Volume I Part 27 (2/2)

I need not repeat that if I had continued in Ireland, I should have shown every attention to your wishes. In my present situation I neither have been nor can be consulted in official arrangements. My warm affection and near relations.h.i.+p towards the Duke of Rutland and Mr. Pitt have disposed me to give them the best advice which my experience in Ireland could suggest to me; and in the course of these communications, your pretensions to the command were stated with every advantage.

General Cuninghame replies by declaring that he considers himself very ill-used, after having supported the British Government in Ireland for thirty-three years in Parliament; but adds: ”Why should I complain to my benefactor, who has it not in his power to relieve me?”

Amongst the Irish correspondents who continued to look up to Lord Temple as the statesman who best understood the circ.u.mstances and wants of the country, was Colonel Martin, the owner of the vast estates of Connemara, who afterwards acquired a special reputation in the Imperial Parliament, by his Bill for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. At the period when he was in correspondence with Lord Temple, the humanity for which he was subsequently distinguished did not, it is said, extend to his own species; for no man, in a land notorious for feudal violence, enjoyed a wider celebrity as a duellist. From a letter written in the July of this year, the following extract may be inserted, as being strikingly characteristic both of the writer and the state of society over which, in those belligerent days, men of such grave temperaments as the Grenvilles were called upon to preside.

You have perhaps heard already of my affair at Castlebar with Mr. Fitzgerald. On the 14th I went to Castlebar, where with some difficulty and after the use of language not very consonant to my feelings, I prevailed on Mr. Fitzgerald to meet me in the barrack-yard. When I took my first ground, I was distant about eight yards from him, but on his declaring in a vaunting manner that we were not near enough, I told him he should not have reason to complain on that head, and accordingly I advanced within less than five yards to him, and said he had it in his power to make it much nearer. We both fired about the same time; he missed me, but my shot entered his waistcoat and pa.s.sed along his breast and grazed his arm. He then called to me not to fire again until he recovered his pistol, on which I declared I would wait any time he chose. When he was ready, we fired as before; my shot hit him just above the waistband of his breeches and got out on the opposite side of his waistcoat. I was wounded in the breast, but very slightly; and I am at present so well as to be able to travel anywhere in my carriage.

Mr. Fitzgerald shows his clothes to every person, but declares he is not wounded; for my part, I will not declare my reasons for believing him to be unhurt. On the ground he declared himself sorry for the offence, and that he was _wounded_. For the last I declared my sorrow, so everything ended.

Although Lord Temple throughout this year, as he observes in one of his letters, ”lived too little in the political world” to evince much interest in its vicissitudes, the honours which his official career had so well earned followed him into private life. Towards the close of 1784, he was created Marquis of Buckingham.

In his retirement, however, he was not an inattentive observer of public affairs, and seems to have contemplated the design of drawing up an account of that memorable struggle of parties of which he had been a witness, and especially of the transactions in which he had been directly and personally concerned. That he did not carry this design into execution, and that nothing remains of it but the following fragment, is much to be regretted, as few men were so well qualified by experience, knowledge and ability, to become the historian of these events. The fragment, for it is nothing more, breaking off at the most interesting point of the narrative, which it was evidently the writer's intention to pursue to the close, is printed with the t.i.tle, and exactly in the form in which it was left by Lord Temple. It is hardly necessary to remark that there is an error in the date, which has reference to the months of November and December, 1783, and not 1784, a mistake which probably arose from the circ.u.mstance of these notes having been put together in the latter year.

LORD BUCKINGHAM'S PRIVATE NOTES.

I have much lamented that, during the very interesting period of November and December, of 1784, I did not keep a regular journal of the transactions of those months, in which I am supposed to have borne so princ.i.p.al a share. Many of the minuter springs which guided those operations have slipped my memory, from the multiplicity of them, and from the rapidity with which they crowded upon each other during the latter busy days, ending with the formation of the new Ministry on the 21st of December, 1784.

It will, however, be necessary for me to take this narrative from an earlier period, necessarily connected with it--I mean the formation of the Government known by the name of the Coalition Ministry.

I was in Ireland during that period, and was not uninformed, authentically, of the disposition on the part of Lord North to have supported the Ministry of Lord Shelburne upon terms of provision for his friends, very short of those which he afterwards claimed and extorted from Mr. Fox. It was clearly known to Lord Shelburne, that no official arrangement was proposed by Lord North for himself; and, to say truth, those of his friends for whom he wished provision to be made, were at least as unexceptionable as many, I may even add as most of those whom Lord Shelburne had collected from the two former Administrations. The infatuation, however, which pervaded the whole of his Government, operated most forcibly in this instance. The affectation of holding the ostensible language of Mr. Pitt, in 1759, is only mentioned to show the ridiculous vanity of the Minister who, unsupported by public success, or by the parliamentary knowledge and man[oe]uvre of a Duke of Newcastle, not only held it, but acted upon it, professing, in his own words, to ”know nothing of the management of a House of Commons, and to throw himself upon the people alone for support.” This farce operated as it might be expected; and although the negotiation between Lord North and Mr. Fox was matter of perfect notoriety for several weeks, those moments were suffered to pa.s.s away without any attempt to avail himself of the various difficulties which presented themselves, at the different periods of that discussion, till, at the very eve of the ratification of it, Mr. Pitt was employed by his Lords.h.i.+p to open propositions, through Mr. Fox, to that party. This was rejected _in toto_; and the events which followed the meeting of Parliament, are too well known to make a detail of them necessary.

Before I proceed I wish to add, that although I have treated the vanity and personal arrogance of Lord Shelburne as it deserves, yet I will do him justice in acknowledging his merit, as one of the quickest and most indefatigable Ministers that this country ever saw. Many of his public measures were the result of a great and an informed mind, a.s.sisted by a firm and manly vigour. And I must ever think the Peace, attended with all its collateral considerations, the most meritorious and happiest event for a kingdom exhausted of men and of credit. I was not pledged in the slightest degree to the measure; for, by my absence in Ireland, and my little connection with his Lords.h.i.+p, I was enabled to judge of it with coolness and impartiality; and from the knowledge of the various difficulties attending it, I am convinced that better terms could not be obtained, and that the further prosecution of the war was impracticable, even if the combination against us allowed the hope of success. This testimony I have wished to bear, though it is not immediately connected with my purpose.

Upon the resignation of Lord Shelburne, His Majesty was placed in a situation in which, through the various events of his reign, he never had yet found himself. The man[oe]uvres which he tried, at different periods of the six weeks during which this country was left literally without a Government, are well known.

Perhaps nothing can paint the situation of his mind so truly, as a letter which he wrote to me on the 1st of April: this was an answer to one which I thought it necessary to address to him from Ireland, after receiving from him a message and a general detail of his situation, through Mr. W. Grenville, to whom he opened himself very confidentially upon the general state of the kingdom.

Upon my return to England, I was honoured with every public attention from His Majesty, who ostensibly held a language upon my subject, calculated to raise in the strongest degree the jealousy of his servants. In the audience which I asked, as a matter of course, after being presented at his levee, he recapitulated all the transactions of that period, with the strongest encomium upon Mr. Pitt, and with much apparent acrimony hinted at Lord Shelburne, whom he stated to have abandoned a situation which was tenable, and particularly so after the popular resentment had been roused. This was naturally attended with strong expressions of resentment and disgust of his Ministers, and of personal abhorrence of Lord North, whom he charged with treachery and ingrat.i.tude of the blackest nature.

He repeated that, to such a Ministry he never would give his confidence, and that he would take the first moment for dismissing them. He then stated the proposition made to him by the Duke of Portland, for the annual allowance of 100,000 to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. I gave to him, very much at length, my opinion of such a measure, and of the certain consequences of it: in all which, as may reasonably be supposed, His Majesty ran before me, and stated with strong disgust the manner in which it was opened to him--as a thing _decided_, and even drawn up in the shape of a message, to which his signature was desired as a matter of course, to be brought before Parliament the next day. His Majesty declared himself to be decided to resist this attempt, and to push the consequences to their full extent, and to try the spirit of the Parliament and of the people upon it. I thought it my duty to offer to him my humble advice to go on with his Ministers, if possible, in order to throw upon them the ratification of the Peace, which they professed to intend to ameliorate, and to give them scope for those mountains of reform, which would inevitably come very short of the expectations of the public. From these public measures, and from their probable dissension, I thought that His Majesty might look forward to a change of his Ministers in the autumn; and that, as the last resource, a dissolution of this Parliament, chosen by Lord North and occasionally filled by Mr.

Fox, might offer him the means of getting rid of the chains which pressed upon him. To all this he a.s.sented; but declared his intention to resist, at all events and hazards, the proposition for this enormous allowance to His Royal Highness, of whose conduct he spoke with much dissatisfaction. He asked, what he might look to if upon this refusal the Ministry should resign: and I observed, that, not having had the opportunity of consulting my friends, I could only answer that their resignation was a proposition widely differing from their dismissal, and that I did not see the impossibility of accepting his Administration in such a contingency, provided the supplies and public bills were pa.s.sed, so as to enable us to prorogue the Parliament. To all this he a.s.sented, and declared his intention of endeavouring to gain time, that the business of Parliament might go on; and agreed with me that such a resignation was improbable, and that it would be advisable not to dismiss them, unless some very particular opportunity presented itself.

1785.

The Breach Between the Marquis of Buckingham and Mr. Thomas Grenville.

Mr. Pitt's Government was now reaping all the advantages of peace and security. The lull that followed the termination of the American War and the dispersion of the Coalition, enabled the Minister to consolidate his power and develop his plans. Lord North, who had the misfortune not long afterwards to lose his eyesight, was receding from the arena on which he had acted so remarkable a part during the preceding fourteen years; and Mr. Fox and his adherents, returning again to their own natural orbit, were vindicating their integrity and consistency in the maintenance of a const.i.tutional Opposition. Faction, weakened and dismembered, had fallen before the genius of Mr. Pitt.

The princ.i.p.al measure in the Cabinet in 1785 was a Bill for the reform of the representation in Parliament, by which Mr. Pitt proposed to transfer the franchises of thirty-six boroughs to counties and unrepresented towns. A clause in this Bill, for giving pecuniary compensation to the disfranchised boroughs, was fatal to its reception.

Mr. Fox laid down the maxim, that the franchise was not a property, but a trust: the House adopted that view of the question, and the Bill was lost. But Mr. Pitt, nevertheless, discharged his pledge to the public by thus initiating the principle of parliamentary reform.

The Marquis of Buckingham still continued a pa.s.sive spectator of public events, and the correspondence of this period possesses consequently little political interest. We learn by a letter from his brother, Mr. W.

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