His majesty was able to return to business in March.
Lord Thurlow had been universally charged with carrying on an intrigue with the Opposition, for the purpose of continuing in office under the regency. Lord Eldon's belief is introduced against that charge; but there can be no doubt whatever that the charge was universally rumoured at the time; that anecdotes confirmatory of the fact were told in every direction; that no known attempt was ever made to answer them; and that, from the period of the regency, an alienation arose, which finally determined his dismissal by the minister. The well-known boast of the chancellor's loyalty to the incapacitated king, which produced such animadversion in the House, and such burlesque out of it—Burke's ridicule of his official sensibilities, "the iron tears down Pluto's cheeks," were all founded on the public belief of this intrigue. And it is certainly no answer, at the end of half a century of uncontradicted opinion, to say that no formal accusation on the subject was made on the king's recovery, when the whole subject of the regency had become alike distasteful to both sides of the House—to Ministers, from delicacy to the king; and to Opposition, from a sense of failure.
Soon after Scott became solicitor-general, the king, at Weymouth, said, "Well, I hope your promotion has been beneficial to you?" He asked his majesty if he meant his professional income. "Yes," said the king, "in that and in other respects." Scott told him that he must lose by it about £2000 a-year; and on the king expressing surprise, he said "That the attention of the law-officers was called to matters of international law, public law, and revenue law—matters which, as they were not familiar to them, took up a good deal of their time, and that the fee usually given to the solicitor-general with the government cases was only three guineas, while those from private cases were from ten to twenty-five." "Oh!" said the king, "then for the first time I comprehend what I never could understand, why it has always been so difficult to get any opinion from my law-officers."
At the close of the session of 1792, Lord Thurlow gave up the great seal. "What it was," said Lord Eldon afterwards, "that occasioned the rupture between Lord Thurlow and his colleagues, I never could find out." We here see an instance of the ignorance in which a high official was content to remain, on a subject which might naturally and fairly excite his curiosity. It is obvious that he wished to keep himself out of the mêlée and took the best probable way of doing so, by asking no questions. But a dilemma arose out of this resignation to Scott himself. Pitt sent for him, and said, "I have a circumstance to mention to you, which, on account of your personal and political connexion with Lord Thurlow, I wish that you should first hear from myself. Lord Thurlow and I have quarreled, and I have signified to him his Majesty's commands that he should resign the great seal." Scott replied, that he was not at all surprised at the event which had taken place; but added, that he owed too great obligations to Lord Thurlow to reconcile it to himself to act in political hostility to him, and he had also been too long in political connexion with the minister to join any party against him; so that nothing was left but to resign his office, and make his bow to the House of Commons. Pitt argued against this, and finally induced him to consult Lord Thurlow. Thurlow at once told him, that to resign would be a foolish thing; adding in the spirit of a prediction, which was afterwards strikingly realized, "it is very possible that Mr Pitt, from party and political motives, at this moment may overlook your pretensions; but, sooner or later, you, must hold the great seal. I know no man but yourself qualified for its duties."
If the ex-chancellor was complimentary to Scott, it notoriously was not his habitual style; the fierceness of his tone was well known. His language of Loughborough, who succeeded him, was savagely contemptuous. On one occasion, when the latter was speaking with considerable effect on a subject on which Lord Thurlow had an adverse opinion, though he did not regard himself as sufficiently master of it for direct refutation, he was heard to mutter, "If I was not as lazy as a toad at the bottom of a well, I could kick that fellow Loughborough heels over head, any day in the week."
Thurlow told the Prince that though Loughborough "had the gift of the gab in a marvellous degree, he was no lawyer;" and added, "in the house of Lords I get Kenyon or somebody to start some law doctrine, in such a manner that the, fellow must get up to answer it, and then I leave the woolsack, and give him such a thump in his bread-basket that he cannot recover himself."
The solicitor-general was now growing rich, and he purchased for L.22,000 the manor of Eldon, a property of about 1300 acres in the county of Durham. He was an "improving landlord," and for several years he expended the income of the estate on planting—which at once much increased its value, and added to the beauty of that part of the county of Durham.
In 1793, he ascended another step in his profession, by his appointment to the great office of attorney-general, in succession to Sir Archibald Macdonald, who was made chief baron of the exchequer. The new attorney-general was soon summoned to the highest exercise of his abilities, his learning, and his courage; he commenced office in the midst of national convulsion.
The Revolution of France, which had been growing violence and havoc for the last four years, had now arrived at its height. The change, beginning with popular reform in 1789, had, in 1793, been consummated in regicide. The republic proclaimed in the year before, within three months had darkened into a democracy. The general alarm of the continental kings; combined them in an attempt to overthrow a government which threatened them all; the attempt was found to result only in consolidating its power; and, in the first year of war, France presented to the disaffected of all nations, the tempting spectacle of a land in which the foremost prizes of power had fallen into the hands of men of the humblest condition; and in which those men humbled to the dust the proudest diadems of Europe. Obscure pamphleteers, country advocates, monks, and editors of struggling journals, were suddenly seen in the first offices of state, wielding the whole power of the mightiest kingdom of the Continent, absorbing its revenues, directing its armies, and moving in the rank of princes among the proud hereditary sovereignties of the world. To the crowd of unprincipled men, engendered by the habits of European life, and their consciousness of abilities fully equal to those which had won such opulent enjoyments and lofty distinctions in France, the success of the Revolution was an universal summons to conspiracy. On the Continent that conspiracy was, according to the habits of the people, crafty and concealed. In England, equally according to the habits of the people, it was bold and public, daring and defying. Great meetings of the population were held in the open air; committees of grievance were appointed; correspondences were spread through the country; the whole machinery of overthrow was openly erected, and worked by visible hands. Even where secresy was deemed useful by the more cautious or the more fearful, it was of a different character from the assassin-like secresy of the foreign insurgent; it was more the solemn and regulated observance of a secret tribunal. The papers which have transpired of those secret committees have all the forms of diplomacy, combined with a determination of language, and an intensity of purpose, which would do honour to a nobler cause. But the contest was now at hand, and on three men in England depended the championship of the monarchy. These three were the King, the Minister, and the Attorney-General. There were never three individuals more distinctly, and we shall scarcely hesitate to say, more providentially, prepared to meet the crisis. George III., a sovereign of the most constitutional principles, and of the most unshaken intrepidity; William Pitt, the most sagacious and the most resolute statesman that England had ever seen, formed by his manly eloquence to rule the legislature, and, by his character for integrity, to obtain the full confidence of the empire; and Sir John Scott, at once wise, calm, and bold, profoundly learned in his profession, personally brave, and alike incapable of yielding to the menaces of party or the corruptions of power. It is not to be forgotten, as a portion of that genuine public respect which in England is always withheld from even the most shining personal gifts, when stained by private profligacy, that those three were wholly and alike above the breath of slander. The king, eminent for domestic virtue; Pitt, unstained by even an imputation; and Scott, fondly attached to his wife and family.
In January 1793, the cruel murder of the innocent and unfortunate Louis XVI. had been perpetrated by the National Convention—an act which Napoleon long afterwards pronounced "a grand political error; sufficient to stamp the government not merely with guilt, but with infatuation." The French minister at the Court of St James's was ordered to leave the country, and war was proclaimed. The revolutionary committees in England now assumed increased activity. Communications were established between them and the Jacobin government; and while France prepared for War, English republicanism prepared for revolution. The time of the struggle was fully come. The English minister now buckled on his armour. A succession of vigorous measures employed the legislature during the whole period; they were fiercely combated, but they were all ultimately carried. Opposition never exhibited more brilliant parliamentary powers. Fox was matchless in declamation, alternately solemn and touching; Sheridan, Grey, and a long list of practised and indefatigable talent, were in perpetual debate; but Pitt, "with huge two-handed sway", finally crushed them all. The classic illustration of Hercules destroying the Hydra, was frequently used to express the solitary prowess of this extraordinary man in resisting the multiplied, wily, and envenomed attacks of his opponents; and he realized the fable to the full—he not merely crushed the heads, but he seared them. He extinguished that principle of evil increase, by which all the efforts of foreign governments had been baffled in their contests with Jacobinism; and in the midst of an empire at all times inclined to look with jealousy on power, and at that moment nervous for the suspended privileges of its constitution, Pitt utterly extinguished the Whigs. Fox was defeated so hopelessly, that he gave up Parliament altogether, and his party followed his example. Pitt had not merely cut down the statelier trunks of Opposition, but he had swept away the brushwood, and smote the ground with sterility. His bold enterprise had not merely taken the citadel Of faction by storm, and driven its defenders, faint-hearted and fugitive, over the face of the land, but he had sown the foundations with salt. The total solitude of the Opposition benches, during the greater part of the minister's political life, was the most unequivocal and striking evidence ever given to ministerial supremacy.