, he died in the full faith of dukism; worshipping the duke andbelieving that ultimately he should himself become a duke. It was underall the circumstances an euthanasia; he expired leaning as it were onhis white wand and babbling of strawberry leaves.
Book 1 Chapter 4
Sybil, Or, The Two Nations Page 3