CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mr Canning

‘Mr Canning is dead. There is another blow to wretched Ireland. No man can become of importance to her but he is immediately snatched off by one fatal accident or the other.’

Daniel O’Connell to his wife, August 1827

THE FUNERAL OF Frederick Duke of York took place late in the evening, according to royal custom, on 20 January 1827. In St George’s Chapel, Windsor, his body would join those of Henry VIII and Charles I. Both of them, as it happened, were also second sons who, unlike Frederick, had succeeded to the throne, although with very different results. The worrying question of Frederick’s own possible accession to the throne was now for ever solved.

The weather was icy: this freezing temperature, or rather the lack of provision for it where a number of elderly men were concerned, would have important consequences. According to Greville, ‘nothing could be managed worse than [the funeral] was’.1 Except for the appearance of the soldiers in the chapel, the spectacle was not particularly imposing and the cold was intense. There was a delay of nearly two hours before the coffin was brought in, while the congregation waited. The matting in the aisles, which might have alleviated the damp chill of the chapel, had been removed; among others Lord Eldon, who had been Lord Chancellor more or less continuously since 1801 and was now in his late seventies, was left to stand there on the stone for two hours. Canning made a dour joke on the subject afterwards to Wellington: whoever removed the matting must have had bets against the lives of the Cabinet. It was a joke he might regret.2

Afterwards both the Duke of Sussex, younger brother of the dead man, and the Duke of Wellington got severe colds as a result of the exposure. Greville believed that the Bishop of Lincoln died of it. Then all the common soldiers were rumoured to have fallen sick. Ominously, it was Canning himself who was most severely struck down; he was still unwell several weeks later. Severe rheumatic pains in his head, added to a continuous painful condition thought to be gout, caused him agonies.

There was more to come. The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, had the good fortune to miss the funeral because he was convalescing at Bath from an illness which had struck him down before Christmas. Seemingly, he recovered and was back in London in February, while it was Canning who was now recuperating at Brighton with his wife. Here Canning and George IV, in residence at Brighton Pavilion, exchanged gifts: the Cannings received healing royal fruit and happily responded with some wild pig which had been presented to them, since the King was known to have a passion for it. On 17 February Lord Liverpool was found lying unconscious on the floor of his London house; ironically, he was actually holding a letter in his hand giving a worrying report on the state of Canning’s health.

The immediate question – who was now to serve as Prime Minister? – reflected on a small scale what one exasperated Anglican clergyman would call the ‘Abominable’ Question of the time. It was the Bishop of Oxford who told Robert Peel (the MP for the University) later in the year when discussing a new Chancellor for Oxford: ‘the Abominable Cath. Quest... is now mixed up with everything we eat or drink or see or think’.3 Canning was the obvious choice of successor, at any rate in the opinion of Canning himself and quite a few others. But Canning was committed to the cause of Catholic Emancipation, a well-known source of madness in the previous monarch, and various hysterical outbursts in the present one. Also Peel, the Home Secretary, was likely to refuse to serve under him, due to this very commitment on the part of Canning.

Meanwhile the politics of dispute did not stand still. On 5 March Sir Francis Burdett brought in yet another Bill for Catholic Relief.4 He chose to emphasize, among other signs of hope for the cause, the King’s visit to Ireland in August 1821. This showed how seriously George IV’s signs of favour had been taken then, with his apparently heartfelt declaration on departure that whenever an opportunity offered to serve Ireland, he would seize it ‘with eagerness’. Burdett pointed out that ‘most ardent hopes had been raised’ – and if that was not the intended message, why should the ministers have advised the King to make the visit to ‘that unfortunate country’ with all the pomp and circumstance of royalty? The King had been received as ‘the Messiah bringing healing on his wings’, and he was of course the first English sovereign who arrived as a harbinger of peace, not war.

Burdett also alluded, like many other supporters of Emancipation, to the military valour of Irish soldiers in the English cause in the past: historic names like Crécy and Agincourt were thrown in, as well as Waterloo. ‘They never failed us in the hour of peril and combat,’ he declared. The next speaker, although he disagreed with Burdett, was moved to congratulate him on his eloquence.

For all that eloquence, Catholic Relief was defeated by four votes in the House of Commons. This reversal – the first defeat on the subject of Emancipation in the Commons (as opposed to the Lords) since 1819 – can probably be attributed to the slight swing against Catholicism in the recent ‘No Popery’ General Election.5

There was talk, not for the first time, of possible trouble in Ireland as a result of the defeat: five million rounds of musket-ball cartridge were believed to have been ordered for garrisons all around the country. Thomas Moore celebrated the news in cynical style:6

I have found out a gift for my Erin

A gift that will surely content her;–

Sweet pledge of a love so endearing!–

Five millions of bullets I’ve sent her.

She ask’d me for freedom and right

But ill she her wants understood;–

Ball-cartridges, morning and night,

Is a dose that will do her more good.

Liverpool’s collapse proved to be due to a severe cerebral haemorrhage, leading to partial paralysis, and he resigned officially in April.^*1 During the weeks which followed his initial collapse and preceded this resignation, the wheeler-dealing among Pro- and Anti-Catholics, also between Whigs and Tories, was dominated by the Abominable Question. All sorts of candidates were proposed, including the Duke of Wellington. Internal debates also took place as to whether the so-called ‘open system’ should continue in which Cabinet ministers were free to have their own views on Emancipation.

The Duke of Newcastle was that Ultra-Tory who had angrily opposed the restoration of the office of Earl Marshal to a Catholic, on the grounds that it violated the constitution to have ‘a Papist’ hold high office near the person of the King. On principle Newcastle objected to any concession whatsoever to the Papists and he paid a special visit to George IV on 24 March to hector him on the subject. He was rewarded with a long account of the history of Roman Catholicism from James II to the present, given to him by his sovereign, followed by the welcome announcement that the King professed himself ‘a Protestant, heart and soul’. The Duke of Newcastle assured Lord Colchester in consequence that the King would never give his assent to any measures for Emancipation.7

In spite of the King’s manifest reluctance, it was Canning who was eventually invited to become Prime Minister on 10 April. There was a flurry of Anti-Catholic resignations, including that of the Lord Chancellor, Eldon. In the Lords Eldon spoke with emotion, eliciting at one point a rare interpolated comment from the official parliamentary report in Hansard: ‘His lordship here became sensibly affected.’8 It was the imputation that the ministers had all acted in concert to dictate to the King that distressed and angered Eldon.

Most prominently, Peel and Wellington resigned. Peel gave a clear explanation of his reason for doing so in a speech to the House of Commons three weeks later in order, as he put it, to vindicate himself against charges of disloyalty to both sovereign and government.9 He focused entirely on the subject of Catholic Emancipation. For eighteen years, Peel said, he had pursued one undeviating course, offering ‘an uncompromising, but a temperate, a fair, and, as I believe, a constitutional resistance to the making of any further concessions to the Roman Catholics’. For fourteen of those eighteen years he had been in office, and for eleven of the fourteen, closely involved with the issue.

Most emphatically, Peel stated that he regarded the removal of barriers to Roman Catholic power as inconsistent with the constitution. How could he then remain in a government of which the new head believed the exact opposite? A junior minister who resigned also on Anti-Catholic grounds was George Dawson, an Irish MP from the north, Peel’s friend from Oxford days, who was married to his sister Mary. The two men were close: Peel had made him his Private Secretary in Ireland, and later his Under-Secretary at the Home Office.

The Duke of Wellington withdrew not only from the government but from the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Army, to which he had only just been appointed on the death of the Duke of York. His implied contempt for the new administration might seem to justify Byron’s description of him as:

Proud Wellington with eagle beak so curled

That nose the hook where he suspends the world.

Mrs Arbuthnot, however, had another, less lofty explanation. The Great Duke had, she wrote, acted in a huff. Daniel O’Connell, for one, must have been pleased by Wellington’s resignation since he had exploded at the news of the appointment: Wellington, he said, deserved the execration of the people of Ireland, as he had won his title with Irish soldiers’ blood, and then voted against ‘the freedom of the Catholics of Ireland’.10

But the Duke’s whole pattern of behaviour at this time seemed to many to demonstrate that declared hatred of ‘factiousness’ (otherwise, intrigue) which might prove a disadvantage to a practising politician. On the whole question of withdrawal from the government, the Duke spoke at length in the House of Lords, a somewhat confused speech which led one observer, Prince Pückler-Muskau, to remark that the Duke was no orator, since he conducted his defence ‘like an accused person’. It was noticeable that Wellington explicitly ruled himself out as Prime Minister with the words: ‘I am sensible I am not qualified’, as well as warding off charges of disloyalty for deserting his sovereign.11

Once again opposition to Catholic Emancipation was given as the prime reason. Wellington’s resignation, like that of Peel, was because the new head of the government disagreed with him – and the King – on the matter of Catholic Relief. According to Mrs Arbuthnot, there was loud cheering at the time in the House of Lords, but here was material indeed for his enemies should circumstances ever dictate a very different public reaction to the whole subject. (The same could be said about Peel; but then any recantation by Peel on Catholic Relief was surely unthinkable.)

In private George IV made his own continuing opposition to Emancipation furiously clear in a heavily underlined letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury.12 The King was infuriated by newspaper reports of Lord Mansfield’s speech in the House of Lords.^*2 Mansfield had denounced Canning as ‘a constant, zealous and most able advocate’ of a measure which the late King George III had detested.

The King was appalled. Because Canning was his Prime Minister, this implied ‘a direct calumny’ upon his own Protestant Faith, as opposed to his father’s, and upon his honour. ‘This I do not choose to pass unnoticed... I do not deserve as King of this country, this wicked attempt to misinterpret and falsify both my principles and conduct to my Protestant subjects.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury was to make Lord Mansfield aware of the royal displeasure.13

Obviously Canning would now face considerable difficulties in forming a new Cabinet. The Abominable Question haunted everything, and among the Tories there were now, roughly speaking, four groups where Catholic Relief was concerned. Canning and his supporters had always been liberal on the matter, not so much on religious grounds as practical considerations to do with Ireland. There were others, lukewarm on the subject but now prepared to agree with him. Wellington and Peel had both declared themselves publicly dead against. A fourth group of Ultra-Tories, symbolized by the Duke of Newcastle, were against reform of any sort.

Nor were the Whigs in much better array, even though they were regarded as in principle in favour of Emancipation: Lord Eldon pointed out that the Whigs of former days had been constant advocates of a Protestant King, a Protestant government and a Protestant Parliament. ‘The present race of Whigs, through the issue of their loins had totally lost sight of their original distinctive characteristic.’ Nowadays it was more complicated. The Abominable Question was at the forefront of discussion at the parties of the formidable Lady Holland in her stately mansion, Holland House. Lord Holland himself had told Lord Grey as long ago as 1810 that ‘the Catholic claims should be a sine qua non to the acceptance of office’. Lady Holland, who according to her critics needed a padlock on her tongue, complained after Liverpool’s stroke that ‘this confounded division’ of the country into Pro-Protestants and Pro-Catholics was making the King as powerful as ever Henry VIII had been. And she was hostile to Canning.14

Fortunately, the new Henry VIII’s mood now swung temporarily in Canning’s favour, due to the secession of so many Anti-Catholics from the Cabinet – disloyal by his standards, whatever might be said by them in self-defence in Parliament. For the time being, Canning intended to maintain the system of Lord Liverpool by which Catholic Emancipation was an open question. Two other major contentious questions, concerning the Corn Laws and Parliamentary Reform, were also to be left open. However, the Whig Lord Lansdowne, of whom the Hollands approved, became Home Secretary.

But the future for Catholic Relief remained uncertain. George IV’s approval of Canning was evidently not matched by any change in his attitude to the constitution and his own position within it. The King specifically told the Marquess of Londonderry (half-brother of the late Castlereagh) on 13 April that he was bound by his Coronation Oath to resist Emancipation. Two of the most prominent Anglican clergymen, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, were personally assured that he was an even stronger Anti-Catholic than his father.15 Perhaps the King hoped by these manoeuvres to make it easy for the Anti-Catholics to remain in his government. The ploy did not succeed.

Canning’s Cabinet contained in fact only three known Anti-Catholics. There was Lord Bexley, who alone among the Anti-Catholics had chosen not to resign from the previous Cabinet, and John Copley, now transformed into Lord Chancellor under the name of Lord Lyndhurst; fiercely Anti-Catholic, he was a brilliant lawyer, compared to Mephistopheles for ‘the rich, melodious tone of his voice’.16 Thirdly, there was the Marquess of Anglesey, known as ‘One-Leg’ after his injury at Waterloo commanding the cavalry of the Anglo-Belgian Army, a politically impetuous character, currently opposed to Emancipation.

Now there was the question of the Whigs joining with the Pro-Catholic Tories to support Canning’s government. There were powerful Whigs headed by Lord Grey who refused to join the government unless it was specifically promised that the Catholic measure would be introduced. There was an additional factor in Canning’s personal unpopularity with certain Whigs. This was attested by the noble reformer Lord Grey’s disdainful remarks on the subject of his parentage, which by modern standards at least lacked taste: he could not de facto join a government, he said, headed by the son of an actress.17

These were the Whigs who believed the time for compromise was over, the time for outright Emancipation had come. Other Whigs were less dedicated on the issue and entered into talks with Canning: these, however, eventually broke down. It seemed that the long, long rule of the Tories – over fifty years with a short break in 1806 – was not yet over despite the increasingly splintered nature of the party.

Unfortunately, Canning’s health had never really recovered from that fatal ordeal of the royal funeral in January. His sardonic remark to the Duke of Wellington on the subject of the lives of the Cabinet was now acquiring a horrible ring of truth; or perhaps the poisonously Anti-Papist Duke of York was enjoying revenge from beyond the grave. During July, Canning’s health grew perceptibly worse and at Windsor it was noted that he looked dreadfully ill. The Duke of Devonshire generously loaned the Prime Minister Chiswick House on 20 July in order to help his recovery. But the pains grew worse, with inflammation of liver and lungs; hope faded and on 8 August George Canning died there at the age of fifty-seven, by a melancholy coincidence in the same room as had another politician widely thought to have died too soon: Charles James Fox. He had been Prime Minister for a mere 119 days.^*3

The King duly appointed what would be his third Tory Prime Minister in under a year: forty-five-year-old Viscount Goderich. Wellington had entertained some hopes, according to his correspondence with Mrs Arbuthnot. In that way that politicians have always behaved, a mixture of arrogance and humility, he took care during this period of uncertainty to be found always ‘At Home’, in case the call to office came. But for George IV it was to be Goderich, a member of the Liverpool administration, lukewarm perhaps on the subject of Emancipation but who had not felt inspired to resign. The time had not yet arrived to tackle what from the Anti-Catholic point of view was described as all the mischief Canning had done: ‘as much in four months, as it was possible for a Man to do. God knows how it is to be remedied’, in the words of Wellington.18

Born Frederick Robinson, Goderich had been given his peerage by Liverpool shortly before the latter’s collapse; he had asked for it himself, on the sympathetic grounds that his eleven-year-old daughter had died, and being in the Lords made it easier to spend the evenings with his sorrowing wife. Goderich was the younger son of Lord Grantham, progressing from Harrow and Cambridge to a seat in the House of Commons at the age of twenty-four and from there via various government posts to being Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1823.

Although basically liberal, voting against slavery for example, he was not seen as a man of very strong political convictions – something which might be construed as an advantage in the present situation. On the other hand, a certain nervosity, a propensity to go to pieces under stress, even a tendency to weep during the making of a speech – not helped by the death of his child – was more dangerous when there were so many big political beasts around. (Lord Grey had a nasty habit of referring to him as ‘Lady Goderich’.) During the autumn of 1827, as Goderich failed to provide the King with the stability he required, the latter came to describe him as ‘a damned, snivelling, blubbering blockhead’.19 This was not only cruel but unfair: the confusion of English politics at this time, among Whigs as well as Tories, with no generally viable solution to the Abominable Question in sight, would have tried a Machiavelli or a Metternich. Goderich was neither.

Throughout this time, O’Connell in Ireland let his political actions and speeches be guided by one thing only: what was potentially good for Emancipation. That is to say, at the death of the Duke of York at the turn of the year he had expressed hopes for a better future with the new heir to the throne: William Duke of Clarence. He had even sent a message of encouragement to be passed on to the Duke’s entourage: ‘In plain English, the Duke can command Ireland heart, hand and soul if he pleases.’20 He was quoting once again the widely held belief that Clarence had liberal sympathies, unlike his brother Cumberland.

Thereafter O’Connell sent a series of messages to Eneas MacDonnell, an activist lawyer and former newspaper editor now in London as the agent to the Catholic Association – or, as he was embracingly described, agent to ‘the Catholics of Ireland’. Members of Parliament for the Irish counties were to be instructed that every man was to be regarded as an ‘actual enemy’ [sic] who did not support Canning against Peel and the Anti-Catholics. Burdett’s defeat in March found O’Connell full of public indignation: a meeting was called at which opponents of Emancipation were declared anathema, to receive no support at the next General Election.

Nevertheless, O’Connell was for good reason devastated by the cruel news in August. He wrote to his wife in despair: ‘My heart’s darling, Mr Canning is dead. There is another blow to wretched Ireland. No man can become of importance to her but he is immediately snatched off by one fatal accident or the other.’21

That Irish novelist approved by George IV, Lady Morgan, believed that Canning’s absorbing idea had been to become the Atlas of England, ‘to raise her on his shoulders’. Such a man would be sadly missed at this awesome moment. O’Connell cheered himself with the assurance that at least under the circumstances it was ‘impossible to form a No-Popery administration’, hoping for the Whig Lord Lansdowne. Nor did he immediately reject the idea of Goderich, although by the end of September he was privately doubting that the new administration had enough good sense and courage to act honestly by Ireland.22 There were some individuals ‘perfectly free from guile’, others such as Henry Joy, the new Attorney-General and ‘a virulent Anti-Catholic partisan’, for whom he had angry contempt.

Whatever the developments in England, it was in Ireland that the Catholic Association was able to tap into the true and intimate concerns of the people. Hence the furore raised in the autumn on the subject of Catholic burial grounds. Like the lack of Catholic chaplains in Dublin’s Newgate Prison, it was an issue which struck at the emotions as well as the intellect. The matter was raised with energy at a meeting of the Association in September by the Rev. William L’Estrange. By an Act passed in 1824, clergy who were not Protestants and thus not part of the Established Church were allowed to officiate at burials in Protestant churchyards, provided that the local clergyman (of the Church of Ireland) gave permission; if he refused, he had to give his reasons in writing. There also needed to be payment of a burial fee. Obviously this system, connected to such a serious and emotional moment in any family’s life, was subject to possible abuse. In fact it had always been customary for Catholic clergy to officiate at Catholic burials in a predominantly Catholic country – only, as with so much of Catholic daily life, it had been technically illegal.

Now a subcommittee was formed to procure free Catholic burial grounds as part of the Association’s campaign to make legal what had long been popular practice. O’Connell had already given an opinion on ‘Rights of Sepulture’ four years earlier: that the praying for the dead by a Catholic priest at a funeral or in a churchyard was emphatically not against common law. The Catholic religion had its existence in the common law before the Reformation, so that praying for the dead could not now be prohibited at funerals, in churchyards or elsewhere. On the contrary, it was a common-law part of the duty of the priest that he was bound to perform. O’Connell now wrote at length along the same lines to L’Estrange: it was perfectly legal for any sect of Christians, such as the Quakers, to have separate burial grounds.23

O’Connell reiterated his earlier argument about the Catholics’ historic right. All this applied to enclosed as well as unenclosed churchyards, and it was obviously advisable to have a chapel adjacent for the sake of celebrating with ‘suitable solemnity and religion’. He ended on a less high-minded note which referred to the burial fees charged by the Protestants: ‘This measure will take away a large quantity of plunder from a very vile class, the parsons of the [Established] Church.’

On a different level, O’Connell’s emphasis on industrious but peaceful political activity was maintained. Personally, he was haunted by debts, which the inheritance from his late relative ‘Hunting Cap’ had failed to wipe out. In public things were very different: the Catholic Rent continued to be collected in an orderly fashion. Contacts and local alliances were being made which might be useful one day when battle was once more openly joined, as it had been at the time of the General Election in 1826.

In England throughout the autumn, the confused administration of Goderich, Tory but including Whigs, did not flourish, nor was it growing in favour with the King. By mid-December, as Charles Greville put it, Prime Minister and monarch ‘had been going on ill together for some time’. He also recorded what he had heard from Lord Mount Charles, the eldest son of the King’s mistress Lady Conyngham – a good source for information about the royal mood: ‘the King is quite mad upon the Catholic question... his real desire is to get rid of the Whigs, take back the Duke of Wellington and make an Anti-Catholic Government’.24

Viscount Lowther, in a letter to the King’s Secretary, Sir William Knighton, on 6 January 1828, reported that there was much talk of changes in the ministry. From all he heard, the general wish was for the King to decide in favour of a ministry which was either exclusively Tory or exclusively Whig. ‘The majority of the John Bulls like a plain downright straightforward course and are already quite nauseated with the twistings and patchings of the middle Party.’ They saw that there was no force or energy in the government, hence all their plans were weakened and ‘drivelled away’ by the necessity of compromise. Nor was the verdict much better from the Whig side. In the New Year the leading Whig, Lord Holland, dismissed Goderich in a letter to his son as having behaved with ‘irresolution, levity and pour trancher le mot [let’s say the word] incapacity’, even if he had no bad design for anybody. All the same Holland personally could not ‘prudently or creditably’ accept a post in his government.25

Goderich’s term as Prime Minister ended on 8 January 1828, over a clash between his Chancellor and his Colonial Secretary, but it was as much dismissal as resignation. It was said that he wept and had to be handed the royal handkerchief. Early in the morning the Duke of Wellington received a visit from the new Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst, to break it to him that he was wanted at Windsor. There he found the King still in bed, still in his night-clothes including a night-turban, announcing that the Cabinet was defunct. Wellington was invited to form a government.

He agreed, although still unsure whether the role of Prime Minister accorded with that of Commander-in-Chief – which represented the monarch’s own view. George IV for his part, his assurance as a monarch having grown with the confused autumn, had two prime conditions for his government. Catholic Emancipation must remain an open question, and the Cabinet must contain both Pro- and Anti-Catholics. In short there was to be absolutely no official governmental support for further Catholic Relief (which he had taken up again under Goderich). The uncompromising resistance of which Peel had openly spoken in May was still discernible in the mentality of the monarch. He also pettishly insisted that Lord Grey was not to form part of the administration – a veto based on a personal clash over a lady long ago.26

At the time this did not seem a particularly auspicious opening to the New Year for the Catholics or their supporters. Thomas Spring Rice, an Irish MP in favour of Emancipation and Under-Secretary for the Home Office, quit his post. He told O’Connell that a ‘Tory and exclusive government’ certainly could not claim any sympathy from him ‘should such a monster be formed’, as he thought most probable.27 There were a host of angry Catholic Petitions in January which seemed at the time to be utterly in vain. Yet 1828 was in fact to prove the turning point in the struggle for Catholic Emancipation.