Ten years later Peel, counting upon this deference, and believing with Q that the Tory Party was in all matters submissive to his command, declared himself a Free Trader. Whereupon, as happened in the old potter’s shop visited by Omar Khayyam, there was revolt by the clay population.
And suddenly one more impatient cried:
‘Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?’
The awkward question was answered by Peel’s former vassals uprising and turning out his Government.
The name of Colonel Sibthorpe lingers in the Parliamentary gallery of notabilities of the Unreformed Parliament. Q describes him as woefully deficient in judgment.
‘If there be a right and a wrong side to any subject he is sure to adopt the wrong one. He never makes a very long speech because he cannot. But he speaks on every subject, and in Committee it is no unusual thing for him to make fifteen or twenty speeches in one night.’
Like the maid in the pastoral poem, Colonel Sibthorpe’s face was his fortune, at least the early making of it.
‘Two or three Senators rejoice in tufts,’ Q writes, ‘and a few more in whiskers of decent proportions. Compared with the moustache and whiskers of the gallant Colonel one feels indignant that they should be dignified by the name. The lower section of his face, drawing a straight line from ear to ear immediately under his nose, is one great forest of hair. You hardly know whether he has a mouth or not, so completely is it buried amidst the surrounding crop of hair.’
This personal peculiarity elicited from O’Connell a fair example of the sort of humour that in these past times appealed to an assembly grateful for temporary deliverance from a state of boredom. Sibthorpe, making one of his incoherent attacks upon the Liberal majority, said: