The form of the required engagement was left to Erskine’s discretion; and in case Erskine failed, Canning would be still at liberty to claim, as he afterward did, that his conditions were not so rigorously meant as Erskine should have supposed them to be.
Meanwhile the Government of England was falling to pieces. Day by day the situation became more alarming. For months after these despatches were sent, the Commons passed their time in taking testimony and listening to speeches intended to prove or disprove that the Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the army, was in the habit of selling officers’ commissions through the agency of his mistress, a certain Mrs. Clarke; and although the Duke protested his innocence, the scandal drove him from his office. The old King, blind and infirm, was quite unfit to bear the shame of his son’s disgrace; while the Prince of Wales stood no better than the Duke of York either in his father’s esteem or in public opinion. The Ministry was rent by faction; Perceval, Castlereagh, and Canning were at cross purposes, while the Whigs were so weak that they rather feared than hoped their rivals’ fall. Whatever might be the factiousness of Congress or the weakness of government at Washington, the confusion in Parliament was worse, and threatened worse dangers.
“All power and influence of Perceval in the House is quite gone by,” wrote a Whig member, February 16.[51] “He speaks without authority and without attention paid to him; and Canning has made two or three such rash declarations that he is little attended to. You may judge the situation of the House, when I tell you we were last night nearly three quarters of an hour debating about the evidence of a drunken footman by Perceval suggesting modes of ascertaining how to convict him of his drunkenness,—Charles Long [one of the Administration], near whom I was sitting telling me at the time what a lamentable proof it was of the want of some man of sense and judgment to lead the House. There is no government in the House of Commons,—you may be assured the thing does not exist; and whether they can ever recover their tone of power remains to be proved. At present Mr. Croker, Mr. D. Brown, and Mr. Beresford are the leaders.... The Cintra Convention, or the general campaign, or the American question, are minor considerations, and indeed do not enter into the consideration of any one.”
The House of Lords maintained more appearance of dignity; and there, February 17, four-and-twenty hours after Colonel Fremantle wrote this letter, Lord Grenville began a debate on American affairs. As a test of Tory sincerity in view of what Erskine was soon to do at Washington, the debate—as well as all else that was said of American affairs during the session—deserved more than ordinary notice, if only in justice to the British ministry, whose language was to receive a commentary they did not expect.[52]
The most significant speech came from Lord Sidmouth. The conservatism of this peer stood above reproach, and compared closely with that of Spencer Perceval. Rather than abandon the “established principle” of the Rule of 1756, he far preferred an American war. He proved his stubborn Tory consistency too clearly, both before and after 1809, to warrant a suspicion of leanings toward liberal or American sympathies; but his speech of February 17 supporting Grenville, and charging ministers with bad faith, was long and earnest. He called attention to the scandal that while the Government professed in the speech from the Throne a persuasion “that in the result the enemy will be convinced of the impolicy of persevering in a system which retorts upon himself, in so much greater proportion, those evils which he endeavors to inflict,” yet instead of retorting those evils, Perceval licensed the export and import both with France and Holland of the very articles which those countries wished to sell and buy, while Canning at the same moment rejected the American offers of trade because he thought it “important in the highest degree that the disappointment of the hopes of the enemy should not have been purchased by any concession.”
Ministers might disregard Grenville’s furious denunciation of the orders as an act of the most egregious folly and the most unexampled ignorance that ever disgraced the councils of a State; they might even close their ears to Sidmouth’s charge that the folly and ignorance of the orders were surpassed by their dishonesty,—but not even Spencer Perceval could deny or forget that while a year before, Feb. 15, 1808, forty-eight peers voted against him, on Feb. 17, 1809, seventy lords, in person or by proxy, supported Grenville. While the opposition gained twenty-two votes, the government gained only nine.
The impression of weakness in the ministry was increased by the energy with which the authors of the orders stood at bay in their defence. When Whitbread in the House of Commons renewed the attack, and the House, March 6, entered on the debate, James Stephen came forward as the champion of his own cause. Stephen’s speech,[53] published afterward as a pamphlet, was intended to be an official as well as a final answer to attacks against the orders, and was conclusive in regard to the scope and motives of Perceval’s scheme. Neither Canning nor Liverpool spoke with personal knowledge to be compared with that of Stephen. Canning in particular had nothing to do with the orders except as a subject of diplomatic evasion. Stephen, Perceval, and George Rose were the parents of commercial restriction, and knew best their own objects. With frankness creditable to him, but contrasting with the double-toned language of Perceval and Canning, Stephen always placed in the foreground the commercial objects he wanted and expected to attain. His speech of March 6, 1809, once more asserted, in language as positive as possible, that the orders had no other purpose than to stop the American trade with France because it threatened to supplant British trade. The doctrine of retaliation, or the object of retorting evils on France, had nothing to do with Stephen’s scheme. His words were clear, for like a true enthusiast he was wholly intent on the idea in which he thought safety depended.
Canning also planted himself on advanced ground. The question, he said, was between England and France; not between England and America. On the principles of international law he had no defence to offer for the Orders in Council as between England and America. “He was willing to admit that it was not upon the poor pretence of the existing law of nations, but upon the extension of that law (an extension just and necessary), that his Majesty’s ministers were to rely, in the present instance, for justification.” This extension rested on the excuse that France had first discarded the law of nations; and America, in attempting to give to Great Britain the priority in wrong, had incurred this censure,—“that she had brought a false charge, and persisted in it.” In his opinion, the American offer to withdraw the embargo in favor of England and to enforce it against France, “was illusory; he might add, in the language of Mr. Madison, ‘it was insulting.’” Those who accused ministers of a disinclination to adopt pacific measures respecting America had lost sight of the facts. “We had rather gone too far than done too little. We twice offered to negotiate; yet the Non-importation Act was not revoked.”
If this was Canning’s true state of mind, his instructions to Erskine less than a month before, offering to abandon the Orders in Council, seemed to admit no defence. Still less could be explained how President Madison, after reading these speeches, should have expected from Canning the approval of any possible arrangement. Yet the irritation of Canning’s tone showed him to be ill at ease,—he felt the ground slipping under his feet. The public had become weary of him and his colleagues. The commercial system they had invented seemed to create the evils it was made to counteract. The press began to complain. As early as January 13 the “Times” showed signs of deserting the orders, which it declared to be no “acts of retaliation,” but “measures of counteraction,” complicated by transit duties doubtful either in expediency or justice. “If America will withdraw her Embargo and Non-importation Acts as far as they relate to England, provided we rescind the Orders in Council, we cannot consider this as a disgraceful concession on our part.” After the debate of March 6, the “Times” renewed its complaints. Every day increased the difficulties of ministers, until mere change became relief.
At length, April 26, the reality of the weakness of Perceval and Canning became clear. On that day a new Order in Council[54] appeared, which roused great interest because it seemed to abandon the whole ground taken in the Orders of November, 1807, and to return within the admitted principles of international law. The machinery of the old orders was apparently discarded; the machinery of blockade was restored in its place. The Order of April 26, 1809, declared that the old orders were revoked and annulled except so far as their objects were to be attained by a general blockade of all ports and places under the government of France. The blockade thus declared was to extend northward as far as Ems, and was to include on the south the ports of northern Italy. Of course the new blockade was not even claimed to be effective. No squadrons were to enforce its provisions by their actual presence before the blockaded ports. In that respect the Order of April 26, 1809, was as illegal as that of Nov. 11, 1807; but the new arrangement opened to neutral commerce all ports not actually ports of France, even though the British flag should be excluded from them,—retaliating upon France only the injury which the French decrees attempted to inflict on England.