The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (Vol. 1-4). Robert Thomas Wilson

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      LORD STANLEY (AFTERWARDS FOURTEENTH EARL OF DERBY).

      Peel himself had taught them to disregard the experience of a quarter of a century. Peel, when he showed how keenly he felt Mr. Disraeli’s sarcasms, failed to remember that the arrows which stung him came from his own quiver.

      A few days after the Session opened, Sir Robert Peel, in explaining his plan for getting rid of the Corn duties, made it clear that Repeal was to be total, but not immediate. Writing to Mrs. Cobden on the 28th of January, Cobden says:—“Peel is at last delivered, but I hardly know whether to call it a boy or a girl. Something between the two, I believe. His Corn measure makes an end of all Corn laws in 1849, and in the meantime it is virtually a fixed duty of 4s. He has done more than was expected of him, and all but the right thing.” As a matter of fact, there was to be a sliding scale till 1849, the maximum duty being 10s. when wheat was under 48s. a quarter, and the minimum duty being 4s. when wheat was 54s. a quarter. On the 2nd of March, when the House went into Committee on the resolution, Mr. Villiers’ amendment, insisting on immediate, as well as total, Repeal, was lost by a large majority, and on the 11th of May the Corn Bill reached the third reading. The debate lasted three nights, and at 4 a.m. on the 16th it was passed by a majority of 98 in a House of 516.

      Before tracing the subsequent stages of this controversy, it may not be amiss to allude to one of the most curious incidents that marked its progress. On the 27th of January, when Sir Robert Peel’s resolutions embodying his financial policy came before the House of Commons, the presence of Prince Albert in the gallery, as a spectator of the scene, roused the jealousy and wrath of the Tories. Lord George Bentinck, in the course of the debate, waved his hand excitedly towards his Royal Highness, and accused him of being “seduced by the First Minister of the Crown to come down to this House to usher in, to give éclat, and, as it were, by reflection from the Queen, to give the semblance of a personal sanction of her Majesty to a measure which, be it for good or evil, a great majority at least of the landed, aristocracy of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland, imagine fraught with deep injury, if not ruin, to them.” This was an insinuation at once ridiculous and unjust. The truth is that the Queen, from her girlhood, has had a somewhat exaggerated idea of the instructive value of Parliamentary debates. She is to this day an ardent student of all Parliamentary reports. She has the true Parliamentary instinct peculiar to England and English-speaking communities which leads them to take a strange but genuine delight in Parliamentary discussion. Indeed, she has been known to tell her Ministers not only what she thought of a particular debate, but how she herself would have handled the subject-matter of it had she been a member of the House of Commons; in fact, it was in replying to a communication of this kind that Lord Palmerston once observed, in the felicitous vein of a courtier, that it was a lucky thing for Ministers who had the misfortune to differ from her Majesty, that they had not to answer her arguments in Parliament. Under the influence of these ideas, the Queen naturally induced Prince Albert to attend the great historic debate of the 14th of January—“to hear a fine debate,” as she herself has said, “being so useful to all princes.”38 Party feeling, however, ran so high in 1846, that Lord George Bentinck and the Tory Protectionists put the worst construction on a perfectly innocent act. The Prince Consort simply went to listen to the discussion, just as the Prince of Wales and his son went to hear Mr. Gladstone introduce his Government of Ireland Bill in the House of Commons on the 8th of April, 1886; and it is a mark of the sweetened temper of political life in these latter days that not only did no Tory complain of the Prince’s presence on that occasion, but nobody even resented the kid-glove plaudits with which the young Prince Albert Victor, with the generous but irrepressible enthusiasm of youth, greeted Mr. Gladstone’s stately and impressive peroration.39 Lord George Bentinck’s attack on the Prince Consort was deficient alike in tact and taste; but it is only fair to say that there was the shadow of an excuse for it. It had been whispered that the Court had become Peelite—and the rumour was not without foundation in fact. The Prince Consort reflected its sympathies quite accurately when he wrote to Baron Stockmar, on the 16th of February, that Peel was “abused like the most disgraceful criminal,” adding not only that factions would combine to crush him—as they did—but that this “would be a great misfortune.”

      In the House of Lords the course of the Corn Bill was comparatively smooth. Lord Stanley took the leadership of the Protectionists, but the disintegration of parties was complete. Nothing illustrates this better than a caustic remark which Lord Stanley threw out at a great political dinner-party at his house, two days after the Bill had been passed by the Commons. On that occasion he said, scoffingly, that it was most diverting to see a Liberal like Lord Bessborough whipping up the Bishops to support the Duke of Wellington on a Free Trade question.40 In the Upper House the opposition to the Bill virtually collapsed. Lord Stanley, when argumentative, was tame, and, when personal, vituperative. The ablest of the Bishops, in the name of the Church, repudiated the idea that the Protectionist policy had benefited the rural poor; and Wilberforce distinguished himself, especially, by his graphic picture of the sufferings which the agricultural labourers were enduring. The Duke of Wellington, however, decided the matter by telling the Peers that they would be wise to bow to public opinion with a good grace, and not commit themselves to a struggle between the Crown and the people. But he was hardly candid in pretending that the Crown in this matter was opposed to the people. This idea can be disproved by an extract from that remarkable letter in which the Queen, in speaking of Peel’s resumption of office, eulogises his chivalrous behaviour towards herself, and adds, with unaffected sincerity, “I have never seen him so excited and determined, and such a good cause must succeed.”41 The Lords, however, acting on the Duke’s advice, only engaged in a sham fight, and the final stage of the Bill passed without debate or division. The night on which Peel’s triumph in the Lords was announced was the night on which, however, his Ministry fell in the Commons. It was the night on which a combination of factions, as the Prince Consort had predicted, rejected what was called the Coercion Bill for Ireland, and wrecked the most popular Cabinet that ever governed England.

      It has already been said that the unruly state of Ireland had been

      SIR JAMES GRAHAM.

      aggravated by famine, and that evictions, following refusal of rent, had been avenged by outrages. In the Queen’s Speech it had been indicated that measures to restore order in Ireland would be framed; but it was not till the end of June that a Coercion Bill was brought forward in the House of Commons for second reading. This was the Bill which was fatal to the Ministry. According to an old legend of the Moslems, a good angel and a bad angel walk on either side of a man all through life, and Lord Balling has very justly observed that, whilst Free Trade was the good angel of Peel’s Administration, its bad angel was Coercion for Ireland. The introduction of a Coercion Bill for Ireland, after the safety of the Corn Law Bill was assured, was taken as a plausible pretext for dissolving the alliance between the Whigs and the Government. It was regarded by the Protectionists as an excellent opportunity for punishing the Ministers for deserting them. Perhaps, if the truth were known, it was regarded by Sir Robert Peel himself as a good field in which to meet a defeat that was

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      inevitable, and which would send him into the retirement for which latterly he had begun to crave. A great deal has been said and written as to the reasons which induced the various parties to form combinations against the Administration СКАЧАТЬ