The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (Illustrated Edition). Robert Thomas Wilson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of the Crown—Her Popular Sympathies—Why Peel Changed his Policy—The Potato Rot—Impending Famine—Distress in England—The Campaign of the Free Traders—Scenes at their Meetings—The Protectionist Agitation and the Agricultural Labourers—Sufferings of the Poor—The Duke of Norfolk’s Curry Powder—Meeting at Wootton Bassett—The Queen and the Sufferers.

      It was on the 4th of December, 1845, that the Times startled the world by its celebrated leading article, beginning “The doom of the Corn Laws is sealed.” This was the very earliest disclosure of that great act of political renunciation which impending famine in Ireland had forced on Sir Robert Peel. How the Times came to discover, on the 4th of December, that the Cabinet had broken up on the previous day, through the obstinacy of Lord Stanley and the Duke of Buccleuch, was for a long time a political mystery. It inspired what Lord Beaconsfield once called “the babble of the boudoirs,” and the tittle-tattle of many clubs. It was whispered that one very near the Royal person had divulged this profound secret of State, a knowledge of which would have been worth a king’s ransom on the Corn Exchange. Such surmises were entirely wrong. So far as the Court knew, or guessed at the secret, it was kept inviolate. It was understood that Mr. Sidney Herbert, the youngest of Sir Robert Peel’s colleagues, on the evening of the 3rd of December conveyed to Mrs. Norton (afterwards Lady Stirling Maxwell, of Keir) an idea of what had happened in the Cabinet, and that she, in turn, carried her gleanings from Mr. Herbert’s conversation to Mr. Delane, the editor of the Times. The affair, it may be said in passing, has furnished Mr. George Meredith with a striking incident in his story, “Diana of the Crossways,” for the heroine of that romance has much in common with the gifted intrigante, “whose bridal wreath was twined with weeds of strife.” A more prosaic explanation, however, is supplied by Mr. Greville. He asserts that Lord Aberdeen gave Mr. Delane a hint that the Corn Law was doomed, his object being to conciliate America (which was deeply interested in the export of corn) in view of the Oregon dispute, which he was anxious to settle. It is hard to believe that a man of Lord Aberdeen’s high sense of honour would, from such an inadequate motive, violate his Ministerial oath, and betray the secrets of his chief.

      Lord John Russell had failed, as has been said, to form his Administration when the Cabinet of his rival broke up. Here it may now be convenient to explain the reason of that failure, which he laid before his disappointed Sovereign. On the morning of the 20th of December, when Sir Robert Peel waited on the Queen at Windsor, and was asked to withdraw his resignation, her Majesty had been disturbed by a letter from Lord John Russell, stating that he must abandon all hopes of forming a Ministry, because he had been unable “in one instance” to secure indispensable support from his more prominent followers. Who were the “prominent followers”? and who, “in one instance,” thwarted the Leader of the Opposition in his effort to extricate the Queen, from the difficulty in which she was entangled? The pragmatic “instance” was Lord Grey, and his refusal to serve the country in the hour of need was a matter not of principle but of personal feeling. Writing to Mr. J. F. Macfarlan, Chairman of the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, on the 22nd of December, 1845, Mr. (afterwards Lord) Macaulay told the whole story. “You will have heard,” he says, “of the termination of our attempt to form a Ministry. All our plans were frustrated by Lord Grey.... On my own share in these transactions I reflect with unmixed satisfaction. From the first I told Lord John that I stipulated for one thing only, total and immediate Repeal. I would be as to all other matters absolutely in his hands; that I would take any office, or no office, just as it suited him best; and that he should never be disturbed by any personal pretensions or jealousies on my part. If everybody else had acted thus there would now have been a Liberal Ministry.” We now know that Macaulay was mistaken. It was perfectly well known, not only to the Queen, but to the chiefs of the great parties, that Lord John Russell could never have carried Repeal, for two reasons. He was distrusted by Free Traders like Cobden. It was impossible to expect that the House of Lords, who threatened to revolt against Wellington, would accept Free Trade from the Whigs, many of whom were eager to maintain a small fixed duty on corn. All this was quite well understood at Court, and it partially accounts for the unconcealed delight with which the Queen asked Sir Robert Peel to withdraw his resignation. It was, moreover, suspected at the time that the Court—always distrustful of Lord Palmerston—privily sympathised with the feelings of Lord Grey, who thought that the only office which Lord Palmerston was willing to accept, was precisely the one in which he would do irretrievable mischief. He had been Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and naturally he could not, with self-respect, serve another Whig Government in an inferior capacity. But Lord Grey, though quite ready to serve with Palmerston if he took some other Department, held that, if he went to the Foreign Office, his pugnacity, combined with the hostile animus which he had inspired in France, must, sooner or later, lead to a disturbance of the peace of Europe. Lord Palmerston was, in truth, the Mordecai sitting at the gate of the Whig Oligarchy, and then, as ever, Lord Grey could only co-operate comfortably with a Ministry of Greys.

      It was on the 20th December that Sir Robert Peel summoned his late colleagues in Downing Street, to inform them that he had resumed office, and to invite their assistance in abolishing the duties on foreign corn. The conclave was depressed and downcast, for the situation was unique and embarrassing. Lord Stanley, true to his imperious impulses, persisted in resigning. He refused to believe that the destitution in Ireland was so bad as it was painted by Peel, and it is but just to say that his main reason for deserting his leader had no direct connection with the effect of the Corn Laws on the price of food. The real interest of the country, Lord Stanley contended, was to have a flourishing rural population. That could only exist under the shadow of a territorial aristocracy, maintained by a Corn Law which kept up rents, because it kept up prices. No conscious self-interest seems to have tainted Lord Stanley’s motives, and the same may be said of Cobden and the Free Traders, who, on the other hand, believed that the world would gain by the substitution of a commercial for a territorial aristocracy. The aim of the Free Traders, in fact, was to rule the English people by an oligarchy of rich manufacturers, thus “thrusting aside the nobles,” and creating “a new policy specially adapted to the life of a great trading community.”18 Lord Stanley’s idea, however, was that the landed interest had made England; that it gave her social stability and military power; that it had won her battles by sea and land, and built up her mighty fabric of empire. The Corn Laws he believed, quite honestly, to be the

      THE IRISH FAMINE: STARVING PEASANTS AT A WORKHOUSE GATE.

      outworks of a great system of landlordism which gave the State a solid basis. His firm conviction was that Mr. Cobden and the Leaguers were eager to capture the outworks, that they might the more easily storm the citadel. And this idea, too, was common to the Whigs, who were advocates of a duty on corn, which, though small, was to be fixed. Through Lord Melbourne they had taught the country and the Queen that a man must

      LORD GEORGE BENTINCK.

      be mad who would dream of abolishing the Corn Laws—and they showed no sign, as a Party, of wavering in that conviction till the 22nd of November, 1845, when Lord John Russell sent the famous “Edinburgh Letter” to his constituents in the City of London, abandoning Protection once and for ever. It is but fair to remind a later generation of the relation in which the two great Parties stood to the Corn Law, because partisan writers often present an inadequate conception of the arduous task which Peel set himself, when he undertook to abolish the Corn Duties, in defiance of beliefs long rooted in the minds not only of the people, but of the governing classes of England.

      There is no denying the fact that the admirable behaviour of the Queen throughout the epoch-marking Ministerial crisis of 1845-46 did a great deal to restore the influence of the Crown as an operative factor in English politics. Since the death of George IV. that influence had been waning. Under William IV. it had been exercised, but without subtlety of tact or breadth of sympathy; and therefore, when exercised, it was somewhat rudely “abated” by the popular Party. Nothing was СКАЧАТЬ