CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Duel

‘Well, what do you think of it, a gentleman who has been fighting a duel?’

The Duke of Wellington to Mrs Arbuthnot, March 1829

ROBERT PEEL’S SPEECH to the House of Commons, in which he intended to explain the absolute necessity of Catholic Emancipation, began at 7.30 in the evening on 5 March.1 It lasted for nearly five hours. Peel’s opening sentence was as dramatic as anything else, given what had been happening: ‘I rise as a Minister of the King and sustained by the just authority which belongs to that character, to vindicate the advice given to his Majesty by a united Cabinet.’ Then he added: ‘I yield to a moral necessity I cannot control’, before passing on to the crucial statement: ‘According to my heart and conscience, I believe that the time is come when less danger is to be apprehended to the general interests of the empire, and to the spiritual and temporal welfare of the Protestant establishment in attempting to adjust the Catholic Question, than in allowing it to remain any longer in its present state.’

Like the King, Peel demanded sympathy for the pain he was enduring. There was a quotation from Peel’s favourite, Dryden, in The Hind and the Panther, which referred to the suffering involved in a change of mind:

’Tis said, with ease – but oh! how hardly tried

By haughty souls to human honour tied –

Oh! sharp convulsive pangs of agonising pride!

Peel then explained why there would be no Veto or ‘securities’: ‘we willingly relinquish a “security” from which no real benefit will arise, but which might, after what has passed, detract from the grace and favour of the measure of relief’. Greville for one believed that these same pangs of agonizing pride led to the making of the best speech Peel ever delivered, and Mrs Arbuthnot recorded a generally similar view. On the other side it was probably a compliment that Sir Robert Inglis, now MP for Oxford University in Peel’s place, thought it so bad that his previous constituents would be appalled. John Hobhouse wrote that ‘it was difficult to believe our senses, and this was the Protestant champion’. As Lord Sefton commented to Hobhouse, ‘My God! did you ever hear anything like that? There he goes, bowling them down, one after another.’2

Peel ended his bowling by quoting Livy in Latin to this effect: ‘I would indeed like to please you but I much prefer to make you safe whatever your feelings towards me may be in the future.’ Then he added: ‘Sir, I will hope for the best. God grant that the moral storm may be appeased – that the turbid waters of strife may be settled and composed – and that, having found their just level, they may be mingled with equal flow in one clear and equal stream.’

The cheers in the House of Commons were heard as far as Westminster Hall. Greville reflected: if only the University of Oxford had been there! It was said that Peel’s old father, Sir Robert Peel the first Baronet – who died the following year – had his speech read to him and declared: ‘Robin’s the lad after all.’3 At last it seemed possible that the answer to that question the King had put to Wellington six weeks earlier – ‘By God, do you mean to let them into Parliament?’ – was ‘Yes’. But of course, at the very end it would not be Wellington and his government who would let the Roman Catholics into Parliament: it was the monarch when he gave the Royal Assent. There had already been one short-lived hysterical scene over the inclusion of Emancipation in the King’s speech; it might be a prelude to something more obdurate. In this context the continuing presence of the Duke of Cumberland made for danger.

The Catholic Relief Bill was given its first reading in the House of Commons on 10 March and the second reading was moved on 17 March. The date was of course St Patrick’s Day, increasingly marked by celebration in England, as the Irish community swelled with immigration. Daniel O’Connell was in London but, as he told his wife Mary, he had not yet decided the timing of taking his seat in Parliament. He did, however, survive a challenge in the shape of a Petition to the House by four Co. Clare Freeholders, calling for his deselection; their argument was that there had been intimidation by the Catholic clergy. The Petition was dismissed and he was duly declared elected.

In spite of this, in spite of his earlier public victory in Co. Clare, there remained a huge question mark over O’Connell’s actual admission to the House of Commons; it concerned the oath that he would take on entry. One of John Croker’s correspondents in Dublin described him as being ‘in a paroxysm of fear now that the hour approaches for performing the Fee-faw-fum of the Irish political giant at the bar of the House’. This derision did O’Connell less than justice, although Henry Hunt, the Radical MP, with less savagery, also believed he should try to take his seat. But the bill was not yet law, and any MP entering Parliament now was still faced with an effectively Anti-Catholic oath which O’Connell had always sworn he would never take, ‘for [all] the wealth of the world’.4 It was understandable that he wished to reserve himself for the symbolic moment of entry until the dreaded oath was amended.

On the eve of the introduction of the bill, Daniel O’Connell had written to Mary: ‘tomorrow is the awful day, big with the fate of Cato and Rome’, and, having quoted Joseph Addison’s tragedy Cato (which American patriots such as George Washington also loved), mocked himself: ‘you see, my love, how poetic I am grown’.5 Two days later he greeted the detailed Emancipation Bill as a ‘great and glorious triumph’ with no Veto and no ecclesiastical payments.

The additional bills to prevent the extension of the Jesuits and other monastic orders, and the ‘bad, very bad’ bill to raise the freehold qualifications, would hopefully be countered. In fact, the history of the Society of Jesus during this period was extremely complicated. In short, it had been suppressed by the Pope in 1773 in the brief Dominus ac Redemptor; nevertheless, there were Jesuits in England with their headquarters in Liège, where the Prince showed them an indulgent attitude. The Pope caused the restoration of the Society at the end of his captivity in 1814 at the hands of Napoleon; by 1829 there were reckoned to be over a hundred Jesuits in England, and, quite apart from Stonyhurst in Lancashire, even a small day school for boys in Norton Street (now Bolsover Street), near Regent’s Park.

O’Connell was similarly optimistic to the Provincial of the Franciscan Fathers in Cork: the bill, on the subject of Catholic Orders, was ‘insolent’ and ‘inexcusable’ but unworkable in practice.6 In short, he advised the Catholics to be quiet for the time being and remember there would soon be fellow Catholic MPs in Parliament, working on their behalf.

The Irishmen in London on St Patrick’s Day made merry. In St Giles district (to the east of modern Oxford Street), long held to be the haunt of vagrants, O’Connell encountered hundreds of his elated compatriots with large shamrocks in their hats. ‘God bless you, Counsellor!’ they shouted, and a new cry was heard: ‘Huzza for the Juke of Willington!’7 This was at a moment when the Tory press were hissing with fury over the Duke’s behaviour, coupled with that of Peel. In the genial spirit of the day, another Irishman had a helpful suggestion: ‘By my soul, we are all terribly dry with shouting. I wish the Counsellor would open his heart and give us our Patrick’s Pot.’^* The Catholic grandees, however, were less welcoming to their Irish co-religionist. On 6 March O’Connell complained to his wife that this time the Duke of Norfolk had not yet entertained him, and nor had any of the leading English Catholics: ‘We have been invited only by the rich mercantile men’ (which included ‘rich Jews in the City’).8

The debate on the second reading of the bill was marked by ‘a rabid rant’ from the Attorney-General. Sir Charles Wetherell accused Peel and Lyndhurst, the Lord Chancellor, in language that even Lord Lowther, who shared his views, thought too extreme to be effective. Many believed him to be drunk. Others commented on the vulgarity and coarse buffoonery of his speech. The frenzied gestures with which Wetherell accompanied his words were so great that his braces broke, and his breeches began to descend. This inspired a bon mot which Greville attributed to the Speaker: the only ‘lucid interval’ Wetherell had was that between his waistcoat and his breeches.9

Charles Wetherell was dismissed from the government on 22 March. So far the Duke of Wellington had pursued a conciliatory policy towards his colleagues, including Wetherell, who voted against the bill. He did not wish to be obliged to take in Whigs in favour of Emancipation to fill their places. Wetherell for his part had refused to resign his post, despite his strong feelings against Emancipation, in order, as he told his friends, to throw the onus of dismissing him on the government. Now Charles Wetherell’s furious pomposity (including the entertainment provided by his breaking braces) was from any point of view hard to ignore. What this demonstrated, along with other similarly themed speeches from Ultra-Tories, was that while compromise was the new spirit of Wellington, the spirit of Anti-Popery remained deep, not only in the hearts of those designated the ‘lowest orders’, but in fact among those designated their governors.

Such tirades were not limited to the House of Commons. In the Lords, ‘Roaring Hatton’, in other words the Earl of Winchilsea, the hero of Penenden Heath to his followers, continued to harangue sympathetic fellow Brunswickers in his familiar style. The Anti-Catholic newspaper John Bull had printed one of his own rants in mid-February: ‘Let the voice of Protestantism be heard from one end of the Empire to the other. Let the sound of it echo from hill to hill, and vale to vale. Let the tables of the Houses of Parliament groan under the weight of your Petitions; and let your Prayers reach the foot of the Throne.’10 Part of his appeal, or otherwise, was of course the voice, that bellow which Mrs Arbuthnot declared she could hear right outside in the lobbies – less appropriate, as she pointed out, in the House of Lords than on Penenden Heath.

When Lord Winchilsea decided to make his views known in other ways, trouble, real trouble ensued. The story of Emancipation had begun with the bloodshed in the Gordon Riots. For a moment it looked as if the blood shed fifty-odd years later might be that of the Prime Minister. The duel which the Duke of Wellington was currently having with the forces of reaction – including the King – found a grim echo on 21 March. And the challenge to a duel actually came from the Duke of Wellington, not the Earl of Winchilsea.11

On 16 March a letter appeared in the Standard from Lord Winchilsea announcing that he was cancelling his subscription of £50 a year (nearly £4,000 today) to the newly founded King’s College, London. This was because of the part that the Duke of Wellington had played in its foundation. It was the Duke who had been present at the opening meeting in June the previous year, flanked by archbishops and bishops, to reaffirm the place of religious teaching in education (unlike University College, then called London University, in ‘Godless Gower St’). Winchilsea proceeded to accuse the Duke, in print, of an evil long-term plan to attack the constitution of 1688. He was using King’s College as a stealthy way ‘under the cloak of some outward zeal for the Protestant religion, [to] carry on his insidious designs, for the infringement of our liberties, and the introduction of Popery into every department of the State’.

Wellington twice demanded apologies for accusations which attributed shocking motives to him in promoting the inauguration of the College. Unabashed, Lord Winchilsea refused, unless the Duke made a public statement declaring that he had not been contemplating Catholic Emancipation in June 1828. This time it was Wellington who strongly and absolutely refused. He would not be called to account by Winchilsea. If it was a battlefield, the Iron Duke did not intend to be defeated on it.

Wellington’s message, written at six-thirty in the evening, was unequivocal. It began: ‘Since the insult, unprovoked on my part, and not denied by your Lordship, I have done everything in my power to induce your Lordship to make me reparation – but in vain... Is a gentleman who happens to be the King’s minister to submit to be insulted by any gentleman who thinks proper to attribute to him disgraceful or criminal motives for his conduct as an individual?’ He went on: ‘I cannot doubt of the decision which I ought to make on this question. Your Lordship is alone responsible for the consequences.’ A formal challenge followed: ‘I now call upon your Lordship to give me that satisfaction for your conduct which a gentleman has a right to require, and which a gentleman never refuses to give.’12

Sir Henry Hardinge, a Cabinet minister, was instructed as his second and Lord Falmouth, an Ultra-Tory colleague, would act for Winchilsea. The duel would take place very early the following morning, Saturday, 21 March. Battersea Fields was the site chosen. As it happens, much of the detail of this dramatic event is preserved in a report written that day by the doctor co-opted on behalf of the Duchess of Wellington. Dr John Hume bears witness to his complete astonishment when the ‘persons of rank and consequence’ he was summoned to attend turned out to be the Prime Minister and an opponent. Wellington said in ‘a laughing manner, “Well, I dare say you little expected it was I who wanted you to be here.”’ Dr Hume could only agree. Wellington repeated the phrase of his challenge: he had no alternative. They then encountered Lords Winchilsea and Falmouth. Formal attempts were made by the anxious seconds to acquire suitable apologies which would have aborted the duel. It was too late.

Hardinge explained what was going to happen. Since he only had one hand – a war injury – Hume helped him to load Wellington’s pistol. An instant’s pause: then, according to custom, he spoke the words: ‘Gentlemen, are you ready? Fire!’

In Dr Hume’s version, Wellington ‘presented’ (raised) his pistol immediately, but seeing that Winchilsea did not do the same, hesitated for a moment ‘and then fired without effect’. It emerged subsequently that he actually grazed his opponent’s trouser leg with his shot. Winchilsea, according to Hume, did not present his pistol at all; but, once Wellington had fired, raised it and with deliberation ‘holding his pistol perpendicularly over his head’, fired into the air. It was over. Or so it seemed.

It turned out that Winchilsea had written a letter in advance which he handed to Lord Falmouth. He had also assured his second that he would not fire upon the Duke. Hardinge now demanded a total apology for the material Winchilsea had caused to be printed. Falmouth duly produced a letter of apology: it contained what Falmouth declared to be an admission that Winchilsea had been in the wrong. He had ‘unadvisedly published an opinion’ which had given offence to the Duke, and now offered to have this expression of ‘regret’ published in the Standard.

The crisis was not quite over. The Duke said in a low voice to Hardinge: ‘This won’t do; it is no apology.’ It was true that the actual word ‘apology’ appeared nowhere, only regret being expressed. A brief nit-picking argument about actual wording now took place between the seconds, still at the scene of the duel; it was concluded only when Lord Falmouth took a pencil and inserted in the middle of Winchilsea’s declaration for publication: ‘(in apology) I regret...’. Finally the Duke was able to depart, arriving to her complete astonishment at Mrs Arbuthnot’s house while she was having breakfast. ‘Well, what do you think of it, a gentleman who has been fighting a duel?’ he said breezily on entry.

Dr Hume ended his detailed account of the affair with a positive paean of praise for the behaviour of Wellington: how the triumphant victor of Europe – ‘fixing the boundaries of kingdoms and controlling by his single word the destinies of the world’ – had shown himself ‘calm, modest, unassuming, yet dignified, resolute and firm etc. etc.’. Hume even spared a word for Winchilsea, who had received the Duke’s fire without betraying any emotion, but, as he raised his own pistol to fire into the air, seemed to have a faint smile, as if to say: ‘Now, you see, I am not quite so bad as you thought me.’

The question remains: did the Great Duke really have no alternative but to fight a duel? He was nearly sixty (Winchilsea was still in his thirties). He was involved in negotiations for a crucial process in which his own participation was absolutely vital. Perhaps Dr Hume’s lyrical praise of Wellington the victorious contained the key: Wellington had recently been obliged to curb all his aggressive instincts in the interests of compromise and welfare and had done so with admirable public equanimity. Now, for an instant, he let himself go.

It is interesting that Wellington did not gain the admiration of the world for his behaviour, personally courageous as it might be. Greville had the cynical reaction that the reprobate Winchilsea had made an ass of himself and positively wanted to be sent to the Tower. Mrs Arbuthnot loyally defended Wellington: if he had not fought, such insults would have been repeated all over again. But she admitted that it was the fashion to say that he should not have fought. He should have treated Lord Winchilsea with contempt, since the Duke’s reputation for courage was ‘too well-established to render such a measure necessary’.13

One person, however, who did tell the Duke that he was quite right to fight was the King. The Duke reported on his visit when he dined with the Arbuthnots on his return from Windsor. Harriet’s account of the Duke’s behaviour on that occasion does suggest rather touchingly a brief human moment in the life of the great military man (which might have turned to disaster but didn’t, largely due to the behaviour of Winchilsea, who was a nightmare but a gentlemanly nightmare). The Duke was ‘in high spirits and seemed rather pleased at having had a fight’, noted Harriet.

In all other ways the King was very far from giving his approval to Wellington at this time. The crisis of his potential refusal had not gone away and would not go away until he had formally given the Royal Assent. The third reading of the Emancipation Bill took place in the House of Commons on 30 March. It was passed by a majority of 178. There were more Ultra speeches, but the bill was now on its way to the House of Lords. A majority there was theoretically more doubtful: the presence of Anglican bishops, who were against Emancipation, in the House signified danger. One of them, Charles Sumner of Winchester, did pledge support for Catholic Relief, but the Archbishop of Canterbury remained set against it.

Wellington moved the first reading on 31 March, and despite protests from the Ultras succeeded in establishing the second reading for 2 April. The debate lasted for three days, in the course of which Ultra speeches came from peers such as Lord Winchilsea’s second, Lord Falmouth. On the other hand, there was a ‘magnificent’ speech in favour of Emancipation from the Whig Lord Grey and another from the Irish lawyer William Lord Plunket, recently ennobled and Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, previously that Whig MP who had spoken up for Irish interests after the death of Henry Grattan. It was notable that the steps of the throne were ‘half covered with ladies’, bearing witness to the continued passionate interest of ‘the fair sex’ in the political crisis.

John Cam Hobhouse for one was struck by Wellington’s performance as a speaker – subject to much criticism in the past. The Duke spoke slowly but without hesitation and virtually without notes. ‘The most striking part of his speech was when he alluded to his own experience of the horrors of civil war, and said he would willingly lay down his life to avoid one month of it.’ The effect of this statement on his audience was visible: this was not so much the boasting of an orator but the sincere testimony of ‘a great soldier’.14

Here Hobhouse had surely pointed to one of the strongest weapons in the duel for and against Emancipation: the reputation of the Iron Duke, who had within living memory controlled the destinies of the world, in his doctor’s emotional description. The historian Macaulay, still in his twenties at the time (he was elected an MP the following year), was fond of repeating the story told to him by Lord Clarendon.15 Asked on what terms the Iron Duke would recommend the Catholic Relief Bill to the peers, Lord Clarendon replied: ‘Oh! it will be easy enough. He’ll say: “My Lords! Attention! Right about face! March.”’ It was not quite like that; it was his reputation, not his martial manner, which secured him their agreement. But one symbolized the other.

The happy result was a majority for the government of 105. Part of this success was the defection of the bishops from the hostile side: ten of them voted for the bill. As the MP Charles Williams Wynn reflected on 7 April, ‘at length we have a prospect of release from the Catholic Question’.16

The result at the end of the third reading on 10 April was roughly similar – and similarly joyous for the government. Daniel O’Connell wrote lyrically to Mary the next day: ‘the ascendancy and superiority which neighbours had over you will be at an end the day you receive this letter’.17 He had predicted to her a few days earlier that the bill would go through the following week and he would then arrange to take his seat; in short, Parliament would have to face what had changed. The Duke of Wellington came up to Lord Duncannon as the final vote was announced, and said cheerfully: ‘Well, I said I would do it, and I have done it handsomely, have I not?’ All that remained was to secure the Royal Assent.

But while the mood at Westminster was happily positive from the Catholic point of view, the atmosphere at Windsor was very different. As the Duke had told Mrs Arbuthnot’s husband Charles in March, ‘Nobody knows the difficulties I have in dealing with my Royal master, and nobody knows him as well as I do.’ But he added firmly: ‘I will succeed but I am as in a field of Battle, and I must fight it out my way.’ When the results of the vote were known, the King exclaimed histrionically: ‘Oh, the Duke of Wellington is King of England, O’Connell is King of Ireland, and I suppose I am only considered Dean of Windsor.’ He also, even more histrionically, fancied himself as another persecuted (and subsequently executed) monarch, Louis XVI.18

The King’s state of mind now becomes of vital importance: how much had it been affected either by the recent controversy over Emancipation or by the very different effect of his declining health – or a combination of the two? It was generally believed by those in the know that at this stage the King never heard or thought of Catholic Emancipation without being ‘disturbed’ by it.19 It was as early as January, after all, that Lord Mount Charles, the son of Lady Conyngham, had told Greville that he really thought that the King would go mad on the Catholic Question. Mount Charles detected the influence of two men who were dead, his father and his brother the Duke of York, and the all-too-living Duke of Cumberland. On the subject of George III, the present King was explicit if melodramatic: ‘his Father would have laid his head on the block rather than yield’ to the demand for Emancipation: ‘he is equally ready to lay his there in the same cause’.20

There is little doubt that George IV’s growing obsession with his father and the latter’s fatal – in Catholic terms – rejection of Emancipation at the time of the Union lay at the foundation of his agitation. This was a very different mentality from that of the young Prince who had favoured the Whigs, contracted a marriage with a Catholic in the comely shape of Mrs Fitzherbert, and welcomed Catholic refugees from the French Revolution. But there were significant physical factors as well: Knighton’s concern over the royal use of laudanum, combined with a vast intake of alcohol, was shared by many people. Not only did the alcohol lead to extreme irritability, but occasionally there were days of total stupor. In December the previous year Greville had predicted the King would not last more than another two years. It was a possibility that could never be overlooked.

In the meantime, Mrs Arbuthnot referred to the King’s infantile behaviour, the word ‘child’ constantly reoccurring. There were his notorious fantasies, as when, incredibly, he lectured the Duke of Wellington on his, the King’s, own courage on the field of Waterloo. (It was less than thirteen years ago; could George IV seriously have imagined that he was present?) At the opening of Parliament in 1824 the King had been described by Lord Colchester as having the crown pressing heavily on his brow. The point remained, five years later, that the crown was still pressing on his brow and no other; the question of his right to refuse the Royal Assent remained.

Of course, the very childishness and the fantasies made it difficult to assess what action the King would actually take. He had after all caved in quickly at the beginning of March when Wellington and his government threatened resignation, together with that sad note about the pain it caused him to do so. Now he had to decide – if decision was the right word. Any decision was a negative one in that he had to decide to refuse the Royal Assent to a measure passed in both Houses of Parliament and presented to him by his Prime Minister with full agreement of his Cabinet. Three days before the fatal moment, it transpired later, he told his surgeon that he was going to refuse.21

The oath sworn by George III in 1761, and repeated by his son in 1821, referred to ‘the Protestant reformed religion established by law’; both Kings had promised to maintain and preserve inviolably ‘the settlement of the united Church of England and Ireland’ and ‘the doctrine, worship, discipline and government thereof’, as well as the rights and privileges of the bishops and clergy. But this bald statement of what was actually sworn ignores the indefinable but potent Anti-Papist tradition of history in which somehow the King’s oath had got mixed up with the whole legality of the Hanoverian succession.

The mind of George IV, muddled by those two enemies of clear thinking, drugs and alcohol, with in this case the third destructive force of his increasing age, fixed on the oath as a sacred trust. His conscience forbade him to assent to the bill. At the same time Mrs Arbuthnot rudely commented about the King: ‘everybody knows that he has no more conscience than the chair he sits on’.22 But, like most scornful dismissals, this went too far. The King did have a conscience. Whatever the stories of his conduct, growing ever wilder – that he had personally ridden the winning horse at Goodwood, and won battles such as Salamanca as well as Waterloo itself – that did not exclude the possibility of genuine torments over a principle. He could still hear the voice of conscience in his ear, even if it was a wayward voice by any normal standard. The real question concerned his rights under the constitution to listen to it – and then insist that the awkward counsel of this delicate or zany royal conscience prevail, by blocking the bill.

Would the King then actually refuse to sign at the last moment, and if so what were the rights of the government in contrast? There have been constitutional critics of Wellington who have suggested that the inordinate attention he paid to the King’s personal view was unnecessary at the time; that it was in some way old-fashioned. On one occasion, the military Duke was certainly sharp enough on the subject of the Duke of Cumberland, busy organizing Petitions and a march of 20,000 men on Windsor, to present them to their sovereign. Wellington exploded that if he did so, he would send the royal Duke to the Tower of London: ‘One can never be safe with such an intriguing villain,’ he commented.23

More sensibly, Wellington suggested to Cumberland that the best course would be to leave his proxy vote against the bill with the notoriously Anti-Catholic Earl of Eldon and go abroad. The implication was that he should spend more time with his family. Some of this campaign to get Cumberland to leave for the Continent – on the part of others, rather than Wellington – had the grimy tinge that press stories about royalty have had from time to time down the ages. There had always been those prurient rumours that Cumberland had fathered the illegitimate child of his sister Princess Sophia. Now the newspapers in favour of Emancipation such as The Times revelled in them.

Wellington’s more dignified approach, suggesting a strategic retreat, laid itself open to a reproof from Cumberland, however: such a retreat would be ‘unmanly and unworthy’. What would Wellington himself have said on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo if ‘any General officer had come to your Grace and said: he had business which required him to go to his family?’ Cumberland had his own histrionic moment when he declared: ‘I would rather lay my head on the scaffold, feeling that I die in a good cause, than lead a life with shame and disgrace at the end of it.’24 It must be remembered, in extenuation, that these references by the royal brothers to execution were made only thirty-odd years after the death of a monarch at the hands of his people; Louis XVI’s fate was not remote history.

Once again, to be fair to the Duke of Cumberland, not only was his wife ill, but his beloved son was also very unwell. His letter implored the Duchess’s understanding: ‘Ach, God, how I wish I could [return]. I am, alas, the only one of the Royal Family except the King who is Protestant, faithful in this holy cause, if I quit all is finished... you know your Ernest, you know that he adores you, that he adores his child as no father could.’ It was ‘the feeling of Duty’ which kept him from their side.25 So the Duke remained. He presented over two hundred Petitions to the King in person and 150 to the House of Lords. His speeches emphasized that he opposed a breach in the constitution, not the Roman Catholics as such.

The Duke of Cumberland related in his memoirs how he had written a long letter to his brother begging him not to sanction the bill.26 The King wept, but did not have the resolution to do that which in Cumberland’s opinion would have taught Wellington that he would not submit to his ‘overbearing and dictatorial manner’. It would also have immortalized him and secured the affection of his subjects. The eloquent letter was not enough.

Just as the short but extraordinary crisis of early March had been survived by the government, the King did actually give his assent on 13 April, for all his threats to the contrary. The Duke of Wellington prudently decided not to go down to Windsor personally to secure the royal signature lest his presence cause further upsets: ‘that there should be no fresh discussion between them’. The sight of King Arthur might have incited King George to a further metaphorical duel.

Under the circumstances, then, George IV duly gave his assent. In doing so, he pointed out once again that he had ‘never before’ affixed his name ‘with pain or regret’ to any act of the legislature.27 None of this altered the fact that the sovereign of the United Kingdom had assented to a bill to which he was thoroughly and openly opposed.

As a postscript, it was either delightful or depressing, according to the point of view of the observer, to find that King George IV soon took to calling the Act for Roman Catholic Relief ‘his measure’. He was fond of saying that he always knew he should carry it at a canter; the Duke, however, was ‘very nervous!!’28