[113] He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Cavendish, Bart., of Doveridge Hall, Derbyshire, and afterwards had some lucrative offices in Ireland. His wife, the heiress of Mr. Bradshaw, was created Baroness in 1792. He died in 1804. It is to him that the public are indebted for the very interesting reports of the debates in Parliament, of which the first volume was published in 1841 by the late Mr. Wright,—an astonishing work for a man of his station, fortune, and pursuits, and incomparably the best—indeed the only faithful record of the proceedings in Parliament in the early part of this reign. It would have been far more valuable if he had taken the pains to give the words of the speakers in the passages of their speeches that were the most successful—his abridgment of course conveying a very imperfect and inadequate idea of any rhetorical excellence; hence, we rise from the perusal of his reports of Burke with some disappointment. Still, the work cannot be too carefully consulted by all who wish to gain an accurate insight into the history of the period which it embraces. One proof of Mr. (afterwards Sir Henry) Cavendish’s correctness is, that his reports of his own speeches go far to justify Walpole’s account of him.—E.
[114] Eldest son of Simon Lord Irnham, who had two other sons—Temple, who was a poet, and had parts, but proved a tedious orator; and the third, who was a seaman, and had most parts of the three. He had also two daughters, of whom Anne, the elder, then married to a Mr. Horton, was very engaging, and rose afterwards to a very extraordinary rank.
[115] This was very like his pitiful countryman James the First, who had disclaimed his own son-in-law, the King of Bohemia, when elected for their Prince by an oppressed nation.
[116] It is true Lord Granville had provoked the Genoese in the year 1743 by the treaty of Worms, in which he had proposed to force Final from the Genoese, and give it to the King of Sardinia. France had rescued Genoa from the Austrians. Still, there was no moral or political reason for our taking part for the Genoese against the Corsicans. The despotic principles of Lord Bute suggested that preference.
[117] The debate on the Adjournment is reported in Cavendish, vol. i. p. 28–31. It turned chiefly on the disturbances among sailors.—E.
[118] In a letter on these proceedings written shortly before the judgment reversing the outlawry, Walpole says, “In short, my dear sir, I am trying to explain what I really do not understand.” (To Sir Horace Mann, vol. i. p. 392.) That he was not better informed at the date of these Memoirs, is proved by the statement in the text. It was, however, no disgrace to be ignorant of the absurd technicalities by which Lord Mansfield’s very able judgment is defaced; nor should they attach any stain to the memory of a judge who had to expound the law and not to make it. Lord Mansfield’s love of the prerogative did not in this instance lead him into the slightest injustice. Following the order which the form of the proceedings naturally suggested, he commenced with an elaborate and lucid examination of all the arguments which the ingenuity of the defendant’s counsel, arguing from the reversal of the outlawry, had most ably urged; and after carefully reviewing and combating each seriatim, he disposes of them in these words: “These are the errors which have been objected, and this the manner and form in which they are assigned. For the reasons I have given, I cannot allow them.” After a spirited vindication of his character, and a bold declaration of the utter indifference in which he held all the menaces by which he had been publicly and privately assailed, he proceeds to advert to a technical error in the “Writ of Exigent,” which by a series of precedents and cases ranging from the 7th of James the First to the 18th of Charles the Second (a period of sixty years), he shows to be fatal to the writ, and on that ground decides that the outlawry could not stand, adding at the conclusion of his judgment, “I beg to be understood that I ground my opinion singly upon the authority of the cases adjudged, which as they are on the favourable side, in a criminal case highly penal, I think ought not to be departed from.”—Burrow’s Reports, vol. iv. p. 2561.
The error upon which the reversal proceeded was, that after the words “at the County Court” the writ altogether omitted to state “of the County of Middlesex,” a ground obviously different from that which Walpole here suggests. It is observable, also, that the discovery of this error had not, as Walpole states, been made by Serjeant Glynn “two months before in his pleading;” it is probable, however, that Walpole may have confounded this with another error relied on by the Serjeant, but overruled by the court,—namely, that the averment “Brook Street near Holborn in the County of Middlesex” was not a sufficient averment that Brook Street was in Middlesex.
A clear account of these proceedings is given in the Life of Lord Mansfield (No. XI. of the Law Magazine), in an able and yet not servile defence by that eminent lawyer, who, with all his defects of character, will always be regarded as one of the brightest ornaments of British jurisprudence. It was written by Mr. Plunket, the author of a history of the Roman law, who has since died, a Puisne Judge of St. Lucia.—E.
[119] Mr. Townshend was the eldest son of the Hon. Thomas Townshend, second son of Charles, Viscount Townshend, and M.P. for Whitchurch. He prided himself on his family and fortune, and probably resented the preference shown to a political adventurer, such as Rigby. An additional motive for his resigning was his attachment to Lord Chatham, with whom he soon entered into violent opposition to the Government. He ranked high among the second-rate speakers in the House. The Whigs proposed him for the Chair against Sir Fletcher Norton, 1770, of course unsuccessfully. He was one of the Secretaries of State in Lord Shelburne’s Administration, and distinguished himself by a most able defence of the peace.—(Wraxall’s Historical Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 289.)—In 1783, the friendship of Mr. Pitt, with whom he had become connected by the marriage of his daughter with the second Lord Chatham, raised him to the peerage as Lord Sydney, and restored him the Seals of Secretary, which he held till 1789. He died in 1800. He was an accomplished classical scholar, and indefatigably industrious.—E.
[120] The Pope published a most satisfactory refutation of the claim of the French Government, but the French troops retained their conquest. A body of French troops under the Marquis de Rochecourt took possession of Avignon on the 11th of June. No resistance was offered by the papal authorities, the Legate only making a protest, accompanied by a declaration that the invaders had subjected themselves to the ecclesiastical penalties enumerated in the Bull In Cænâ Domini. The plea set up by the French was the invalidity of the original alienation of Avignon to the Pope by Jeanne of Naples in 1368. The Pope published a reply, which was thought conclusive by all but the French, who retained possession of the territory they had seized, until it suited their interests to resign it.—E.