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

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СКАЧАТЬ as to the reasons which induced the various parties to form combinations against the Administration that had done the State such noble service. The motives of its enemies, however, were simple enough. The Protectionists had what they called their “betrayal” to avenge; the Whigs considered that Peel had behaved most ungenerously to the Melbourne Ministry, whose conciliatory Irish policy, as worked out by Lord Normanby and Mr. Drummond, had promised well for that country. They firmly believed that if they were in power they could control Ireland by kindness, but that in applying such a policy, they did not dare to trust as a colleague the Minister who had so unscrupulously overthrown Lord Melbourne. A union between Peel and Lord John Russell, such as the Queen desired to bring about, was also impossible for another reason—Peel would not part company with Sir James Graham. Lord John Russell, on the other hand, would not consent to act with Sir James, whom the Whigs detested as an unforgivable renegade. The Coercion Bill for Ireland was therefore doomed from the outset, not on its merits, but by party passion. This was so strong, that the Whigs in the House of Lords, as if to give Peel warning of his fate, actually combined with the Protectionists to defeat Lord Lyndhurst’s Charitable Trusts Bill, although it was directed against abuses which every Whig was pledged to attack. “We, alas,” Lord Campbell confesses, “with shame,” had “not enough virtue to withstand the temptation of snatching a vote against the Government”42—a vote, by the way, which kept alive heinous abuses for eight years longer.

      The Upper House, however, was not quite so factious over the Irish Coercion Bill. It was introduced by the Earl of St. Germains, who explained that it enabled the Government not only to proclaim any district in Ireland in which crime prevailed, but to quarter extra police on it at the expense of the ratepayers. Stringent clauses prohibiting the possession of arms, and preventing people from quitting their houses between sunset and sunrise, were added. These were, in fact, the clauses which whetted the wit of the younger Radicals against what they derisively termed, not an Irish Coercion, but an “Irish Curfew Bill.” The Lords were also told that outrages in Ireland had risen from 1,496 in 1844, to 3,642 in 1845, and the Bill passed through the Upper House with very trifling opposition. It was in the Commons that it was destined to be made the battle-ground of factions. The Protectionists pretended that Peel was not in earnest in introducing it; for, though the Bill was announced in January, it was not till the 30th of March that Sir James Graham moved the first reading, and not till late in June that the second reading was taken. The Whigs and Radicals objected to the Bill because they held that conciliation, and not repression, was wanted in Ireland. The Irish members taunted Peel with having created the disturbances in Ireland by changing the tolerant policy of Melbourne, Normanby, and Drummond, and by giving Irish judicial appointments to the most violent Orange partisans. Others, like Mr. Roche, asked “Why don’t you feed the Irish peasantry, if, as is clear, hunger is making them discontented?” The position of men like Mr. Cobden was most embarrassing. As Liberals, they were bound to vote against the Bill. But then they did not wish to expel Peel from office—and Peel had said that by the Bill he would stand or fall. They decided at last to vote against the measure, and rightly, for it was impossible to carry on the Queen’s Government with three parties in the House—Peelites, Protectionists, and Whig Tree Traders. A single vote, moreover, could not save the Ministry, for Peel’s enemies would soon have organised another combination against him on another question. The Bill was accordingly defeated by a vote of 219 to 292, and the great Ministry which effected a peaceful revolution, and created a new era of government in England, fell before a majority of 73. Though 106 Protectionists returned to their old allegiance, and voted with Peel, 70 voted against him, and they, combined with all the Whigs and Radicals, rendered the defeat of the Government so complete that even Peel’s antagonists forbore to cheer. Writing on the 4th of July to Lord Hardwicke in India, the fallen Minister said he had every reason to forgive his enemies for “having conferred upon him the blessing of the loss of power.”43

      Just before the fatal verdict was given, the Queen had the consolation of knowing that, thanks to the adroit diplomacy of Lord Aberdeen, who was justly a persona grata at Court, a dispute with the United States as to the settlement of the Oregon territory had ended. This was some slight solace to her Majesty for the vexation of losing a Ministry which she felt convinced was in full touch with national sympathies at a most perilous time, and which she trusted, she says in one of her letters, because she never once knew them recommend anything “that was not for the country’s good, and never for the Party’s advantage only.”44 This controversy with the United States had in 1822 brought us to the verge of war, for, by a Convention in 1818, American and English settlers were to have the privilege of colonising the no-man’s land in Oregon indiscriminately for ten years, a term again renewed in 1827. Quarrels from clashing jurisdictions and conflicting allegiances naturally arose out of this confused state of things, and it was clear that the territory ought to be divided fairly and finally between the two Governments. In March, President Polk had sent a Message to Congress, pointing out that though England was at peace with all the world, she was making unusual warlike preparations “both at home and in her North American possessions.” This, the President broadly hinted, was due to the continuance of the Oregon dispute, and, alluding in an alarmist fashion to the contingency of war between the two nations, he suggested the propriety of also increasing the military and naval forces of the Republic. On the 13th of April, Mr. Reverdy Johnson proposed to the Senate a Resolution, which was carried, giving notice to England that the existing loose arrangement with regard to Oregon should, so far as America was concerned, determine at the end of twelve months, and urging on the Governments of both countries the necessity for taking steps to arrive at an amicable settlement. It was on the 9th of June that Lord Brougham asked Lord Aberdeen if it were true that the Oregon question had really been settled, and Lord Aberdeen answered in the affirmative. He seems to have managed the whole affair very skilfully. Finding that President Polk would not submit the dispute to arbitration, and that he sent a Message to the Senate recommending it to give notice of ending the joint occupation of Oregon, Lord Aberdeen waited to see what the Senate would do. When it passed Mr. Reverdy Johnson’s friendly and suggestive

      THE BRITISH ARMY CROSSING THE SUTLEJ.

      Resolution, Lord Aberdeen, discarding diplomatic forms, immediately acted on it, and submitted a draft of a new Oregon Convention, formulating his idea of an amicable settlement for the consideration of the United States. Mr. Pakenham, the American Secretary of State, promptly accepted it as the basis of the Treaty, which was ratified on 17th of June, 1846—a Treaty which made the 49th parallel of North latitude the boundary line between the two countries. All land to the north of that line went to Canada; and all land to the south of it, to the United States.

      Another cause of anxiety had virtually disappeared before Peel resigned; office. The war cloud that loomed over our Indian frontier had vanished,

      THE BATTLE OF FEROZESHAH.

      though not till a brilliant and decisive campaign had been fought against the Sikhs in the Punjab.

      The power of the Sikh nation was consolidated by Ranjit Sing—an adventurer who, in 1799, obtained a grant of Lahore from Zaman Shah. He gradually conquered the Punjab, and, in 1809, attacked the small Sikh States east of the Sutlej. Those Cis-Sutlej principalities accordingly sought and obtained British protection. In 1818, Ranjit stormed Multan, and carried the Khalsa banner from the extreme south of the Punjab, far away into the valley of Kashmir. In 1839, his son, Kharak Sing, succeeded to his throne, but was supposed to have been poisoned in 1840. After that, the Sikh dominion fell into anarchy, and frequent violations of British territory led to the first Sikh war of 1845.

      On the 17th of November, 1845, the Sikhs declared war on the English, and on the 11th of December the first Sikh soldier crossed the Sutlej. On the 18th, the battle of Moodkee was fought by Sir Hugh Gough, afterwards Lord Gough, who was in command of an army of 11,000 men. Moodkee is a village in the Ferozepore district, lying in a plain twenty-six miles south of the Sutlej. Two СКАЧАТЬ