1820.] THE BILL OF PAINS AND PENALTIES. 169 proceedings commenced, addresses were presented to the Queen by deputations from the county of Middlesex, from St. Leonards Shoreditch, and from the Mechanics of the Metropolis. These assemblages, whether led by the radical Sheriff of Middlesex, in his state carriage, or by enthusiastic committeemen with white wands, gradually swelled into a multitude, of which the advanced guard were trampling down the laurels in her Majesty's garden at Hammersmith, before the rear-guard had passed Hyde Park Corner. Not on that 13th of November, 1642, when London poured forth its thousands whilst Rupert was fighting in the streets of Brentford, was there a greater earnestness than in those mechanics who marched to Hammersmith under a burning sun, and marched back again, hungry and weary, satisfied that their shouts had advanced the cause of justice for the oppressed. It is impossible not to recognize something of grandeur in such demonstrations, however capable they may be of affording matter for ridicule : "All kinds of addresses From Collars of SS, Came up like a fair; And all through September, And down to December, They hunted this Hare!"* The weekly journal from which we quote these lines was the chief of those new papers which "were established with the professed object of maintaining a constant war against all who espoused her Majesty's cause."+ There certainly never was a time in which the proper functions of the press were more degraded to the purposes of private slander. But it must be said in fairness, that if the Queen and her partizans were attacked with the coarsest reviling or the bitterest wit, the King and his supporters were no less subject to libellous attacks far exceeding the accustomed licence of periodical writing. Milton has described the controversialists of London, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. It is scarcely necessary to point the contrast furnished by the writers of 1820. The violence and ribaldry of the journals were perfectly in accord with the floods of indecency that were poured out every morning in the short-hand reports of the evidence on the trial-reports which were regularly printed by authority, circulated amongst the Peers, and thence duly copied in the daily papers. If the scenes that were passing in the streets were extraordinary, certainly the appearance presented by the House of Lords, on any one of the days of this trial, was no less remarkable. That House, the old Court of Requests, had been fitted up anew on the accession of George IV. The elevated arm-chair, from which former monarchs addressed the Parliament, had been supplanted by a magnificent throne-a canopy of crimson velvet, supported by Corinthian columns, and surmounted by the imperial crown. For this special occasion of the Queen's trial, galleries had been erected on each side of the House for the accommodation of the unusual number From Theodore Hook's song of "Hunting the Hare," in "John Bull." 170 THE BILL OF PAINS AND PENALTIES. [1820. of Peers who were expected to attend. A chair of state was placed for the Queen a little beyond the bar, fronting the throne and the woolsack. The places for her counsel were immediately behind her. On the 21st of August, the Attorney-General was concluding his speech in support of the Bill, when drums and trumpets, mixed with the shouts of the people, announced the Queen's arrival. She takes her seat. The interpreters being sworn, Teodora Majocchi was called in. The Queen turned suddenly round, uttered a loud exclamation, and rushed out of the House. This man had been one of her domestic servants. The examination of witnesses for the Bill proceeded till the 6th of September. The Solicitor-General summed up on the 7th, and on the 9th, upon an application from the Queen's counsel, an adjournment took place till the 3rd of October. The examinations and cross-examinations of the witnesses for the Bill, gross and revolting as were many of the details, were signal exhibitions of legal acuteness. It was impossible to deny the right of counsel to put questions offensive to delicacy; but it was scarcely possible not to feel some indignation when a noble lord now and then asked a question which the most brazen advocate would have attempted to clothe in somewhat more decent language. The universal licence of that unhallowed time seemed occasionally to make some of the highest forget their selfrespect. There probably would have been more instances of unseemly interference with the ordinary course of legal inquiry if one man had not stood in the midst of that assembly, whose whole bearing was that of authority and command; whose look, denouncing "battle dangerous" if any rash offence were given, made the boldest peer prudent. The great admiral, who in the bay of Algiers, was "all-fightful," complained of "the disrespect of counsel [Mr. Brougham] in fixing his eyes on him at the time that he was presuming to check him for an expression which had not been used by him, but by another noble lord." There was another of the Queen's law-officers who dared even to fix his eyes upon a prince of the blood, exclaiming, “Come forth, thou slauderer." Some who heard these things might well fear that the old respect for "degree, priority, and place" was coming to an end. On the 3rd of October Mr. Brougham entered on the Queen's defence. His speech on that day and the following may be cited amongst the greatest examples of forensic eloquence. "At half-past twelve to-day," writes lord Dudley, "Brougham concluded a most able speech with a magnificently eloquent peroration. The display of his power and fertility of mind in this business has been amazing; and these extraordinary efforts seem to cost him nothing. He dined at Holland House yesterday, and staid till eleven at night, talking 'de omni scibili'-French cookery, Italian poetry, and so on."* Mr. Rush, the American minister, notices as illustrative of the English bar, and individually of Mr. Brougham, that during the adjournment of the Queen's trial, her Attorney-General attended the assizes at Yorkshire, and engaged in a cause in behalf of a poor old woman, upon whose pig-cote a trespass had been committed, for which trespass the old woman obtained a verdict of forty shillings damages. † From the 4th to the 24th of October, the examination of witnesses on behalf of the Queen was continued. Mr. Denman then * Lord Dudley's "Letters," p. 267. "Residence at the Court of London," second series, vol. i. p. 339. 1820.] THE BILL OF PAINS AND PENALTIES. 171 summed up the evidence in an address, which lasted two days. His denunciations were so unmeasured, that some noble lords complained of the extraordinary licence used by the Queen's counsel. Mr. Rush has remarked of this time, when the most daring words were written and spoken with impunity, not only that every day produced its fiery libels against the King and his adherents, but that Mr. Denman, addressing himself to the assembled Peerage of the realm, denounced in thundering tones one of the brothers of the King. Perhaps more remarkable was the boldness of the same counsel, which compared the proceedings against the Queen to circumstances in the history of Imperial Rome described by Tacitus-how Octavia, the wife of Nero, in consequence of an unjust aversion which existed in the mind of her husband, was dismissed, and a mistress taken in her place; how she was banished by means of a conspiracy, in which slaves were produced as evidence against her, although the greater part of her servants protested her innocence; how Nero persevered, although she was hailed as in triumph by a generous. people—and how, on a second conspiracy, she was convicted, condemned, and banished to an island in the Mediterranean. Not so bold, but equally cutting, was the application by Mr. Brougham of a passage from Milton. Having asked John Allen Powell, the solicitor employed on the Milan Commission,— who is your client or employer in this case? and being debarred from putting this question, the Queen's Attorney-General exclaimed, "Up to this moment I have never been able to trace the local habitation or the name of the unknown being who is the plaintiff in this proceeding. I know not but may vanish into thin air. I know not under what shape it exists it 'If shape it might be called that shape had none, It is not our intention to furnish even the very briefest abstract of the evidence that was brought forward to sustain, or to rebut, the charge against the Queen upon which the Bill of Pains and Penalties was founded,—namely, that her royal highness conducted herself towards Bartolomeo Bergami, a foreigner engaged in her service in a menial situation, both in public and private," with indecent and offensive familiarity and freedom, and carried on with him a licentious, disgraceful, and adulterous intercourse." The impres-sion of the character of the Queen, produced upon all impartial persons by the publication of the evidence, was pretty much the same as that expressed by Sydney Smith after the proceedings had closed :-"The style of manners she has adopted does not exactly tally with that of holy women in the days that are gone, but let us be charitable and hope for the best." The evidence * The orator dovetailed with great skill inconsecutive lines of the famous passage in "Paradise Lost." The allusion might have been too strong for his audience if he had given the entire passage: "Or substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd, And shook a dreadful dart; what seem'd his head + "Memoir," vol. ii. p. 206. 172 THE BILL ABANDONED-JOY OF THE COUNTRY. [1820. and the arguments of counsel having been concluded, the peers, on the 2nd of November, came to the question of the second reading of the Bill of Pains and Penalties. The question was debated for five nights; when the motion for the second reading of the Bill was carried by 123 against 95. The majority was smaller than the Government had expected. It was thought by many that this was too small a majority for such a Bill to be sent into such a place as the House of Commons." But the majority was still more reduced when the Divorce clause came under consideration. Some peers were willing to pass the Bill if this clause were removed. In the course of the proceedings lord Harrowby had intimated that the Divorce clause might be withdrawn. Mr. Canning, watching the progress of these proceedings from Paris, at the beginning of October, had written to lord Liverpool, that though he thought the omission of the Divorce clause was likely enough to facilitate the passing of the Bill in the House of Lords, that omission would furnish an argument against it in the House of Commons. The Bill would become "a pure penal enactment for immorality; and when, from the beginning of time, did such an enactment take place? And where, if it take place now, is this new species of legislation to end?" The Opposition saw clearly that the way to defeat the Bill was to press for retaining the Divorce clause; and that it should be retained was carried by a majority of 129 to 62. On the 10th of November, on the motion that the Bill be read a third time, the majority was only nine-108 to 99. After the division, Lord Dacre was about to present a petition from the Queen, praying to be heard by counsel against the passing of the Bill. Lord Liverpool rose and said that such a course would not now be necessary :-" Had the third reading been carried by as considerable a number of peers as the second had been, he and his noble colleagues would have felt it their duty to persevere in the Bill, and to send it down to the other branch of the legislature. In the present state of the country, however, and with the division of sentiment so nearly balanced, just evinced by their lordships, they had come to the determination not to proceed further with it. It was his intention, accordingly, to move That the further consideration of the Bill be adjourned to this day six months.'" There was a general joy throughout the country at the termination of these proceedings. Those who looked carefully into the matter did not think with the excited multitude that the result was an acquittal of the Queen; but all rejoiced that the time was come when the heads of decent families would not be obliged to hide the newspaper from the eyes of their daughters, and when the legislature would have some better work before it than the discussion of a measure whose only fruits had been-" a Government brought into contempt and detestation; a kingdom thrown into such ferment and convulsion, as no other kingdom or Government ever recovered from without a revolution." There was one advantage to the Government and to the country, which Mr. Canning could not so well see as those who at home were watching the course of public opinion. What the Ministers at the end of 1819 were dreading as symptoms of revolution, were put an end * "Diary of Lord Colchester," vol. iii. p. 179-Letter of Mr. Bootle Wilbraham. 1820.] PROROGATION-DISCUSSIONS IN THE NEXT SESSION. 173 to at the end of 1820 by the very "ferment and convulsion" about the Queen. Mr. Wilbraham writes from Latham House to lord Colchester, during the extremest violence of the popular feeling, "Radicalism has taken the shape of affection for the Queen, and has deserted its old form; for we are all as quiet as lambs in this part of England, and you would not imagine that this could have been a disturbed country twelve months ago." On the 23rd of November Parliament was prorogued. On the 29th the Queen went in procession to St. Paul's, to return thanks for her deliverance from a great peril and affliction. In the next session of Parliament there were violent discussions on her Majesty's affairs, particularly on her continued exclusion from the Liturgy. An annuity of fifty thousand pounds was provided for her by Act of Parliament. Her popularity gradually declined, and in April, 1821, it was written-" The Queen is gone by as a topic of inflammation; and her taking quietly the fifty thousand pounds a year, after her protest and declaration that she would not till her right was acknowledged, was a coup de grace to her. It is said that an attempt is making by lady Jersey, who patronises her, to procure a drawing-room at Brandenburgh House, but it will undoubtedly fail. She is now hardly named in society or in the newspapers." Cobbett, who had addressed the most violent letters to the + Queen, stimulating her to resist every attempt at compromise, says that after the abandonment of the Bill, when the Whig faction flocked about her, the people, who hated this faction more than the other, troubled her with no more addresses. "The faction agitated questions about her in Parliament, concerning which the people cared not a straw: what she was doing soon became as indifferent to them as what any other person of the royal family was doing. The people began again to occupy themselves with the business of obtaining a parliamentary reform; and her way of life, and her final fate, soon became objects of curiosity much more than of interest with the people." + It is scarcely necessary, after the lapse of more than forty years, to enter upon any detail of the discussions upon questions connected with the Queen, agitated in Parliament after the great investigation was concluded-questions about which the arch-demagogue declared "the people cared not a straw." These discussions occupied many hundred columns of Hansard's Debates during the Second Session of the Seventh Imperial Parliament. On the 11th of July, the last day of the session, and only eight days before the time appointed for the King's coronation, Mr. Hume moved that an Address be presented to his Majesty, praying that he would issue his proclamation for the coronation of the Queen, "thereby consulting the true dignity of the crown, the tranquillity of the metropolis, and the general expectations of the people." At the moment when Mr. Hume was proposing his resolution the usher of the black rod summoned the Commons to attend in the House of Peers, where Commissioners were assembled to prorogue the Parliament. The motion necessarily fell to the ground. The Coronation took place on the 19th of July. The Queen was destined to a more bitter humiliation than * "Diary of Lord Colchester," vol. iii. p. 164. |