Historical Characters: Mackintosh, Talleyrand, Canning, Cobbett, Peel

by Baron Henry Lytton Bulwer Dalling and Bulwer

“It is singular to observe how ready some people are to admire in a great man the exceptions to the general rule of his conduct rather than the rule itself. Such perverse worship is like the idolatry of barbarous nations, who can see the noonday splendour of the sun without emotion, but who, when he is in eclipse, come forward with hymns and cymbals to adore him. Thus there are those who venerate Mr. Pitt less in the brightness of his meridian glory, than under his partial obscurity, and who gaze on him with the fondest admiration when he has ceased to shine.”

In this manner, by his spirit, eloquence, and abilities, he brought public opinion round in such a manner that it even accommodated itself to his personal position, bringing forward into the light his personal views as the popular ones, and throwing those which had formerly been popular, but which he did not support, into the shade. The great constitutional questions hitherto debated were for a time lost sight of, and party spirit, as Mr. Baring stated, leaving its other and more accustomed topics, seemed for the first time to display itself on subjects simply relating to the commerce and mercantile policy of the country.

VIII.

At first the adherents of the Duke of Wellington were like the Royal emigrants from the old French army at the period of the great Revolution. They thought no officers could be found fitted to take their places. But when they saw another government formed, and formed of materials which, if they could be gradually moulded together, would constitute a composition of solid and perhaps permanent endurance, their feelings were marked by all that violence and injustice which are invariably displayed by men who unexpectedly lose power. Mr. Canning was a renegade for quitting his old political friends to join the Whigs; the Whigs were renegades for abandoning their old political principles to join Mr. Canning. Party rancour had not the candour to acknowledge that if the opinions of Mr. Canning on Catholic Emancipation were sufficient to alienate from him the great bulk of the Conservatives, it was natural that those opinions should attach to him the great bulk of the Liberals. To the attacks of his own party, which he called “the barking of his own turnspits,” Mr. Canning was sufficiently indifferent; but there was one voice lifted up against him, the irony of which pierced his proud heart deeply. Alone and stately, Lord Grey, who had long considered himself the great Whig leader, now stood stripped of his followers, and with little disposition to acknowledge the ascendency of another chieftain. Contempt was the terrible weapon with which he assailed his brilliant rival, whom from the height of a great aristocratic position and a long and consistent public career, he affected to look down upon as a sort of political adventurer; now carrying out measures the most oppressive to the civil liberties of the people; now spouting liberal phrases which he had no intention to realise; now advocating the claims of the Catholics in glowing words; and now abandoning them when called upon for practical deeds; and finally dressing himself up in borrowed plumes and strutting before the public as the author of a foreign policy the errors of which he cast off upon his colleagues, the merits of which, with equal meanness and unfairness, he took wholly to himself.

If all that Lord Grey said could have been completely justified (which it could not); if all that Lord Grey said, I repeat, had been entirely just (which it was not), the speech which contained it would still have been ill-timed, and impolitic. Mr. Canning represented at that moment those liberal ideas which the public were prepared to entertain. He was encircled by the general popular sympathy, and was therefore in his day, and at the hour I am speaking of, the natural head of the Liberal party. The great necessity of the moment was to save that party from defeat, and give it an advanced position, from which it might march further forward in the natural course of events. If Mr. Canning’s party had not obtained power, Lord Grey would never have had a party capable of inheriting it. If Mr. Canning had not become Prime Minister when he did, Lord Grey would not have become Prime Minister three years afterwards.

The public, with that plain common sense which distinguishes most of its judgments, made allowances for the haughty nobleman’s anger, but condemned its exhibition. Moreover, the formal charge of Lord Londonderry, who, as his brother’s representative, accused Mr. Canning of having forsaken that brother’s policy, was more than a counterpoise to Lord Grey’s accusation that one Foreign Secretary was no better than the other. Nor did people stop to examine with minute criticism every act of a statesman who had lived in changeful times, and who was then supporting a policy at home favourable to our trade, and carrying out a policy abroad which inspired affection for our name and reverence for our power.

I have as yet purposely confined my observations to those events which were connected with Spain and Portugal, and the struggle we had entered into against the Holy Alliance in regard to those countries; because it was there that Mr. Canning’s talents had been most displayed, and that their consequences had been most important. But we are not to limit our review of his conduct merely to these questions.

It was not merely in Spain or in Portugal that England justified her statesman’s proud pretension to hold over nations the umpire’s sceptre, and to maintain, as the mediatrix between extremes, the peace of the world. Such was the reputation which this statesman had obtained, even amongst those against whom his policy had been directed, that the Emperor Alexander, disgusted with the irresolution of all his other long, credited allies, turned at last to Mr. Canning, as the only one capable of taking a manly and decided part in the settlement of a question in which his power was to be guarded against on the one hand, and the feelings of his subjects, and the traditions of his empire, were to be considered on the other.

IX.

The affairs in the East during the last few years require a narrative which, though rapid, may suffice to account for the alliance into which at this time we entered.