Dined at Miss Berry’s, and Lord John Russell came after; told me he had 320 people to vote with him on the Speakership (of whom perhaps 20 will not come), so his party make sure of it. Nobody talks of anything else, and what has been written on the subject in pamphlets and newspapers would fill volumes. Though it is become inconceivably tiresome, I cannot help writing and talking about it myself, so impossible is it to avoid the contagion. I went yesterday to see the two Houses of Parliament;[1] the old House of Lords (now House of Commons) is very spacious and convenient; but the present House of Lords is a wretched dog-hole. The Lords will be very sulky in such a place, and in a great hurry to get back to their own House, or to have another. For the first time there is a gallery in the House of Commons reserved for reporters, which is quite inconsistent with their standing orders, and the prohibition which still in form exists against publishing the debates. It is a sort of public and avowed homage to opinion, and a recognition of the right of the people to know through the medium of the press all that passes within those walls.
[1] [The old Houses of Parliament were burnt down on October 16, 1834, during Mr. Greville’s absence from town in the autumn. The Houses here spoken of were the temporary buildings used during the erection of the new Houses.]
Lord John said to me, ‘Do you remember last year, when we were talking, I told you I thought the House of Lords would throw out some measure or other—that there would be a change of Government, a dissolution; and then we should have a Parliament returned with which nobody could govern the country? You see we have reached that point.’ According to their several calculations, both the opposite parties continue to claim a majority, or rather on the Tory side an equality; and as these are made by men experienced in the composition of the House, and as almost everybody is pledged and committed in some way or other, it is a perfect enigma to me how one or the other can be so deceived. The Whigs, having discovered that Abercromby must be proposed ‘upon a great principle’ (which is great as omne ignotum is magnificum—for they have never given a hint of what the principle is), have now found out that the English Church Reform which is in agitation is a very bad move on the part of the Government, as the people do not care about Church Reform here—do not want any such thing. This is, very possibly, in great measure true; for the people, who are urged and excited by the Radical leaders, will be sure to grow indifferent about such reforms as they can obtain by legitimate means, and with the concurrence of legitimate authority, and be invited to agitate for those which may be more difficult or slow of accomplishment. Sydney Smith said last night that he hears from those who know that it will be very sweeping; but he thinks it will not touch the great livings, nor meddle with advowsons. He concludes that at the same time the Dissenters will be relieved from Church rates, that tithes will be extinguished, and the question of Dissenters’ marriages settled. This has been an enormous scandal, and its continuance has been owing to the pride, obstinacy, and avarice of the Church; they would not give up the fees they received from this source, and they were satisfied to celebrate these rites in church while the parties were from the beginning to the end of the service protesting against all and every part of it, often making a most indecent noise and interruption. All these grievous abuses must be done away CHURCH REFORM. with; and deeply responsible are those who never would hear of their being done away with before. These guilty parties are the clergy and the Tories, both of whom, now that it is almost too late, have consented to drop their arrogant pretensions, and to submit to those necessary and reasonable reforms against which they have so bitterly inveighed, and so resolutely fought. We are disgusted and shocked at reading Croly’s account of the scandalous conduct of the Catholic clergy in Ireland, with regard to the emoluments they extort from their miserable flocks, and at the systematic desecration of holy things which they countenance and practise; but when the difference is considered between their spiritual condition and their moral composition as a class, the conduct of the clergy here appears just as revolting. The Irish clergy are generally sprung from the lowest class, and have received a bad education at Maynooth; they depend for subsistence upon the voluntary liberality or devotion of their people, they have few motives or principles of restraint, and every incentive to follow the shameful course which they do; but the English clergy are generally respectably born, well educated, and amply endowed, and yet they are content to be the ministers of a scandalous system, which, if it were not a source of profit to themselves, they would not tolerate for an instant. Instead of compelling the Dissenters to be married in church, if they had been really penetrated with any devotional feelings, or by any considerations of delicacy and charity, they would long ago have complained of this necessity as a grievance, and besieged the Legislature with entreaties to relieve the Church from the scandal, and themselves from so painful and odious a duty. But it was a badge of inferiority and dependence forced upon the Dissenters, and a source of profit to themselves; and therefore they defended and maintained it, and this is what they call defending the Church; and when the Dissenters themselves pray to be relieved from the tax and the humiliation, and liberal men support their prayer, a cry is got up that the Church is in danger. When the Dissenters, having prayed in vain, grow louder and bolder in their demands, and the cries of the Churchmen gradually sink into a whine, which is at last silenced in submission, the Church really is in danger; and then, when it no longer can be refused, it becomes perilous to grant the boon which justice and wisdom have so long required. So it is, and has been with all obstinate and senseless denials, followed by reluctant and tardy concessions—with Catholic emancipation, the Test and Corporation Acts, Parliamentary Reform, and with everything else; and thus, one of the great difficulties which beset Peel and his Government is, that they stand in an utterly false position. As a statesman, it must be mortifying to him to reflect that all the great measures which his political life has been spent in opposing have been carried in spite of him, and that whatever danger may have resulted from this cause is in great measure owing to the opposition he was enabled, by his great talents and his influence, or rather the influence of the party which he led, to give to those measures. He contrived totally to fail in preventing the success of the measures themselves, but so to mar and delay them as to obviate the good that might have been produced by timely and voluntary concessions; and now, coming forward as he says, ‘to resist the pressure from without,’ he finds himself compelled to yield to that pressure; for what, after all, is the language which he now holds, what are his addresses, his speeches, his promises, his Church Commission, but a surrender to the spirit and the principle of Reform, and to the demands of the people—the people, as contra-distinguished from those great interests on whose support he has depended, and whose wishes or prejudices he has consulted? For assuredly, neither the King, nor the Church, nor the aristocracy, seriously and sincerely desire these or any other reforms, and only agree to them from necessity. Peel is, I think, right; he has no other alternative. Such is the force and power of public opinion, that no Government can resist it; and if Peel can succeed in restraining and directing it, if he can convert it from a destructive into a conservative element, he will render such a great service as will cancel all the former mischief he has done; but he FALSE POSITION OF SIR R. PEEL. enters with disadvantage upon a course which implies at the outset the surrender of much of the governing principle of his political life, and in which neither friend nor foe can doubt that the conduct he adopts, however justifiable, necessary, indispensable, is compulsory and unpalatable. A man who is called to the head of affairs must undoubtedly act, not according to any impracticable obstinate theories of his own, but according to the state in which he finds affairs, no matter how produced or by whom; but it is a very different thing to adopt a system reluctantly and under necessity, because somebody else by his incapacity or his misfortune has rendered it indispensable, and to do so after you yourself have brought about this state of things: and such is the false position of Peel with all his Tory associates. This, however, is begging the question in dispute between the two great antagonistic parties. Peel would say that the imprudent concessions and reckless changes of the Whigs have made the difficulty; the Whigs would say that the resistance of the Tories to all moderate and gradual reforms produced the sweeping measure of ’31, and the excitement that was partly its cause and partly its consequence.
February 17th, 1835
Yesterday I read Burke’s appeal from the new to the old Whigs, which contains astonishing coincidences with the present times. His definition of the people is somewhat tumid and obscure, and involved in a splendid confusion of generalities and abstruse doctrine; but it is a wonderful monument of his genius, and exhibits that extent of knowledge and accuracy of insight into the nature of parties and the workings of political ambition which make him an authority for all times, and show him to be in the political what Shakespeare was in the moral world. But his writings, however as objects of study they may influence the opinions or form the judgment of young men, would have no more power than a piece of musty parchment to arrest the tide of present violence, and superinduce reflection and calmness. A speech of Tom Duncombe’s would produce far greater effect than the perusal of a discourse of Burke’s. Wisdom never operates directly on masses; it may work upon them through secondary and by indirect means, but it cannot face the noise of actual contest, where passion and not reason is always uppermost. Nobody but Burke could have described so well the Dukes of Devonshire and Bedford of the present day, who appear to have lost their senses, and to be ready to peril all their great possessions to gratify the passions of the moment. He says:—‘But riches do not in all cases secure even an inert and passive resistance; there are always in that description men whose fortunes, when their minds are once vitiated by passion or evil principle, are by no means a security from their actually taking their part against the public tranquillity. We see to what low and despicable passion of all kinds many men in that class are ready to sacrifice the patrimonial estates which might be perpetuated in their families with splendour, and with the fame of hereditary benefactors to mankind, from generation to generation. Do we not see how lightly people treat their fortunes when they are under the passion of gaming? The game of resentment or ambition will be played by many of the great and rich as desperately and with as much blindness to the consequences as any other game. Passion blinds them to the consequences as far as they concern themselves, and as to the consequences with regard to others, they are no part of their consideration.’
The other night I met some clerks in the Foreign Office to whom the very name of Palmerston is hateful, but I was surprised to hear them (Mellish particularly, who can judge both from capacity and opportunity), give ample testimony to his abilities. They said that he wrote admirably, and could express himself perfectly in French, very sufficiently in Italian, and understood German; that his diligence and attention were unwearied—he read everything and wrote an immense quantity; that the foreign Ministers (who detest him) did him justice as an excellent man of business. His great fault is want of punctuality, and never caring for an engagement if it did not suit him, keeping everybody waiting for hours on his pleasure or caprice. This testimony is beyond suspicion, and it is confirmed by the opinions of his LORD PALMERSTON AS A MAN OF BUSINESS. colleagues; but it is certain that he cut a very poor figure in Parliament all the time he was in office before.
At the Travellers’ yesterday I fell in with Bülow, who is just come back from Berlin to resume his mission. He told me that he was on such terms with Palmerston that it was impossible for him to stay here, and that for some time past he had given up communicating with him except upon the most indispensable matters and in the most formal way. He then gave me an account of the reception of the news of the change of our Government at Berlin, where the Emperor of Russia happened to be at the time. The Empress had come there on a visit to her father, and the Emperor (who is supposed to have preserved his conjugal fidelity immaculate) had rushed from Moscow without any notice to see her, and was still there when news of this great event arrived. There is something very characteristic in the first impression which the intelligence produced, at once manifesting the secret wishes of the party and their ignorance and apparent incapacity of comprehending the nature of our Constitution, and the limited extent of the power of the King of England. The Emperor immediately conceived that the whole system of the late Government would be reversed at home and abroad, that Leopold would be driven from Belgium, the Dutch dominion restored, and the Quadruple Alliance dissolved. Bülow, who has been in England long enough to know better the real state of things, endeavoured to undeceive him, and succeeded, though not without great difficulty; but when he proceeded to explain to him that the new Government would very likely not be able to keep their places, and that at any rate they would be compelled to conduct the Government upon the principle of Reform which the late Government had established, the Emperor could not by any means comprehend it, nor why or how there could be any difficulty in keeping their places if the King was resolved to support them, and had appointed them at his own pleasure. It would seem as if they had never read the last two or three years of our history, or, having read it, as if the habits of unbounded power in which they are born, educated, and expect to die, had rendered their understandings utterly impervious to the apparent paradox of a crowned head destitute of power to choose his own Ministers. The Duke of Cumberland, who was likewise there, began by talking the same nonsense, and was full of the destruction of the Reform Bill; but Billy Holmes, who, whatever else he may be, is a very sharp fellow, succeeded in muzzling him. This account which Bülow gave me is, however, more than amusing; it is instructive, because it shows which way the real wishes of the absolute sovereigns point, and makes it highly probable that they look upon the present settlement of Europe as one only ad interim, and to be remodelled whenever an opportunity shall present itself. They are satisfied at present with damming and dyking out the waters of Liberalism, but they hope to drain the lands in which they are collected, and to place themselves for ever out of the danger of an inundation. The war of opinions is in fact declared; it may languish, there may be truces, but there will be no peace in our time.
February 19th, 1835
The important day is arrived, and it dawns in sunshine and south wind. In a few hours the question of the Speakership will be decided, and there will at least be the gain (wherever the loss may fall) of getting rid of a subject which has become intolerably tiresome. For the last three weeks every newspaper has been literally filled with the controversy, every club engaged in betting on the event; in every room, at the corner of every street, nobody talked of anything else. It was the first enquiry of every man you met, ‘Well, what do you hear to-day? they say Sutton will win by 30.’ The next man (a Whig) would say, ‘It is safe; Abercromby will have 317 votes sure’—each party unboundedly confident, and both securing a retreat by declaring that defeat will not signify. Half the Opposition think it a false move to try it, and the more sober of the Government are conscious that a defeat will be very injurious.
We had a Council yesterday, and a levee more than usually brilliant; all the new Ministers and all the old, the ELECTION OF SPEAKER ABERCROMBY. whole Corps Diplomatique, with a host of others, mixed up in the first entrée room, and all very civil and good-humoured. The King received the ex-Ministers very graciously, and talked to them all, at least to all I saw pass by. Brougham alone was absent, and Lord Spencer, who was hardly to be considered as one of them, and is not in town, though, by-the-bye, I think I am wrong in this, because there were others whom I did not see—Duncannon, Spring Rice, and Hobhouse.