Historical and Political Essays

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After some discreditable scenes, on which a recently published
correspondence has thrown a painful though somewhat doubtful light,
the connection of Madame de Stael with Benjamin Constant was broken.
The two continued occasionally to correspond, and as late as 1815 we
find her lending him a large sum of money; but their relations were
never again what they had been, and on the side of Constant there
appears to have been a large amount of positive malevolence. 'O
Benjamin,' she wrote to him in one of her later letters, 'you have
destroyed my life! For ten years not a day has passed that my heart
has not suffered for you--and yet I loved you so much!' A strong
affection, such as she had not found in her marriage with the Baron de
Stael, was an imperious necessity of her existence, and after her
breach with Constant she soon found an object in a young officer from
Geneva named Rocca, who had returned to his native town badly wounded
after brilliant service in Spain. When they first met, in 1810, Madame
de Stael was forty-four and Rocca about twenty-three; but a genuine
and honourable affection seems to have grown up on both sides, and in
the following year they were married. Madame de Stael, however, either
clinging to her name or dreading the ridicule of such a strangely
assorted marriage, insisted upon its concealment, and Rocca generally
passed in society as her lover. A child was born in 1812, but it was
only after the death of Madame de Stael that the legitimacy of the
connection was established. It proved much more productive of
happiness than might have been expected, and greatly brightened her
closing years. Nearly at the same time an important change passed over
her religious views, and the vague deism of her youth deepened into a
positive, definite, and earnest Christianity, but without mysticism
and without intolerance. Some beautiful lines that are cited by Lady
Blennerhassett very faithfully express the spirit of her belief: 'Il
faut avoir soin, si l'on peut, que le declin de cette vie soit la
jeunesse de l'autre. Se desinteresser de soi, sans cesser de
s'interesser aux autres, met quelque chose de divin dans l'ame.'

She lived to see the downfall of perhaps the only man she really
hated, his return from Elba, his final defeat at Waterloo, and the
restoration of the Bourbons. But, though she detested Napoleon and his
system, these things gave her no pleasure. The spectacle of an invaded
and a dismembered France aroused her strongest feelings of patriotism,
and she loved liberty too truly and too ardently to rejoice in the
influences that triumphed in 1815. Her last years were chiefly spent
in the composition of her 'Considerations on the French Revolution,'
in which she sums up the convictions of her life. It is one of her
most valuable and most lasting books. The disproportioned prominence
which is naturally assigned in it to Necker, and the manifest personal
element in her antipathy to Napoleon, impair its weight, indeed, as a
history; but few writers have criticised with more justice the
successive stages of the Revolution, and few books of its generation
are so rich in political wisdom. The concluding chapters, in which, in
a strain of noble eloquence, she pleads the cause of moderate and
constitutional freedom, show how steadily and how strongly, in an age
of many disenchantments, she clung to the belief of her youth.

The 'Considerations on the French Revolution' had a vast and an
immediate success, and in a few days sixty thousand copies were sold.
Madame de Stael, however, did not live to witness her triumph. In
February 1817 she was struck down by a paralytic illness, and on July
14, after a long period of complete prostration, she passed away
tranquilly in her sleep. It was a peaceful ending to an agitated and
chequered career. She had enjoyed much and suffered much. She had
committed grave faults, and had met with her full share of
disappointment and ingratitude; but few women have left such an
enduring monument behind them, or have touched human life on so many
sides and with so many sympathies.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] There is also an English, and somewhat abridged, translation.

THE PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR ROBERT PEEL

There is probably no other English public man of the present century
whose career has attracted in so large a measure the interest both of
politicians and of men of letters as Sir Robert Peel. In addition to a
crowd of industrious but not very distinguished compilers, it has been
discussed with great skill by Guizot, by Lord Dalling, by Mr. Goldwin
Smith, and by Mr. Spencer Walpole; and in that great literature of
monographs which has grown up with such remarkable rapidity in England
within the last decade, no less than three have been devoted to the
life of Peel. The interest that attaches to him is, indeed, of a very
peculiar character. He was almost wholly destitute of the power of
imagination that is so conspicuous in the careers or speeches of
Chatham and Burke, of Canning and Beaconsfield. Except during a few
years that followed the Reform Bill of 1832, he never exhibited the
spectacle of a leader struggling successfully against enormous odds.
He was not one of those statesmen who see further than their
contemporaries, and who, after years of failure and struggle, are
proved by their ultimate triumph to have most truly read the
tendencies of their age. Though he was three times Prime Minister of
England, and though he was for a time deemed the most brilliant of
party leaders, he left the great and powerful party which trusted him
almost hopelessly shattered. Twice in his life he carried measures of
transcendent importance which he had not only persistently opposed,
but had been specially placed in power for the purpose of resisting.
The most striking incidents in his career are incidents of failure
rather than of success, and history has pronounced that, on the most
important questions of his time, he was disastrously wrong. The long
delay in the inevitable emancipation of the Catholics, which was
largely due to him, and the circumstances under which he ultimately
carried the measure, produced evils that are in full activity at the
present hour. His persistent opposition to parliamentary reform
contributed to bring England to the very verge of revolution; though
when the Reform Bill had been carried he nobly retrieved his error by
the frankness with which he accepted, and the skill with which he
used, the new conditions of English politics. His abolition of the
Corn Laws at the head of a Government which had been pledged to
maintain them gave a great shock to public confidence, and for a long
period most seriously dislocated the machinery of party government.
But, in spite of all this, there are few statesmen who have carried so
large a number of measures of great and acknowledged importance, who
have impressed so deeply the sense of their superiority on the minds
of their contemporaries, or who were followed to the grave by a more
widespread and genuine regret.

It is this contrast between the leading incidents of Peel's life and
the impression which he made on the world that constitutes the great
interest of his career. The explanation is not difficult to discover.
It is the common story of extraordinary qualities balanced by
striking defects. He was not a great statesman, but he was a
supremely great administrator, a supremely great master of
parliamentary management and of parliamentary legislation. He had
little prescience; he often grossly misread the signs of the times, or
only recognised them when it was too late; but when he was once
convinced, he acted on his conviction with frankness and courage, and
when a thing had to be done, no one could do it like him. As Disraeli
said: 'In the course of time the method which was natural to Sir
Robert Peel matured into a habit of such expertness that no one in the
despatch of affairs ever adapted the means more fitly to the end.'[10]
In the words of Sir Cornewall Lewis: 'For concocting, producing,
explaining, and defending measures, he had no equal, or anything like
an equal.'[11]

In the interesting volumes which were published by Lord Mahon and Mr.
Cardwell in 1856 we have Peel's own explanation of his conduct
relating to the removal of the Catholic disabilities in 1829, and to
the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846; but the publication of his
confidential correspondence has been long delayed, and the volume
before us only carries the work down to 1827. It has been edited by
Mr. Parker with great care and accuracy, and with undeviating good
sense and good taste, and it throws much curious light upon a corner
of history which has been but little explored.

Peel started in life with great advantages. The eldest son of a very
wealthy manufacturer who had long occupied a respectable place in
Parliament, and who was closely attached to the dominant party in the
State, he was from his earliest youth destined by his father to be a
statesman. Under such circumstances he was certain in the pre-Reform
period to have not only all the advantages which the best school and
university education could give, but also the still greater advantages
of an early introduction into both parliamentary and official life;
provided always that no aberration of character, or taste, or
imagination, or opinion drew him aside from the plain path that lay
before him. He grew up in an atmosphere of the best middle-class
virtues. Decorum, good sense, industry, strict morality; a sober
religious orthodoxy; much simplicity of life, preserved in the midst
of great wealth; ideals which, if not very lofty, were at least
eminently practical and perfectly honourable, prevailed around him,
and their influence imbued his whole nature. He accepted cordially the
destiny that was before him, and threw himself into it with untiring
industry. His opinions changed during his life much more than his
character, and the shy, sensitive, industrious, somewhat
self-conscious, somewhat awkward Harrow boy, prefigured very
faithfully the future statesman. He is described as wandering when a
schoolboy by himself among the hedges, knocking down birds with
stones, a practice in which he was very skilful, and which eventually
developed into a strong passion for shooting. He was quiet,
good-natured, studious, scarcely ever in scrapes, and it was not until
the last year of his school life that he threw himself with any
keenness into the amusements of his comrades. He had good natural
abilities; but probably the one point in which he greatly exceeded the
average of intelligent boys was his memory, which was of extraordinary
retentiveness, and which he carefully cultivated. During a few months
which elapsed between leaving Harrow and going to Oxford he constantly
attended the House of Commons, under the Gallery; and he also
attended some natural history lectures at the Royal Institution. His
Oxford career was very successful. He is said to have worked before
his degree examination for no less than eighteen hours, through the
day and night. He gained a double-first, and in the first class of
mathematics he stood alone. Such a success at once stamped him as a
youth of extraordinary promise, and the impression it made was
especially great because, the examination system having been very
recently reorganised, he was the first Oxford man who had attained it.

He was brought into Parliament in April 1809, almost immediately after
he came of age, for the borough of Cashel. No special significance
attaches to the fact of his having entered Parliament for an Irish
constituency, for his father had simply bought the seat, and the young
member appears to have never gone over to his constituents or held any
communication with them.

'When I sat for Cashel,' he afterwards wrote, 'and was not in office,
having made those sacrifices which could then legally be made, but now
cannot, I did not consider myself at all pledged to the support of
Government.'[12] Perceval, who represented in its extreme form the
Tory reaction that followed the Revolution, was then Prime Minister,
and Peel at once took his place among his followers. He first spoke in
seconding the Address in 1810, and in the partial judgment of his
father his speech was considered, 'by men the best qualified to form a
correct opinion of public speaking, the best first speech since that
of Mr. Pitt.'[13]

It was not, perhaps, an unmixed advantage to Peel that while he was
still a mere boy his father had somewhat ostentatiously destined him
to be one day a Tory statesman. Such an education could hardly fail to
strengthen the self-consciousness which was never wanting in Peel's
character, and to give a decided bias to his judgment. At the same
time, the distinctive merits of his career would have probably never
been fully developed without the early administrative training which
his opinions made possible for him, and there is nothing in his early
history to give the least countenance to the belief that his adherence
to the extreme type of Tory politics imposed the slightest strain upon
his judgment. His immediate interests and his sentiments appear at
this time to have perfectly concurred. He came into Parliament with
the party which was dominant, and with the section of the party which
was most poor in able men. Had he adopted on the Catholic question the
liberal opinions of Canning and Castlereagh, he must have held a
position altogether subordinate to them; and the same causes that in
the preceding Ministry had raised Perceval to be leader of the House
of Commons over the heads of Castlereagh and Canning, marked out for
Peel the future leadership of the party of resistance to concession.
It has been said, on the authority of Sir Lawrence Peel, that his
first appointment was that of private secretary to Lord Liverpool, but
Mr. Parker has found no trace of this in the papers either of Peel or
of Lord Liverpool. In 1810, however, when he was but just twenty-two,
he entered administrative life as Under-Secretary of State for War and
the Colonies, and he held that place till August 1812, when he
obtained the far more important post of Chief Secretary for Ireland,
and became for the next six years virtual governor of that country.

It was a post requiring not only great administrative skill, but also
great gifts of original statesmanship. During the last five years of
the eighteenth century, and especially during the rebellion of 1798,
religious passions in Ireland, which had for more than a generation
been steadily subsiding, had been kindled into a flame, and the urgent
necessity of settling the Catholic question had begun to press with
irresistible force on the minds of the more intelligent statesmen.
Pitt had intended to complete the Union by measures for admitting
Catholics into Parliament, for commuting tithes, and for paying the
Catholic clergy. Through the instrumentality of Lord Castlereagh
assurances of the disposition of the Cabinet had been conveyed to the
Catholic bishops and the leading Catholic laymen in 1799, which were
sufficient to secure their active support for the Union and to prevent
any serious opposition among the Catholic laity. The bishops met the
wishes of the English Government by drawing up a series of
resolutions, in which they declared their readiness to accept with
gratitude an endowment for the priesthood, to confer upon the English
Government a power of veto over the appointment of Catholic bishops
which would prevent the introduction into that body of any disloyal
men, and to certify to the Government the nomination of all Catholic
parish priests, as well as the fact that they had taken the oath of
allegiance. But the King had not been informed of the negotiations
that had taken place, and it is well known how his uncompromising
opposition produced the resignation of Pitt in 1801, how the agitation
caused by the question threw the King into a temporary fit of
insanity, and how Pitt at once promised that he would not move the
question again during the reign. In the spring of 1804 Pitt resumed
office, on the express understanding that he would not permit Catholic
Emancipation; when the question was introduced in 1805 by Lord
Grenville in the Lords, and by Fox in the Commons, it was defeated in
both Houses by immense majorities, and Pitt declared that though he
was still of opinion that there was no danger in the concession, yet,
as long as the circumstances which prevented him from bringing it
forward continued, he would be no party to agitating the question.

In 1806 Pitt died, and Fox and Grenville were themselves in power, but
the Catholics were again disappointed. The prejudice of the King, the
feeling of the country, the recent vote of the House of Commons, the
presence of Lord Sidmouth in the Ministry, proved insuperable
obstacles, and Fox could only urge the Catholic leaders to postpone
the question. Fox died in September 1806, and the Government presided
over by Lord Grenville met a new Parliament in the following December.
Grenville had been Pitt's colleague during the negotiations with the
Catholics that preceded the Union; he had strongly urged upon Pitt the
necessity of resigning in 1801, and he never forgave him for having so
lightly abandoned the cause. Grenville did not attempt to carry
emancipation, but he resolved to take at least one serious step in the
direction of concession, by throwing open to the Catholics all the
posts in the army and navy. An Irish Act of 1793 had enabled them to
hold in Ireland commissions in the army, and to attain any rank except
commander-in-chief, master-general of the ordnance, and general of the
staff; but if the regiments in which they served were sent to England,
they were disqualified by law from remaining in the service. The
original Bill of Grenville's Government was intended to remove this
anomaly, and assimilate the law in the two countries; but in the
course of the discussions it was agreed that the Catholics should be
freed from the exceptions to which they were subjected by the Irish
Act, that all posts in the army and navy should be thrown open to men
of all religious persuasions, subject only to the obligation of taking
an oath which was prescribed, and that Catholic soldiers should be
guaranteed by law the free exercise of their religion. The King had
been informed of this, and was understood to have given a distinct,
though a reluctant, assent; but a strong Protestant party, headed by
Perceval, fiercely opposed it. The King withdrew his assent from the
added clauses, and expressed his disapprobation of the whole measure.
At last, after much discussion, the Ministers agreed for the present
to withdraw their Bill, reserving to themselves by a Cabinet minute,
which was submitted to the King, the right to renew it, or to propose
any other measure on the subject which they desired. But the King was
determined to push his victory to the end. He demanded from his
Ministers a promise in writing that they would never again propose to
him any measure connected with Catholic emancipation, and as the
Ministers refused to give this unconstitutional pledge, the King
dismissed them from office, and called the Duke of Portland to the
head of affairs.

It was the second time that the King had broken up a Ministry on the
Catholic question, and his conduct was especially significant, as his
refusal to grant military promotion to Catholics was announced in the
midst of a great war, and at a time when thousands of Catholics were
fighting in his armies. It at once appeared that there were two
entirely distinct schools of Tories. Pitt, to the very close of his
life, had declared that his opinions on the Catholic question were
unchanged, though he would not force them against the inclination of
the King; and his views were adopted by Canning, Castlereagh, and
Wellesley. Perceval, on the other hand, emphatically declared that he
'could not conceive a time or any change of circumstances which could
render further concession to the Catholics consistent with the safety
of the State.'[14] With the exception of Eldon, scarcely any man of
real ability adopted this view until Peel entered Parliament as the
follower of Perceval. It is sufficiently evident from this fact how
little truth there is in the theory that attributes Peel's early
Toryism to a blind admiration for Pitt.

The party of the King triumphed. Parliament was dissolved on the 'No
Popery' cry, and on the first great party division that followed the
election the Ministers in the House of Commons had a majority of 195.
Canning and Castlereagh, though they had no sympathy with that cry,
availed themselves of the current that ran so strongly against the
Whigs. In the Ministry of the Duke of Portland they held the seals for
the Foreign and War Departments, but the leadership of the Commons and
the virtual leadership of the Ministry was given to Perceval, who,
though entirely without brilliant parts, exhibited unexpected talents,
both as a practical debater and as a manager of men, and who had the
advantage of representing fully the dominant party. Several
circumstances, however, other than a conviction of the danger of the
Catholic claims, contributed to the triumph of the anti-Catholic
party. The Whigs, already broken by their policy towards France in the
first stages of the Revolution and of the war, had become still more
unpopular through their opposition to the seizure of the Danish fleet
and to the Peninsular War. They were divided among themselves, for
there was little sympathy between the more aristocratic Whigs, who
were represented by Grenville and Lord Howick, and the more Radical
party of Sir F. Burdett and Whitbread. A strong personal as well as
political dislike already existed between Howick and Canning, and
prevented their hearty co-operation on the one great question on which
they were agreed. Above all, there was a general conviction among
statesmen that the King's mind was trembling on the verge of insanity,
and that a renewal of the Catholic complications of 1801 would produce
a catastrophe.

The question was debated in both the Lords and Commons in 1808. In the
former it was lost by a majority of 87, and in the latter by a
majority of 153. Grattan on this occasion introduced the Catholic
petition in a speech of consummate power; but both Castlereagh and
Canning opposed the reception of the petition, on the ground that the
time was unsuited for the agitation of the question; and the spirit of
the ruling part of the Ministry was sufficiently shown by the
reduction of the Maynooth grant from 13,000_l._ to 9,250_l._ When the
Portland Government was broken up in September 1809 by the quarrel,
duel, and resignation of Canning and Castlereagh, Perceval became the
head of the new Ministry, Lord Wellesley occupying the place of
Canning, and Lord Hawkesbury that of Castlereagh; and an intensely
anti-Catholic ministry continued to the death of Perceval. In 1809 the
Catholic question was not introduced into Parliament. In the spring of
1810 it was introduced into both Houses, but was defeated by
majorities of 86 and 104; but in October 1810 an event occurred which
profoundly changed the aspect of affairs. The King's insanity broke
out anew in a form which gave little hope of recovery, and the Prince
of Wales was appointed Regent. For a year the regency was subject to
restrictions similar to those which had been adopted in 1788, but on
February 1, 1812, these restrictions were to cease, and the Regent was
to enter into full fruition of the royal power.

The hopes of the Catholics were now raised to the highest point. With
the confirmed insanity of George III. the most serious of all the
obstacles to their claims was removed. During the year of the
restricted regency, while there was still some chance of the recovery
of the King, the Prince of Wales declined to remove the existing
Ministry from office, though even this decision was not taken without
some hesitation and some negotiations with the Whigs. The Catholics,
however, fully expected that the royal influence would now be exerted
in their favour, and that the Whig Ministry would speedily come. The
Prince of Wales had long been in close connection with the Whigs. As
early as 1797 he had expressed a desire to go over to Ireland as
Lord-Lieutenant, carrying with him a policy of conciliation to the
Catholics. In 1805, when Fox and Grenville had introduced the Catholic
question into the Imperial Parliament, the Prince, while stating that
considerations of obvious delicacy prevented him from taking an
immediate and open part in its favour, had given the Whig leaders the
fullest authority to assure the Catholics of Ireland that he would
never forsake their interests, the 'most distinct and authentic
pledge' of his wish to relieve them from the disabilities of which
they complained, and to exert himself in their favour as soon as he
was constitutionally able to do so. It is easy therefore to imagine
the consternation and the indignation with which, in 1812, the
Catholics found that the Prince Regent had changed his principles and
his policy; that, after a short and perhaps insincere negotiation with
the Whigs, he had resolved to maintain in power a Ministry which was
constructed for the main purpose of maintaining the Catholic
disabilities; and that his own opinions were rapidly verging towards
this policy.

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