While the Tories were thus hurling England into war, it is interesting to observe how the Guelphs conducted it. The Duke of York, with a generalship worthy of his family, led an army of British and Russian soldiers into a captivity from which they could only be redeemed by the surrender of prisoners taken on the sea by real Englishmen.
Englishmen were taxed in order to give the German despots money wherewith to fight the French. Austria received for one campaign more money than England had to pay even for the "Alabama" claims, and the czar of Russia received £900,000 for the eight months his troops were in the field. During the same war the king's second son, the same Duke of York who had given so characteristic a sample of Guelph generalship in leading his forces to defeat, gave an equally characteristic specimen of Guelph morality. He had for mistress one Mary Ann Clarke, a woman of low origin, who transferred her intimacy to a Colonel Wardle, and confided to him many of the secrets of her relations to the royal duke. Wardle, on Jan. 27, 1809, affirmed in the House of Commons that the Duke of York had permitted Mrs. Clarke to carry on a traffic in commissions and promotions, and demanded a public inquiry. Mrs. Clarke was examined at the bar of the House of Commons for several weeks, displaying a shameless, witty impudence that drew continual applause and laughter from a mob of English gentlemen, many of whom knew her too well. The charges were proved, and the Duke of York resigned his position as commander-in-chief; and the disclosures made—doctors of divinity suing for bishoprics, and priests for preferment, at the feet of a harlot, kissing her palm with coin—may teach Englishmen what they have to guard against even to-day on the part of that Tory party that has religion, conscience, and morality much more on its lips than in its heart.
It is not altogether irrelevant in this connection to mention that in 1825, when the Catholic relief bill had passed the House of Commons by 268 votes against 241, the Duke of York opposed the repeal of the Catholic disabilities by the common Tory appeal to what they call conscience, saying "these were the principles to which he would adhere, and which he would maintain and act up to, to the latest moment of his life existence, whatever might be his situation in life, so help him God."
England has indeed had to pay dearly for her hereditary monarchy, and for the awful hypocrisy which permits the appeal to God by such State Churchmen as the Duke of York to have any effect on politics. I need hardly say that the House of Lords did with the Catholic Emancipation Bill what it has lately done with the House of Commons Bill for Home Rule in Ireland, and threw it out.
While England was fighting France, she had also to fight the United States. It is an episode of which neither country has any reason to be proud. The New Englanders were mostly opposed to the declaration of war. The average Englishman knows little about it. He is taught by his history books that the victory of the "Shannon" over the "Chesapeake" destroyed the prestige of the American navy; and he is wrong even in that.
The "Shannon" had a brave and able commander, and had been many weeks at sea, so that Captain Broke had been able to train his men thoroughly, and, above all things, to prevent them from getting drunk.
Captain Lawrence had to engage many men who had never been on a war-vessel before, and did not know how to work the guns. Many of the sailors had bottles of rum in their pockets, and were too drunk to stand when their ship got within fighting distance of the "Shannon."
I wish our present Secretary of the Navy would learn the lesson, and now, when the need of the Newfoundlanders is so great, and when we require sober men to man our navy, give the brave fishermen of that island every reasonable inducement to enlist in our service.
The war closed unsatisfactorily, by the mediation of the Emperor Alexander of Russia; and the Treaty of Ghent left England mistress of the seas.
The treaties of 1814 and 1815 gave England another opportunity for relieving Newfoundland from the French control of her shore; but the Tories were at the helm, and became fellow-conspirators with other tyrants of Europe in perpetrating the most monstrous wrong and the completest restoration of despotism that was conceivable, in Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, everywhere.