A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

Spencer Perceval was an able lawyer, a dexterous debater, a skilful Parliamentarian. He was privately an excellent man, with an excellence that the irony of Sydney Smith has made immortal. He was not quite the man to sit in the Siege Perilous that had been occupied in turn by Pitt and Fox. He held his office under difficult conditions. In 1810 the King, whose ailing mind was unhinged by the death of his daughter Amelia, lost his reason irreparably. Perceval had to fight the question of the Regency with a brilliant Opposition and a bitterly hostile Prince of Wales. He succeeded, in the January of 1811, in carrying his Regency Bill on the lines of the measure proposed in 1788. In May, 1811, he was shot dead, in the Lobby of the House of Commons, by a madman named John Bellingham, who had some crazy grievance against the Government.

The years from the January of 1811 to the January of 1820 are technically the last nine years of the reign of George the Third; they are practically the first nine years of the reign of George the Fourth. The nine years of the Regency were momentous years in the history of England. The mighty figure of Napoleon, whose shadow, creeping over the map of Europe, had darkened and shortened the life of Pitt, was still an abiding menace to England when the Prince of Wales became Regent. But England, that had lost so much in her struggle with the Corsican conqueror, who had now no Nelson to oppose to him on the high seas, and no Pitt to oppose to him in the council chamber, found herself armed against his triumphs in the person of a great soldier.

[Sidenote: 1769-1852—Arthur Wellesley]

In the same year that saw the birth of Napoleon, and on a date as little certain as that of the conqueror of Europe, a child was born to Garret Wellesley, first Earl of Mornington, in Dublin. The child was a son, the third that Anne Hill, Lord Dungannon's eldest daughter, had borne to her music-loving husband; the child was christened Arthur. Dates as various as May 1, May 6, and April 29, 1769, are given by different authorities in that very year, and the place of birth is as unsettled as the date, Dangan Castle in Meath, and Mornington House, Merrion Street, {342} Dublin, being the alternatives offered. Very little is known about the childhood and early youth of Arthur Wellesley. His mother seems to have considered him stupid, and to have disliked him for his stupidity. He went from school to school—first at Chelsea, then at Eton, then at Brussels—without showing any special gifts, except a taste for music, inherited no doubt from the father, whose musical tastes had earned him the affection of George the Third. An unamiable mother decided that he was "food for powder and nothing more;" and when he was sixteen years old he was sent to the French Academy at Angers, where he was able to learn all the engineering that he wanted, at the very same time that the young Napoleon Bonaparte was being trained for a soldier in the military college at Brienne. Of the little that can be known of the first seventeen years of Arthur Wellesley's life the clearest facts are that his childhood was not happy, that he was believed by many to be a dull and backward boy, and that he himself thought that if circumstances had not made him a soldier he would probably have become distinguished in public life as a financier.

[Sidenote—1786-97—Wellesley's military training]

Circumstance made him a soldier. Through the patronage of his eldest brother, who became Earl of Mornington on his father's death, in 1781, the young Arthur Wellesley entered the Army as an ensign in the Seventy-third Foot. The same influence that had got him into the army aided him to rise in it. When he was little more than of age he was captain of the Eighteenth Light Dragoons, aide-de-camp to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and member of the Irish Parliament for his brother's borough of Trim. In the Irish Parliament he supported Pitt's measure to enfranchise Roman Catholics. It was characteristic of the young man that, when once a career had been chosen for him, he devoted himself to it with a cold, persistent zeal that accomplished as much for him as the most passionate enthusiasm would have done for another. He set before himself the principle that having undertaken a profession he had better try to understand it, and understand it he did with a determined thoroughness {343} that was rare indeed, if not unknown, among the young officers of his day. We are told that soon after he got his first commission he had one of the privates of the Seventy-third weighed, first in his ordinary military clothes, and then in heavy marching order, in order to ascertain what was expected of a soldier on service. This kind of thoroughness, at once comprehensive and minute, distinguished the conduct of his whole career. One of the maxims that regulated his life was always to do the day's business in the day. Long years later he and a friend were driving together along a coaching road, and amusing themselves by guessing what kind of country lay behind each hill they approached. When the friend commented upon the surprising accuracy of his companion's guesses the man who had been Arthur Wellesley answered: "Why, all my life I have been trying to guess what lay on the other side of the hill;" a stimulating piece of wisdom, to which he himself supplied the no less stimulating comment: "All the business of war, and, indeed, all the business of life, is to endeavor to find out what you don't know from what you do." The youth who took soldiering in this iron spirit must have been more than a puzzle to many of his contemporaries, whose simple military creed it was that when an officer was not actually fighting he might best employ his time in drinking and gambling. Young Wellesley fell in love with Catherine Pakenham, Lord Longford's daughter, and she with him; but the means of neither permitted marriage then, and they did not marry until long years later. When the war with France was forced upon a reluctant minister, Wellesley went to the Continent under Lord Moira and saw some fighting. But his serious career began when he was sent to India with the Thirty-third Regiment in 1797.

It was in India that the young soldier was to learn those lessons in the art of war which were afterwards to prove so priceless to England, and to gain a fame which might well have seemed great enough to satisfy any ambition less exacting than his. But he had the generous greed of the great soldier, the restless, high-reaching spirit, to which {344} the success of yesterday is as nothing save as an experience that may serve for the success of to-morrow. No better field than India could have been found for a young and ambitious soldier who had devoted himself to his career almost by chance, but who was resolved to approve his choice by giving to the career of arms a zeal, a stubborn pertinacity, a very passion of patience, rare, indeed, at the time, and who was resolved to regard nothing as too great to attempt, or too trivial to notice, in the execution of his duty.

After a career of military honor and experience in India, Arthur Wellesley began his struggle with Napoleon on the battle-fields of the Spanish Peninsula, and ended it upon the battle-field of Waterloo. His was the hand that gave the final blow to the falling, failing Emperor. The career of so much glory and of so much gloom, of Corsican lieutenantship and Empire, of Brumaire and Bourbon Restoration, of Egyptian pyramids and Russian snows, of Tilsit and of Elba, and of the Hundred Days, ended in the Island of St. Helena. There exists among the documents that are preserved from Napoleon's youth a geographical list made out in his own boyish hand of names and places, with explanatory comments. The name of St. Helena is on the list, and the only words written opposite to it are "Little Island." The Preacher on Vanities never had a better text for a sermon. The "little island" that had then seemed so unimportant became in the end more momentous than the Eastern Empire of his dreams. The man who had made and unmade kingdoms, who had flung down the crowns of Europe for soldiers of fortune to scramble for as boys unto a muss, was now the unhonored captive of ungenerous opponents, the unhonored victim of the petty tyrannies of Sir Hudson Lowe.

[Sidenote: 1812-15—The War of 1812]

As the most disastrous event of the reign of George the Third prior to the Regency was a war with America, so the most disastrous event of the Regency was a war with America. Napoleon's fantastic decrees of commercial blockade levelled against England, and known as the Continental system, had embroiled the young republic and England, and differences inflamed by the unwisdom of {345} Perceval were not to be healed by the belated wisdom of Castlereagh. Two keen causes of quarrel were afforded by England's persistent assertion of the right to stop and search American vessels on the high seas for British subjects and England's no less persistent refusal to recognize that naturalization as an American citizen in any way affected the allegiance of a British subject to the British crown. Wise statesmanship might have averted war, but wise statesmanship was wanting. The death of Spencer Perceval caused the elevation to the premiership of a man as incapable as his predecessor of dealing skilfully with the American difficulty. Robert Banks Jenkinson, who had been Lord Hawkesbury and who was now Lord Liverpool, was a curiously narrow-minded, hidebound politician who had never recovered from the shock of the French Revolution, and who was chiefly conspicuous for his dogged opposition to every species of reform. He was five years old when the fight at Concord began the struggle that ended with American Independence, but the great event which overshadowed his childhood had no apparent effect upon his later judgment. This belated survival of the tradition of Hillsborough thought and said that America ought to look to England "as the guardian power to which she was indebted not only for her comforts, not only for her rank in the scale of civilization, but for her very existence." Folly such as this could only end in disaster. America, believing herself to be deeply wronged, declared war on Great Britain in the June of 1812. The war lasted more than two years with varying fortunes. Once again the scarlet coats of English soldiers were familiar, if detested, objects to many of the men who had made the Republic, and over bloody battle-fields fluttered that English flag which most of those who now opposed it had only seen as a trophy of their fathers' victories. Both sides fought under heavy disadvantages. If England was weakened by her struggle with Napoleon, America was hampered by internal dissensions, by a disorganized army and by a navy so small that it might almost have been regarded as not in existence. Yet it was this very navy which did most for {346} America in the struggle, and dealt England the most staggering blows inflicted upon her supremacy of the sea. The most shameful episode of the whole unhappy campaign was when the English General Ross captured Washington, and, in obedience to infamous orders from home, burned the Capitol and other public buildings. No more disgraceful act stains the history of the time. It proved as impossible for England to defend as for America to forget. The war ended at last, after the commerce of both countries had been gravely injured, in a grotesque treaty of peace, signed at Ghent, in which the principal cause of the war, the impressment of American sailors by English ships, was not even alluded to. But as the impressment was abandoned by England, the war had not been waged wholly in vain.