Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century

by James Richard Joy

[GEORGE CANNING, born, London, April II, 1770; died, London, August 8, 1827; educated at Eton and Oxford; Member of Parliament, 1793; 1797, editor of Anti-Jacobin periodical; 1807- 09, Secretary for Foreign Affairs; 1809, duel with Castlereagh; 1814-16, Ambassador at Lisbon; 1817-20, President of India Board; 1822, appointed Governor-General of India; 1822-27, Minister for Foreign Affairs; 1827, Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury. Buried in Westminster Abbey.]

During the first twenty years of the nineteenth century Great Britain, though possessing the most liberal constitution of any of the powers, was the consistent ally of the absolute monarchies of Europe. Strange as the situation at first appears, it is not difficult to trace the causes which produced it.

For the explanation of most of the phenomena of European history in the first half of the century the student must turn back to the French Revolution. The social and political ideas which were at the bottom of that great upheaval were in part suggested by the success of free institutions in constitutional England, where parliamentary government had been highly developed while France lay bound by her Bourbon despots. A large body of Englishmen numbering some of the greatest names in politics and literature sympathized deeply with the earlier manifestations of the revolutionary spirit.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven"

sang Wordsworth, whose youthful enthusiasm over that dawn was soon chilled by the crimes which were committed in the name of Liberty—the slaughter of the royal pair, the reign of the guillotine, and the enthronement of reason in the place of God. The tide of opinion in England was turned by these scenes of lawless license, and when, in 1793, the revolutionary government of France offered its armed aid to all oppressed peoples, England, led by William Pitt, joined Austria and Prussia in a war to suppress the dangerous republic, and restore the Bourbon dynasty to its ancient throne. Seven successive coalitions were thus formed by English diplomacy between 1793 and 1815 to meet the changing phases of the struggle which, after 1803, had ceased to be monarchy against democracy and had become a universal war for self-preservation from Napoleon, the military genius who had made himself the dictator of revolutionary France. When the great war seemed to have come to an end, in 1814-15, and Napoleon was finally caged at St. Helena, England found herself naturally taking a principal part in re-establishing the Bourbon Louis XVIII. on the throne of France. She had stood with the other powers so long against a common foe that she continued to stand with them now in undoing, as far as might be, the work which the disturbing and renovating conqueror had wrought in the kingdoms which he had overrun. Not only were the old boundaries generally restored and the exiled monarchs brought back to replace the upstart Bonaparte kings, but the constitutional freedom which the French arms had introduced in many parts of Europe was annulled wherever possible. The Congress of Vienna, in which the allied powers formulated their policy, did its best to turn back the shadow twenty years on the dial of progress, and England either joined in the effort or stood by consenting to the death of so many newly won liberties.

When the allied sovereigns were met in Napoleon's capital after Waterloo, the Czar of Russia conceived a thought which seemed to him to be an inspiration. In the ecstasy of the hour of deliverance from the sword which had been the nightmare of the continent for a generation Alexander proposed to his fellow potentates a covenant binding them to be governed by the principles of Christian justice and charity in their dealings with their own subjects and in their mutual relations. Sincere and pious as the Czar undoubtedly was, this agreement, which was accepted by the other monarchs, excepting George IV. of England, did not produce the results which one might suppose from its name, the Holy Alliance. It was used not only to stifle the spirit of liberty in western Europe, but its baleful influence was felt in Italy, Spain, and Greece. In effect it was a trades- union in which the allied crowned-heads undertook to stifle popular liberty wherever it showed signs of life. When Alexander explained his proposal to the English commissioners at Paris they could scarcely keep a straight face at its absurdity. Yet though England refused to become a member of the Holy Alliance, she did allow herself for a period of several years to be ruled by its decisions, or at least to allow them to be enforced without a protest.

Such in brief was the chain of events which associated the foreign policy of England with that of the Holy Alliance. The brilliant statesman who broke away from this foreign policy and led England out upon a line of independent action was George Canning.

The future Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister was born in London, April II, 1770. His father was an Englishman from the north of Ireland, who had read law, but failed to get clients, and had succeeded at nothing, from pamphleteering to selling wine. He died on his babe's first birthday. The widow married an actor and essayed a stage career. What would have become of little George had he remained in his mother's company is an interesting speculation. An actor called the attention of his uncle, a London banker, to the probability that the lad was on the high road to the gallows—to which in those days more than one road led. This uncle, Stratford Canning, assumed the responsibility of the child's education, sent him to Eton and later to Oxford. At the former he distinguished himself by his witty contributions to "The Microcosm'—most famous of school-boy periodicals—and at the University where he was graduated, B.A., in 1791 he won some distinction in literature and oratory, taking the University prize with his Latin poem. At Oxford he passed through the "blissful dawn" of which Wordsworth sang, and was an enthusiastic admirer of the French Revolution of 1789 and of the British Whigs who supported it—Fox, Sheridan, and their sort. He came up to London as the tide was turning, and his own opinion was among the first to change. Pitt, the Prime Minister, had been apprised of his talent, sent for him, and had him "chosen" to the House of Commons, a simple matter in those unregenerate days, when the Tory chieftains had their pockets full of boroughs.

Pitt gave Canning a minor government office—he was not yet thirty years of age—and treated him almost as a son, the young man reciprocating the regard with a really filial devotion. He was ambitious for advancement, and discontented with his slow promotion. In 1797, in company with other choice spirits, he began the publication of The Anti-Jacobin, a weekly periodical which for nearly a year held up to merciless ridicule that section of the British public which still countenanced the ruling ideas of the French Revolution. When the King's refusal to yield on the question of Catholic emancipation (1801) compelled Pitt to resign, Canning went out of office with him. Addington, the stupid mediocrity who succeeded Pitt, provoked Canning's pen to fresh lampoons, some of them long remembered for their savage personalities.

When Pitt resumed the premiership, in 1804, to direct the new struggle with Napoleon, he again bestowed office upon Canning, and when he died, in 1806, Canning became the leader of the group of Pittites who endeavored to perpetuate his ideas. In 1807 he entered the cabinet in the important capacity of Foreign Secretary.