Pitt's Continental Policy--Mr. Tierney--Mr. Whitbread--Lord
Castlereagh--Lord Liverpool--Mr. Canning.
In examining a little further among the statesmen who opposed the
continental policy of Mr. Pitt and his successors--though by no means
intending to notice all who thus distinguished themselves--a less
notorious person than Mr. Sheridan attracts the eye; but one who, when
we regard the solid, every-day qualities of the mind, greatly surpassed
the showy blandishments of that celebrated orator. I allude to Mr.
Tierney. Like Mr. Perceval, he was bred to the bar; but unlike him, he
was not a mere lawyer, nor was his comprehension hemmed in by narrow
prejudices, nor his soul shriveled by bigotry. Though his reputation in
this country is dim when compared with other luminaries that shone in
that Whig constellation in the dawn of the present century, yet it would
be difficult to name one who shed a more steady and useful light along
the path of the liberal party, during the first ten years of that
century--always excepting Mr. Fox. Mr. Tierney was foremost among the
reformers in the perilous times of the treason trials, in 1794--was a
prominent member of the society of "Friends of the People"--penned the
admirable petition to Parliament, in which that association demonstrated
the necessity and safety of an enlarged suffrage, and an equal
representation--and, having attained a highly respectable standing at
the bar, entered Parliament in 1796, the year before Fox and the heads
of the Opposition unwisely abandoned their attendance upon the House,
because they despaired of arresting the course of Pitt. Mr. T. was at
once brought into a prominent position. He took up the gauntlet, and
during two or three sessions was the main leader of the remnant of the
Whigs, who stood to their posts; and he showed himself competent to fill
the occasion thus opened to him. Night after night he headed the
diminished band, arraying the rigid reasoning powers and tireless
business habits which he brought from the bar, against the haughty
eloquence of Pitt and the dry arguments of Dundas, blunting the cold
sarcasms of the former with his inimitable humor, and thrusting his keen
analytical weapon between the loose joints of the latter's logical
harness. He was solicitor general of Mr. Addington's mixed
administration; but the dissolution of that compound soon relieved him
from a cramped position, whence he gladly escaped to the broader field
of untrammeled opposition. Here he did manful service in the popular
cause, effectually blocking up all avenues to advancement, both in the
comparatively secluded walks of the profession which he ornamented, and
the more rugged and conspicuous paths of politics, which he delighted to
tread. During a part of the dark night of the Continental Coalition, he
guided the helm of his party with a skill and vigilance which its more
renowned chiefs might have profitably imitated. His ability to master
the details, as well as trace the outlines, of a complicated subject,
(so essential to success at the bar,) induced his colleagues to devolve
upon him the labor of exposing those exhausting schemes of finance by
which Pitt and his successors drained the life-blood of England's
prosperity, and swelled a debt which the sale of its every rood of soil
could hardly discharge. Thus he acquired a knowledge of trade and
finance, second only to that of the later Mr. Huskisson. It is meet that
the unassuming talents and services of such a man, "faithful among the
faithless," should not be overlooked when naming the modern reformers of
England.
I have spoken of Mr. WHITBREAD. Some who have not looked into the
Parliamentary history of the times we are now glancing over, suppose him
to have been merely a great brewer, purchasing an obscure seat in the
House of Commons by his ill-gotten wealth, who held his tongue during
the session, and sold beer in vacation. But he possessed an intellect of
the most vigorous frame, which had been garnished by a complete
education, and liberalized by extensive foreign travel. He was the
companion and counselor of Fox, Erskine, Sheridan, Grey, Mackintosh,
Romilly, and Brougham--a frequent visitor at Holland House--a ready and
strong debater, always foremost in the conflicts of those violent
times--for a short period the trusted leader of his party in the
House--and in 1814, when the quarrel between the imprudent Caroline and
her lewd husband came to an open rupture, he was selected, with
Brougham, to be her confidential adviser and friend. Generous in the
diffusion of his vast wealth--gentle and kindly in his affections--the
warm friend of human freedom, and the sworn foe of oppression in all its
forms--he gave his entire powers to the cause of progress and reform,
and resisted, in all places, at all seasons, and when others quailed,
the foreign policy of Pitt, Perceval, and Castlereagh. The return of
Napoleon from Elba alarmed all classes of Englishmen, and for the moment
swept all parties from their moorings. An Address to the Throne for an
enlargement of the forces was immediately moved by Grenville in the
Lords, and Grattan in the Commons, (both Whigs,) and supported by a
large majority of the panic-struck Opposition. Whitbread stood firm;
and, though denounced as a traitor and a French Jacobin, made an able
speech in favor of his motion that England ought not to interfere for
the restoration of the Bourbons. Such a fact illustrates the inflexible
metal of the man, more than a column of panegyric. His political
principles approached the standard of democracy; and this, with his
plebeian extraction and rather blunt manners, gave him less favor with
some of the full-blooded patricians of his party than with their common
constituency. He died in 1815, and like Romilly and Castlereagh, fell by
his own hand.
Many worthy and not a few illustrious names might find a place here.
Grey, the dignified and uncompromising--Romilly, the sagacious and
humane--Mackintosh, the classical and ornate--Grattan, the chivalrous
and daring--Burdett, the manly and bold--Horner, the learned and
modest--Holland, the polished and generous--Brougham, the versatile and
strong--all of whom, with others scarcely less notable, sustained the
drooping cause of freedom against the policy of Pitt and his followers,
and kept alive the sacred fires, to break out brightly in happier times.
But, each may be noticed in other connections. We will now speak of
three statesmen of a different school.
LORD CASTLEREAGH was the life and soul of Pitt's continental policy
during the six years before Napoleon fell. Like Sheridan, he was an
Irishman. But, unlike him, he resisted every measure which promised to
bless his native country, with the skill of a magician and the venom of
a fiend. Ever ready to bribe, bully, or butcher, he plunged England
deeper and deeper into debt and into blood, and seemed to regret when
there was no more money to be squandered, and no more fighting to be
done. As the best atonement he could make for permitting her to come out
of the conflict with a free Government, and without being utterly
ruined, he went to the Congress of Vienna, and humbly begged leave to
lay her constitution and her honor at the feet of the allied despots
whom she had impoverished herself in sustaining against the arms of
France. It has been contended that Perceval was an honest bigot; at
least as honest as any man could be who performed so many bad deeds.
But, beyond all question, Castlereagh is one of the most atrocious and
despicable Englishmen of the nineteenth century. The name of no other
modern statesman is so cordially and so justly detested by the mass of
the people. With no more eloquence than a last year's almanac--utterly
incapable of cutting even a second-rate figure as a Parliamentary
debater--yet, because of his intimate acquaintance with the affairs of
that vast kingdom, his blunt sense, promptness in council, unflinching
courage, and his unfaltering attachment to the Throne, and his
unscrupulous execution of its decrees, he led the Tory party in the
Commons, and controlled the counsels of the King through eleven of the
most turbulent years in England's recent history. Though not the nominal
Premier, he was the real head of its ministry during the war with this
country, and in the times which preceded and followed the overthrow of
Bonaparte, and bore a leading share in the subsequent despotic
transactions which assumed the soft name of "the pacification of
Europe." At the Congress of Vienna he represented the Power which had
staked all, and nearly lost all, in restoring the Bourbons. This gave
him the right to demand, in her name, that the victories she had bought
or won should redound to the advancement of constitutional liberty. But
this cringing tool of anointed tyranny, so far from bearing himself in a
manner worthy of his great constituency, succumbed to the dictation of
Russia and Austria--aided them in forming the diabolical Holy Alliance,
that politico-military Inquisition for "the settlement of Europe"--and,
decked out in his blazing star and azure ribbon, seemed to take as
vulgar a satisfaction in being permitted to sit at the council-board of
these monarchs, as did Mr. Tittlebat Titmouse, when admitted to the
table of the Earl of Dreddlington. His subsequent course in endorsing
the military _surveillance_ which this Holy Inquisition exercised over
the people of Europe, encountered the tireless hostility of the liberal
party of England, whose leaders made the island ring with their
protests. At length, this bold, bad man, this "_ice-hearted dog_," as
Ebenezer Elliott called him, having opposed the abolition of the slave
trade, the amelioration of the criminal code, the modification of the
corn laws, Catholic emancipation, Parliamentary reform, and every other
social and political improvement, during twenty-five years, suddenly
finished a career which had been marked at every step by infamous deeds.
Immediately thereupon, Mr. Canning, who succeeded to his place as
Foreign Secretary, filed his protest against certain proceedings of the
Holy Alliance, and England withdrew from that conspiracy of royal
rogues.
Throughout the period just mentioned, LORD LIVERPOOL was the nominal
head of the Ministry. He was a very respectable nobleman, with a large
purse and few talents; an easy, good-for-nothing, James-Monroe sort of a
body, whom every Whig and Tory made a low bow to, but whom nobody feared
or cared for; a pilot that could steer the ship of state tolerably well
in quiet waters, but who quit the helm for the cabin the instant the sky
was overcast, or the waves raged. He was in office so long that he
became a sort of ministerial fixture--a kind of nucleus around which
more ambitious, showy, and potent materials gathered. People had become
so accustomed to see him at the head of affairs, where he did so little
as to offend no one, that they looked upon him as almost as necessary to
the working of the governmental machine as the King himself. This
commonplace man, under the successive names of Mr. Jenkinson, Lord
Hawkesbury, and Lord Liverpool, held important stations in the Cabinet
more than thirty years, nearly half of which he was Premier.
As has been remarked, MR. CANNING succeeded Lord Castlereagh as Foreign
Secretary in 1823, and Lord Liverpool as Premier in 1827. Like
Castlereagh, Canning was of Irish descent; but, unlike him, he had some
Irish blood in his veins. Like him, he sustained the continental policy
of Pitt; but, unlike him, he did not desire to degrade England, after
she had destroyed Napoleon. Like him, he exercised great sway in the
councils of the country; but, unlike him, it was not so much the
influence of mere official station, as the voluntary tribute paid to a
splendid and captivating genius. For thirty-five years, this remarkable
man participated in public affairs; and whatever opinion may be formed
of his statesmenship, he was undoubtedly the most brilliant orator (I
use the term in its best and in its restricted sense) which has appeared
in the House of Commons the present century.
Canning's father was a broken-down Irish barrister, who, having little
knowledge of law, and less practice, quit Ireland for London, where he
eked out a scanty existence by writing bad rhymes for the magazines, and
tolerable pamphlets for the politicians. He died the day George was a
year old--April 11, 1771. The mother, left penniless, listened to the
flatteries of Garrick, went upon the stage, tried to sustain first-rate
characters, failed, sunk silently into a secondary position, married a
drunken actor, who then had two or three wives, and who, after strolling
about the provinces a few years, died in a mad-house, when she married a
stage-smitten silk mercer, who had a little more money than her late
husband, and a rather better character. Failing in business soon after,
he tried the stage in company with his wife, where he speedily broke
down, and she continued for some years to figure in third-rate
characters at the minor theaters. In such company as would naturally
surround such guardians, the future Prime Minister of England spent the
first nine or ten years of his life. He had a respectable paternal uncle
in London--a merchant of some wealth. An old actor, by the name of
Moody, detected the glittering gem of genius in the unpromising lad,
went to this uncle, and urged him to take his nephew (whom he had never
seen) under his care. He complied, sent him to a grammar school, then to
Eton, and, dying, left the means of educating his ward at Oxford. Young
Canning shone conspicuously at the University, as a wit, an
elocutionist, and a poet, and contracted some aristocratic friendships
which served his turn in subsequent life, especially that with Mr.
Jenkinson, afterwards Lord Liverpool.
After he left the University, he became intimate with Sheridan, who knew
something of his mother and his own history, and by him was introduced
to Fox and other leading Whigs. Though impregnated with liberal
principles, his ambitious eye saw that Whigism was an obscured luminary,
and so he turned and worshiped the ascendant star of Pitt. Entering
Parliament in 1793, just at the bursting of the continental storm, he at
once took his seat on the Treasury benches, and soon became a polished
shaft in the quiver of the great anti-Gallican archer. In or out of
office, he followed the fortunes of Pitt and his successors, till he
quarreled and fought a duel with Castlereagh, in 1809, when they both
left the Cabinet, and Canning remained under a cloud till 1814, when he
was banished as minister to the Court of Lisbon. From this time, he
never had the full confidence of the old school Tories, though he was
their most brilliant advocate in Parliament, and generally shared office
with them, and sustained their measures. After Castlereagh died, Mr.
Canning drew closely around him the more liberal Tories--such as Lords
Melbourne, Palmerston, Glenelg--and made up, in conjunction with Mr.
Huskisson, a "third party," called "Canningites," who, through the
auspices of Brougham, in 1827, formed a _quasi_ coalition with the
Whigs. After the death of their chief, many of his followers went
completely over to the Whigs, aided Earl Grey in carrying the reform
bill, took office under him, and subsequently, in an evil hour, became
the leaders of that party.
With the exception of giving a hearty support to the abolition of the
slave trade, and advocating the cause of Catholic emancipation, Mr.
Canning sustained the worst Tory measures from his entrance into
Parliament to the death of Castlereagh--a period of thirty
years--bringing to bear against the People's cause all the resources of
his classical learning, vivid wit, vigorous reasoning, captivating
manners, and unrivaled oratory. Undoubtedly, he despised the truckling
course of Castlereagh towards the Holy Alliance; and, either because he
wished to escape from "a false position," or because his colleagues
desired to cripple his influence, he was just about to go out to India
as Governor General, when the suicide of Castlereagh altered his
destination, and he exchanged a subordinate foreign station for the
chief control of that department of affairs. Immediately, England took a
nobler position toward the continental alliance in which she had been
entangled by his wily predecessor. The new Secretary protested against
the interference of the Allied Sovereigns with the popular movements in
Spain, and early the next year (1824) stated in his place that Ministers
had refused to become parties to another Congress. This was the longest
stride toward progress for thirty years, and well might the House of
Commons ring with enthusiastic plaudits. This was promptly followed by
the virtual recognition of the independence of the new South American
Republics--another blow at the Holy Military Inquisition. Calling Mr.
Robinson to his aid as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mr. Huskisson as
President of the Board of Trade, the reoerganized ministry (good, easy
Lord Liverpool being its nominal head) adopted a more liberal policy in
commerce and finance, which, coupled with its course in foreign affairs,
drew to it a large share of confidence in the middle classes, and
softened the asperities of the Opposition. During the four years that
Canning controlled Liverpool's ministry, taxes were reduced, several
restrictions removed from trade, the endless delays in chancery inquired
into, the death penalty curtailed, resolutions passed looking toward
slave emancipation, the corn laws slightly modified, and a bill for the
relief of the Catholics was carried in the Commons, but thrown out by
the Lords. Liverpool died early in 1827. After a quarrel with Wellington
and Peel, Canning, in May of that year, reached the culminating point of
his ambition, the Premiership of England. But, at the end of four months
of vexed and troublesome rule, he died, much lamented by the people, who
were expecting good things from his administration.
Viewed from one point of observation, Mr. Canning's later policy was
favorable to the cause of reform; but, in another aspect, it may be
doubted whether his half-way measures were not, in the long run,
detrimental to that cause. He was raised up to save the Tory party, if
they would have consented to be saved by him; for, had he lived, he
would have continued gradually to yield to the advancing spirit of the
age, and kept them in power many years. But their distrust of him after
the peace of 1815 crippled his genius, mortified his pride, and
determined him in due time to rend the party which would not permit him
to rule. Through the aid of his personal adherents, his "third party,"
he did for the Tories in 1826-7, what Peel did for them twenty years
later--yielded to liberal opinions--split the party in twain--and formed
a _quasi_ coalition with his ancient opponents. Though by this means
some measures, such as Catholic emancipation and Parliamentary reform,
were sooner carried (though only to a partial extent) than they
otherwise might have been, yet it is hardly to be doubted that the
liberal cause is now more depressed than it would have been, had no such
coalition been formed and no such resulting concessions made. Though the
secession of the Canningites weakened the Tories, the accession diluted
the Whigs. It ultimately gave them such leaders as Melbourne and
Palmerston--men who, down to 1828, had been among the most strenuous
opponents of reform--men who have made Whigism popular at Court, by
arraying it in purple and fine linen, and other soft clothing--who have
stripped it of its rugged aspect, and decked it in the high-bred airs
which it wore in the days of the elder Georges and the Walpoles, when a
few noble families controlled its affairs. But, on the other hand, Mr.
Canning broke the power of old-fashioned John Bull Toryism--the
remorseless, insolent, _statu-quo_ Toryism of French revolutionary
times--and introduced the more complying, civil, progressive Toryism,
which emancipates Catholics and repeals corn laws.
Mr. Canning was like Mr. Fox in one respect. Each introduced a new era
in his party. The aristocratic Whigism of the last century, to which I
have alluded, is graphically hit off by Brougham, when he says the heads
of the few great families who controlled the party "never could be made
to understand how a feeble motion, prefaced by a feeble speech, if made
by an elderly lord and seconded by a younger one, could fail to satisfy
the country and shake the Ministry!" Fox, the Jefferson of English
liberalism, opened the door for men without ancestry or wealth to enter
the party, and find the place to which their talents assigned them,
whether at its head or its foot. He introduced the Whigism of the type
of Grey, Brougham, Romilly, Russell, and the Edinburgh Review. It has
served its day and generation, and has become so like modified,
_Canningized_ Toryism, that the chief distinction between them is in the
different modes of spelling their names. Within the last twenty years,
the people of England have advanced a century, while the Whig leaders
have not kept pace even with the calendar. English liberalism looks with
longing eye for "the coming man;" and when he appears, he will be as far
in advance of the Palmerstons and Russells of to-day, as they are before
the Pitts and the Percevals of past times.
To return to Mr. Canning. During the last five years of his life, he
occupied a sort of middle-ground between the ancient and the modern
_regime_; or, rather, was the connecting-link between the old and the
new order of things. Having served under Pitt in his youth, he formed an
alliance with the disciples of Fox in his maturity. Having advocated the
complete destruction of the Irish Parliament in 1799 and 1800, he
proposed a qualified emancipation of its Catholics in 1823 and 1827.
Having sustained the European coalition for the overthrow of Napoleon,
he repudiated its legitimate offspring, the Holy Alliance. Having
drained England of her wealth to nourish and maintain absolutism on the
continent, he shrunk from permitting her to pluck the fruit of her own
culture. In these latter years, he might have been properly called
either a liberal Tory or a Conservative Whig. He was the friend of
Catholic emancipation; but though public sentiment was not ripe enough
during his administration to accomplish this reform, his efforts tended
to bring it to that maturity which, soon after his death, enabled this
proscribed sect to gather the fruit from that tree of religious
toleration which his hand had aided to plant in the breast of English
Protestantism. But, on the vital subject of Parliamentary reform, he
would yield nothing. It was in reference to this that he had his famous
quarrel with Brougham, who, by the bye, was for many years the pitted
antagonist of Canning. The point in controversy was the disfranchisement
of a rotten borough, which had been convicted of bribery. Both girded
themselves for the contest. Never was the rugged intensity of the one,
nor the polished strength of the other, more conspicuous than on that
occasion. Brougham's attack was compared to the concave _speculum_, in
which every ray was concentrated with focal intensity, and poured in a
burning stream upon his shrinking victim. Canning's, to the convex
mirror, which scattered the rays, and showered them down upon his foe
with blinding fervor.
Turning from the statesman to the orator, we find him occupying a place
equaled by few of his cotemporaries; surpassed by none. He was the
Cicero of the British Senate; and, using the term _oratory_ in its
precise sense, he shines unrivaled among the English statesmen of our
day. He is an admirable refutation of the somewhat popular error, that a
_reasoner_ must necessarily be as dull and uninteresting as the Rev. Dr.
Dryasdust--that wit, raillery, vivid illustration, and suggestive
allusions, are incompatible with sound argument--that to be convincing,
one must be stupid--that logic consists in a lifeless skeleton of
consecutive syllogisms, divested of the flesh, blood, and marrow of
eloquence--and that the profundity of a speech is to be measured by the
depth of the slumbers into which it precipitates the auditory. It is
thus that many a man has gained the reputation of being a great
reasoner, when he was only a great bore; or been accounted wiser than
his more vivacious associates, because he wore a stolid visage and held
his tongue--completely putting to rout the venerable maxim of "nothing
venture, nothing have."
Though few public speakers of his time dealt more with the lighter
graces of oratory--wit, fancy, epigram, anecdote, historical
illustration, and classical allusion--so, few excelled him in the
clearness of his statements, the solidity of his arguments, and the
skill with which he brought all his resources to bear upon the point to
be reached, and the power with which he pressed it home to the
conviction of his hearers. A burst of laughter from all sides, excited
by his infectious wit, or a round of applause from his friends when some
galling sarcasm pierced the mailed harness of the Opposition, relieved
the tedium of a currency debate, intolerably dull in most hands, but
which he, by mingling figures of speech with the figures of the budget,
always made interesting, and thus kept his party in good humor while he
drove these wearisome topics through the thick skulls of knights of the
shire and country squires, of which material the Tories were largely
made up. Throwing around the path where he led his auditors a profusion
of flowers, gathered in all climes and refreshing to all tastes, he was
ever carrying forward the heavy chain of argument, delighting while he
convinced, and amusing that he might convert.
But these rare qualities produced their drawbacks. So skillful a master
of so bewitching an art could not be sparing in the exhibition of his
peculiar powers. His pleasantry and by-play, when handling momentous
questions, offended graver men, who could not believe that so much
levity was consistent with sincerity. He excited the jealousy of plainer
understandings, who saw things as clearly as he, but could not set them
in so transparent a light. His coruscations were not only glittering,
but they often dazzled and confounded less ornate minds. His sarcasms
stung his enemies to madness; and, not content merely to drive his
opponents to the wall, he hurled them there with such force, that they
rebounded into the arena, to become in turn the assailants; and his
friends found that a brilliant attack led on by him often resulted in a
counter assault, which summoned to the rescue all the forces of his
party. And more than this, his port and bearing left the impression upon
most minds that a consummate artist was acting a part, and not a sincere
man speaking from the heart. His obscure origin, (obscure for one who
aspired to be a Tory Premier,) and his early coquetry with the Whigs,
affixed to him the epithet of "an adventurer;" and he never shook off
the epithet, nor effaced the impression that it was fitly bestowed. The
people of England, whether he was Treasurer of the Navy, Foreign
Secretary, Prime Minister, or Parliamentary orator, never wholly escaped
from the suspicion that the son was following the profession of the
mother, but had chosen the chapel of St. Stephen's rather than the
theater of Drury Lane, for the display of his genius.
Turning from the orator to the man, we find much to delight the eye.
George Canning never forgot the humble mother that bore him. So soon as
his resources would permit, he made ample provision for her support; and
for years after he entered Parliament, and even when a foreign
ambassador, he wrote her a weekly epistle, breathing the kindliest
affection. Though he could never elevate her tastes and associations
above the connections of her youth, he used to throw aside the cares of
office, that he might visit her, and the humble cousins with whom she
dwelt, at Bath; and there, when in the zenith of his fame, would walk
out with his plebeian relatives, and receive the homage of the lordly
visitants at that fashionable resort, in their company. This marks him a
noble man. He delighted in literary pursuits--would drop the pen when
preparing a diplomatic dispatch, to talk over the classics with his
university acquaintances--was a brilliant essayist, and wrote Latin and
English verses with grace and beauty.