The Times Great Victorian Lives. Ian Brunskill

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СКАЧАТЬ was fired at him by a half-pay lieutenant named Davies. He was only slightly hurt, the ball striking him above the hip and causing nothing more serious than a contusion. It was said that had he not turned quickly round when passing the corner of the baluster the bullet must have taken a fatal direction. The would-be assassin was tried, proved to be insane, and confined for life in Bedlam, where he only recently expired. The other fact to which we have alluded is of higher biographical importance, although our information with respect to it is rather general than particular. It is that Lord Palmerston joined with Croker and Peel in producing that series of satires against the Parliamentary Opposition which was published under the title of the New Whig Guide. How much he contributed to this work, which, after all, perhaps, did not do the Whigs any great damage, it is difficult to say; nor are we well informed as to those squibs of his which appeared in the John Bull. On the whole, the satire in which the Tories indulged in those days was more remarkable for its personality and bluffness than for either wit or elegance, and very little of it deserves to live. Satire is the great weapon of Opposition, and when a party firmly seated in power resorts to it they are generally driven to extremities, and goaded into anger. In that case they are apt to be unsparing in their abuse, they are inclined to tread on the opponent whom they have managed to trip, and they hope to win by bullying what they lose in fair fight. This is the character of most of those shafts launched by the Tories against the Liberal party; and if we are forced to make such a statement with regard to men of great ability, it is but right to add that much of what is so distasteful to us now was due, not to the coarseness of the men, but to the temptations of their position; and that had they changed places with the Whigs, the latter, even with such men as Sydney Smith and Thomas Moore among their number, might have been guilty of the same excesses. The Whigs were at a discount in the eyes of the nation; they were therefore compelled to be circumspect; they found it necessary to guard against the imputation of using insolence for invective and personality for logic; they were obliged to rest their cause on its merits, and to attack the Government with genuine arguments and genuine wit; whereas the Tories, rioting in power, were less nice in their choice of missiles, and found it for their interest to show upon some occasions that the sole difference between them and their opponents was one of personalities.

      The turning point in Lord Palmerston’s career was now fast approaching. Hitherto he had been a member of the Government only in a subordinate capacity; he had never been a member of the Cabinet. Lord Liverpool’s Ministry was in its later years divided into two sections, the principal point of difference being solicited by the claims of the Catholics to emancipation. At the head of the one section was Canning, and he had followers in Mr. Robinson (Lord Goderich), in Huskisson, in Sir John Copley, and in Lord Palmerston. At the head of the other section was the Premier himself, while among those who sided with him were Lord Eldon, the Duke of Wellington, and Mr. Peel. Canning, it is well known, was the advocate of Catholic Emancipation – therefore, up to a certain limit, of Constitutional Reform; while, on the other hand, Peel bore the standard of commercial and juridical reform. The Canning party fully accepted the Peel reforms, but the Peel party had the utmost horror of any attempt to meddle with the Constitution, and were determined to stop the way. Therefore, when Lord Liverpool was struck down by paralysis, and when Canning, as the most popular man in the Cabinet, was requested to form a Ministry, his colleagues, who were opposed to the very small measure of constitutional reform implied in Catholic Emancipation, refused to stand by him, and he was compelled to look for aid in the first place from the subordinates of the Government, among whom was Palmerston, and in the second place from the more moderate Whigs, among whom were Lord Lansdowne and W. Lamb, afterwards Lord Melbourne. It was under these difficult circumstances, which forced Canning to the dubious expedient of a coalition, that Lord Palmerston was called to the Cabinet and put upon his mettle. Unfortunately the Coalition Ministry of 1827 shared the fate of all coalitions, and after it had put Canning to death, and Goderich, his successor, to his wits’ end, it went the way of all flesh. It served its purpose, however, in preparing the way for a new race of Ministers, of whom by far the most remarkable was Lord Palmerston. Of all the Tory Ministers who on this occasion coalesced with the Whigs he was attached to his party by the fewest number of ties, and was drawn to his political opponents by the greatest number. He was ripe for a quarrel with the men who had hunted his friend Canning to death, and he was ripe for a union with the men who had been his own companions at College and had sat with him at the feet of the eloquent professor of Whiggism. At first, however, his junction with the Whigs was not such as to preclude, when the Coalition fell to pieces, an acceptance of office under the Duke of Wellington, whose Government was pledged to oppose Reform. In the Duke’s Cabinet the Canningites found that they occupied by no means so high a place as in the previous Government; but it was less on personal grounds than on grounds of principle that Lord Palmerston felt the necessity of seceding from it; and it may be worth while to trace the steps by which he was led finally to change sides.

      The Canningites agreed with the Whigs in their desire to emancipate Dissenters, both Catholic and Protestant; but they agreed with the Tories in their opposition to Parliamentary Reform. It was the opinion of Huskisson and Palmerston that by mitigating the more palpable abuses – by, for example, giving a member to Manchester–it might be possible to stave off more Radical measure of Reform. ‘I am anxious,’ said the latter, ‘to express my desire that the franchise should be extended to a great town, not because I am a friend to Reform in principle, but because I am its decided enemy. I think that extending the franchise to large towns is the only mode in which the House can avoid the adoption at some time or other of a general plan of Reform.’ Therefore, when East Retford and Penryn were to be disfranchised, and the Opposition proposed that the power of electing members should be transferred to Manchester and Birmingham, it so happened that by a curious shuffling of the question at issue Huskisson and Palmerston found themselves in the division lobby voting against the Government of which they were members. The real point of difference between themselves and the Government was quite unimportant, since they were all agreed on the Tory side of the House to give to a large town – Birmingham was the favourite – the franchise which had been taken from one of the corrupt boroughs, and to give that which was taken from the other to the neighbouring hundred. But in the particular division to which we refer, Mr. Huskisson and the Canningites, as fate would have it, were found voting the franchise of East Retford to Manchester, while their colleagues were voting it to the hundred in which the borough was situate. Poor Huskisson, with considerable ability and the best possible intentions, was all his life a bungler. He was always in difficulties through his clumsiness, which was physical as well as moral. He was always stumbling over chairs, tripping against ropes as he landed from steamboats, breaking his shins upon stones, until at last he was knocked down and killed outright by the first railway train. On the present occasion he sent in his resignation and didn’t send it in, explained and tried to retract without retracting. ‘There is no mistake, there can be no mistake, there shall be no mistake,’ said the Duke, in his most oracular style. Palmerston and some others followed Huskisson, and it will be observed that they had the credit of retiring from the Ministry as the advocates of a certain measure of Reform. When afterwards Palmerston became the member of a Whig Cabinet pledged to Reform, he could say this in his defence, that he had been anxious to avoid a Radical measure by the application of partial remedies, but that the time had long passed for piecemeal legislation, and that nothing less than sweeping changes would satisfy the country.

      To sit in the House of Commons no longer as a Minister was a novelty for Lord Palmerston. It was also a novelty that he now turned his attention especially to foreign politics. How came this about? The care of foreign politics devolved upon him as the ablest of Canning’s disciples. Upon him the mantle of the master fell. Add to this, that among the eventualities to be foreseen was the chance of his one day taking a seat in a Whig Cabinet. Which of the great offices of State could he hold in that Cabinet with most satisfaction to himself and to his colleagues? Evidently the post in which he should find himself most enjoying the sympathy of the party would be the Foreign Secretaryship. The Whigs were always enthusiastic in praise of Canning’s foreign policy, and they would back Palmerston as the successor of Canning. In quitting the Tory ranks however, he was not all at once committed to the Whigs. The Duke of Wellington tried to win him back to the Cabinet, but although he might conscientiously, and even triumphantly, have joined it when its leading members came round to СКАЧАТЬ