It used to be said that when Mr. Smith the banker, who lived in Whitehall, asked George III. for the entrée of the Horse Guards, the King replied, "I can't do that; but I wish to make you an Irish Peer." However, the true version of the story seems to be that which is given in the "Life of the Marquis of Granby."
"In 1787 the owner of Rutland House desired to increase the private entrée into Hyde Park to the dimensions of a carriage entrance, and asked Charles, fourth Duke of Rutland, to support the necessary application to the King. The Duke, who was then Viceroy of Ireland, replied, 'You will let me know whether ye application is to be made to Lord Orford, who is ye Ranger of ye Park, or to ye King himself: in ye latter case I would write to Lord Sydney att ye same time; if it be to the King a greater object might be easier accomplished than this trifle, as I know he is very particular about his Parks; at least he is so about St. James Park, for he made a man an Irish Peer to keep him in Good Humour for having refused him permission to drive his carriage through ye Horse Guards.'"
Lord Palmerston, himself an Irish peer, used to say that an Irish peerage was the most convenient of all dignities, as it secured its owner social precedence while it left him free to pursue a Parliamentary career. At the same time, greatly as he enjoyed his position, Palmerston never would take the oaths or comply with the legal formalities necessary to entitle him to vote for the Irish Representative Peers; and the reason for this refusal was characteristic alike of an adroit politician and of the unscrupulous age in which he lived. An Irish peer who has proved his right to vote for the Representative Peers, is eligible for election as a Representative, and Palmerston feared that his political opponents, wishing to get him out of the House of Commons into the comparative obscurity and impotence of the House of Lords, would elect him a Representative Peer in spite of himself, and so effectually terminate his political activities. In the days immediately succeeding Palmerston a conspicuous ornament of the Irish Peerage was the second Marquis of Abercorn. He had no need to trouble himself about Representative arrangements, for he sat in the House of Lords as a peer of Great Britain, but his hereditary connexion with the North of Ireland, his great estates there, and the political influence which they gave him, made him, in a very real sense, an Irish peer. He was Lord-Lieutenant from 1866 to 1868, and during his viceroyalty Disraeli (who subsequently drew his portrait in "Lothair") conferred upon him the rare honour of an Irish dukedom. It was rumoured that he wished, in consideration of his 80,000 acres in Tyrone and Donegal, to become the Duke of Ulster, but was reminded that Ulster was a Royal title, borne already by the Duke of Edinburgh. Be that as it may, he stuck to his Scotch title, and became Duke of Abercorn. Down to that time the Duke of Leinster had been the sole Irish duke, and went by the nickname of "Ireland's Only." To him, as an old friend, the newly created Duke of Abercorn wrote a mock apology for having invaded his monopoly; but the Duke of Leinster was equal to the occasion, and wrote back that he was quite content to be henceforward the Premier Duke of Ireland. When, six months later, Disraeli was driven out of office, he conferred an Irish barony on a faithful supporter, Colonel M'Clintock, who was made Lord Rathdonnell; and it was generally understood that, by arrangement between the leaders on both sides, no more Irish peerages were to be created. This understanding held good till Mr. George Curzon, proceeding to India as Viceroy and contemplating a possible return to Parliament when his term of office expired, persuaded Lord Salisbury to make him Lord Curzon of Kedleston in the Peerage of Ireland.
But, after all, the Irish Peerage of to-day is to a great extent the product of the Irish Union. "There is no crime recorded in history—I do not except the Massacre of St. Bartholomew—which will compare for a moment with the means by which the Union was carried." The student of men and moods, having no clue to guide him, would probably attribute this outburst to Mr. Gladstone at some period between his first and second Home Rule Bills; and he would be right. For my own part, I can scarcely follow the allusion to St. Bartholomew, but beyond doubt the measures employed by the English Government in order to secure the Union were both cruel and base. It is the baseness with which we are just now concerned. In order to carry the Union it was necessary to persuade the Irish Houses of Lords and Commons, and to capture the whole machinery of bribery and terrorism which directed the Irish Parliament. As that blameless publicist Sir T. Erskine May tranquilly observes, "corrupt interests could only be overcome by corruption." The policy of out-corrupting the corruptest was pursued with energy and resolution. Each patron of Irish boroughs who was ready to part with them received £7500 for each seat. Lord Downshire got £52,000 for seven seats; Lord Ely £45,000 for six. The total amount paid in compensation for the surrender of electoral powers was £1,260,000. In addition to these pecuniary inducements, honours were lavishly distributed as bribes. Five Irish peers were called to the House of Lords, twenty were advanced a step in the peerage, and twenty-two new peers were created. It would be invidious, and perhaps actionable, to attach proper names to the amazing histories of Corruption by Title which are narrated in the Private Correspondence of the Viceroy, Lord Cornwallis, and the published Memoirs of Sir Jonah Barrington. Even that sound loyalist Mr. Lecky was constrained to admit that "the majority of Irish titles are historically connected with memories not of honour but of shame." On the 22nd January 1799 one member of the Irish House of Commons took his bribe in the brief interval between his speech for, and his vote against a resolution affirming the right of the Irish nation to an independent Legislature. Another aspirant to the peerage "made and sang songs against the Union in 1799, and made and sang songs for it in 1800." He got his deserts. A third secured £30,000 for his surrendered boroughs, a peerage for himself, and for his brother in Holy Orders an archbishopric so wealthy that its fortunate owner became a peer, and subsequently an earl, on his own account. The scandalous tale might be indefinitely prolonged; but enough has been said to show why it is difficult to shed tears when these strangely-engendered peerages sink below the prescribed number of a hundred.
IV
OMITTED SILHOUETTES
Last year[4] I ventured to submit for public inspection a small collection of Social Silhouettes. From time to time during the last few months I have received several kind enquiries about Omitted Portraits. For instance, there is the Undertaker. Perhaps a friend will write: "Dickens made capital fun out of Mr. Mould and the 'Hollow Elm Tree.' Couldn't you try your hand at something of the same kind?" Another writes, perhaps a little bluntly: "Why don't you give us the Barrister? He must be an awfully easy type to do." A third says, with subtler tact: "I feel that, since Thackeray left us, yours is the only pen which can properly handle the Actor"—or the Painter, or the Singer, or the Bellringer, or the Beadle, as the case may be. Now, to these enquiries, conceived, as I know them all to be, in the friendliest spirit, my answer varies a little, according to the type suggested. With regard to the Barrister, I stated quite early in my series that I did not propose to deal with him, because he had been drawn repeatedly by the master-hands of fiction, and because the lapse of years had wrought so little change in the type that Serjeant Snubbin, and Fitz-Roy Timmins, and Sir Thomas Underwood, and Mr. Furnival, and Mr. Chaffanbrass were portraits which needed no retouching. I must, indeed, admit that the growth of hair upon the chin and upper lip is a marked departure from type, and that a moustached K.C. is as abnormal a being as a bearded woman or a three-headed nightingale; but the variation is purely external, and the true inwardness of the Barrister remains what it was when Dickens and Thackeray and Trollope drew him. So, again, with regard to the Family Solicitor; as long as men can study the methods of Mr. Tulkinghorn (of Lincoln's Inn Fields) and Mr. Putney Giles (of the same learned quarter) they may leave Mr. Jerome K. Jerome in undisturbed possession of his stage-lawyer, who "dresses in the costume of the last generation but seven, never has any office of his own, and (with the aid of a crimson bag) transacts all his business at his clients' houses."
When I am asked why I do not describe the Painter, my reply is partly the same. We have got Gaston Phœbus, and Clive Newcome, and Claude Mellot, and the goodly company of Trilby, and we shall not easily improve upon those portraits, whether highly finished or merely sketched. But in this case I have another reason for reticence. I know a good many painters, who about this time of year bid me to their studios. I have experienced before now the delicate irritability of the artistic genius, and I know that a reverential reticence is my safest course. Conversely, my reason for not describing the Actor is that I really do not know him well enough. An actor off the stage is about as exhilarating an object as a theatre by daylight. The brilliancy and the glamour have departed; the savour of sawdust and orange-peel remains. Let us render all honour to the histrion when his foot is on his native boards; but if we are wise we shall eschew in private life the society of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummles, nor open our door too widely to the tribe of Costigan and Fotheringay.