He accordingly spoke very emphatically in the debate on the third reading, contending, that no peer who had voted for

the second reading, and thus declared his conviction [Nov. 10, 1820.] of the Queen's guilt, could now be justified in withdrawing his support from it. He said:

"Are there any of your Lordships who, on such a subject, will not be satisfied with circumstantial evidence? Murders are proved to the satisfaction of juries by circumstantial evidence. I recollect a case in which a man was found dead in the highway-shot through the head-the wadding of the pistol clotted in his hair; on the head being washed, a piece of paper was found unconsumed; this proved to be part of a ballad; and the remainder of it was found in the pocket of another person, who was apprehended on suspicion of being the murderer. Was not this a safer ground for conviction than the oath of a man swearing that he saw the shot fired? Suppose a lady and gentleman are interrupted in a criminal purpose, and afterwards lock themselves up in a room for some hours, or are found sleeping in the same apartment, what inference is to be drawn? Laying aside the evidence of Majocchi, Demont, and that class of witnesses,-if there is not enough remaining to establish the charge, I have grievously erred in allowing divorce bills to pass through this House. But looking at all the circumstances, I think it would be very difficult for any of your Lordships to lay your hands on your heart and say, Not guilty, upon my honour.'"*

6

When he sat down, Lord Liverpool threw to him a slip of paper, with the following words:" Most admirably! I am much obliged to you for it and sorry if what I said last night gave you pain."+

Nevertheless, upon a division, the third reading was carried only by a majority of nine.‡

Thereupon Lord Liverpool, instead of moving "That this bill do pass," said, that "Had the third reading been carried by as considerable a number as the second reading, he and his noble colleagues would have felt it their duty to persevere in the bill, and to submit it to the other branch of the legislature. In the present state of the country, however, and with opinions so nearly balanced-just exemplified by their Lordships-they had come to the determination to proceed no farther with it." He accordingly moved, "That the farther consideration of the Bill be adjourned to this day six months."

Lord Eldon put the question from the woolsack, and with an abject countenance said, "The contents have it."

Heartily dissatisfied with the issue, and with his brethren of the Cabinet, he thus addressed his daughter:—

"I thought it wholly inconsistent with the dignity of the House of

* 3 Hansard, 1739.

† On the back of this was found the following memorandum :-"Liverpool asked me to speak in the House of Lords upon circumstantial evidence on the last day of the Queen's trial. I did so. He then handed this to me, apologizing for angry language at the Cabinet the night before, when he communicated his intention of relinquishing the business."

108 to 99. 3 Hansard, 1744.

Lords to close the most solemn inquiry ever entertained in that House by doing nothing. The bill should either have been rejected or passed. But to have upon our Journals four different resolutions, all founded upon our avowed conviction of her guilt, and then neither to withdraw those resolutions, nor to act upon them, appears to me perfectly absurd, and, both to the country and to her, unjust. To her, surely it is so. We condemn her four times; she desires at our bar that we will allow her to be heard in her defence before the Commons; we will neither do that, nor withdraw our condemnations; for, though the bill is withdrawn, the votes of condemnation remain upon our Journals. This is surely not pretty treatment for a lady. Report says, that in a petition, which Lord Dacre would have presented if the bill had not been withdrawn, she signs herself thus

CAROLINE, QUEEN IN SPITE OF you.'

This thing, which has so long kept the country in a state of agitation, will probably die away, like all other nine days' wonders-except that, when Parliament meets, Ministers will be abused heartily, and some witnesses on both sides will be prosecuted for perjury."

66

He was mistaken in supposing that the memory of this scandalous proceeding would so soon pass away, for it produced a deep disgust in the public mind, which was not effaced during the current reign;-and not until examples of purity and of all the domestic virtues had af terwards been displayed on the throne, was it that the people of this country were again affectionately attached to the monarchical government under which they and their forefathers had so long flourished. Lord Eldon himself, though little given to change his opinion, or to confess that he had been wrong, seems in his latter days to have re gretted the proceedings upon the Bill of Pains and Penalties against Queen Caroline,”—which he goes so far as to denominate—" proceedings, perhaps more just than prudent."* Happily, I am not called upon to offer any opinion upon the guilt or innocence of the party ac cused, or to say how far her disregard of the opinion of others, and her habitual refusal to submit to the conventional restraints imposed upon her rank and sex, may, in her case, repel the inference usually drawn from certain transgressions of the rules of delicacy, and so redeem her from the highest imputation of misconduct. Had it not been for the ill-usage she experienced in the early part of her married life, there probably would have been little hesitation in coming to an unfavourable conclusion upon the evidence produced against her; and in that case, whatever the fact might be, she would have had no just reason to complain, for a woman must be prepared to see the inferences drawn against her which naturally arise from the situations in which she chooses to place herself; and if she has raised a general belief of guilt, it is really not very important to others that she retains a consciousness in her own breast of not having actually consummated her infidelity.

* Anecdote Book.

This was the most wretched part of Lord Eldon's life. His sufferings must have been materially aggravated by the consideration that the individual whom he was now called upon to villify and to degrade was the same Caroline of Brunswick who received him so hospitably at Blackheath—and he must have felt some envy when he saw Mr. Canning sacrificing office, and daring the King's displeasure, rather than assist in the proceedings against her.

CHAPTER CCV.

CONTINUATION OF THE LIFE OF LORD ELDON TILL THE CABINET WAS LIBERALIZED BY THE INTRODUCTION OF MR. CANNING AND MR. HUSKISSON, IN THE YEAR 1823.

DURING the Christmas vacation which followed the Queen's trial, Lord Eldon enjoyed a short repose at Encombe; and, after [A.D.1820.] the exciting scenes in which he had been engaged, he took delight in meditating for hours together on the hearth, "with the fancy very busy in finding out likenesses of the human visage in the fire." He concludes a letter to his daughter, giving an account of this " sleep of the mind," by announcing his speedy return to the turmoils of business: "In an hour's time I shall be among the lawyers, who are no favourites of yours; and I would much rather see my pointers, &c., and listen to the sounds with which they express their joy at seeing their master, than to the eloquence of the most eloquent of the babblers, to whom now, for a long time possibly, I must lend unwilling ears. say possibly, because, till the temper of Parliament is tried in the subsequent week, our fate remains mighty uncertain."

I

The zeal of the Whigs in opposing the "Bill of Pains and Penalties" no doubt had been sharpened by the hope that the Ministry would be either beaten in Parliament by persisting in it, or would quarrel with the King by abandoning it—so that either way their gain was certain. But Lord Liverpool baffled them completely. The King, upon reflection, became satisfied that more could hardly have been done to gratify him; and his Majesty looked with some displeasure on Sir John Leach, by whose sanguine prophecies he had been buoyed up. For his present servants he had no great regard; but he decidedly preferred them to the early friends," against whom he was now much exasperated, as they had defeated him in the object nearest his heart, and he imputed their conduct to purely factious motives. The

Queen's popularity likewise considerably declined when [A. D. 1821.] her dangers were over; the excesses of the multitude enlisted in her cause had excited alarm in the minds of moderate men, and a general feeling prevailed that it was necessary, for the sake of public tranquillity, to rally round the Government.

For these reasons the session of Parliament, which was expected to be so stormy, and to which Lord Eldon had looked forward with so much apprehension, was one of the quietest known for many years. Sir Charles Wetherell delivered a very elaborate argument in the House of Commons to prove the illegality of the continued exclusion of the Queen's name from the Liturgy; but a resolution to that effect was there negatived by a large majority,* and, when the subject came to be mentioned in the House of Peers, Lord Eldon, giving no rea[JAN. 26.] sons, contented himself with dogmatically asserting the contrary doctrine," after having obtained every information that could be acquired, and applied to it the deepest research."+

The only serious difficulty to be encountered was "Catholic Emancipation," which began to assume a very formidable aspect. Hitherto there had been only debates on petitions from the Roman Catholics, or resolutions for taking their claims into consideration at a future time. But a bill for removing all their disabilities had passed the House of Commons, and (horrible to relate) was actually put into the hands of Lord Eldon, at the bar of the House of Lords, by Mr. Plunkett, its author. His lordship behaved on the occasion with composure and self-command. On his return to the woolsack he recited, with an unbroken voice, the title of the bill to which the concurrence of their lordships was asked; and he calmly declared, that "although he feared it would be impossible for the promoters of the measure, by any modifications, ever to induce him to acquiesce in it, he would bestow his best reflection on the subject before the discussion on the second reading."

66

When the motion for a second reading of the bill came on,-after inducing the Duke of York to make a very bold declaration against any change in the Protestant Constitution of 1688," he himself delivered what is considered his greatest anti-Catholic speech, concluding, after praising the old Whig peers, who had framed the Act of Settlement, with this earnest prayer: May the posterity of those noble lords find, in the preservation of our present laws, in those wise and fundamental laws which require the Throne, the Government, and the Church to be unalterably and for ever Protestant, that solid security for their liberties which they can never find in excluding a Papist from the throne, but surrounding a Protestant King with popish advisers!" The bill was rejected by what was considered the auspicious majority of THIRTY-NINE.‡

Next day Lord Eldon wrote to Sir William: "The Duke of York has done more to quiet this matter than every thing [APRIL 17, 1821.] put together. It has had a great effect. I have nothing further to delay your drinking to the THIRTY-NINE, who saved the THIRTY-NINE ARTICLES'-a very fashionable toast." Shortly after, being requested by him to correct and publish his speech, he wrote back an answer, showing his uneasy suspicions of Lord Liverpool's

* 4 Hansard, 219.

† Ib. 799.

159 to 120. 5 Hansard, 356.

sincerity, and his own resolution, which being really founded on principle, ever proved indomitable: -"I have no great appetite for printing.* At the same time, the papers have printed such nonsense, that I am uneasy about it. As to Liverpool, I do not know what he means. To please Grenville, he makes a Regius Professor,-friend to the Catholics. To please Lansdowne, he makes a Bishop of Bristol and Regius Professor,-friend to the Catholics. He, therefore, I dare say, will not stir a step beyond pronouncing in words his speech. I am not quite content with this-and yet I don't know what to do. But what he does or does not do, I think, should not regulate me. Can a man who makes such a Secretary for Ireland as we have, and two such Regius Professors and such a bishop, be serious? With me this thing about the Catholics is not a matter of consistency, but of conscience. If there is any truth in religious matters, I cannot otherwise regard it."†

The only other measure which excited much interest during the present session was the bill for disfranchising the borough of Grampound. This Lord Eldon strenuously opposed, although it was supported by his colleagues. He said that "the present bill was completely irreconcilable with the law and constitution of this country. It was a bill of pains and penalties,' and an ex post facto law, for it inflicted on innocent men the punishment due only to the guilty, and a severer punishment than any existing law provides for the guilty." However, on the ground, not of punishing crime, but of taking the elective franchise from a place which could not be permitted to enjoy it longer without serious detriment to the public, the bill passed, and formed a precedent for the bill to disfranchise Sudbury, lately carried through with the sanction of Sir Robert Peel.

As the session drew to a close, preparations began to be made with a view to the coronation of George IV., which the Queen's arrival had interrupted the preceding year. On this occasion Lord Eldon was very fitly raised to an Earldom. He said that "George III. and George IV. had previously often pressed the dignity upon him, and that even now his young master' was obliged to say, 'If you will not make out your own patent, I will get some one else to do it; and when I send it to you, I will see if you dare to return it.' He sent a formal letter of thanks to his Majesty and received an answer testifying the favour in which he was then held.

999

It was published in a pamphlet as corrected by himself, and it is reprinted in Hansard, v. 285.

In the same letter, referring to an application for a place for an idle young lawyer, he gives such admirable advice that I cannot refrain from copying it :"The truth is, that upon F. there must be impressed the necessity of his working for himself. These lads, who give each other great dinners, with their claret, champagne, &c., must learn that this will not do, if they are to pursue a profession; and they must learn that if they want the aid of a profession, they must submit to the privations which young men, who are to get forward in professions, have always submitted to. This is a truth of which they are not aware." 5 Hansard, 695.