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

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

[Sidenote: 1827—Death of Canning]

The Duke of York was the second son of George the Third, and for some time had been regarded as heir-presumptive to the crown. The Duke's public career was in almost every way ignoble. He had proved himself an utterly incapable commander, although a good War Office administrator, and his personal character was about on a level with his military capacity. His death in January, 1827, may be said to have had two serious consequences at least—it made the Duke of Clarence the next heir to the crown, and it brought on Canning the severe cold from which he never recovered. It may be mentioned here, although the fact is of little political importance, that Canning when he became Prime Minister made the Duke of Clarence Lord High Admiral. The office was probably bestowed as a token of Canning's gratitude to the King who had stood by him, not indeed to the last, but at the last. It certainly could not have been given because of any conviction in Canning's mind that the Duke of Clarence was likely to render signal benefit to the royal navy, to the State, or to the country by his services in such an office.

Canning seemed for a while to rally from the cold which he had caught at the Duke of York's funeral, but the months of incessant anxiety which followed cast too heavy a burden on his shattered nerves and feeble physical frame. It was hoped by his friends that the adjournment of the Houses of Parliament, which took place after the Ministry had been formed, might give him rest enough from official work to allow him to repair his strength. But Canning's was not a nature which admitted of rest. The happy faculty which he had once possessed of getting easily to sleep when the day's work was done had long since deserted him, and of late he took his official cares to bed with him, and they kept him long awake. The early {61} summer of 1827 brought him no improvement, and his friends already began to fear for the worst. He suffered from intense agonies of nervous pain, and the agonies seemed to grow worse and worse with each return. The Duke of Devonshire offered him the use of a summer residence which he had at Chiswick, and Canning gladly accepted the offer. It was remarked at the time by some of his friends that an evil omen hung over this summer retreat. The former Duke of Devonshire, father of Canning's friend, had offered the same villa as a temporary retreat to Charles James Fox; the offer was accepted by him, and Fox actually died in the bedroom which was now occupied by Canning.

The omen soon made good its warning. Canning gradually sank under the influence of his fatal illness. He said to a friend that during three days he had suffered more pain than all that had been compressed into his life up to that time, and we know that his was a frame which was always liable to acute pain. He sank and sank, and on August 7 he talked for the last time coherently and composedly to those who were around him. Then he met his approaching death with a resigned and cheerful spirit, and his latest words showed that he knew where to repose his trust for the great change which was so near. Shortly before four o'clock on the morning of August 8, 1827, the struggle was over and the great statesman was at rest. Even at that early hour the villa was surrounded by a large crowd of anxious watchers, who could not leave the grounds until they heard the last tidings that were to come from the sick-chamber. The funeral of Canning in Westminster Abbey, although it was in name a private ceremonial, was followed by a throng of sorrowing admirers, among whom were princes and nobles, statesmen and prelates, politicians of all orders, and men and women of all ranks down to the very poorest, who thus bore their spontaneous tribute to the services and the memory of the great Prime Minister, and expressed in the only way left to them their sense of the loss which his country and the cause of peace and freedom had sustained by his death.

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[Sidenote: 1827—Canning and the English ministers]

Canning had only just completed his fifty-seventh year when his career came to a close. He died before his old friend and colleague whose sudden illness had left open to him the place of Prime Minister, for Lord Liverpool did not die until December 4 of the following year. The place of Canning in English history is more clear to us now than it was to the world even when the anxious crowd was watching round the villa at Chiswick and when the throng followed his remains to Westminster Abbey. He was, as we have already said, the founder of that system of foreign policy which English statesmanship has professed ever since his time. His was that doctrine of conditional non-intervention for which, in later days, men like John Stuart Mill contended as the doctrine which ought to be the governing principle of a great council of European States, if such could be established. Canning's idea was not that England should proclaim such a principle of non-intervention as that which Cobden and Bright, and other men equally sincere and patriotic, endeavored to impress on public opinion at a later day. Canning's principle was that England should not intervene even on the right side of any Continental struggle in which she had no direct concern, unless some other State equally free from any direct share in the controversy were making preparation to intervene on the wrong side. Then, according to his doctrine, England was bound to say to the interposing State: "If you, an outsider to this controversy, are making up your mind to intervene on what we believe to be the wrong side, then it may become our duty to intervene on what we believe to be the right side." It was in accordance with this principle that Canning prevailed upon the Governments of France and Russia to enter into that engagement with England which secured the independence of Greece, as it was in accordance with this principle that he had made the proclamation of policy which secured the independence of the Spanish-American colonies, and thus called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old.

Canning must, on the whole, be ranked among great Liberal statesmen, although there were some passages in {63} his career which showed that he had not advanced quite so far in Liberal principles as some of the statesmen of his own day. It is hard now to understand how such a man could have stood out against the principle of Parliamentary reform and popular suffrage, and could have resisted the efforts to give full rights of citizenship to the members of dissenting denominations. It is especially hard to understand why a man who was in favor of abolishing religious disqualifications in the case of Roman Catholics should have thought it right to maintain them in the case of Protestant Dissenters. The explanation of this latter inconsistency may be found, perhaps, in the assumption that when Canning thought of the grievance to Roman Catholics he had in his mind the grievances to the Roman Catholics of Ireland, a separate country with a nationality and traditions of her own, and a country in which the vast majority of the population belonged to the one religious faith. He may have thought that the English Protestant Dissenters who did not see their way to class themselves with the Protestants of the English State Church had not so distinct a claim to the recognition of their grievance. It may seem strange that a mind like Canning's could have been beguiled from the acceptance of a great principle by a curious distinction of this kind, but it must be remembered that down to a much later day many of the professed supporters of religious equality contended for some limitation of the principle where political privileges were concerned, and that only in our own time has admission to the House of Commons been left open to the professors of every religious faith, and even to those who profess no religious faith at all. So far as Parliamentary reform in the ordinary sense of the words is concerned, we may feel quite sure that if Canning had lived a few years longer his mind would have accepted the growth of public opinion and the evidences which justified that growth, and he would not have been found among the unteachable opponents of popular suffrage and a well-adjusted Parliamentary representation.

As a financial reformer he was distinctly in advance of {64} his time, and even such men as Sir Robert Peel only followed slowly in the path which Canning and Huskisson had opened. Canning's fame as a Parliamentary orator is now well assured. He has been unduly praised, and he has been unduly disparaged. He has been described as the greatest Parliamentary orator since the days of Bolingbroke, and he has been described as a brilliant and theatric declaimer who never rose to the height of genuine political oratory. The common judgment of educated men now regards him as only inferior, if inferior at all, to the two Pitts and Fox among great Parliamentary orators, and the rival of any others belonging to his own, or an earlier, or a later day in the history of the English Parliament. Of him it may fairly be said that his career made an era in England's political life, and that the great principles which he asserted are still guiding the country even at this hour.

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