Your Excellency is of opinion, that His Majesty's servants should have employed themselves in endeavouring to find a successor to your Excellency from the receipt of your letter of the 12th of March. If your Excellency will give yourself the trouble to recollect the transactions of that period, you will, I am sure, concur with me in opinion, that it would have been the extreme of folly and presumption for any of His Majesty's present servants to have treated upon this subject with any person breathing before the 2nd of April, when they had the honour of kissing His Majesty's hand. Long after the day of the receipt of your Excellency's letter, it was perfectly uncertain here, to whose hands His Majesty would commit the management of his affairs; nay, your Excellency cannot be ignorant, that, since that time, the expectations (and I doubt not the hopes) of the public were fixed upon seeing your Excellency at the head of the Administration.
The 2nd of April was, therefore, the first moment that any of His Majesty's present servants could take any step towards the nomination of a new Chief Governor of Ireland. From that time measures for that purpose have been constantly pursued, till the affair was finally settled, on the 24th of last month. The various impediments which have arisen I need not mention to your Excellency, but the fact is exactly as I have stated; and, as the delay is not unprecedented, nor even very long, I think it is not trespassing too much upon your Excellency's candour to expect that you will believe my assertion.
In your last letter, your Excellency seems hurt, that the London newspapers should have announced in Dublin the appointment of the Earl of Northington two days before you received my letter. Whatever might have been the information or the conjectures of the news-writers, I assure your Excellency that I wrote within an hour after I received authentic information of that appointment.
As to the total and absolute neglect of Irish considerations, on which your Excellency expresses yourself so strongly, you certainly cannot mean to allude to the ordinary and current business (which has been regularly attended to, and has met with the most speedy decision that each case would admit of), but to some great commercial points, upon which your Excellency had written at different times to the late Administration, and which had not, as I collect from your Excellency's letter, been considered, when they quitted His Majesty's service.
I well remember, that Lord Carlisle very fully and clearly stated, very earnestly and repeatedly pressed, the demands of Ireland, with respect to the refusal of Portugal to admit their woollen goods. Lord Hillsborough, then Secretary of State, urged the claim of Ireland with much zeal and perseverance in his despatches to the Court of Portugal, and in his conferences with the Portuguese Minister in London. What was done in that business by the late Administration I know not: nothing of that sort has yet come to my knowledge; but, during the few days that we have been in office, the Secretary of State for the Foreign Department has renewed this negotiation with Monsieur de Pinto, and I doubt not but it will be pursued with all the attention that so important a question deserves. But it is singular, that His Majesty's present servants should be criminated for not having finished in the first busy three weeks of a new Administration what has been depending during the two last Ministries, and, notwithstanding the efforts of one of them at least, is by no means so far advanced as to promise an immediate conclusion.
That the interests of Ireland should not be separated from those of Great Britain in any commercial treaty with France and Spain, and that they should be considered in every arrangement with the United States of America, are important truths, upon which your Excellency, with much propriety, lays a great stress. They cannot be urged too often or too strongly; but whether your Excellency has any particular measures to suggest on these heads, or whether the late Administration, when they signed the provisional articles, and projected the commercial treaties with the House of Bourbon, had formed any detailed and digested plan upon these principles, I am not informed; but this is certain, that it would have been very hasty and rash, for His Majesty's servants in the first hurry of a new arrangement, before any commercial treaty is formed with America, or the definitive treaties signed with France and Spain, to think themselves capable of proposing a well-formed system of commerce, adapted to the new situation of Great Britain with her late and present dependencies.
Your Excellency will consider, that we came to the situations we now possess, in the midst of a session of Parliament, with almost all the material business of that session unfinished, indeed, hardly begun, and that, besides Parliamentary affairs, there never was a time in which the Executive Power was occupied with a greater variety of complicated and important questions.
Many of the matters to which your Excellency alludes, must necessarily employ the attention of His Majesty's Ministers for a long space of time. Your Excellency will, therefore, I hope, judge of our exertions according to the capacities of ordinary men, and not according to the rapidity of your Excellency's conceptions, and the eagerness of your zeal for the prosperity of Ireland.
I beg pardon for detaining your Excellency so long, but I trust that what I have written may serve to justify me to your Excellency, when I confess, that the heavy and severe censures in your Excellency's letter have produced no other emotions in my mind than those of astonishment.
I have the honour to be, with the greatest truth and respect, My Lord,
Your Excellency's most obedient humble servant,
North.