July 7th, 1839
I came to town yesterday from Basingstoke by railroad; found that Lady Flora Hastings was dead, and a great majority in the House of Lords in favour of an Address to the Crown against the proposed Committee of Council on Education, the Bishop of London having made an extraordinarily fine speech.
July 14th, 1839
Nothing new; proceedings in Parliament very languid. The Queen has appointed Lady Sandwich very dexterously, for she gets one of the favoured Paget DUKE OF WELLINGTON’S ANGRY VEIN. race and the wife of a Tory peer, thereby putting an end to the exclusively Whig composition of the Household. This is a concession with regard to the principle.
July 19th, 1839
There have been angry debates in the Lords about the Birmingham riots, chiefly remarkable for the excitement, so unlike his usual manner, exhibited by the Duke of Wellington, who assailed the Government with a fierceness which betrayed him into much exaggeration and some injustice. Lord Tavistock, who, although a partisan, is a fair one, and who has a great esteem and respect for the Duke, told me that he had seen and heard him with great pain, and that his whole tone was alarmingly indicative of a decay of mental power. This is not the first time that such a suspicion has been excited: George Villiers told me, soon after he came over, how much struck he had been with the change he observed in him, and from whatever cause, he is become in speaking much more indistinct and embarrassed, continually repeating and not always intelligible, but his speeches, when reported, present much the same appearance, and the sense and soundness (when the reporters have lopped off the redundancies and trimmed them according to their fashion) seem to be unimpaired. It is, however, a serious and melancholy thing to contemplate the possibly approaching decay of that great mind, and I find he always contemplates it himself, his mother’s mind having failed some years before her death. It will be sad if, after exploits as brilliant as Marlborough’s, and a career far more important, useful, and honourable, he should be destined for an end like Marlborough’s, and it is devoutly to be hoped that his eyes may be closed in death before ‘streams of dotage’ shall begin to flow from them. The Tories, with whom nothing goes down but violence, were delighted with his angry vein, and see proofs of vigour in what his opponents consider as evidence of decay; his bodily health is wonderfully good, which is perhaps rather alarming than reassuring as to the safety of his mind.
July 22nd, 1839
I met the Duke yesterday at dinner and had much talk with him. He is very desponding about the state of the country and the condition in which the Government have placed it. He complains of its defenceless situation from their carrying on a war (Canada) with a peace establishment; consequently that the few troops we have are harassed to death with duty, and in case of a serious outbreak that there is no disposable force to quell it; that the Government are ruled by factions, political and religious. On Saturday they had been beaten on a question relating to the Poor Laws[5] of great importance; and he said that they must be supported in this, and extricated from the difficulty. I was glad to meet him and see (for it is some time since I have talked to him) whether there was any perceptible change in his manner or any symptom indicative of decay. Without there being anything tangible or very remarkable, I received the impression that there was not exactly the same vigour of mind which I have been used to admire in him, and what he said did not appear to me indicative of the strong sense and acuteness which characterise him. If he has no attack, I dare say he will be able to continue to act his part with efficacy for a long time to come. I asked him in what manner Government would prosecute the inquiry they had promised into the conduct of the Birmingham magistrates? He said what they ought to do was to order the Attorney-General to prosecute them for a corrupt neglect of their duty, a thing they would as soon put their hands in the fire as do. Such is their position, so dependent upon bad men, that they are compelled to treat with the utmost tenderness all the enemies of the Constitution. There can be no doubt that the appointments to the magistracy have been fraught with danger, and made on a very monstrous principle. When Lord John Russell resolved and avowed his resolution to neutralise the provision of the Act which gave the appointment of magistrates to the Crown instead of to the Town Council (as they had proposed) by taking the recommendations of the Council, he incurred the deepest RADICAL MAGISTRATES. responsibility that any Minister ever did, for he took on himself to adopt a course practically inconsistent with the law, for the express purpose of placing political power in particular hands, to which the law intended it should not be confided; and on him, therefore, rested all the responsibility of such power being wisely and safely exercised by the hands to which he determined to entrust it; and when he appoints such a man as Muntz,[6] ex-Chartist and ex-Delegate, what must be the impression produced on all denominations of men as to his bias, and of what use is it to make professions, and deliver speeches condemnatory of the principles and conduct of Chartists and associators, if his acts and appointments are not in conformity with those professions? Mr. Muntz, he says, has abandoned Chartism, and is no longer the man he was: but who knows that? For one man who knows what Muntz is, a hundred know what he was, and in the insertion of his name in the list the bulk of the world will and can only see, if not approbation of, at least indifference to the doctrines such men have professed, and the conduct they have exhibited to the world. It is the frightful anomaly of being a Government divesting itself of all conservative character, which constitutes the danger of our day. As the ‘Times,’ in one of its spirited articles, says, this very morning, ‘that it cares not to see the Monarchy broken in pieces so that they may hurl its fragments at the heads of their opponents.’
[5] An instruction to the Committee to introduce a clause allowing out-door relief in all cases of able-bodied paupers married previously to the passing of the Act.
[6] [Whatever the antecedents of Mr. Muntz may have been, he lived to justify Lord John Russell’s choice. He was not only a good magistrate, but member for Birmingham for many years, and a useful member. He was the first man who, in our time, wore a long beard in the House.]