ABERGELDIE CASTLE.
(From a Photograph by G. W. Wilson and Co.)
Ireland, represented by the new National Party, under Mr. Butt, gained little during 1875, but she gained something. Under a Liberal Government half the Home Rule Party could have been bribed by places into silence. But an ostentatiously hostile Tory Ministry could not offer them places, and yet they had to be quieted somehow, for the Irish people had by this time lost faith in their insincere Parliamentary action. Fenian agents were telling the Irish peasantry that they could expect no concessions unless they extorted them by revolution. The Government, accordingly, relaxed the existing Coercion Acts, and the debate on one of these—the Westmeath Act—was, on the 22nd of April, 1875, rendered historic by the intervention of Mr. Biggar, who talked against time for five hours, by the simple device of reading long extracts from Blue Books.[85] Shortly after this feat, Mr. Charles Stewart Parnell, a young Wicklow squire, who had been educated at Cambridge, and was notable for his shyness, his aristocratic reserve, and his faltering and confused speech, took his seat as Member for Meath, in succession to John Martin, who had died. Nothing was known of him save that he had the reputation of being a Protestant landlord who was on good terms with his tenants, that from his mother—a daughter of the celebrated Commodore Stewart of the United States Navy—he had inherited Republican ideas, that he was a lover of field sports, and that he was a cadet of the family of which his great-grandfather, Sir John Parnell, Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer in 1782, was a distinguished member, and the head of which was the present Lord Congleton. That his beautiful estate of Avondale was heavily mortgaged was not regarded as noteworthy. Mr. Joseph Gillies Biggar, whose quaint bourgeois humour had already made him, if not the favourite, at least one of the privileged “diversions” of the House, and who was destined to be Mr. Parnell’s coadjutor in organising the largest and most powerful Irish National Party of the Victorian period, was a prosperous provision-dealer, of Scottish extraction, trading in Belfast. His experience of affairs had been gained as Chairman of the local Water Board.
Parliament was prorogued peacefully on the 13th of August, and, on the whole, Ministers emerged from the Session with credit. Mr. Disraeli’s bright wit, his cheerful temper, and his airy jocularity in meeting serious attacks, recalled pleasant memories of Lord Palmerston, and tempted the House to forget his occasional blunders as its Leader. The Recess, however, brought serious peril to his Cabinet—peril which, however, it had done little to deserve. In the middle of September it was discovered that the Foreign Office had induced the Admiralty to issue a Fugitive Slave Circular to naval officers. They were told they must not receive fugitive slaves in territorial waters unless their lives were in danger. If the fugitive slave came on board a British ship in territorial waters, he was not to remain if it were proved he were a slave. If received on the high seas, he must be surrendered when the ship came within the territorial waters of the country from which he had escaped. The Circular, in fact, defined the legal obligations under which British ships of war must logically lie if they chose to enter the territorial waters of slave States, with which England was not at war. It was a Circular embodying regulations on which every Liberal Minister had habitually acted, but the Liberal Party immediately proceeded to make political capital out of it. An agitation as fierce as that which was caused by the abandonment of the Merchant Shipping Bill sprang up, and Lord Derby, at whose instance the Admiralty issued the Circular, was accused of attempting to commit England to a furtive partnership with slave-owners. The most that could be said in fairness against the document was that it was so badly drafted as to imply that the deck of a Queen’s ship was subject to foreign jurisdiction. Moreover, the order to surrender a fugitive slave who had taken refuge on a Queen’s ship on the high seas, was so completely indefensible that Lord Derby himself struck it out of the second edition of his Circular. He might as well have ordered a British Consul in Rio to arrest and surrender a Brazilian slave who, having gained freedom by escaping to English soil, had afterwards returned to that port. Till Parliament met in 1876, the country rang with the inflated protests of Liberal partisans against the amended Circular, which was published after the original one had been suspended in October, and cancelled in November.
But the issue and publication of the Slave Circular was not the only blunder at the Admiralty that rendered the Government unpopular during the Recess. They were guilty of one which gave the Queen the utmost annoyance. When she was crossing the Solent from Osborne to Gosport on the 18th of August her yacht ran down another yacht called the Mistletoe. The owner (Mr. Heywood) and his sisters-in-law, Miss Annie Peel and Miss Eleanor Peel, were on board, and, though the last-named was rescued, Miss Annie Peel and the sailing-master were drowned. The Queen happened to be on deck, and her emotion during the scene was painful to witness. The Prince of Leiningen, as commander of the Royal yacht, was blamed by the people for the catastrophe, and unfortunately the Admiralty not only refused to try him by court-martial, but, after a secret inquiry, condemned the navigating officer. This roused public wrath, and it was ungenerously alleged that the Queen had forced a servile Minister to protect her nephew from just punishment. The fact is, as a subsequent case showed, the Admiralty merely followed the stereotyped rule, which, in those days, was to punish subordinate officers for the blunders of their superiors. It used to be asked, What was a navigating officer on board a Queen’s ship for, unless to take his captain’s punishment? Unfortunately for the Prince of Leiningen, there was a tribunal from which he could not escape—the coroner’s inquest on the bodies of those for whose death he was morally responsible. The evidence given before the coroner still further exasperated the ill-feeling which had been roused. Yachtsmen—proverbially a loyal body of men—were irritated at the tone of a letter addressed to the president of the Cowes Yacht Club (the Marquis of Exeter), in which General Ponsonby expressed the Queen’s wish that in future members of the Club would not approach too closely to the Royal yacht when the Queen was on board. The insinuation contained in this document and assumption that no blame rested on the officers of the Alberta, provoked yachtsmen in every club in Great Britain to retort that, in their painful experience, the Queen’s yachts were navigated in the Solent with a disregard of the “rules of the road” which rendered them a constituted nuisance.
In this particular instance the Royal yacht had been driven at the rate of seventeen miles an hour, and the Prince of Leiningen and his subordinates had paid no attention to the Board of Trade rule which makes it the duty of a steamer to get well out of the way of a sailing-vessel. The quartermasters of the yacht, too, gave their evidence in a manner which not only cast suspicion on their testimony, but suggested that they stood in terror of their officers. A letter which the Queen wrote to her nephew expressing her satisfaction with their conduct, was moreover taken to be an attempt to unduly influence the Coroner’s Court. The first jury did not agree on a verdict, and the outcry about the Queen’s letter was so loud that the case had to be tried again. The Queen had for a moment forgotten that the vast influence which she had acquired during her reign rendered it imperative for her to be silent on all matters of controversy—especially if they were under judicial investigation. She forgot that the mere expression of her individual opinion gave an advantage to one side in a dispute, the extent of which she herself had clearly never dreamt of—an advantage so great, that it bore unfairly against the side that had not got it. The second jury, however, brought in a verdict of “Accidental Death,” and condemned the officers of the Royal yacht (1), for steaming at too high a speed, and (2), for keeping a bad look-out. The verdict was quite illogical. If the look-out on the Alberta was bad and her speed too high, and if, as was proved, her officer had violated the rule of the road, the verdict ought to have been one of Manslaughter. But no further steps were taken to do justice. Mr. Anderson brought the case before the House of Commons, and though he was defeated in his effort to make the Government move in the affair, he created a great stir in the country, by declaring that public funds had been used as hush-money to prevent further inquiry.[86] So far as the verdict of the jury went, demanding that the Royal yachts should steam at less speed in the Solent, it was absurd. State business often forces the Queen and her messengers and Ministers to travel fast. What the jury should have recommended was a new rule of the road, to the effect that everything must make way on the water for a yacht flying the Sovereign’s personal flag.
The other blunder of the Admiralty arose out of an inquiry into the loss of two ironclads off the Wicklow coast. On the night of the 1st of September the Iron Duke rammed and sank the Vanguard. There was a fog at the time, and the captain of the Vanguard left the deck at the moment of greatest peril, and was stupid enough to reduce speed for no discernible reason without warning the Iron Duke, which was coming behind him. The captain of the Iron Duke was stupid enough to increase her speed in the fog, and she was not only badly steered, but her fog-signal was not blown. Had they been employed in the merchant service these two officers would have been subjected to the severest punishment. As it was, the captain of the Vanguard was dismissed the service. The captain of the Iron Duke, who had been condemned by the court-martial for ramming the Vanguard, was acquitted, on a review of his sentence by the Admiralty. The Admiralty then, by way of compensation, cashiered his subordinate, Lieutenant Evans, without a trial, and without giving him leave to make a defence. As for the Admiral, who, from lack of skill or from negligence permitted the ships of his squadron to sail close to each other in a fog, he was freed from blame.
Fortunately for Mr. Disraeli, an opportunity for a great stroke of policy occurred, which diverted public attention from these blunders, and re-established the waning popularity of his Ministry. On the 26th of November it was announced that the Government had bought for £4,000,000 the Khedive’s shares in the Suez Canal, and what a French writer described as “a conquest by mortgage” was hailed by the English people, with a shout of gratification. The impecunious ruler of Egypt had been literally hawking