THE CORN LAW CRISIS
He had been right in his forecast when he told Mary that a political
crisis was at hand. That which had been long whispered, was beginning
to be stated openly in club and market-place. The Corn Laws, the
support of the country, the mainstay, as so many thought, of the
Constitution, were in danger; and behind closed doors, while England
listened without, the doctors were met to decide their fate.
Potatoes! The word flew from mouth to mouth that wet autumn, from town
to country, from village to village. Potatoes! The thing seemed
incredible. That the lordly Corn Laws, the bulwark of the landed
interest, the prop of agriculture, that had withstood all attacks for
two generations, and maintained themselves alike against high prices
and the Corn Law League—that these should go down because a vulgar root
like the potato had failed in Ireland—it was a thing passing belief. It
couldn’t be. With the Conservatives in power, it seemed impossible.
Yet it was certain that the position was grave, if not hopeless. Never
since the Reform Bill had there been such meetings of the Cabinet, so
frequent, so secret. And strange things were said. Some who had
supported Peel yet did not trust him, maintained that this was the
natural sequel of his measures, the point to which he had been moving
through all the years of his Ministry. Potatoes—bah! Others who still
supported him, yet did not trust him, brooded nervously over his action
twenty years before, when he had first resisted and then accepted the
Catholic claims. Tories and Conservatives alike, wondered what they
were there to conserve, if such things were in the wind; they
protested, but with growing misgiving, that the thing could not be.
While those among them who had seats to save and majorities to guard,
met one another with gloomy looks, whispered together in corners and
privately asked themselves what they would do—if he did. Happy in these
circumstances were those who like Mottisfont, the father, were ready to
retire; and still happier those who like Mottisfont, the son, knew the
wishes of their constituents and could sing “John Barleycorn, my Joe,
John,” with no fear of being jilted.
Their anxieties—they were politicians—were mainly personal—and selfish.
But there were some, simple people like Mr. Stubbs at Riddsley, who
really believed, when these rumors reached them, that the foundations
of things were breaking up, and that the world in which they had lived
was sinking under their feet. Already in fancy they saw the glare of
furnaces fall across the peaceful fields. Already they heard the tall
mill jar and quiver where the cosey homestead and the full stackyard
sprawled. They saw a weakly race, slaves to the factory bell, overrun
the land where the ploughman still whistled at his work and his wife
suckled healthy babes. To these men, if the rumors they heard were
true, if Peel had indeed sold the pass, it meant the loss of all. It
meant the victory of coal and cotton, the ruling of all after the
Manchester pattern, the reign of Cash, the Lord, and ten per cent. his
profit. It meant the end of the old England they had loved.
Not that Stubbs said this at Riddsley, or anything like it. He smiled
and kept silence, as became a man who knew much and was set above
common rumor. The landlord of the Audley Arms, the corndealer, the
brewer, the saddler went away from him with their fears allayed merely
by the way in which he shrugged his shoulders. At the farmers’ ordinary
he had never been more cheerful. He gave the toast of “Horn and Corn,
gentlemen! And when potatoes take their place you may come and tell
me!” And he gave it so heartily that the farmers went home,
market-peart and rejoicing, laughed at their doubting neighbors, and
quoted a hundred things that Lawyer Stubbs had not said.
But a day or two later the lawyer sustained an unpleasant shock. He had
been little moved by Lord John’s manifesto—the declaration in which the
little Whig Leader, seeing that the Government hesitated, had plumped
for total repeal. That was in the common course of things. It had
heartened him, if anything. It was natural. It would bring the Tories
into line and put an end to trimming. But this—this which confronted
him one morning when he opened his London paper was different. He read
it, he held his breath, he stood aghast a long minute, he swore. After
a few minutes he took his hat and the newspaper, and went round to the
house in which Lord Audley lived when he was at Riddsley.
It was a handsome Georgian house, built of brick with stone facings,
and partly covered with ivy. A wide smooth lawn divided it from the
road. The occupant was a curate’s widow who lived there with her two
sisters and eked out their joint means by letting the first floor to
her landlord. For “The Butterflies” was Audley property, and the
clergyman’s widow was held to derogate in no way by an arrangement
which differed widely from a common letting of lodgings. Mrs. Jenkinson
was stout, short, and fussy, her sisters were thin, short, and precise,
but all three overflowed with words as kindly as their deeds. Good Mrs.
Jenkinson, in fact, who never spoke of his lordship behind his back but
with distant respect, sometimes forgot in his presence that he was
anything but a “dear young man,” and when he had a cold, would
prescribe a posset or a warming-pan with an insistence which at times
amused and more often bored him.
Stubbs found his lordship just risen from a late lunch, and in his
excitement, the lawyer forgot his manners. “By G—d, my lord!” he cried,
“he’s resigned.”
Audley looked at him with displeasure. “Who’s resigned?” he asked
coldly.
“Peel!”
Against that news the young man was not proof. He caught the infection.
“Impossible!” he said, rising to his feet.
“It’s true! It’s in the _Morning Post_, my lord! He saw the Queen
yesterday. She’s sending for Lord John. It’s black treachery! It’s the
blackest of treachery! With a majority in the House, with the peers in
his pocket, the country quiet, trade improving, everything in his
favor, he’s sold us—sold us to Cobden on some d—d pretext of famine in
Ireland!”
Audley did not answer at once. He stood deep in thought, his eyes on
the floor, his hands in his pockets. At length, “I don’t follow it,” he
said. “How is Russell, who is in a minority, to carry repeal?”
“Peel’s promised his support!” Stubbs cried. Like most honest men, he
was nothing if not thorough. “You may depend upon it, my lord, he has!
He won’t deceive me again. I know him through and through, now. He’ll
take with him Graham and Gladstone and Herbert, his old tail, Radicals
at heart every man of them, and he’s the biggest!”
“Well,” Audley said slowly, “he might have done one thing worse. He
might have stayed in and passed repeal himself!”
“Good G—d!” the lawyer cried, “Judas wouldn’t have done that! All he
could do, he has done. He has let in corn from Canada, cattle from
Heaven knows where, he has let in wool. All that he has done. But even
he has a limit, my lord! Even he! The man who was returned to support
the Corn Laws—to repeal them. Impossible!”
“Well?” Audley said. “There’ll be an election, I suppose?”
“The sooner the better,” Stubbs answered vengefully. “And we shall see
what the country thinks of this. In Riddsley we’ve been ready for
weeks—as you know, my lord. But a General Election? Gad! I only hope
they will put up some one here, and we will give them such a beating as
they’ve never had!”
Audley pondered. “I suppose Riddsley is safe,” he said.
“As safe as Burton Bridge, my lord!”
The other rattled the money in his pocket. “As long as you give them a
lead, Stubbs, I suppose? But if you went over? What then?”
Stubbs opened his eyes. “Went over?” he ejaculated.
“Oh, I don’t mean,” my lord said airily, “that you’re not as staunch as
Burton Bridge. But supposing you took the other side—it would make a
difference, I suppose?”
“Not a jot!” the lawyer answered sturdily.
“Not even if the two Mottisfonts sided with Peel?”
“If they did the old gentleman would never see Westminster again,”
Stubbs cried, “nor the young one go there!”
“Or,” Audley continued, setting his shoulders against the mantel-shelf,
and smiling, “suppose I did? If the Beaudelays interest were cast for
repeal? What then?”
“What then?” Stubbs answered. “You’ll pardon me, my lord, if I am
frank. Then the Beaudelays influence, that has held the borough time
out of mind, that returned two members before ’32, and has returned one
since—there’d be an end of it! It would snap like a rotten stick. The
truth is we hold the borough while we go with the stream. In fair
weather when it is a question of twenty votes one way or the other, we
carry it. And you’ve the credit, my lord.”
Audley moved his shoulders restlessly. “It’s all I get by it,” he said.
“If I could turn the credit into a snug place of two thousand a year,
Stubbs—it would be another thing. Do you know,” he continued, “I’ve
often wondered why you feel so strongly on the corn-taxes?”
“You asked me that once before, my lord,” the agent answered slowly.
“All that I can say is that more things than one go to it. Perhaps the
best answer I can make is that, like your lordship’s influence in the
borough, it’s part sentiment and part tradition. I have a picture in my
mind—it’s a picture of an old homestead that my grandfather lived in
and died in, and that I visited when I was a boy. That would be about
the middle nineties; the French war going, corn high, cattle high, a
good horse in the gig and old ale for all comers. There was comfort
inside and plenty without; comfort in the great kitchen, with its floor
as clean as a pink, and greened in squares with bay leaves, its dresser
bright with pewter, its mantel with Toby jugs! There was wealth in the
stackyard, with the poultry strutting and scratching, and more in the
byres knee-deep in straw, and the big barn where they flailed the
wheat! And there were men and maids more than on two farms to-day, some
in the house, some in thatched cottages with a run on the common and
wood for the getting. I remember, as if they were yesterday, hot summer
afternoons when there’d be a stillness on the farm and all drowsed
together, the bees, and the calves, and the old sheep-dog, and the only
sounds that broke the silence were the cluck of a hen, or the clank of
pattens on the dairy-floor, while the sun fell hot on the orchard,
where a little boy hunted for damsons! That’s what I often see, my
lord,” Stubbs continued stoutly. “And may Peel protect me, if I ever
raise a finger to set mill and furnace, devil’s dust and slave-grown
cotton, in place of that!”
My lord concealed a yawn. “Very interesting, Stubbs,” he said. “Quite a
picture! Peace and plenty and old ale! And little Jack Horner sitting
in a corner! No, don’t go yet, man. I want you.” He made a sign to
Stubbs to sit down, and settling his shoulders more firmly against the
mantel-shelf, he thrust his hands deeper into his trouser-pockets. “I’m
not easy in my mind about John Audley,” he said. “I’m not sure that he
has not found something.”
Stubbs stared. “There’s nothing to find,” he said. “Nothing, my lord!
You may be sure of it.”
“He goes there.”
“It’s a craze.”
“It’s a confoundedly unpleasant one!”
“But harmless, my lord. Really harmless.”
The younger man’s impatience darkened his face, but he controlled it—a
sure sign that he was in earnest. “Tell me this,” he said. “What
evidence would upset us? You told me once that the claim could be
reopened on fresh evidence. On what evidence?”
“I regard the case as closed,” Stubbs answered stubbornly. “But if you
put the question—” he seemed to reflect—“the point at issue, on which
the whole turned, was the legitimacy of your great-grandfather, my
lord, Peter Paravicini Audley’s son. Mr. John’s great-grandfather was
Peter Paravicini’s younger brother. The other side alleged, but could
not produce, a family agreement admitting that the son was
illegitimate. Such an agreement, if Peter Paravicini was a party to it,
if it was proved, and came from the proper custody, would be an awkward
document and might let in the next brother’s descendants—that’s Mr.
John. But in my opinion, its existence is a fairy story, and in its
absence, the entry in the register stands good.”
“But such a document would be fatal?”
“If it fulfilled the conditions it would be serious,” the lawyer
admitted. “But it does not exist,” he added confidently.
“And yet—I’m not comfortable, Stubbs,” Audley rejoined. “I can’t get
John Audley’s face out of my mind. If ever man looked as if he had his
enemy by the throat, he looked it; a d—d disinheriting face I thought
it! I don’t mind telling you,” the speaker continued, some disorder in
his own looks, “that I awoke at three o’clock this morning, and I saw
him as clearly as I see you now, and at that moment I wouldn’t have
given a thousand pounds for my chance of being Lord Audley this time
two years!”
“Liver!” said Stubbs, unmoved. “Liver, my lord, asking your pardon!
Nothing else—and the small hours. I’ve felt like that myself. Still, if
you are really uneasy there is always a way out, though it may be
impertinent of me to mention it.”
“The old way?”
“You might marry Miss Audley. A handsome young lady, if I may presume
to say so, of your own blood and name, and no disparagement except in
fortune. After Mr. John, she is the next heir, and the match once made
would checkmate any action on his part.”
“I am afraid I could not afford such a marriage,” Audley said coldly.
“But I am to you. As for this news—” he flicked the newspaper that lay
on the table—“it may be true or it may not. If it is true, it will
alter many things. We shall see. If you hear anything fresh let me
know.”
Stubbs said that he would and took his leave, wondering a little, but
having weightier things on his mind. He sought his home by back ways,
for he did not wish to meet Dr. Pepper or Bagenal the brewer, or even
the saddler, until he had considered what face he would put on Peel’s
latest move. He felt that his reputation for knowledge and sagacity was
at stake.
Meanwhile his employer, left alone, fell to considering, not what face
he should put upon the matter, but how he might at this crisis turn the
matter and the borough to the best account. Certainly Stubbs was
discouraging, but Stubbs was a fool. It was all very well for him; he
drew his wages either way. But a man of the world did not cling to the
credit of owning a borough for the mere name of the thing. If he were
sensible he looked to get something more from it than that. And it was
upon occasions such as this that the something more was to be had by
those who knew how to go about the business.
Here, in fact, was the moment, if he was the man.