Some amusing examples of his restless anxiety to figure on all occasions in the character of an Admirable Crichton are given by Mr. Charles Greville, whose “Memoirs” stand in much the same relation to the graphic satires of the nineteenth century as the “Odes” of Dr. Walcot do towards the caricatures of James Gillray. “Dined,” says Mr. Greville (under date of 7th June, 1831), “with Sefton yesterday, who gave me an account of a dinner at Fowell Buxton’s on Saturday to see the brewery, at which Brougham was the magnus Apollo. Sefton is excellent as a commentator on Brougham; he says that he watches him incessantly, never listens to anybody else when he is there, and rows him unmercifully afterwards for all the humbug, nonsense, and palaver he hears him talk to people.... They dined in the brewhouse and visited the whole establishment. Lord Grey was there in star, garter, and ribbons. There were people ready to show and explain everything. But not a bit. Brougham took the explanation of everything into his own hands; the mode of brewing, the machinery, down to the feeding of the cart-horses. After dinner the account books were brought, and the young Buxtons were beckoned up to the top of the table by their father to hear the words of wisdom which flowed from the lips of my Lord Chancellor. He affected to study the ledger, and made various pertinent remarks on the manner of book-keeping. There was a man whom Brougham called ‘Cornelius’ (Sefton did not know who he was), with whom he seemed very familiar. While Brougham was talking he dropped his voice, on which ‘Cornelius’ said, ‘Earl Grey is listening,’ that he might speak louder and nothing be lost. He was talking of Paley, and said that ‘although he did not always understand his own meaning, he always made it intelligible to others,’ on which ‘Cornelius’ said, ‘My good friend, if he made it so clear to others, he must have some comprehension of it himself;’ on which Sefton attacked him afterwards, and swore that ‘he was a mere child in the hands of “Cornelius;” that he never saw anybody so put down.’ These people are all subscribers to the London University,[116] and Sefton swears he overheard Brougham tell them that ‘Sir Isaac Newton was nothing compared to some of the present professors,’ or something to that effect. I put down all this nonsense because it amused me in the recital, and is excessively characteristic of the man, one of the most remarkable that ever existed. Lady Sefton told me that he went with them to the British Museum, where all the officers of the Museum were in attendance to receive them. He would not let anybody explain anything, but did all the honours himself. At last they came to the collection of minerals, when she thought he must be brought to a standstill. Their conductor began to describe them, when Brougham took the words out of his mouth, and dashed off with as much ease and familiarity as if he had been a Buckland or a Cuvier. Such is the man, a grand mixture of moral, political, and intellectual incongruities.”[117]
If the part which Brougham’s position as attorney-general to Queen Caroline obliged him to take at the memorable period of the “Bill of Pains and Penalties” had not closed the door of professional advancement against him, he had most effectually locked it against himself so long as her husband lived by the intemperate and ill-judged language in which he alluded to that event in the speech which he delivered at Edinburgh on the 5th of April, 1825.[118] But Brougham was constantly on the watch for its being opened, and on the very day when George the Fourth died, that is to say on the 20th of June, 1830, he spoke in the House of Commons in eulogistic terms of the new sovereign, praising him for allowing the Speaker to take the oaths at an unusually early hour in order to suit the convenience of members, a graceful act, which Mr. Brougham declared he hailed as a happy omen of the commencement of an auspicious reign. The astute K. C.’s object did not escape the penetrating eye of HB, who forthwith represented him as The Gheber Worshipping the Rising Sun, in whose smiling face we recognise the unmistakable lineaments of William the Fourth. The sun proved not unmindful of the attention; for, on the formation of Earl Grey’s ministry in 1830, Mr. Brougham was made Lord Chancellor, with the title of Baron Brougham and Vaux. The appointment took the nation by surprise; for although a consistent upholder of Whig principles, he had always maintained a peculiar and independent position with his party, and was expected to prove rather an embarrassment than otherwise. These expectations were fully realized, and there can be no doubt that the sentiments which Lord Brougham’s bearing as Chancellor excited among his colleagues and contemporaries, excluded him for the remainder of his life from all official life and employment.
With all his wonderful powers, however, Lord Brougham could make, as O’Connell asserted of him, as inconsiderate a speech as any man. One of these speeches, which was delivered on the 14th of August, 1833, in a debate on the bill for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, suggested to HB a happy subject. His lordship is reported to have said that, “the object of the clause [then under discussion] was to make the black, from the moment that he arrived on the shores of this country, a free man in all respects: to make him eligible to sit in Parliament, either in the House of Lords, if it should be his Majesty’s pleasure to give him a title to a seat, or in the other House if he should be elected.” HB, with his usual facility for seizing an idea, took his lordship at his word, and forthwith elevated the emancipated “nigger” to the woolsack, clothing him in the wig and gown of Lord Chancellor Brougham, and giving him the features of the noble and learned lord himself: this sketch bears the title of A Select Specimen of the Black Style.
The House of Lords was a lively place whilst my Lord Chancellor Brougham was in office, and in the “scenes” in which he figured, and which drew down upon him the hatred and resentment of his contemporaries, he not unfrequently displayed a want of judgment which was nothing less than lamentable. We might give many instances of these regrettable scenes, but one shall suffice. On the 29th of September, 1831, the Lord Chancellor made the following answer to a question put by the Marquis of Londonderry:—“My lords,” he said, “I beg to state to you once for all, that I will not sit here to be bothered with questions which emanate from the ridiculous ideas of certain absurd individuals who cannot or will not see anything, however clear, and seem lamentably incapacitated by nature from comprehending what is going on. Moreover, I beg to state to the noble marquis, that for the future I will answer no question of his,—will give him no information whatever.” The amazed patrician said in reply, “As to the language which the noble and learned lord has ventured to apply to me here, I will only say that I shall wish those words to be repeated in another place.” The Lord Chancellor rejoined that he had said nothing which he was not prepared to repeat elsewhere; and here the matter appears to have ended, for strange to say it was the Marquis of Londonderry and not the irascible Brougham who subsequently apologised, a circumstance which occasioned the artist’s satirical and telling sketch of The Duel that did Not Take Place. These scenes do not appear to have been the result of any mere ebullition of temper; on the contrary, Brougham would seem to have delighted in these undignified exhibitions. “The Chancellor, who loves to unbosom himself to Sefton, because he knows the latter thinks him the finest fellow breathing, tells him that it is nuts to him to be attacked by noble lords in the Upper House, and that they had better leave him alone if they care for their own hides. Since he loves these assaults, last night,” continues Mr. Greville, “he got his bellyful, for he was baited by a dozen at least, and he did not come out of the mêlée so chuckling and happy as usual.”[119]
Parliament was dissolved on the 15th of August, 1834, and by that time his party, the king, and everybody else, had grown pretty well tired of Lord Chancellor Brougham. His head would seem to have been almost turned by his success; for he employed the recess which followed the prorogation in making a sort of royal progress through Scotland, parading the Great Seal on his way, to the great disgust of the king, who seriously thought he had taken leave of his senses, and protested against it being carried across the border. In the course of this strange progress he reached Inverness in the beginning of September, 1834, and was presented by the magistrates with the freedom of their city. In returning thanks for this honour, Lord Brougham said he was conscious “that it was not owing to any personal merits that he had received this mark of distinction at their hands. First of all he owed it to the circumstance that he had the honour of serving a monarch who lived in the hearts of his subjects. He had enjoyed the honour of serving that prince for nearly four years, and during that time he had experienced from his Majesty only one series of gracious condescension, confidence, and favour. To find that he lived in the hearts of his loyal subjects in the ancient and important capital of the Highlands, as it had afforded him (Lord Brougham) only pure and unmixed satisfaction, would, he was confident, be so received by his Majesty, when he (Lord Brougham) told him, as he would by that night’s post (cheers), of the gratifying circumstances.”[120] So far, however, from being gratified, the bluff sailor king was tremendously annoyed. These fulsome adulations, and the ridiculous manner in which his eccentric and embarrassing Chancellor tortured any personal attention to himself (Brougham) into a personal compliment to his royal master, thoroughly disgusted him. For some weeks previously The Times had attacked the eccentric Chancellor with a constancy and vigour of satire quite unexampled; the tide of ridicule was swelled by contributions from the London and provincial press; Brougham made some foolish speeches at Aberdeen and Dundee, which excited the laughter of his enemies and the alarm of his friends. “Those who are charitably disposed,” remarks the unfriendly Greville, “express their humane conviction that he is mad, and it probably is not very remote from the truth.”
Intellectually strong as he was, a Chancellor so eccentric as this was an incubus to be got rid of at the first convenient opportunity. In May, 1834, Mr. Stanley, Sir James Graham, the Earl of Ripon, and the Duke of Richmond, seceded from the ministry; but the Whig party, in spite of these resignations and the subsequent one of Lord Grey in July, continued in office under Lord Althorp till the following November, when the latter being called (by the death of his father) to the Upper House as Earl Spencer, the king seized the opportunity which he had so long desired of placing a less embarrassing and self-willed Chancellor on the woolsack. This circumstance prompted the clever sketch of the Fall of Icarus. Icarus in this instance is of course Brougham, who, flying in defiance of the injunctions of Dædalus too near the sun—that is to say, William the Fourth—the wax of his mechanical wings melted and he fell into the sea. That there may be no mistake as to the artist’s meaning, the wings aforesaid are labelled with the titles of various publications which were loudest in sounding the praises of the King and of the “noble and learned lord,” and to which he himself, with the questionable taste which distinguished him, was reputed (with justice) to be a contributor.
Whether my Lord Chancellor Brougham caught the infection from his client, Queen Caroline, we know not; but his conduct, whether in or out of office, appears to have been of the most undignified character. Ignoring the fact that his party were no longer in power, there is no doubt whatever that he wrote a letter to his successor, Lord Lyndhurst, actually suggesting his own nomination to Lyndhurst’s vacant office of Chief Baron of the Exchequer, thereby (as he pointed out) saving to the public his own pension of ex-Chancellor. What his real motive may have been is of little consequence; it was certainly a most undignified proceeding, made the more undignified, if possible, because the proposal was not accepted. It suggested to the artist one of his pictorial puns, The Vaux and the Grapes, and to the Rev. Richard Harris Barham the following amusing verses, which we have extracted from a contemporary poetical skit:—
| “Then in Great Stanhope Street The confusion was great In a certain superb habi-tation, Where seated at tea, O’er a dish of Bohea, Brougham was quaffing his ‘usual potation’ (For you know his indignant ne-gation, When accused once of jollifi-cation), Down went saucer and cup, Which Le Marchant picked up, Not to hear his lord mutter ‘d—n-ation.’ But this greatest of men Soon caught hold of a pen, And, after slight delibe-ration, No longer he tosses His flexile proboscis About in so much exci-tation;[121] But scribbling with great ani-mation, He sends off a communi-cation:— ‘Dearest Lyndhurst,’ says he, ‘Can’t you find room for me When constructing your adminis-tration? Though the Times says I’m mad, And each rascally Rad Abuses my tergiversation; Though those humbugs, the Whigs, Swear that my “thimble-rigs” Were the cause of all their vacill-ation; The whole story’s a base fabri-cation To damage my great reputa-tion; So now to be brief, Only make me Lord Chief, And I’ll serve without remuner-ation!’ When he found ’twas ‘no go,’ And that Lyndhurst and Co. Were deaf to all solici-tation, As ’twas useless with Lyndy To kick up a shindy, He resolved upon peregrin-ation. Not waiting for much prepa-ration, He bolted with precipi-tation; A sad loss, I ween, To Charles Knight’s magazine, And to Stinkomalee edu-cation.” |
Lord Brougham, indeed, by his despotic, intractable conduct, had thoroughly shut himself out from all chance of office. Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative ministry lasted till April, 1835, when a second Whig government came into power, under the premiership of Lord Melbourne, and from the re-constructed cabinet, Brougham—much to his own surprise, but to the surprise of no one else—was excluded.[122]
Irish disaffection was, unfortunately, as stale a subject in 1833 Irish Disaffection. as in 1883. For what particular sins of her own England has been cursed with a neighbour so bloodthirsty, so unreasonable, and so troublesome as Ireland, it would be difficult to say. Although we had no Irish Americans—no cowardly “dynamitards”—in those days, Ireland was nevertheless in a state of chronic disaffection, and an “Irish Coercion Bill” was found just as necessary to restrain the excitement of Irish political malcontents in 1833 as in 1883. Irish history, in this respect at least, has a method of repeating itself which is singularly embarrassing, and the student of the history of Irish disaffection cannot fail to be interested in the statement with which Lord Grey introduced his measure fifty years ago. We learn from this statement that a state of things existed little short of actual rebellion. Bodies of men were collected and arrayed by signals, evidently directed by a system of organization in which many were combined, and such system was conducted in a manner which had hitherto set at defiance all the exertions of law and order. The disturbers of the peace prescribed the terms on which land was to be let, and any one who presumed to disobey their orders was subject to have his property destroyed or be put to death. The reign of terror was complete. The organization which supplied the place of the Land League of to-day dictated what persons should employ and be employed; and while they forbad labourers from working for obnoxious masters on the one hand, they prevented a master on the other from employing as labourers any but those who were obedient to their orders. They enforced their decrees by acts of cruelty and outrage; by spoliation, murder, attacks on houses in the dead of night; by dragging the inmates from their beds and so maltreating them that death often ensued, or by inflicting cruelties which were sometimes worse than death. The persons belonging to this organization assembled by signals, made concerted movements, watched the movements of the troops, and by information received so avoided them that the military were rendered practically useless.