The Marquis of Londonderry is to be buried to-morrow in Westminster Abbey. It is thought injudicious to have anything like an ostentatious funeral, considering the circumstances under which he died, but it is the particular wish of his widow. She seems to consider the respect which is paid to his remains as a sort of testimony to his character, and nothing will pacify her feelings or satisfy her affection but seeing him interred with all imaginable honours. It seems that he gave several indications of a perturbed mind a short time previous to his death. For some time past he had been dejected, and his mind was haunted with various apprehensions, particularly with a notion that he was in great personal danger. On the day (the 3rd of August) he gave a great dinner at Cray to his political friends, some of them finding the wine very good, wished to compliment him upon it, and Arbuthnot called out, ‘Lord Londonderry!’ He instantly jumped up with great vivacity, and stood as if in expectation of something serious that was to follow. When he was told that it was about the wine they wished to speak to him, he sat down; but his manner was so extraordinary that Huskisson remarked it to Wilmot as they came home. In the last interview which the Duke of Wellington had with him he said he never heard him converse upon affairs with more clearness and strength of mind CANNING RETURNS TO OFFICE. than that day. In the middle of the conversation, however, he said, ‘To prove to you what danger I am in, my own servants think so, and that I ought to go off directly, that I have no time to lose, and they keep my horses saddled that I may get away quickly; they think that I should not have time to go away in a carriage.’ Then ringing the bell violently, he said to the servant, ‘Tell me, sir, instantly who ordered my horses here; who sent them up to town?’ The man answered that the horses were at Cray, and had never been in town. The Duke desired the man to go, and in consequence of this strange behaviour wrote the letter to Bankhead which has been since published.
August 20th, 1822
Knighton went with the King to Scotland, and slept in one of his Majesty’s own cabins, that next to him. He is supposed to have been appointed Privy Purse. Bloomfield has got the mission to Stockholm. When Bloomfield was dismissed a disposition was shown to treat him in a very unceremonious manner; but he would not stand this, and displayed a spirit which he was probably enabled to assume in consequence of what he knows. When they found he was not to be bullied they treated with him, and gave him every honour and emolument he could desire.
September 22nd, 1822
I saw Lady Bathurst on the 13th. Canning had not then sent his answer, and greatly surprised were the Ministers at the delay. Lord Liverpool’s proposal to him was simple and unclogged with conditions—the Foreign Office and the lead in the House of Commons. The King’s repugnance to his coming into office was extreme, and it required all the efforts of his Ministers to surmount it. The Duke of Wellington and Peel have all the credit of having persuaded the King to consent, but Lord Bathurst’s arguments influenced him as much as those of any person, and he told Lady Conyngham that he was more satisfied by what Lord Bathurst had said to him on the subject than by any of the Ministers. I know that amongst the Canning party Lord Bathurst is supposed to have joined with the Chancellor in opposing his appointment. The danger in which the Duke of Wellington was sensibly affected the King, because at this moment the Duke is in high favour with him; and when he heard he was so ill he sent Knighton to him to comfort him with a promise that he would reconsider the proposal of receiving Canning, and the next day he signified his consent. I saw a note from Lady Conyngham to Lady Bathurst, in which she gave an account of the uneasiness and agitation in which the King had been in consequence of the Duke’s illness, saying how much she had suffered in consequence, and how great had been their relief, when Knighton brought word that he was better. The ‘dear King,’ she said, was more composed. She added that she (Lady B.) would hear that evening what would give her pleasure, and this was that the King had agreed to take Canning. In a conversation also Lady C. said that she did hope, now the King had yielded his own inclination to the wishes and advice of his Ministers, that they would behave to him better than they had done. Canning was sworn in on Monday. His friends say that he was very well received. The King told Madame de Lieven that having consented to receive him, he had behaved to him, as he always did, in the most gentlemanlike manner he could, and that on delivering to him the seals, he said to him that he had been advised by his Ministers that his abilities and eloquence rendered him the only fit man to succeed to the vacancy which Lord Londonderry’s death had made, and that, in appointing him to the situation, he had only to desire that he would follow the steps of his predecessor. This Madame de Lieven told to Lady Jersey, and she to me. It seems that the King was so struck with Lord Londonderry’s manner (for he said to the King nearly what he said to the Duke of Wellington), and so persuaded that some fatal catastrophe would take place, that when Peel came to inform him of what had happened, he said to him before he spoke, ‘I know you are come to tell me that Londonderry is dead.’ Peel had just left him, and upon receiving the despatches immediately returned; and when Lady Conyngham was told by Lord Mount Charles that there was a report that he was dead, she said, ‘Good God! then he has destroyed QUEEN CAROLINE’S RETURN. himself.’ She knew what had passed with the King, and was the only person to whom he had told it.
September 23rd, 1822
George Bentinck, who thinks there never existed such a man as Canning, and who probably has heard from him some circumstances connected with his resignation at the time of the Queen’s trial, told —— that it was in consequence of a dispute between the King and his Ministers concerning the payment of the expenses of the Milan Commission. The Ministers wished the King to pay the expenses himself, and he wished them to be defrayed by Government. Lord Londonderry promised the King (without the concurrence of the other Ministers) that the expenses should be paid by Government, but with money ostensibly appropriated to other purposes. This Canning could not endure, and resigned. Such is his story, which probably is partly true and partly false.
November 5th, 1822
I have been to Newmarket, Euston, Riddlesworth, Rendlesham, Whersted, besides going to town several times and to Brighton. Since I left London for the Doncaster races I have travelled near 1,200 miles. At Riddlesworth the Duke of York told me a great deal about the Queen and Brougham, but he was so unintelligible that part I could not make out and part I do not remember. What I can recollect amounts to this, that the Emperor of Austria was the first person who informed the King of the Queen’s conduct in Italy, that after the enquiry was set on foot a negotiation was entered into with the Queen, the basis of which was that she should abdicate the title of Queen, and that to this she had consented. He said that Brougham had acted a double part, for that he had acquiesced in the propriety of her acceding to those terms, and had promised that he would go over to her and confirm her in her resolution to agree to them; that he had not only not gone, but that whilst he was making these promises to Government he had written to the Queen desiring her to come over. The Duke told me that a man (whose name he did not mention) came to him and said, ‘So the Queen comes over?’ He said, ‘No, she does not.’ The man said, ‘I know she does, for Brougham has written to her to come; I saw the letter.’ If Lord Liverpool and Lord Londonderry had thought proper to publish what had been done on the part of Brougham, he would have been covered with infamy; but they would not do it, and he thinks they were wrong. The rest I cannot remember.[11]
[11] [This is an erroneous and imperfect account of this important transaction, the particulars of which are related by Lord Brougham in his ‘Memoirs,’ cap. xvi. vol. ii. p. 352, and still more fully by Mr. Yonge in his ‘Life of Lord Liverpool,’ vol. iii. p. 52. Mr. Brougham had sent his brother James to the Queen at Geneva to dissuade her from setting out for England, but, as he himself observes, ‘I was quite convinced that if she once set out she never would stop short.’ He met her himself at St. Omer, being the bearer of a memorandum dated the 15th of April, 1820, which contained the terms proposed by the King’s Government. He went to St. Omer in company with Lord Hutchinson, but Mr. Brougham, and not Lord Hutchinson, was the bearer of these propositions. Lord Hutchinson had no copy of the document. The extraordinary part of Mr. Brougham’s conduct was that he never at all submitted or made known to the Queen the memorandum of the 15th of April; and she knew nothing of it till she had reached London, when all negotiation was broken off. This fact Lord Brougham does not explain in his ‘Memoirs;’ but Lord Hutchinson declared in his report to Lord Liverpool that in truth Brougham ‘did not appear to possess the smallest degree of power, weight, or authority over the mind of the Queen’ when at St. Omer.]