[8] [Orders in Council for Reprisals and Capture of Ships constitute a Declaration of War, and are signed by all the Privy Councillors present. This course was taken in 1854 on the Declaration of War against Russia.]
May 15th, 1840
A month, and nothing written here, or written, read, or done, elsewhere. Went to Newmarket for the Craven meeting, then to Bretby for a week, then Newmarket again, and back to London on Friday.
Just after I got back to Newmarket, the intelligence arrived of the extraordinary murder of Lord William Russell, which has excited a prodigious interest, and frightened all London out of its wits. Visionary servants and air-drawn razors or carving-knives dance before everybody’s imagination, and half the world go to sleep expecting to have their throats cut before morning. The circumstances of the case are certainly most extraordinary, and though every day produces some fresh cause for suspecting the man Courvoisier, both the fact and the motives are still enveloped in great mystery. People are always ready to jump to a conclusion, and having made up their minds, as most have, that he must have done the deed, they would willingly hang him up at once. I had the curiosity to go the day before yesterday to Tothill Fields Prison to see the man, who had just been sent there. He is rather ill-looking, a baddish countenance, but his manner was calm though dejected, and he was civil and respectful, and not sulky. The people there said he was very restless, and had not slept, and that he was a man of great bodily strength. I did not converse with him.
May 17th, 1840
Just after writing the above, I went to the house in Norfolk Street, to look at the premises, and the places where the watch and other things were found hidden. It was impossible not to be morally convinced that the house had not been broken into, that the indications of such violence were fabricated, and that the goods must have been secreted by Courvoisier, consequently, that by him the murder was committed; but there is as yet no evidence to convict him of the actual commission of the deed, and though NARROW ESCAPE OF A CULPRIT. I believe him to be guilty, I could not, on such a case as there is as yet, find him so if placed on a jury. I am very sceptical about evidence, and know how strangely circumstances sometimes combine to produce appearances of guilt where there may be none. There is a curious case of this mentioned in Romilly’s Memoirs, of a man hanged for mutiny upon the evidence of a witness who swore to his person, and upon his own confession after conviction, and yet it was satisfactorily proved afterwards that he had been mistaken for another man, and was really innocent. He had been induced to confess at the instigation of a fellow-prisoner, who told him it was his best chance of escaping.
Lord Ashburton, when we were talking of this, told me an anecdote of General Maitland (Sir Thomas), which happened at some place in the West Indies or South America. He had taken some town, and the soldiers were restrained from committing violence on the inhabitants, when a shot was fired from a window, and one of his men killed. They entered the house, went to the room from the window of which the shot had been fired, and found a number of men playing at billiards. They insisted on the culprit being given up, when a man was pointed out as the one who had fired the shot. They all agreed as to the culprit, and he was carried off. Sir Thomas considering that a severe example was necessary, ordered the man to be tied to the mouth of a cannon, and shot away. He was present, but turned his head away when the signal was given for blowing this wretch’s body to atoms. The explosion took place, when to his amazement the man appeared alive, but with his hair literally standing ‘like quills upon the fretful porcupine,’ with terror. In the agony of the moment he had contrived to squeeze himself through the ropes, which were loosely tied, and get on one side of the cannon’s mouth, so that the ball missed him. He approached Maitland and said, ‘You see, General, that it was the will of Heaven my life should be spared; and I solemnly assure you that I am innocent.’ Maitland would not allow him to be executed after this miraculous escape, and it turned out, upon further enquiry, that he was innocent, and it was some other man who had fired the shot.
For the last month there has been something like a cessation of political warfare, not from any diminished desire on the part of the Opposition to harass the Government, but from want of means to do so. In the House of Lords the other night, Lord Stanhope brought on the China Question; when the Duke of Wellington got up, and to the delight of the Government, and the dismay and vexation of the Tories, threw over Stanhope (in a very good speech), asserted the justice of our quarrel with China, refused to discuss the question of policy at all, warmly defended and eulogised Elliot, moved the previous question, and then quitted the House, without waiting to hear Stanhope’s reply. It was gratifying to see his energy and vigour, and to see them exerted on one of those occasions when his great mind and patriotic spirit never fail to show themselves. Whenever a question has, in his view, assumed a national character, he scatters to the wind all party considerations; such he now considers the Chinese war to be. We are involved with China, nation against nation, and he will not by word or deed put in jeopardy the smallest of the mighty interests at stake, for the sake of advancing some party purpose, and damaging the Government. In like manner, he thinks that Elliot has bravely, faithfully, and to the best of his ability, done his duty; that if he has committed errors of judgement they should be overlooked, and that he should be supported, encouraged, and defended. This is the real greatness which raises him so far above all the ordinary politicians of his day, and which will confer on his memory imperishable renown. It is rendered the more striking by his conduct on Friday on the Irish Municipal Bill, which is a mere party question, where he showed that he could be as violent as any Tory could desire. I called on Barnes[9] on Saturday, and found him much disgusted at the Duke’s China speech, and anxious to know how it could have happened. When I told him that it was always so with him, and that he never would be DUKE OF WELLINGTON SUPPORTS GOVERNMENT. merely factious, Barnes said (which, is true enough) that it is extraordinary, if he had intended to adopt such a tone in the House of Lords, that he should have allowed Graham to bring forward his motion in the House of Commons, and it certainly does place Graham in a mortifying position, for the Duke’s speech is a complete answer to Graham’s motion.
[9] [The editor of the ‘Times’ newspaper.]