SEDITIOUS SUBJECTS AND TURBULENT WIFE
Despite the glorious success of British arms in Europe and despite the Regent’s unwavering support of his ministers in bringing it about, George remained deeply unpopular with the mass of his subjects, at any rate in London where political opinions were more openly expressed. This was partly due to his reputation as a libertine and spendthrift with his people’s money at a time of general financial strain, and to indignation at his allegedly cruel treatment of his wife and daughter, but it mainly derived from the economic and social circumstances of the time. From the beginning of the regency the country suffered under high taxation, not least to meet the enormous cost of foreign subsidies to carry on the war, the interruption of overseas trade because of economic warfare, and subsequent widespread unemployment in the manufacturing districts. Bad weather and harvest failures raised the price of bread and added to the distress. All these were exploited by radical propaganda, which depicted the government and the royal family as corrupt and self-seeking parasites indifferent to the sufferings of the poor. Cobbett referred to the royal family wallowing in luxury ‘at the expense of a nation of industrious people’.1 The removal of George III from active kingship laid open a contrast between his parsimonious housekeeping and care for public economy and the extravagant self-indulgence of his sons. Not for the last time, the popular press delighted in contrasting the sober and respectable life of the reigning monarch, who had become the symbol of British virtue and liberty against French wickedness and tyranny, with the sexual profligacy and financial irresponsibility of the younger members of the royal family.
Since the last twenty years of the eighteenth century a new class of business entrepreneurs and professional men had grown up, devoted to those so-called ‘Victorian values’ of self-help, enterprise, sober living and private morality, and often inspired by strict evangelical religion. They frowned on the remnants of eighteenth-century dissipation which they identified with the old aristocracy. They demanded a fair field for the development of talent and a social and political status and influence through which they could attain greater importance in society. They supported the growing demand for fairer political representation and for the new economic doctrines associated with Adam Smith which stressed individualism and freedom from old restraints on enterprise. Although these doctrines found a readier echo and acceptance in the party of Pitt, Perceval and Liverpool than in the old centres of aristocratic whiggery, they implied reform of political and economic structures at a faster pace and to a more extensive degree than the old governing élite of either party considered acceptable. The spectre of the French Revolution still haunted the British political establishment and though the new ‘middle class’ flirted with radical reform they agreed with the old aristocracy that it should not be carried beyond safe limits for the security of private property. Not for another twenty years was there to be sufficiently wide support for reform of the old constitution; in the meantime, and especially during the years of the regency, the ‘lower orders’ reacted to the hardships of the post-war years of depression by posing a threat to law and social discipline.
The period from 1812 to 1821 was one of popular disturbance, occasional rioting, a seditious and unrestrained popular press, and repeated literary attacks on the Prince Regent as the embodiment of national corruption and repressive tyranny, led by poets and intellectuals such as Byron and Shelley and journalists like Leigh Hunt and William Cobbett. The rancorous disparagement of disappointed Whigs reinforced the resentment of the poorer classes at such evils as the privations of agricultural labourers, the hardships of life in new industries and the harsh treatment of the unemployed, the insane and petty criminals driven by despair and deprivation. In associating him with the social evils of the day, they did the Prince Regent an injustice, but as the figurehead of the nation he had to bear responsibility for the sufferings of his people. The Prince was hissed and jeered in the streets of his own capital and abused even in the debates in Parliament. In 1816 Brougham declared in the House of Commons that he was devoted to vicious pleasures and indifferent to the sufferings of his people. The bluntness of the attack stunned the House. Romilly was one of the few to defend him and even that in not uncritical terms: ‘With all the Prince’s faults, and they are great enough, it is absurd to speak of him as if he was one of the most sensual and unfeeling tyrants that ever disgraced a throne’.2 Leigh Hunt summed it all up in a famous passage in his radical journal the Examiner: George was
a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demi-reps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim to the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.3
The verdict has passed into the popular history of the time, and as one recent commentator has remarked, ‘it became something of a classic text for the Whig legend of George IV and its last statement was repeated time and again for well over a century’4 – aided by the success of Thackeray’s grossly exaggerated caricature of George IV in his influential but biased lecture in The Four Georges in 1855. Hunt and his brother John, who edited the Examiner, were brought to trial, charged with intention ‘to traduce and vilify His Royal Highness’. Despite Brougham’s vigorous defence they were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, which made them martyrs to the cause of the liberty of the people and the press. Many other figures in the literary world joined the ranks of the Prince’s detractors.
Critics among the poets and essayists of respectable society were hurtful to a man who had devoted considerable energy to the patronage of literature, but they did not threaten the fabric of the polite world. Discontent boiling up among the unpropertied working classes was a far more dangerous matter. Luddite riots in 1812, Corn Law riots in 1815–16, nocturnal meetings and drilling of men on the moors above the Yorkshire woollen towns in 1816 and 1817, threats of violence against employers and Anglican clergymen – the ‘black dragoons’ as they were christened – all aroused the fears of men of property and kept the troops on the alert night and day.5
The Luddite movement which emerged in the manufacturing districts of the north and north midlands in 1812 owed little to any political stimulus. It was a protest against unemployment and poverty which was ascribed to the increasing use of machinery and resulting trade practices by employers in such industries as the knitting of stockings and manufacture of woollen cloth. It was probably a spontaneous movement amongst craftsmen who saw their old skills being displaced by the employment of women and children to work machines. However, it did suggest an awakening political consciousness among the working classes and the authorities were always ready to imagine the presence of secret agents and agitators who were supposedly using the opportunity to politicize the common people. Repression was consequently severe. Machine-breaking was made punishable by death and many hundreds of working men were sentenced, though in the great majority of cases the death penalty was reduced to transportation or confinement in the hulks – prison ships moored in the Thames.
Nevertheless, the atmosphere of panic among the upper ranks of society was easily aroused and, once aroused, difficult to calm. Local magistrates, some of them employers whose property was threatened, or clergy who were often associated with the putting down of dissent in any form, felt themselves to be particular targets. Samuel Bamford, the Lancashire weaver and radical leader, recorded in his memoirs instances of manufacturers keeping cannon and muskets in their factories day and night for fear of attack by mobs.6 Though the improvement of trade after the repeal in 1812 of the ‘Orders in Council’ which had strangled trade with the continent helped to calm agitation in the manufacturing districts, and the last years of the war brought better news of victories in Europe and hopes of peace and prosperity to follow, social and economic conditions were slow to improve. High levels of taxation to finance the huge subsidies to European allies that formed a major element in the British war effort affected the upper and middle classes and despite frantic efforts by the government to economize and reduce expenditure after Waterloo the House of Commons, representing those classes, insisted on abolishing the property tax, a form of income tax and a mainstay of government finance. This placed a proportionately heavier burden on the lower classes. At the same time the hated Corn Law of 1815, which tried to protect English agricultural interests from competition by cheap foreign imports, was seen as a blatant kind of class discrimination, protecting landowners and farmers while raising the price of bread to the poor.
The immediate post-war years were a time of economic depression and social unrest with which the central and local authorities were ill-equipped to deal except by force.7 The government thus became more and more unpopular. Demands for reform of the representative system, to make parliament more responsive to the people at large, were suspect as being the first steps along the road to democracy and the redistribution of property. Agitation by public meetings, or suspected plots to overthrow the government, were countered by the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act and the billeting of troops in the ‘disturbed districts’.
The Prince Regent, presiding to all appearances over this repressive regime, had to bear a large share of the resulting unpopularity. He had been greeted by absolute silence from the crowds which came to witness the opening of Parliament in both November 1812 and 1813 and this turned into outright hostility after Caroline’s departure in 1814. Yet he was not insensitive to the plight of the poor and the unemployed. Moira, the Regent’s spokesman in the Lords, declared in a debate on the Framebreaking Bill in 1812 which proposed the death penalty for the offence, that while Parliament should take measures to stamp out the offences, it should also ‘endeavour to prevent those distresses which gave rise to them, and to try to ameliorate the situation of the starving manufacturers’ (i.e. artisans). Most people shared this more humanitarian attitude but felt themselves, and the state, to be helpless in face of the trade cycle and the after-effects of the war. ‘These evils’, the Regent declared in his speech opening the session in 1817, ‘are of a nature not to admit of an immediate remedy’. Poor relief expenditure, the responsibility of local and not national authorities, rose to its maximum but it was never more than a palliative. The year turned out to be one of the worst, in terms of popular distress, in the whole of the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, though distress and disaffection were sporadic in nature and varied in intensity from place to place. Government however was always liable to panic, and anxiety was kept on the boil by exaggerated reports from spies and informers set to watch for signs of danger – and paid by results. The situation culminated in an apparent assassination attempt in January 1817, when the Regent’s carriage window was pierced by either a bullet or a stone when he was on his way to open the session of Parliament. The Cabinet was shaken by the outrage: Peel considered it a sign that ‘the general spirit of the country is worse, I apprehend, than we understand it to be’. The attack seemed a prelude to a general insurrection. Both Houses rushed to pass loyal addresses expressing their horror at the attempt, and though in his reply George assured them that he felt ‘no other sentiment on the occasion but deep regret at the violation of the laws and the breach of good order’, Lord Fitzwilliam caustically expressed the hostility of the Whig opposition when he remarked that ‘minds differently constituted might perhaps under similar circumstances have lamented that they could not show themselves to their subjects without being hiss’d, hooted and pelted’.8
The government decided to take no chances and the attack provided a pretext for stronger measures of repression. Secret committees of the two houses claimed to have found evidence of extensive disaffection in London and the manufacturing towns and declared the existence of a ‘traitorous conspiracy’ for the overthrow of government and ‘a general plunder and division of property’ among the ‘lower orders’. On the basis of these somewhat unreliable assertions Parliament suspended Habeas Corpus, passed an Act to forbid ‘seditious’ meetings of more than fifty persons without the authority of a magistrate, and two years later, after the ‘Peterloo massacre’ of 16 August, 1819, when the crowd at a peaceful demonstration in Manchester was ridden down by yeomanry cavalry and eleven people were killed, passed the ‘Six Acts’ against various forms of radical activity. The Prince’s action in sending a message of congratulation to the Manchester magistrates after Peterloo without waiting for full information, much less an enquiry into the episode, seemed further to emphasize his lack of sympathy for his own subjects and their plight.9
George’s action was certainly hasty, but on the other hand ministers believed that the mood of the country was dangerous and that any apparent lack of support for the forces of law and order would demoralize those on whom the maintenance of the country’s institutions depended. Though much of the appearance of disaffection and potential uprisings was later shown to have been manufactured or exaggerated by government spies and informers, the mood at the time was near to panic and Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, was taking no chances.
Thus George came to be associated in the popular culture of the time with the repressive acts of the central and local authorities and the refusal of ministers and Parliament to make concessions to popular demands or modify the discriminatory system of taxation which bore most heavily on the poorer sections of society. The identification was not altogether unjust. George was kind to his personal servants as individuals, but he gave little thought to general social problems. He was not an ‘enlightened despot’ who could set his own policies or rule without reference to the interests of the upper classes who dominated society and government, even had it been the practice of the age for governments to concern themselves with social welfare beyond the necessary maintenance of order and subordination. Nor was he, unlike his father, an active, businesslike monarch who took the trouble to inform himself on political details. He lacked interest in routine business and could barely be persuaded to attend to his papers and boxes. He was content to leave to others the smooth working of the machine. Ministers were theoretically his personal servants, but in practice they were increasingly responsible from day to day to Parliament rather than to the monarch, who was fast becoming a constitutional figurehead. The monarch’s views and opinions might be taken into account, but if they were at variance with those of ministers and Parliament it was expected that he and not they would give way. It was becoming the accepted principle that the Crown should not resist the will of Parliament, at least in matters of real significance.
Whether a king could enforce his will in the minor matter of appointments or grand views of policy depended on personalities and the nature of his relationship with the Prime Minister and his colleages. Thus, to associate the repressive policies of Liverpool’s government and Sidmouth in particular with George personally is unfair: he followed rather than led his ministers’ actions. Radical propaganda did focus on the ministers, particularly on Liverpool, Sidmouth, Castlereagh – who as leader of the House of Commons was seen as sharing in the responsibility for repressive legislation – and Canning, and might even appeal to George as Regent to exercise his prerogative to rescue the country from them. ‘You have been beloved and respected by people and can be again’, the Black Dwarf wrote in 1817. In fact, after the Leigh Hunt trial in 1812 editors were cautious about attacking the Regent personally and adopted an oblique way of associating him with ministers’ actions. The same article referred to him as adored by the people once, when Fox was alive, but now led astray by his ‘own passions, and the pernicious flattery of sycophants’.10
In one respect, however, George was saddled with the whole responsibility for what was seen as his tyrannical conduct, and was pilloried unmercifully in the press. This was the treatment of his wife in the months following his accession to the throne in January 1820. In February the radical newspaper the Republican came out in support of
this injured woman – this victim, first to unbridled lust, and now to despotism. … This innocent, injured, and unfortunate Princess, had her future happiness sacrificed at the altar of profligacy. … Her husband has decoyed her into a marriage to answer his own private views, without the slightest affection towards her, he just condescends to consummate the marriage, and then drives her from his house, studies to insult her, by every means that can be devised, and utterly forsakes her by a public avowal that he will never meet her in public. What tie can a woman feel towards such a husband as this … when she perceives that the man who has seduced her into this situation, is daily revelling in adulterous harlotry?11
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, the public was to take her up as an injured woman suffering under the persecution of a profligate tyrant who was as guilty as she was of adultery. Cobbett wrote that the parting with Caroline was the real cause of the unpopularity which George had to endure for the rest of his life; and the attempt in 1820 to divorce her reduced his reputation to its lowest ebb. Even Sarah Lyttelton wrote that the King ‘is so unpopular, his private character so despised, and everything he does so injudicious as well as unprincipled that one can hardly wish him well out of it, except for the fear of a revolution’.12
Princess Caroline’s departure from England in 1814 had dashed at least temporarily the hopes of the Regent’s political opponents that she might provide them with further opportunities to embarrass him. By removing herself voluntarily from the scene at a time when George’s popularity, despite the victories in Europe, was still low, and about to fall even lower because of the hardships of the post-war recession, she deprived herself of the opportunity to exploit his misfortunes to her own advantage. Looked at more objectively, her decision was understandable. Without the King to protect her, and in face of the hostility of the Queen and most of the royal family, she was vulnerable to plots and machinations which might provide pretexts for the Prince to divorce her, while the approaching prospect of Charlotte’s being married off to a foreign suitor freed George’s hands from any restraint which his daughter’s presence might impose on him. In any case, eighteen years of fighting against the frustrations of her life were enough. Abroad, she might have the chance of avoiding constant publicity and of being able to enjoy herself without the need to observe the restraints of English society. She knew she was unlikely ever to become queen and if she could manage to live comfortably on her increased income she might pass her time agreeably enough.
Accompanied by a retinue of mainly English friends and supporters, Caroline embarked on 8 August 1814 on what became a hectic and picaresque tour of the pleasure spots of Europe in the company of notorious adventurers and obscure Italian hangers-on who soon replaced the more respectable of her English companions.13 Her behaviour, freed from whatever had remained of the barriers imposed by prudence and convention, reflected her determination to enjoy her new freedom to, and beyond, the limit of acceptable conduct. Reports, which hardly underrated the spectacular side of her activities, attracted attention in England, not least that of the Prince, while his agents, or spies, who trailed after her reported back the full details. The Prince was overjoyed, not only that she was now out of the way, but also that she was providing evidence which might be useful in the divorce proceedings on which he was still determined. Baron Ompteda, a former Hanoverian court chamberlain, who was recommended by Count Münster, the Hanoverian minister in England, undertook to ‘give proof to the Prince Regent of Great Britain and Hanover of his zeal and devotion’ by providing ‘an exact account of her conduct’ and ‘sufficient proofs to legitimate’ any reports of particularly scandalous behaviour. Evidence was to be forthcoming soon enough. Meanwhile, foreign courts were encouraged to refuse to receive her or recognize her royal status, the papal court being particularly helpful and co-operative.14
Reports from Ompteda and others, particularly describing Caroline’s supposed intimacy with her Italian major-domo and favourite Pergami (or Bergami) and their frequent occupancy of adjoining or communicating bedrooms, encouraged George to hope that the necessary evidence for divorce would soon be available. If nothing else, the possibility that Caroline might have a child, in addition to the existing doubts about the status of William Austin, who was accompanying her and being widely regarded as her son, aroused fresh concern about Charlotte’s succession to the throne. The Prince’s Hanoverian ministers were particularly concerned because of the Salic law which would forbid Charlotte’s succession to the German kingdom in any case. They urged the necessity of a divorce but, as Count Münster pointed out, a divorce in Hanover under local law might not suffice in England. There was also a doubt whether her adultery with a foreigner abroad would subject her to the penalties of high treason in England.
The Prince sought a legal opinion from the ecclesiastical lawyers at Doctors’ Commons, and was advised that proceedings in the ecclesiastical courts might be lengthy, taking perhaps three years or longer, and that if it were to be proved that he had committed adultery himself there would be a bar to divorce proceedings against his wife under the principle of ‘recrimination’. The law officers agreed that the facts produced were not sufficiently well-founded to ensure the success of divorce proceedings in England, and the Cabinet pointed out that the evidence, coming from foreigners in a ‘low station of life’, might be difficult to prove, considering the xenophobic attitude of the English in general, particularly towards Italians, who were regarded as especially frivolous, untrustworthy and venal. Lengthy proceedings in an ecclesiastical court were also ruled out as being likely to stir up public agitation against the Prince, proceedings for a parliamentary Bill of divorce were likely to fail because of the nature of the witnesses and proceedings for a verdict of high treason would be even more unreliable. The Cabinet concluded that they were ‘decidedly adverse’ to any proceedings either in the ecclesiastical courts or in Parliament without further and more reliable evidence.15
So matters rested until after Charlotte’s death, when her father determined to renew his efforts. ‘Much difficulty in point of delicacy’, he wrote to Lord Eldon, had been ‘set aside in my mind by the late melancholy event which has taken place in my family’: in other words he was no longer deterred from disgracing his dead daughter’s mother. He was determined
to extricate myself from the cruellest as well as the most unjust predicament that ever even the lowest individual, much more a Prince, was ever placed in, by unshackling myself from a woman who has for the last three and twenty years not alone been the bane and curse of my existence, but who now stands prominent in the eyes of the whole world characterized by a flagrancy of abandonment unparalleled in the history of women, and stamped with disgrace and dishonour.
He could not bear the thought that ‘such a monster’ should continue to bear his name and he had determined to rid himself of her by any means. He laid the latest reports of Caroline’s conduct before his ministers, confident that they would endorse his wishes, only to receive the same answer: moreover such proceedings would be seen as the vindictive pursuit of a woman no longer protected by the status of her daughter as a future Queen of England. In the delicate state of the country, with sedition and discontent rife, it would be foolhardy to take the risk.16
George turned to other tactics. New efforts would be made to gather conclusive evidence in Italy. Three commissioners were appointed under the authority of the Vice-Chancellor, Sir John Leach, to investigate the matter on the spot. The chosen members of the commission were William Cooke, KC, formerly an authority on the bankruptcy laws, but now almost retired from the bar, John Allan Powell, a younger solicitor hoping for preferment, and Major James Browne, a military attaché at the British embassy in Vienna who was selected for his knowledge of Italian language and customs. They were instructed that there must be no possible doubt about their evidence: witnesses must not be given money except for bona fide expenses and no other inducements must be offered for them to testify. The mission was enthusiastically supported by the Prince, but only reluctantly and partially by the Prime Minister and Cabinet, who feared the impact of more scandal on public opinion. The ‘Milan Commission’, as it became known from its base of operations, was thus of doubtful constitutional legality.17
The commission began work in the autumn of 1818 but it soon degenerated into farce. The witnesses, called to Browne’s lodgings in Milan to give their testimony, made it clear that scandalous stories about Caroline were freely available at the right price, and they gossiped unrestrainedly in the inns with the eager Englishmen. Clearly no reliable or untainted evidence was going to emerge. Nevertheless, Caroline herself was frightened that she would be irretrievably damaged by these disclosures, many if not all of which were in fact quite true, and offered a compromise. She told James Brougham, Henry’s brother, who visited her in Pesaro where she was now living, that she would agree to a divorce provided she received an adequate sum to enable her to live comfortably in Italy with Pergami. She no longer wished to return to England.
James Brougham was sceptical as to her motives but passed on the offer to his brother, who consulted Lord Lauderdale, the Prince’s friend. They concluded that no divorce was possible without proof or her confession of adultery, and this Caroline ruled out. She hoped that Henry Brougham would secure her an agreement on her terms: the Prince’s intransigence forbade that, but Caroline still hoped that he might be forced to agree at least to a formal separation in return for an income and her agreement to give up her hopes of becoming Queen – which had no longer any value for her since Charlotte’s death. Brougham formalized these notions into a proposal that Caroline would remain abroad, renounce the right to be crowned or take the title of Queen, and receive £50,000 a year. He put the proposals to Lord Hutchinson, a friend of the Prince, but George again refused to agree to such terms. Only a divorce would satisfy him, based on the report of the Milan Commission which was now almost ready and which condemned Caroline’s conduct. The furthest he would go was to consider a divorce by consent and arrangement, but the Cabinet stepped forcefully on that idea and insisted that divorce could be obtained only on proof of adultery before a recognized court. Since any attempt of that kind was likely to lead to public controversy and a threat of riot and disturbance, the Cabinet repeated their veto on anything further than a separation by agreement, without public proceedings, which the Regent again refused to consider.18
The affair was leading to a breakdown of relations between the Prince and his government, while Caroline, increasingly frustrated by the delay and uncertainty, and probably already in touch with the Prince’s English radical enemies, was making ostentatious preparations to return to England to demand her rights. Her journey came to nothing for the present, possibly, as her biographer suggests, because the Peterloo affair diverted the attention of her radical advisers and provided an alternative and more productive channel for their attacks on the Regent and his government.19 The question of a royal divorce or separation hung fire until, after Christmas, the old mad King at Windsor caught a cold which turned to pneumonia and carried him at last peacefully to the grave on 29 January 1820. The ‘Queen’s affair’ was about to begin.
1 Quoted in The Gridiron, or, Cook’s Weekly Register, 23 March 1822. Government expenditure 1812–15 totalled £550 million, 3.5 times the equivalent in 1793–6: J.E. Cookson, Liverpool’s Administration, 19.
2 Parl. Debates, xxxiii, 476–513; Romilly, Memoirs, iii, 236–7; Castlereagh to George, [20 March] 1816: LG4, ii, 161.
3 22 March 1812.
4 C. New, Life of Henry Brougham, 91.
5 J. Stevenson, Popular Disturbances, 155–62; F.O. Darvall, Popular Disturbances, passim.
6 Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, vol. 1, Early Days, 301–2.
7 N. Gash, Aristocracy and People, 76–89; Cookson, 102–16; Romilly, Memoirs, iii, 75.
8 Peel to Lord Whitworth, 29 Jan. 1817: C.S. Parker, Peel, i, 237; Parl. Debates, xxi, 1167; Darvall, 334–7; Commons Journals lxxii, 4; Smith, Whig Principles, 335, quoting Fitzwilliam to Milton [29 Jan. 1817]: Fitzwilliam papers, Northamptonshire Record Office, X515.
9 Parl. Debates, 18 Feb. 1817, xxxv, 411–19 (Lords) and 19 Feb. 438–47 (Commons); second reports ibid., 12 June, xxxvi, 949–56 and 20 June, 1088–98; Read, Peterloo, 181–5.
10 The Black Dwarf, 21 Dec. 1817.
11 The Republican, 25 Feb. 1820.
12 E.B. Wilbraham to Colchester, 20 June 1820: Colchester, Diary, iii, 141–3; Sarah Lyttelton to F. Spencer, 7 and 24 June 1820: Wyndham, Lyttelton, 224.
13 Caroline’s narrative of her travels, Queen Caroline papers, RA 13/7; Fraser, 263–87.
14 Fraser, 261, 309, 343–5, 359; Queen Caroline papers, RA 8/6.
15 Münster to George, 2 June 1816; Legal opinion 1 Aug. 1816; minute of Cabinet, 11 Aug.; legal opinion, Hanover [n.d.]: RA 8/2; Cabinet minute, 24 July 1819: C.D. Yonge, Liverpool, iii, 19–22.
16 George to Eldon, 1 Jan. 1818: RA 21/179/159; Twiss, ii, 304–5; Fraser, 302–4.
17 Memoranda by Powell and by Leach, 4 Feb. 1821: RA 13/7; Leach to Cooke, Browne and Powell, 8 Aug. 1818: LG4, ii, 252.
18 Memoranda by Leach and Powell on the Milan Commission; James Brougham to Henry Brougham [1819]: ibid., ii, 410–17, 272–85; Fraser, 311–12; Brougham to Hutchinson, 14 July 1819; cabinet minute 17 June 1819; George to Liverpool, 22 June: Yonge, iii, 15–19.
19 Fraser, 332–8.