The Prince Consort was quick to notice the effect which her Majesty’s unswerving fidelity to public interests at this time had produced on the country. It was therefore with pardonable pride that he wrote to Baron Stockmar[20] a curious letter, shrewdly pointing out that the crisis now past had been of signal advantage to the Crown. The Queen had been seen to remain calm and unmoved in the fierce and strident strife of factions—the one stable element in the Constitution at a moment when no other rallying point was visible to the nation. Albany Fonblanque, the wittiest of the Radical journalists of that day, ridiculed, to the top of his bent, the chiefs of the two great parties, whose petty rivalries and personal jealousies had thrown public affairs into sad confusion. They were, it must be confessed, rather like Rabelais’ giant, who, though he habitually fed on windmills, choked on a pat of butter swallowed the wrong way. But on behalf of the Radicals, Fonblanque, it is interesting to notice now, had nothing but praise to bestow on the Queen’s behaviour in the midst of the tragi-comedy of politics, which was being enacted before the eyes of a famished people. “In all the pranks and bunglings of the last three weeks,” he wrote, “there is one part which, according to all report, has been played most faultlessly—that of a Constitutional Sovereign. In the pages of history the directness, the sincerity, the scrupulous observance of Constitutional rule, which have marked her Majesty’s conduct in circumstances the most trying, will have their place of honour. However unused as we are to deal in homage to Royalty, we must add that never, we believe, was the heart of a monarch so warmly devoted to the interests of a people, and with so enlightened a sense of their interests.”[21] The Continental tour of the Queen in 1845 had suggested to the people that the personal influence of the Sovereign might, if adroitly used, be of great service to the State in conciliating foreign nations, whose goodwill it would be advantageous to secure. Her conduct in the Ministerial crisis of 1845-46, however, convinced them that, if intelligently directed, the personal influence of the Queen, in domestic politics, might also be rendered not less beneficial to her subjects and her empire.
But at the meeting in Downing Street which terminated this momentous crisis, Lord Stanley, whose place was on his resignation promptly filled by Mr. Gladstone, was the only ex-Minister who had the courage of his opinions. The Duke of Buccleuch ceased to resist the logic of facts. The Duke of Wellington, who had wavered very much, finally cast in his lot with Peel—to the amazement of all his old friends, especially of Mr. John Wilson Croker. Mr. Croker had been induced by Sir Robert Peel, whilst on a visit to Drayton Manor in September, 1845, to attack the Anti-Corn-Law League in the Quarterly Review, and, angry at what he deemed his betrayal, he somewhat peremptorily demanded explanations from the Duke. His Grace simply wrote to him saying that he felt it his duty to stand by the Queen. This, in his view, implied that he must support the Minister who alone seemed able to carry on her Majesty’s Government, which he (Wellington), as “a retained servant of the Crown,” could not bring himself to hand over to “the League and the Radicals.”[22] Croker, however, retorted, in a letter to Sir Henry Hardwicke, that Peel had done something quite as bad as that: “he has,” wrote the indignant reviewer, “broken up the old interests, divided the great families, and commenced just such a revolution as the Noailles and Montmorencies did in 1789.” But the Iron Duke was proof against all such appeals. He entrenched himself behind his favourite doctrine that he was primarily a servant of her Majesty. Her interests, he told the House of Lords, were of more importance than the opinion of any individual about the Corn Law or any other law. At the same time, he did not pretend to relish the situation. As he said—with a rough soldier’s oath—to Lord Beaumont, “it is a —— mess, but I must look to the peace of the country and the Queen.”[23] In private he told Lord Stanley that he was against the policy which Peel had adopted. In public, however, referring to Peel’s conversion, he said, in the House of Lords:—“I applauded the conduct of my right hon. friend. I was delighted with it. It was exactly the course I should have followed under similar circumstances, and I therefore determined to stand by him.” The Duke’s strong personal loyalty to his young Queen had, in fact, first transformed him into a Conservative Opportunist, and then his own common sense led him to recognise the necessity for abandoning laws that made bread dear to an enfranchised but starving populace.
From the sketch now given of the ferment of public opinion, produced by a war between two powerful classes for political predominance in 1846, one thing must be self-evident. In view of the authority and influence of the Duke of Wellington in the House of Lords, it was fortunate for Sir Robert Peel that the quick and generous sympathies of the Queen, whose tender heart was touched by the sufferings of the poor, were entirely with him all through this trying time. Her Majesty may therefore claim some share in the great work that crowned her Minister’s career with honour—for she strengthened his hands by the confidence she displayed in his judgment, when his oldest friends forsook him. The Queen knew well that it was with no light heart, and for no trivial cause, that Peel abandoned, not the creed—for, like Mr. Huskisson, he had always been a Free Trader in principle[24]—but the policy of levying exceptional duties on foreign corn. Much blame has been cast on Sir Robert Peel for giving up that policy almost immediately after he had won place and power by pledging himself to maintain it. Certainly, after the revelations made in the Croker Papers, it is difficult in some respects to justify his conduct. It is indeed regrettable that those to whom his memory ought to be precious, have not deemed it expedient to explain away the instructions which he gave Mr. Croker, as editor of the Quarterly, in September, 1845. M. Guizot[25] has, however, defended Peel from the charges of base tergiversation which, to the annoyance of the Queen, were pressed against him in the fierce and fiery invectives of Mr. Disraeli, and in the passionate but somewhat incoherent harangues of Lord George Bentinck. As the French statesman was on terms of intimacy not only with Peel, but with many of his colleagues, his opinion must be received with respect. According to M. Guizot, all through 1845 Sir Robert Peel was in a condition of painful and “touching perplexity” as to his duty in view of the spread of destitution. This perplexity, M. Guizot contends, was that not of a sordid placeman, but of “a sincere and conscientious mind carried forward in the direction of its own inclination by a great flood of public opinion and passion, and struggling painfully against its adversaries, its friends, and itself.” When the Queen met Sir Robert Peel with a smile on the 20th of December, and said “she was glad to be able to ask him to withdraw his resignation,” she was, according to this theory, really lifting a cloud of gloom from his anxious head, and congratulating him on the ending of that state of suspense in which his troubled mind had been painfully poised. It may be a
THE DEPUTATION FROM LONDON AND DUBLIN CORPORATIONS BEFORE THE QUEEN. ([See p. 216.])
coincidence, but in corroboration of M. Guizot’s view we must note that a sigh of relief echoes through the letter in which the careworn Minister, six days after he resumed office, informed the Princess Lieven of the fact. “However unexpected is the turn which affairs have taken, it is,” he writes, “for the best. I resume power with greater means of rendering public service than I should have had if I had relinquished it. But it is a strange dream!”[26]
Yet, if one considers for a moment the great process of political evolution over which the Queen was from her girlhood called on to preside, one finds nothing really miraculous in the dream. It was merely a phase of the beatific vision of a partially enfranchised democracy, which for the moment dazed all sorts and conditions of men. The late Lord Dalling, who lived through this stirring epoch of bloodless revolution, says that “previous to the Reform Bill and the Municipality Bills, everybody in England looked up: the ambitious young man looked up to the great nobleman for a seat in Parliament; the ambitious townsman to the chief men in his borough for a place in the Corporation. Subsequently to these measures, men desirous to elevate their position looked down. The aristocratic tendency of other days had thus become almost suddenly a democratic one. This democratic tendency, which has gone on increasing, had made itself already visible at the period when the Corn Law agitation began. It had been natural until then to consider this subject relative to the interests of the upper classes; it was now becoming natural to consider it in relation to the interests of the lower classes. The question presented itself in a perfectly different point of view, and politicians found, somewhat to their surprise, that all former arguments had lost their force. It was this change in the spirit of the times which had occasioned within such a very few years a total change in the manner of looking at matters affected by the Legislature.”[27] Lord Beaconsfield’s apologists sometimes say that what embittered him against the capitalists of the Anti-Corn-Law League, was his conviction that though they had the cry of cheap bread on their lips, the whisper of low wages was at their hearts. The wage-rate, no doubt, had a potent influence in recasting public opinion at this time. But it did not recast it in the Disraelitish mould. The working classes discovered, through the lucid teaching of Cobden, that wages did not fall because the Corn duty was low, and that they did not rise because it was high. When they made that discovery, the only argument that could protect Protection in a reformed Parliament vanished from the minds of men who were not partisans of the patrician order. Politicians of calm and enlightened judgment felt, as they felt the air they breathed, that public opinion in 1845-46 was becoming more and more hostile to the Corn Laws. The Queen and the entourage of the Court, then greatly under the influence of Baron Stockmar, who was in constant communication with Prince Albert, were evidently among the first to become sensitive to the change, but like Peel, Wellington, and Russell, they frankly acknowledged what must follow from it.
England was in truth all through 1845 moving fast to that “total and immediate repeal” of the Corn Laws which Cobden demanded, and the county gentry, Whig as well as Tory, equally dreaded. When Russell and Peel were in fact waiting for what Prince Bismarck calls “the psychological moment” to proclaim the new departure, the “psychological moment” came with the terrible incident which caused the spectre of famine to stalk over Ireland. That incident was the failure of the potato crop, and it removed the question of the Corn Laws far away from the battle-ground of rival political or economic theories. The problem was no longer one of maintaining or abandoning a territorial system. At the beginning of 1846 it became a question of deciding whether so many hundred thousand of our fellow-creatures in Ireland should perish in the agonies of hunger, or whether, by removing the Corn duty, her Majesty’s Government at one blow would strike down the barrier that prevented bread from reaching the lips of a starving peasantry. For the wretched cotters in Ireland the winter of 1845-46 was, truly, one of extreme privation. “Those who had savings,” writes Mr. Greg,[28] “lived off them, but among the really poor there was widespread destitution.” Forced to sell their clothes for food, the Irish peasantry refused to pay rent, and when rent was extorted by harsh process of law, retaliatory outrages immediately followed. The ghastly outlook in Ireland gave the Anti-Corn-Law agitators welcome leverage for their movement in England, and they increased their activity every day. Lord John Russell, on the 22nd of November, 1845, wrote the Edinburgh Letter to the electors of the City of London, warning them that the Whig Party, in view of the state of the country, were ready to put an end to a system which had been proved to be the blight of commerce and the bane of agriculture. This, we have seen, forced Peel’s hands. As Mr. Bright said to Lord John, whom he met, after the issue of his manifesto, on the platform of a railway station in Yorkshire, “Your letter has made total and immediate repeal inevitable; nothing can save it” (the Corn Law).[29] Peel himself did not conceal from the Queen that he could perhaps keep the Whigs at bay for three years, and shortly before his death he told Cobden the same thing. But neither the monarch nor her Minister dared to procrastinate in the face of popular destitution, and they felt compelled to obey, no matter at what cost or sacrifice, the dictates of reason and humanity. For it was not from Ireland only that the moan of a suffering people broke upon the ear of a sorrowing Queen. It is true that the venal and factious press of that country at first attempted to deceive the world by denying the existence of wide-spreading potato-rot in the island. With the cries of the dying ringing in their ears, Irish journalists disputed with each other as to whether there actually was any famine in the land. But the facts could not long be concealed, either from the people or from the Queen. At the end of September, 1845, it had to be generally admitted that the staple food of Ireland had suddenly disappeared, and that even in England only the northern counties had escaped from the potato-disease. To such an extent did the rest of England suffer, that Professor Lindley declared there was hardly a sound potato to be found in Covent Garden Market.[30] As Lord Beaconsfield has observed, “This mysterious but universal sickness of a single root changed the history of the world.”[31]
The Corporations of London and Dublin, on the 3rd of January, 1846, memorialised the Queen on the subject. Their deputations, who waited on her at Windsor, received from her a gracious and sympathetic reply to their statements, which she heard with manifest interest. The Anti-Corn-Law League felt that it would be good policy to turn the prevailing distress to account, and it immediately renewed, with redoubled vigour, its agitation against the duties that kept up the price of bread. Its leaders organised a series of meetings all over England and Scotland, and although the Chartists rather held aloof from them, the Free Trade speakers at last fairly touched the heart of the nation. Extraordinary scenes of enthusiasm took place at these meetings. In the last week of 1845, at a meeting in Manchester, it was suggested to raise a quarter of a million pounds sterling to help the agitation that must strengthen Peel’s hands,[32] and Mr. John Morley has described how men jumped up from their seats and cried out, one after the other, “A thousand pounds for me!” “A thousand pounds for us!” and so on, till in less than two hours £60,000 were subscribed on the spot.[33] Of course, all this fervour provoked a movement on the other side. The Protectionists organised a counter agitation, but it was very badly managed. The speakers selected were persons, of high rank and ample fortune. But they lacked sympathy and sense, and this defect was fatal to their cause. Their favourite argument was that there was no famine at all to fear, and they revelled in demonstrating to people who had nothing to eat, that their continued prosperity depended on the maintenance of a Corn Law which made bread dear. The Duke of Norfolk covered the Protectionist agitation with odium and ridicule, by suggesting that if haply here and there a labouring man felt hungry, he might derive great benefit by taking at night, just before bed-time, a pinch of curry-powder as a comforting stomachic. The satirists of the Radical party made affluent use of this egregious imbecility, and the Examiner[34] promptly printed a poem headed “Comfort and Curry,” in which the Duke and Duchess were cruelly quizzed.