Sir,—It is impossible for me to express the gratitude which I feel. I can only assure the House that I shall always be ready to serve His Majesty in any capacity in which my services can be deemed useful, with the same zeal for my Country which has already acquired for me the approbation of this House.
The Speaker’s Reply.
My Lord,—Since last I had the honour of addressing you from this place, a series of eventful years has elapsed, but none without some mark and note of your rising glory. The military triumph which your valour has achieved upon the banks of the Douro and the Tagus, of the Ebro and the Garonne, have called forth the spontaneous shouts of admiring nations. Those triumphs it is needless on this day to recount; their names have been written by your conquering sword in the annals of Europe, and we shall hand them down with exultation to our children’s children.
It is not, however, the grandeur of military success which has alone fixed our admiration, or commanded our applause. It has been that generous and lofty spirit which inspired your troops with unbounded confidence, and taught them to know that the day of battle was always a day of victory; that moral courage and enduring fortitude which in perilous times, when gloom and doubt had beset ordinary minds, stood nevertheless unshaken, and that ascendancy of character, which, uniting the energies of jealous and rival nations, enabled you to wield at will the fate and fortunes of mighty empires.
For the repeated thanks and grants bestowed upon you by this House in gratitude for your many and eminent services, you have thought fit this day to offer us your acknowledgments. But this Nation well knows that it is still largely your debtor. It owes to you the proud satisfaction that amidst the constellation of great and illustrious warriors who have recently visited our country, we could present to them a Leader of our own, to whom all, by common acclamation, conceded the pre-eminence, and when the will of Heaven, and the common destinies of our nature, shall have swept away the present generation, You will have left your great name and example as an unperishable monument exciting others to like deeds of glory, and serving at once to adorn, defend, and perpetuate the existence of this country among the ruling nations of the earth.
It now remains only that we congratulate your Grace upon the high and important mission on which you are about to proceed; and We doubt not that the same splendid talents, so conspicuous in war, will maintain with equal authority, firmness, and temper our national honour and interests in peace.
ODE WRITTEN DURING THE NEGOTIATIONS WITH BUONAPARTE (1814).
Source.—Robert Southey: Poems.
1. Who counsels peace at this momentous hour,
When God hath given deliverance to the oppress’d,
And to the injured power?
Who counsels peace, when Vengeance like a flood
Rolls on, no longer now to be repressed;
When innocent blood
From the four corners of the world cries out
For justice upon one accurséd head;
When Freedom hath her holy banner spread
Over all nations, now in one just cause
United; when with one sublime accord
Europe throws off the yoke abhorr’d,
And Loyalty and Faith and Ancient Laws
Follow the avenging sword?
2. Woe, woe to England! woe and endless shame,
If this heroic land,
False to her feelings and unspotted fame,
Hold out the olive to the Tyrant’s hand!
Woe to the world, if Buonaparte’s throne
Be suffer’d still to stand!
For by what names shall Right and Wrong be known?
What new and courtly phrases must we feign
For Falsehood, Murder, and all monstrous crimes,
If that perfidious Corsican maintain
Still his detested reign,
And France, who yearns even now to break her chain,
Beneath his iron rule be left to groan?
No! by the innumerable dead
Whose blood hath for his lust of power been shed,
Death only can for his foul deeds atone;
That peace which Death and Judgment can bestow,
That peace be Buonaparte’s, and that alone!
3. For sooner shall the Ethiop change his skin,
Or from the Leopard shall her spots depart,
Than this man change his old flagitious heart.
Have ye not seen him in the balance weighed,
And there found wanting?—On the stage of blood
Foremost the resolute adventurer stood;
And when, by many a battle won,
He placed upon his brow the crown,
Curbing delirious France beneath his sway,
Then, like Octavius in old time,
Fair name might he have handed down,
Effacing many a stain of former crime.
Fool! should he cast away that bright renown!
Fool! the redemption proffer’d should he lose!
When Heaven such grace vouchsafed him that the way
To Good and Evil lay
Before him, which to choose.