reserve. Probably he foresaw his opportunity in the inevitable
disruption of his opponents; and if so, his foresight was soon realized
by events. On the capture of the Bastille, Fox exclaimed: "How much the
greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the
best!" At the same time Burke was writing to an intimate friend: "The
old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner. It is true
that this may be no more than a sudden explosion. If so, no indication
can be taken from it; but if it should be character rather than
accident, then that people are not fit for liberty, and must have a
strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them." This
contrast between the judgments of the 10 great Whigs was continuously
and rapidly heightened. Fox threw himself into the revolutionary cause
with all the ardour which he had displayed on behalf of American
independence. Burke opposed with characteristic vehemence the French
attempt to build up a theoretical Constitution on the ruins of
religion, history, and authority; and any fresh act of cruelty or
oppression which accompanied the process stirred in him that tremendous
indignation against violence and injustice of which Warren Hastings had
learned by stern experience the intensity and the volume. The
_Reflections on the French Revolution_ and the _Appeal from the New to
the Old Whigs_ expressed in the most splendid English which was ever
written the dire apprehensions that darkened their author's receptive
and impassioned mind. "A voice like the Apocalypse sounded over England,
and even echoed in all the Courts of Europe. Burke poured the vials of
his hoarded vengeance into the agitated heart of Christendom, and
stimulated the panic of a world by the wild pictures of his inspired
imagination."
Meanwhile the Whig party was rent in twain. The Duke of Portland, Lord
Fitzwilliam, the Duke of Devonshire, Lord John Cavendish, and Sir George
Elliot adhered to Burke. Fox as stoutly opposed him, and was reinforced
by Sheridan, Francis, Erskine, and Grey. The pathetic issue of the
dispute, in Burke's formal repudiation of Fox's friendship, has taken
its place among those historic Partings of Friends which have modified
the course of human society. As far as can now be judged, the bulk of
the country was with Burke, and the execution of Louis XVI. was followed
by an astonishing outbreak of popular feeling. The theatres were closed.
The whole population wore mourning. The streets rang with the cry "War
with France!" The very pulpits re-echoed the summons. Fox himself was
constrained to declare to the electors of Westminster that there was no
one outside France who did not consider this sad catastrophe "as a most
revolting act of cruelty and injustice."
But it was too late. The horror and indignation of England were not to
be allayed by soothing words of decorous sympathy from men who had
applauded the earlier stages of the tragedy, though they wept at its
culmination. The warlike spirit of the race was aroused, and it spoke in
the cry, "No peace with the regicides!" Pitt clearly discerned the
feeling of the country, and promptly gave effect to it. He dismissed
Chauvelin, who informally represented the Revolutionary Government in
London, and he demanded from Parliament an immediate augmentation of the
forces.
On the 20th of January, 1793, France declared war against England. The
great struggle had begun, and that declaration was a new starting-point
in the political history of England. English parties entered into new
combinations. English politics assumed a new complexion. Pitt's imperial
mind maintained its ascendency, but the drift of his policy was entirely
changed. All the schemes of Parliamentary, financial, and commercial
reform in which he had been immersed yielded place to the stern
expedients of a Minister fighting for his life against revolution abroad
and sedition at home. For though, as I said just now, popular sentiment
was stirred by the King's execution into vehement hostility to France,
still the progress of the war was attended by domestic consequences
which considerably modified this sentiment. Hostility gave way to
passive acquiescence, and acquiescence to active sympathy.
Among the causes which produced this change were the immense increase of
national burdens; the sudden agglomeration of a lawless population in
the manufacturing towns which the war called into being; the growing
difficulties in Ireland, where revolutionary theories found ready
learners; the absolute abandonment of all attempts at social and
political improvement; the dogged determination of those in authority to
remedy no grievance however patent, and to correct no abuse however
indefensible.
The wise and temperate reforms for which the times were ripe, and which
the civil genius of Pitt pre-eminently qualified him to effect, were not
only suspended but finally abandoned under the influence of an insane
reaction. The besotted resistance to all change stimulated the desire
for it. Physical distress co-operated with political discontent to
produce a state of popular disaffection such as the whole preceding
century had never seen. The severest measures of coercion and repression
only, and scarcely, restrained the populace from open and desperate
insurrection, and thirty years of this experience brought England to the
verge of a civil catastrophe.
Patriotism was lost in partisanship. Political faction ran to an
incredible excess. The whole community was divided into two hostile
camps. Broadly speaking, the cause of France was espoused, with
different degrees of fervour, by all lovers of civil and religious
freedom. To the Whigs the humiliation of Pitt was a more cherished
object than the defeat of Napoleon. Fox wrote to a friend: "The triumph
of the French Government over the English does, in fact, afford me a
degree of pleasure which it is very difficult to disguise;" and I have
gathered that this was the prevalent temper of Whiggery during the long
and desperate struggle with Republican and Imperial France. What Byron
called "The crowning carnage, Waterloo," brought no abatement of
political rancour. The question of France, indeed, was eliminated from
the contest, but its elimination enabled English Liberals to concentrate
their hostility on the Tory Government without incurring the reproach of
unpatriotic sympathy with the enemies of England.
In the great fight between Tory and Whig, Government and Opposition,
Authority and Freedom, there was no quarter. Neither age nor sex was
spared. No department of national life was untouched by the fury of the
contest. The Royal Family was divided. The Duke of Cumberland was one of
the most dogged and unscrupulous leaders of the Tory party; the Duke of
Sussex toasted the memory of Charles James Fox, and at a public dinner
joined in singing "The Trumpet of Liberty," of which the chorus ran--
"Fall, tyrants, fall!
These are the days of liberty;
Fall, tyrants, fall!"
The Established Church was on the side of authority; the Dissenters
stood for freedom. "Our opponents," said Lord John Russell, in one of
his earliest speeches--"our opponents deafen us with their cry of
'Church and King.' Shall I tell you what they mean by it? They mean a
Church without the Gospel and a King above the law." An old Radical
electioneer, describing the activity of the country clergy on the Tory
side, said: "In every village we had the Black Recruiting-Sergeant
against us." Even within sacred walls the echoes of the fight were
heard. The State Holy-days--Gunpowder Treason, Charles the Martyr, the
Restoration and the Accession--gave suitable occasion for sermons of the
most polemical vehemence. Even the two Collects for the King at the
beginning of the Communion Service were regarded as respectively Tory
and Whig. The first, with its bold assertion of the Divine Right of
Sovereignty, was that which commended itself to every loyal clergyman on
his promotion; and unfavourable conclusions were drawn with regard to
the civil sentiments of the man who preferred the colourless
alternative. As in the Church, so in our educational system. Oxford,
with its Caroline and Jacobite traditions, was the Tory University;
Cambridge, the nursing mother of Whigs; Eton was supposed to cherish a
sentiment of romantic affection for the Stuarts; Harrow was profoundly
Hanoverian. Even the drama was involved in political antipathies, and
the most enthusiastic adherents of Kean and Kemble were found
respectively among the leaders of Whig and Tory Society.
The vigour, heartiness, and sincerity of this political hatred put to
shame the more tepid convictions of our degenerate days. The first Earl
of Leicester, better known as "Coke of Norfolk," told my father that
when he was a child his grandfather took him on his knee and said, "Now,
remember, Tom, as long as you live, never trust a Tory;" and he used to
say, "I never have, and, by George, I never will." A little girl of
Whig descent, accustomed from her cradle to hear language of this sort,
asked her mother, "Mamma, are Tories born wicked, or do they grow wicked
afterwards?" and her mother judiciously replied, "They are born wicked,
and grow worse." I well remember in my youth an eccentric maiden
lady--Miss Harriet Fanny Cuyler--who had spent a long and interesting
life in the innermost circles of aristocratic Whiggery; and she always
refused to enter a four-wheel cab until she had extorted from the driver
his personal assurance that he never had cases of infectious disease in
his cab, that he was not a Puseyite, and was a Whig.
I am bound to say that this vehement prejudice was not unnatural in a
generation that remembered, either personally or by immediate tradition,
the iron coercion which Pitt exercised in his later days, and which his
successors continued. The barbarous executions for high treason remain a
blot on the fair fame of the nineteenth century. Scarcely less horrible
were the trials for sedition, which sent an English clergyman to
transportation for life because he had signed a petition in favour of
Parliamentary reform.
"The good old Code, like Argus, had a hundred watchful eyes,
And each old English peasant had his good old English spies,
To tempt his starving discontent with good old English lies,
Then call the British yeomanry to stop his peevish cries."
At Woburn, a market town forty miles from London, under the very shadow
of a great Whig house, no political meeting could be held for fear of
Pitt's spies, who dropped down from London by the night coach and
returned to lay information against popular speakers; and when the
politicians of the place desired to express their sentiments, they had
to repair secretly to an adjacent village off the coach road, where they
were harangued under cover of night by the young sons of the Duke of
Bedford.
The ferocity, the venality, the profligate expenditure, the delirious
excitement of contested elections have made an indelible mark on our
political history. In 1780 King George III. personally canvassed the
Borough of Windsor against the Whig candidate, Admiral Keppel, and
propitiated a silk-mercer by calling at his shop and saying, "The Queen
wants a gown--wants a gown. No Keppel. No Keppel." It is pleasant to
reflect that the friends of freedom were not an inch behind the
upholders of tyranny in the vigour and adroitness of their
electioneering methods. The contest for the City of Westminster in 1788
is thus described in the manuscript diary of Lord Robert Seymour:--
"The Riotts of the Westr. Election are carried such lengths the Military
obliged to be called into the assistance of Ld. Hood's party. Several
Persons have been killed by Ld. J. Townsend's Butchers who cleave them
to the Ground with their Cleavers--Mr. Fox very narrowly escaped being
killed by a Bayonet wch. w'd certainly have been fatal had not a poor
Black saved him fm. the blow. Mr. Macnamara's Life is despaired of--&
several others have died in the difft. Hospitals. Next Thursday decides
the business.
"July 25.--Lord John Townsend likely to get the Election--what has
chiefly contributed to Ld. Hood's losing it is that Mr. Pulteney is his
Friend--Mr. P. can command 1,500 Votes--& as he is universally disliked
by his Tenants they are unanimous in voting against him--wch. for Ld. H.
proves a very unfortunate circumstance. The Duke of Bedford sent £10,000
towards the Expenses of the Opposition.
"It is thought that Lord Hood will not attempt a Scrutiny. One of Ld.
Hood's votes was discovered to be a carrot-scraper in St. James's Market
who sleeps in a little Kennel about the Size of a Hen Coup.
"Augt. 5th--The Election decided in favour of Ld. J.T., who was
chaired--and attend'd by a Procession of a mile in length. On his Head
was a crown of Laurel. C. Fox follow'd him in a Landau & 6 Horses
cover'd in Favors & Lawrels. The appearance this Procession made was
equal in splendor to the public Entry of an Ambassador."
A by-election was impending in Yorkshire, and Pitt, paying a social
visit to the famous Mrs. B.--one of the Whig Queens of the West
Riding--said, banteringly, "Well, the election is all right for us. Ten
thousand guineas for the use of our side go down to Yorkshire to-night
by a sure hand." "The devil they do!" responded Mrs. B., and that night
the bearer of the precious burden was stopped by a highwayman on the
Great North Road, and the ten thousand guineas were used to procure the
return of the Whig candidate. The electioneering methods, less
adventurous but not more scrupulous, of a rather later day have been
depicted in _Pickwick_, and _Coningsby_, and _My Novel_, and
_Middlemarch_, with all the suggestive fun of a painting by Hogarth.
And so, with startling incidents and culpable expedients and varying
fortunes, the great struggle for political freedom was conducted through
the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, and it has been my
interesting fortune to know some of the toughest of the combatants both
among the leaders and in the rank-and-file. And from all of them
alike--and not only from them, but from all who remembered the time--I
have gathered the impression that all through their earlier life the
hidden fires of revolution were smouldering under English society, and
that again and again an actual outbreak was only averted by some happy
stroke of fortune. At the Election of 1868 an old labourer in the
agricultural Borough of Woodstock told a Liberal canvasser from Oxford
that in his youth arms had been stored in his father's cottage so as to
be in readiness for the outbreak which was to take place if Lord Grey's
Reform Bill was finally defeated. A Whig nobleman, of great experience
and calm judgment, told me that if Princess Victoria had died before
William IV., and thereby Ernest Duke of Cumberland had succeeded to the
Throne, no earthly power could have averted a revolution. "I have no
hesitation in saying," I heard Mr. Gladstone say, "that if the repeal of
the Corn Laws had been defeated, or even retarded, we should have had a
revolution." Charles Kingsley and his fellow-workers for Social Reform
expected a revolution in April 1848.
But, after all, these testimonies belong to the region of conjecture.
Let me close this chapter by a narrative of fact, derived from the late
Lord de Ros, who was an eye-witness of the events which he narrated.
Arthur Thistlewood (whose execution for the "Cato Street Conspiracy" I
have described in a previous chapter) was a young Englishman who had
been in Paris in the time of Robespierre's ascendency, and had there
imbibed revolutionary sentiments. He served for a short time as an
officer in the English Army, and after quitting the service he made
himself notorious by trying to organize a political riot in London, for
which he was tried and acquitted. He subsequently collected round him a
secret society of disaffected citizens, and proceeded to arrange a plan
by which he hoped to paralyze Government and establish a Reign of Terror
in London.
One evening, in the winter of 1819-20, a full-dress ball was given by
the Spanish Ambassador in Portland Place, and was attended by the Prince
Regent, the Royal Dukes, the Duke of Wellington, the Ministers of State,
and the leaders of fashion and society. "About one o'clock, just before
supper, a sort of order was circulated among the junior officers to draw
towards the head of the stairs, though no one knew for what reason,
except that an unusual crowd had assembled in the street. The appearance
of Lavender and one or two well-known Bow Street officers in the
entrance-hall also gave rise to surmises of some impending riot. While
the officers were whispering to one another as to what was expected to
happen, a great noise was heard in the street, the crowd dispersed with
loud cries in all directions, and a squadron of the 2nd Life Guards
arrived with drawn swords at a gallop from their barracks (then situate
in King Street), and rapidly formed in front of the Ambassador's house.
Lavender and the Bow Street officers now withdrew; the officers who had
gathered about the stairhead were desired to return to the ballroom.
"The alarm, whatever it might have been, appeared to be over, and before
the company broke up the Life Guards had been withdrawn to their
barracks. Inside the Ambassador's house all had remained so quiet that
very few of the ladies present were aware till next day that anything
unusual had happened, but it became known after a short time that the
Duke of Wellington had received information of an intended attack upon
the house, which the precautions taken had probably prevented; and upon
the trial of Thistlewood and his gang (for the Cato Street Conspiracy)
it came out, among other evidence of the various wild schemes they had
formed, that Thistlewood had certainly entertained the project, at the
time of this ball, to attack the Spanish Ambassador's house, and destroy
the Regent and other Royal personages, as well as the Ministers, who
were sure to be, most of them, present on the occasion."
For details of the Cato Street Conspiracy the curious reader is referred
to the _Annual Register_ for 1820, and it is strange to reflect that
these explosions of revolutionary rage occurred well within the
recollection of people now[11] living, among whom I hope it is not
invidious to mention Mr. Charles Villiers,[12] Lady Mary Saurin,[13] and
Lady Glentworth.[14]
FOOTNOTES:
[11] 1897.
[12] The Right Hon. C.P. Villiers, M.P., 1802-98.
[13] (_nee_ Ryder), 1801-1900.
[14] Eve Maria, Viscountess Glentworth, 1803-19.
XI.
PARLIAMENTARY ORATORY.
Closely connected with the subject of Politics, of which we were
speaking in the last chapter, is that of Parliamentary Oratory, and for
a right estimate of oratory personal impressions (such as those on which
I have relied) are peculiarly valuable. They serve both to correct and
to confirm. It is impossible to form from the perusal of a printed
speech anything but the vaguest and often the most erroneous notion of
the effect which it produced upon its hearers. But from the testimony of
contemporaries one can often gain the clue to what is otherwise
unintelligible. One learns what were the special attributes of bearing,
voice, or gesture, the circumstances of delivery, or even the antecedent
conditions of character and reputation, which perhaps doomed some
magnificent peroration to ludicrous failure, or, on the contrary,
"ordained strength" out of stammering lips and disjointed sentences.
Testimony of this kind the circumstances of my life have given me in
great abundance. My chain of tradition links me to the days of the
giants.
Almost all the old people whose opinions and experience I have recorded
were connected, either personally or through their nearest relations,
with one or other of the Houses of Parliament. Not a few of them were
conspicuous actors on the stage of political life. Lord Robert Seymour,
from whose diary I have quoted, died in 1831, after a long life spent
in the House of Commons, which he entered in 1771, and of which for
twenty-three years he was a fellow-member with Edmund Burke. Let me
linger for a moment on that illustrious name.
In originality, erudition, and accomplishments Burke had no rival among
Parliamentary speakers. His prose is, as we read it now, the most
fascinating, the most musical, in the English language. It bears on
every page the divine lineaments of genius. Yet an orator requires
something more than mere force of words. He must feel, while he speaks,
the pulse of his audience, and instinctively regulate every sentence by
reference to their feelings. All contemporary evidence shows that in
this kind of oratorical tact Burke was eminently deficient. His
nickname, "The Dinner-bell of the House of Commons," speaks for his
effect on the mind of the average M.P. "In vain," said: Moore, "did
Burke's genius put forth its superb plumage, glittering all over with
the hundred eyes of fancy. The gait of the bird was heavy and awkward,
and its voice seemed rather to scare than attract."
Macaulay has done full justice to the extraordinary blaze of brilliancy
which on supreme occasions threw these minor defects into the shade.
Even now the old oak rafters of Westminster Hall seem to echo that
superlative peroration which taught Mrs. Siddons a higher flight of
tragedy than her own, and made the accused proconsul feel himself for
the moment the guiltiest of men. Mr. Gladstone declared that Burke was
directly responsible for the war with France, for "Pitt could not have
resisted him." For the more refined, the more cultivated, the more
speculative intellects he had--and has--an almost supernatural charm.
His style is without any exception the richest, the most picturesque,
the most inspired and inspiring in the language. In its glories and its
terrors it resembles the Apocalypse. Mr. Morley, in the most striking of
all his critical essays, has truly said that the natural ardour which
impelled Burke to clothe his judgments in glowing and exaggerated
phrases is one secret of his power over us, because it kindles in those
who are capable of that generous infection a respondent interest and
sympathy. "He has the sacred gift of inspiring men to care for high
things, and to make their lives at once rich and austere. Such a gift is
rare indeed. We feel no emotion of revolt when Mackintosh speaks of
Shakespeare and Burke in the same breath as being, both of them, above
mere talent. We do not dissent when Macaulay, after reading Burke's
works over again, exclaims: 'How admirable! The greatest man since
Milton!'"
No sane critic would dream of comparing the genius of Pitt with that of
Burke. Yet where Burke failed Pitt succeeded. Burke's speeches, indeed,
are a part of our national literature; Pitt was, in spite of grave and
undeniable faults, the greatest Minister that ever governed England.
Foremost among the gifts by which he acquired his supreme ascendency
must be placed his power of parliamentary speaking. He was not, as his
father was, an orator in that highest sense of oratory which implies
something of inspiration, of genius, of passionate and poetic rapture;
but he was a public speaker of extraordinary merit. He had while still a
youth what Coleridge aptly termed "a premature and unnatural dexterity
in the combination of words," and this developed into "a power of
pouring forth with endless facility perfectly modulated sentences of
perfectly chosen language, which as far surpassed the reach of a normal
intellect as the feats of an acrobat exceed the capacities of a normal
body." It was eloquence particularly well calculated to sway a popular
assembly which yet had none of the characteristics of a mob. A sonorous
voice; a figure and bearing which, though stiff and ungainly, were
singularly dignified; an inexhaustible copiousness of grandiloquent
phrase; a peculiar vein of sarcasm which froze like ice and cut like
steel--these were some of the characteristics of the oratory which from
1782 to 1806 at once awed and fascinated the House of Commons.