intellectual powers. He seemed built for longevity; and no man was better
made to bear fatigue, labour, or debauch. Even in hearing and seeing
he had the advantage of other people. Vain as he was, he, in words and
manner and sometimes in actions, acknowledged the superiority of Mr.
Fox,[241] and even liked his society as much as he could that of any
man who had advantages over him. He was, in short, less jealous of him
than he would have been of another in the same situation. The unaffected
admiration which he knew Mr. Fox entertained and professed for his wit,
eloquence, and writings, in some measure disarmed his malignity.
The truth is, that although vindictive where his vanity had been wounded,
he was not an ill-natured man. He could pardon an injury more readily
than a slight, and either, I fear I must add, more easily than a great
obligation. To inferiors he was not merely civil and serviceable, but he
was kind and considerate. Where his own self-love was no wise concerned,
he was disposed to soothe that of others, and that, too, in cases where
he could have no view of courting popularity. Even on his death-bed, the
old woman put into the house by his creditors was so won by his anxiety
lest she should lose her dinner by waiting on him, that she contracted
an attachment for him as strong as if she had attended him from his
childhood.
I saw him at that period. Enough transpired, even in those moments of
distress, to show that any attempt to relieve him from his embarrassments
would have been fruitless, all concert with him for such a purpose
impracticable, and any reliance on his assertions hazardous in the
extreme. Mrs. Sheridan assured me that in his last illness he professed
much contrition for his sins, and Dr. Howley, Bishop of London,[242]
unquestionably attended and read prayers to him, while he folded his
hands, being unable to speak. Mrs. Sheridan, indeed, related other
circumstances in proof of the sincerity of his repentance and earnestness
for forgiveness; but the Archbishop’s recollection by no means confirmed
them, and her anxious wishes or general knowledge of Mr. Sheridan’s
opinion might lead her somewhat hastily to believe them. It is true,
however, that he always affected a sense of religion, and if some traits
of superstition are proofs of such feeling, he was not exempt from them.
The pious love to infer the truth of religion from the compunction of
persons of irregular habits on their death-beds. Where the case occurs,
religion has a right to such argument as it supplies. It would be unjust
to withhold any credible testimony to the fact, when it occurs. I believe
Mr. Sheridan died with strong religious apprehensions on his mind; but
what does that prove? That a sense of religion may exist, where the moral
virtues it inculcates are habitually neglected.
Of the brilliancy of wit and fascination of manner, which made one forget
in his society so many and such grievous faults, I have spoken more than
once in the preceding chapters and elsewhere. My pen has been reluctantly
employed here in tracing the darker shades of his portrait, from an
apprehension that the false glitter thrown over them might injure the
truth of the more general picture of public men, which I have endeavoured
faithfully to delineate.
But let me not close so painful a judgment on a man whose genius has
often delighted me, without reminding my readers that no Englishman since
the time of Edmund Waller has so indisputably attained excellence in the
three branches of conversation, composition, and oratory, as the person
whose defects I have been thus compelled to recall. His best speeches
recalled in fame and effect those of Mr. Fox, Mr. Pitt, Lord North, or
Mr. Canning. If they had not the characteristic excellencies of Mr.
Burke, Mr. Windham, or Mr. Grattan, they far surpassed in effect, though
not in genius, the happiest efforts of those three eccentric men. Many
years after the Begum speech in the House of Commons, Mr. Fox pronounced
it to be the best ever delivered within the walls of Parliament, and
Mr. Pitt is reported to have been of the same opinion.[243] Indeed, he
implied as much, by unexpectedly assenting to the motion with which it
concluded. Other speakers of his age have shone in written composition;
but what modern orator but Sheridan ever produced a masterpiece in any
literature? Burke’s best work holds not the same relation to common
political pamphlets or ordinary metaphysical disputations, as the _School
for Scandal_ bears to the comedies on our stage. If the conversation of
Fox, Windham, or Grattan abounded more with philosophy and knowledge, and
if it was occasionally as varied and delightful as Mr. Sheridan’s, yet it
was not so well adapted to the taste of all classes, nor so remarkable
for playful satire and vivacity, for quick discernment and well-bred
exposure of individual character. FitzPatrick, Hare, Lord John Townshend,
and others more nearly his rivals in that respect, never aspired to
the fame of leading orators or classical authors. It was reserved for
Sheridan to be brilliant alike in the club, the theatre, and the senate.
If we must acknowledge in some features of Pope’s inimitable portrait
of Wharton a resemblance to the prominent blemishes of Sheridan, we may
yet with confidence aver that the poet, in recording the genius and
versatility of the “wonder of the age,” falls far short of the splendour
and variety which dazzled and delighted the theatre, the Parliament, and
the public in our own contemporary—Mr. Sheridan.
In this same year of 1816 died another friend, whom I had found in the
ranks of Opposition, if not in the party of the Whigs, thirty years
before—Charles, third Earl Stanhope. I have spoken of him at length in
the first Book of these notes.[244] The House of Lords, in spite of his
eccentricities, and I, perhaps in consequence of them, regretted his
loss, and missed the originality with which he seldom failed to enliven
our debates. It fell to my lot as his legatee and executor to compose the
inscription on his monument in Chevening, and I have the satisfaction
of thinking that I have there recorded the peculiarity for which he
would most like to be distinguished, without wounding the feelings of
his family who had some reason to be hurt both at his conduct and his
will.[245] The present Lord told me very handsomely that he always read
it with pleasure, for there was not a word in it that was not true.
The forwardness in person, character, and understanding of the Princess
Charlotte of Wales, and the dread lest her mother might contrive for her
or she devise for herself an alliance or something worse, induced the
Court to look out for a marriage for her, soon after the proposal of the
Prince of Orange had been rejected. The alleged motives of that rejection
led to the reasonable preference of a Prince unfettered with any duties
which would call him away from England. The Duke and Duchess of York and
Lord Anglesey suggested, as I believe, the Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg;
and some pardonable contrivances, powerfully aided by the very handsome
person of the Prince himself, secured the full acquiescence of the young
lady. Much of the curiosity which the story of his courtship might have
excited is destroyed by the death of his Royal consort next year, an
event which produced a sensation more flattering to the memory of the
young Princess than to her surviving relations, and more illustrative of
the strength of the passion of hope than of loyalty.
[Illustration: _Charles, 3rd Earl Stanhope_
_J. Opie, R.A. Pinx._
_Emery Walker Ph. Sc._]
Among the marriages of the Royal Family which followed was one between
the Duke of Kent and the widowed sister of Prince Leopold. That
alliance may in its results revive the importance of Prince Leopold, to
all appearance suddenly extinguished in this country in 1817. On his
marriage in 1816, an enormous annuity of £50,000 per annum was granted
him. He was also given, by an Act of Parliament, all the rights, except
that of succession to the throne, which attach to a descendant of the
Princess Sophia. He, with over-caution, declined a peerage: George IV.
was afterwards little disposed to renew the offer. Personal beauty and
circumspection were at that time Leopold’s most vaunted qualifications.
The vulgar thought him, in his capacity of needy German Prince, and
without much further proof, sordid and rapacious. The visible improvement
of his Royal bride, in the course of the few months she was destined to
live, gained him the credit of acquiring, by discretion and sagacity,
great ascendancy over her mind. Whether his instructions or further
experience would ever have enabled her to fulfil the somewhat extravagant
expectations entertained by the people may be left to a chapter in
that science termed _media scientia_, which the schoolmen describe as
inscrutable to the Deity himself.
The great virtues of Princes and Princesses who die young have frequently
been the object of pleasantry, and it cannot be denied that the sudden
extinction of an existence full of hope, in the person of a young and
pretty bride, was well calculated to mislead the best feelings of the
country into such an illusion. Yet, in the judgment of sobriety, little
had appeared in this young lady to justify the inordinate grief at
her death. She was pretty and she was gay; nor had she betrayed any
propensities to remind men of her mother. But, on the other hand, she
had shown even in the nursery, and still more in the months preceding
her marriage, that she inherited, together with the Prince Regent’s
quickness of apprehension and feeling, some of his greatest defects,
_viz._, a love of exaggeration, if not a disregard of truth, in
professions and complaints, a passion for tale-bearers and favourites,
and all those petty failings and practices which lead to what the French
call _tracasseries_ and which rendered the private Court of her father,
whether Heir-Apparent, Prince Regent, or King, the abode of uneasy
heartburnings and jealousies and the scene of squabbles and scrapes,
embarrassing, indeed, to the progress of State affairs, but almost below
the notice of politicians, and quite unworthy of the province of history.
I have thus adverted prematurely to the untimely death of the Princess
Charlotte, and to what little I knew from report of her character, when
the course of my narrative had only brought me to her marriage. To
prevent repetition, I will here mention that on my return to England
in November, 1817, three days after her death, everybody I met between
London and Dover, including post-boys and turnpike men, bore signs of
mourning on their persons. Yet so little was this national affection
extended to other parts of the family, that calumnies, representing the
Regent and Queen Charlotte as rejoiced at the catastrophe, and even
guilty of accelerating it, were very generally credited by the vulgar,
and not repelled even in better educated circles with that scorn and
contempt which justice and truth required.
The extraordinary sensation produced by her death was, indeed, a stronger
indication of the unpopularity of the Prince Regent and his brothers than
of the childish affection for Royalty, which the people of England so
frequently display. The events which had intervened between her marriage
and her death, and the tone assumed by the Prince Regent’s Government
thereupon, had soured the lower classes of the community, and sensibly
lessened the small stock of popularity which the Prince Regent had ever
possessed. Although the Alien Bill had been most unnecessarily renewed
in 1816, that Session of Parliament closed without any appearance of
disaffection in the country or any symptom of ill-humour in Parliament.
A bad harvest ensued; the people were distressed. Lord Sidmouth, who
held the Seals of the Home Department, listened with inauspicious
complacency to every tale which officious magistrates and designing spies
brought of conspiracies and impending tumults. The faction of Levellers,
Jacobins, or Radicals, which is never formidable, yet never wholly
extinct in England or Scotland, resumed their practice of disseminating
seditious and blasphemous handbills. They availed themselves of the
elaborate blunders of Major Cartwright,[246] the able mischief of
William Cobbett,[247] and the brawling eloquence (_loquentia potius quam
eloquentia_) of Hunt,[248] to promote the cry for universal suffrage
and annual Parliaments, among a class whose sufferings give to the
prospect of change, whatever name it may assume, the pleasing colours of
improvement.
The Prince Regent, apt enough to suspect danger, was yet more pleased
at encountering it, whether real or imaginary, with arbitrary authority
or coercion. Lord Sidmouth, either from sheer credulity or from
subserviency, was busy in collecting foolish stories of plots,[249] and
earnest in recommending measures of precaution and severity.
On January 28 Parliament met for the dispatch of business. I went down
about four o’clock with an intention of reading the King’s Speech (a copy
of which is usually lying on the table or the woolsacks, in the interval
between its delivery and the resumption of the House) before business
began. There were no Lords: there was some difficulty in procuring a
copy of the Speech from the Chancellor. He was said to be at dinner, but
he was closeted in his own room with Lord Sidmouth. The clerks seemed
disconcerted, and everything, if not out of place and in dismay, at a
stand and in suspense.
At length the mystery was cleared up. The Duke of Sussex, who arrived
before five, told me the Prince Regent had not only been hissed but
pelted in his way to and from the House, and he whispered to me
significantly, “He himself _pretends_ he was shot at.” Accordingly, on
the resumption of the House, before the Select Vestry Bill was moved or
the Chancellor had read the Speech from the woolsack, up rose my Lord
Sidmouth, and with more than his usual solemnity (sufficient though it
be to that or almost any other occasion) stated that the Prince, on his
return through the Park, had been grossly insulted and assailed.
The Duke of Montrose (Master of the Horse) then related, in a manner
somewhat indistinct and confused, that a stroke had been _propelled_
against the carriage in which he was accompanying the Prince Regent
_by a force stronger than a man’s arm_. Two holes, he added, were made
in the glass, and he described their appearance. Lord James Murray,
who was in Waiting, was then called to the bar. His evidence led to
the inference that a shot had been aimed from one of the trees in the
Park, and he conjectured that an air pistol, for he probably perceived
that the concealment of an air gun was somewhat difficult, had been the
instrument. Lord Grey cross-examined him, which Lord Grenville whispered
to me was injudicious. He, Lord Grenville, soon afterwards spoke, as did
Lords Eldon and Sidmouth, with becoming horror of such an outrage; but
he did not affect, as the others did, great agitation and alarm at the
event, which, in spite of his propriety and decorum, he must have deemed
questionable. Lord Sidmouth, to vent his feelings of indignation and
alarm with an equal attention to pathos and precedent, had the journals
of 1795, when a similar event had occurred, spread out before him; and
bade the clerk, when one question was disposed of, _look out what was to
be done next_. He was disconcerted at finding that the absence of the
Masters-in-Chancery would compel us to convey our horror to the Commons
by an inferior servant of the House.
A conference took place. The Houses, as indeed it would appear the
conspirators had been also, were strictly regulated by precedent of
1795: the expression of our indignation and the assurances of our loyalty
were couched verbatim in the words of the resolution and address of that
year, and though the House of Commons did not, as formerly, adjourn the
debate on the address, we did. The Prince said, and perhaps thought, it
was _a shot_; so said, and so thought, his father in 1795. But when Lord
Onslow stooped in the carriage to look for the stone or bullet which had
broken the window, George III. reminded him, saying: “Sit up, my Lord;
they will say we are afraid.” In this rehearsal of a stale and insipid
comedy the only little incident that marked dignity or presence of mind
was omitted. On neither occasion was a shot fired. Lord Eldon assured
me that he had in his possession the stone which had broken the window
in 1795, and which was found at the bottom of the State carriage. He
preserved it, with the dagger produced in the Commons by Mr. Burke,[250]
as memorials of those strange times, surely not as marks of the sagacity
or honesty of those he affects to admire!
The device this time did not greatly assist Ministers. It made little
sensation either way. Government, however, in spite of a good but heavy
speech from Lord Grey, with which he was more dissatisfied than his [——],
and a spirited one from Lord Wellesley, met with ample support from the
House and more countenance from Lord Grenville than was of good omen
for the preservation of our party. Some approximation between Burdett
and Grey was produced by the recurrence of coercive measures. Cobbett
and Hunt took occasion, in letters to Lord Grey and interviews with me,
to adhere to a declaration of Lord Cochrane,[251] that the endeavours
of the people should be directed to the removal of the Ministry and the
elevation of the Whigs to power. It has happened more than once in the
course of my life that the party called Jacobins, Levellers, or Radical
Reformers, after reviling the Whigs and strengthening the High-Church
Party by lowering their opponents, have sought in the hour of danger to
shelter themselves under the party they have so traduced. The Whigs, and
let it [be] spoken with pride, have on such occasions, though smarting
from the recent ingratitude of their suppliants, been ever ready from
principle and generosity to stretch their protecting hands to persons
calumniated or persecuted by power.
I saw Cobbett twice. His upright figure indicated the drill of a
soldier, his ruddy complexion and homely accent the subsequent character
of a farmer as well as his original condition. Neither countenance
nor conversation (at least at this time) were at all of a piece with
the sprightliness of his style, the shrewdness of his remarks, or the
closeness of his reasoning in written compositions. His objects were, the
co-operation of the Whigs in public meetings for a change of Ministry,
and their protection and countenance if he wrote in their favour. In
such objects I told him Whigs could not but concur, but I avoided all
appearance of any closer connection. He was alarmed at the threatened
suspension of the Habeas Corpus.[252] He very unaffectedly acknowledged
his distrust of his own nerves, and a dread of behaving meanly and basely
if arrested; he, therefore, hinted at an intention, which he afterwards
executed, of retiring to America. He earnestly asseverated that he never
had, and never would, belong to any political Opposition whatever.
No concert, much less union, with this extreme branch of Radicals ensued.
Lord Grey, with the full consent of a large meeting of his Parliamentary
friends (called February 24, 1817), engaged on an opposition to the
suspension of the Habeas Corpus and to sundry coercive measures resorted
to by Government, and in which Lord Grenville and his immediate friends,
though disclaiming all rupture with the Whigs and professing undiminished
regard, openly acquiesced. Burdett soon and rapidly resumed his old
personal habits with many Whigs. Good will and communication between
the Whigs and him, as leader of reformers, remained uninterrupted, till
his deep but often shaded tinge of Toryism,[253] at last, separated him
from all the parties and persons with whom he had ever acted in public.
Parliamentary Reform, however, was not yet adopted as an indispensable
article in the Whig creed; nor did the Burdettites pledge themselves to
act as a party in bringing Whigs into power.
Lord Fitzwilliam,[254] from old affections for many and from recent
disgust at the system of espionage so unnecessary and so revolting
to a generous and honourable mind, sided without hesitation with
us. From this period, he and his large connection became active and
important members of the popular division of the Whig party. With little
talent and less acquirements, he was, throughout life, one of the most
considerable men in the country and a striking instance of that most
agreeable truth—that courage and honesty in great situations more than
supply the place of policy or talent. It was not his relationship to
Lord Rockingham, though no doubt an advantage, nor his princely fortune,
though a yet greater, which conferred the sort of importance he enjoyed
for half a century in this country. He derived it more directly and more
certainly from his goodness and generosity, and from the combination of
gentleness and courage which distinguished his amiable and unpretending
character. Such unblemished purity and such unobtrusive intrepidity,
such generosity of feeling, firmness of purpose, and tenderness of
heart, meeting in one of high station and princely fortune, commanded
the affection and confidence of the public; and Lord Fitzwilliam enjoyed
them, beyond even those of his own class who united much greater reach
of understanding and more assiduity of business to superior personal
accomplishments and advantages.
He had been named of the Committee,[255] but he fearlessly and publicly
condemned the evidence which had there been admitted. The suspension
of the Habeas Corpus was, nevertheless, carried in the face of Lord
Wellesley’s and Lord Grey’s opposition. Cobbett fled to America, and
returned, when the Suspension Act had expired, with the bones of Tom
Paine and a stronger disposition than ever to indulge in scurrilous
language and factious practices. The Radical party had manifestly
decreased in numbers, and the unprovoked measures of 1817 seemed invented
for the purpose of reviving its malignity and recruiting its force by
persecution. They had in my judgment that effect.
The country this year sustained the loss of Francis Horner, a man whose
sobriety of judgment and patient application of considerable powers to
the best and wisest purposes of a public life would have placed him ere
long at the head of the rational friends of liberty (including Whigs and
reformers) in the House of Commons. His constitution was weak, and by
neglect of it he had brought on symptoms of atrophy. He repaired, by the
advice of physicians and at the earnest entreaty of friends, to a milder
climate: but it was too late. He died at Pisa on [February 8], 1817.[256]
Could anything connected with such a misfortune (which was to me,
personally as well as politically, a very great one) be termed gratifying
or satisfactory, the expression of regret at his loss in private, in
Parliament, and in public, would deserve those epithets. Lord Morpeth,
in moving the writ for St. Mawes, paid a feeling and judicious tribute
to his solid virtues and rising merit; he was applauded and supported
by many of the most respectable members of both sides of the House,
including Mr. Manners Sutton and Sir Samuel Romilly, the last too soon,
alas! destined to follow the pupil he so feelingly lamented.