COUNTER-REMARKS
TO
MR. DUDLEY MONTAGU PERCEVAL’S
REMARKS
UPON SOME PASSAGES IN COLONEL NAPIER’S FOURTH
VOLUME OF HIS HISTORY OF THE
PENINSULAR WAR.
“The evil, that men do, lives after them.”
COUNTER-REMARKS,
&c. &c.
In the fourth volume of my history of the Peninsular War I assailed the public character of the late Mr. Perceval, his son has published a defence of it, after having vainly endeavoured, in a private correspondence, to convince me that my attack was unfounded. The younger Mr. Perceval’s motive is to be respected, and had he confined himself to argument and authority, it was my intention to have relied on our correspondence, and left the subject matter in dispute to the judgment of the public. But Mr. Perceval used expressions which obliged me to seek a personal explanation, when I learned that he, unable to see any difference between invective directed against the public acts of a minister, and terms of insult addressed to a private person, thinks he is entitled to use such expressions; and while he emphatically “disavows all meaning or purpose of offence or insult,” does yet offer most grievous insult, denying at the same time my right of redress after the customary mode, and explicitly declining, he says from principle, an appeal to any other weapon than the pen.
It is not for me to impugn this principle in any case, still less in that of a son defending the memory of his father; but it gives me the right which I now assert, to disregard any verbal insult which Mr. Perceval, intentionally or unintentionally, has offered to me or may offer to me in future. When a gentleman relieves himself from personal responsibility by the adoption of this principle, his language can no longer convey insult to those who do not reject such responsibility; and it would be as unmanly to use insulting terms towards him in return as it would be to submit to them from a person not so shielded. Henceforth therefore I hold Mr. Perceval’s language to be innocuous, but for the support of my own accuracy, veracity, and justice, as an historian, I offer these my “Counter-Remarks.” They must of necessity lacerate Mr. Perceval’s feelings, but they are, I believe, scrupulously cleared of any personal incivility, and if any passage having that tendency has escaped me I thus apologize before-hand.
Mr. Perceval’s pamphlet is copious in declamatory expressions of his own feelings; and it is also duly besprinkled with animadversions on Napoleon’s vileness, the horrors of jacobinism, the wickedness of democrats, the propriety of coercing the Irish, and such sour dogmas of melancholy ultra-toryism. Of these I reck not. Assuredly I did not write with any expectation of pleasing men of Mr. Perceval’s political opinions and hence I shall let his general strictures pass, without affixing my mark to them, and the more readily as I can comprehend the necessity of ekeing out a scanty subject. But where he has adduced specific argument and authority for his own peculiar cause,—weak argument indeed, for it is his own, but strong authority, for it is the duke of Wellington’s,—I will not decline discussion. Let the most honoured come first.
The Duke of Wellington, replying to a letter from Mr. Perceval, in which the point at issue is most earnestly and movingly begged by the latter, writes as follows:—
London, June 6, 1835.
Dear Sir,
I received last night your letter of the 5th. Notwithstanding my great respect for Colonel Napier and his work, I have never read a line of it; because I wished to avoid being led into a literary controversy, which I should probably find more troublesome than the operations which it is the design of the Colonel’s work to describe and record.
I have no knowledge therefore of what he has written of your father, Mr. Spencer Perceval. Of this I am certain, that I never, whether in public or in private, said one word of the ministers, or of any minister who was employed in the conduct of the affairs of the public during the war, excepting in praise of them;—that I have repeatedly declared in public my obligations to them for the cordial support and encouragement which I received from them; and I should have been ungrateful and unjust indeed, if I had excepted Mr. Perceval, than whom a more honest, zealous, and able minister never served the king.
It is true that the army was in want of money, that is to say, specie, during the war. Bank-notes could not be used abroad; and we were obliged to pay for every thing in the currency of the country which was the seat of the operations. It must not be forgotten, however, that at that period the Bank was restricted from making its payments in specie. That commodity became therefore exceedingly scarce in England; and very frequently was not to be procured at all. I believe, that from the commencement of the war in Spain up to the period of the lamented death of Mr. Perceval, the difficulty in procuring specie was much greater than it was found to be from the year 1812, to the end of the war; because at the former period all intercourse with the Continent was suspended: in the latter, as soon as the war in Russia commenced, the communication with the continent was in some degree restored; and it became less difficult to procure specie.
But it is obvious that, from some cause or other, there was a want of money in the army, as the pay of the troops was six months in arrear; a circumstance which had never been heard of in a British army in Europe: and large sums were due in different parts of the country for supplies, means of transport, &c. &c.
Upon other points referred to in your letter, I have really no recollection of having made complaints. I am convinced that there was no real ground for them; as I must repeat, that throughout the war, I received from the king’s servants every encouragement and support that they had in their power to give.
Believe me, dear Sir,
Ever yours most faithfully,
Wellington.
Dudley Montagu Perceval, Esq.
This letter imports, if I rightly understand it, that any complaints, by whomsoever preferred, against the ministers, and especially against Mr. Perceval, during the war in the Peninsula, had no real foundation. Nevertheless his Grace and others did make many, and very bitter complaints, as the following extracts will prove.
No. 1.
Lord Wellington to Mr. Stuart, Minister Plenipotentiary at Lisbon.
“Viseu, February 10th, 1810.
“I apprized Government more than two months ago of our probable want of money, and of the necessity that we should be supplied, not only with a large sum but with a regular sum monthly, equal in amount to the increase of expense occasioned by the increased subsidy to the Portuguese, and by the increase of our own army. They have not attended to either of these demands, and I must write again. But I wish you would mention the subject in your letter to lord Wellesley.”
No. 2.
“February 23d, 1810.
“It is obvious that the sums will fall short of those which His Majesty’s Government have engaged to supply to the Portuguese government, but that is the fault of His Majesty’s Government in England, and they have been repeatedly informed that it was necessary that they should send out money. The funds for the expenses of the British army are insufficient in the same proportion, and all that I can do is to divide the deficiency in its due proportions between the two bodies which are to be supported by the funds at our disposal.”
No. 3.
“March 1st, 1810.
“In respect to the 15,000 men in addition to those which Government did propose to maintain in this country, I have only to say, that I don’t care how many men they send here, provided they will supply us with proportionate means to feed and pay them; but I suspect they will fall short rather than exceed the thirty thousand men.”
No. 4.
“March 5th, 1810.
Mr. Stuart, speaking of the Portuguese emigrating, says,
“If the determination of ministers at home or events here bring matters to that extremity.”
No. 5.
Lord Wellington to Mr. Stuart, in reference to Cadiz.
“30th March, 1810.
“I don’t understand the arrangement which Government have made of the command of the troops there. I have hitherto considered them as a part of the army, and from the arrangement which I made with the Spanish government they cost us nothing but their pay, and all the money procured by bills was applicable to the service in this country. The instructions to general Graham alter this entirely, and they have even gone so far as to desire him to take measures to supply the Spaniards with provisions from the Mediterranean, whereas I had insisted that the Spaniards should feed our troops. The first consequence of this arrangement will be that we shall have no more money from Cadiz. I had considered the troops at Cadiz so much a part of my army that I had written to my brother to desire his opinion whether, if the French withdrew from Cadiz, when they should attack Portugal, he thought I might bring into Portugal, at least the troops, which I had sent there. But I consider this now to be at an end.”
No. 6.
Lord Wellington to Mr. Stuart.
“1st April, 1810.
“I agree with you respecting the disposition of the people of Lisbon. In fact all they wish for is to be saved from the French, and they were riotous last winter because they imagined, with some reason, that we intended to abandon them.”——“The arrangement made by Government for the command at Cadiz will totally ruin us in the way of money.”
No. 7.
Lord Wellington to Mr. Stuart.
“April 20th, 1810.
“The state of opinions in England is very unfavourable to the Peninsula. The ministers are as much alarmed as the public or as the opposition pretend to be, and they appear to be of opinion that I am inclined to fight a desperate battle, which is to answer no purpose. Their private letters are in some degree at variance with their public instructions, and I have called for an explanation of the former, which when it arrives will shew me more clearly what they intend. The instructions are clear enough, and I am willing to act under them, although they throw upon me the whole responsibility for bringing away the army in safety, after staying in the Peninsula till it will be necessary to evacuate it. But it will not answer in these times to receive private hints and opinions from ministers, which, if attended to, would lead to an act directly contrary to the spirit, and even to the letter of the public instructions; at the same time that, if not attended to, the danger of the responsibility imposed by the public instructions is increased tenfold.”
No. 8.
Ditto to Ditto.
“May, 1810.
“It is impossible for Portugal to aid in feeding Cadiz. We have neither money, nor provisions in this country, and the measures which they are adopting to feed the people there will positively oblige us to evacuate this country for want of money to support the army, and to perform the king’s engagements, unless the Government in England should enable us to remain by sending out large and regular supplies of specie. I have written fully to Government upon this subject.”
No. 9.
General Graham to Mr. Stuart.
“Isla, 22d May, 1810.
In reference to his command at Cadiz, says, “lord Liverpool has decided the doubt by declaring this a part of lord Wellington’s army, and saying it is the wish of Government that though I am second in command to him I should be left here for the present.” “This is odd enough; I mean that it should not have been left to his judgement to decide where I was to be employed; one would think he could judge fully better according to circumstances than people in England.”
No. 10.
Lord Wellington to Mr. Stuart.
“June 5, 1810.
“This letter will shew you the difficulties under which we labour for want of provisions and of money to buy them.” “I am really ashamed of writing to the government (Portuguese) upon this subject (of the militia), feeling as I do that we owe them so much money which we are unable to pay. According to my account the military chest is now indebted to the chest of the aids nearly £400,000. At the same time I have no money to pay the army, which is approaching the end of the second month in arrears, and which ought to be paid in advance. The bât and forage to the officers for March is still due, and we are in debt every where.” “The miserable and pitiful want of money prevents me from doing many things which might and ought to be done for the safety of the country.” “The corps ought to be assembled and placed in their stations. But want of provisions and money obliges me to leave them in winter-quarters till the last moment. Yet if any thing fails, I shall not be forgiven.”
No. 11.
Mr. Stuart to Lord Wellington.
“June 9, 1810.
“I have received two letters from Government, the one relative to licenses, the other containing a letter from Mr. Harrison of the Treasury, addressed to colonel Bunbury, in which, after referring to the different estimates both for the British and Portuguese, and stating the sums at their disposal, they not only conclude that we have more than is absolutely necessary, but state specie to be so scarce in England that we must not rely on further supplies from home, and must content ourselves with such sums as come from Gibraltar and Cadiz,” &c. &c.
“From hand to mouth we may perhaps make shift, taking care to pay the Portuguese in kind and not in money, until the supplies, which the Treasury say in three or four months will be ready, are forthcoming. Government desire me to report to them any explanation which either your lordship or myself may be able to communicate on the subject of Mr. Harrison’s letter. As it principally relates to army finance, I do not feel myself quite competent to risk an opinion in opposition to what that gentleman has laid down. I have, however, so often and so strongly written to them the embarrassment we all labour under, both respecting corn and money, that there must be some misconception, or some inaccuracy has taken place in calculations which are so far invalidated by the fact, without obliging us to go into the detail necessary to find out what part of the statement is erroneous.”
No. 12.
Wellington to Stuart.
“June, 1810.
“I received from the Secretary of State a copy of Mr. Hamilton’s letter to colonel Bunbury, and we have completely refuted him. He took an estimate made for September, October, and November, as the rate of expense for eight months, without adverting to the alteration of circumstances occasioned by change of position, increase of price, of numbers, &c., and then concluded upon his own statement, that we ought to have money in hand, (having included in it by the bye some sums which we had not received,) notwithstanding that our distress had been complained of by every post, and I had particularly desired, in December, that £200,000 might be sent out, and a sum monthly equal in amount to the increased Portuguese subsidy.”
No. 13.
Ditto to Ditto.
“June, 1810.
“All our militia in these provinces [Tras os Montes and Entre Minho y Douro] are disposable, and we might throw them upon the enemy’s flank in advance in these quarters [Leon] and increase our means of defence here and to the north of the Tagus very much indeed. But we cannot collect them as an army, nor move them without money and magazines, and I am upon my last legs in regard to both.”
No. 14.
Wellington to Stuart.
“November, 1810.
“I have repeatedly written to government respecting the pecuniary wants of Portugal, but hitherto without effect.”
No. 15.
Ditto to Ditto.
“December 22.
“It is useless to expect more money from England, as the desire of economy has overcome even the fears of the Ministers, and they have gone so far as to desire me to send home the transports in order to save money!”
No. 16.
Ditto to Ditto.
“28th January, 1811.
“I think the Portuguese are still looking to assistance from England, and I have written to the king’s Government strongly upon the subject in their favour. But I should deceive myself if I believed we shall get any thing, and them if I were to tell them we should; they must, therefore, look to their own resources.”
No. 17.
Ditto to Ditto.
In reference to the Portuguese intrigue against him.
“18th February, 1811.
“I think also that they will be supported in the Brazils, and I have no reason to believe that I shall be supported in England.”
No. 18.
Ditto to Ditto.
“13th April, 1811.
“If the Government choose to undertake large services and not supply us with sufficient pecuniary means, and leave to me the distribution of the means with which they do supply us, I must exercise my own judgement upon the distribution for which I am to be responsible.”
No. 19.
Lord Wellington to Mr. Stuart.
“4th July, 1811.
“The pay of the British troops is now nearly two months in arrears, instead of being paid one month in advance, according to his majesty’s regulations. The muleteers, upon whose services the army depends almost as much as upon those of the soldiers, are six months in arrears; there are now bills to a large amount drawn by the commissioners in the country on the commissary at Lisbon still remaining unpaid, by which delay the credit of the British army and government is much impaired, and you are aware of the pressing demands of the Portuguese government for specie. There is but little money in hand to be applied to the several services; there is no prospect that any will be sent from England, and the supplies derived from the negociation of bills upon the treasury at Cadiz and Lisbon have been gradually decreasing.”
No. 20.
Lord Wellington to Lord Wellesley.
“26th July, 1811.
“Although there are, I understand, provisions in Lisbon, in sufficient quantities to last the inhabitants and army for a year, about 12 or 14,000 Portuguese troops which I have on the right bank of the Tagus are literally starving; even those in the cantonments on the Tagus cannot get bread, because the government have not money to pay for means of transport. The soldiers in the hospitals die because the government have not money to pay for the hospital necessaries for them; and it is really disgusting to reflect upon the detail of the distresses occasioned by the lamentable want of funds to support the machine which we have put in motion.”
“Either Great Britain is interested in maintaining the war in the Peninsula, or she is not. If she is, there can be no doubt of the expediency of making an effort to put in motion against the enemy the largest force which the Peninsula can produce. The Spaniards would not allow, I believe, of that active interference by us in their affairs which might affect and ameliorate their circumstances, but that cannot be a reason for doing nothing. Subsidies given without stipulating for the performance of specific services would, in my opinion, answer no purpose.”
No. 21.
Mr. Sydenham to Mr. Stuart.
“27th September, 1811.
“I take great shame to myself for having neglected so long writing to you, &c. but in truth I did not wish to write to you until I could give you some notion of the result of my mission and the measures which our government would have adopted in consequence of the information and opinion which I brought with me from Portugal, but God knows how long I am to wait if I do not write to you until I could give you the information which you must naturally be so anxious to receive. From week to week I have anxiously expected that something would be concluded, and I as regularly deferred writing; however I am now so much in your debt that I am afraid you will attribute my silence to inattention rather than to the uncertainty and indecision of our further proceedings. During the ten days agreeable voyage in the Armide I arranged all the papers of information which I had procured in Portugal, and I made out a paper on which I expressed in plain and strong terms all I thought regarding the state of affairs both in Portugal and Spain. These papers, together with the notes which I procured from lord Wellington and yourself, appeared to me to comprehend every thing which the ministers could possibly require, both to form a deliberate opinion upon every part of the subject and to shape their future measures. The letters which I had written to lord Wellesley during my absence from England, and which had been regularly submitted to the prince, had prepared them for most of the opinions which I had to enforce on my arrival. Lord Wellesley perfectly coincided in all the leading points, and a short paper of proposals was prepared for the consideration of the cabinet, supported by the most interesting papers which I brought from Portugal.”
Then followed an abstract of the proposals, after which Mr. Sydenham continues thus:—
“I really conceived that all this would have been concluded in a week, but a month has elapsed, and nothing has yet been done.” “Campbell will be able to tell you that I have done every thing in my power to get people here to attend to their real interests in Portugal, and I have clamoured for money, money, money in every office to which I have had access. To all my clamour and all my arguments I have invariably received the same answer ‘that the thing is impossible.’ The prince himself certainly appears to be à la hauteur des circonstances, and has expressed his determination to make every exertion to promote the good cause in the Peninsula. Lord Wellesley has a perfect comprehension of the subject in its fullest extent, and is fully aware of the several measures which Great Britain ought and could adopt. But such is the state of parties and such the condition of the present government that I really despair of witnessing any decided and adequate effort on our part to save the Peninsula. The present feeling appears to be that we have done mighty things, and all that is in our power; that the rest must be left to all-bounteous Providence, and that if we do not succeed we must console ourselves by the reflection that Providence has not been so propitious as we deserved. This feeling you will allow is wonderfully moral and Christian-like, but still nothing will be done until we have a more vigorous military system, and a ministry capable of directing the resources of the nation to something nobler than a war of descents and embarkations.” “Nothing can be more satisfactory than the state of affairs in the north; all that I am afraid of is that we have not a ministry capable of taking advantage of so fine a prospect.”
Mr. Sydenham’s statement of the opinions of Lord Wellesley at the time of the negociations which ended in that lord’s retirement in February, is as follows:—
“1st. That Lord Wellesley was the only man in power who had a just view of affairs in the Peninsula, or a military thought amongst them.”
“2nd. That he did not agree with Perceval that they were to shut the door against the Catholics, neither did he agree with Grenville that they were to be conciliated by emancipation without securities.”
“3rd. That with respect to the Peninsula, he rejected the notion that we were to withdraw from the Peninsula to husband our resources at home, but he thought a great deal more both in men and money could be done than the Percevals admitted, and he could no longer act under Perceval with credit, or comfort, or use to the country.”
No. 22.
Extract of a letter from Mr. Hamilton, Under-Secretary of State.
“April 9th, 1810.
“I hope by next mail will be sent something more satisfactory and useful than we have yet done by way of instructions, but I am afraid the late O. P. riots have occupied all the thoughts of our great men here, so as to make them, or at least some of them, forget more distant but not less interesting concerns. With respect to the evils you allude to as arising from the inefficiency of the Portuguese government, the people here are by no means so satisfied of their existence (to a great degree) as you who are on the spot. Here we judge only of the results, the details we read over, but being unable to remedy, forget them the next day.”
No. 23.
Lord Wellington to Mr. Stuart.
“6th May, 1812.
“In regard to money for the Portuguese government, I begged Mr. Bisset to suggest to you, that if you were not satisfied with the sum he was enabled to supply, you should make your complaint on the subject to the king’s government. I am not the minister of finance, nor is the commissary-general. It is the duty of the king’s ministers to provide supplies for the service, and not to undertake a service for which they cannot provide adequate supplies of money and every other requisite. They have thrown upon me a very unpleasant task, in leaving to me to decide what proportion of the money which comes into the hands of the commissary-general, shall be applied to the service of the British army; and what shall be paid to the king’s minister, in order to enable him to make good the king’s engagements to the Portuguese government; and at the same time that they have laid upon me this task, and have left me to carry on the war as I could, they have by their orders cut off some of the resources which I had.”
“The British army have not been paid for nearly three months. We owe nearly a year’s hire to the muleteers of the army. We are in debt for supplies in all parts of the country; and we are on the point of failing in our payments for some supplies essentially necessary to both armies, which cannot be procured excepting with ready money.”
No. 24.
The following extracts are of a late date, but being retrospective, and to the point, are proper to be inserted here. In 1813 lord Castlereagh complained of some proceedingsVol. iv. p. 178. described in my history, as having been adopted by lord Wellington and Mr. Stuart, to feed the army in 1810 and 1811, and his censure elicited the letters from which these extracts are given.
No. 25.
Lord Wellington to Mr. Stuart.
“3d May, 1813.
“I have read your letter, No. 2, 28th April, in which you have enclosed some papers transmitted by lord Castlereagh, including a letter from the Board of Trade in regard to the purchases of corn made by your authority in concert with me, in Brazil, America, and Egypt. When I see a letter from the Board of Trade, I am convinced that the latter complaint originates with the jobbing British merchants at Lisbon; and although I am delighted to see the Government turn their attention to the subject, as it will eventually save me a great deal of trouble, I am quite convinced that if we had not adopted, nearly three years ago, the system of measures now disapproved of, not only would Lisbon and the army and this part of the Peninsula have been starved; but if we had, according to the suggestions of the commander-in-chief, and the Treasury, and the Board of Trade, carried on transactions of a similar nature through the sharks at Lisbon, above referred to, calling themselves British merchants, the expense of the army crippled in its operations, and depending upon those who, I verily believe, are the worst subjects that his Majesty has; and enormous as that expense is, it would have been very much increased.”
“In regard to the particular subject under consideration, it is obvious to me that the authorities in England have taken a very confined view of the question.”
“It appears to me to be extraordinary that when lord Castlereagh read the statement that the commissary-general had in his stores a supply of corn and flour to last 100,000 men for nine months, he should not have adverted to the fact, that the greatest part of the Portuguese subsidy, indeed all in the last year, but £600,000, was paid in kind, and principally in corn, and that he should not have seen that a supply for 100,000 men for nine months was not exorbitant under these circumstances. Then the Government appears to me to have forgotten all that passed on the particular subject of your purchases. The advantage derived from them in saving a starving people during the scarcity of 1810-1811; in bringing large sums into the military chest which otherwise would not have found their way there; and in positive profit of money.”——“If all this be true, which I believe you have it in your power to prove, I cannot understand why Government find fault with these transactions, unless it is that they are betrayed into disapprobation of them by merchants who are interested in their being discontinued. I admit that your time and mine would be much better employed than in speculation of corn, &c. But when it is necessary to carry on an extensive system of war with one-sixth of the money in specie which would be necessary to carry it on, we must consider questions and adopt measures of this sort, and we ought to have the confidence and support of the Government in adopting them. It is only the other day that I recommended to my brother something of the same kind to assist in paying the Spanish subsidy; and I have adopted measures in respect to corn and other articles in Gallicia, with a view to get a little money for the army in that quarter. If these measures were not adopted, not only would it be impossible to perform the king’s engagement, but even to support our own army.”
Mr. Stuart to Mr. Hamilton.
“8th May.
“Though I thank you for the letter from the Admiralty contained in yours of the 21st April, I propose rather to refer Government to the communication of lord Wellington and the admiral, by whose desire I originally adverted to the subject, than to continue my representations of the consequences to be expected from a state of things the navy department are not disposed to remedy. My private letter to lord Castlereagh, enclosing lord Wellington’s observations on the letter from the Treasury, will, I think, satisfy his lordship that the arrangements which had been adopted for the supply of the army and population of this country are of more importance than is generally imagined. I am indeed convinced that if they had been left to private merchants, and that I had not taken the measures which are condemned, the army must have embarked, and a famine must have taken place.”
Now if these complaints thus made in the duke’s letters, written at the time, were unfounded, his Grace’s present letter is, for so much, a defence of Mr. Perceval; if they were not unfounded his present letter is worth nothing, unless as a proof, that with him, the memory of good is longer-lived than the memory of ill. But in either supposition the complaints are of historical interest, as shewing the difficulties, real or supposed, under which the general laboured. They are also sound vouchers for my historical assertions, because no man but the duke could have contradicted them; no man could have doubted their accuracy on less authority than his own declaration; and no man could have been so hardy as to put to him the direct question of their correctness.
Mr. Perceval objects to my quoting lord Wellesley’s manifesto, because that nobleman expressed sorrow at its appearance, and denied that he had composed it. But the very passage of lord Wellesley’s speech on which Mr. Perceval relies, proves, that the sentiments and opinions of the manifesto were really entertained by lord Wellesley, who repudiates the style only, and regrets, not that the statement appeared, but that it should have appeared at the moment when Mr. Perceval had been killed. The expression of this very natural feeling he, however, took care to guard from any mistake, by reasserting his contempt for Mr. Perceval’s political character. Thus he identified his opinions with those contained in the manifesto. And this view of the matter is confirmed by those extracts which I have given from the correspondence of Mr. Sydenham, no mean authority, for he was a man of high honour and great capacity; and he was the confidential agent employed by lord Wellesley, to ascertain and report upon the feelings and views of lord Wellington, with respect to the war; and also upon those obstacles to his success, which were daily arising, either from the conduct of the ministers at home, or from the intrigues of their diplomatists abroad.
Thus it appears that if lord Wellington’s complaints, as exhibited in these extracts, were unfounded, they were at least so plausible as to mislead Mr. Sydenham on the spot, and lord Wellesley at a distance, and I may well be excused if they also deceived me. But was I deceived? Am I to be condemned as an historian, because lord Wellington, in the evening of his life, and in the ease and fulness of his glory, generously forgets the crosses, and remembers only the benefits of by-gone years? It may be said indeed, that his difficulties were real, and yet the government not to blame, seeing that it could not relieve them. To this ISee [Extract. No. 15] can oppose the ordering away of the transports, on which, in case of failure, the safety of the army depended! To[Do. No. 7.] this I can oppose the discrepancy between the public and private instructions of the ministers! To this I can oppose those most bitter passages, “If any thing fails I shall[Do. No. 10.] not be forgiven,” and “I have no reason to believe that I[Do. No. 17.] shall be supported in England.”
I say I can oppose these passages from the duke’s letters, but I need them not. Lord Wellesley, a man of acknowledged talent, practised in governing, well acquainted with the resources of England, and actually a member of the administration at the time, was placed in a better position, to make a sound judgement than lord Wellington; lord Wellesley, an ambitious man, delighting in power, and naturally anxious to direct the political measures, while his brother wielded the military strength of the state; lord Wellesley, tempted to keep office by natural inclination, by actual possession, by every motive that could stir ambition and soothe the whisperings of conscience, actually quitted the cabinet
Because he could not prevail on Mr. Perceval to support the war as it ought to be supported, and he could therefore no longer act under him with credit, or comfort, or use to the country;
Because the war could be maintained on a far greater scale than Mr. Perceval maintained it, and it was dishonest to the allies and unsafe not to do it;
Because the cabinet, and he particularized Mr. Perceval as of a mean capacity, had neither ability and knowledge to devise a good plan, nor temper and discretion to adopt another’s plan.
Do I depend even upon this authority? No! In lord Wellington’s letter, stress is laid upon the word specie, the want of which, it is implied, was the only distress, because bank notes would not pass on the continent; but several extracts speak of corn and hospital stores, and the transport vessels ordered home were chiefly paid in paper. Notes certainly would not pass on the continent, nor in England neither, for their nominal value, and why? Because they were not money; they were the signs of debt; the signs that the labour, and property, and happiness, of unborn millions, were recklessly forestalled, by bad ministers, to meet the exigency of the moment. Now admitting, which I do not, that this exigency was real and unavoidable; admitting, which I do not, that one generation has a right to mortgage the labour and prosperity of another and unborn generation, it still remains a question, whether a minister, only empowered by a corrupt oligarchy, has such a right. And there can be no excuse for a man who, while protesting that the country was unable to support the war, as it ought to be supported, continued that war, and thus proceeded to sink the nation in hopeless debt, and risk the loss of her armies, and her honour, at the same time; there is no excuse for that man who, while denying the ability of the country, to support her troops abroad, did yet uphold all manner of corruption and extravagance at home.
There was no specie, because the fictitious ruinous incontrovertible paper money system had driven it away, and who more forward than Mr. Perceval to maintain and extend that system—the bane of the happiness and morals of the country; a system which then gave power and riches to evil men, but has since plunged thousands upon thousands into ruin and misery; a system which, swinging like a pendulum between high taxes and low prices, at every oscillation strikes down the laborious part of the community, spreading desolation far and wide and threatening to break up the very foundations of society. And why did Mr. Perceval thus nourish the accursed thing? Was it that one bad king might be placed on the throne of France; another on the throne of Spain; a third on the throne of Naples? That Italy might be the prey of the barbarian, or, last, not least, that the hateful power of the English oligarchy, which he called social order and legitimate rights, might be confirmed? But lo! his narrow capacity! what has been the result? In the former countries insurrection, civil war, and hostile invasion, followed by the free use of the axe and the cord, the torture and the secret dungeon; and in England it would have been the same, if her people, more powerful and enlightened in their generation, had not torn the baleful oppression down, to be in due time trampled to dust as it deserves.
Mr. Perceval was pre-eminently an “honest, zealous, and able servant of the king!”
To be the servant of the monarch is not then to be the servant of the people. For if the country could not afford to support the war, as it ought to be supported, without detriment to greater interests, the war should have been given up; or the minister, who felt oppressed by the difficulty, should have resigned his place to those who thought differently. “It is the duty of the king’s ministersSee [Extract, No. 23.] to provide supplies for the service, and not to undertake a service for which they cannot provide adequate supplies of money and every other requisite!” These are the words of Wellington, and wise words they are. Did Mr. Perceval act on this maxim? No! he suffered the war to starve on “one-sixth of the money necessary to keep it up,” and would neither withdraw from the contest, nor resign the conduct of it to lord Wellesley, who, with a full knowledge of the subject, declared himself able and willing to support it efficiently. Nay, Mr. Perceval, while professing his inability to furnish Wellington efficiently for one war in the Peninsula, was by his orders in council, those complicated specimens of political insolence, folly, and fraud, provoking a new and unjust war with America, which was sure to render the supply of that in the Peninsula more difficult than ever.
But how could the real resources of the country for supplying the war be known, until all possible economy was used in the expenditure upon objects of less importance? Was there any economy used by Mr. Perceval? Was not that the blooming period of places, pensions, sinecures, and jobbing contracts? Did not the government and all belonging thereto, then shout and revel in their extravagance? Did not corruption the most extensive and the most sordid overspread the land? Was not that the palmy state of the system which the indignant nation has since risen in its moral strength to reform? Why did not Mr. Perceval reduce the home and the colonial expenses, admit the necessity of honest retrenchment, and then manfully call upon the people of England to bear the real burthen of the war, because it was necessary, and because their money was fairly expended to sustain their honour and their true interests? This would have been the conduct of an able, zealous, and faithful servant of the country; and am I to be silenced by a phrase, when I charge with a narrow, factious, and contemptible policy and a desire to keep himself in power, the man, who supported and extended this system of corruption at home, clinging to it as a child clings to its nurse, while the armies of his country were languishing abroad for that assistance which his pitiful genius could not perceive the means of providing, and which, if he had been capable of seeing it, his more pitiful system of administration would not have suffered him to furnish. Profuseness and corruption marked Mr. Perceval’s government at home, but the army withered for want abroad; the loan-contractors got fatSee [Extract No. 20] in London, but the soldiers in hospital died because there was no money to provide for their necessities. The funds of the country could not supply both, and so he directed his economy against the troops, and reserved his extravagance to nourish the foul abuses at home, and this is to be a pre-eminently “honest, zealous, and able servant of the king!”
See further on, Second [Extracts, No. 4.] This was the man who projected to establish fortresses to awe London and other great towns. This was the man who could not support the war in Spain, but who did support the tithe war in Ireland, and who persecuted the press of England with a ferocity that at last defeated its own object. This was the man who called down vindictive[Ditto, No. 6] punishment on the head of the poor tinman, Hamlyn of Plymouth, because, in his ignorant simplicity, he openly offered money to a minister for a place; and this also was the man who sheltered himself from investigation, under the vote of an unreformed House of Commons, when Mr. Maddocks solemnly offered to prove at the bar, that he, Mr. Perceval, had been privy to, and connived at a transaction, more corrupt and far more mischievous and illegal in its aim than that of the poor tinman. This is the Mr. Perceval who, after asserting, with a view to obtain heavier punishment on Hamlyn, the distinguished puritySee further on, Second [Extracts, No. 7.] of the public men of his day, called for that heavy punishment on Hamlyn for the sake of public justice, and yet took shelter himself from that public justice under a vote of an unreformed house, and suffered Mr. Ponsonby to defend that vote by the plea that such foul transactions were as “glaring as the sun at noon-day.” And this man is not to be called factious!
Mr. Perceval the younger in his first letter to me says, “the good name of my father is the only inheritance he left to his children.” A melancholy inheritance indeed if it be so, and that he refers to his public reputation. But I find that during his life the minister Perceval had salaries to the amount of about eight thousand a-year, and the reversion of a place worth twelve thousand a-year, then enjoyed by his brother, lord Arden. And also I find that after his death, his family received a grant of fifty thousand pounds, and three thousand a-year from the public money. Nay, Mr. Perceval the son, forgetting his former observation, partly founds his father’s claim to reputation upon this large amount of money so given to his family. Money and praise he says were profusely bestowed, money to the family, praise to the father, wherefore Mr. Perceval must have been an admirable minister! Admirable proof!
But was he praised and regretted by an admiring grateful people? No! the people rejoiced at his death. Bonfires and illuminations signalized their joy in the country, and in London many would have rescued his murderer; a[Ditto, No. 5] multitude even blessed him on the scaffold. No! He was not praised by the English people, for they had felt his heavy griping hand; nor by the people of Ireland, for they had groaned under his harsh, his unmitigated bigotry. Who then praised him? Why his coadjutors in evil, his colleagues in misrule; the majority of a corrupt House of Commons, the nominees of the borough faction in England, of the Orange faction in Ireland; those factions by which he ruled and had his political being, by whose support, and for whose corrupt interests he run his public “career of unmixed evil,” unmixed, unless the extreme narrowness of his capacity, which led him to push his horrid system forward too fast for its stability, may be called a good.
By the nominees of such factions, by men placed in the situation, but without the conscience of Mr. Quentin Dick,See further on, Second [Extracts, No. 7.] Mr. Perceval was praised, and the grant of money to his family was carried; but there were many to oppose the grant even in that house of corruption. The grant was a ministerial measure, and carried, as such, by the same means, and by the same men, which, and who, had so long baffled the desire of the nation for catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. And yet the people! emphatically, the people! have since wrung those measures from the factions; aye! and the same people loathe the very memory of the minister who would have denied both for ever, if it had been in his power.
“Mr. Perceval’s bigotry taught him to oppress Ireland, but his religion did not deter him from passing a law to prevent the introduction of medicines into France during a pestilence.”
This passage is, by the younger Mr. Perceval, pronounced to be utterly untrue, because bark is only one medicine, and not medicines; because there was no raging deadly general pestilence in France at the time; and because the measure was only retaliation for Napoleon’s Milan and Berlin decrees, a sort of war which even Quakers might wink at. What the extent of a Quaker’s conscience on such occasions may be I know not, since I have heard of one, who, while professing his hatred of blood-shedding, told the mate of his ship that if he did not port his helm, he would not run down his enemy’s boat. But this I do know, that Napoleon’s decrees were retaliation for our paper blockades; that both sides gave licenses for a traffic in objects which were convenient to them, while they denied to unoffending neutrals their natural rights of commerce; that to war against hospitals is inhuman, unchristianlike, and uncivilized, and that the avowal of the principle is more abhorrent than even the act. The avowed principle in this case was to distress the enemy. It was known that the French were in great want of bark, therefore it was resolved they should not have it, unless Napoleon gave up his great scheme of policy called the continental system. Now men do not want Jesuit’s bark unless to cure disease, and to prevent them from getting it, was literally to war against hospitals. It was no metaphor of Mr. Whitbread’s, it was a plain truth.
Oh! exclaims Mr. Perceval, there was no deadly raging general pestilence! What then? Is not the principle the same? Must millions suffer, must the earth be cumbered with carcasses, before the christian statesman will deviate from his barbarous policy? Is a momentary expediency to set aside the principle in such a case? Oh! no! by no means! exclaims the pious minister Perceval. My policy is just, and humane; fixed on immutable truths emanating directly from true religion, and quite consonant to the christian dispensation; the sick people shall have bark, I am far from wishing to prevent them from getting bark. God forbid! I am not so inhuman. Yes, they shall have bark, but their ruler must first submit to me. “Port thy helm,” quoth the Quaker, “or thee wilt miss her, friend!” War against hospitals! Oh! No! “I do not war against the hospital, I see the black flag waving over it and I respect it; to be sure: I throw my shells on to it continually, but that is not to hurt the sick, it is only to make the governor capitulate.” And this is the pious sophistry by which the christian Mr. Perceval is to be defended!
But Mr. Cobbett was in favour of this measure! Listen to him! By all means! Let us hear Mr. Cobbett; let us hear his “vigorous sentences,” his opinions, his proofs, his arguments, the overflowings of his “true English spirit and feeling” upon the subject of Mr. Perceval’s administration. Yes! yes! I will listen to Mr. Cobbett, and what is more, I will yield implicit belief to Mr. Cobbett, where I cannot, with any feeling of truth, refute his arguments and assertions.
Mr. Cobbett defended the Jesuit’s bark bill upon the avowed ground that it was to assert our sovereignty of the seas, not our actual power on that element, but our right to rule there as we listed. That is to say, that the other people of the world were not to dare traffic, not to dare move upon that high road of nations, not to presume to push their commercial intercourse with each other, nay, not even to communicate save under the controul and with the license of England. Now, if we are endowed by Heaven with such a right, in the name of all that is patriotic and English, let it be maintained. Yet it seems a strange plea in justification of the christian Mr. Perceval—it seems strange that he should be applauded for prohibiting the use of bark to the sick people of Portugal and Spain, and France, Holland, Flanders, Italy, and the Ionian islands, for to all these countries the prohibition extended, on the ground of our right to domineer on the wide sea; and that he should also be applauded for declaiming against the cruelty, the ambition, the domineering spirit of Napoleon. I suppose we were appointed by heaven to rule on the ocean according to our caprice, and Napoleon had only the devil to sanction his power over the continent. We were christians, “truly British christians,” as the Tory phrase goes; and he was an infidel, a Corsican infidel. Nevertheless we joined together, each under our different dispensations, yes, we joined together, we agreed to trample upon the rest of the world; and that trade, which we would not allow to neutrals, we, by mutual licenses, carried on ourselves, until it was discovered that the sick wanted bark, sorely wanted it; then we, the truly British christians, prohibited that article. We deprived the sick people of the succour of bark; and without any imputation on our christianity, no doubt because the tenets of our faith permit us to be merciless to our enemies, provided a quaker winks at the act! Truly the logic, the justice, and the christianity of this position, seem to be on a par.
All sufferings lead to sickness, but we must make our enemies suffer, if we wish to get the better of them, let them give up the contest and their sufferings will cease: wherefore there is nothing in this stopping of medicine. This is Mr. Cobbett’s argument, and Mr. Cobbett’s words are adopted by Mr. Perceval’s son. To inflict suffering on the enemy was then the object of the measure, and of course the wider the suffering spread the more desirable the measure. Now suffering of mind as well as of body must be here meant, because the dead and dying are not those who can of themselves oblige the government of a great nation to give up a war; it must be the dread of such sufferings increasing, that disposes the great body of the people to stop the career of their rulers. Let us then torture our prisoners; let us destroy towns with all their inhabitants; burn ships at sea with all their crews; carry off children and women, and torment them until their friends offer peace to save them. Why do we not? Is it because we dread retaliation? or because it is abhorrent to the usages of christian nations? The former undoubtedly, if the younger Mr. Perceval’s argument adopted from Cobbett is just; the latter if there is such a thing as christian principle. That principle once sacrificed to expediency, there is nothing to limit the extent of cruelty in war.
So much for Mr. Cobbett upon the Jesuit’s bark bill, but one swallow does not make a summer; his “true English spirit and feeling” breaks out on other occasions regarding Mr. Perceval’s policy, and there, being quite unable to find any weakness in him, I am content to take him as a guide. Something more, however, there is, to advance on the subject of the Jesuit’s bark bill, ere I yield to the temptation of enlivening my pages with Cobbett’s “vigorous sentences.”
Hansard’s Debates. Mr. Wilberforce, no small name amongst religious men and no very rigorous opponent of ministers, described this measure in the house, as a bill “which might add to the ferocity and unfeeling character of the contest, but could not possibly put an end to the contest.”
Mr. Grattan said, “we might refuse our Jesuit’s bark to the French soldiers; we might inflict pains and penalties, by the acrimony of our statutes, upon those who were saved from the severity of war; but the calculation was contemptible.”
Mr. Whitbread characterized the bill as “a most abominable measure calculated to hold the country up to universal execration. It united in itself detestable cruelty with absurd policy.”
Lord Holland combatted the principle of the bill, which he said “would distress the women and children of Spain and Portugal more than the enemy.”
Lord Grenville “cautioned the house to look well at the consideration they were to receive as the price of the honour, justice, and humanity of the country.”
Then alluding to the speech of Lord Mulgrave (who, repudiating the flimsy veil of the bill being merely a commercial regulation, boldly avowed that it was an exercise of our right to resort to whatever mode of warfare was adopted against us) Lord Grenville, I say, observed, that such a doctrine did not a little surprise him. “If,” said he, “we are at war with the Red Indians, are we to scalp our enemies because the Indians scalp our men? When Lyons was attacked by Robespierre he directed his cannon more especially against the hospital of that city than against any other part, the destruction of it gave delight to his sanguinary inhuman disposition. In adopting the present measure we endeavour to assimilate ourselves to that monster of inhumanity, for what else is the bill but a cannon directed against the hospitals on the continent.”
But all this, says Mr. Perceval the younger, is but “declamatory invective, the answered and refuted fallacies of a minister’s opponents in debate.” And yet Mr. Perceval, who thus assumes that all the opposition speeches were fallacies, does very complacently quote lord Bathurst’s speech in defence of the measure, and thus, in a most compendious manner, decides the question. Bellarmin says yes! exclaimed an obscure Scotch preacher to his congregation, Bellarmin says yes! but I say no! and Bellarmin being thus confuted, we’ll proceed. Even so Mr. Perceval. But I am not to be confuted so concisely as Bellarmin. Lord Erskine, after hearing lord Bathurst’s explanation, maintained that “the bill was contrary to the dictates of religion and the principles of humanity,” and this, he said, he felt so strongly, that he was “resolved to embody his opinion in the shape of a protest that it might go down in a record to posterity.” It isHansard’s Debates. also a fact not to be disregarded in this case, that the bishops, who were constant in voting for all other ministerial measures, wisely and religiously abstained from attending the discussions of this bill. Lord Erskine was as good as his word, eleven other lords joined him, and their protests contained the following deliberate and solemn testimony against the bill.
“Because the Jesuit’s bark, the exportation of which is prohibited by this bill, has been found, by long experience, to be a specific for many dangerous diseases which war has a tendency to spread and exasperate; and because to employ as an engine of war the privation of the only remedy for some of the greatest sufferings which war is capable of inflicting, is manifestly repugnant to the principles of the Christian religion, contrary to humanity, and not to be justified by any practice of civilised nations.
“Because the means to which recourse has been hitherto had in war, have no analogy to the barbarous enactments of this bill, inasmuch as it is not even contended that the privations to be created by it, have any tendency whatever to self-defence, or to compel the enemy to a restoration of peace, the only legitimate object by which the infliction of the calamities of war can in any manner be justified.”
Such was the religious, moral, and political character, given to this bill of Mr. Perceval’s, by our own statesmen. Let us now hear the yet more solemnly recorded opinion of the statesmen of another nation upon Mr. Perceval’s orders in council, of which this formed a part. In the American president’s message to Congress, the following passages occur.
“The government of Great Britain had already introduced into her commerce during war, a system which at once violating the rights of other nations, and resting on a mass of perjury and forgery, unknown to other times, was making an unfortunate progress, in undermining those principles of morality and religion, which are the best foundations of national happiness.”
One more testimony. Napoleon, whose authority, whatever Mr. Perceval and men of his stamp may think, will always have a wonderful influence; Napoleon, at St. Helena, declared, “that posterity would more bitterly reproach Mr. Pitt for the hideous school he left behind him, than for any of his own acts; a school marked by its insolent machiavelism, its profound immorality, its cold egotism, its contempt for the well-being of men and the justice of things.” Mr. Perceval was an eminent champion of this hideous school, which we thus find the leading men of England, France, and America, uniting to condemn. And shall a musty Latin proverb protect such a politician from the avenging page of history? The human mind is not to be so fettered. Already the work of retribution is in progress.
Mr. Perceval the younger, with something of fatuity, hath called up Mr. Cobbett to testify to his father’s political merit. Commending that rugged monitor of evil statesmen for his “vigorous sentences,” for his “real English spirit and feeling,” he cannot now demur to his authority; let him then read and reflect deeply on the following passages from that eminent writer’s works, and he may perhaps discover, that to defend his father’s political reputation with success will prove a difficult and complicate task. If the passages are painful to Mr. Perceval, if the lesson is severe, I am not to blame. It is not I but himself who has called up the mighty seer, and if the stern grim spirit, thus invoked, will not cease to speak until all be told, it is not my fault.
EXTRACTS FROM MR. COBBETT’S WRITINGS.History of George IV.
Extract 1.—Of Mr. Perceval’s harshness.
“But there now came a man amongst them who soon surpassed all the rest in power, as well as in impudence and insolence towards the people. This was that Spencer Perceval of whose signal death we shall have to speak by and bye. This man, a sharp lawyer, inured, from his first days at the bar, to the carrying on of state prosecutions; a sort of understrapper, in London, to the attorneys-general in London, and frequently their deputy in the counties; a short, spare, pale faced, hard, keen, sour-looking man, with a voice well suited to the rest, with words in abundance at his command, with the industry of a laborious attorney, with no knowledge of the great interest of the nation, foreign or domestic, but with a thorough knowledge of those means by which power is obtained and preserved in England, and with no troublesome scruples as to the employment of those means. He had been Solicitor General under Pitt up to 1801, and Attorney General under Addington and Pitt up to February, 1806. This man became the adviser of the Princess, during the period of the investigation and correspondence of which we have just seen the history; and, as we are now about to see, the power he obtained, by the means of that office, made him the Prime Minister of England to the day of his death, though no more fit for that office than any other barrister in London, taken by tossing up or by ballot.”
Extract 2.—Of Perceval’s illiberal, factious, and crooked policy.
“We have seen that the King was told that the publication” (the publication of the Princess of Wales’s justification) “would take place on the Monday. That Monday was the 9th of March. In this difficulty what was to be done? The whig ministry, with their eyes fixed on the probable speedy succession of the Prince, or at least, his accession to power, the King having recently been in a very shakey state; the whig ministry, with their eyes fixed on this expected event, and not perceiving, as Perceval did, the power that the unpublished book (for ‘The Book’ it is now called) would give them with the Prince as well as with the King, the whig ministry would not consent to the terms of the Princess, thinking, too, that in spite of her anger and her threats, she would not throw away the scabbard as towards the King.
“In the meanwhile, however, Perceval, wholly unknown to the Whigs, had got the book actually printed, and bound up ready for publication, and it is clear that it was intended to be published on the Monday named in the Princess’s letter; namely, on the 9th of March, unless prevented by the King’s yielding to the wishes of Perceval. He did yield, that is to say, he resolved to change his ministers! A ground for doing this was however a difficulty to be got over. To allege and promulgate the true ground would never do; for then the public would have cried aloud for the publication, which contained matter so deeply scandalous to the King and all the Royal family. Therefore another ground was alleged; and herein we are going to behold another and another important consequence, and other national calamities proceeding from this dispute between the Prince and his wife. This other ground that was chosen was the Catholic Bill. The Whigs stood pledged to grant a bill for the further relief of the Catholics. They had in September, 1806, dissolved the parliament, though it was only four years old, for the purpose of securing a majority in the House of Commons; and into this new house, which had met on the 19th of December, 1806, they had introduced the Catholic Bill, by the hands of Mr. Grey (now become Lord Howick,) with the great and general approbation of the House, and with a clear understanding, that, notwithstanding all the cant and hypocrisy that the foes of the Catholics had, at different times, played off about the conscientious scruples of the King, the King had now explicitly and cheerfully given his consent to the bringing in of this bill.
“The new ministry had nominally at its head the late Duke of Portland; but Perceval, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, was, in fact, the master of the whole affair, co-operating, however, cordially with Eldon, who now again became Chancellor. The moment the dismission of the Whigs was resolved on, the other party set up the cry of “No Popery.” The walls and houses, not only of London, but of the country towns and villages, were covered with these words, sometimes in chalk and sometimes in print; the clergy and corporations were all in motion, even the cottages on the skirts of the commons, and the forests heard fervent blessings poured out on the head of the good old King for preserving the nation from a rekindling of the “fires in Smithfield!” Never was delusion equal to this! Never a people so deceived; never public credulity so great; never hypocrisy so profound and so detestably malignant as that of the deceivers! The mind shrinks back at the thought of an eternity of suffering, even as the lot of the deliberate murderer; but if the thought were to be endured, it would be as applicable to that awful sentence awarded to hypocrisy like this.”
Extract 3.
“The great and interesting question was, not whether the act (Regency Act) were agreeable to the laws and constitution of the country or not; not whether it was right or wrong thus to defer the full exercise of the Royal authority for a year; but whether limited as the powers were, the Prince upon being invested with them, would take his old friends and companions, the Whigs, to be his ministers.”—“Men in general unacquainted with the hidden motives that were at work no more expected that Perceval and Eldon would continue for one moment to be ministers under the Regent than they expected the end of the world.”
“But a very solid reason for not turning out Perceval was found in the power which he had with regard to the Princess and the BOOK. He had, as has been before observed, the power of bringing her forward, and making her the triumphant rival of her husband. This power he had completely in his hands, backed as he was by the indignant feelings of an enterprizing, brave, and injured woman. But, it was necessary for him to do something to keep this great and terrific power in his own hands. If he lost the princess he lost his only prop; and, even without losing her, if he lost the book, or rather, if the secrets of the book escaped and became public, he then lost his power. It was therefore of the greatest importance to him that nobody should possess a copy of this book but himself!
“The reader will now please to turn back to paragraph 73, which he will find in chap. 11. He will there find that Perceval ousted the Whigs by the means of the book, and not by the means of the catholic question, as the hoodwinked nation were taught to believe. The book had been purchased by Perceval himself; it had been printed, in a considerable edition, by Mr. Edwards, printer, in the Strand; the whole edition had been put into the hands of a bookseller; the day of publication was named, that being the 9th of March, 1807; but on the 7th of March, or thereabouts, the king determined upon turning out the Whigs and taking in Perceval. Instantly Perceval suppressed THE BOOK; took the edition out of the hands of the booksellers, thinking that he had every copy in his own possession. The story has been in print about his having burned the books in the court yard of his country house; but be this as it may, he certainly appears to have thought that no one but himself had a copy of THE BOOK. In this however he was deceived; for several copies of this book, as many as four or five, at least, were in the hands of private individuals.”—“To get at these copies advertisements appeared in all the public papers, as soon as the Prince had determined to keep Perceval as his minister. These advertisements plainly enough described the contents of the book, and contained offers of high prices for the book to such persons as might have a copy to dispose of. In this manner the copies were bought up: one was sold for £300, one or two for £500 each, one for £1000, and the last for £1500.”
Extract 4.—Of Mr. Perceval’s harshness and illiberality.
—— ——“Thus Perceval really ruled the country in precisely what manner he pleased. Whole troops of victims to the libel law were crammed into jails, the corrupt part of the press was more audacious than ever, and the other part of it (never very considerable) was reduced nearly to silence. But human enjoyments of every description are of uncertain duration: political power, when founded on force, is of a nature still more mutable than human enjoyments in general; of which observations this haughty and insolent Perceval was destined, in the spring of 1812, to afford to the world a striking, a memorable, and a most awful example. He had got possession of the highest office in the state; by his secret, relative to the Princess and her BOOK, had secured his influence with the Prince Regent for their joint lives; he had bent the proud necks of the landlords to fine, imprisonment, and transportation, if they attempted to make inroads on his system to support the all-corrupting paper-money; the press he had extinguished or had rendered the tool of his absolute will; the most eminent amongst the writers who opposed him, Cobbett (the author of this history,) Leigh and John Hunt, Finnerty, Drakard, Lovel, together with many more, were closely shut up in jail, for long terms, with heavy fines on their heads, and long bail at the termination of their imprisonment. Not content with all this, he meditated the complete subjugation of London to the control and command of a military force. Not only did he meditate this, but had the audacity to propose it to the parliament; and if his life had not been taken in the evening of the 11th of May, 1812, he, that very evening, was going to propose, in due form, a resolution for the establishment of a permanent army to be stationed in Marybonne-park, for the openly avowed purpose of keeping the metropolis in awe.”
Extract 5.—Of Mr. Perceval’s unpopularity.
“Upon the news of the death of Perceval arriving at Nottingham, at Leicester, at Truro, and indeed all over the country, demonstrations of joy were shown by the ringing of bells, the making of bonfires, and the like; and at Nottingham particularly, soldiers were called out to disperse the people upon the occasion.”——“At the place of execution, the prisoner (Bellingham) thanked God for having enabled him to meet his fate with so much fortitude and resignation. At the moment when the hangman was making the usual preparations; at the moment that he was going out of the world, at the moment when he was expecting every breath to be his last, his ears were saluted with—God bless you, God bless you, God Almighty bless you, God Almighty bless you! issuing from the lips of many thousands of persons.”——“With regard to the fact of the offender going out of the world amidst the blessings of the people, I, the author of this history, can vouch for its truth, having been an eye and ear witness of the awful and most memorable scene, standing, as I did, at the window of that prison out of which he went to be executed, and into which I had been put in consequence of a prosecution ordered by this very Perceval, and the result of which prosecution was a sentence to be imprisoned two years amongst felons in Newgate, to pay a thousand pounds to the Prince Regent at the end of the two years, and to be held in bonds for seven years afterwards; all which was executed upon me to the very letter, except that I rescued myself from the society of the felons by a cost of twenty guineas a week, for the hundred and four weeks; and all this I had to suffer for having published a paragraph, in which I expressed my indignation at the flogging of English local militiamen, at the town of Ely, in England, under a guard of Hanoverian bayonets. From this cause, I was placed in a situation to witness the execution of this unfortunate man. The crowd was assembled in the open space just under the window at which I stood. I saw the anxious looks, I saw the half horrified countenances; I saw the mournful tears run down; and I heard the unanimous blessings.”
“The nation was grown heartily tired of the war; it despaired of seeing an end to it without utter ruin to the country; the expenditure was arrived at an amount that frightened even loan-mongers and stock-jobbers; and the shock given to people’s confidence by Perceval’s recent acts, which had proclaimed to the whole world the fact of the depreciation of the paper-money; these things made even the pretended exclusively loyal secretly rejoice at his death, which they could not help hoping would lead to some very material change in the managing of the affairs of the country.”
Extract 6.—Of Mr. Hamlyn, the Tinman.
Cobbett’s Register. “I shall now address you, though it need not be much at length, upon the subject of lord Castlereagh’s conduct. The business was brought forward by lord Archibald Hamilton, who concluded his speech with moving the following resolutions: ‘1º. That it appears to the House, from the evidence on the table, that lord viscount Castlereagh, in the year 1805, shortly after he had quitted the situation of President of the Board of Control, and being a Privy Councillor and Secretary of State, did place at the disposal of lord Clancarty, a member of the same board, the nomination to a writership, in order to facilitate his procuring a seat in Parliament. 2º. That it was owing to a disagreement among the subordinate parties, that this transaction did not take effect; and 3º., that by this conduct lord Castlereagh had been guilty of a gross violation of his duty as a servant of the Crown; an abuse of his patronage as President of the Board of Control; and an attack upon the purity of that House.’”
“Well, but what did the House agree to? Why, to this: ‘Resolved, that it is the duty of this House to maintain a jealous guard over the purity of election; but considering that the attempt of lord viscount Castlereagh to interfere in the election of a member had not been successful, this House does not consider it necessary to enter into any criminal proceedings against him.’”
“Now, then, let us see what was done in the case of Philip Hamlyn, the tinman of Plymouth, who offered a bribe to Mr. Addington, when the latter was minister. The case was this: in the year 1802, Philip Hamlyn, a tinman of Plymouth, wrote a letter to Mr. Henry Addington, the first Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, offering him the sum of £2000 to give him, Hamlyn, the place of Land Surveyor of Customs at Plymouth. In consequence of this, a criminal information was filed against the said Hamlyn, by Mr. Spencer Perceval, who was then the King’s Attorney General, and who, in pleading against the offender, asserted the distinguished purity of persons in power in the present day. The tinman was found guilty; he was sentenced to pay a fine of £100 to the King, and to be imprisoned for three months. His business was ruined, and he himself died, in a few months after his release from prison.”
“Hamlyn confessed his guilt; he stated, in his affidavit, that he sincerely repented of his crime; that he was forty years of age; that his business was the sole means of supporting himself and family; that a severe judgment might be the total ruin of himself and that family; and that, therefore, he threw himself upon, and implored, the mercy of his prosecutors and the Court. In reference to this, Mr. Perceval, the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, observe, said: ‘The circumstances which the defendant discloses, respecting his own situation in life and of his family are all of them topics, very well adapted to affect the private feelings of individuals, and as far as that consideration goes, nothing further need be said; but, there would have been no prosecution at all, in this case, upon the ground of personal feeling; it was set on foot upon grounds of a public nature, and the spirit in which the prosecution originated, still remains; it is, therefore, submitted to your lordships, not on a point of individual feeling, but of PUBLIC JUSTICE, in which case your lordships will consider how far the affidavits ought to operate in mitigation of punishment.’—“For lord Archibald Hamilton’s motion, the speakers were, lord A. Hamilton, Mr. C. W. Wynn, lord Milton, Mr. W. Smith, Mr. Grattan, Mr. Ponsonby, sir Francis Burdett, Mr. Whitbread, and Mr. Tierney. Against it, lord Castlereagh himself, lord Binning, Mr. Croker, Mr. Perceval, (who prosecuted Hamlyn,) Mr. Banks, Mr. G. Johnstone, Mr. H. Lascelles, Mr. Windham, and Mr. Canning.”
Extract 7.—Of Mr. Quentin Dick.
(On the 11th of May, 1809, Mr. Maddocks made a charge against Mr. Perceval and lord Castlereagh, relative to the selling of a seat in Parliament to Mr. Quentin Dick, and to the influence exercised with Mr. Dick, as to his voting upon the recent important question.) Mr. Maddocks in the course of his speech said:—“I affirm, then, that Mr. Dick purchased a seat in the House of Commons for the borough of Cashel, through the agency of the Hon. Henry Wellesley, who acted for, and on behalf of, the Treasury; that upon a recent question of the last importance, when Mr. Dick had determined to vote according to his conscience, the noble lord, Castlereagh, did intimate to that gentleman the necessity of either his voting with the government, or resigning his seat in that house: and that Mr. Dick, sooner than vote against principle, did make choice of the latter alternative, and vacate his seat accordingly. To this transaction I charge the right honourable gentleman, Mr. Perceval, as being privy and having connived at it. This I will ENGAGE TO PROVE BY WITNESSES AT YOUR BAR, if the House will give me leave to call them.” Mr. Perceval argued against receiving the charge at all, putting it to the House, “whether AT SUCH A TIME it would be wise to warrant such species of charges as merely introductory to the agitation of the great question of reform, he left it to the House to determine: but as far as he might be allowed to judge, he rather thought that it would be more consistent with what was due from him to the House and to the public, if he FOR THE PRESENT declined putting in the plea (he could so conscientiously put in) until that House had come to a determination on the propriety of entertaining that charge or not.”
The House voted not to entertain the charge, and Mr. Ponsonby and others declared, in the course of the debate, that such transactions ought not to be inquired into, because they “were notorious,” and had become “as glaring as the noon-day sun.”
Now let the younger Mr. Perceval grapple with this historian and public writer, whose opinions he has invoked, whose “true English spirit and feeling” he has eulogised. Let him grapple with these extracts from his works, which, however, are but a tithe of the charges Mr. Cobbett has brought against his father. For my part, I have given my proofs, and reasons, and authorities, and am entitled to assert, that my public character of Mr. Perceval, the minister, is, historically, “fair, just, and true.”
HISTORY
OF THE
WAR IN THE PENINSULA.
HISTORY
OF THE
PENINSULAR WAR.