TWO:This speech, which was regarded as the manifesto of the Reform party, called forth a reply from the Duke of Wellington, which was pregnant with revolution, and which precipitated the[321] downfall of his Administration. He said:"The noble Earl has recommended us not only to put down these disturbances, but to put the country in a state to meet and overthrow the dangers which are likely to arise from the late transactions in France, by the adoption of something like Parliamentary Reform. The noble earl has stated that he is not prepared himself to come forward with any measure of the kind; and I will tell him farther, neither is the Government.... Nay, I will go yet farther, and say that if at this moment I had to form a legislature for any country, particularly for one like this, in the possession of great property of various descriptions, although perhaps I should not form one precisely such as we have, I would endeavour to produce something which would give the same result; namely, a representation of the people containing a large body of the property of the country, and in which the great landed proprietors have a preponderating influence. Further still, I beg to state that not only is the Government not prepared to bring forward any measure of this description, but, in so far as I am concerned, while I have the honour to hold the situation which I now do among his Majesty's counsellors, I shall always feel it my duty to oppose any such measures when brought forward by others." When he sat down the hum of criticism was so loud that he asked a colleagueprobably Lord Lyndhurstthe cause. The answer was, "You have announced the fall of your Government, that is all."
FORE:Pampeluna and San Sebastian being invested, Lord Wellington proceeded with his main army to occupy the passes of the Pyrenees. These, Wellington, in his dispatches, says amounted to about seventy, and, in the service of securing these, he complains that he was left very much without the necessary supplies for his army. The British Government had, from some causehe supposed to send them against the Americansreduced the number of convoys, and many of our store-ships were taken by the French frigates and privateers. It was, as much as ever, in vain to expect the Spaniards to do anything to supply the deficiency, after all that the English had done for them. As fast as they got rid of the French, they busied themselves in making war on the clergy and putting them down. Wellington was, therefore, continually obliged to arrest his marches to wait for provisions. Notwithstanding, by the 7th of July he had driven Joseph Buonaparte through the mountains into France, chased Clausel beyond Tudela on the Ebro, and taken his post on the very edge of France. Buonaparte, alarmed at the progress of Wellington, displaced Jourdan as incapable, and sent back Soult to do what neither he, nor Ney, nor Marmont, nor Massena had been able to do before they were necessarily displacedthat is, arrest the onward march of Wellington into France.While the agitation was going forward in this manner in Ireland, the state of that country was the subject of repeated and animated debates in Parliament. One of the remedies proposed by the Government was an Arms Bill, which was opposed with great vehemence by the Irish Liberal members. Mr. Shaw, the Recorder of Dublin, in his speech on the second reading, described the condition of Ireland from the Conservative point of view; he considered that the country was in an alarming state, the lower classes extensively agitated, and the higher unusually dejected and depressed. Even the great benefit of the temperance movement had brought with it the evil of an organisation now turned to the most dangerous purposes. The real object of the Repeal agitation was to array the people and the priesthood against the property of the country. There was no class more alarmed at the progress of the movement than the respectable portion of the Roman Catholics, who dreaded lest they should be swept away by the tide. If the law did not put down the agitation, the agitation would put down the Constitution. Mr. C. Buller's remedy was "to Canadianise" Ireland, which meant to make Mr. O'Connell Attorney-General, and substitute the titulars for the clergy of the Establishment. Mr. Roebuck thought "there was no great difference between the late and the present Government. Neither of them had put down the giant evil of Ireland, her rampant Church. He would take away her revenue, and give it, if to any Church at all, to the Church of the Roman Catholics. The grand evil and sore of Ireland was the domination of the Church of the minority."
FORE:QUEEN VICTORIA IN THE CORONATION ROBES, 1838.
FORE:What a totally different species of composition was the "Vicar" to the tale of "Rasselas," published by his friend Dr. Samuel Johnson (b. 1709; d. 1784), the great lexicographer, seven years before! This was conceived in the romantic and allegoric spirit of the time"The Ten Days of Seged," "The Vision of Mirza," and the like. It was laid in the south, but amid Eastern manners, and didactic in spirit and ornate in style. It was measured, and graceful, and dulltoo scholastic to seize on the heart and the imagination. On a nature like Goldsmith's it could make no impression, and therefore leave no trace. The one was like a scene amid palm trees, and fountains, and sporting gazelles; the other like a genuine English common, on which robust children were tumbling and shouting, amid blooming gorse, near the sunny brook, with the lark carolling above them. There is no country in Europe, scarcely in the world, where letters are known, which has not its translation of the "Vicar of Wakefield." Even in England, "Rasselas" is almost forgotten.In May the gingham-weavers of Carlisle and that neighbourhood held a similar gathering, and in June meetings were held on Hunslet Common, near Leeds, at Glasgow, Ashton-under-Lyne, and other places. The meeting at Glasgow, on the 16th of June, was held on the Green, and amounted to thirty or forty thousand people. They complained of the low wages for cotton-weaving, and proposed a petition to the Prince Regent, praying that he would enable them to get over to Canada, promising that all such as received that favour should repay the outlay by yearly instalments. But the bulk of the assembly protested against emigration, asserting that the remedy for their distresses lay in annual parliaments, universal suffrage, and the consequent reduction of taxation; and they proposed that they should march up to London in a body, and present their petition to the Prince Regent in person. At Ashton the chair was taken by the Rev. Joseph Harrison, and the strange creature called Dr. Healey, of whom Bamford gives an extraordinary account in his "Life of a Radical," made a most wild and seditious harangue. At a great meeting at Stockport, on the 28th of the same month, a very different personage presided. This was Sir Charles Wolseley, of Wolseley Park, in Staffordshire. Sir Charles said that he had been engaged in the outbreak of the French Revolution, and had assisted in the taking of the Bastille, and that he would spend his last drop of blood, if it were necessary, in destroying the Bastilles of his own country. The acquisition of such an advocate of Reform was not likely to be received with apathy. Sir Charles was invited to preside at a similar meeting at New Hall, near Birmingham, on the 12th of July. At this meeting he was elected "legislatorial attorney and representative" for that town. This was a circumstance that excited the alarm of Government. They immediately issued warrants for the apprehension both of Sir Charles and of Dr. Harrison for seditious expressions used at the Stockport meeting. Sir Charles was arrested at his own house, at Wolseley Park; and Harrison was taken on the platform of a public meeting, at Smithfield, in London, on the 21st of July, at which Hunt was presiding. On conveying Harrison to Stockport, the constable who arrested him was attacked by the mob, and a pistol was fired at him, the ball of which lodged in his body.
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THREE:The proceedings of Parliament having ceased to occupy public attention, the time had come for political demonstrations of various kinds in the country, giving expression to the feelings that had been excited by the state of public affairs and the conduct of the Government. The first and most remarkable of these was a banquet, given at Dover, on the 30th of August, to the Duke of Wellington as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, at which nearly 2,000 persons sat down to dinner. The toast of the day was proposed by Lord Brougham, who occupied a peculiar position, as a Liberal ex-Chancellor opposing a Liberal Administration, and wishing to see them supplanted by their Conservative opponents. He was greeted with tumultuous cheering when he rose to propose the health of the Duke of Wellington. He had, according to Greville, intruded himself upon the company, and made a speech in which bombast alternated with eloquence. The reply of the Duke of Wellington was a perfect contrast to Brougham's oratorical flight, in its quietness and modesty. But if the great chiefs of the Conservative party were moderate in the expression of their feelings during the vacation, some of their followers went to the opposite extreme of violence and indiscretion. At a dinner of the Conservative Registration Society, on the 30th of October, Mr. Bradshaw, the member for Canterbury, dared to speak of the young Queen in the following terms:"Brought up under the auspices of the citizen King of the Belgians, the serf of France, and guided by his influence, the Queen thinks if the monarchy lasts her time, it is enough," and so on. In proportion to the violence of the manifestations of disloyalty among the Tories, was the fervour of loyalty evinced by Mr. O'Connell and his followers in Ireland. At a meeting at Bandon, on the 5th of December, the famous agitator, in the midst of tremendous cheering, the entire assembly rising in response to the concluding appeal, said:"We must be, we are, loyal to our young and lovely Queen. God bless her! We must be, we are, attached to the Throne, and to the lovely being by whom it is filled. She is going to be married. God bless the Queen! I am a father and a grandfather; and in the face of heaven I pray with as much honesty and fervency for Queen Victoria as I do for any of my own progeny."
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