FREDERICKSBORG CASTLE, ELSINORE.
The result of the division was hailed with great delight by the country. To have turned out Palmerston would have brought Lord Derby back to office, whose followers, it was suspected, would have finally driven him into war with Germany. To retain Palmerston in power, but by a vote that humiliated him and destroyed his personal prestige, was felt to be in every way safer for the country than the transference of its Government to an Opposition which was at once weak and warlike. “However the dice may fall,” writes Count Vitzthum, “the Prime Minister is disarmed, and his secret schemes of anger and revenge are condemned. The victory of the Peace Party is a victory of the Queen. Maligned, insulted, and reproached for German sympathies, her Majesty has checked the dictatorship of her Prime Minister, and beaten him three times in his own Cabinet on the question of war and peace. The Queen has recognised the true interests, the true wishes of her people, and not allowed herself to be misled by the gossip of the drawing-rooms, or the declamations of the daily Press.”[211] As for Lord Palmerston, his biographer has published some letters which show how bitterly he resented his defeat. In one of these, addressed to the King of the Belgians, he rails at Austria and Prussia for taking advantage of the weakness of Denmark, at Denmark for obstinately putting herself in the wrong, and at France for not cooperating with England. “One consequence,” he says, “is clear and certain, that if our good friend and neighbour at Paris were to take it into his head to deprive Prussia of her Rhenish provinces, not a finger in England would be stirred, nor a voice raised, nor a man or a shilling voted, to resist such a retribution upon the Prussian monarch.” As the Power which seized the Rhine would have Belgium at its mercy, it would be difficult to imagine an English Minister addressing to a Belgian Sovereign a more maladroit expression of impotent discomfiture. Then, in autumn, Palmerston, replying to a letter from Lord Russell, writes, “You say that with less timidity around us we might probably have kept Austria quiet on the Danish affair. Perhaps we might; but then we had no equal pull upon Prussia, and she would have rallied all the German Powers round her, and we should equally have failed in saving Denmark.[212] As to Cabinets, if we had colleagues like those who sat in Pitt’s Cabinet, such as Westmoreland and others, or such men as those who were with Peel, like Goulburn and Hardinge, you and I might have our own way on most things; but when, as is now the case, able men fill every department, such men will have opinions, and hold to them; but, unfortunately, they are often too busy with their own department to follow up foreign questions so as to be fully masters of them, and their conclusions are generally on the timid side of what ought to be the best.”[213] The further development of the Danish Question need not be dwelt on here, as it affected the policy neither of the Cabinet nor of the Court. The Germans resumed the war as soon as the Conference broke up. Uninterrupted victory put them in complete possession of the Duchies, to which Denmark finally renounced all claim by the Treaty of Vienna, which was signed on the 18th of October.
CHAPTER IX.
THE HEIR-PRESUMPTIVE.
Disputes with American Belligerents—The Southern Privateers—Uneasiness of the Queen—Federal Recruiting in Ireland—Mr. Gladstone’s Budget—Revival of the Reform Agitation—Mr. Gladstone Joins the Reformers—“Essays and Reviews”—A Heresy-Hunt in Convocation—A Ribald Chancellor—The Parliamentary Duel between Wilberforce and Westbury—The Vote of Censure on Mr. Lowe—The Five Under-Secretaries and the House of Commons—Prorogation of Parliament—The Strife in the United States—Gambling in Cotton—A Commercial Panic in England—The Battle of Chancellorsville—Sherman’s March through Georgia—The Canadian Raiders—The Presidential Election—Birth of the Heir-Presumptive—Baptism of the Heir-Presumptive—The Queen’s Gift to her Little Grandson—The Queen and the Floods at Sheffield—The Murder of Mr. Briggs—The Queen Refuses a Reprieve to the Murderer—The Queen’s Letter to the Princess Louis—John Brown and the Queen’s Pony—Dr. Norman McLeod’s Message from the Queen—An Anniversary of Sorrow and Sympathy.
Next in importance to the Danish Question in 1864, were disputes which rose out of the relations of England to the belligerents in the American Civil War. The Southern States having no navy fit to cope with that of the Federal Government, had equipped swift steam cruisers which swept American commerce from the seas. They ran no risks in scuttling unarmed merchantmen, and their speed protected them from capture by men-of-war. The most formidable of these cruisers or privateers, such as the Alabama and the Georgia, had been built in English yards, usually under the pretence of being destined for some Foreign Power which was at peace. When they escaped to sea and got their armament on board, they hoisted their true colours, and set forth to prey on American commerce. It has been shown how the precautions which the authorities had taken to prevent the Southern cruisers from escaping were evaded. The authorities, however, were more successful in arresting certain steam-rams—which were being built at the yard of Messrs. Laird in Birkenhead—the sailing of which Mr. Adams warned Lord Russell would be taken by the Federal Government as an act of war. Lord Monck, then Viceroy of Canada, in a letter to the late Mr. A. Hayward, says that the arrest of the rams had produced a good effect in favour of the English Government on the official mind in America. On the other hand, the ship-building trade supported Messrs. Laird in denouncing the action of the authorities; and the Tory Opposition, and the sympathisers with the Slave States joined the shipbuilders in attacking the Government. These attacks were futile, but to avoid the annoyance of litigation, the Government virtually bribed Messrs. Laird into silence by buying the rams for her Majesty’s service. On the other hand, the partisans of the Northern States blamed the Government for being too generous in extending hospitality to the Southern cruisers, or “pirates,” as they were termed by the extreme Radicals of the period. When the Georgia, a Confederate cruiser, which had been built on the Clyde, and secretly equipped by a Liverpool firm, put into Liverpool, it was pointed out that she ought not to be treated as a ship of war. She had been preying on the commerce of a friendly Power. Like a pirate, she had never taken her prizes to be condemned in a Prize Court, but had scuttled them on the high seas. She had never once been in any of the ports of the belligerent Power under whose flag she sailed, and altogether a very unpleasant precedent for a great Maritime State was being created by her reception at Liverpool. The Queen was understood to be somewhat uneasy on the subject, and Mr. Thomas Baring, on the part of the commercial community, expressed a similar feeling of discomfort. It was admitted that the Government had the power to exclude these vessels from English ports, but Ministers contended that it would be inexpedient to act so conspicuously in favour of one of the belligerents, between whom they desired to stand absolutely neutral. The Government could not be induced to go further than promise to remonstrate with the Confederates on account of the conduct of their agents in this country.[214] Complaints were then made that the Federal Government were surreptitiously carrying on a system of recruiting in Ireland. Of this no proof could be obtained, because of the cloak which emigration gave to the proceedings of the American agents. It was well known in Ireland that any able-bodied labourer who emigrated to New York could get a bounty of nearly £100 if he joined the colours. Hence, it is difficult to believe that the American “crimps” had any inducements to effect the enlistment of Irish recruits at Cork, rather than at New York. There is reason to think that the “crimps” infested passenger ships and cajoled emigrants during the voyage to enlist when they arrived at New York. But public opinion was satisfied that the Government could not effectually stop proceedings of this sort—especially on imperfect evidence.
In 1864 finance was again the mainstay of Lord Palmerston’s Administration. Mr. Gladstone had come to be regarded as a kind of fiscal magician. He rose superior to every reverse of fortune, and he had an expedient ready to meet every emergency. In spite of monetary panics, cotton famines, lavish military expenditure, and large remissions of taxation, the elasticity of the revenue under his fostering care supplied every deficit almost as soon as it was created. The public credit of England had never been higher; her finances had never been more stable or productive. On the 7th of April, when the Budget was introduced, he spoke to an overflowing House, and
THE GUARD ROOM, WINDSOR CASTLE.
princes, peers, foreign envoys, and men of distinction in all ranks gathered together to listen to the orator. The year had been uneventfully prosperous, and again the balances were on the right side of the national ledger. The revenue had produced £70,208,000, or £2,037,000 above the estimates; the expenditure had been £67,056,000, or £1,227,000 below the estimates. On the existing basis of taxation, Mr. Gladstone estimated for the coming year a revenue of £69,460,000; but his estimated expenditure was only £66,890,000, so that there was a large margin for financial readjustments. He got rid of £20,000 by modifying the duty on corn and grain and the tax on small licences; he devoted £1,330,000 to reduce the sugar duties, and by taking a penny off the Income Tax he sacrificed at once £800,000, though ultimately £1,200,000; he reduced the duty on fire insurances on stock-in-trade from 3s. to 1s. 6d. per £, which involved a loss of £283,000. The net result of his scheme was a loss of revenue of £2,332,000, while the relief from taxation amounted to £3,000,000. This left him with an estimated surplus for the coming year of £238,000. The Budget was popular, not only on its own account, but on account of the masterly exposition of the financial state of England which accompanied it. Englishmen read with swelling pride the figures in which Mr. Gladstone congratulated them on a steady increase of £1,000,000 every year to their revenue—an increase due to its “inherent vigour.” As for the movement of trade, it was marvellous, the value of exports and imports having increased from £377,000,000 in 1871, to £444,000,000 in 1874. Nor was the Queen capable of concealing her satisfaction at the results of the great fiscal policy, the responsibility for initiating which, she and her husband had anxiously shared with Peel. It was the justification, not only of his foresight, but of their unswerving faith in his insight and ideas, that since 1842 the trade of her people had simply been trebled—that what men of business called their “turnover” had now reached the enormous sum of £1,500,000 for every working day of the year. It was not surprising that, with such mighty interests at stake, her Majesty cast her personal influence into the scale against Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell, who led the War Party in the Cabinet, and shrank from putting such a vast fabric of industry in jeopardy, merely to gratify the wounded vanity of a Minister who, having signed an invalid Treaty, was enraged because it was torn up under his eyes. Mr. Gladstone carried his Budget, though he failed to carry a useful measure to substitute the Scottish for the English system of collecting Imperial taxes.[215] He was successful, however, in spite of the clamour of the private companies, in passing a beneficial measure removing the restriction on Government life insurances.[216]