The first incident, I was once told by Mr. John Allen, that disinclined Mr. Canning (who had probably already some misgivings) to attach himself irrevocably to the Whig camp, was the following one: Lord Liverpool, then Mr. Jenkinson, had just made his appearance in the House of Commons. His first speech was highly successful. “There is a young friend of mine,” said Mr. Sheridan, “whom I soon hope to hear answering the honourable gentleman who has just distinguished himself: a contemporary whom he knows to possess talents not inferior to his own, but whose principles, I trust, are very different from his.”
This allusion, however kindly meant, was disagreeable, said Mr. Allen, to the youthful aspirant to public honours. It pledged him, as he thought, prematurely; it brought him forward under the auspices of a man, who, however distinguished as an individual, was not in a position to be a patron. Other reflections, it is added, followed. The party then in opposition possessed almost every man distinguished in public life: a host of formidable competitors in the road to honour and preferment, supposing preferment and honour to be attainable by talent. But this was not all. The Whig party, then, as always, was essentially an exclusive party; its preferments were concentrated on a clique, which regarded all without it as its subordinates and instruments.
On the other side, the Prime Minister stood almost alone. He had every office to bestow, and few candidates of any merit for official employments. Haughty from temperament, and flushed with power, which he had attained early and long exercised without control, he had not the pride of rank, nor the aristocratic attachments for which high families linked together are distinguished. His partisans and friends were his own. He had elevated them for no other reason than that they were his. By those to whom he had once shown favour he had always stood firm; all who had followed had shared his fortunes; there can be no better promise to adherents.
These were not explanations that Mr. Canning could make precisely to the Whig leaders, but he had an affection for Mr. Sheridan, who had always been kind to him, and by whom he did not wish to be thought ungrateful. He sought, then, an interview with that good-natured and gifted person. Lord Holland, Mr. Canning’s contemporary, was present at it, and told me that nothing could be more respectful and unreserved than the manner in which the ambitious young man gave his reasons for the change he was prepared to make, or had made; nothing more warm-hearted, unprejudiced, and frank, than the veteran orator’s reception of his retiring protégé’s confession: nor, indeed, could Mr. Sheridan help feeling the application, when he was himself cited as an example of the haughtiness with which “the great Whig Houses” looked down on the lofty aspirations of mere genius. The conversation thus alluded to took place a little before Mr. Pitt’s proposals were made, but probably when they were expected. Mr. Canning, his views fairly stated to the only person to whom he felt bound to give them, and his seat in Parliament secured, placed himself in front of his old friends, whom Colonel Fitz-Patrick avenged by the following couplet:
“The turning of coats so common is grown,
That no one would think to attack it;
But no case until now was so flagrantly known
Of a schoolboy turning his jacket.”
V.
There was little justice in Colonel Fitz-Patrick’s satire. Nine-tenths of Mr. Fox’s partisans, old and young, were deserting his standard when Mr. Canning quitted him. The cultivated mind of England was, as it has been said in two or three of these sketches, against the line which the Whig leader persisted to take with respect to the French Revolution—even after its excesses; and it is easy to conceive that the cause of Liberty and Fraternity should have become unfashionable when these weird sisters were seen brandishing the knife, and dancing round the guillotine. Admitting, however, the legitimacy of the horror with which the assassins of the Committee of Public Safety inspired the greater portion of educated Englishmen, it is still a question whether England should have provoked their hostility; for, after the recall of our ambassador and our undisguised intention of making war, the Republic’s declaration of it was a matter of course.