In the midst of these difficulties the lives of the ministers were threatened by a plot somewhat like those of the seventeenth century. Later writers have represented it as contemptible in its conception, and as directly provoked by the "Manchester massacre". So it may be said that Guy Fawkes was an insignificant person, and that his employers were exasperated by the severe treatment of popish recusants. The facts are that Arthur Thistlewood, the author of the Cato Street conspiracy, was a well-known confederate of the Watsons and other members of the extreme reform party, and that his plan for murdering the assembled cabinet in a private house would probably have been effectual, had it not been detected by the aid of an informer. This informer, Edwards, had warned the authorities in November, 1819, of the impending stroke, and may or may not have instigated Thistlewood's gang to execute it at a moment and place well-calculated to secure their arrest. At all events twenty-four conspirators armed themselves in Cato Street, near the Edgware Road, London, for the purpose of assassinating the ministers at a cabinet dinner in Harrowby's house in Grosvenor Square, and some of their associates were posted near the door of that house to summon them when the guests should have assembled. Harrowby's dinner was of course put off, but the watchers were deceived by the arrival of carriages for a dinner party next door, and failed to apprise the gang in Cato Street. The police rushed in upon the gang, but a body of soldiers ordered to support them reached the spot too late, a policeman was stabbed, and Thistlewood, with twelve or fourteen others, contrived to escape. He was captured the next morning, and executed with four of his accomplices, five more were transported for life, and the atrocity of the enterprise was naturally treated in the king's speech as a justification for the repressive measures in operation. In the following April a petty outbreak in Scotland was easily put down by a few troops at a place called Bonnymuir. It was, however, preceded by a treasonable proclamation, which spread terror among the citizens of Glasgow for several hours, and was sufficiently like an attempt at armed rebellion to confirm the alarm excited by the Cato Street conspiracy. In the face of such warnings, the energy of the government in stamping out disorder could hardly be censured.
The last parliament of George III. was prorogued on February 28, 1820, and dissolved on the following day. One of its last debates was on Lord John Russell's proposal to suspend the issue of writs to the boroughs of Grampound, Penryn, Barnstaple, and Camelford. This was carried in the house of commons, but lost in the house of lords. The new parliament was opened by George IV. in person on April 21. Widespread excitement occasioned by the question of the divorce prevented the business of the first session from attracting much attention. A deficit in the revenue, coinciding with growing expenditure, compelled Vansittart to fall back on a fresh manipulation of the sinking fund. One measure, however, of the highest importance was introduced by Brougham. The committee of 1814 on national education had amassed a great body of valuable evidence, and he now founded upon its report a comprehensive bill extending to the whole country. It placed the management and teaching of elementary schools entirely in the hands of Churchmen, and was dropped after the first reading, but the conscience of the nation was roused by it, and it bore fruit later. Further slight mitigations of the criminal law were carried as a result of attacks made by Sir James Mackintosh, upon whom the mantle of Romilly had fallen, and it is worthy of notice that even Eldon, the stout opponent of such mitigations, condemned the use of spring-guns, as a safeguard against poaching. The only ministerial change in this year was the final retirement in May of Lord Mulgrave, who had held high office in every ministry except that of Grenville since 1804, and had voluntarily surrendered his post at the head of the ordnance in 1818 to make room for Wellington.
QUEEN CAROLINE.
The "queen's trial," as it is erroneously called, was the last act but one in a domestic tragedy which had lasted twenty-five years. The Princess Caroline of Brunswick was a frivolous and ill-disciplined young woman when she was selected by George III. as a wife for the heir-apparent, already united and really attached to Mrs. Fitzherbert. The princess could not have been married to a man less capable of drawing out the better side of her character, nor was she one to inspire his selfish and heartless nature with a sentiment, if not of conjugal love, yet of conjugal friendship. From the first there was no pretence of affection between them. A few years after her marriage she was relegated, not unwillingly, to live independently at Blackheath, where many eminent men accepted her hospitality. During this period, as we have seen, a "delicate investigation" into her conduct was instituted in 1806. Though she emerged from it with less stain on her character than had been expected, she never enjoyed the respect of the royal family or of the nation, and there was no question of her sharing the home of her husband. Instead of being a bond of concord between them, the education of her daughter was the subject of constant discord, requiring the frequent intervention of the old king until he lost his reason. After she went abroad in 1814, she travelled widely, but her English attendants soon retired from her service, and she incurred fresh suspicion by her flighty and undignified conduct. She had no part in the rejoicing for the marriage, or in the mourning for the death, of the Princess Charlotte; and in 1818 a secret commission, afterwards known as the Milan commission, was sent out by the prince regent to collect evidence for a divorce suit. Not only Liverpool, but Eldon, who had formerly stood her friend, concurred in the appointment of this commission, promoted by Sir John Leach, and its report was the foundation of the proceedings now taken against her.
These proceedings were immediately due to her own action in returning to England in June, 1820, but this action was not wholly unprovoked. She had long and bitterly resented her official exclusion from foreign courts, and when, after the king's accession, her name was omitted from the prayer-book, she protested against it as an intolerable insult. Contrary to the advice of her wisest partisans, including Brougham, she persisted in braving the wrath of the king and throwing herself upon the people. She was received at Dover with acclamations from immense multitudes; and her journey to and through London was a continued ovation. Not that her innocence was established even in the popular mind, but that, innocent or guilty, she was regarded as a persecuted woman, and persecuted by a worthless husband. The ministry fulfilled its promise to the king by moving the house of lords to institute an inquiry into the queen's conduct. Pending this, conferences took place between Wellington and Castlereagh, on the part of the king, and Brougham and Denman on that of the queen. It was at once laid down as a preliminary basis of the negotiation that neither should the king be understood to retract, nor the queen to admit, any allegation against her. The points upon which she inflexibly insisted were, the recognition of her royal status at foreign courts, through an official introduction by the British ambassador, and the insertion of her name in the prayer-book.
The house of commons, on the motion of Wilberforce, offered to protect her honour (whatever that might import) on condition of her waiving this last point, but she courteously declined its conciliatory proposals on June 22. On July 4 a secret committee of the house of lords recommended a solemn investigation, to be carried out "in the course of a legislative proceeding," and on the 8th Liverpool introduced a bill of pains and penalties, to deprive her of her title, and to dissolve her marriage. The second reading of this bill was formally set down for August 17, and for several weeks afterwards the house of lords was occupied in hearing evidence in support of the charges against her. The whole country was deluged with the squalid details of this evidence, the ministers were insulted, and the sympathy of the populace with her cause was obtrusively displayed in every part of the kingdom. On October 3, after an adjournment of the lords, Brougham opened the defence in the most celebrated of his speeches. On November 2 the lord chancellor, Eldon, moved the second reading of the bill, and on the 8th it was carried by a majority of twenty-eight. Four days later, on the third reading, the majority had dwindled to nine only. Knowing the temper of the house of commons, Liverpool treated such a victory as almost equivalent to a defeat, and announced that the government would not proceed further with the measure.
Had the queen possessed the virtue of self-respect or dignity, she would have been satisfied with this legislative, though not morally decisive, acquittal. But she was intoxicated with popular applause, largely due to her royal consort's vices, and, after London had been illuminated for three nights in her honour, she declined overtures from the government, and appealed for a maintenance to the house of commons, which granted her an annuity of £50,000 in the next session. But she never lived to enjoy it After going in procession to St. Paul's, to return thanks for her deliverance, on the 29th, and vainly attempting, once more, to procure the mention of her name in the prayer-book, she concentrated her efforts on a claim of right to be crowned with the king. No government could have conceded this claim, and, when it had been refused by the privy council, her solemn protests were inevitably vain. Even her least prudent counsellors would assuredly have dissuaded her from the attempt which she made to force an entrance into Westminster Abbey on the coronation day, July 19, 1821. It was a painful scene when she, who had so lately been the idol of the fickle populace, was turned away from the doors amidst conflicting exclamations of derision and pity. A fortnight later, on August 2, she was officially reported to be seriously ill; on the 7th she was no more. In accordance with her own direction her body was buried at Brunswick. Her ill-founded popularity was shown for the last time, when a riotous multitude succeeded in diverting her funeral procession, and forcing it to pass through the city on its way to Harwich. But it did not survive her long; the people were becoming tired of her, and the king, who had forfeited the respect of the middle and upper classes, was less hated by the lower classes after her death.
GEORGE IV. IN IRELAND.
The personal character and opinions of George IV. seem to have influenced politics less during the early years of his reign than during his long regency. His coronation was celebrated with unprecedented magnificence, and amidst external demonstrations of loyalty, hard to reconcile with the unbounded enthusiasm which the queen had so lately inspired. Soon afterwards, he sailed in his yacht from Portsmouth on a voyage to Ireland, but put into Holyhead and there awaited news of the queen's expected death. This reached him at last, and probably impressed him, no less than his ministers, as "the greatest of all possible deliverances, both to his majesty and the country".[68] He proceeded to Dublin in one of the earliest steam-packets, and secluded himself until "the corpse of his wife was supposed to have left England".[69] He then plunged into a round of festivities, and pleased all classes of Irishmen by his affable and condescending manners. He was, indeed, the first sovereign of England who had appeared in Ireland on a mission of peace. John William Ward, afterwards fourth Viscount Dudley in his letters, describes him as having behaved like a popular candidate on an electioneering trip, and surmises that "if the day before he left Ireland, he had stood for Dublin, he might have turned out Shaw or Grattan ".[70] Certain it is that his visit to Ireland was regarded as an important political event. The same kind of success attended his visit to Scotland in August of the following year, 1822. Thenceforth, he scarcely figures in political life until the resignation of Lord Liverpool in 1827, and though he consented with reluctance to Canning's tenure of the foreign office, he did not attempt to interfere with the change in foreign policy consequent upon it. He was, in fact, sinking more and more into an apathetic voluptuary; but he could rouse himself, and exhibit some proofs of ability, under the impulse of his brothers, the honest Duke of York and the arch-intriguer, the Duke of Cumberland.
The cry for retrenchment, now taken up by the country gentlemen, and not unmingled with suggestions for a partial repudiation of the national debt, compelled the government to adopt a policy of strict economy. Accordingly, in 1822, Vansittart introduced a scheme for the conversion of the so-called "Navy 5 per cents.," which resulted in a saving of above £1,000,000 annually. He also carried a more questionable scheme for the payment of military, naval, and civil pensions, which then amounted to £4,900,000 a year, but were falling in rapidly; the money required for this purpose was to be borrowed by trustees, and was to be repaid in the course of forty-five years at the rate of £2,800,000 a year; in this way an immediate saving of about £2,000,000 annually was effected at the cost, however, of the next generation. By means of these expedients, with a considerable reduction of official salaries, the government was enabled to repeal the additional duty on malt, to diminish the duties on salt and leather, and, on the whole to remit about £3,500,000 of taxes. When the entire credit of financial reform is given to Huskisson, Joseph Hume, and other economists of the new school, it should not be forgotten that a beginning was made by economists of the old school, before Huskisson joined the government in 1823, or Robinson took Vansittart's place as chancellor of the exchequer.