In 1818 the duke was made master-general of the ordnance; in 1819, governor of Plymouth; and in 1820, colonel of the Rifle Brigade.
The great continental courts in 1818 gave him the rank of field-marshal in their respective armies, together with military and civil distinctions, such as were only customarily conferred on crowned heads, or the very noblest of their subjects.
Meanwhile the British Isles were intensely agitated; a cry for parliamentary reform resounded from the gates of Buckingham Palace to the Land’s-end, to John O’Groat’s house, and to the cliffs of Connemara. Roman Catholic emancipation was another demand, which was ceaselessly heard, and the Protestant dissenters of England were active and importunate in demanding redress for the grievances of which they complained. The duke was adverse to all these concessions, and determined to resist them as long as they could be resisted, with safety to the crown and peerage. The people hated the prince-regent, and when he reached the throne as the fourth George, he was one of the most unpopular monarchs in Europe. The measures adopted by this prince to preserve illiberal institutions were bloody and remorseless; executions for political offences were numerous all over the land, men of virtue and honour were incarcerated for liberal opinions uttered or printed, public meetings were put down by charges of cavalry, or by cannon loaded with grape and canister, drawn up against an unarmed and really loyal people, exasperated by unendurable oppressions. Against these wickednesses the duke exerted no influence, raised his voice in no protest, but was in the minds of the people regarded as one of the haughtiest of their oppressors. On the death of Lord Liverpool, and the appointment of Mr. Canning to the premiership, he received from the duke an uncompromising, bitter, and ungenerous opposition. Canning was professedly a Conservative, but his opinions were moderately liberal, and everything liberal was resisted by Wellington and his alter ego in politics, Mr. Peel, afterwards Sir Robert. There was a bigoted and angry party spirit in all the duke’s proceedings. He would not command the army nor direct the ordnance, but resigned all his military offices, because the king made Canning the chief of a ministry in which the duke himself served. Canning and Huskisson introduced a corn-bill, which was the first relaxation proposed by members of a government to the corn-law. This measure had been prepared in the Liverpool cabinet, and received the assent of the duke himself; yet such was his animosity to the moderately liberal policy of Canning, that he proposed the rejection of the bill in the lords, and threw it out. There was a want of honour and good faith in this conduct, wholly at variance with the manly, frank, straightforward character of the duke, and there is no way of accounting for it but by supposing that he was instigated to the course he adopted by Peel, whose tortuous and uncertain principles and policy began to assume prominence. It was Peel’s character throughout his career to betray all who trusted in him as a leader, and to cany by trick and treachery all the measures against which, in his public life, he most vehemently and acrimoniously inveighed. The duke was taunted in the house with intriguing for the premiership. He declared, in reply, that he was “unqualified for such a situation.” Nevertheless, when offered, he accepted it. He declared that he “should be mad even to think of it;” but he did think of it, at all events afterwards, and took it, and also filled it better than his tory predecessors. Perhaps the truth of the case was, that Peel originated all the intrigues against Canning, in which the duke was unconsciously an abettor of the designs of that artful man. Peel saw that his best hope of attaining to the chief post in the councils of the country was by using skilfully and patiently the influence he had acquired over the duke. He foresaw, as it was easy to foresee, that events would soon make the duke tired of the post, and that he would in such case certainly devolve it upon him, as “his man of all work.” One of the most harassing oppositions to which an English premier was ever exposed was directed and led by Wellington and Peel against Canning, chiefly on the ground of his willingness to concede Catholic emancipation, and some relaxation of the duties upon corn, and the restrictions upon trade. In this opposition the duke was sincere, but there is good ground for believing that Peel, filled with envy against Canning, was already laying his own schemes for carrying concession even farther than Canning or Huskisson ever dreamed of doing. Canning was shamelessly deserted and betrayed on all hands. He displayed wonderful ability, justifying the language of Byron: “Canning is a genius, almost a universal one, a scholar, a wit, a statesman, an orator, and a poet.” He struggled against the factious opposition treacherously carried on in the name of principles by men who, like Peel, felt no homage for them, until his proud and sensitive heart broke. The Peel and Wellington faction killed him. In the fourth month of his premiership he died at his post, leaving to posterity a great name, and an eternal reproach against his unprincipled persecutors.
Lord Goderich (“prosperity Robinson”) could not carry on the government. The duke was made premier, eight months after he had publicly declared his own incapacity for such an office. One of his first acts, notoriously under the influence of Peel, was to give office to Huskisson, the champion of free trade, and the energetic colleague of Canning! He added four more of Canning’s colleagues. Thus, after he and Peel had declared Canning and his cabinet to be irreligious, revolutionary, and dangerous to the country, in all the cant phrases of the time, their very first act was to take possession, as it were, of the Canning cabinet itself, and next of the Canning policy, on account of which the illustrious dead had been solemnly denounced by the one, and vituperated, in a manner far exceeding parliamentary licence, by the other. The repeal of the corporation and test acts, demanded by the dissenters, the emancipation of the Roman Catholics, and the claims of the commercial community, and the political economist, for a relaxation of the protectionist policy were now to be satisfied; but the policy chosen was to keep all these parties at bay, to resist all melioration of things as they were as long as possible, and then to concede nothing on the ground of justice, or of human rights, but only what popular power could force. This policy Peel did not manage happily, and the duke was brought down with him as by a dead weight. The parliamentary tact of Peel, his debating power, his aptitude for public business, and the singular influence of the duke, worked wonders for a time; but eventually much more had to be conceded to the public power, than, if at first and generously, the government had shown a reforming spirit, would have been at once insisted upon.
Lord John Russell moved for a repeal of the corporation and test acts, oppressions which goaded the dissenters, and which in themselves were as profane as they were hypocritical. Of course the duke and Mr. Peel resisted this, but the House of Commons carried the measure.
Instead of the duke and “his man Friday,” as the wags of the day termed Peel, resigning, as men of honour ought to have done, they resolved to take up the measure against which they had voted and argued, and uttered the most earnest warnings on the sacred ground of religion! The duke carried the measure through the House of Lords!
A month afterwards a corn-bill, the first inroad actually effected upon the protective system, was carried in the House of Commons. The duke declared the repeal or modification of the corn-laws to be especially wicked, as injuring the landed interest; nevertheless, he took up the measure and carried it through. Corn might come in, if only Whigs and Radicals could be kept out. Thus early, measures which Canning proposed with consistency and honour,—and for proposing which these men hunted him to death,—they inconsistently, and with a violation of principle which lowered the character of public men, carried through parliament to preserve the ministerial ascendancy of Peel and the party.
As the session advanced the spirit of reform both in and out of parliament advanced. Penryn and East Retford were rotten boroughs, with only a handful of constituents. The reformers demanded the transfer of the representation from two such insignificant and corrupt places to Manchester and Birmingham. The duke would not consent to the enfranchisement of the two great centres of manufactures; he held fast by the rotten boroughs. Huskiseon, Grant, Lamb, and Lords Dudley and Palmerston resigned. Thus the Canning cabinet was expunged, and a pure tory remainder formed the nucleus of a new ministry, which was composed of Lord Aberdeen, Sir H. Hardinge, and Sir George Murray,—men in every way immeasurably inferior to those who, no longer able to follow the bigoted yet inconsistent and time-serving policy of the duke and Peel, were obliged to resign office.
The state of Ireland now became alarming. The Roman Catholic population, led by O’Connell, menaced insurrection, and a system of agitation was maintained very effective, and very embarrassing to government. The Roman Catholics knew that nothing would be conceded by Wellington and Peel on principle, but that anything might be wrung from them, if, by the concession, they supposed that they thereby gave a longer lease of power to the privileged classes. The army began to discuss the question of religious disability, and a third of the force was alleged to be Roman Catholic. The duke came to the conclusion that to avert civil war, Roman Catholic emancipation must be effected. In his public statements he greatly exaggerated the dangers of withholding the measure; but as neither he nor Peel were supposed at heart to be very earnest, although very illiberal Protestants, the public considered it a new trick to take popular public measures out of the hands of the liberal party, to pass them in forms less in harmony with the principles involved in them, than would have been the case if carried by the Whigs. In February, 1829, the measure of Roman Catholic emancipation was announced in the speech from the throne, and was carried through parliament by all the power which the ministry could command. The high Protestants lost confidence in the duke, and the Earl of Winchelsea impeached his private honour in connection with the events which had transpired. On the 31st of March the duke and the earl met in Battersea Fields to fight a duel. The duke fired and missed; Lord Winchelsea fired in the air, and the affair terminated. Throughout the political transactions of his premiership his grace showed much passion, and a tyranny to his colleagues in office more suitable to the barrack-room than the cabinet. Peel was the abettor of all this, and by many deemed the inventor of it. After conceding such a large measure of religious liberty, his grace seemed to dislike more inveterately than ever all measures of free-trade and parliamentary reform. The French revolution of 1830 excited the whole country, and an agitation for reform of threatening magnitude arose and spread throughout the land. He had the hardihood to attempt prosecutions of the press, although by such means the French king had brought about his dethronement. He defied public feeling, and did so with an air of peremptory authority and insolence offensive to parliament and the people. He became one of the most unpopular men in England. Almost all parties united in deeming him unfit to lead the government of the country in such a crisis. He was hooted by mobs in the streets; the windows of his mansion were broken, and had to be defended by iron casings. A new parliament was elected; a reform was demanded. The duke met the demand by a sturdy defiance. He declared, “that the country already possessed a legislature which answered all the good purposes of legislation, that the system of representation possessed the full and entire confidence of the country, and that he was not only not prepared to bring forward any measure of reform, but would resist such, as long as he held any station in the government of the country.” With those words the career and credit of the duke as a statesman may be said to have closed. A perfect hurricane of rage arose around him through all the land. He was hurled from power, and the Whigs came into office pledged to a Reform Bill, which, after vain and fierce opposition, became the law of the land. King William IV. became alarmed at the rapid progress of reform; he suddenly dismissed the Whigs, and “sent for the duke.” The latter failed again in his discernment of the true slate of public feeling in England. He refused to become premier, advised the king to send for Sir Robert Peel (what the latter had been all along planning and expecting). Sir Robert arrived and formed a ministry, the duke becoming minister of foreign affairs and leader of the government party in the House of Lords. This ministry was speedily swept away by the popular indignation, and the Whigs again returned to power. From that time the duke seems to have made expediency his sole rule of political action; he became heart and soul a Peelite. In 1841 he had an opportunity of upholding Sir Robert Peel in power for some time, and of aiding him in the great work of commercial and economical reform, against which both had all their life protested and straggled. It can hardly be urged in excuse for the duke’s long opposition to commercial reform, that questions of finance and political economy were out of the proper range of his subjects, for he was a first-rate financier, and a successful student of political economy. He is represented to have said of himself that his true genius was the Exchequer rather than the War Office. “At one of the most critical conjunctures of the Peninsular war, he drew up a most able paper on the true principles of Portuguese banking; and at Seringapatam, after very serious evils had been experienced from a long-standing debasement of the coinage, a memorandum was accidentally discovered in the treasury from the pen of Colonel Wellesley, every prediction and observation of which had been exactly verified by events.” His desire to stand by his order, to uphold government by that order, and to maintain its revenues by the protection of territorial produce overpowered alike his sense of justice, and his patriotism.
In 1843, he resumed the office of “commander-in-chief of the land forces,” which he held until his decease. In his management of the army, he displayed the same repugnance to reform as in civil life, and a determination to resist all changes that lessened aristocratic influence in its government, or the promotion of its officers. The liberal views and measures which spontaneously emanated from the Duke of Cambridge, in 1858-9, would have been impossible to the Duke of Wellington, except under such a pressure of popular power as made a concession of some things necessary to preserve others. The improvements which gradually grew up in the condition of the common soldier seldom, almost never, had his approbation, and were generally carried out by successive whig governments in opposition to the commander-in-chief.