Chippinge Borough

by Stanley John Weyman

“But little, I am afraid,” Vaughan said. None the less was his heart full of gratitude to the fat, ungainly man.

“All, may be,” Wetherell answered. “I shouldn’t wonder. I’ve been told, by one who heard him, that Canning hesitated in his first speech, very much as you did. It was on the Sardinian Subsidy. The men who don’t feel the House never know the House. They dazzle it, Mr. Vaughan, but they don’t guide it. And that’s what we’ve got to do.”

He passed on then, with a melancholy nod and averted eyes, but Vaughan could have blest him for that “we.” “There’s one man at least believes in me,” he told himself. And when a few hours later, in the midst of a scene as turbulent as any which the House of Commons had ever witnessed—nine times without a pause it divided on the motion that “this House do now adjourn”—he watched the man who had commended him, riding the storm and directing the whirlwind, now lashing the Whigs to fury by his sarcasm, and now, carrying the whole House away in a hurricane of laughter, if he did not approve—and with his views he could not approve—he learnt, and learnt much. He saw that the fat, slovenly man, with the heavy face and that hiatus between his breeches and his waistcoat which had made him famous, was allowed to do things, and to say things, and to look things, for which a less honest man had been hurried long ago to the Clock Tower. And this, because the House believed in him; because it knew that he was fighting for a principle really dear to him; because it knew that he honestly put faith in those predictions of woe, which he scattered so freely, and in that ruin of the Constitution, with which he twitted his opponents.

A week later Vaughan acted upon his advice. He seized an opportunity and, catching the Chairman’s eye—the Bill was in Committee—delivered himself of a dozen sentences, with so much spirit and propriety, that Sir Robert Peel, speaking an hour later, referred to the “plausible defence raised by the Honourable Member for Chippinge.” The reference drew all eyes to Vaughan: and though nothing was said to him and he took care to bear himself as if he had done no better than before, he left the House with a lighter step and a comfortable warmth about the heart. He was more at ease that evening, if not more happy, than he had been for weeks past. Love, pleasure, and the rest were gone; and faith in woman. But if he could be sure of gaining a seat in the next Parliament, the way might be longer than he had hoped, it might be more toilsome and more dusty: but in the end he would arrive at the Treasury Bench.

He little thought, alas, that the effort on which he hugged himself was to prove a source of misfortunes. But so it was. His maiden speech had attracted neither notice nor envy. But those few sentences, short and simple as they were, by drawing an answer from the leader of the Opposition, had gained both for him. Within five minutes a score of members had asked “Who is he?” and another score had detailed the circumstances of his election for Chippinge. He had gone down to vote for his cousin, in his cousin’s borough, family vote and the rest; so the story ran. Then, finding on the morning of the polling that if he threw over his cousin, he might gain the seat for himself, he had turned his coat in a—well, in a very dubious manner, snatched the seat, and—here he was!

In a word, it was the version of the facts which he had once dreaded, and about which he had afterwards ceased to trouble himself.

There were, perhaps, half a dozen persons in the House who knew the facts, and knew that the young man had professed from the first the opinions which he was now supporting. But there was just so much truth in the version, garbled as it was, just so much vraisemblance in the tale that even those who knew the facts, could not wholly contradict it. The story did not come to Wetherell’s ears; or he, for certain, would have gainsaid it. But it did come to Wathen’s. Now the Sergeant was capable of spite, and he had not forgotten the manner after which Vaughan had flouted him at Chippinge; his defence—if a defence it could be called—was accompanied by so many nods and shrugs, that persons less prejudiced than Tories, embittered by defeat, and wounded by personalities, might have been forgiven, if they went from the Sergeant with a lower opinion of our friend than before.

From that day Vaughan, though he knew nothing of it, and though no one spoke to him of it, was a marked man in the eyes of the opposite party. They regarded him as a renegade; while his own side were not overanxious to make his cause their own. The May elections had been contested with more spirit and less scruple than any elections within living memory; and many things had been done and many said, of which honourable men were not proud. Still it was acknowledged that such things must be done—here and there—and even that the doers must not be repudiated. But it was felt that the party was not required to grapple the latter to its breast with hooks of steel. Rumour had it that Lord Lansdowne felt himself to blame; and that the offender had been disinherited by his cousin was asserted. The man would be of no great importance, therefore, in the future; and if he did not make a second appearance in Parliament, the loss in the end would be small. Not a few summed up the matter in that way.

If Vaughan had been intimate with anyone in the House he would have learned what was afoot; and he might have taken steps to set himself right. But he had lived little of his life in London, he had but made his bow to Society; of late, also, he had been too sore to make new friends. Of course he had acquaintances, every man has acquaintances. But no one in political circles knew him well enough to think it worth while to put him on his guard.

Unluckily, the next occasion which brought him to his feet, was of a kind to give point to the feeling against him. On a certain Thursday, Sergeant Wathen moved that the Borough of Chippinge be removed from Schedule A, to Schedule B—his object being that it might retain one member; and Vaughan, thinking the opening favourable, rose, intending to make a few remarks in a strain to which the House, proverbially fond of a personal explanation, is prone to listen with indulgence. For the motion itself, he had not much hope that it would be carried: in a dozen other cases, a similar motion had failed.