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

by Baron Henry Lytton Bulwer Dalling and Bulwer

The Whigs were for applying to the municipalities in Ireland the same principles of popular election which had been applied to municipalities in England and Scotland. The Conservatives contended that Irish society was not constituted like English and Scotch society, and would not admit of the same institutions. They urged that the old municipalities had been constituted on the basis most proper to keep up an exclusive Protestant ascendancy; they contended that the new municipalities, according to the Government plan, seemed likely to create an exclusive ascendancy for the Catholics; and they asserted that under such circumstances it would be wise and just to establish an order of things that would preserve some balance between the two great divisions of the Irish community. They entered, in fact, upon that difficult ground, a ground made difficult when the Irish Catholic was placed on an equality with the Irish Protestant, and commenced the transfer of power from a long predominant minority to an ambitious and irritated majority. But it was after carefully weighing immediate peril against contingent difficulties, that Sir Robert Peel had already taken his choice; and he ought now to have accepted its consequences. The worst way of arguing for a legislative union between two countries is surely to question that they will admit of the same laws. The best way of removing religious passions from political affairs, is to forget in political questions religious distinctions.

By not acting on these convictions, he re-opened the sore which he had made such sacrifices to heal, but this error, which was certain to bear its punishment in regard to Ireland at a later season, did not affect his immediate position in the rest of the Empire.

II.

We have said that anything like an alliance with a man who assumed an attitude of defiance towards English power would arouse the instincts of English pride. Besides, nothing at all times injures and lowers a government more than the appearance of being counselled by a private individual who is not publicly responsible for his advice. The mere fact that the Whig policy was more congenial to Mr. O’Connell’s views than the Tory one, would have naturally created a sort of link between this singular man and the Whig Government. To keep his followers together, he wanted the influence of patronage; to obtain the aid of his followers, the Government did not show itself unwilling to bestow patronage upon him. In the meantime the independence of his attitude and language—an independence which the peculiarity of his position obliged him somewhat ostentatiously to display—apparently justified the accusation that the Premier was his protégé, and not he the protégé of the Premier. Hence, though the House of Commons still maintained by a small majority the Whig policy in Ireland, there was a growing coolness amongst the English at large towards Irish grievances, and a disposition to accuse Lord Melbourne of a mean desire to retain place, when in reality he was undergoing many personal mortifications from public motives.

The Conservatives in Parliament had, moreover, increased, and were become impatient. A difference between the Colonial Office and the Jamaica Legislature offered the opportunity of adding some votes to that number. A battle was fought, and the ministry only gained a majority of five. Being oppressed by a long catalogue of questions which it had undertaken to settle, and had not the power to deal with, the Ministry not unwillingly resigned; and, by the Duke of Wellington’s advice, Sir Robert Peel had the same commission confided to him by Queen Victoria which he had received previously from William IV.

A difficulty, however, here intervened with respect to certain leaders in the highest position at Court, whom the Premier desired to remove, and from whom the Queen would not consent to part. The question ought not to have arisen, but once having done so, concession could not be made with becoming dignity, either by the sovereign or by the statesman, who had acted too much as a man of business, and too little as a man of the world.

III.

Lord Melbourne resumed for a time the position he had abandoned, but, by doing so, he rather weakened than strengthened his party, and gave his opponents the advantage of maturing their strength by a prolonged contest against a ministry which had confessed its incapacity to master the difficulties which beset it.

These difficulties were not a little increased by combinations which betokened an insurrectionary disposition amongst the working classes, who, in some cases, proceeded to riot, and set forth their general plans and devices on the project of a constitution called “the people’s charter,” a project which was generally considered as subversive of credit, property, and order.

The Conservatives attributed these doctrines, however denounced by the Whigs, as deducible from Whig tendencies, and profited by the mistrust which a weak government and an agitated commonalty naturally suggested. One hostile motion succeeded another, each manifesting an increasing decline in the strength of the Whigs, and an increasing confidence on the part of their opponents, until a new opportunity arose for bringing together the same parties that had, by their union, brought about Lord Melbourne’s previous resignation.