Harriet Martineau's Writing on British History and Military Reform, vol 1

Deborah Logan, Kathryn Sklar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000161717
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

This volume contains Harriet Martineau's writings on the history of England and its efforts and negotiations to promote peace between 1790 and 1815, providing a detailed account of the political revolutions and democratic and military reforms that shaped England's history.

BOOK II

CHAPTER I.

IT remains a wonder, to this day, that the country escaped absolute ruin from misgovernment during the critical years whose history we have now to disclose. The imbecility of the Portland Administration is no matter of dispute. In differing moods of contempt, of wrath, and of simple wonder, the fact is admitted in all the memoirs of the time. Lords Eldon and Malmesbury at one end of the political scale, and Cobbett and Burdett at the other, treat the fact as admitted. It has been seen how, in April, the Premier was neglected by his Cabinet; how they were already falling off from him, and acting on their own notions. The matter did not mend with time. As the months passed on, the Duke of Portland took more laudanum, suffered more pain, and sank more under it; sat for hours in dead silence, and as if hearing nothing, though he kept a friend or two by him, to save him from being alone; and about midnight began to revive, being in full flow of such political wisdom as he had by one or two o’clock in the morning. Endless difficulty arose from his lethargy; and, in one case at least, fatal mischief. At the most critical period of the century, we had a King with an infirm brain, and a Prime Minister dying of torturing disease and opiates; while the family of the one, and the Cabinet of the other, offered little ground for hope or reliance. The Prince of Wales and the Duke of York were now soon to show their quality. In the Cabinet were two of the weakest men then engaged in public affairs — Lords Hawkesbury and Castlereagh. Lord Chatham was soon to prove himself beneath contempt in his function, though he was the brother of William Pitt. Whatever Lord Eldon was as a lawyer, he was of the lowest order of politicians; and he now classed himself with Hawkesbury and the other weak members of the Cabinet, entertaining a virulent hatred against Canning, and some jealousy of Perceval. The talk of these men when they met was of the profits of a political position — of complimenting and binding their friends by gifts of office, by seats in parliament, by consideration of one sort or another; and in the record, we find a ludicrous assumed tone of dignity, benevolence, and magnanimity, running through the whole. We read a vast deal about ‘friendship and handsome acts,’ in the giving away of sinecures, and permitting pluralities of lay offices;* and find that, at this date, there were fifty-three candidates for peerage, ‘to none of which the King would listen.’ Mr. Perceval, though not adequate to his position, was of a higher order than these. If he had had an intellect of a somewhat better quality, and the training which such an intellect would have secured for itself, he would have been an excellent man. He was strictly virtuous in the private relations of life, was absolutely honorable, very amiable, and of a generosity and disinterestedness which were the more remarkable from the absence of those qualities of the intellect with which they are usually allied. He had poor powers of reasoning, and none of imagination; and therefore his strong religious sensibilities made him a bigot, and the force of his unreasoned convictions drove him into an abusive dogmatism. He could never see what was not before his eyes; and therefore the people fared badly under his rule. (We speak already of his rule, because he was now virtually the head of the Cabinet.) He could never understand how any one could hold views unlike his own; and therefore, while gentle, agreeable, and well-bred towards his family and personal friends, he was grossly abusive towards opponents in parliament, and a pragmatical despot wherever he could make himself felt further abroad. His comrades complained of him as being ‘too parsimonious,’ when the object was to afford subsidies to Austria for the continental war; but the rest of his administration shows that this was from no consideration for the heavily taxed people, but probably because he could not stretch the vision of his mind so as to comprehend objects so remote. Sydney Smith has left a sketch of him ‘paying the strictest attention to the smaller parts of ecclesiastical government, to hassocks, to psalters, and to surplices; in the last agonies of England, bringing in a Bill to regulate Easter offerings; and adjusting the stipends of curates, when the flag of France is unfurled on the hills of Kent;’ and again, walking to Hampstead church in advance of his dozen children, ‘with their faces washed, and their hair pleasingly combed,’ while all Ireland was ready to rise in exasperation at his treatment of the Catholics; and Mr. Perceval has himself left us, in certain letters to Mr. Wilberforce,* evidence of his dread that the meeting of parliament on a Monday should occasion Sunday travelling among M. P.s, at a moment when he should have felt himself quite care-laden enough, without undertaking the charge of other gentlemen’s Sunday morals; but this pernicious absurdity, while making him more hated by the people than rank vice would have done, arose from the narrowness of his intellectual range, and by no means from any harshness, hypocrisy, or pride, in the temper of the man. He was beloved by all who came near him; and the stern and virtuous Romilly bears the same testimony on this point as everybody else.† He abstained from intercourse with him, because he did not think it right to enjoy the engaging social qualities of one whose political rule he totally abhorred. They had long maintained ‘a delightful intimacy;’ and Perceval strove earnestly against the alienation which Romilly willed, but did not cease to regret. In regard to purpose and persistency, Perceval was among the few strong members of the Cabinet. In regard to ability, he was among the many weak. During the session which was now to begin, he made a remarkably feeble appearance in his place. His parliamentary friends accounted for it by supposing him worn out with fatigue and anxiety by illness in his family. However this might be, he was far from answering the expectations of any party during the short session of 1807. — At that juncture, the post of First Admiralty Lord was of very high importance. In the state of Europe at the time, and under Napoleon’s system of Continental blockade, the holder of that office, Lord Mulgrave, was one of the most important men in the government. Lord Melville told him that he had it in his power to do more good to his country within twelve months than perhaps any other man in it. He brought forward Lord Palmerston into official life, and also Mr. Croker, whose name thenceforward became connected with Admiralty business. Lord Mulgrave was a man of sense, with whom Canning seems to have agreed very well. — Canning was the strong man of the government; — so strong that the others did not know what to make of him; and he did not know how to get on with them. He was the eagle in the dovecote, or rather among the owls. He fluttered the Volces in their Corioli so tremendously that we find them heartily wishing that their gates had never shut him in among them. His most sanguine and affectionate elderly friends considered him as ‘hardly yet a statesman.’ It seems as if his exuberant activity and his boyish petulance and fun made them forget how old and how wise he really was. He was thirty-seven; and he immediately showed that he was as fit for office as he ought to be at that age, if ever. He was surrounded with difficulties, as Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Everything had, for years past, gone wrong abroad; and at home the discipline of his office was so lax that he had everything to reform. Not only were we feebly or falsely represented abroad; at home, no secrets were kept. The clerks were gossips, and the messengers were lazy; and Mr. Canning had quite troubles enough with his colleagues, without the aggravations that might be caused by the tongues of underlings. His work connected him chiefly with Lord Mulgrave on the one hand, and with Lord Castlereagh, the War Secretary, on the other. With Lord Mulgrave he could act easily and agreeably; with Lord Castlereagh it was impossible. Lord Castlereagh was gentlemanly, amiable, and pliable; but he was weak, and wholly incompetent to his function; and Canning was not one who could easily tolerate folly at any time; and when it was made mischievous by being put in a high place, it was exasperating to him. We shall soon see the consequences. Meantime, we find old diplomatists and practised politicians — all who knew what Canning was doing — astonished at the ability he manifested. It was destined to be a mere specimen of what he could do; for he was unfortunately placed, and his position was a most insecure one. He had alienated the Grenville and Grey party, which included nearly all the ability except his own; and he was every day respecting less the men with whom he was acting — very few of whom regarded him as a comrade. To work he went, however, persuading the King to write to the Emperor of Russia in friendly style, while there was yet time to forestall Napoleon in the wooing of the weak Russian; sending out new men to foreign Courts, furnished with elaborate instructions about schemes of policy which were all to be ruined by the folly of others; suggesting ideas to the Army and Navy Ministers of diversions which should leave a central battle-field clear for renewed efforts for the liberties of Europe — diversions which became desperate failures as soon as they passed from being his ideas to being other people’s acts; and, the while, peremptorily insisting on that dissolution of parliament, which was found to be necessary, after his party had for some weeks doubted the need.⁷⁷

* Malmesbury Diaries, iv. p. 397.

* Life of Wilberforce, iii. p. 397.

† Memoirs of Romilly, iii. p. 37.

The new Administration made prodigious and irresistible efforts to have a House of Commons of their own. Mr Tierney, who managed the business of buying seats for the friends of the Grenville Ministry, could get none.* £6000 were given for seats, without any stipulation as to the length of the parliament, though the last had existed only four months. The new Ministers had bought up all the seats that were to be had, and at any prices. It was said and believed that the King had advanced a very large sum out of his privy purse, for the purpose. The leading Opposition men had great difficulty in getting in; and few of them were returned for the places they had previously represented. In the last parliament, the new Ministers had with difficulty mustered a majority of 32; now they had one of nearly 200. No one supposed this to be any indication of a change in popular feeling. The people did not look to parliament to reflect the mind of the nation. Some of them who were alarmed at the cry of the Church and the throne being in danger from Lords Grey and Grenville, sent up addresses of thundering loyalty; but these were chiefly from Chapters and Corporations. The Whig party, in their grief at the extinction of their last hope of popular benefit from Whig rule, used language of such violence as commonly belongs only to faction; and they were considered factious accordingly. The people were sick of factions; and they turned to men who professed to be of no party, but presented themselves as chivalrous champions of popular rights, waging war for the people against all the world. Now was Cobbett read in a hundred thousand homes; and now was Burdett worshipped in the streets. He appeared in the extremest glory of bad taste, on the day of the opening of the new parliament, in a triumphal car — his face pale, his air languid, his wounded leg — wounded in a duel with his old friend Paull — stretched on a cushion,† and the other foot so placed on a footstool as to appear to be trampling on a figure inscribed ‘Venality and Corruption.’ In the midst of all the violence on every hand, thoughtful and earnest men carried heavy hearts within them. To the Horners and the Romillys, and some in private life like-minded with them, there was a mournful solace in turning from the spectacle before their eyes, and from pondering on the decay of liberty, and the deterioration of the idea of it in the minds of Englishmen, to enjoy the assertion of its principles in the then new work — Fox’s ‘History of the Reign of James II.’ There they could fully possess themselves with the idea of what they were losing; and they could glory once more in what Englishmen could do, when in manifest peril of their hard-won liberties. It is one of the most touching traits of the time — the recourse which despairing politicians had to literature, as a congenial diversion from the anxiety amidst which they lived. Once more was Napoleon to be expected on our shores — at liberty as he now was, from having carried all before him, and reduced to vassalage almost every sovereign on the continent. Many of the most sensible men in the country thought an invasion more probable in the summer of 1807 than ever before; and yet, the training for defence, which had been prosecuted with so much vigor when the alarm was fresher, was now neglected. Royalty, nobility, and gentry were too much engrossed with humbling and insulting Catholic soldiers to attend to the defence of the country; and shabby little French privateers came, two or three together, within musket-shot from Eastbourne, or other places where the people were likely to be half asleep, laughed at our martello towers (brick-built, so as to be likely to fall in with the weight of the gun, on a shot being fired at the centre), hooked as many vessels as would pay for the adventure, and made off, in sight of the indignant summer visitors, who could only fret and fume, on pier or cliff. At one time, the national defenders were at church; at another, the commanding officer was out partridge shooting. In one place, there were cannon without ammunition; in another, there was ammunition without cannon. One way or another, many a cargo was thus carried off, and many a crew went to a French prison, from the neglect of brethren at home — notwithstanding all the boast of forts, towers, regiments, ironbound cliffs, and defensive canals. At the same time, a spirit of ‘savagery’ — so called by patriots of that time — seemed to have taken possession of the English people. The poor denounced the great in language of virulent hatred, and the railers were stringently coerced. The criminal law was vehemently enforced — cruel as it then was upon petty thefts and superficial disorders. The murders became terrific; and the punishments of all offences savage, from something of the same temper. When the royal family walked on the terrace at Windsor, on Sundays, disturbance was caused by the number of intoxicated people who had to be turned off; and one here and there would strike a Court official, or knock off an officer’s hat. At such a time, Cobbett was sure of listeners when he called the rich and noble ‘locusts ‘and ‘caterpillars,’ and the clergy ‘black slugs.’ At such a time, the temptation was strong for the flimsy and the vain, the superficial and unstable well-wishers of the people, to come forward, and offer to lead them to the acquisition of impossible things. It is cheering to observe how some men of soberer minds and wiser hearts were beginning to look into popular interests, and entering upon those researches into matters of national welfare which the existing generation is carrying on over their graves. A Burdett with his shows is sure to be swept away by the first strong wind from any quarter; but a Lancaster, a Whitbread, a Malthus, a Horner, a Romilly, is sure to hand over his deeds or his speculations to a future generation, however small may be his apparent success in his own.⁷⁸

* Memoirs of Romilly, ii. p. 200.

† Annual Register, 1807, p. 237.

Under the date of 1816 will be found a statement of the efforts made in this year by Mr. Whitbread* on behalf of the Education of the people, as well as to encourage in them provident habits, by providing a secure and ready investment for the smallest sa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Half Title One
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents of The Edition
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• History of the Peace: Being a History of England from 1816 to 1854. With an Introduction 1800 to 1815 (1864)
• Publisher’s Note
• Preface to the American Edition
• Book I
• Book II
• Endnotes
• Silent Corrections