The Addington treaty was soon discovered to be nothing more than a truce. Napoleon lived only in war; hostilities were essential to the government which he had formed for France; and his theory of government, false as it was, and his passion for excitement, whatever might be its price, made even the two years of peace so irksome to him, that he actually adopted a gross and foolish insult to the British ambassador as the means of compelling us to renew the conflict. The first result was, the return of Pitt to power; the next, the total ruin of the French navy at Trafalgar; the next, the bloody and ruinous war with Russia, expressly for the ruin of England through the ruin of her commerce; and finally the crash of Waterloo, which extinguished his diadem and his dominion together—a series of events, occurring within little more than ten years, of a more stupendous order than had hitherto affected the fate of any individual, or influenced the destinies of an European kingdom.
With the ministry of Mr Addington, Lord St Vincent retired from public life. He was now old, and the hardships of long service had partially exhausted his original vigour of frame. He retired to his seat, Rochetts in Essex, and there led the delightful life of a man who had gained opulence and distinction by pre-eminent services, and whose old age was surrounded by love, honour, and troops of friends. He appeared from time to time in the House of Lords, where, however, he spoke but seldom, but where he always spoke with dignity and effect.
In the month of March 1823, Lord St Vincent was seized with a general feeling of infirmity which portended his speedy dissolution. He had a violent and convulsive cough; yet his intellects were strongly turned upon public events, and he expressed an anxiety to know all that could be known of events in France, which was then disturbed; of the Spanish revolution, which then threatened to involve Europe; and even of the affairs of Greece. In the course of the evening of the 13th, while his physician and family were round him, his strength suddenly gave way, and at half past eight he died, at the age of eighty-eight, and was buried at Stone in Staffordshire. He was succeeded in the peerage by his nephew, who, however, inherits only the viscounty.
In our general notice of Lord St Vincent's career, we have adverted as little as possible to the opinions which his biographer had introduced from his own view of public affairs. We have no wish to make a peevish return to the writer of a work which has given us both information and pleasure. But it is necessary to caution Mr Tucker against giving trite and trifling opinions on subjects of which he evidently knows so little as of the Romish question, or the state of Ireland. Nothing is easier than to be at once solemn and superficial on such topics; and when a writer of this order flings his epithets of "bigoted, harsh, and impolitic," and the other stock phrases of party organs, he only enfeebles our respect for his authority in the immediate matters of his work, and rather lowers our respect for his faculties in all. The question of Popery in Ireland, is not a question of religion but of faction. Religious controversy on Romish doctrines has long ceased to exist. Romanism has no grounds on which a controversy can be sustained. It cannot appeal to the Scriptures, which it shuts up; and it will no longer be suffered to appeal to its mere childish pretence of infallibility. Its only ground in Ireland is party; and the present unhappy condition to which it has reduced Ireland, exhibits the natural consequences of indulgence to Popery, and the only means by which its spirit can be rendered consistent with the order of society.
Footnote 1: [(return)]
Memoirs of Admiral Earl St Vincent. By T.S. TUCKER. 2 vols.