The Greville Memoirs Volume II Part 8

We had a meeting at the Council Office on Friday to order a prayer 'on account of the troubled state of certain parts of the United Kingdom'--great nonsense.

The King of the French has put an end to the disturbances of Paris about the sentence on the ex-Ministers by a gallant _coup d'etat_. At night, when the streets were most crowded and agitated, he sallied from the Palais Royal on horseback, with his son, the Duc de Nemours, and his personal _cortege_, and paraded through Paris for two hours. This did the business; he was received with shouts of applause, and at once reduced everything to tranquillity. He deserves his throne for this, and will probably keep it.

December 30th, 1830 {p.099}

Notwithstanding the conduct of King Louis Philippe, and the happy termination of the disorders and tumults at Paris last week, the greatest alarm still prevails about the excitement in that place.

In consequence of the Chamber of Deputies having pa.s.sed some resolutions altering the const.i.tution of the National Guard, and voting the post of Commandant-General unnecessary, Lafayette resigned and has been replaced by Lobau. I never remember times like these, nor read of such--the terror and lively expectation which prevail, and the way in which people's minds are turned backwards and forwards from France to Ireland, then range excursively to Poland or Piedmont, and fix again on the burnings, riots, and executions here.

Lord Anglesey's entry into Dublin turned out not to have been so mortifying to him as was at first reported. He was attended by a great number of people, and by all the most eminent and respectable in Dublin, so much so that he was very well pleased, and found it better than he expected. War broke out between him and O'Connell without loss of time. O'Connell had intended to have a procession of the trades, and a notice from him was to have been published and stuck over the door of every chapel and public place in Dublin. Anglesey issued his proclamation, and half an hour before the time when O'Connell's notice was to appear had it pasted up, and one copy laid on O'Connell's breakfast table, at which antic.i.p.ation he chuckled mightily.

O'Connell instantly issued a handbill desiring the people to obey, as if the order of the Lord-Lieutenant was to derive its authority from his permission, and he afterwards made an able speech. Since the beginning of the world there never was so extraordinary and so eccentric a position as his. It is a moral power and influence as great in its way, and as strangely acquired, as Bonaparte's political power was. Utterly lost to all sense of shame and decency, trampling truth and honour under his feet, cast off by all respectable men, he makes his faults and his vices subservient to the extension of his influence, for he says and does whatever suits his purpose for the moment, secure that no detection or subsequent exposure will have the slightest effect with those over whose minds and pa.s.sions he rules with such despotic sway. He cares not whom he insults, because, having covered his cowardice with the cloak of religious scruples, he is invulnerable, and will resent no retaliation that can be offered him. He has chalked out to himself a course of ambition which, though not of the highest kind--if the _consentiens laus bonorum_ is indispensable to the aspirations of n.o.ble minds--has everything in it that can charm a somewhat vulgar but highly active, restless, and imaginative being; and n.o.body can deny to him the praise of inimitable dexterity, versatility, and even prudence in the employment of the means which he makes conducive to his ends. He is thoroughly acquainted with the audiences which he addresses and the people upon whom he practises, and he operates upon their pa.s.sions with the precision of a dexterous anatomist who knows the direction of every muscle and fibre of the human frame. After having been throughout the Catholic question the furious enemy of the Orangemen, upon whom he lavished incessant and unmeasured abuse, he has suddenly turned round, and inviting them to join him on the Repeal question, has not only offered them a fraternal embrace and has humbled himself to the dust in apologies and demands for pardon, but he has entirely and at once succeeded, and he is now as popular or more so with the Protestants (or rather Orangemen) as he was before with the Catholics, and Crampton writes word that the lower order of Protestants are with him to a man.

1831.

January 2nd, 1831 {p.101}

[Page Head: A DINNER AT THE ATHENaeUM.]

Came up to town yesterday to dine with the Villiers at a dinner of clever men, got up at the Athenaeum, and was extremely bored.

The original party was broken up by various excuses, and the vacancies supplied by men none of whom I knew. There were Poulett Thomson, three Villiers, Taylor, Young, whom I knew; the rest I never saw before--Buller, Romilly, Senior, Maule,[9] a man whose name I forget, and Walker, a police magistrate, all men of more or less talent and information, and altogether producing anything but an agreeable party. Maule was senior wrangler and senior medallist at Cambridge, and is a lawyer. He was nephew to the man with whom I was at school thirty years ago, and I had never seen him since; he was then a very clever boy, and a.s.sisted to teach the boys, being admirably well taught himself by his uncle, who was an excellent scholar and a great brute. I have young Maule now in my mind's eye suspended by the hair of his head while being well caned, and recollect as if it was yesterday his doggedly drumming a lesson of Terence into my dull and reluctant brain as we walked up and down the garden walk before the house.

When I was introduced to him I had no recollection of him, but when I found out who he was I went up to him with the blandest manner as he sat reading a newspaper, and said that 'I believed we had once been well acquainted, though we had not met for twenty-seven years.' He looked up and said, 'Oh, it is too long ago to talk about,' and then turned back to his paper. So I set him down for a brute like his uncle and troubled him no further.

I am very sure that dinners of all fools have as good a chance of being agreeable as dinners of all clever people; at least the former are often gay, and the latter are frequently heavy.

Nonsense and folly gilded over with good breeding and _les usages du monde_ produce often more agreeable results than a collection of rude, awkward intellectual powers.

[9] [Afterwards Mr. Justice Maule.]

Roehampton, January 4th, 1831 {p.101}

Called on Lady Canning this morning, who wanted me to read some of her papers. Most of them (which are very curious) I had seen before, but forgotten. I read the long minute of Canning's conversation with the King ten days before his Majesty put the formation of the Administration in his hands. They both appear to have been explicit enough. The King went through his whole life, and talked for two hours and a half, particularly about the Catholic question, on which he said he had always entertained the same opinions--the same as those of George III. and the Duke of York--and that with the speech of the latter he entirely concurred, except in the 'so help me G.o.d' at the end, which he thought unnecessary. He said _he_ had wished the Coronation Oath to be altered, and had proposed it to Lord Liverpool. His great anxiety was not to be annoyed with the discussion of the question, to keep Canning and Lord Liverpool's colleagues, and to put at the head of the Treasury some anti-Catholic Peer. This Canning would not hear of; he said that having lost Lord Liverpool he had lost his only support in the Cabinet, that the King knew how he had been thwarted by others, and how impossible it would have been for him to go on but for Lord Liverpool, that he could not serve _under_ anybody else, or act with efficacy except as First Minister, that he would not afford in his person an example of any such rule as that support of the Catholic question was to be _ipso facto_ an exclusion from the chief office of the Government, that he advised the King to try and make an anti-Catholic Ministry, and thought that with his feelings and opinions on the subject it was what he ought to do.

This the King said was out of the question. In the course of the discussion Canning said that if he continued in his service he must continue as free as he had been before; that desirous as he was to contribute to the King's ease and comfort, he could not in any way pledge himself on the subject, because he should be a.s.suredly questioned in the House of Commons, and he must have it in his power to reply that he was perfectly free to act on that question as he had ever done, and that he thought the King would better consult his own ease by retaining him in office without any pledge, relying on his desire above all things to consult his Majesty's ease and comfort. He said among other things that, though leader of the House of Commons, he had never had any patronage placed at his disposal, nor a single place to give away.

[Page Head: THE DUKE AND MR. CANNING.]

About the time of this conversation Canning was out of humour with the Duke of Wellington, for he had heard that many of the adherents of Government who pretended to be attached to the Duke had spoken of him (Canning) in the most violent and abusive terms.

In their opinions he conceived the Duke to be to a certain degree implicated, and this produced some coldness in his manner towards him. Shortly after Arbuthnot came to him, complained first and explained after, and said the Duke would call upon him. The Duke did call, and in a conversation of two hours Canning told him all that had pa.s.sed between himself and the King, thereby putting the Duke, as he supposed, in complete possession of his sentiments as to the reconstruction of the Government. A few days after Mr.

Canning was charged by the King to lay before him the plan of an Administration, and upon this he wrote the letter to his former colleagues which produced so much discussion. I read the letters to the Duke, Bathurst, Melville, and Bexley, and I must say that the one to the Duke was rather the stiffest of the whole,[10]

though it was not so cold as the Duke chose to consider it. Then came his letter to the Duke on his speech, and the Duke's answer.

When I read these last year I thought the Duke had much the best of it; but I must alter this opinion if it be true that he knew Mr. Canning's opinions, as it is stated that he did entirely, after their long interview, at which the conversation with the King was communicated to him. That materially alters the case.

There was a letter from Peel declining, entirely on the ground of objecting to a pro-Catholic Premier, and on the impossibility of his administering Ireland with the First Lord of the Treasury of a different opinion on that subject from his own. There was likewise a curious correspondence relative to a paper written by the Duke of York during his last illness, and not very long before his death, to Lord Liverpool on the dangers of the country from the progress of the Catholic question, the object of which (though it was vaguely expressed) was to turn out the Catholic members and form a Protestant Government for the purpose of crus.h.i.+ng the Catholic interest. This Lord Liverpool communicated (privately) to Canning, and it was afterwards communicated to the King, who appears (the answer was not there) to have given the Duke of York a rap on the knuckles, for there is a reply of the Duke's to the King, full of devotion, zeal, and affection to his person, and disclaiming any intention of breaking up the Government, an idea which could have arisen only from misconception of the meaning of his letter by Lord Liverpool. It is very clear, however, that he did mean that, for his letter could have meant nothing else. The whole thing is curious, for he was aware that he was dying, and he says so.

[10] [This correspondence is now published in the third volume of the Duke's 'Correspondence,' New Series, p.

628.]

January 12th, 1831 {p.104}

Pa.s.sed two days at Panshanger, but my room was so cold that I could not sit in it to write. n.o.body there but F. Lamb and J.

Russell. Lady Cowper told me what had pa.s.sed relative to the negotiation with Melbourne last year, and which the Duke or his friends denied. The person who was employed (and whom she did not name) told F. Lamb that the Duke would take in Melbourne and two others (I am not sure it was not three), but not Huskisson. He said that it would be fairer at once to say that those terms would not be accepted, and to save him therefore from offering them, that Melbourne would not be satisfied with any Government which did not include Huskisson and Lord Grey, and that upon this answer the matter dropped. I don't think the Duke can be blamed for answering to anybody who chose to ask him any questions on the subject that he had _made no offer_; it was the truth, though not the whole truth, and a Minister must have some shelter against impertinent questioners, or he would be at their mercy.

An Envoy is come here from the Poles,[11] who brought a letter from Prince Czartoryski to Lord Grey, who has not seen him, and whose arrival has naturally given umbrage to the Lievens.

[11] [This Envoy was Count Alexander Walewski, a natural son of the Emperor Napoleon, who afterwards played a considerable part in the affairs of France and of Europe, especially under the Second Empire. During his residence in London in 1831 he married Lady Caroline Montagu, a daughter of the Earl of Sandwich, but she did not live long. I remember calling upon him in St.

James's Place, and seeing cards of invitation for Lady Grey's a.s.semblies stuck in his gla.s.s. The fact is he was wonderfully handsome and agreeable, and soon became popular in London society.]

January 19th, 1831 {p.105}

To Roehampton on Sat.u.r.day till Monday, having been at the Grove on Friday. George Villiers at the Grove showed me a Dublin paper with an attack on Stanley's proclamation, and also a character of Plunket drawn with great severity and by a masterly hand; it is supposed to be by Baron Smith, a judge who is very able, but fanciful and disaffected. He will never suffer any but policemen or soldiers to be hanged of those whom he tries. George Villiers came from Hatfield, where he had a conversation with the Duke of Wellington, who told him that he had committed a great error in his Administration in not paying more attention to the press, and in not securing a portion of it on his side and getting good writers into his employment, that he had never thought it necessary to do so, and that he was now convinced what a great mistake it was. At Roehampton nothing new, except that the Reform plan is supposed to be settled, or nearly so. Duncannon has been consulted, and he and one or two more have had meetings with Durham, who were to lay their joint plans before Lord Grey first, and he afterwards brought them to the Cabinet.

[Page Head: CROKER'S BOSWELL.]

Ellis told me (a curious thing enough) that Croker (for his 'Boswell's Life of Johnson') had collected various anecdotes from other books, but that the only new and original ones were those he had got from Lord Stowell, who was a friend of Johnson, and that he had written them under Stowell's dictation. Sir Walter Scott wanted to see them, and Croker sent them to him in Scotland by the post. The bag was lost; no tidings could be heard of it, Croker had no copy, and Stowell is in his dotage and can't be got to dictate again. So much for the anecdote; then comes the story.

I said how surprising this was, for nothing was so rare as a miscarriage by the post. He said, 'Not at all, for I myself lost _two reviews_ in the same way. I sent them both to _Brougham_ to forward to Jeffrey (for the "Edinburgh"), and _they were both lost in the same_ way!' That villain Brougham!

G. Lamb said that the King is supposed to be in a bad state of health, and this was confirmed to me by Keate the surgeon, who gave me to understand that he was going the way of both his brothers. He will be a great loss in these times; he knows his business, lets his Ministers do as they please, but expects to be informed of everything. He lives a strange life at Brighton, with tagrag and bobtail about him, and always open house. The Queen is a prude, and will not let the ladies come _decolletees_ to her parties. George IV., who liked ample expanses of that sort, would not let them be covered. In the meantime matters don't seem more promising either here or abroad. In Ireland there is open war between Anglesey and O'Connell, to whom it is glory enough (of his sort) to be on a kind of par with the Viceroy, and to have a power equal to that of the Government. Anglesey issues proclamation after proclamation, the other speeches and letters in retort. His breakfasts and dinners are put down, but he finds other places to harangue at, and letters he can always publish; but he does not appear in quite so triumphant an att.i.tude as he did. The O'Connell tribute is said to have failed; no men of property or respectability join him, and he is after all only the leader of a mob; but it is a better sort of mob, and formidable from their numbers, and the organisation which has latterly become an integral part of mob tactics. Nothing can be more awful than the state of that country, and everybody expects that it will be found necessary to strengthen the hands of the Government with extraordinary powers to put an end to the prevailing anarchy. O'Connell is a coward, and that is the best chance of his being beaten at last.

Lord Lyndhurst took his seat as Chief Baron yesterday morning, Alexander retiring without an equivalent, and only having waited for quarter day. Brougham has had a violent squabble in his Court with Sugden, who having bullied the Vice-Chancellor and governed Lyndhurst, has a mind to do the same by Brougham; besides, he hates him for the repeated thras.h.i.+ngs he got from him in the House of Commons, and has been heard to say that he will take his revenge in the Court of Chancery. The present affair was merely that Brougham began writing, when Sugden stopped and told him 'it was no use his going on if his Lords.h.i.+p would not attend to the argument,' and so forth.

I met Lyndhurst at dinner yesterday, who talks of himself as standing on neutral ground, disconnected with politics. It is certainly understood that he is not to fight the battles of the present Government, but of course he is not to be against them.

His example is a lesson to statesmen to be frugal, for if he had been rich he would have had a better game before him. He told a curious anecdote about a trial. There was a (civil) cause in which the jury would not agree on their verdict. They retired on the evening of one day, and remained till one o'clock the next afternoon, when, being still disagreed, a juror was drawn. There was only one juror who held out against the rest--Mr. Berkeley (member for Bristol). The case was tried over again, and the jury were unanimously of Mr. Berkeley's opinion, which was in fact right, a piece of conscientious obstinacy which prevented the legal commission of wrong.

Roehampton, January 22nd, 1831 {p.107}

[Page Head: O'CONNELL ARRESTED.]

The event of the week is O'Connell's arrest on a charge of conspiracy to defeat the Lord-Lieutenant's proclamation. Lord Anglesey writes to Lady Anglesey thus:--'I am just come from a consultation of six hours with the law officers, the result of which is a determination to arrest O'Connell, for things are now come to that pa.s.s that the question is whether he or I shall govern Ireland.' We await the result with great anxiety, for the opinion of lawyers seems divided as to the legality of the arrest, and laymen can form none.

January 23rd, 1831 {p.107}

No news; Master of the Rolls, George Ponsonby, and George Villiers here. The latter told a story of Plunket, of his wit.

Lord Wellesley's aide-de-camp Keppel wrote a book of his travels, and called it his personal narrative. Lord Wellesley was quizzing it, and said, 'Personal narrative? what is a personal narrative?

Lord Plunket, what should you say a personal narrative meant?'

Plunket answered, 'My Lord, you know we lawyers always understand _personal_ as contradistinguished from _real_.' And one or two others of Parsons, the Irish barrister. Lord Norbury on some circuit was on the bench speaking, and an a.s.s outside brayed so loud that n.o.body could hear. He exclaimed, 'Do stop that noise!'

Parsons said, 'My Lord, there is a great echo here.' Somebody said to him one day, 'Mr. Parsons, have you heard of my son's robbery?' 'No; whom has he robbed?'

[Page Head: O'CONNELL'S CASE.]

Nothing but talk about O'Connell and his trial, and we have more fears he will be acquitted than hopes that he will be convicted.

They still burn in the country, and I heard the other day that the manufacturing districts, though quiet, are in a high state of organisation.

January 25th, 1831 {p.108}

Met Colonel Napier[12] last night, and talked for an hour of the state of the country. He gave me a curious account of the organisation of the manufacturers in and about Manchester, who are divided into four different cla.s.ses, with different objects, partly political, generally to better themselves, but with a regular Government, the seat of which is in the Isle of Man. He says that the agriculturists are likewise organised in Wilts.h.i.+re, and that there is a sort of free-masonry among them; he thinks a revolution inevitable; and when I told him what Southey had said--that if he had money enough he would transport his family to America--he said he would not himself leave England in times of danger, but that he should like to remove his family if he could.