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added to each volume's Table of Contents.
A HISTORY OF THE FOUR GEORGES
AND OF WILLIAM IV.
by
JUSTIN MCCARTHY
and
JUSTIN HUNTLY MCCARTHY
In Four Volumes
VOL. IV.
Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
1901
Copyright, 1901, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS OF THE FOURTH VOLUME.
CHAPTER PAGE
LXIII. "OPENS AMID ILL OMENS" . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
LXIV. POPULAR ALARMS--ROYAL EXCURSIONS . . . . . . . . 15
LXV. GEORGE CANNING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
LXVI. THE CLOSE OF CANNING'S CAREER . . . . . . . . . 46
LXVII. "THE CHAINS OF THE CATHOLIC" . . . . . . . . . . 65
LXVIII. THE LAST OF THE GEORGES . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
LXIX. KING WILLIAM THE FOURTH . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
LXX. LE ROI D'YVETOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
LXXI. REFORM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
LXXII. THE GREAT DEBATE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
LXXIII. THE TRIUMPH OF REFORM . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
LXXIV. THE EMANCIPATION OF LABOUR . . . . . . . . . . . 188
LXXV. THE STATE CHURCH IN IRELAND . . . . . . . . . . 205
LXXVI. "ONLY A PAUPER" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
LXXVII. PEEL'S FORLORN HOPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
LXXVIII. STILL THE REIGN OF REFORM . . . . . . . . . . . 261
LXXIX. THE CLOSE OF A REIGN AND THE OPENING OF AN ERA 280
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
{1}
A HISTORY OF THE FOUR GEORGES.
CHAPTER LXIII.
"OPENS AMID ILL OMENS."
The closest student of history would find it hard indeed to turn to the
account of any other royal reign which opened under conditions so
peculiar and so unpropitious as those which accompanied the succession
of George the Fourth to the English throne. Even in the pages of
Gibbon one might look in vain for the story of a reign thus singularly
darkened in its earliest chapters. George the Fourth had hardly gone
through the State ceremonials which asserted his royal position when he
was seized by a sudden illness so severe that, for a while, the nerves
of the country were strained by the alarm which seemed to tell that a
grave would have to be dug for the new King before the body of the late
sovereign had grown quite cold in the royal vault. It would be idle,
at this time of day, to affect any serious belief that the grief of the
British people at this sudden taking off, had it come to pass, would
have exceeded any possibility of consolation. George the Fourth was an
elderly personage when he came to the throne, he had been known to his
subjects as a deputy King for many years, his mode of living had long
been a familiar subject of scandal among all classes of his people, and
no one could have supposed that the prosperity of the country {2}
depended to any measurable extent on the continuance of his life.
[Sidenote: 1820--Lord Liverpool's Administration]
George, however, recovered. His illness proved therefore to be only
one among the unpropitious conditions which accompanied the dawn of his
reign. Almost the next thing that was heard of him by the outer world
was that he had inaugurated his work of government by calling on his
ministers to assist him in obtaining a divorce from his wife. Not
often, it must be admitted, has a sovereign just succeeding to a throne
thus celebrated his attainment of regal rank. Then, again, the
beginning of George the Fourth's reign was immediately followed by the
explosion of a conspiracy belonging to an order uncommon indeed in the
England of those days, almost wholly unknown to the England of our own
time, and resembling in its principal characteristics some of the
Nihilist or Anarchist enterprises common even still in certain parts of
the European continent. Thus opened the first chapter of the reign of
King George the Fourth. We shall have to go more fully into details,
and we only print these few lines as what used to be called in former
days the argument of our first chapters.
George was too unwell to stand by his father's bedside when the poor
old King was passing, at last, out of that life which had so long been
one of utter darkness to him. George, the son, had taken cold in his
beloved pavilion at Brighton, and the cold soon developed into an
illness so serious that for some days it was believed the now King was
destined to succeed his father in the grave almost as soon as he had
succeeded him in the sovereignty. George's life of excesses had not,
however, completely worn out the fine constitution with which nature
had originally endowed him, and despite the kind of medical treatment
favored at that time, the old familiar panacea, which consisted mainly
in incessant bleeding, the King recovered. He was soon able to receive
the official addresses of loyalty, to despatch to Louis the Eighteenth
and other European sovereigns his formal announcement of the fact that
he had succeeded to the throne, his formal expressions of grief at {3}
the loss of his beloved father, and his formal assurances of his
resolve to do all he could to maintain harmonious relations with the
rulers of foreign States. He retained the ministers whom he had found
in office, and who were, of course, his own ministers. Lord Liverpool
was Prime Minister, Lord Eldon was Lord Chancellor, Lord Palmerston was
one of the younger members of the administration.
The times were troublous. Lord Liverpool's long tenure of office had
been marked, so far as foreign affairs were concerned, by a resolute
hostility to every policy and all movements which tended in a
revolutionary direction, and to Lord Liverpool and his closest
colleagues the whole principle of popular liberty was merely the
principle of revolution. In home affairs Lord Liverpool had always
identified himself with systems of political repression, systems which
were established on the theory that whenever there was any talk of
popular grievance the only wise and just course was to put in prison
the men from whose mouths such talk came forth. On financial questions
Lord Liverpool appears to have entertained some enlightened views,
views that were certainly in advance of the political economy professed
by most of his colleagues, but where distinctly political controversy
came up he may be taken as a fair illustration of the old-fashioned
Tory statesmanship. Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, had a great deal of
shrewdness in his mental constitution, a shrewdness which very often
took the form of selfishness; and although he exhibited himself for the
most part as a genuine Tory, one is inclined to doubt whether he did
not now and then indulge in a secret chuckle at the expense of those
among his colleagues who really believed that the principles of
old-fashioned Toryism were the only sound principles of government.
The first business of State into which the new sovereign threw his
whole heart and soul was the endeavor to solemnize the opening of his
reign by obtaining a divorce from his wife. He went to work at once
with the set purpose of inducing his ministers to lend him their aid in
the {4} attainment of this great object. Lord Eldon was more
especially in his confidence, and with him George had many private
interviews and much exchange of letters on the subject which then
engrossed his attention. He accomplished his object so far that it was
arranged to leave the name of his wife out of the Royal Liturgy. But
even to set on foot the formal proceedings for a divorce proved a much
more difficult piece of business. Pliant as the ministers were,
inclined to be abject as some of them were in their anxiety to please
their royal master, yet the men with whom George especially consulted
could not shrink from impressing on his notice some of the obstacles
which stood in the way of his obtaining his heart's desire. One of the
main difficulties consisted in the fact that a great part of the
evidence given against George's unhappy consort during the former
investigations had been given by a class of witnesses upon whose
statement it would be impossible for any regularly constituted court of
law to place much reliance. Again and again in the correspondence
which passed between the King and some of his ministers this weakness
of his case is pointed out, and it is somewhat curious to find so
complete a recognition of it by his advisers when we bear in mind what
they had sanctioned before and were to sanction later on.
[Sidenote: 1820--Queen Caroline]
The Queen herself was on the Continent, and was threatening her
immediate return to her husband's country unless some settlement was
made with her which should secure her ample means of living and allow
her to be formally recognized abroad as the wife of King George. Henry
Brougham was acting as the Queen's principal adviser at home, and was
doing his best to bring about some sort of compromise which might
result in the Queen's accepting a quiet and informal separation on fair
and reasonable terms. George, however, was not inclined to listen to
conditions of compromise. He wanted to get rid of his Queen once for
all, to be publicly and completely divorced from her, to be free from
even a nominal association with her; and he was not inclined to accept
any terms which merely secured him against the chance of her {5} ever
again appearing within his sight. Brougham was disposed, and even
determined, to do all he could for the unhappy Caroline, although now
and then in one of his characteristic bursts of ill-temper he used to
rail against the trouble she gave him by her impatient desire to rush
back to England and make her appeal to public opinion there. There was
a great deal of negotiation between the advisers on both sides, and the
final offer made on the part of the King was that the Queen should have
an allowance of 52,000 pounds a year--not, one would have thought, a
very illiberal allowance for the daughter of a small German prince--and
that she should be allowed to retain her titles, and should be
authorized to use them at foreign courts, but that her name was not to
appear in the Liturgy, and that she was not to appear officially in
England as the wife of the sovereign. These terms were offered much
against the will of the King himself, who still yearned for the
divorce, the whole divorce, and nothing but the divorce. George
yielded, however, to the urgent advice of his ministers, with the
strong hope and belief still in his own heart that Caroline would not
accept the conditions, and would insist upon presenting herself in
England and asserting her position as Queen.
The Queen, meanwhile, had left Rome, where she had been staying for
some time and where she complained of the want of deference shown to
her by the Papal authorities. She was hurrying back to England, and
had written to Brougham requesting him to meet her at Saint Omer, and
there accordingly Brougham met her. Whether he was very urgent in his
advice to her to accept the terms it is not easy to know; but, at all
events, it is quite certain that she refused point-blank to make any
concessions, that she left Brougham with positive abruptness, and
hastened on her way to England. Among her most confidential advisers
was Alderman Wood, the head of a great firm in the City of London, a
leading man in the corporation of the City, and a member of the House
of Commons. Many eminent Englishmen--among whom were Wilberforce,
Canning, and Denman, afterwards Lord Chief Justice--were {6} were warm
supporters of her cause, for the good reason that they sincerely
believed her to be innocent of the more serious charges against her and
deeply wronged by the conduct of the King. Even her most resolute
enemies had to admit that whether her conduct in thus rushing back to
England and forcing herself on public notice were wise or unwise, from
the worldly point of view, it certainly seemed at least like the
conduct of a woman proudly conscious of her own innocence, and
determined to accept no compromise which might put her in the position
of a pardoned sinner. The nearer she came to England the more cordial
were the expressions of sympathy she received, and from the moment she
landed on English shores her way to London became like a triumphal
procession.
[Sidenote: 1820--The King's divorce proceedings]
In the mean time the King and his ministers had come to an agreement
which was exactly what the King had struggled for from the first, an
agreement that steps should be taken in the ordinary way, according to
the legal conditions then existing, for the purpose of obtaining a
divorce. The course to be adopted was to bring in a Divorce Bill, and
endeavor to have it passed through both Houses of Parliament. The
proceedings were to open in the House of Lords, and the Queen's leading
defenders--for her cause was of course to be defended by counsel as in
an ordinary court of law--were Brougham and Denman. The Queen's
arrival in London was a signal for the most tumultuous demonstrations
of popular devotion and favor towards her, and popular anger, and even
fury, against all who were supposed to be her enemies. The house in
which she took up her abode was constantly surrounded by vast throngs
of her sympathizers, and she used to have to make her appearance at the
windows at frequent intervals and bow her acknowledgments to the crowds
below. Sometimes the zeal of her admirers found a different way of
expressing itself, and the window-panes of many houses were broken
because the residents were known to be on the side of the King and not
of the Queen. Conspicuous public men who were known, or were believed,
to have taken part against her were mobbed in the streets, and even the
Duke {7} of Wellington himself was more than once the object of a
hostile demonstration. So widely spread, so deeply penetrating was the
feeling in favor of the Queen that it was said to have found its way
even into the ranks of the army, and it was believed that some soldiers
of regiments quartered in London itself were to be found carousing to
the health of Queen Caroline. A crowd of Italian witnesses had been
brought over to bear evidence against the Queen, and these foreign
invaders, nearly all of humble rank, had to be sheltered in buildings
specially erected for their protection in the near neighborhood of
Westminster Hall, and had to be immured and guarded as if they were
malefactors awaiting trial and likely to escape, in order that they
might be safe from the outbreaks of popular indignation.
It told heavily for the case of the Queen, in the minds of all
reasonable and impartial people, that while the King's foreign
witnesses were drawn for the most part from a class of persons who
might be supposed easily open to subornation and corruption, a great
number of distinguished men and women came from various parts of Europe
in which the Queen had resided to give evidence in her favor, and to
speak highly of her character and her conduct. The manner in which the
proceedings against the Queen were pressed on by the Ministry had one
immediate result to their disadvantage by depriving them of the
services of George Canning, then one of the most rising of European
statesmen. Canning was strongly impressed with a belief in the Queen's
innocence and he could not consent to become one of her formal public
accusers, which he must have done were he to remain a member of the
administration. Canning, therefore, after a time, gave up his place as
a member of the Government, and he left the work of the prosecution, as
it may be called, to be carried on by men less chivalrous and less
scrupulous. It is not necessary to go at any length into the story of
the proceedings before the House of Lords. These proceedings would
have been made memorable, if there were nothing else to make them so,
by the speeches which Brougham and {8} Denman delivered in defence of
the Queen. Never perhaps in the course of history have the ears of a
monarch's advisers been made to tingle by such sentences of magnificent
and scathing denunciation poured out in arraignment of the monarch's
personal conduct. Denman, indeed, incurred the implacable hostility of
George because, in the course of his speech, he introduced a famous
citation from Roman history which, although intended to tell heavily
against the King, was mistakenly believed by some of the King's friends
to convey a much darker and deeper imputation on the sovereign than
that which was really in Denman's mind.
[Sidenote: 1821--Queen Caroline and the King's coronation]
The case may be briefly said to have broken down. In the House of
Lords, where the friends of the sovereign were most powerful, there was
only a majority of nine for the third reading of the Bill of Divorce,
and the Bill if persevered in would yet have to encounter the House of
Commons. The Government, therefore, made up their minds to abandon the
proceedings, and thereupon the friends of the Queen exulted
tumultuously over the victory they had won. But the struggle was not
by any means at an end. The royal coronation had yet to come, and the
King was anxious that the ceremonial should be got through at as early
a date as possible. The Queen announced her determination to present
herself on the Day of Coronation and claim her right to be crowned as
Queen Consort of George the Fourth. Then the advisers on both sides
went to work anew with the vain hope of bringing about something like a
compromise which might save the sovereign, the Court, and the country
from scandalous and tumultuous scenes. Again the Queen was offered the
allowance which had been tendered to her before, on the old conditions
that she would behave quietly and keep herself out of sight. Again she
insisted that her name must be included in the Royal Liturgy, and again
the King announced his resolve to make no such concession. Then the
Queen once more made it known that her resolve was final, and that she
would present herself at Westminster Abbey on the Coronation Day.
George had been advised {9} that all historical precedents warranted
him in maintaining that the King had an absolute right to direct the
forms of the ceremonial to be used on such an occasion, and he declared
that he would not allow the Queen to take any part in the solemnity or
even to be present during its performance. The Queen wrote letters to
the King which she sent to him through his Prime Minister, Lord
Liverpool. George sent back the letters unopened to Lord Liverpool,
with the announcement that the King would read no letter addressed to
him by the Queen, and would only communicate with her through the
ordinary official medium of one of his ministers.
The letters thus written on both sides have long since been published,
and the perusal of them will probably impress most readers with the
idea of a certain sincerity on the part of both the principal writers,
the King and Queen. Let us speak as harshly and as justly as we may of
the King's general conduct, of his mode of living, and of the manner in
which he had always treated the Queen, we shall find it hard not to
believe that there was in the depth of George's mind a fixed conviction
that he had real cause of complaint against his unhappy wife. Let us,
on the other hand, give the fullest recognition to the fact that
although the scandalous levities in the conduct of the Queen abroad
told heavily against her, we are none the less compelled to admit that
her letters to the King, and her demand to be included in the
Coronation ceremonies, seemed to be part of the conduct of a woman who
will not and cannot admit that she has done anything to forfeit her
place at her husband's side.
The whole story seems now so preposterously out of keeping with all the
associations of a modern Court that it startles our sense of historical
credibility when we find by the actual dates that men and women are
still living who might have been carried by their nurses to see the
crowds round Westminster Abbey on the Coronation Day of King George the
Fourth. The Coronation took place on July 19, 1821, and the whole
ceremony was got up in the most costly, the most gorgeous, and, as it
would seem now {10} to a calm and critical reader of history, in the
most theatrical style. The poor Queen did, indeed, make an attempt to
take the place which she claimed in the performances at Westminster
Abbey. "It was natural," says Miss Martineau, "that one so long an
outcast and at length borne back into social life by the sympathies of
a nation should expect too much from these sympathies and fail to stop
at the right point in her demands." Miss Martineau adds, however, and
her words will carry with them the feelings of every reader now, "It
would have been well if the Queen had retired into silence after the
grant of her annuity and the final refusal to insert her name in the
Liturgy." The Queen, of course, failed to obtain an entrance to
Westminster Abbey. It had been arranged by orders of the King that no
one was to be allowed admission, even to look on at the ceremonial,
without a ticket officially issued and properly accredited with the
name of the bearer. The Queen, therefore, was allowed to pass through
the crowded streets, but when she came to the doors of the Abbey the
soldiers on guard asked for her ticket of admission, and of course she
had none to present. Some of the friends who accompanied her
indignantly asked the soldiers whether they did not recognize their
Queen, the Queen of England; but the officers in command replied that
their orders were strict, and the unhappy Caroline Amelia was literally
turned away from the Abbey door. The King had accomplished his object.
[Sidenote: 1821--Death of Queen Caroline]
The poor woman's story comes to an end very soon. On August 2, only a
few days after the Coronation, it was made known to the public that the
Queen was seriously ill. She was suffering, it appears, from internal
inflammation, and the anxieties, the excitements, the heart burnings,
the various agonies of emotion she had lately been undergoing must have
left her poorly prepared. On August 7 her condition became so alarming
to those around her that it was thought right to warn her of her
danger. She quietly said that she had no wish to live, that she hoped
not to suffer much bodily pain in dying, but that she could leave life
without the least regret. She {11} died that day, having lived more
than fifty-two years. It was her singular fate, however, that even in
her death, which otherwise must have brought so much relief, she became
a new source of trouble to her royal husband. George had made up his
mind to pay a visit after his coronation to his subjects in Ireland, to
"the long cherished isle which he loved," as Byron says, "like his
bride." He had got as far as Holyhead on his way when the news reached
him of the Queen's illness, and he thought that it would be hardly
becoming for him to make his first public appearance in Ireland at such
a moment, and to run the risk, perhaps, of having his royal entrance
into Dublin accompanied by the news that his Queen had just died.
Then, when the news of her death did actually reach him, it was still
necessary to make some little delay--joy bells and funeral bells do not
ring well together--and thus George, even as a widower, found his wife
still a little in the way. The remains of Caroline Amelia were carried
back to her native Brunswick, and there ended her melancholy story. It
is impossible not to regard this unhappy woman as the victim, in great
measure, of the customs which so often compel princes and princesses to
leave reciprocal love out of the conditions of marriage. "The birds
which live in the air," says Webster's immortal "Duchess of Malfi,"
On the wild benefit of nature, live
Happier than we, for they can choose their mates.
Other women, indeed, might have struggled far better against the
adverse conditions of an unsuitable marriage and have borne themselves
far better amid its worst trials than the clever, impulsive,
light-hearted, light-headed Caroline Amelia was able to do. There
seems no reason to doubt that she had a good heart, a loving nature,
and the wish to lead a pure and honorable life. But she was too often
thoughtless, careless, wilful, and headstrong, and, like many others
who might have done well under fair conditions, she allowed the worst
qualities of her nature to take the command just at the very moment
when there {12} was most need for the exercise of all that was best in
her. Even with regard to George himself, it seems only fair and
reasonable to assume that he, too, might have done better if his
marriage had not been merely an arrangement of State. Perhaps the
whole history of State marriages contains no chapter at once more
fantastic and more tragic than that which closed with the death of
Caroline Amelia, wife of George the Fourth.
[Sidenote: Death of Napoleon Bonaparte]
While the joy-bells of London were already chiming for the coronation
of George the Fourth, the most powerful enemy George's country had ever
had was passing quietly away in St. Helena. On May 5, 1821, the
Emperor Napoleon died in his island exile. No words could exaggerate
the sensation produced through the whole world by the close of this
marvellous career. He was unquestionably one of the greatest figures
in history. As a conquering soldier he has no rival in the modern
world, and indeed all the history we know of, ancient or modern, can
give but very few names which may bear comparison with his. Unlike
Caesar and Alexander, he had made his way from the humble obscurity of
common life, and, unlike Caesar, he did not seem to have had in him the
intellectual greatness which must have made him, under any conditions,
a master of men and of hemispheres. So far as mere dramatic effect is
concerned, he was less fortunate than Caesar in his disappearance from
the world's stage. Napoleon was doomed to pine and wither away on a
lonely island in the South Atlantic for years and years, and there was
something like an anticlimax in the closing scenes of that marvellous
life-drama. It is pitiful and saddening now to read of the trumpery
annoyances and humiliations to which his days of exile were subjected,
and to read, too, of the unceasing complaints with which he resented
what he regarded as the insults offered to him by his jailers. There
was, indeed, much that was ignoble in the manner of his treatment by
those who had him in charge, in the paltry indignities which he had to
endure, and which he could not endure in the patient dignity of
silence. The mere refusal to allow to him his title of Emperor, and to
insist {13} that he should only be addressed as General Bonaparte, was
as illogical as it was ungenerous; for if revolutionary France had not
the right to make him an Emperor, she certainly could not have had the
right to make him a General. Every movement he made and every movement
made by any of his friends on the island was watched as jealously and
as closely as if he had been some vulgar Jack Sheppard plotting with
his pals for an escape through the windows or the cellars of his prison.
One cannot but regret that Napoleon could not have folded himself in
the majestic mantle of his dignity and his fame, could not even, if it
were needed, have eaten out his own heart in silence, and left his
captors to work their worst upon him without giving them the
satisfaction of extorting a word of querulous remonstrance. His
captors, no doubt, were perpetually haunted by the dread that he might
somehow contrive to make his escape, and that if he once got away from
St. Helena the whole struggle might have to begin all over again. No
doubt, too, his captors would have said, speaking in the spirit of the
times, that Napoleon was not to be trusted like an honorable prisoner
on parole, and that there was no way of securing the peace of the world
but by holding him under close and constant guard. The whole story of
those years of captivity is profoundly sad, and is one which may
probably be read with less pain even by Frenchmen than by high-minded
Englishmen. There has lately been given to the world in the pages of
an American magazine, _The Century_, a continuation of the record once
made by Dr. Barry E. O'Meara of his conversations with Napoleon during
Napoleon's exile in St. Helena. Dr. O'Meara was a surgeon in the
English navy, and was serving in the _Bellerophon_ when Napoleon came
on board. He was allowed to take care of Napoleon by the British
Government, and, as he was an Irishman, he felt a certain sympathy with
Napoleon and came to be treated by the fallen Emperor as a friend. He
published a volume called "A Voice from St. Helena," in which he gave a
detailed account of his talks with the great Emperor. The book was
much read {14} at the time of its publication, and created a deep
interest wherever it was read. From this work O'Meara left out many of
the memoranda he had written down, probably because he thought they
might give offence needlessly to living persons; but the withheld
memoranda were all carefully preserved and passed into the hands of
some of his descendants in New Jersey, and have after this long lapse
of time been published at last. They tell us with painful accuracy of
the petty annoyances constantly inflicted upon Napoleon, and of the
impatience and fretfulness with which, day after day, he resented them
and complained of them. We seem to live with the great dethroned
Emperor in his hours of homeliest complainings, when every little
grievance that burns in his heart finds repeated expression on his
lips. Few chapters in the history of fallen greatness can be more
touching than these pages.
Not all that Napoleon said about England, however, was mere complaint
and disparagement. The world of London may be interested in learning
from these reminiscences how Napoleon told Dr. Barry O'Meara that if
he, Napoleon, had had any authority over the English Metropolis, he
would have long ago taken measures for constructing an embankment on
both sides of the Thames as it passed between Middlesex and Surrey. If
Dr. O'Meara had embodied this suggestion in his public volume, Napoleon
might unconsciously have become the projector of the Thames Embankment.
_Fas est ab hoste_--the proverb is somewhat musty.
{15}