THE LOWER WARD, WINDSOR CASTLE.
from the passionate excitement and the repeated shocks of those Ministerial crises which exhausted Parliament in 1846. One gap in the long line of Irish relief measures we can descry, and even then it was made by an eleemosynary measure giving compensation to West India planters for the loss they were likely to suffer from the abolition of the differential duties on foreign sugar. A Bill to shorten service in the army, and one establishing a new Bishopric at Manchester, were also among the measures passed during the Session. On the 22nd of February the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Charles Wood—afterwards Lord Halifax—made his financial statement. Wood was a member of the Grey section of the Cabinet, and it was of him in after-years that Mr. Grant Duff once impudently remarked, “Providence, in its inscrutable purposes, had deprived him of clearness of
LORD CAMPBELL’S AUDIENCE OF THE QUEEN. ([See p. 290.])
expression—nay, almost of the gift of articulate speech itself.” The reporters of the old school used to tell merry tales of their difficulties in making sense of his financial speeches, but with some of his colleagues he was popular. He showed courage in fighting the Irish famine, and he did not flinch in the monetary crisis of October which followed it. But his brusquerie of manner and indistinctness of speech made many enemies, especially among deputations who waited on him. He was not, therefore, the fittest person to make heavier demands on the national purse than had been heard of for many years—and yet that was just what he did. But there was one consoling fact on which he dwelt. In spite of distress, the revenue from customs and excise during 1846 had far exceeded Mr. Goulburn’s estimates. It had left Sir C. Wood with a balance of £9,000,000 in hand, and though it showed no signs of falling off, yet a commercial crisis was to be looked for similar to those of 1825 and 1836. Sir C. Wood therefore estimated for a forthcoming revenue of £52,065,000; but then he said he had to provide for an expenditure which, owing to the changes wrought by the introduction of steam power into the navy and the arsenals, must rise to £57,570,000. Still, as £10,000,000 would be wanted as extraordinary expenditure on Irish distress, there was a deficit to be made good. This he proposed to meet by borrowing £8,000,000—the other £2,000,000 consisted of advances to local authorities, and would be repaid—fresh taxation being ill adapted to hard times. His surplus was £489,000, and to it would be added £450,000 he hoped to get from China. The Famine Loan was floated at £3 7s. 6d. per cent., but so eager were the Government to get the money that a discount of 5 per cent. was by a resolution of the House of Commons ordered to be given to those who paid in their contributions before the 18th of June.
During the early part of the Session the Queen’s interest seems to have been chiefly limited to the ceremonial side of affairs, though, of course, foreign policy, which she made a constant study, the affairs of the Duchy of Lancaster, and, in some degree, the measures for relieving famine, engaged her attention. As to ceremonies, her Majesty and Prince Albert were always curious, and keen to trace out the origins of the old customs to which she had to defer. “On Thursday,” writes Lord Campbell in a letter, dated 6th February, 1847, “I went down to Windsor and shook hands with Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales, and their Royal Highnesses the Princess Royal and the Princess Alice. By-the-by, there was an amusing scene in the Queen’s closet. I had an audience that her Majesty might prick a Sheriff for the county of Lancaster, which she did in proper style with a bodkin I put into her hand. I then took her pleasure about some Duchy livings and withdrew—forgetting to make her sign the parchment roll. I obtained a second audience, and explained the mistake. While she was signing, Prince Albert said to me, ‘Pray, my Lord, when did this ceremony of pricking begin?’ Campbell: ‘In ancient times, Sir, when sovereigns did not know how to write their names.’ Queen (as she returned me the roll with her signature): ‘But we now show that we have been to school.’”
Her Majesty’s interest in the affairs of the Duchy was abiding. Writing on the 9th of March to his brother, Lord Campbell says:—“I have been to Osborne attending a Council. Had it not been so bitterly cold I should have enjoyed it. I had a private audience of her Majesty; and when my business was over she said, ‘How you were attacked in the House of Lords the other night, Lord Campbell—most abominably.’ I gave a courtier-like answer,” adds this unblushing old political comedian, “without telling her Majesty of the dinner I am to give an Saturday to Lord Stanley and Lord Brougham” (who had attacked him), “for she was excessively angry with them; and she would not understand the levity with which such matters are treated among politicians of opposite parties.”[73] The attack, it may be explained, was due to an indiscreet proposal made by Lord John Russell to appoint new Councillors for the Duchy without a view to Party, who should serve permanently. Lords Lincoln, Hardwicke, Spencer, Portman, and Sir James Graham were named, and the whole project was attacked as a Whig job, designed to conciliate the Peelites, whose precarious alliance was worth purchasing. When the fight was over, Campbell invited all the combatants to dine with the Councillors, old and new; and he gives a most amusing account of the banquet—telling how all these public enemies met on the easiest of convivial terms in private; how Brougham “shook hands with the Premier, and called him John;” and “Stanley said to Sir James Graham, ‘Graham, how are you?’” and how Brougham “related a supposed speech of Sir Charles Wetherell’s, complaining that death is now attended with a fresh terror from Campbell writing the life of a deceased person as soon as the breath was out of his body.” One wonders if the Queen would have wasted much sympathy on Campbell, or much indignation on his enemies, had she known that they “sat at table till near eleven,” and that, as “Lyndhurst was stepping into his carriage, he was overheard to say to Lord Brougham, ‘I wish we had such a Council as this once a month.’”