forgotten faction of the Bourbons, as well as to a variety of mistakes
and accidents elsewhere recounted,[207] the result of the Emperor of
Russia’s arrival at Paris in 1814 is mainly to be attributed. Austria was
averse, Russia was indifferent to, the restoration of the Bourbons, and
Prussia was exclusively bent on vengeance and aggrandisement; and the
Regent of England was almost the only man in his own councils, as well
as the only Prince in the Confederacy, really desirous of accomplishing
that object. It is not perhaps equally known, but it is equally true,
that there was, in 1815, equal and greater indifference in the Allied
Powers, amounting to an unwillingness to confer on Louis XVIII. all the
advantages which the prodigious efforts of Europe had wrested from his
antagonist. The experiences of one year have given them an insight into
the personal character of the restored Princes, and still more of the
ungrateful and unreasonable faction which accompanied them. This would
have led Austria, Russia, and Prussia to acquiesce in any arrangement
cheerfully which afforded a prospect of preserving peace, even though it
had altered what is miscalled the legitimate succession of the Monarchy.
The Prince Regent and Duke of Wellington exploded all such notions.
They treated the restoration of Louis XVIII. as an indispensable part
of the arrangement. The Duke of Wellington asked Louis if he preferred
being placed on his throne by Frenchmen or by foreigners. He answered,
“Decidedly by Frenchmen.” “Then,” replied Wellington, “there is but
one method and one man: you must employ Fouché.”[208] Reluctantly, and
with a bad grace, Louis consented. Fouché became Minister. But ere long
Fouché and the base, runaway emigrants whom he restored affected to
be so national that they treated the foreigners, and even the Duke of
Wellington himself, with indignity. The courtiers and the King himself
turned their backs upon him in so marked a way that the Duke resented it,
and did not return to the Tuileries till Monsieur (Charles X.) conveyed
an apology to him.[209] He wrote an account of this transaction home. The
letter was among those confided to and printed by Gurwood (from whom I
had the relation), but suppressed in the publication.
During my absence from England in 1815, many changes had occurred in
the aspect of the party with whom I had uniformly acted. Mr. Whitbread,
who had for many years much influence, good and bad, on its fortunes,
had recently put a violent termination to his ever-active but useful
existence.[210] That lamentable event, as well as many of his defects,
might be traced to a restless impatience of contradiction, which,
resulting perhaps from physical causes, was unaccountably blended in his
very singular character with the earnest affection for individuals and
the most unquestionable benevolence towards mankind. Too honourable and
too conscientious to do what he thought wrong, he had, nevertheless, such
an appetite for applause, and had been so pampered with it by dependants
and sycophants, that when he foresaw it was about to cease or to be
converted by many who had administered it into censure and resistance,
he mistook their discontent with him for self-reproach, and he could not
endure it.
Such was the real history of his suicide. He had extraordinary readiness
and indefatigable application in business, a warm heart, great
decision of character, and a good understanding. Though not without
some imagination, he was lamentably deficient in taste; yet by dint of
earnestness, assiduity, and practice he had made himself little less than
an orator and certainly a very able speaker in Parliament. Vanity often
made him impracticable. Flatterers and dependants engrossed his society,
and not unfrequently perverted his manners and judgment. His death,
though a great loss to the public, and yet more to his neighbourhood
and country, was more likely to heal than exasperate any dissension
in Opposition, for he loved to mark distinctions favourable to his own
popularity, and was, moreover, personally obnoxious to the Grenvilles.
But there were other alterations in the state of the party. Our leaders
had espoused very opposite principles on one great branch of commercial
policy which was brought into agitation in 1814 and 1815. Lauderdale had
been the secret instigator, and was the open champion, of the restrictive
Corn Law[211] which Ministers had adopted. Grey’s real opinion, fortified
and perhaps inculcated by Lauderdale, leant towards any measure that
kept up the price of that article, and prevented any sudden reduction of
rents. Lord Grenville and Mr. Horner were decidedly friends to a free
trade; and the authority and sound philosophy of such men, coinciding
with the natural prejudices of the populace and the mischievous clamour
of some seditious writers, constituted a formidable opposition to a very
questionable, as well as unpopular, policy. Lord Grey, after hesitating
between his own and Lauderdale’s opinion on one side, and a desire of
harassing the Ministry under the sanction of Lord Grenville on the
other, pressed for a postponement of the question, and steered a course
deeply resented by Lauderdale, not quite agreeable to either party,
nor perhaps entirely creditable to himself.[212] He and Lord Grenville
had differed yet more openly on the war, the latter reverting to his
anti-Jacobin prejudices, and Grey maintaining nobly and ably the wisdom
and justice of not interfering. But the war was terminated by the victory
of Waterloo, the occupation of Paris, the forced restoration of Louis
XVIII., and the mass of treaties negotiated by the Prince Regent, Duke
of Wellington, and Lord Castlereagh, and vainly denominated by them
the final settlement of Europe. That immediate cause of difference was
therefore extinct. Yet there remained, in truth, between the Foxite and
Grenville branches of Whigs no real bond of union but a concurrence
of opinion on the subject of Roman Catholics and Ireland, and the
recollection of mutual kindnesses and services during a political
connection of ten years.
The latter feeling was, I believe, strong in Lord Grenville’s honourable
mind, notwithstanding some tenacity of opinion for which his family has
always been remarkable, and from which he is not entirely exempt. It
could not be stronger in his mind than it was in mine, but I am aware
that many Whigs, and among them persons of importance who differed with
him less, felt very soon afterwards much more inclination to separate
from him than myself.
Lord Grey did not come up to the meeting of Parliament in 1816. The
treaties[213] were discussed in his absence; but Lord Grenville was so
little disposed to court the Government that he arraigned without scruple
or reserve every fault of omission or commission he could find in the
treaty, and proposed an amendment which, while it lamented the power and
territory left to France, dwelt yet more emphatically on the impolicy and
danger of keeping a foreign force in that kingdom, and deprecated the
necessity created by that measure of maintaining vast standing armies
during peace. For that amendment, which he had accommodated as far as
he could to my views, I voted. I signed, in common with eleven peers, a
dissentient to its rejection. I moved no amendment of my own, but having
said _not content_ without directing the House to the original address, I
embodied in a short protest of my own the main objections to the treaty,
namely, that it imposed the Bourbons on France, and sanctioned the
principle of guaranteeing hereditary monarchies against the people, for
whom and from whom they should alone derive their authority.
Many of the transactions at Paris, as well as the ungenerous treatment of
Napoleon, were objectionable on principle and disgusting to the feelings
of all who had a nature capable of justice or humanity to a fallen foe.
Substantially, if not technically, the merit or guilt of such acts rests
with the Prince Regent and the Duke of Wellington. If the removal of
the works of art,[214] the demolition of sundry monuments, and other
severe retributions of the kind were after the capitulation irregular
and questionable; if the judicial murders of Labedoyère and Marshal Ney
were direct violations of the articles of that capitulation; and if the
detention and transportation of a dethroned and abdicated monarch by a
foreign Power be a breach of the Law of Nations, as well as an unusual
and harsh exercise of power, they will all be more or less stains on the
character of the great General of the Confederacy, as well as on the
Governments who sanctioned and the Ministerial agents who counselled or
perpetrated such acts of violence or bad faith.
The Duke of Wellington did not, indeed, instigate, possibly he did not
approve of, these public crimes, nor was he the official instrument in
committing them.[215] Nothing perhaps but a weak reluctance to give
advice unpleasant to Royalty restrained him from remonstrating against
some of those acts. He must even then have been aware that they would
tarnish the lustre of his achievements. He had, indeed, the bad taste
on that and many subsequent occasions to speak loudly in disparagement
of Frenchmen,[216] but bigotry or fanaticism in a cause he is much too
sensible to feel, and personal resentment to Ney or Napoleon he could
have none. He is said to have censured in private the appointment of
Sir Hudson Lowe to St. Helena, foreseeing from his knowledge of the
character of that gaoler that his usage of the illustrious prisoner would
be neither humane nor decorous.[217] Such regret, if expressed, was
never conveyed to the quarters where it might have rectified the mistake
and alleviated the sufferings of the prisoner. Wellington preferred the
odium of abetting the oppression of a great man to the hazard of losing
Royal favour or incurring the resentment of official pride, by an act of
humanity and generosity. He must abide by the consequences. History, if
she does not brand him as an accessory in the guilt, will describe him
in this instance as deficient in that magnanimity which is incapable of
it, and which has been so justly extolled in our Black Prince. That great
General, in circumstances not totally dissimilar, respected, soothed, and
interceded for a fallen competitor or dethroned usurper,[218] whom the
chances of war had placed at his disposal. With whom the cruel expedient
of exiling Napoleon originated I do not know. I have reasons to believe
that such a destination for him had been contemplated before he left the
Isle of Elba.[219] When I, in private, upbraided Lord Liverpool with an
act of harshness, so little of a piece with his general character and
policy, he defended himself by the extreme difficulty of knowing what to
do with such a prisoner.
The Prince Regent subsequently showed himself so full of rancour to the
very memory of a man who had eclipsed the glory and assumed, with some
of the vices, all the functions of Royalty, without having been born or
bred to any such pernicious office, that the suspicion of posterity
will fall chiefly upon him. Yet his first feeling, or at least his first
exclamation, on receiving the famous letter, by no means bespoke the
hatred he afterwards displayed to the writer! He is reported to have
said, after glancing his eye over its contents, “Upon my word, a very
proper letter: much more so, I must say, than any I ever received from
Louis XVIII.” This commendation was extorted neither by the strange
singularity of Napoleon’s fate, by the striking and pathetic selection of
the topics, the apt allusion to Themistocles, or the short and emphatic
style of the epistle, but by the title “Altesse” with which it commenced,
and which for some reason or another, to me unknown, our Regent
considered as more respectful and more appropriate to the station he then
held than “Monseigneur.” But though struck with such profound display
of knowledge in etiquette, as none, he deemed, but _porphyrogeniti_
and Germans could possess, it did not soften him, or, if it did, the
compassion it excited was very transient indeed. He grudged even the
asylum our laws afforded to the persecuted adherents of the fallen
Emperor. He was cross at the attentions shown by fashionable society in
London to Flahault[220] and other young men of the late Imperial Court,
and he was bitterly incensed against me because the Duke of Sussex signed
a dissentient to the bill for the detention of Napoleon Bonaparte.
The importance he attached to that incident, and the soreness expressed
about it many years afterwards, are proofs, among many, of the very
trifling, contracted, and personal view he took of all transactions, as
well [as] of the inaccuracy of the reports with which his appetite for
gossip was generally supplied. He imagined, or at least asserted, that
both Lady Holland and myself had used very earnest persuasions to prevail
on his brother Augustus to sign his name, whereas it so happened that
from some little personal motives of vanity, and chiefly at the request
of Lady Holland, I had taken considerable pains to conceal my entering
the protest till it was too late for him or any other peer to add his
name. He, however, availed himself, contrary to my wishes,[221] of the
third reading to annex by reference his adherence to the opinion I had
recorded.
The necessity of any bill implied the irregularity of the whole
proceeding. It passed, however, with little debate in the Session of
1816. Our politicians had a feverish dread of incurring odium by a
fruitless expression of sympathy for a man, so long the theme of popular
execration in the country. Mr. Brougham most unnecessarily expressed
some qualified approbation of the measure. I felt on that, as on some
other occasions, the full value of our privilege of protesting. One
has the consolation of recording one’s principles, without inviting
observation to the shades of difference subsisting between one’s self
and one’s friends. I was, indeed, told that the step I was taking would
be peculiarly offensive to the English public. To the Court it was so,
no doubt: to the people, I believe, far the contrary. The dispassionate
portion of the community would have been better pleased if a less distant
exile and a milder fate had been reserved for their fallen enemy. Our
people, on this, as on many other occasions, displayed more delicacy
and generosity of sentiment than their representatives either gave them
credit for or had the courage to exemplify in their own conduct.
The trial and execution of Marshal Ney and the papers relating to it,
though laid before the House of Lords, on the motion of Lord St. John,
attracted little notice and no debate in Parliament. It was apprehended
by those who reprobated the proceeding, that an unsuccessful attempt to
stigmatise it as a crime comparable to that of infamous memory which
brought Jerome of Prague to the stake, might invite a vote of actual
approbation and stamp permanently on the national character a stain
which, as it is, only tarnishes the fame of a few individuals.[222] The
thirst for revenge which manifestly actuated Louis XVIII. might perhaps
be palliated, and at least was reasonably accounted for by a reference
either to the Marshal’s private professions to him and his subsequent
violation of them, or to the King’s habitual and unfeeling cruelty. But
it is remarkable that the very letters of Lord Bathurst and the Duke of
Wellington of July 7 and 15, 1815,[223] which were produced to justify
the construction put upon the 12th article of the Capitulation by the
victors, distinctly admit and show that a doubt of the meaning of that
article had occurred to the Prince Regent himself before he ratified the
Convention.
It is equally clear from those letters that such doubt was removed from
his mind by the explanation of the Duke of Wellington—that is, by the
interpretation put upon it by one of the signing parties without any
fresh communication with the other. It results from this simple statement
of facts that, by the admission and almost in the judgment of that power
to which an appeal was afterwards made to give the milder construction
to the 12th article, the said article was ambiguous and susceptible of
two interpretations. But another article of the same treaty, namely,
the 15th, contains the following words: “If difficulties arise in the
execution of _any one_ of the articles of the present Convention, the
interpretation of it shall be made in favour of the French Army and of
the City of Paris.” Difficulties did arise in the execution of the 12th
article. The construction which the ratifying party apprehended was put
upon it by one of the weaker party, and the benefit of the doubt under
the 15th article was claimed by that party. Yet “the interpretation was
not made in favour” of, but to the injury and murder of a Marshal of the
Army, and an inhabitant of Paris!
I was, I own, deeply affected by the merits of this case at the time, not
only from compassion for the sufferers, but from a sincere dread of the
disgrace which would attach to the English General and to the English
name, if so just a claim for our intercession were resisted. I ventured
to write to Lord Kinnaird,[224] then living in intimacy with the Duke of
Wellington, on the subject; and in the persuasion that my letter would
arrive long before the irrevocable moment of his execution, I urged him
to communicate my reasons and feelings to his powerful friend. The letter
is as follows:
MIDDLETON, _Dec. 5, 1816_.
DEAR KINNAIRD,
What is passing at Paris annoys me more than I can well
describe. For La Valette,[225] on the score of private
acquaintance, though slight, I am much concerned; but, from the
regard to the character of our country and to that of the Duke
of Wellington (in whom, after the great things he has done,
even as decided an opponent of the war as myself must feel some
national interest), I have conceived more horror at the trials
and executions going on in the teeth of our Capitulation than
mere humanity could create.
How can such a man as Wellington assert that the impunity for
political conduct extends only to impunity from the Allies
for offences committed against them? When ships strike, when
garrisons surrender, do the captains or commanders stipulate
that the foreign conqueror shall not molest them for their
political exertions? With or without such stipulations, what
shadow of right has a foreign enemy to punish individuals for
opinions held or conduct pursued in their own country? It is
clear the impunity promised was impunity for crimes, real or
supposed, against a French Government. If the French Government
was a party to that promise, by that promise it must abide;
if not, the other Allies are bound in honour not to deliver
over a town taken in virtue of it without exacting the same
terms from those to whom they deliver it. Such perhaps is the
formal, technical way of putting the argument. Practically
and substantially the case, if not more striking, is yet more
conclusive to men of justice and honour. The Allies have
virtually (I might say formally too) been masters of Paris,
while the persons who delivered it to them, on the faith of
impunity for political offences,[226] have for political
offences been imprisoned, tried, condemned, and executed!
Wellington has himself precluded all doubt on the question.
He maintains in his letter to Lord Castlereagh that there is
no article in the Capitulation securing to the town of Paris
the pictures and statues, and thereupon he argues; and he acts
upon his argument that the Allies may seize the pictures,
etc., etc., and seize them without any fresh or formal cession
from Louis XVIII. Up to that time, then, the Allies, according
to him, were in military possession of Paris; and up to that
time therefore, even upon his own view of the subject, the
inhabitants were entitled to claim impunity for all political
opinions and conduct. Those who had the right and the power of
taking forcibly from Paris property not specified or disposed
of in the Capitulation, notwithstanding the nominal Government
of Louis XVIII., must surely have a right to enforce on any
such nominal and dependent Government the observance of
promises on the faith of which the inhabitants had surrendered
the town. Technical arguments may possibly be urged on both
sides; and though they appear to me all in favour of Ney’s
claim, it is _not_ on them I lay the stress, but on the obvious
and practical aspect of the transaction as it must strike
impartial men and posterity. The plain relation of the events
in history will be this. A promise of security was held out to
the inhabitants of Paris: they surrendered the town; and while
Wellington and the Allies were still really in possession of
it, Labedoyère was executed, and Ney was tried for political
opinion and conduct. Even of subsequent executions, and I fear
there will be many, it will be said, “The Allies delivered
over their authority in Paris to a French Government, without
exacting an observance of the stipulations on which they had
originally acquired it.”
Had we taken Martinique in ’93 or ’94 on a promise of not
molesting individuals for political opinions or conduct, should
we have been at liberty to cede it, had Louis XVIII. been then
restored, without insisting on the impunity of all political
offences, or, at the very least, on the right of leaving the
country for such as might have so offended? In Egypt the French
stipulated that no natives should be molested for their conduct
or opinions during the war. We took military possession of
the country on those terms, and then delivered it over to the
political authority of the Ottoman Porte. When, however, the
Captain Pacha, acting under that authority, began murdering the
Beys and proceeding against the adherents of the French, we
not only remonstrated and threatened, but actually protected
the persecuted men within our lines. Yet by reference to the
history of those times, you will find that many blamed Lord
Hutchinson,[227] for not having recourse to yet more violent
methods to enforce on the “legitimate political authority”
the observance of engagements entered into by our military
power on taking military possession of the country. Lord
Nelson’s conduct at Naples was indeed different: but what is
the impression left of those transactions? Will Wellington
condescend to accept the only palliation ever offered for
Nelson, though a man in all other respects so justly beloved,
_viz._, blind, bigoted zeal and a very narrow capacity on
every subject not connected with his own profession. What
would Wellington himself have said, if the British troops had
surrendered any town in Spain to the French with a similar
stipulation, and if on the flimsy and hypocritical subterfuge
of a distinction between Joseph’s Spanish Government and the
French military authorities, all the Spaniards who had assisted
us during the siege had been prosecuted for treason against
Joseph? Yet where is the distinction?
The worst is, that as nothing but Wellington’s name could
carry down so foul a transaction, so the whole odium of the
breach of faith will fall on him and him only. He signed, he
interpreted the Capitulation; _and when a construction of a
doubtful passage might have saved one of the first officers
of the age, he gave it the meaning least favourable to the
conquered party, and left a man with whom he had once coped in
the field of honourable war to be taken off by the hands of the
executioner._
The want of principle and consistency and the disgusting
changes of the Marshals have, I know, steeled men’s minds to
their sufferings. This is natural enough. But when the violence
of the times is gone by, and, above all, when the tomb has
closed on their offences, the transaction will be judged with
reference to the character of Wellington and to the nature of
his promise, not to the conduct or misconduct of the sufferers.
Si ego digna in quam faceres, tu tamen indignus qui
feceris, Pamphile.