No. DLXI.

VOL. XCII.

If the concluding portion of Lord Stanhope's well-written work prove less generally attractive than that which went before, the cause is to be sought for, neither in the comparative unimportance of the events therein recorded, nor in any lack of skill on the part of the noble biographer in telling his story. The story, on the contrary, is well and clearly told, and it ranges over an interval than which the history of the world embraces none more important. But for this very reason the writer labours under great disadvantages. He has to deal with matters which have been so often and so fully handled that few persons arrived at early manhood can be wholly unacquainted with them; while to such as have passed, like ourselves, the meridian line of life, they present scarcely any feature that is new. For Mr Pitt's later life was, more, perhaps, than that of any great man of modern times, entirely a public life. He may be said to have run his course to an end without any domesticity whatever.

Singularly exempt from the passions which have their good as well as their evil proclivities, he formed no family connections, and entered into few private intimacies. Once, and only once, he appears to have hovered on the brink of matrimony. The conversation and manners of Lord Auckland's daughter caught his fancy, and he became, in consequence, a frequent visitor at the house of his friend; but when it was suggested to him that intimacies of this sort mean something, and that something means marriage, he instantly withdrew. The reason assigned by himself for declining a formal proposal was lack of means to support a family; but when we remember that he was in the receipt of at least £10,000 ayear, and that £3000, being the salary then attached to the LordWardenship of the Cinque-Ports, was independent of the revenues of political office, we find some difficulty in accepting this as the true solution of the problem. The fact we rather believe to be, that he had

VOL. XCII.-NO. DLXI.

A

no inclination to the society of women; and we know that, in his intercourse with men, he cared for little else than politics. Hence we look in vain, even in the pages of so accurate and painstaking a writer as Lord Stanhope, for those minute touches of individual character which give its peculiar charm to biography. Mr Pitt, as the great statesman, the indefatigable worker, the mainstay of order, and of the law's supremacy at home,-the pertinacious opponent of revolutionary principles and of French ambition abroad-is kept distinctly before us; but of Mr Pitt in the home-circle, unbending to all who approach him, throwing out loose observations, and giving and taking as common men do, we hear little or nothing. Under such circumstances, it appears to us that we shall best serve the purposes of the present paper if we abstain from meddling with the thread of Lord Stanhope's narrative, and confine ourselves to one or two points in Mr Pitt's career which have either escaped heretofore the notice of historians, or been touched upon so lightly as to make no very distinct impression upon the public mind.

On Mr Pitt's merits as a financier and administrator in times of peace, writers of all parties seem to be agreed. Even Lord Macaulay gives him credit for the wisdom of his general views, though he objects, as might be expected, to the manner in which they were on particular occasions carried into effect. It is admitted, likewise, that among what are called liberal politicians, few were prepared to go further in the way of wholesome change than he. His was true Toryism-not a policy of repression. He was honestly desirous, while he maintained the rights of the Established Church, to repeal or greatly modify those harsh laws with which Whig Governments and Whig Parliaments had encumbered the Statute-book. He was honestly desirous to place upon a footing of political equality all classes of the

King's subjects, whatever forms of Christianity they might profess. In like manner he had arranged a scheme for the gradual transfer of the suffrage from decayed boroughs to growing towns; which, had circumstances enabled him to carry into effect, would have saved the country from what it had to go through in 1831. But Mr Pitt, unlike Liberals by profession, was neither a bigot nor a fanatic. He knew that measures good in themselves cease to be good if they be carried inopportunely. He was able to do what few statesmen seem to be capable of achieving— to balance the profit of success in some favourite device, against the loss to be incurred by shaking, in the accomplishment of it, society to its centre. No minister, for example, ever desired more earnestly than he to open the doors of the constitution to Roman Catholics. His plan of union between the Parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland embraced arrangements for bringing that purpose about; yet he relinquished that purpose in deference to a necessity which he felt to be more urgent than the purpose itself. Is he justly censurable for this? A moment's considera- . tion will show that he really could not help himself. In the first place, his own friends, the members of his own Administration, paralysed his efforts by an act of the grossest treachery. In the next place, not the royal will alone, but the weight of public opinion was against him. On the other hand, the only party in the State strong enough to form, though not perhaps sufficiently strong to carry on, a Government without him, was pledged at all hazards to force through both Houses of Parliament a measure which the King, it was well understood, would abdicate rather than confirm. Was Pitt right or wrong in saving the country from an inevitable convulsion, though the price which he paid for so doing was the abandonment of a favourite project, and the cer

tainty of having his own honour as a politician called in question? Let us endeavour, in very few words, to describe how the case really stood.

So early as 1792 a bill was introduced into the Irish Parliament for repealing some of the most obnoxious of the laws which bore hard upon Roman Catholics. It was proposed in this bill to sanction the marriage of Protestants with Roman Catholics, by exempting them from the forfeiture of their rights to vote at elections in consequence of such marriage. Attorneys were at the same time allowed to take Roman Catholics for clerks; and leave was given to open schools without a licence from the Protestant bishop of the diocese. The measure was not only just in itself, but it was eminently politic; for Ireland, like Great Britain, had caught the fever of the French Revolution, and the Roman Catholic population, as yet in many instances loyal, took advantage of the difficulties which beset the Government to press their claims. Mr Pitt's views in favour of Ireland did not, however, stop there. He induced Lord Westmoreland, the Tory Lord-Lieutenant, himself an ultra-Protestant, and leaning for support exclusively on certain high Protestant families, to open the session of 1793 with an announcement that the King was anxious for "a general union of sentiment among all classes of his subjects, and that, entertaining these views, his Majesty trusted that the situation of his Catholic subjects would engage the serious attention of the Legislature."

In pursuance of the intentions thus shadowed forth, a bill for the further relief of Roman Catholics was, on the 4th of February 1793, introduced into the Irish House of Commons. It repealed every penalty and disability affecting the education of children and the succession to estates. It enabled Roman Catholics to hold civil and military offices, with the exception of a certain number which were

specified in the Act. Above all, it admitted Roman Catholics to vote at elections, without taking any other oaths than those of allegiance and abjuration. In itself this was a prodigious step in advance; but it was still more important, looking to the remote consequences involved in it. The abolition of all the other disabilities under which Roman Catholics still lay, could only be a question of time. For, the moment you admit a body of religionists to vote for the men who shall represent them in the Legislature, you pave the way-and a very broad and obvious way it is-for the admission of members of their own body into the Legislature itself.

Great as these concessions were, they satisfied nobody. The ultraProtestants complained of them as too extensive; the parties benefited pronounced them to be too narrow. Revolutionary principles continued to spread, and Mr Pitt became more and more convinced that he must continue to temper the firmness which he was prepared to exercise with further conciliation. He cast about, therefore, to strengthen himself, by taking into the Cabinet statesmen who should be prepared to support him in both courses, and, in 1794, accepted as his colleagues the heads of that section of politicians which came afterwards to be recognised as the Grenvillites. This was followed in 1795 by the recall of Lord Westmoreland from Ireland, and the nomination of Earl Fitz-William to succeed him. That Mr Pitt consented to the latter arrangement with reluctance is no proof of his insincerity. He was unwilling to throw overboard a colleague who, in spite of some defects in character, had worked with him faithfully. And the manner in which the change was pressed upon him was certainly not such as to reconcile him to the arrangement. new friends were but awkward solicitors. Their requests seemed to him to savour of dictation, and to dictation Pitt could never submit.

His

Urged by Lord Grenville and Mr Windham to sacrifice at the same time his Irish Chancellor, FitzGibbon, he resolutely refused. He refused also to inaugurate a new system of government in Ireland, by superseding abruptly other gentlemen to whom the management of the influences in that country had heretofore been intrusted. Moreover, he declined to remove Lord Westmoreland himself till another place could be found for him; and he sent Lord Fitz-William at last to Dublin, with strict injunctions to do nothing hastily, and, in every measure which he should originate, to take the Chancellor and the rest of his subordinates along with him. It was at this juncture that Lord Auckland thought fit to mark his sense of gratitude for past favours, by finding fault with everything which his chief proposed to do. He wrote bitter letters to persons whom he knew to be as dissatisfied as himself, and became in due time a party to a plot for defeating, by underhand means, Mr Pitt's purposes. We are very sorry to say a harsh word of the father of so deservedly popular a prelate as the present Bishop of Bath and Wells; but truth has stronger claims upon such as deal with history than personal predilections. The first Lord Auckland behaved extremely ill to his benefactor. Gorged with pensions, he considered himself slighted because Mr Pitt, in the changes now effected, refused to bring him into the Cabinet; and, as we shall take occasion presently to show, he was not very scrupulous in the means which he adopted to gratify his resentment.

Lord Fitz-William, as is well known, paid no regard to the instructions which Mr Pitt had given him. Immediately on arriving in Dublin, he took his own line, and, ignoring the existence of the Chancellor and the other members of his Administration, entered at once into intimate relations with the heads of the Roman Catholic party. The con

sequence was, his speedy recall, and a check given at a critical moment to the policy which he had been chosen to originate. But worse things were done elsewhere. The King, nervously alive to the danger of admitting Roman Catholics to political power, consulted the two highest legal authorities of the day, whether his consent to the repeal of the Test Act would be consistent with the due observance of the coronation oath. Both of the auauthorities, Lord Kenyon and Sir John Scott (afterwards Lord Eldon), though personally opposed in the strongest manner to Mr Pitt's views in the matter, affirmed that there could be no inconsistency in the proceeding. "Though the Test Act," they said, "appears to be a wise law, and, in point of sound policy, not to be departed from, yet it seems that it might be repealed or altered without any breach of the coronation oath or Act of Union (with Scotland)." This was a very honourable postponement of personal and party feeling to the dictates of truth and honour. It would have been well for the good names of other public men if they had acted in a similar spirit.

Deeply as we reverence the memory of good old George III., we cannot deny that he never could be brought to see that, in the making or unmaking of laws, his private sentiments formed no fair standard by which to try his duties as a constitutional king. The power which imposes a political obligation is surely competent to annul it; and the coronation oath, as it was imposed by the authority of Parliament, so it could be binding only as long as Parliament chose to enforce it. Had it been possible to convince the King of this, the probabilities are, that both England and Ireland would have escaped from a great deal of mischievous agitation; for in 1795 Pitt had arranged such a settlement of the Roman Catholic question as would have given to the Protestant Government, in Church and State, as great an amount of security as

a Protestant Government can ever count upon in dealing with the Papacy. The Romish clergy were prepared at that time to grant to the Crown a veto on the nomination of their bishops. They were willing, likewise, themselves to become pensioners on the bounty of Parliament. But the King's thoughts reverted continually to the terms of his coronation oath; and they whose duty it was to point out to him the groundlessness of his scruples made haste to embitter them. Lord Chancellor Loughborough took advantage of a visit which he paid at this time to the King at Weymouth, to undo all that the written opinions of Lord Kenyon and Sir John Scott might have effected. He not only adopted and confirmed the King's views on the point of conscience, but betrayed to him the plans of his Prime Minister before they had been matured; interposing thereby, to the accomplishment of an object of the deepest national importance, obstacles which Mr Pitt was never afterwards able to surmount.

Of all this Pitt remained in ignorance. He went forward, therefore, with his arrangements-one, and not the least momentous of which, aimed at bringing about a legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland. And if he did not pledge his Government to the Irish party, he certainly led its chiefs to believe that, provided they offered no opposition to the great scheme, Catholic emancipation, in the widest sense of the term, would be conceded to them. We must confess that, with Lord Stanhope, we are unable to acquit our great statesmen of something like over-finessing on that occasion. He certainly ought, before proceeding so far, to have made sure of the King's assent to the proposed arrangement. He was not ignorant -he could not be that the King's aversion to break in on the settlement of 1688 was intense; and this knowledge it doubtless was which restrained him from coming

to an open understanding with his Majesty till the step could no longer be avoided. We may make large allowances for the weakness of human nature in such a case, but we cannot approve it. The result was, that in 1800 the Act of Union was passed; and that Pitt, forced at last to explain to his master the position in which the Government stood, found the King immovable; for treason had again been at work. The Lord Chancellor and Lord Auckland were both with the King before Mr Pitt sought an audience; and the King, anticipating every argument which his Minister had arranged, positively refused to follow his advice. What could Mr Pitt do? His royal master was against him; so, as he perfectly well knew, was the great body of the people. He could only tender his resignation, which, after repeated endeavours to escape from so great a misfortune, the King reluctantly accepted.

Thus far, we presume, not even the most rabid of Whigs will say that Mr Pitt was to blame. Certainly, if he had preferred a personal crotchet to the interests of his country, he might have followed up the act of resignation by making common cause with Mr Fox and Mr Grey, and striving to force upon the King the obnoxious measure. But, in the first place, Pitt was too patriotic for such a course; and, in the next, he knew very well that had the case been otherwise he would have failed. The country was against Catholic emancipation; and an appeal to the constituency would have brought together such a House of Commons as no minister would have dared to face with a bill to that effect in his hand. Pitt, therefore, played the only part which was worthy of him, in not only not going into opposition, but in promising to the new Government, which Mr Addington was called upon to form, all the support in his power.

Mr

Well, but granting all this to be as we represent it, was Mr Pitt jus