In the fourth volume of my history of the Peninsular War I assailed the public character of the late Mr. Perceval, his son has published a defence of it, after having vainly endeavoured, in a private correspondence, to convince me that my attack was unfounded. The younger Mr. Perceval’s motive is to be respected, and had he confined himself to argument and authority, it was my intention to have relied on our correspondence, and left the subject matter in dispute to the judgment of the public. But Mr. Perceval used expressions which obliged me to seek a personal explanation, when I learned that he, unable to see any difference between invective directed against the public acts of a minister, and terms of insult addressed to a private person, thinks he is entitled to use such expressions; and while he emphatically “disavows all meaning or purpose of offence or insult,” does yet offer most grievous insult, denying at the same time my right of redress after the customary mode, and explicitly declining, he says from principle, an appeal to any other weapon than the pen.
It is not for me to impugn this principle in any case, still less in that of a son defending the memory of his father; but it gives me the right which I now assert, to disregard any verbal insult which Mr. Perceval, intentionally or unintentionally, has offered to me or may offer to me in future. When a gentleman relieves himself from personal responsibility by the adoption of this principle, his language can no longer convey insult to those who do not reject such responsibility; and it would be as unmanly to use insulting terms towards him in return as it would be to submit to them from a person not so shielded. Henceforth therefore I hold Mr. Perceval’s language to be innocuous, but for the support of my own accuracy, veracity, and justice, as an historian, I offer these my “Counter-Remarks.” They must of necessity lacerate Mr. Perceval’s feelings, but they are, I believe, scrupulously cleared of any personal incivility, and if any passage having that tendency has escaped me I thus apologize before-hand.
Mr. Perceval’s pamphlet is copious in declamatory expressions of his own feelings; and it is also duly besprinkled with animadversions on Napoleon’s vileness, the horrors of jacobinism, the wickedness of democrats, the propriety of coercing the Irish, and such sour dogmas of melancholy ultra-toryism. Of these I reck not. Assuredly I did not write with any expectation of pleasing men of Mr. Perceval’s political opinions and hence I shall let his general strictures pass, without affixing my mark to them, and the more readily as I can comprehend the necessity of ekeing out a scanty subject. But where he has adduced specific argument and authority for his own peculiar cause,—weak argument indeed, for it is his own, but strong authority, for it is the duke of Wellington’s,—I will not decline discussion. Let the most honoured come first.
The Duke of Wellington, replying to a letter from Mr. Perceval, in which the point at issue is most earnestly and movingly begged by the latter, writes as follows:—
London, June 6, 1835.
Dear Sir,
I received last night your letter of the 5th. Notwithstanding my great respect for Colonel Napier and his work, I have never read a line of it; because I wished to avoid being led into a literary controversy, which I should probably find more troublesome than the operations which it is the design of the Colonel’s work to describe and record.
I have no knowledge therefore of what he has written of your father, Mr. Spencer Perceval. Of this I am certain, that I never, whether in public or in private, said one word of the ministers, or of any minister who was employed in the conduct of the affairs of the public during the war, excepting in praise of them;—that I have repeatedly declared in public my obligations to them for the cordial support and encouragement which I received from them; and I should have been ungrateful and unjust indeed, if I had excepted Mr. Perceval, than whom a more honest, zealous, and able minister never served the king.
It is true that the army was in want of money, that is to say, specie, during the war. Bank-notes could not be used abroad; and we were obliged to pay for every thing in the currency of the country which was the seat of the operations. It must not be forgotten, however, that at that period the Bank was restricted from making its payments in specie. That commodity became therefore exceedingly scarce in England; and very frequently was not to be procured at all. I believe, that from the commencement of the war in Spain up to the period of the lamented death of Mr. Perceval, the difficulty in procuring specie was much greater than it was found to be from the year 1812, to the end of the war; because at the former period all intercourse with the Continent was suspended: in the latter, as soon as the war in Russia commenced, the communication with the continent was in some degree restored; and it became less difficult to procure specie.
But it is obvious that, from some cause or other, there was a want of money in the army, as the pay of the troops was six months in arrear; a circumstance which had never been heard of in a British army in Europe: and large sums were due in different parts of the country for supplies, means of transport, &c. &c.