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The controversy with Sir James Graham perhaps affords a sufficient explanation of the failure of Sir Charles's repeated efforts in behalf of Lord Hardwicke, though there is no doubt the Government had an answer in the Admiralty regulation which had placed him upon the retired list.
'Lord Hardwicke's application for employment was brought before the Cabinet,' writes Lady Hardwicke, 'but the Admiralty declaring that an order in Council to make this exception would bring the whole retired list upon their shoulders, his request was politely declined, with the feeling that the late enactment had fallen cruelly upon his professional career.'
'Few but myself,' concludes Lady Hardwicke, 'who have seen the anguish of disappointment caused by such a termination of the cherished ambition of a whole life, can at all appreciate the severity of this blow. This statement of facts engraven on the tablet of my heart I have drawn up with a view of placing in the hands of my dear children the means of vindicating their beloved father's memory in case upon any future occasion they should be called upon to do so. Let them remember that "the Lord nourisheth with discipline" and accept the trials and disappointments of life with the same spirit of resignation which their beloved father always exhibited, to my great and endless consolation.'
To me, his daughter, it has seemed that the occasion of which my mother speaks, for the vindication of my father's memory, has arrived with the publication of this memoir of his life, and I have therefore set out the facts as she wrote them down.
The long period of Whig rule, which had lasted with the single break of a few months in 1852 since the year 1846, was at length terminated by the return of Lord Derby's second administration to power in 1858, and Lord Hardwicke took office as Lord Privy Seal with a seat in the Cabinet. His energy and professional zeal, however, had been fully employed since 1856 as the Chairman of a Royal Commission which had been appointed to inquire into the question of the manning of the Navy. The negative results of the expedition to the Baltic during the late war with Russia had brought the question into public notice, and the great changes which were taking place in the design and construction of ships of war by the invention of the screw propeller and the evolution of the ironclad battleship had given a more than ordinary urgency to the question of national defence.
Lord Hardwicke entered upon his duties with the greatest energy. One of the instructions to the Commission was to 'determine in case of need the means necessary to man at short notice thirty or forty sail of the line.' In a speech at Cambridge in 1858 he pointed out some facts regarding the Navy of which the public were quite ignorant, and which pointed to a serious decrease in the naval power of the country which caused much uneasiness. Lord Hardwicke reminded his hearers that though during the period of the American, Revolutionary, and Napoleonic wars we had maintained an establishment of from 105,000 to 140,000 seamen and marines, and had experienced little difficulty in manning a fleet of ships of the line which averaged 120 sail, yet during the recent war with Russia the Admiralty had with difficulty found crews for the thirty-three vessels which took part in the operations in the Baltic. 'These ships,' he said, 'went to sea in such a condition as to inflict a positive injustice on the brave officers in command of them, and if it had not been for the efficiency of the latter and the way their crews were disciplined, they might as well have stopped at home.'
Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort both took great interest in this important question, and the Prince in the following letter showed his practical knowledge of the subject by urging the importance of the training-ship as a source of an efficient personnel for the Navy.
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'My DEAR LORD HARDWICKE,