I will try what I can do to obtain a postponement of the Catholic Bill for you, but have little hope of success.
Ever affectionately your,
C. W. W.
Thirty or forty years ago the public press was managed with much less talent and principle than the respectable portion of it now possesses. Personality and scurrility appear to have gone out of fashion, and such attacks as that from which the Duke of Buckingham suffered in the columns of a provincial paper, are of very rare occurrence.
LORD GRENVILLE TO THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.
Dropmore, May 21, 1822.
I learn from my brother that the Duke of Portland is to move the second reading of Canning's Bill, and that they talk of the 31st for it; that day being opportunely hitched in between the two important epochs of Ascot and Epsom. But these arrangements of days for Parliamentary business are always so uncertain, and so liable to be varied up to the last moment, that I have never found one got much previous communication of them; nor do I, to speak fairly, think that the want of it affords the smallest ground of offence. As to the yeomanry arrangements, it does not seem to me possible that the day of this motion could have been fixed in time to enable you to reconcile those two engagements.
I shall be sorry if you are absent from the discussion of this Bill, for a thousand reasons that make one wish you present at it, and I still hope you will contrive to run up for that night only. But if that really cannot be, I will very willingly hold your proxy, supposing that I do not in the interval (and it is now little likely I should) receive some one that I cannot transfer. I now hold only Lord Carysfort's.
On the other subject on which you write to me it is more difficult to advise. The least troublesome course no doubt is that which I have always pursued—to treat, and unaffectedly to consider, the whole tribe of newspaper libellers as unworthy of the smallest notice. And this was, on the first impression, the opinion which I expressed the other day to my brother, who wrote to me on this matter, in consequence of something your son had said to him. On reflection I do not feel as sure as at first, that I was right in this opinion, as applicable to your case and to the Aylesbury paper. To any idea of a complaint against him in the House of Lords I feel utterly averse. My recollection does not serve me to remember any instance since Lord Sandwich and Bishop Warburton in the beginning of the last reign, in which the House has interfered in case of general libel. I myself brought a printer before them for an attack on Bishop Watson, but then that, if I am not mistaken, was a case of attack for words spoken in Parliament, and not for general political conduct. If you prosecute, the right course is certainly that of information in the King's Bench; for it would be most unseemly to allege that your character has really been endamaged by such ribaldry.
On the question itself, whether to prosecute or not, I really feel myself incompetent to advise. I have already said that my first impression was against it, but further consideration of the subject has so shaken that opinion, that I should be sorry now you laid the least stress upon it. Every man who goes into a court of law, and especially every man who attacks a newspaper there, does, under our blessed system of newspaper government, expose himself to a lottery, the chances of which no man can foresee, and out of which it would be much more desirable to keep himself. But, then, in this as in other cases, one may be driven to the wall, and obliged to do that which in itself one is far from wishing. That this is the case in this instance, certainly seems probable, and if it is, the decision is one which you alone can take for yourself; though if my own judgment were fully satisfied either way, I would certainly not hesitate to let you see it.