Sir Richard Croft, the accoucheur of the Princess, overwhelmed by the calamity, committed suicide. "Poor Croft," exclaims the cool and benevolent Stockmar, "does not the whole thing look like some malicious temptation, which might have overcome even some one stronger than you? The first link in the chain of your misery was nothing but an especially honourable and desirable event in the course of your profession. You made a mistake in your mode of treatment; still, individual mistakes are here so easy. Thoughtlessness and excessive reliance on your own experience, prevented you from weighing deeply the course to be followed by you. When the catastrophe had happened, doubts, of course, arose in your mind as to whether you ought not to have acted differently, and these doubts, coupled with the impossibility of proving your innocence to the public, even though you were blameless, became torture to you. Peace to thy ashes, on which no guilt rests save that thou wert not exceptionally wise or exceptionally strong."
Leopold was inclined to go home, but remained in England by the advice of Stockmar, who perceived that, in the first place, there would be something odious in the Prince's spending his English allowance of L50,000 a year on the Continent, and in the second place, that a good position in England would be his strongest vantage ground in case of any new opening presenting itself elsewhere.
About this time another birth took place in the Royal Family under happier auspices. The Duke of Kent was married to the widowed Princess of Leiningen, a sister of Prince Leopold. The Duke was a Liberal in politics, on bad terms with his brothers, and in financial difficulties which prevented his living in England. Finding, however, that his Duchess was likely to present him with an heir who would also be the heir to the Crown, and being very anxious that the child should be born in England, he obtained the means of coming home through friends, after appealing to his brothers in vain. Shortly after his return "a pretty little princess, plump as a partridge," was born. In the same year the Duke died. His widow, owing to his debts, was left in a very uncomfortable position. Her brother Leopold enabled her to return to Kensington, where she devoted herself to the education of her child— Queen Victoria.
The first opening which presented itself to Leopold was the Kingdom of Greece, which was offered him by "The Powers." After going pretty far he backed out, much to the disgust of "The Powers," who called him "Marquis Peu-a-peu" (the nickname given him by George IV.) and said that "he had no colour," and that he wanted the English Regency. The fact seems to be that he and his Stockmar, on further consideration of the enterprise, did not like the look of it. Neither of them, especially Stockmar, desired a "crown of thorns," which their disinterested advisers would have had them take on heroic and ascetic principles. Leopold was rather attracted by the poetry of the thing: Stockmar was not. "For the poetry which Greece would have afforded, I am not inclined to give very much. Mortals see only the bad side of things they have, and the good side of the things they have not. That is the whole difference between Greece and Belgium, though I do not mean to deny that when the first King of Greece shall, after all manner of toils, have died, his life may not furnish the poet with excellent matter for an epic poem." The philosophic creed of Stockmar was that "the most valuable side of life consists in its negative conditions,"—in other words in freedom from annoyance, and in the absence of "crowns of thorns."
The candidature of Leopold for the Greek Throne coincided with the Wellington Administration, and the active part taken by Stockmar gave him special opportunities of studying the Duke's political character which he did with great attention. His estimate of it is low.
"The way in which Wellington would preserve and husband the rewards of his own services and the gifts of fortune, I took as the measure of the higher capabilities of his mind. It required no long time, however, and no great exertion, to perceive that the natural sobriety of his temperament, founded upon an inborn want of sensibility, was unable to withstand the intoxicating influence of the flattery by which he was surrounded. The knowledge of himself became visibly more and more obscured. The restlessness of his activity, and his natural lust for power, became daily more ungovernable.
"Blinded by the language of his admirers, and too much elated to estimate correctly his own powers, he impatiently and of his own accord abandoned the proud position of the victorious general to exchange it for the most painful position which a human being can occupy—viz., the management of the affairs of a great nation with insufficient mental gifts and inadequate knowledge. He had hardly forced himself upon the nation as Prime Minister, intending to add the glory of a statesman to that of a warrior when he succeeded, by his manner of conducting business, in shaking the confidence of the people. With laughable infatuation he sedulously employed every opportunity of proving to the world the hopeless incapacity which made it impossible for him to seize the natural connection between cause and effect. With a rare naivete he confessed publicly and without hesitation the mistaken conclusions he had come to in the weightiest affairs of State; mistakes with the commonest understanding could have discovered, which filled the impartial with pitying astonishment, and caused terror and consternation even among the host of his flatterers and partisans. Yet, so great and so strong was the preconceived opinion of the people in his favour, that only the irresistible proofs furnished by the man's own actions could gradually shake this opinion. It required the full force and obstinacy of this strange self-deception in Wellington, it required the full measure of his activity and iron persistency, in order at last, by a perpetual reiteration of errors and mistakes, to create in the people the firm conviction that the Duke of Wellington was one of the least adroit and most mischievous Ministers that England ever had."
Stockmar formed a more favourable opinion afterwards, when the Duke had ceased to be a party leader, and become the Nestor of the State. But it must be allowed that Wellington's most intimate associates and warmest friends thought him a failure as a politician. To the last he seemed incapable of understanding the position of a constitutional minister, and talked of sacrificing his convictions in order to support the Government, as though he were not one of the Government that was to be supported. Nor did he ever appreciate the force of opinion or the nature of the great European movement with which he had to deal.
It seems clear from Stockmar's statement, that Wellington used his influence over Charles X to get the Martignac Ministry, which was moderately liberal, turned out and Polignac made Minister. In this he doubly blundered. In the first place Polignac was not friendly but hostile to England, and at once began to intrigue against her; in the second place he was a fool, and by his precipitate rashness brought on the second French Revolution, which overthrew the ascendency of the Duke's policy in Europe, and had no small influence in overthrowing the ascendency of his party in England. It appears that the Duke was as much impressed with the "honesty" of Talleyrand, as he was with the "ability" of Polignac.
A certain transitional phase of the European Revolution created a brisk demand for kings who would "reign without governing." Having backed out of Greece, Leopold got Belgium. And here we enter, in these Memoirs, on a series of chapters giving the history of the Belgian Question, with all its supplementary entanglements, as dry as saw-dust, and scarcely readable, we should think, at the present day, even to diplomatists, much less to mortal men. Unfortunately the greater part of the two volumes is taken up with similar dissertations on various European questions, while the personal touches, and details which Stockmar could have given us in abundance, are few and far between. We seldom care much for his opinions on European questions even when the questions themselves are still alive and the sand-built structures of diplomacy have not been swept away by the advancing tide of revolution. The sovereigns whose wirepuller he was were constitutional, and themselves exercised practically very little influence on the course of events.