Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847

Grey's brilliant debut appears not to have been sustained: he spoke little during the session, but talked much—a fatal distinction to a parliamentary aspirant. Ambitious of figuring, he attempted to figure on all occasions; and, once or twice, unluckily daring the great champion of the treasury bench to the field, he was driven from it with wounds which, if they did not teach him a sense of his weakness, at least taught him a sense of his danger. Mr Grey's credit, says Addington in a letter, "as a man of discretion and temper, remains to be established. His reputation for abilities has not increased within the last two months, while he has in all respects enhanced that of the person (Pitt) to whom he ventured to oppose himself."

In alluding to the intercourse of Addington with Wilberforce, the biographer, we think very justly, complains of the sillinesses which have transpired in the latter's diary. Addington took higher views on ecclesiastical subjects; and was less rapid in his movements for the abolition of the slave-trade; being of opinion that precipitate measures would only increase the traffic to an enormous extent, deprive England of all power of restraining the frightful atrocities of the middle passage; and, by throwing the whole trade into the hands of foreigners, leave it open to all the reckless abominations of mankind.

The result was, unfortunately, all that rational men anticipated. The trade carried on by the foreigner has been tripled, or even quadrupled; the horrors of the middle passage are without restraint; and the sufferings of the victims, on their march to the coast, by fatigue, want of food, and the cruelty of their treatment, are estimated to destroy nearly twice the number of those who ever cross the Atlantic. The very powers with whom we have already made treaties for the purpose of extinguishing this infernal traffic, are deepest in its commerce; and its extinction now seems hopeless, except through some of those tremendous visitations, by which Providence scourges crimes which have grown too large for the jurisdiction of man.

Lord Sidmouth, then far advanced in life, when he saw those remarks in the diary, naturally felt offended, but he bore the offence with dignity, merely saying, as he closed the volume, "Well, Wilberforce does not speak of me as he spoke to me, I am sorry to say." Of Wilberforce, no one can desire to doubt the general honesty; but that he was singularly trifling and inconstant, was evidently the opinion of his contemporaries in the House. The following anecdote is given from the author's notes on this point. "Lord Sidmouth told us, that one morning, at a cabinet meeting, after an important debate in the House of Commons, some one said, 'I wonder how Wilberforce voted last night:' on which Lord Liverpool observed, 'I do not know how he voted, but of this I am pretty sure, that in whatever way he voted, he repents of his vote this morning.' Lord Sidmouth added, 'It was odd enough, that I had no sooner returned to my office, than Wilberforce was announced, who said,—Lord Sidmouth, you will be surprised at the vote I gave last night, and, indeed, I am not myself altogether satisfied with it;'—to which I replied, My dear Wilberforce, I shall never be surprised at any vote you give.'"

During this session the abolition of Negro slavery first seriously attracted the notice of parliament. The conduct of it, in the House of Commons, was intrusted to Wilberforce; but, in his absence, in consequence of indisposition, Pitt, on the 9th of May 1798, moved the resolution, "that the House would, early in the next session, proceed to take into consideration the circumstances of the slave trade." In a cause like this, the humane and magnanimous mind of Burke naturally enlisted at once. But he was by no means of that school of humanity which gains the race, only by riding over every thing in its way. Red-hot humanity had no charms for the great philosopher; and, philanthropist as he was, he could discover no wisdom in measures which changed only one violence for another, pauperised the whites without liberating the blacks; and, while it cost twenty millions sterling to repair about third of the injury, left the unhappy African at the mercy of avarice round the circumference of the globe.

A letter from Huntingford says:—"Dr Lawrence, our Winchester acquaintance, called on me lately. He talked much on Mr Burke's ideas respecting the slave-trade. I found by him that Mr Burke foresaw the total ruin of the West-India colonies, if the trade were at once prohibited. He is for a better regulation of the ships which carry on that infamous commerce: he would lay the captains under restrictions, and punish them with rigour for wanton severity or brutal inhumanity to the slaves; and, when the poor creatures are purchased at the West-India islands, he would have them instructed in religion; and be permitted to purchase their own freedom, when by industry they should acquire a sufficient sum for that purpose. For their religious instruction he would erect more churches; and, to enable them in time to accumulate the price of their ransom, he would enact that the property of a slave should be as sacred as that of a freeman." Burke went further than opinions, for he embodied his sentiments in a paper entitled, "Sketch of a Negro Code," all outline of a bill in parliament, which is to be found in the collection of his works.

In August of this year, Addington mentioned that Lord Grenville passed a month with him at Lyme, and that one day visiting Lord Rolle, a party were speculating on the probable successor to the Speaker (Cornwall)—Grenville and Addington giving it as their opinion, that neither of them had any chance. He adds, "within twelve months, we were both Speakers ourselves."

An important and melancholy event, however, threw the cabinet and the country alike into confusion. Early in November, it was ascertained that the King was taken dangerously ill. Three successive notes from Grenville represented the illness as most alarming, and giving room for apprehening of incurable disorder. As Dr Addington was known to have paid particular attention to cases of insanity, Pitt proposed his being summoned to visit the royal patient. In consequence, he visited his Majesty for several days, and on examination with the other physicians before the Privy Council, expressed a strong expectation of the royal recovery, founded on the circumstance that this illness had not, for its forerunner, any of the symptoms which usually precede a serious attack of this nature. The debates on the Regency Bill now brought out all the vigour of the House. The Whigs thundered at the gate of the cabinet; but there was a strong hand within, and it was still kept shut. The Prince of Wales, then under all the captivations of Whig balls and banquets, and worshiping at the feet of Fox, was no sooner to be master of the state by an unlimited Regency Bill, than Fox was to be master of every thing. Pitt still fought the battle with all the cool determination of one determined never to capitulate. Fox became in succession fierce, factious, and half frantic; still his great adversary stood on the vantage ground of law, and was imperturbable. But the contest now began to spread beyond the walls of parliament. The spirit of the nation, always siding with the brave defence, daily felt an increasing interest in the gallantry with which Pitt almost alone fought the ablest Opposition that had ever been ranged within the walls of Westminster, and inflamed by the sight of power almost within their grasp.

But the announcement of a sudden change in his Majesty's indisposition abated the contest at once. From the 8th to the 20th of February, the progress to health was palpable. On the 19th, the discussions on the Regency Bill were suspended in the House of Lords; and on the 6th of March, the Speaker and several members of the administration were admitted to present their congratulations to the King, at Kew, on his recovery.

We cannot resist the temptation of exhibiting Lord Sidmouth in the unsuspected character of a poet. As several millions of verses were poured out as the offerings of the Muse on the joyful occasion, as Parnassus was rifled by the Universities, and as every village school in the kingdom hung a pen-and-ink garland on the altar of Æsculapius or Hygeia; it was felt to be the bounden duty of every candidate for cabinet honours, to put his desk "in order," and rhyme, to the best of his power. Addington, in consequence, produced the following—

ON THE KINGS RECOVERY"When sinks the orb of day, a borrow'd lightThe moon displays, pale Regent of the night.Vain are her beams to bid the golden grainSpread plenty's blessings o'er the smiling plain;No power has she, except from shore to shoreTo bid the ocean's troubled billows roar.With hungry cries the wolf her coming greets;Then Rapine stalks triumphant through the streets;Avarice and Fraud in secret ambush lurk,And Treason's sons their desperate purpose work.But, lo! the Sun with orient splendour shines,"–&c. &c. &c.

We cannot indulge ourselves with any more of this loyal lucubration—we think that the slur at the Regency was not quite fair; we were by no means aware that the moon was so mischievous; and, as our general conclusion, we must admit that, if his lordship did not gain the Laureateship, he amply deserved it. However, better times were at hand. Pitt, like all other eminent men, had a keen insight into character, and he had long known the especial qualities of Addington. This solves the difficulty of accounting at once for his continued personal intercourse, and yet his apparent official neglect. He knew him to be well-informed, intelligent, and honest; although his retiring habits had already given full evidence of his indisposition to face the storms of party.

On Mr Grenville's promotion to the Home department, in 1789, Addington was proposed for the Speaker's chair, and was elected by two hundred and fifteen to one hundred and forty-two, who voted for the Opposition candidate, Sir Gilbert Elliot. In the private correspondence which was so frequent between him and the minister, various suggestions had been thrown out by Pitt of the Irish secretaryship, a seat at the treasury, &c. But the man and the place were now found together, incomparably adapted to each other. The place implies an honourable neutrality, and Addington was true to the trust. It requires the favourable opinion of the House to the man as well as the officer; and Sheridan's first address to him, as the spokesman of the Opposition, was, "we were all very sorry to have voted against you." It required considerable knowledge of general and parliamentary law, and the new Speaker had devoted years to their acquisition. Even the minor merits of a grave and commanding presence were there; for Addington, in his early years, was of as striking a countenance and figure as in old age he was gentle and amiable.

Characteristic anecdotes are scattered through the volumes: these we think their most attractive portion; and of such Addington's memory was full in his later years. One night, on his crying out, in the usual form, to hush some chattering in the House, "Order, order, or I shall name names!" Charles Fox, then standing beside the chair, told him that Wilkes once asked the Speaker, Onslow, what would be the consequence of his naming names? "Heaven above only knows," was the solemn reply.

One night Fox himself put the same question to Sir Fletcher Norton (the Speaker,) who nonchalantly answered, "Happen! hang me, if I know or care!"

A substantial proof of the general approval was given to the new official, in the addition of £1000 a-year to his salary; thus giving him £6000 a-year—which, besides a house, with some other emoluments on public and private bills, and the sale of certain clerkships connected with the business of the Commons, is generally calculated as equivalent to about £10,000 yearly. For this, however, the Speaker is expected to keep up considerable state, to give occasional banquets during the session to successive parties of the members; to have evening receptions and levées; and, in general, to lead a rather laborious life; the least part of whose labour is in the Speaker's chair. He has also the appointment of a chaplain to the House, which is equivalent to the disposal of valuable church patronage, the chaplain being always provided for, after a few years' attendance, by a request of the House to the crown. To complete this accumulation of good things, the Speaker who exhibits intelligence, is frequently promoted to the higher offices of the cabinet, and generally receives a peerage.

But those were the "piping times of peace;" times of trouble and terror were at hand. The French democracy had already burst on Europe; and every throne was heaving on the surge which it had raised. Pitt alone, of all the great ministers of Europe, seemed to disregard its hazards. Customary as it is for the pamphleteers of later times to assail his memory, as the promoter of hostilities, the chief outcry against Pitt in the year 1790, was his tardiness in thinking that those hostilities could ever force England to take a share in the struggles of the Continent. The whole aristocracy, the whole property, the whole mercantile interest, and even the whole moral feeling of the empire, had become from hour to hour more convinced that a war was inevitable. Even the Opposition, whose office it was to screen the atrocities of every national enemy, and who, for a time, had looked to Jacobinism as an auxiliary in the march to power, had at last shrunk from this horrible alliance—had felt the natural disgust of Englishmen for an association with the undisguised vice and vileness of the Republic, and had at last sunk into silence, if not into shame. Burke had published his immortal "Reflections," and their sound had gone forth like the tolling of a vast funeral bell for the obsequies of European monarchy. Still, nothing could move Pitt. By nature, a financier, and by genius the most magnificent of all financiers, he calculated the force of nations by the depths of their treasuries; and seeing France bankrupt, conceived that she was on the verge of conviction, and waited only to see her sending her humbled Assembly to beg for a general loan, and for a general peace at the same moment.

But those were days made to show the shortsightedness of human sagacity. The lesson was rapidly given; it was proved in European havoc, that utter powerlessness for good was not merely compatible with tremendous power for evil, but was actually the means of accumulating that power; that the more wretched, famishing, and haggard a nation might become at home, the more irresistible it might prove abroad: that, like the madman, it might be fevered and tortured by mental disease, into preternatural strength of frame, and might spring out of the bed where it had lain down to die, with a force which drove before it all the ordinary resistance of man. Pitt had still to learn, that this was a war of Opinion; and had to learn also, that Opinion was a new material of explosion, against whose agency all former calculation was wholly unprovided, and whose force was made to fling all the old buttresses and battlements of European institutions like dust and embers into the air.

It is not worth the trouble now to inquire, whether Pitt's sagacity equally failed him in estimating the probable effect of the French Revolution on England. His expression at a dinner party, where Addington, Grenville, and Burke formed the guests, "Never mind, Mr Burke, we shall go on as we are until the day of judgment;" shows his feeling of the stability of the constitution. As we have no love for discovering the

"Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise,"

we are gratified by thinking that both were partly in the right: Burke, in regarding the Revolution as destined to sweep the Continent with long and tremendous violence, and Pitt as believing it likely to make but little permanent impression on the habits, the power, or the heart of England. Burke argued from the weakness of the Continental governments; Pitt from the strength of the British constitution: the former having no connexion with the national interests, the latter being formed from those interests, for those interests, and being as much supported by them as a tree by its roots. There was not a portion of that stately tree, from its solid trunk to the highest ornament of its foliage, which was not fed from the ground. The truth was, that the Jacobinisim of England was confined to adventurers, and never obtained any hold on the great body of the proprietors and the people. Its spirit evaporated in tavern harangues, to which the multitude went to listen, as to the chattering and grimaces of a mountebank.

No man of distinction, no man of birth, and no man of property was ever engaged in those coffee-house conspiracies; their Jaffiers and Pierres were cobblers and tinkers, with a sprinkling of petty pamphleteers, and ruined declaimers. When Hardy and Horne Took, were the priests, what must be the worshippers at the Jacobin shrine? But in France, the temple of that idol of confusion was crowded with the chiefs of the Noblesse, the Church, the Law; headed by the Prince of the blood next to the throne; all stimulated by a ferocity of folly unexampled in the history of infatuation, and all unconsciously urged to their ruin by a race of beings inferior in rank, and almost objects of their scorn, yet, rather embodied malignities, and essential mischiefs, than men. France in that fearful time reminded the spectator of Michael Angelo's great picture of the "Last Judgment"—general convulsion above, universal torment below; the mighty of the earth falling, kings, nobles, hierarchs, warriors, plunging down, and met by fiends, at once their tempters, their taunters, and their torturers; a scene of desolation and destiny.

Pitt's sentiment on the safety of England from revolutionary movements was so decided, that if France had not invaded Holland, and thus actually compelled a war, we should probably have had none at this period.

A distinction between the state of France and England not less memorable, if not still more effective, than in property, was religion. In France infidelity was not merely frequent, but was the fashion. No man of any literary name condescended even to the pretence of religion; but in England, infidelity was a stigma; when it began to take a public form, it was only in the vilest quarter; and when it assailed religion, it was instantly put down at once by the pen, by the law, and by the more decisive tribunal of national opinion. Paine, the chief writer of the Satanic faction, was a bankrupt staymaker, and a notorious profligate: his pamphlet had only the effect of making the public protest against its abominations; he was prosecuted, was forced to leave the country, and finally died in beggary in America.

It is remarkable to find so cautious a man as Addington at this period speaking of the Church as "an honest drone, who, if she did not stir herself very soon, would be stung by the wasps of the conventicle." The metaphor is not good for much, for the drone can sting too, and does nothing but sting. But what is it that, at any time, makes the church ineffective? The abuse of the ministerial patronage. The clergy altogether depend on the guidance, the character, and the activity of their bishops. If ministers regard the mitre as merely a sort of donative for their own private tutors, or the chaplains of their noble friends, or as provision for a relative, dependent, or the brother of a Treasury clerk, they not merely degrade the office, but they paralyse the church. Of the living prelacy we do not speak: but it is impossible to look upon the list of archbishops and bishops (a few excepted) during the last century, without surprise that the inferior clergy have done so much, rather than that they have done so little. Where there was no encouragement for literary exertion, ability naturally relaxed its efforts; where preferment was lavished on heads "that could not teach, and would not learn," disgust extinguished diligence; and where character for intelligence, practical capacity, and public effect, were evidently overlooked in the calculation of professional claims, it is only in the natural course of things that their exercise should be abandoned, in fastidiousness or in contempt, in disgust or in despair. The church was never in a more ineffective condition than at the close of the last century; and if the sin was to be laid at the right threshold, it must have been laid at the door of Whitehall.

Addington certainly deserves the credit of having formed a just estimate of the French Revolution from the beginning. In a letter to his brother he inserts this stanza,—

"France shall perish, write that wordIn the blood that she has spilt;Perish hopeless and abhorr'd,Deep in ruin as in guilt."

He, however, fell into the common error of the time, and looked upon her overthrow as certain in the first campaign.

It was on the second reading of the Alien Bill that the dagger scene, of which so much was said at the time, occurred in the House of Commons—thus described by the Speaker: "Burke, after a few preliminary remarks, the house being totally unprepared, fumbled in his bosom, and suddenly drew out the dagger, and threw it on the floor. His extravagant gesture excited a general disposition to smile, by which most men would have been disconcerted; but he suddenly collected himself, and by a few brilliant sentences recalled the seriousness of the house. 'Let us,' said he, 'keep French principles from our heads and French daggers from our hearts; let us preserve all our blandishments in life, and all our consolations in death; all the blessings of time, and all the hopes of eternity.'"

As all partisanship hated Burke, who had trampled it in the mire, this dagger scene was sneered at as a stage trick; but Burke was above all pantomime. The dagger was one which had been sent from France to a Birmingham manufacturer, with an order for a large number of the same pattern: and Burke had received it only on that day—and received it from Sir James Bland Burgess only on his way down to the house—so that there could have been no preparation for public exhibition. It was a natural impulse of the moment, in a time when all was emotion.

The murder of the unfortunate King of France, on the 21st of January 1793, perhaps the most wanton murder in all royal history, instantly brought out a full display of the real feelings of England. The universal sentiment was horror, mingled with indignation; and when the royal message came down to the house on the 28th, stating that, in consequence of the regicide, the king had ordered M. Chauvelin, minister from the late king, to leave the country, as being no longer accredited by the sovereign, the message seemed rather the echo of the national voice than the dictate of the government.

From this period the Whig party diminished day by day. They were chiefly the great landholders of the kingdom, and they saw in this atrocious act a declaration against all property; but they had also the higher motive of its being a declaration against all government. The chief persons of the Opposition at once crossed the house; but as Horne Tooke, in his apt and short style, described the party on his trial, "We all," said he, "entered the revolutionary coach at Reading; but one got out at Maidenhead, another at Slough, a third at Hounslow, and a fourth at Brentford. It was my misfortune, my lord, as it was also Mr Fox's, to go on to London."

The French now threw off all political form, and all diplomatic decorum, and exhibited the whole savagism of republicanism. On the motion of a ruffian of the name of Garnier, the Convention publicly resolved that "Pitt was an enemy to the human race." The same ruffian then proceeded to move, "that every body had a right to assassinate him." This, however, was not carried; but an order was sent, on the proposal of Robespierre, to the armies, that "no quarter should be given to the English troops;" an order which was not repealed until his death by the guillotine.

Those were stirring times, and in every instance of success in the campaign, Pitt sent an immediate courier to Addington when out of town, of which the Speaker gave the signal to the surrounding country by lighting up his house. On one occasion of this kind, a friend of his, travelling on the coach from Bath, heard the coachman say, "I'm sure there's good news come, for there's the Speaker's house all in a blaze."