I was talking to Lord John Russell yesterday at Court on this subject, and he said that he had no doubt Peel highly disapproved of their proceedings, and that it was evident he did not pretend to guide them; for one day in the House of Commons he went over to Peel, and said that he meant to recommit (or some such thing, no matter what the particular course was) the Bill that night, and he supposed he would not object. Peel said, ‘Oh, no, I don’t object,’ and as he was going away Peel called him back and said, ‘Remember I speak only for myself; I can answer for no other individual in the House.’ He went out of town about a fortnight ago, has never returned, and will not; his own friends think he ought, but it is evident that he prefers to wash his hands of the matter. He knows well enough that the Conservatives hate him in their hearts; besides having never cordially forgiven him for his conduct on the Catholic question, they are indignant at his Liberal views and opinions, and when they adopted him as their leader it was in the fond hope that he would restore the good old days of Tory Government, than which nothing could be farther from his thoughts. John Russell said of him yesterday ‘that he was, in fact, a great lover of changes and innovations;’ and so he is. It often occurs to me that he would not care very much if the House of Lords did go to the wall, and that though he is the acknowledged head of the Conservative party, he doesn’t in his heart care much for Conservative principles. He may possibly calculate that no change can take place in this country by which property will be menaced; that personally he is safe, and politically his vast superiority in all the requisites for public life must, under all possible circumstances, make him the most eminent performer on the great stage. I do not know that he has any such thoughts as these, but it appears to me far from improbable, and the more so from his keeping aloof at this moment and abstaining (as far as we know) from any attempt to restrain the indiscretion and impetuosity of his party.
But if on the one hand the conduct of the Tories with respect to the Corporation Bill has been violent and rash, that of the Government with respect to the Tithe Bill has been unspeakably wicked. I cannot recollect an instance of so complete a sacrifice of the interests of others, of their own principles, and of national tranquillity to mere party objects, and the more I reflect upon the course they have taken the more profligate and disgraceful it appears. These Ministers have recorded their opinion that the question of appropriation ought not to be mixed up with that of commutation; that they are essentially distinct, and ought to remain so. At the beginning of this session the united Whigs and Radicals considered only one thing—how to drive Peel out, and though they had a choice of means to accomplish this end, the famous resolution about appropriation was the one which they finally selected for the purpose. In so doing they were altogether regardless of future consequences,[1] and never stopped to calculate what would be the THE WHIGS’ TITHE BILL. effect of saddling the measure of relief (in which all parties concurred) with this impossible condition. Now how stands the case? They declare that Ireland (as all the world knows) is a scene of disorder and bloodshed, of which the Tithe system is the principal cause, and that the Tithe Bill will afford an effectual remedy to the evil. It is therefore their imperative and paramount duty, as it ought to be their earnest and engrossing desire, to secure the application of their remedy, and, whether in office or out of office (with the expectation and intention of coming in), to take care that nothing should be mixed up with it by which it can be endangered, and that it should be proposed merely for what it is, and not made subservient to any object but that for which it has been professedly framed. Having committed the first error of employing this resolution to drive out the Government, they then considered themselves obliged to adopt it as an integral part of the Bill, and accordingly they did so, with a full knowledge that by so doing they should ensure the rejection of the Bill itself and that Ireland would continue in the same state of anarchy and confusion, only aggravated by the furious contests of parties here and by the failure of all schemes of remedial legislation. Nothing can be more certain than this, that if the state of Ireland had been taken into consideration with the simple, straightforward view of tranquillising the country, and that no party object had been mixed up with it, the framers of the Tithe Bill would sedulously have avoided introducing the appropriation clause; but during the great battle with Peel the establishment of this principle (not only the principle of appropriation, but that no relief should be afforded without its recognition) was made the condition of Radical support and the bond of Radical connection, and having as the result of this compact pledged the House of Commons to the principle, they refuse to retrace their steps, and offer the House of Lords the alternative of its recognition (knowing that they cannot in sincerity, honour, or conscience recognise it) or that of an irreparable injury to the Irish Church, which it is the grand object of the Lords to uphold. But the question must not be considered as one merely affecting the interests of the clergy of Ireland. If that were all, there might be no such great harm in these proceedings. Entertaining very strong (and as I think very sound) opinions with respect to the expediency of dealing with its revenues, and for purposes ultimately to be effected which they cannot yet venture to avow, they might be justified, or think themselves justified, in coping with the difficulties which embarrass this question in the best mode that is open to them, and deem it better that the Irish clergy should suffer the temporary privations they undergo than that the final settlement of the ecclesiastical question should be indefinitely postponed. But they do not pretend to be actuated by any such considerations; their declared object is to restore peace to Ireland, to terminate the Tithe quarrel, to raise the Protestant clergy from their fallen state, and to assert the authority of the law by taking away the inducements which now exist for setting the law at defiance. Those who undertake to govern the country are above all things bound to see that the laws are obeyed, and they do not deserve the name of a Government if they submit to, much less if they connive at, a permanent state of anarchy in any part of the country. They know that the law in Ireland is a dead letter, that neither to statute nor common law do the lower orders of Irish Catholics (the bulk of the nation) pay the slightest obedience, and that they are countenanced and urged on in their disobedience by those agitators with whom the Government act in political fellowship, and in deference to whom their measures have been shaped. Granting that after the adoption of the resolution by the House of Commons they were bound to insert it in their Bill, what justification is there for their refusal to receive the Bill back from the Lords with no other alteration than the omission of the appropriation clause? In so refusing they destroy their own measure; they publish to the world that it is the principle of appropriation, and not the Tithe composition, that they really care for; and in thus strangling their own Bill, because they cannot tack that principle on to it, they make THE WHIGS' TITHE BILL. themselves accomplices of the outrages and violence which are perpetrated in the Tithe warfare, and abettors of the regular and systematic violation of the law. The King’s Government exhibits itself in a conspiracy with Catholic agitators and Protestant republicans against the clergy of the Established Church and against the laws of the land. If they are sincere in their own statements and declarations they must of necessity deem no object commensurate with this in point of urgency and importance; and what is the object to which this is postponed? That of maintaining their own consistency; because they turned the late Government out on this question they must now adhere to it with desperate tenacity; their interests as a party demand that they should; O’Connell and the Radicals will not forgive them if they give it up. They might if they would declare their unchanged opinion in favour of the principle of appropriation, and their determination to press the adoption of it at all times and by all means, and never to desist till they had accomplished its recognition, but at the same time announce that the perilous state of Ireland—the magnitude of the evil resulting from the Tithe system—would not allow them to reject the Tithe Bill though denuded of the appropriation clauses, as all the rest of its provisions (all those by which the Tithe system was to be determined) had been passed by the Lords. I cannot conceive how a conscientious Minister can take upon himself the responsibility of quashing this measure, and contentedly look forward to the probability—almost certainty—of a fresh course of outrage and disorder, and a new catalogue of miseries and privations, which he all the time believes it is in his power to avert. But these Ministers think that they could not avert these evils (by accepting the Bill) without giving umbrage to their task-masters and allies, and they do not scruple to sacrifice the mighty interests at stake in Ireland to the paltry and ephemeral interests of their party—interests which cannot outlive the present hour and party, which the slightest change in the political atmosphere may sweep away in an instant. There is also another reason by which they are determined; they cannot face the accusation of inconsistency—the question that would be put, Why did you turn out Peel’s Government? You turned him out on this very principle which you are now ready to abandon. There is no doubt that this question would be put with a very triumphant air by their opponents, but they might easily answer it, without admitting in so many words—what everybody well knows without any admission—that the resolution was brought forward for the express purpose of turning Peel out. They might say that they moved that resolution because it is a principle that they wished to establish, and that they still think ought to be established; that Peel’s resignation on that particular question was of his own choice, and that if they are not irrevocably bound by the resolution itself, they are not the more bound by that circumstance; that they sent the Bill to the House of Lords in what they consider the best form, but that after the Lords had agreed to the whole measure, with the exception of the appropriation clauses, it was their duty to take the matter again into their serious consideration, and to determine whether it was on the whole more advantageous to Ireland and to the Empire that the Bill should be rejected (with all the consequences of its rejection apparent) or that it should be passed without these clauses. There was no necessity for their abandonment of any opinion or principle, nor any obstacle to the appropriation clauses being brought forward again and again in a substantive independent shape. Besides this, it is not pretended that these clauses were to produce any immediate perhaps not even any remote, effect, and they not only acknowledge that the state of Ireland calls for an immediate remedy, but they assert that unless the remedy is applied without loss of time it will come too late; that the Tithe Bill, which this year would accomplish its object, will in all probability next year be wholly inoperative. To my mind this reasoning is so conclusive that I can come to no other than the harsh judgment which I have passed upon their conduct, and I think I have made good my charges against both Whigs and Tories.
[1] The Whigs were not, probably, the Radicals. O’Connell, without doubt, had very good reasons for pinning the Government to this, and foresaw all the consequences of the compact by which he bound them.
August 29th, 1835
ALTERCATION IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS. The House of Lords has become a beargarden since Brougham has been in it; there is no night that is not distinguished by some violent squabble between him and the Tories. Lord Winchelsea directly accused him of cowardice the night before last, to which he replied, ‘As to my being afraid to say elsewhere what I say here, oh, that is too absurd to require an answer.’ It is nevertheless true. Melbourne does very well; his memory served him happily on this night. Brougham had lashed the Lords into a fury by calling them a mob, and Melbourne quoted Lord Chesterfield, who said that all deliberative assemblies were mobs. The other day Lord Howick was inveighing passionately against the Lords for their mutilations of the Corporation Bill, when Melbourne said, with his characteristic nonchalance, ‘Why, what does it matter? We have gone on tolerably well for 500 years with these corporations, and we may contrive to go on with them for another year or so.’
On the King’s birthday his Majesty had Lord Lansdowne and Lord Melbourne to dine with him at Windsor, and he made some extraordinary speeches, of which various versions are about the town. By-the-bye, I was turning over the ‘Annual Register’ the other day, and hit upon his speech last year to the bishops, and I was astonished at the eloquence of it. It is said that Phillpotts composed it for him, but there are some internal marks of its emanating from himself. It is certainly remarkably good of the kind, and I think it more probable that he spoke what he thought and felt, and that Phillpotts reported it and made the best of it.
September 1st, 1835
Lord John Russell assembled his Whigs and Radicals at the Foreign Office yesterday morning, and announced to them the course he proposed to adopt with regard to the Corporation Bill, the amendments he would accept, those he would modify, and those he would decline. Hume made a violent speech, deprecating any concessions, but O’Connell made a very moderate one, recommending a compromise, and saying that great alarm prevailed among many well-meaning and conscientious persons lest Reform should proceed too far; that it was highly expedient to quiet these apprehensions, and upon every account therefore he recommended a moderate and conciliatory course. There were between two and three hundred present at this meeting. Accordingly in the afternoon John Russell stated over again in the House of Commons pretty much what he had said in the morning, and made a very temperate and conciliatory speech. Peel, who had arrived suddenly and unexpectedly in town,[2] rose after him, and, as everybody said (some with joy, others with rage), ‘threw over the Lords.’ He declared his concurrence in those amendments which John Russell agreed to, and his acquiescence in most of the other provisions without the amendments of the Lords; to the aldermen for life he objected, and to some other particulars, as his speech shows. The only amendment to which he subscribed (and that was objected to by Government) was the exclusion of Dissenters from the disposal of Church patronage, and I was very much surprised to hear him stand out for this upon (as I think) very insufficient grounds. Nothing could exceed the dismay and the rage (though suppressed) of the Conservatives at his speech. He was not a bit cheered by those behind him, but very heartily by those opposite. One silly, noisy fellow, whose principal vocation in the House of Commons is to bellow, came near me under the gallery, and I asked him why they did not cheer, when he sulkily answered, ‘he was so well cheered by the other side that it was not necessary.’ Lord Harrowby was under the gallery. I asked him what he said to Peel’s speech. ‘I did not hear it,’ he tartly replied, ‘but he seems to have given up the aldermen. I have a great affection for the aldermen.’ At the ‘Travellers’ I met Strangford, and asked him the same question. He said, ‘I say, Not content.’ ‘But,’ said I, ‘you must take the Bill.’ ‘Not I, for one; the Lords cannot take it, and if we are to be ruined I think we had better be ruined by real Radicals PEEL’S CONCILIATORY CONDUCT. than by sham Tories.’ Afterwards I saw Lord Londonderry, who talked in the same strain, not denying that the Duke of Wellington had unwillingly come into the measures which Lyndhurst had adopted, but talking of Lyndhurst’s Conservative scruples as a constitutional lawyer, and such stuff as this. The manner in which the Duke has been ousted from the leadership, and the alacrity with which the Lords have followed Lyndhurst, because he led them into violent courses, is not the least curious part of this business. (It seems they only meant to make Lyndhurst their leader pro hac vice.)
[2] Peel gave no notice of his intention to come to town. Hardinge, who is more intimate with him than most of his political associates, was so sure he would not come that he told Bradshaw, who asked him, that he certainly would not be here, and that he (Bradshaw) might go into the country when he pleased.
Bingham Baring and I walked away together, and I went with him to Lord Ashburton’s house, who was not a little astonished at what we told him, and asserted that Peel was quite wrong about the aldermen. The violent Whigs were rather provoked at the turn things took, and Howick, whom I saw under the gallery, said with great bitterness (mixed with pleasure at Peel’s abandonment of the Lords) that he, for one, ‘only consented to these alterations, which made the Bill so much worse, with a view to obtain future compensation, and with interest.’ The English Radicals were very indignant, and Hume, Grote, and Roebuck spoke one after another against the Government concessions, but there was no disposition to listen to them, and an evident satisfaction at the prospect of an amicable termination of the rising dispute. Nobody apprehends any other termination, for though the Lords will bluster, and fume, and fret, and there will be no small fermentation of mortified pride and vanity, there must be some difference of opinion at least, and the Duke of Wellington is quite sure to exert his influence to bring the majority to adopt Peel’s views. It has always been considered by the Tories an object of paramount importance to keep their party together (this was the pretext of Wharncliffe and Harrowby for joining in that fatal postponement of Schedule A), and if after Peel’s speech they were to refuse to accept the fair compromise which is tendered to them, it is impossible to suppose that he would consider himself as belonging to them, or that they could pretend to acknowledge him as their leader, and the Tory party would by this schism be effectually broken up.