ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF THE EMPEROR OF THE FRENCH.
Lepelletier, Paris, by exploding hand-grenades under his carriage. The Emperor and Empress escaped, but ten persons were killed, and 156 were wounded. The plot had been concocted by Felix Orsini in England. Therefore, the followers of the Emperor, whose fortunes depended on his life, denounced the English nation as Orsini’s accomplices. The Emperor himself was so unmanned by the incident, that after he drove home to the Tuileries, he and the Empress, on retiring to their room, wept bitterly over the wretched prospect before them. His terror probably prevented him from appreciating the fact, that if his own police could not protect him from Orsini, it was not likely that the police of a foreign country would be much more efficient. It may be, too, that the ease with which he had forced Palmerston to accept a humiliating settlement of the Question of the Principalities deluded him into the idea that it would be equally easy to compel him to restrict the freedom of Englishmen, in the interests of the Bonapartist dynasty.[11] He may also have imagined that England’s difficulties in the East would render Palmerston’s Government more complaisant than the Tory Ministry showed itself on this matter in 1853. His calculations, however arrived at, proved to be correct. The French Government addressed menaces on the subject of harbouring refugees to Sardinia, Switzerland, and Belgium. On the 20th of January Walewski wrote a despatch to Persigny, which he had to communicate to Lord Clarendon, and which not only accused England of deliberately sheltering the assassins of the French Emperor, but also asserted that the English Government ought to assist that of France, in averting “a repetition of such guilty enterprises.” Instead of answering this despatch in the high-spirited tone which Lord Malmesbury had taken in his conversation with the Emperor in 1853, a reply of a timid and indefinite character was privately sent through what was called the “usual official channels of personal communication.” The substance of it was that the Government needed no inducement to amend the English law of conspiracy, and that the Attorney-General had the matter in hand already. The assumption that the English Government was deliberately aiding and abetting a gang of assassins was an insult which Lord Palmerston, as the exponent of a spirited foreign policy, was expected to resent. His failure to resent it gave his enemies an opportunity of recalling his Civis Romanes Sum doctrine, and holding him up to contempt. But at first it was not known that he had shown the white feather in his dealings with the French Emperor. Addresses from the Army, burning with rancorous insults to England, had been presented to the Emperor, and published in the Moniteur. The Emperor finding that these insults, which were only intended for home consumption, had been republished in England, where he feared they might inflame popular feeling, instructed an expression of regret to be sent to the British Government. In introducing the Conspiracy to Murder Bill, Lord Palmerston (18th of February), carried the first reading by leading the House of Commons to believe that this Imperial apology was adequate. He did not think it worth while to explain that it had not been inserted in the Moniteur, where the insults and menaces of the French Colonels had appeared, and that the French people were thus fully under the delusion that their vaporous threats had coerced England into restricting the liberty of her subjects at their bidding. Later on, this deception was discovered. Walewski’s despatch, by an inconceivable blunder, was laid before the House, which also found out that it had never been answered with spirit and dignity. The anger of the Representatives of the people then rose to white heat; and when Mr. Milner Gibson moved a resolution of censure, which had been drafted by Sir J. Graham and Lord John Russell on the 19th of February, it was carried by a majority of 19, in a House of 459. Lord Palmerston and the Cabinet immediately resigned.
At first the Queen, knowing the difficulty of forming a new Government, was reluctant to accept their resignation. She contended—very properly—that it was a bad precedent for a Government to go out on the strength of a vote which was hardly constitutional. The treatment of a despatch was, in her Majesty’s opinion, purely a question for the Executive to decide. The House of Commons had but a very dubious right to touch it at all; at any rate, no Ministry was bound by the Constitution to resign because of a Vote of Censure from either House of Parliament on such a question.
There can be no doubt that the Queen’s view was the correct one, and it is now known that Lord Eversley, the ablest Speaker who has in her Majesty’s reign presided over the House of Commons, actually advised Mr. Speaker Denison to rule Mr. Gibson’s motion out of order, on the very grounds which seemed to the Queen to justify Lord Palmerston in ignoring the censure.[12] On the other hand, her Majesty had to admit the fact that Lord Palmerston and Lord Clarendon had been maladroit in their handling of the whole affair. They should have answered Walewski’s despatch more formally than in a private letter from Clarendon to Cowley. They ought at the outset to have pleaded the constitutional privilege of the Executive, and refusing to produce the despatch in Parliament, have challenged the Opposition to a vote of censure. Moreover, the Queen knew only too well by this time that if Palmerston refused to resign on Mr. Gibson’s motion, he would be turned out on one to abolish the office of Lord Privy Seal, Lord Clanricarde’s appointment to which had given great offence.[13] Thus, though it was in some respects objectionable to sanction a Ministerial resignation because the House of Commons censured, not the policy of the Government, but an administrative act of the Executive,[14] the Queen bent to circumstances, and sent for Lord Derby to form a Cabinet. Lord Derby, though he took office, did not desire it, because he could only reign on sufferance. His party, strictly speaking, was in a minority of about two to one in the House of Commons, and his Government would be at the mercy of casual combinations among the factions of the Opposition. He had to fall back on his old Administration (minus Sir E. B. Lytton).[15]
A painful quarrel between Sir E. B. Lytton and his wife had enlisted considerable public sympathy on the side of the lady, so that his re-election for Hertford was a little doubtful. When offered the Colonial Secretaryship, Sir E. B. Lytton gave Lord Derby a hint on the subject, and Lord Derby, under the impression that Sir E. B. Lytton considered his re-election impossible, induced Lord Stanley to accept the Colonial Office.[16] Lord Grey would have joined Lord Derby had it not been for his distrust of Mr. Disraeli; and he told Lady Tankerville that Mr. Gladstone would have also joined the new Ministry, “had he been offered the leadership of the Commons.”[17] If Lord Palmerston reckoned on the reluctance of the Queen to trust a Derby-Disraeli Ministry with the conduct of affairs, he fell into a grave error. Mr. Greville, who, like many politicians, held the Derby-Disraeli combination in contempt, admits that during this crisis the Queen’s conduct “was certainly curious, and justifies them in saying that it was by her express desire that Derby undertook the formation of the Government. If Palmerston and his Cabinet were actuated by the motives and expectations which I ascribe to them, her Majesty certainly did not play into their hands in that game. When Derby set before her all the difficulties of his situation, and entreated her again to reflect upon it, a word from her would have induced him (without having anything to complain of) to throw it back into Palmerston’s hands. But the word she did speak was decisive as to his going on, and there is no reason to believe that she was playing a deep game, and calculating on his favour. Nor do I believe that she would herself have liked to see Palmerston all-powerful. She can hardly have forgotten how inclined he has always been to abuse his power, and how much she has suffered from his exercise of it. Even when he was to a certain degree under control, and although she seemed to be quite reconciled to him, and to be anxious for the stability of his Government, it is difficult to know what her real feelings (or rather those of the Prince) were, and it is more than probable that her anxiety for the success of Palmerston’s Government was more on account of the members of it, whom she personally liked, and whom she was very reluctant to lose, than out of any partiality for the Premier himself. To Clarendon she is really attached, and Granville she likes very much; most of the rest she regards with indifference.”[18]
When the new Ministry took office they soon announced that they would drop the Conspiracy to Murder Bill, and answer the Walewski despatch. The
