“The great and interesting question was, not whether the act (Regency Act) were agreeable to the laws and constitution of the country or not; not whether it was right or wrong thus to defer the full exercise of the Royal authority for a year; but whether limited as the powers were, the Prince upon being invested with them, would take his old friends and companions, the Whigs, to be his ministers.”—“Men in general unacquainted with the hidden motives that were at work no more expected that Perceval and Eldon would continue for one moment to be ministers under the Regent than they expected the end of the world.”
“But a very solid reason for not turning out Perceval was found in the power which he had with regard to the Princess and the BOOK. He had, as has been before observed, the power of bringing her forward, and making her the triumphant rival of her husband. This power he had completely in his hands, backed as he was by the indignant feelings of an enterprizing, brave, and injured woman. But, it was necessary for him to do something to keep this great and terrific power in his own hands. If he lost the princess he lost his only prop; and, even without losing her, if he lost the book, or rather, if the secrets of the book escaped and became public, he then lost his power. It was therefore of the greatest importance to him that nobody should possess a copy of this book but himself!
“The reader will now please to turn back to paragraph 73, which he will find in chap. 11. He will there find that Perceval ousted the Whigs by the means of the book, and not by the means of the catholic question, as the hoodwinked nation were taught to believe. The book had been purchased by Perceval himself; it had been printed, in a considerable edition, by Mr. Edwards, printer, in the Strand; the whole edition had been put into the hands of a bookseller; the day of publication was named, that being the 9th of March, 1807; but on the 7th of March, or thereabouts, the king determined upon turning out the Whigs and taking in Perceval. Instantly Perceval suppressed THE BOOK; took the edition out of the hands of the booksellers, thinking that he had every copy in his own possession. The story has been in print about his having burned the books in the court yard of his country house; but be this as it may, he certainly appears to have thought that no one but himself had a copy of THE BOOK. In this however he was deceived; for several copies of this book, as many as four or five, at least, were in the hands of private individuals.”—“To get at these copies advertisements appeared in all the public papers, as soon as the Prince had determined to keep Perceval as his minister. These advertisements plainly enough described the contents of the book, and contained offers of high prices for the book to such persons as might have a copy to dispose of. In this manner the copies were bought up: one was sold for £300, one or two for £500 each, one for £1000, and the last for £1500.”
Extract 4.—Of Mr. Perceval’s harshness and illiberality.
—— ——“Thus Perceval really ruled the country in precisely what manner he pleased. Whole troops of victims to the libel law were crammed into jails, the corrupt part of the press was more audacious than ever, and the other part of it (never very considerable) was reduced nearly to silence. But human enjoyments of every description are of uncertain duration: political power, when founded on force, is of a nature still more mutable than human enjoyments in general; of which observations this haughty and insolent Perceval was destined, in the spring of 1812, to afford to the world a striking, a memorable, and a most awful example. He had got possession of the highest office in the state; by his secret, relative to the Princess and her BOOK, had secured his influence with the Prince Regent for their joint lives; he had bent the proud necks of the landlords to fine, imprisonment, and transportation, if they attempted to make inroads on his system to support the all-corrupting paper-money; the press he had extinguished or had rendered the tool of his absolute will; the most eminent amongst the writers who opposed him, Cobbett (the author of this history,) Leigh and John Hunt, Finnerty, Drakard, Lovel, together with many more, were closely shut up in jail, for long terms, with heavy fines on their heads, and long bail at the termination of their imprisonment. Not content with all this, he meditated the complete subjugation of London to the control and command of a military force. Not only did he meditate this, but had the audacity to propose it to the parliament; and if his life had not been taken in the evening of the 11th of May, 1812, he, that very evening, was going to propose, in due form, a resolution for the establishment of a permanent army to be stationed in Marybonne-park, for the openly avowed purpose of keeping the metropolis in awe.”
Extract 5.—Of Mr. Perceval’s unpopularity.
“Upon the news of the death of Perceval arriving at Nottingham, at Leicester, at Truro, and indeed all over the country, demonstrations of joy were shown by the ringing of bells, the making of bonfires, and the like; and at Nottingham particularly, soldiers were called out to disperse the people upon the occasion.”——“At the place of execution, the prisoner (Bellingham) thanked God for having enabled him to meet his fate with so much fortitude and resignation. At the moment when the hangman was making the usual preparations; at the moment that he was going out of the world, at the moment when he was expecting every breath to be his last, his ears were saluted with—God bless you, God bless you, God Almighty bless you, God Almighty bless you! issuing from the lips of many thousands of persons.”——“With regard to the fact of the offender going out of the world amidst the blessings of the people, I, the author of this history, can vouch for its truth, having been an eye and ear witness of the awful and most memorable scene, standing, as I did, at the window of that prison out of which he went to be executed, and into which I had been put in consequence of a prosecution ordered by this very Perceval, and the result of which prosecution was a sentence to be imprisoned two years amongst felons in Newgate, to pay a thousand pounds to the Prince Regent at the end of the two years, and to be held in bonds for seven years afterwards; all which was executed upon me to the very letter, except that I rescued myself from the society of the felons by a cost of twenty guineas a week, for the hundred and four weeks; and all this I had to suffer for having published a paragraph, in which I expressed my indignation at the flogging of English local militiamen, at the town of Ely, in England, under a guard of Hanoverian bayonets. From this cause, I was placed in a situation to witness the execution of this unfortunate man. The crowd was assembled in the open space just under the window at which I stood. I saw the anxious looks, I saw the half horrified countenances; I saw the mournful tears run down; and I heard the unanimous blessings.”
“The nation was grown heartily tired of the war; it despaired of seeing an end to it without utter ruin to the country; the expenditure was arrived at an amount that frightened even loan-mongers and stock-jobbers; and the shock given to people’s confidence by Perceval’s recent acts, which had proclaimed to the whole world the fact of the depreciation of the paper-money; these things made even the pretended exclusively loyal secretly rejoice at his death, which they could not help hoping would lead to some very material change in the managing of the affairs of the country.”
Extract 6.—Of Mr. Hamlyn, the Tinman.
Cobbett’s Register. “I shall now address you, though it need not be much at length, upon the subject of lord Castlereagh’s conduct. The business was brought forward by lord Archibald Hamilton, who concluded his speech with moving the following resolutions: ‘1º. That it appears to the House, from the evidence on the table, that lord viscount Castlereagh, in the year 1805, shortly after he had quitted the situation of President of the Board of Control, and being a Privy Councillor and Secretary of State, did place at the disposal of lord Clancarty, a member of the same board, the nomination to a writership, in order to facilitate his procuring a seat in Parliament. 2º. That it was owing to a disagreement among the subordinate parties, that this transaction did not take effect; and 3º., that by this conduct lord Castlereagh had been guilty of a gross violation of his duty as a servant of the Crown; an abuse of his patronage as President of the Board of Control; and an attack upon the purity of that House.’”