A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume IV Part 1

A History of the Four Georges and of William IV.

Volume IV.

by Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy.

CHAPTER LXIII.

"OPENS AMID ILL OMENS."

The closest student of history would find it hard indeed to turn to the account of any other royal reign which opened under conditions so peculiar and so unpropitious as those which accompanied the succession of George the Fourth to the English throne. Even in the pages of Gibbon one might look in vain for the story of a reign thus singularly darkened in its earliest chapters. George the Fourth had hardly gone through the State ceremonials which a.s.serted his royal position when he was seized by a sudden illness so severe that, for a while, the nerves of the country were strained by the alarm which seemed to tell that a grave would have to be dug for the new King before the body of the late sovereign had grown quite cold in the royal vault. It would be idle, at this time of day, to affect any serious belief that the grief of the British people at this sudden taking off, had it come to pa.s.s, would have exceeded any possibility of consolation. George the Fourth was an elderly personage when he came to the throne, he had been known to his subjects as a deputy King for many years, his mode of living had long been a familiar subject of scandal among all cla.s.ses of his people, and no one could have supposed that the prosperity of the country {2} depended to any measurable extent on the continuance of his life.

[Sidenote: 1820--Lord Liverpool's Administration]

George, however, recovered. His illness proved therefore to be only one among the unpropitious conditions which accompanied the dawn of his reign. Almost the next thing that was heard of him by the outer world was that he had inaugurated his work of government by calling on his ministers to a.s.sist him in obtaining a divorce from his wife. Not often, it must be admitted, has a sovereign just succeeding to a throne thus celebrated his attainment of regal rank. Then, again, the beginning of George the Fourth's reign was immediately followed by the explosion of a conspiracy belonging to an order uncommon indeed in the England of those days, almost wholly unknown to the England of our own time, and resembling in its princ.i.p.al characteristics some of the Nihilist or Anarchist enterprises common even still in certain parts of the European continent. Thus opened the first chapter of the reign of King George the Fourth. We shall have to go more fully into details, and we only print these few lines as what used to be called in former days the argument of our first chapters.

George was too unwell to stand by his father's bedside when the poor old King was pa.s.sing, at last, out of that life which had so long been one of utter darkness to him. George, the son, had taken cold in his beloved pavilion at Brighton, and the cold soon developed into an illness so serious that for some days it was believed the now King was destined to succeed his father in the grave almost as soon as he had succeeded him in the sovereignty. George's life of excesses had not, however, completely worn out the fine const.i.tution with which nature had originally endowed him, and despite the kind of medical treatment favored at that time, the old familiar panacea, which consisted mainly in incessant bleeding, the King recovered. He was soon able to receive the official addresses of loyalty, to despatch to Louis the Eighteenth and other European sovereigns his formal announcement of the fact that he had succeeded to the throne, his formal expressions of grief at {3} the loss of his beloved father, and his formal a.s.surances of his resolve to do all he could to maintain harmonious relations with the rulers of foreign States. He retained the ministers whom he had found in office, and who were, of course, his own ministers. Lord Liverpool was Prime Minister, Lord Eldon was Lord Chancellor, Lord Palmerston was one of the younger members of the administration.

The times were troublous. Lord Liverpool's long tenure of office had been marked, so far as foreign affairs were concerned, by a resolute hostility to every policy and all movements which tended in a revolutionary direction, and to Lord Liverpool and his closest colleagues the whole principle of popular liberty was merely the principle of revolution. In home affairs Lord Liverpool had always identified himself with systems of political repression, systems which were established on the theory that whenever there was any talk of popular grievance the only wise and just course was to put in prison the men from whose mouths such talk came forth. On financial questions Lord Liverpool appears to have entertained some enlightened views, views that were certainly in advance of the political economy professed by most of his colleagues, but where distinctly political controversy came up he may be taken as a fair ill.u.s.tration of the old-fas.h.i.+oned Tory statesmans.h.i.+p. Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, had a great deal of shrewdness in his mental const.i.tution, a shrewdness which very often took the form of selfishness; and although he exhibited himself for the most part as a genuine Tory, one is inclined to doubt whether he did not now and then indulge in a secret chuckle at the expense of those among his colleagues who really believed that the principles of old-fas.h.i.+oned Toryism were the only sound principles of government.

The first business of State into which the new sovereign threw his whole heart and soul was the endeavor to solemnize the opening of his reign by obtaining a divorce from his wife. He went to work at once with the set purpose of inducing his ministers to lend him their aid in the {4} attainment of this great object. Lord Eldon was more especially in his confidence, and with him George had many private interviews and much exchange of letters on the subject which then engrossed his attention. He accomplished his object so far that it was arranged to leave the name of his wife out of the Royal Liturgy. But even to set on foot the formal proceedings for a divorce proved a much more difficult piece of business. Pliant as the ministers were, inclined to be abject as some of them were in their anxiety to please their royal master, yet the men with whom George especially consulted could not shrink from impressing on his notice some of the obstacles which stood in the way of his obtaining his heart's desire. One of the main difficulties consisted in the fact that a great part of the evidence given against George's unhappy consort during the former investigations had been given by a cla.s.s of witnesses upon whose statement it would be impossible for any regularly const.i.tuted court of law to place much reliance. Again and again in the correspondence which pa.s.sed between the King and some of his ministers this weakness of his case is pointed out, and it is somewhat curious to find so complete a recognition of it by his advisers when we bear in mind what they had sanctioned before and were to sanction later on.

[Sidenote: 1820--Queen Caroline]

The Queen herself was on the Continent, and was threatening her immediate return to her husband's country unless some settlement was made with her which should secure her ample means of living and allow her to be formally recognized abroad as the wife of King George. Henry Brougham was acting as the Queen's princ.i.p.al adviser at home, and was doing his best to bring about some sort of compromise which might result in the Queen's accepting a quiet and informal separation on fair and reasonable terms. George, however, was not inclined to listen to conditions of compromise. He wanted to get rid of his Queen once for all, to be publicly and completely divorced from her, to be free from even a nominal a.s.sociation with her; and he was not inclined to accept any terms which merely secured him against the chance of her {5} ever again appearing within his sight. Brougham was disposed, and even determined, to do all he could for the unhappy Caroline, although now and then in one of his characteristic bursts of ill-temper he used to rail against the trouble she gave him by her impatient desire to rush back to England and make her appeal to public opinion there. There was a great deal of negotiation between the advisers on both sides, and the final offer made on the part of the King was that the Queen should have an allowance of 52,000 pounds a year--not, one would have thought, a very illiberal allowance for the daughter of a small German prince--and that she should be allowed to retain her t.i.tles, and should be authorized to use them at foreign courts, but that her name was not to appear in the Liturgy, and that she was not to appear officially in England as the wife of the sovereign. These terms were offered much against the will of the King himself, who still yearned for the divorce, the whole divorce, and nothing but the divorce. George yielded, however, to the urgent advice of his ministers, with the strong hope and belief still in his own heart that Caroline would not accept the conditions, and would insist upon presenting herself in England and a.s.serting her position as Queen.

The Queen, meanwhile, had left Rome, where she had been staying for some time and where she complained of the want of deference shown to her by the Papal authorities. She was hurrying back to England, and had written to Brougham requesting him to meet her at Saint Omer, and there accordingly Brougham met her. Whether he was very urgent in his advice to her to accept the terms it is not easy to know; but, at all events, it is quite certain that she refused point-blank to make any concessions, that she left Brougham with positive abruptness, and hastened on her way to England. Among her most confidential advisers was Alderman Wood, the head of a great firm in the City of London, a leading man in the corporation of the City, and a member of the House of Commons. Many eminent Englishmen--among whom were Wilberforce, Canning, and Denman, afterwards Lord Chief Justice--were {6} were warm supporters of her cause, for the good reason that they sincerely believed her to be innocent of the more serious charges against her and deeply wronged by the conduct of the King. Even her most resolute enemies had to admit that whether her conduct in thus rus.h.i.+ng back to England and forcing herself on public notice were wise or unwise, from the worldly point of view, it certainly seemed at least like the conduct of a woman proudly conscious of her own innocence, and determined to accept no compromise which might put her in the position of a pardoned sinner. The nearer she came to England the more cordial were the expressions of sympathy she received, and from the moment she landed on English sh.o.r.es her way to London became like a triumphal procession.

[Sidenote: 1820--The King's divorce proceedings]

In the mean time the King and his ministers had come to an agreement which was exactly what the King had struggled for from the first, an agreement that steps should be taken in the ordinary way, according to the legal conditions then existing, for the purpose of obtaining a divorce. The course to be adopted was to bring in a Divorce Bill, and endeavor to have it pa.s.sed through both Houses of Parliament. The proceedings were to open in the House of Lords, and the Queen's leading defenders--for her cause was of course to be defended by counsel as in an ordinary court of law--were Brougham and Denman. The Queen's arrival in London was a signal for the most tumultuous demonstrations of popular devotion and favor towards her, and popular anger, and even fury, against all who were supposed to be her enemies. The house in which she took up her abode was constantly surrounded by vast throngs of her sympathizers, and she used to have to make her appearance at the windows at frequent intervals and bow her acknowledgments to the crowds below. Sometimes the zeal of her admirers found a different way of expressing itself, and the window-panes of many houses were broken because the residents were known to be on the side of the King and not of the Queen. Conspicuous public men who were known, or were believed, to have taken part against her were mobbed in the streets, and even the Duke {7} of Wellington himself was more than once the object of a hostile demonstration. So widely spread, so deeply penetrating was the feeling in favor of the Queen that it was said to have found its way even into the ranks of the army, and it was believed that some soldiers of regiments quartered in London itself were to be found carousing to the health of Queen Caroline. A crowd of Italian witnesses had been brought over to bear evidence against the Queen, and these foreign invaders, nearly all of humble rank, had to be sheltered in buildings specially erected for their protection in the near neighborhood of Westminster Hall, and had to be immured and guarded as if they were malefactors awaiting trial and likely to escape, in order that they might be safe from the outbreaks of popular indignation.

It told heavily for the case of the Queen, in the minds of all reasonable and impartial people, that while the King's foreign witnesses were drawn for the most part from a cla.s.s of persons who might be supposed easily open to subornation and corruption, a great number of distinguished men and women came from various parts of Europe in which the Queen had resided to give evidence in her favor, and to speak highly of her character and her conduct. The manner in which the proceedings against the Queen were pressed on by the Ministry had one immediate result to their disadvantage by depriving them of the services of George Canning, then one of the most rising of European statesmen. Canning was strongly impressed with a belief in the Queen's innocence and he could not consent to become one of her formal public accusers, which he must have done were he to remain a member of the administration. Canning, therefore, after a time, gave up his place as a member of the Government, and he left the work of the prosecution, as it may be called, to be carried on by men less chivalrous and less scrupulous. It is not necessary to go at any length into the story of the proceedings before the House of Lords. These proceedings would have been made memorable, if there were nothing else to make them so, by the speeches which Brougham and {8} Denman delivered in defence of the Queen. Never perhaps in the course of history have the ears of a monarch's advisers been made to tingle by such sentences of magnificent and scathing denunciation poured out in arraignment of the monarch's personal conduct. Denman, indeed, incurred the implacable hostility of George because, in the course of his speech, he introduced a famous citation from Roman history which, although intended to tell heavily against the King, was mistakenly believed by some of the King's friends to convey a much darker and deeper imputation on the sovereign than that which was really in Denman's mind.

[Sidenote: 1821--Queen Caroline and the King's coronation]

The case may be briefly said to have broken down. In the House of Lords, where the friends of the sovereign were most powerful, there was only a majority of nine for the third reading of the Bill of Divorce, and the Bill if persevered in would yet have to encounter the House of Commons. The Government, therefore, made up their minds to abandon the proceedings, and thereupon the friends of the Queen exulted tumultuously over the victory they had won. But the struggle was not by any means at an end. The royal coronation had yet to come, and the King was anxious that the ceremonial should be got through at as early a date as possible. The Queen announced her determination to present herself on the Day of Coronation and claim her right to be crowned as Queen Consort of George the Fourth. Then the advisers on both sides went to work anew with the vain hope of bringing about something like a compromise which might save the sovereign, the Court, and the country from scandalous and tumultuous scenes. Again the Queen was offered the allowance which had been tendered to her before, on the old conditions that she would behave quietly and keep herself out of sight. Again she insisted that her name must be included in the Royal Liturgy, and again the King announced his resolve to make no such concession. Then the Queen once more made it known that her resolve was final, and that she would present herself at Westminster Abbey on the Coronation Day.

George had been advised {9} that all historical precedents warranted him in maintaining that the King had an absolute right to direct the forms of the ceremonial to be used on such an occasion, and he declared that he would not allow the Queen to take any part in the solemnity or even to be present during its performance. The Queen wrote letters to the King which she sent to him through his Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool. George sent back the letters unopened to Lord Liverpool, with the announcement that the King would read no letter addressed to him by the Queen, and would only communicate with her through the ordinary official medium of one of his ministers.

The letters thus written on both sides have long since been published, and the perusal of them will probably impress most readers with the idea of a certain sincerity on the part of both the princ.i.p.al writers, the King and Queen. Let us speak as harshly and as justly as we may of the King's general conduct, of his mode of living, and of the manner in which he had always treated the Queen, we shall find it hard not to believe that there was in the depth of George's mind a fixed conviction that he had real cause of complaint against his unhappy wife. Let us, on the other hand, give the fullest recognition to the fact that although the scandalous levities in the conduct of the Queen abroad told heavily against her, we are none the less compelled to admit that her letters to the King, and her demand to be included in the Coronation ceremonies, seemed to be part of the conduct of a woman who will not and cannot admit that she has done anything to forfeit her place at her husband's side.

The whole story seems now so preposterously out of keeping with all the a.s.sociations of a modern Court that it startles our sense of historical credibility when we find by the actual dates that men and women are still living who might have been carried by their nurses to see the crowds round Westminster Abbey on the Coronation Day of King George the Fourth. The Coronation took place on July 19, 1821, and the whole ceremony was got up in the most costly, the most gorgeous, and, as it would seem now {10} to a calm and critical reader of history, in the most theatrical style. The poor Queen did, indeed, make an attempt to take the place which she claimed in the performances at Westminster Abbey. "It was natural," says Miss Martineau, "that one so long an outcast and at length borne back into social life by the sympathies of a nation should expect too much from these sympathies and fail to stop at the right point in her demands." Miss Martineau adds, however, and her words will carry with them the feelings of every reader now, "It would have been well if the Queen had retired into silence after the grant of her annuity and the final refusal to insert her name in the Liturgy." The Queen, of course, failed to obtain an entrance to Westminster Abbey. It had been arranged by orders of the King that no one was to be allowed admission, even to look on at the ceremonial, without a ticket officially issued and properly accredited with the name of the bearer. The Queen, therefore, was allowed to pa.s.s through the crowded streets, but when she came to the doors of the Abbey the soldiers on guard asked for her ticket of admission, and of course she had none to present. Some of the friends who accompanied her indignantly asked the soldiers whether they did not recognize their Queen, the Queen of England; but the officers in command replied that their orders were strict, and the unhappy Caroline Amelia was literally turned away from the Abbey door. The King had accomplished his object.

[Sidenote: 1821--Death of Queen Caroline]

The poor woman's story comes to an end very soon. On August 2, only a few days after the Coronation, it was made known to the public that the Queen was seriously ill. She was suffering, it appears, from internal inflammation, and the anxieties, the excitements, the heart burnings, the various agonies of emotion she had lately been undergoing must have left her poorly prepared. On August 7 her condition became so alarming to those around her that it was thought right to warn her of her danger. She quietly said that she had no wish to live, that she hoped not to suffer much bodily pain in dying, but that she could leave life without the least regret. She {11} died that day, having lived more than fifty-two years. It was her singular fate, however, that even in her death, which otherwise must have brought so much relief, she became a new source of trouble to her royal husband. George had made up his mind to pay a visit after his coronation to his subjects in Ireland, to "the long cherished isle which he loved," as Byron says, "like his bride." He had got as far as Holyhead on his way when the news reached him of the Queen's illness, and he thought that it would be hardly becoming for him to make his first public appearance in Ireland at such a moment, and to run the risk, perhaps, of having his royal entrance into Dublin accompanied by the news that his Queen had just died.

Then, when the news of her death did actually reach him, it was still necessary to make some little delay--joy bells and funeral bells do not ring well together--and thus George, even as a widower, found his wife still a little in the way. The remains of Caroline Amelia were carried back to her native Brunswick, and there ended her melancholy story. It is impossible not to regard this unhappy woman as the victim, in great measure, of the customs which so often compel princes and princesses to leave reciprocal love out of the conditions of marriage. "The birds which live in the air," says Webster's immortal "d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi,"

On the wild benefit of nature, live Happier than we, for they can choose their mates.

Other women, indeed, might have struggled far better against the adverse conditions of an unsuitable marriage and have borne themselves far better amid its worst trials than the clever, impulsive, light-hearted, light-headed Caroline Amelia was able to do. There seems no reason to doubt that she had a good heart, a loving nature, and the wish to lead a pure and honorable life. But she was too often thoughtless, careless, wilful, and headstrong, and, like many others who might have done well under fair conditions, she allowed the worst qualities of her nature to take the command just at the very moment when there {12} was most need for the exercise of all that was best in her. Even with regard to George himself, it seems only fair and reasonable to a.s.sume that he, too, might have done better if his marriage had not been merely an arrangement of State. Perhaps the whole history of State marriages contains no chapter at once more fantastic and more tragic than that which closed with the death of Caroline Amelia, wife of George the Fourth.

[Sidenote: Death of Napoleon Bonaparte]

While the joy-bells of London were already chiming for the coronation of George the Fourth, the most powerful enemy George's country had ever had was pa.s.sing quietly away in St. Helena. On May 5, 1821, the Emperor Napoleon died in his island exile. No words could exaggerate the sensation produced through the whole world by the close of this marvellous career. He was unquestionably one of the greatest figures in history. As a conquering soldier he has no rival in the modern world, and indeed all the history we know of, ancient or modern, can give but very few names which may bear comparison with his. Unlike Caesar and Alexander, he had made his way from the humble obscurity of common life, and, unlike Caesar, he did not seem to have had in him the intellectual greatness which must have made him, under any conditions, a master of men and of hemispheres. So far as mere dramatic effect is concerned, he was less fortunate than Caesar in his disappearance from the world's stage. Napoleon was doomed to pine and wither away on a lonely island in the South Atlantic for years and years, and there was something like an anticlimax in the closing scenes of that marvellous life-drama. It is pitiful and saddening now to read of the trumpery annoyances and humiliations to which his days of exile were subjected, and to read, too, of the unceasing complaints with which he resented what he regarded as the insults offered to him by his jailers. There was, indeed, much that was ign.o.ble in the manner of his treatment by those who had him in charge, in the paltry indignities which he had to endure, and which he could not endure in the patient dignity of silence. The mere refusal to allow to him his t.i.tle of Emperor, and to insist {13} that he should only be addressed as General Bonaparte, was as illogical as it was ungenerous; for if revolutionary France had not the right to make him an Emperor, she certainly could not have had the right to make him a General. Every movement he made and every movement made by any of his friends on the island was watched as jealously and as closely as if he had been some vulgar Jack Sheppard plotting with his pals for an escape through the windows or the cellars of his prison.

One cannot but regret that Napoleon could not have folded himself in the majestic mantle of his dignity and his fame, could not even, if it were needed, have eaten out his own heart in silence, and left his captors to work their worst upon him without giving them the satisfaction of extorting a word of querulous remonstrance. His captors, no doubt, were perpetually haunted by the dread that he might somehow contrive to make his escape, and that if he once got away from St. Helena the whole struggle might have to begin all over again. No doubt, too, his captors would have said, speaking in the spirit of the times, that Napoleon was not to be trusted like an honorable prisoner on parole, and that there was no way of securing the peace of the world but by holding him under close and constant guard. The whole story of those years of captivity is profoundly sad, and is one which may probably be read with less pain even by Frenchmen than by high-minded Englishmen. There has lately been given to the world in the pages of an American magazine, _The Century_, a continuation of the record once made by Dr. Barry E. O'Meara of his conversations with Napoleon during Napoleon's exile in St. Helena. Dr. O'Meara was a surgeon in the English navy, and was serving in the _Bellerophon_ when Napoleon came on board. He was allowed to take care of Napoleon by the British Government, and, as he was an Irishman, he felt a certain sympathy with Napoleon and came to be treated by the fallen Emperor as a friend. He published a volume called "A Voice from St. Helena," in which he gave a detailed account of his talks with the great Emperor. The book was much read {14} at the time of its publication, and created a deep interest wherever it was read. From this work O'Meara left out many of the memoranda he had written down, probably because he thought they might give offence needlessly to living persons; but the withheld memoranda were all carefully preserved and pa.s.sed into the hands of some of his descendants in New Jersey, and have after this long lapse of time been published at last. They tell us with painful accuracy of the petty annoyances constantly inflicted upon Napoleon, and of the impatience and fretfulness with which, day after day, he resented them and complained of them. We seem to live with the great dethroned Emperor in his hours of homeliest complainings, when every little grievance that burns in his heart finds repeated expression on his lips. Few chapters in the history of fallen greatness can be more touching than these pages.

Not all that Napoleon said about England, however, was mere complaint and disparagement. The world of London may be interested in learning from these reminiscences how Napoleon told Dr. Barry O'Meara that if he, Napoleon, had had any authority over the English Metropolis, he would have long ago taken measures for constructing an embankment on both sides of the Thames as it pa.s.sed between Middles.e.x and Surrey. If Dr. O'Meara had embodied this suggestion in his public volume, Napoleon might unconsciously have become the projector of the Thames Embankment.

_Fas est ab hoste_--the proverb is somewhat musty.

{15}

CHAPTER LXIV.

POPULAR ALARMS--ROYAL EXCURSIONS.

[Sidenote: 1820--The Cato Street conspiracy]

The plot which has been already mentioned as one of the unpropitious events that marked the opening of George the Fourth's reign was the famous Cato Street conspiracy. The conspiracy was nothing less than a plot for the a.s.sa.s.sination, all at once, of the whole of his Majesty's ministers. The princ.i.p.al conspirator was a man named Thistlewood, a compound of half-crazy fanaticism and desperate villany--a creature who believed that he had private vengeance to satisfy, and who had, at the same time, persuaded himself that no good could come to the people of England until an example had been made of the King's official advisers by the avenging hand of the lover of liberty. The novelty as well as the audacity of the plot created a perfect consternation all through England, and it became, for a while, the sincere conviction of a vast number of reasonable Englishmen that the whole political and social system of the kingdom was undermined by such plots, and that only the most strenuous exertions made by the champions of law and order could protect the realm from an outbreak of horrors far transcending any of those that had convulsed France during the worst days of the Revolution. It was soon made clear enough that Thistlewood's plot was a conspiracy which included only a very small number of men, and it has never been quite certain whether it was not originally put in motion by the machination of some of the paid spies and informers whom it was believed, at that time, to be the duty of the Ministry to keep in its service for the detection and the frustration of revolutionary conspiracy. It was the common practice of spies and informers, in those days, to go {16} about secretly in quarters where revolutionary conspiracy was believed to be in existence, to represent themselves to some of the suspected plotters as fellow-revolutionists and brother-conspirators, and thus to get into their confidence, and even to suggest to them some new form of conspiracy, in order that their willingness to accept the suggestion might mark them out as proper subjects for a Government prosecution and obtain for the informers the credit of the detection.

[Sidenote: 1820--Origin of the conspiracy]

Thistlewood had been engaged in popular agitation for some sort of reconst.i.tution of political society, and he had been once put on his trial for some alleged offence arising out of such an agitation. More lucky than many other of his contemporaries under similar conditions, he was brought before a jury who found him not guilty of the charge made against him. Now, if Thistlewood had been a sane member of even an Anarchist organization, he might have been softened in his feelings towards the existing order of things by finding that a jury had actually recognized the possibility of his being formally charged with an offence against the Crown and yet not being guilty. But Thistlewood regarded the bare fact that a charge had been made against him as a crime calling out for vengeance, and in his frenzy he got the idea into his head that Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, was the person on whom he was bound to take revenge. Accordingly, the unfortunate creature actually sent a challenge to Lord Sidmouth, inviting and defying him to mortal combat. Perhaps Lord Sidmouth would have acted wisely if he had taken no notice whatever of this preposterous challenge, but, at the same time, it is only fair to remember that Lord Sidmouth might think it dangerous to the public peace to allow a person to go unrebuked who had sent a challenge to a Minister of the Crown. Criminal proceedings were, therefore, taken against Thistlewood, and, instead of being committed to the protection of a lunatic asylum, the author of the challenge was sentenced to a year's imprisonment. When his prison time was over, Thistlewood came out a man inflamed with a desire for vengeance on all the ruling cla.s.ses {17} in general, and on Ministers of the Crown in particular. Like the murderer in "Macbeth," he thought himself one whom the vile blows and buffets of the world had so incensed that he was reckless what he did to spite the world. He soon got around him a small gang of agitators as ignorant and almost as crazy as himself, and he initiated them into a grand scheme for dealing a death-blow to all the ministers at once, and then seizing on the Bank, Mansion House, and Tower of London, and from these strongholds proclaiming the existence of a provisional government.

Now the whole notion of such a plot as this, and any possible success coming out of it, may seem, at first sight, too crazy to be accepted by any set of men, however ignorant or however wicked, who were not downright lunatics. But it is certain that Thistlewood did find a small number of men who were not actually lunatics, and who yet were ready to join with him and to risk their lives in his enterprise. The first act in the plot was to be the a.s.sa.s.sination of the King's ministers. One of the professional spies in the employment of the authorities, a man named Edwards, was already in communication with Thistlewood and his friends. The plot had been for a considerable time in preparation, and it was put off for a while because of the death of George the Third, and the hopes entertained by the conspirators that the new King might go back to the political principles of his earlier years, discard Lord Liverpool, Lord Sidmouth, and his other Tory advisers, and thus render it unnecessary for patriotic men to put them to death in order to save the country.

When, however, it became apparent that George the Fourth was to keep around him the ministers who had served him when he was Prince Regent, it was determined that the work must go on. Edwards, the spy, was able to make it known to Thistlewood that there was to be a dinner of the members of the Cabinet on February 23, 1820, and the opportunity was thought to be placed by a kindly fate in the hands of the conspirators.

Meanwhile the minister at whose house the dinner was to take place, Lord {18} Harrowby, was kept fully informed of all that was going on, and he wisely resolved to take no public notice of the scheme until the day for the dinner should arrive, when the instruments of the wholesale murder-plot could be suddenly arrested at the moment of their attempt to carry out their design. Thistlewood and most of his companions had their headquarters in the garrets of a house in Cato Street, Edgware Road, and there it was arranged among them that they should remain until one or two of their accomplices, who were kept at watch for the purpose, should come to them and report that the doomed dinner-guests had a.s.sembled. Then the conspirators were to repair to the neighborhood of Lord Harrowby's house in Grosvenor Square. One of the outpost men was to knock at Lord Harrowby's door, and the moment the door was opened all the gang were to rush in and put the ministers to death. Lord Harrowby took good care not to have any guests that evening, but the outpost men of the conspiracy were deceived by the fact that a dinner-party was actually going on at the house of the Archbishop of York next door, and when they saw carriages arriving there they felt sure this was the dinner-party for which they were waiting. They waited there until the last of the guests appeared to have arrived, and then set out to give notice to Thistlewood and his companions. Before the outpost men had got back to Cato Street the police were already there, and an attempt was made to arrest the whole of the conspirators. A scuffle took place, in which Thistlewood stabbed one of the policemen to the heart. The const.i.tuted authorities had contrived to make almost as much of a bungle as the conspirators had done; the military force did not arrive in time, and Thistlewood and some of his accomplices succeeded, for the moment, in making their escape. It was only for the moment. Thistlewood was arrested next day. There was nothing heroic or dramatic about the manner of his capture. He had sought refuge at the house of a friend in Moorfields, and he was comfortably asleep in bed when the house was surrounded and he was made prisoner. He was put on trial soon after, and, {19} with four of his accomplices, was sentenced to death, and on May 1 the five were executed.

[Sidenote: 1820--The government and the conspiracy]

The evidence at the trial made it clear to any reasonable mind that the plot was confined altogether to the small knot of ignorant desperadoes who held their councils in Cato Street, and to the informer Edwards, who had been in communication with them. The public were never allowed to know what had become of this man Edwards. Had he been pensioned by the Government and been allowed to pa.s.s into honorable and comfortable retirement, or was he to be arrested and put on his trial like other conspirators? Several attempts were made to get at the truth by means of questions to the ministers in the House of Commons, but no satisfactory reply could be extracted or extorted. Indeed, it seemed quite probable that the general feeling among the ruling cla.s.ses at the time would have been that the Government had done a very good thing by employing a man to help in working up murderous conspiracies in order that such conspiracies should be frightened out of existence, and that it was quite right to protect and reward the emissaries who had rendered such faithful service. For a time there was a widespread and sincere belief that the Cato Street conspiracy was only one in a vast network of conspiracies from which nothing but the severest measures of repression could save England. The King himself in his royal message to Parliament was careful to make use of the Cato Street conspiracy as another and a crowning evidence of the necessity which existed for the wholesale application of the criminal law in order to save the State from the triumph of anarchy. A season of absolute panic set in and the most trivial political disturbance arising in any part of the country was magnified into another attempt of the emissaries of revolution to upset the Throne, pull down the Church, and turn the State into the republic of a rabble.

It is quite clear now to all readers of history that such attempts as those planned by the Cato Street conspirators can only exist at a time when stern and savage restrictions are set upon all efforts to obtain a free public hearing for {20} the discussion of political and social grievances. Where political wrongs can be arraigned in the open day, there is no occasion for the work of the midnight conspirator. Already in England public men were coming forward who were filled with the n.o.ble and patriotic desire to give the philosophy of history some share in the guidance of political life. Popular education had been totally neglected in England, and, indeed, the too common impression among the ruling cla.s.ses was that the lower orders of the people could never be kept in due obedience to their superiors if they were permitted to make themselves unfit for their station by learning how to read and write.

Even the criminal laws themselves bore terrible testimony to the prevailing ideas, by the fact that property was proclaimed as sacred a possession as life itself.

[Sidenote: 1820--Offences that entailed the death penalty]

In the early days of George the Fourth's reign Sir James Mackintosh, the famous historian, philosopher, and philanthropist, brought into the House of Commons a measure for abolis.h.i.+ng the punishment of death in cases of the stealing of property to the value of five s.h.i.+llings, and he succeeded in carrying his measure through Parliament. Up to that time men and women had been executed, year after year, for stealing from a shop any goods of the value of five s.h.i.+llings, were the goods but a few loaves of high-priced bread carried off for the purpose of relieving the sufferings of a hungry family. Sir James Mackintosh's measure aimed at the abolition of the death penalty in a large number of other minor offences, but he only succeeded in robbing the gallows of its victims in two other cla.s.ses of small offences as well as that which has just been mentioned.

At this time of day one reads with amazement the arguments which men like Lord Chancellor Eldon directed against the humane measures introduced by Sir James Mackintosh. Parliament and the country were solemnly warned that if such relaxation of the death punishment were sanctioned by law, the smaller cla.s.s of tradesmen would have to give up their shops and their business altogether, because it would be utterly impossible for them {21} to keep any goods in their windows or on their shelves if the punishment of death were not maintained for the theft of a shawl or a snuff-box. At the same time it was well known to everybody who had eyes to see or ears to hear that numbers of shoplifters escaped punishment altogether because humane juries refused, even on the plainest evidence, to find a verdict of guilty where such a verdict would send the prisoner from the dock to the gallows. Many a jury, too, when it was impossible to doubt that a theft had been committed, acted on the ingenious plan of declaring in their verdict that the articles stolen, whatever their obvious market worth, were under the value of five s.h.i.+llings, thereby saving the offender from the doom of death. Thus the repressive power of the law was necessarily diminished by the uncertainty which common humanity put in the way of its regular enforcement, and that very barbarity of punishment which was intended to keep men back from crime by its mere terrors gave to the criminal only another chance of escape.

Sir James Mackintosh had brought in his measures as successor, in that line of philanthropic reform, to the lamented Sir Samuel Romilly, whose melancholy death, already referred to, had created a profound sensation throughout England and abroad towards the close of the late reign.

About the time when Mackintosh was thus making his partly successful attempt to put some check on the application of the death penalty, Henry Brougham was arousing the attention of Parliament and the country to the lamentable and disgraceful absence of anything like a system of national education. On June 28, 1820, Brougham brought forward the first definite proposal submitted to the House of Commons for a scheme of national education designed to apply to England and Wales. A parliamentary committee had been sitting for some time to make inquiries and receive evidence as to the state of education in the poorer districts of the land. This, too, was owing almost altogether to the energy and the efforts of Brougham, but the inquiries of the committee were resulting in nothing very practical, and Brougham therefore {22} went a step further than he had previously gone and brought forward his definite scheme for national education. It is hardly necessary to say that he did not succeed in carrying his measure, and that generations had yet to pa.s.s away before any real and comprehensive effort wag made by the State to establish such a system of popular education in these countries as had been known to Prussia and other European nations almost for time out of mind. But Brougham had at least started the question, and he never ceased to keep it moving during his long life. Other reformers, too, as well as Mackintosh and Brougham, were making their voices heard above, or at all events through, the din and clamor of the controversy between the friends of the King and the champions of the Queen. Lord John Russell may be said to have then begun his n.o.ble career as reformer of the system of parliamentary representation, and Mr. Lambton, afterwards to be better known as Lord Durham, made more than one bold effort in the same direction.