The Sun.
London, England, 1855-07-19 00:00:00

Bathurst, Melville and Westmoreland, by inducting into
office men like the Duke of Clarence, the Duke of Port-
land, the Marquis of Anglesea,. and Lords Lansdowne,
Goderieb, and Lyndhurst. About this time,. by the
Way, Shell himself was threatened with indictment
for a speech which had been regarded by the late
Cabinet as seditious and inflammatory. The new Pre-
mier, however, setting the projected prosecution aside
as preposterous, a rule of nolle prosequi was forthwith.
entered by the Attorney-General. Soot; afterwards a
severe fracture of his leg by a fall from his horse, on the
28th of June, threw Mr. Shell upon that couch of suffering
upon which he received, on the 10th of August, the start-
ling news of the sudden and calamitous death of the
Prime Minister. Thereupon succeeded a number of
changes hardly less remarkable than the premature event
in which they had originated—political changes, the first
and most notable of which was the installation of the me-
morable Cabinet of the Duke of Wellington. An admi-
nistration dating from
.the 9th of January, 1828, and
comprising amongst its members—of Mr. Canning's asso-
ciates, four no less distinguished than Lord Dudley, Mr.
Grant, Mr. Huskisson, and Lord Palmerston; of other
emancipationists, Lord Melville and Lord Ellenborough ;
and of foes to the further removal of religious disabilities
(some fast, some loose), besides the Premier himself, Peel,
Herries, Goulburn, Aberdeen,. and•Lyndhurst. '• It was a
coalition, in fact,- between the old ultra Tories of Lord
Eldon's school, and the half liberal, half aristocratic Can-
ningites ; a coalition so insecure, however, that by the
20th 'of May not only Mr. Huskisson, but with him
Mr. Lamb and Mr. Grant, Lord Dudley and Lord
Palmerston, had all of them quitted the Adminis-
tration.. It can hardly yet be forgotten how and by whom
they were succeeded—Mr. Huskisson, as Colonial Secre-
tary, by Sir George Murray ; Mr. Lamb, as Secretary for
Ireland, by Lord Francis L. Gower; Lord Dudley, as
Foreign Minister, by the Earl of Aberdeen ; Viscount
Palmerston, as Secretary-at-War' by Sir Henry Hardinge;
and Mr. Grant, as -President of the Board of Trade, by
Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald. The last-named alone is of itself
sufficiently suggestive —for on the acceptauca of office by
Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald hung as an inevitable toessequence
the Clare election—tire famous Clare election that first
sent Daniel O'Connell to the Imperial Legislature as Mem-
ber for All Ireland !
It appears to us rather strange that Mr. M'Cullagh, in
mentioning the curious share taken by Mr. Sheil in the
notorious Orange meeting upon Penenden Heath, on the
24th of, October, 1828, should give a version of •the pro-
ceedings so different from that given by Mr. Sheil himself
in the article penned by him almost immediately after-
wards fur the New Monthly Magazine,. and comprised
among the papers__ reprinted the- other day in the
two volumes of his collected " Sketches Legal and Politi-
cal.' Mr. M`Cullagh, after alluding .to the storm 'of groans
and hisses in which the voice of the-orator was drowned,
observes (vol. ii. p. 35), " Though little accustomed to such
amode of reception, he persisted in delivering, almost vere
batim, what he had prepared to say ; and an accurate copy
having been furnished by him to one of the evening papers
the audience whom he really desired to reach throughout.
every part of the kingdom, became •in a few hours ac-
quainted with what the men of Kent had refused to listen
to." An account rather opposed to the one humorously
detailed by Mr. Sheil himself in the descriptive essay above
mentioned, during the course of which he takes occasion to
marvel with a comical affectation of bewilderment over'
the seemingly miraculous manner in which. l'Ae Sun, the
journal vaguely implied by the biographer as "one of the
evening papers," had obtained so wonflerfully accurate a
report of an oration which no one upon Penotiden Heath
or anywhere else could possibly have heard delivered !*
Nevertheless, while making this facetious aaknowledgment
with a gravity the most sedately ludicrous, Mr. Shell for-
mally vouched, at the same time, for the veracity of the
speech reported in this magical fashion in The Sun as the
faithful exponent of his own ideas in his own language.
Uttered or not uttered, it was a harangue eminently wor-
thy of preservation—an oration upon the peruPal. of which
in our columns Jeremy Bentham thus expressed his un-
bounded admiration—" So masterly an union of logic and
rhetoric as Mr. Shell's speech scarcely have I over beheld."
It was at the close of its impassioned peroration that the
orator was represented as speaking of the Catholiaclainss for
emancipation, as claims in the justice of which—" I3nrke,
the foe to revolution—Fox, the assertor of popular right--
Pitt, the prop of the prerogative, concurred." The rea-
sonableness and wisdom of this concurrence was at length
*bout to be asserted upon the statute book by the Legisla-
ture and*the Government, by the King, the Lords, and the
Commons—the ti ipodial altar, or basis, of the Constitution.
The penumbra of the shadoW of the " coming event" first
became visible on the sth of February, 18.t9, through the
memorable Speech from the Throne; recommending that
the laws imposing civil disabilities upon his Ma-
jesty's Roman Catholic subjects, should be reviewed by the
assembled Parliament. The triumph of the sacred cause
became from that moment universally apparent. So un-
mistakeably apparent that by the 12th of that same
February, on the motion of Mr. Shell, the renowned
Catholic Association, after an existence of nearly six years
duration, was dissolved. The ,Relief Bill was, in fact,
finally passed through the Commons on the'3lst of March,
by a majority of 178—its second reading was carried lathe
Lords, upon the 4th of April, by a majority of 104—and
upon the 13th of April, 1829, it received the royal
assent: the crowning victory being thereby secured to
the great cause of Catholic Emancipation. There was but
one reason for regret in the midst of the prevailing exul-
tation, namely, the summary abolition of the forty-shilling
freeholders—by which act more than two-thirds of the en-
tire constituency of Ireland was, " at one fell swoop," dis-
franchised. The sister kingdom, indeed, was after all,
only partially " relieved" even by the " Relief Bill," from
the ancient bus-then under the weight of which she had
so long groaned, the irksome and intolerable burden of so-
called ascendancy. O'Connell recognised the grim reality
of this evil perpetuation. He was not blinded to it by the
illusory influences of victory. lie determined in the very
hour of triumph to endeavour by inaugurating a new
epoch of agitation to win the boons still requisite for the
social well-being of his follow-countrymen, for the poli-
tical welfare of their common fatherland. This resolve
was announced by the great Tribune on the 24th of Sep-
tember, 1830, by his first letter on the Repeal of the
Union to the people of Ireland. Then commenced that
grievous delusion which was the will-o'-the-wisp of the
Celtic million, she political mirage that led astray up to
the very moment of death the otherwise sagacious intel-
lect of their mighty Leader, revered as their chosen Chief,
and beloved as their Liberator. To the first fascinations of the
new movement Mr. Sheil himself succumbed for a time
being welcomed with extraordinary enthusiasm on the 29th
of November, 1831, when he first joined the Repeal Associa-
tion—but, finally, withdrawing from it. (after the rejection
of Mr. O'Connell's motion for Repeal on the 29th of April,
1834), when the Question was peremptorily set aside by a
formal decision of 523 against merely 38 in the popular
branch of the Imperial Legislature.
It was some considerable time after the passing of the
Relief Bill before the more eminent members of the Catho-
lic bar received the distinction of silk-gowns, the bestowal
of which in their instance was necessarily to be the first
sign of the reality of Catholic Emancipation. It was only
in fact towards the close of Trinity Term, 1830, that Mr.
Shell was called with some others to the inner bar—Daniel
O'Connell, incomparably the most illustrious of the whole
body, being denied the honour to which he had incontest-
ably a signal right, by a paltry and contemptible act of ex-
clusion. Upon the 20th of July in that same year 1830
Mr. Shell contracted his second marriage—his choice fall-
ing this time upon Anastasia' the widow of Mr. Power of
Garteen, in the county of Waterford, and daughter of
John Lalor, Esq., of Crenagh, in the county of Tipperary.
As co-heiress with her sister (the wife of Richard M. Bel-
lew, Esq.), Mrs. Shell inherited by the way considerable
property—thereby not only giving a new name to her
husband, but rendering him thenceforth in a man-
ner independent of his profession. Shortly after his
second marriage, Richard Lalor Sheil became a candidate
for the representation of Louth, but after a severe contest
was defeated, together with his brother-in-law, by Messrs.
Dawson and M'Clintock, their more fortunate antagonists.
Subsequently, however, after the defeat of Ministers on
Sir Henry Parnell's motion regarding the civil list, when
the Wellington Cabinet closed its career, and Earl Grey
was summoned by the King to form a new Administra-
tion,' Mr. Sheil, on the Bth of March, 1831, entered the
House of Commons as member for Lord Anglesea's pocket
borough of Milborne Port, in Dersetshire. At last the
dream of his early boyhood was realised. At last be him-
self enjoyed the fruits of Catholic Emancipation. At last
—at last he had taken his place among the number of the
national representatives. The appearance of the Irish de-
magogue (then in the fortieth year of his age) on taking his
seat in the great popular assembly at Westminster, was
thus commented upon by the late Professor Wilson in
Blackwood's Magazine—the satirist speaking through the
mouth of Tickler in his famous Noctes Ambrosiance :
" To make some amends for her carelessness to all other
external affairs, nature has given hire as fine a pair of eyes as
ever graced human head—large, deeply set, dark, liquid,
flashing like gems, and these fix you like a basilisk, so that
you forget everything else about him."
The member for Milborne Port was, in the July of 1831,
admitted a member of Brookes's—at that period regarded
by Irish barristers as something of a privilege. Previously,
that is in May, Ministers having been defeated in their first
attempt to carry a Reform Bill, had induced the King to
dissolve Parliament. During the general election eonse-
anent upon which dissolution, Mr. Sheil was returned both
for Milborne Port and for the County of Louth, and, elect-
ing to sit for the latter, a new writ had to bo.issued for the
Marquis of Anglesea's snug little constituency. At the
next general election Shell threw aside the county of Louth
for that of Tipperary, and it was as representative for the
latter that he took his place in the first Reform Parliament
opened by William IV. on the sth of February, 1833. IC
was on the 15th of February, only, ten days afterwards,
that Lord Grey introduced, in the Upper House, the cele-
brated"bill for the suppressson of disturbances in Ireland—
on the 27th it was read for the first time in the Com-
mons, on the motion of Lord Althorp—and, after a
stormy discussion, was passed on the 29th of March
by a majority of 345 to 86. It was the first serious
rebuff by a Coercion Act of the growing repeal agitation.
Some time after this event, Mr. Shell laid aside his wig
and gown, and dedicated his energies thenceforth exclu-
sively to the furtherance of his political ambition. That
ambition,was somewhat threatened on the sth of February,
1834, with a sudden and disastrous close—when Lord
Althorp, acting upon the strength of an assertion put forth
on the 22d of the preceding October, in an address made
to his constituents at Hull, by Mr. Mathew Devonport
Hill—solemnly charged Mr. Sheil, in the presence of the
assembled Parliament, with an act of almost unparalleled
treachery, viz., with voting against every clause of the
Coercion Bill, and speaking against it in the house with
the utmost.violence, and yet going secretly to Ministers
and saying "Don't bate one single atom of that bill, or it
will be impossible for any man to live in Ireland." The
sensation produced in the House of Commons by Lord
Althorp's distinct charge against the member for the
county of Tipperary, is remembered. Mr. M'Cullagh thus
records its immediate result :
" After a momentary pause, Mr. Shell rose, and, placing
his arms across his breast, said with a low and firm voice,
Having heard the statement which the noble lord has just
made to the house, I beg on the other hand to declare in the
face of my country, and if I may do so without irreverence,
in the presence of God, that if any individual has said too the
noble lord or to others, that I gave any appr bation !*ll
Coercion Bill iu private he has belied mo by •
scandalous calumny ; but as the noble lord has pulinccisslatc-
ment on his own responsibility, I shall say no more.
Then followed a long and desnitory,disouosioe, ending in a