The Sun.
London, England, 1863-02-02 00:00:00

was proved was that Melville had made temporary use of
various sums, all of which he had paid with interest; and
that Trotter had supplemented a beggarly salary by placing
the public money at Coutts's in his own name, and deriving
profit from the interest on the deposit. Lord Melville was,
therefore, ultimately acquitted, but in April, 1505, the case,
as reported by commissioners appointed to inquire into the
abuses of the Naval Department, looked bad enough, and
furnished matter for a violent party debate, in which Whit-
bread, on the side of the Whigs, took the lead. Pitt tried
hard to defend his colleague, but the case was put very
clearly and forcibly by Lord Henry Petty in a speech which
mainly contributed to the result of the debate, and pre-
pared the way, not only for the advent of the Whigs to
power, but also for his own elevation to one of the most im-
portant seats in the Cabinet. "Let it be remembered," he
said, "how the persons were situated who were thus con-
nected together—Mr. Mark Sprott, the broker, confiden-
tially employed by Mr. Trotter, the paymaster; Mr. Trotter,
the paymaster, confidentially employed by Lord Melville;
and Lord Melville confidentially employed by the public.
He had heard of Jacobin combinations, but it would
be difficult to imagine any combination more detri-
mental to the public than these three persons who
touched the Cabinet on the one side and the Stocks
on the other. What changes of fortune, what convulsions
in finance, was it not capable of effecting ?" In the vote
which followed the house was equally divided, 216 against
216, and the Whigs only carried their point by the casting
vote of the Speaker, Mr. Abbot. Thereupon Lord Melville
resigned office, was struck off the list of Privy Councillors,
and was formally impeached. Ultimately, as we have said,
he was acquitted; but in the meantime, in losing his ser-
vices, Pitt lost the man upon whom he depended most;
and now, oppressed with labour, baffled in his plans (for
swift on the glorious news of Trafalgar came the disastrous
news of Austerlitz), he gradually sank under the exhaus-
tion of incessant toil and disappointed hopes, until in the
following January he died, as some say, of a broken heart,
and as others say, with equal truth, of sheer old age.
Now at last hope dawned upon the Whigs. They had
covered Melville with sackcloth and ashes ; they had con-
signed Pitt to dust and ashes. The Tory Cabinet was
doomed. While the great Tory statesman is still gasping at
Putney, and his attendants have not lost their faith in
brandy and chicken soup, the various coteries of London
are betting (these were betting days) on the chances of the
game. Fox by rights ought to be the new Premier, but it
is well known that the King cannot endure him. Grenville
has not brains enough, Sidmouth has not friends enough to
sustain the duties of the post. Ha wkesbury would refuse it
—so would a much more likely man, the Marquis Welles-
ley. Some of the courtiers, as we learn from " Homer's
Memoirs," start the idea of Lord Henry Petty. When Lord
Henry's father was in the height of his power, and every-
body expected to see him at the head of a Cabinet, was he
not superseded by his subordinate in a previous Adminis-
tration, young Pitt And was there not something sym-
metrical in now playing over again the game of 1781, in
detaching Shelburne's youthful son from his allegiance to
Fox, and in setting him up as the head of the Cabinet to
carry oui the wishes of the King ? "They mistake their
man," writes Horner, " for if Petty has any good quality
on which I rely, it is a firm attachment to Fox and his
maxims of government.' One thing, however, is decided
by the Whigs, that Petty shall be their Chancellor of the
Exchequer, and that not only in this post, but also as mem-
ber for the University of Cambridge, they will back his
claims to be the successor of Pitt. Already there
is a scramble for Cambridge. Lord Palmerston,
a flaming young Pittite, is on the spot, still
an undergraduate ; while Pitt yet lives, Lord
Althorp has posted down to canvass votes ; Lord Henry
thinks it more proper to wait till death has sealed the fate
of the Minister. It is an easy sacrifice to the proprieties,
for it so happens that the Vice-Chancellor and some of his
moat influential Heads of Houses are now actually in Lon-
don on business of the University. The Whigs, more-
over, have not long to wait ; the inevitable blow has fallen,
and the King, after applying to half a dozen different
statesmen, at length consented to a Cabinet of "All the
Talents," of which Lord Grenville was the nominal head,
and Fox the directing genius. It was composed of Tories,
of Whigs, and of half-breeds. Sidmouth. and Ellenborough
represented the Tories—foes at once of Reform and of
France ; Fox and his partisans represented the extreme
Whigs—friendly at once to Reform and to the French ;
while Grenville and Wyndham, Whigs as regards the
domestic policy of the country, sided with the Tories on the
question of foreign policy—and to them respectively, there-
fore, were entrusted the headship of the Cabinet and the
conduct of the war. It was a singular coalition, not only
formed of discordant elements, but in which also the various
Ministers seemed to be entrusted with discordant functions
—in which, for example, the Premier assumed the double
office of First Lord and Auditor of the Treasury ; in which
Ellenborough, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, had a
Cabinet seat; in which Sheridan was made Treasurer of
the Navy ; in which Wyndham, who, whatever his faculty
of eloquence, had not a ray of administrative talent, was at
a time when the country was fighting on the most gigantic
scale, made Secretary for War, and in which Lord Henry
Petty, at the advanced age of 25 (his private secretary
Kaye, afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, being two years his
junior), was entrusted with the most complicated system
of finance which it is possible to conceive. However, such
as it was, the Cabinet was formed, and Lord Henry Petty
went off to Cambridge to contest the seat for the
University. It was a well-fought election, and in
the background—a not uninterested witness of the
struggles of the youthful candidates, we see the
still more youthful Lord Byron (eight years younger
than Petty, four years younger than Palmerston) making
his own cynical observations on the tumult of Granta. As
for two of the candidates, Petty and Palmerston, he says—
" One on his power and place depends,
The other—on the Lord knows what I
Each to some eloquence pretends,
Though neither will convince by that."
As for the voters—

" They know the Chancellor has got
Sore pretty livings in disposal,
Each hopes that one may be his lot,
And therefore smiles on his proposal."

They so smiled that at the close of the poll the votes for
Lord Henry were more than double those for either of his
opponents. To give point to his sneer at the venality of
the University, Lord Byron, in a note to one of his poems,
reminds us that in the following year, when Lord Henry
Petty had ceased to be a Minister of the Crown, he lost his
seat, and was obliged to content himself with the Duke of
Bedford's borough of Camelford, which he continued to
represent till his elevation to the peerage. Ostensibly,
however, the reason of his rejection by the University was
that advocacy of the Catholic claims on which the Admi-
nistration of which he was a member made shipwreck.
The young Chancellor entered upon his duties amid
much jeering of the kind which will be familiar to a gene-
ration that has witnessed the elevation of a novelist to the
Ministry of Finance ; and yet, putting out of the question
Pitt's prodigious reputation—in itself a tower of strength,
and, considering the prodigal terms on which loans had
been raised, foreign States had been subsidiz3d, and our
own armies mismanaged, all under the eye of the Tory Mi-
nister, it surely mattered very little, as far as the money-
market was concerned—to adopt one of Byron's lines,
" Whether 'tis Pitt or Petty rules the hour." The new
Chancellor of the Exchequer had, very soon after entering
on the duties of his office, to bring in a bill for the more effec-
tual examination of the public accounts, and in justification
of his bill he made statements which appear to be almost
incredible. Speaking on the 21st of May, 1806, he showed
that the last Pay-office audit was for the year 1782 ; that
the navy and other offices were equally in arrear—that
there were accounts not passed to the amount of L 167,000,000
—that there were accounts not proceeded with to the
amount of £sB,ooo,ooo—that there were 21 years' Pay-
office accounts to the extent of £150,000,000 not even deli-
vered—that there were naval accounts in the same situa-
tion to the amount of £Bo,ooo,ooo—and, to sum up all, that
there were arrears of public money not accounted for
amounting to no less than £455,000,000—a sum at that
time larger than the whole of the national debt. This
was monstrous, and, apart from the stability which Pitt's
great name gave to the money market, it must be evident
that the financial position of the councry could scarcely be
rendered worse. Lord Henry Petty's financial schemes,
however, were by no means favourably received. His first
proposition was to double the income tax, or more pre-
cisely, to raise it from 63/4 to 10 per cent. (that is to say Bd.
more in the pound than the income tax of ls, 4d. which
the Russian war inflicted on the present generation), and
to extend it to all property yielding more than £5O a year.
It was, in fact, to appease the clamour which` this proposal
awoke that the Ministers brought forward that other mea-
sure for the more effectual audit of the public accounts.
When not even the prospect of greater economy which this
measure held out to the nationent
foundcotild ritesnedlferat a theloimsspofosrt
tolerable, and when Government
more and more
withfun variousdswithNf which
fortune throughouthritCuhtoearryoll
Europe,
and, war now raging
and, indeed, the whole world, Lord Henry Petty struck
out another scheme, of the most alluring character, which,
if it were only feasible, would solve the mystery of taxa-
tion for ever, and evoke any amount of revenue
art:eceovfoerr
anyth amount
the future
could
ditldexhpeetnhegurreee.terAtshesuhmi
tnhgo s et hfaotr ct
he cut rent
year, the Chancellor of the Exchequer by one wave of his
pen, provided without any new taxes for the war in all its
vigour during 14 years to come. The war was to be main-
tained on loans that were to be speedily repaid by a sinking
fund eating into them at compound interest. Calculating
what loans would be necessary, it was assumed that a sum
equal to 10 per cent, on each loan if appropriated from the
war taxes—one half going to the payment of interest, and
the other half to the creation of a sinking fund—would in
the course of 15 years redeem the capital, leaving the whole
10 per cent, again applicable to an operation of the same
t kind should the war continue. This precious plan, the fal-
-1 lacy of which we need not stop to expose, was never fairly
carried out, the Ministry being little more than a year in
power, and only half a year after the death of Fox. In the
same month in which Pitt resigned his life, Nelson was
buried in St. Paul's Cathedral; and befere Pitt had passed
away, Fox, while paying the last honours at the grave of
the mighty Admiral, was struck with the hand of death.
Fox lingered seven months in office, and died on the 13th
of September, 1806. After his departure there was no
more lite in the. Cabinet. Lord Grenville, it is true,

effected what was the grand achievement of his Ministry—
the Abolition of the Slave Trade ; but the measure was
originated by Fox, and it was carried so triumphantly
through both Houses of Parliament as to prove that the
great struggle of 20 years which had thus gloriously ended
might have been crowned with victory much sooner if pre-
vious Ministers had been so minded. All parties were
agreed in their abhorrence of the trade. The first real
difficulty which the Ministers had to encounter was a diffi-
culty of their own raising, and the Cabinet went to work
upon it. Lord Howick intreduced "a Bill to enable his
Majesty to avail himself of the services of all his liege sub-
jects
in his naval and mil;tary forces in the manner therein
mentioned"—that is to say, by their taking an oath which
would admit Catholics into the service of the country.
When the King, who was always tender on the Catholic
question, expressed his disapprobation o: the bill, Ministers
agreed to withdraw it, reserving to themselves the right
expressed in the Cabinet minutes of bringing it forward at
some future time, The minute was couched in terms so
positive as well as disrespectful to the King, who had never
been very cordial with Lords Grenville and Howick, that
he demanded from theca a pledge in writing that
they would never again press him on the subject.
The Ministers, who had overrated their strength, refused
to consent until it was too late, and their only course was
to resign. It was on this occasion that Sheridan said, with
reference to the conduct of the Premier, that he had often
heard of a man knocking his head against a wall, but never
before had he heard of a man building, clamping, and
squaring a wall for the express purpose of doing so.
We have dwelt with so much detail on Lord Henry
Petty's first appearance as a Minister because it was, per •
haps, the most brilliant episode of his life. Never after-
wards did he occupy so prominent a position in the eyes of
the nation. He did, indeed, occupy posts as high and per-
form duties as onerous, but he was no longer the miracle he
was then considered. He was a young nobleman of amiable
disposition, of good education, of considerable ability, and
of great ambition, but he was not the heaven lorn states-
men his friends had imagined. Homer, who had great
hopes of him, but who also took his measure accurately, as
our college friends generally do, describes him as having
" a cool, clear-thinking head, a plain, firm, manly judg-
ment ;" and that is precisely the character which Lord
Lansdowne earned throughout his life. As a speaker, he
was at this time said to resemble Whitbread, without his
passion. Byron, in giving his idea of eloquence, describes
him as a mere debater :—" Pitt I never heal d ; Fox but
once, and then he struck me as a debater, which to me seems
as different from an orator as an improvisatore or a versifier
from a poet. . . . Lord Lansdowne good, but still only
a debater," His powers in debate, however, were so for-
midable that, on the death of Fox, it was proposed that he
should lead the House of Commons, and it was probably
through his own diffidence that this onerous post was in-
trusted to a very different personage. In one respect he
was eminently fitted far the lead. He was remarkable for
self-possession, and it is reported as a striking proof of it
that in the midst of his maiden speech he stopped with
amazing coolness to adjust his cravat, which had got out
of order. To Moore he afterwards observed that he
hardly ever spoke in the House of Lords without
some loss of self-possession, and that the only way to
surmount it was to talk on at all hazards. He could
talk. He was almost always fluent enough, and sometimes
rose into eloquence. Whatever public talents he had, how-
ever, he was now destined to retire very much from public
life. He gave up one of the highest offices under the Crown,
he entered into the bonds of matrimony, and he obtained a
splendid peerage all about the same time.
His father had died in May, 1805, only a few days after
Lord Henry Petty had signalised himself in debate—the
debate on Lord Melville. The old lord had by this time
passed very much out of popular notice, and the principal
cause of public regret for his demise was that only a fort-
night before his death he had declared his knowledge of the
Junius secret, and yet among his papers were to be found
no indication that could lead to its discovery. He was suc-
ceeded by his eldest son, the Earl of Wycombe, whose first
aet on coming into possession was to sell almost all the
literary and artistic treasures which his father had accumu-
lated with so much love and labour. The greater part of
these were dispersed under the hammer of the auctioneer,
many of the pictures going to enrich the Grosvenor, the
National, and other galleries; only the Lansdowne MSS.
were kept together, being purchased by the British Mu-
seum; while the gallery of antique marbles was the sole
portion of the collection for which the Marquis showed any
appreciation,—his opinion being expressed in the fact that
he purchased it from his father's executors for £6,000. He
died in November, 1809, and was succeeded by his half-
brother. the late Marquis, whose first care was to purchase
the antique marbles from his sister-in-law, and there at
Lansdowne-house they may now be seen—some of them, as
the youthful Hercules and the Mercury, considered the
finest statues of the kind that have found theiriway to this
country. As for the pictures, when the Marquis succeeded
to the title there was not one in this splendid mansion, with
the exception of a few family portraits; but love of art was
an instinct of the family, and Lord Lansdowne set himself to
the formation of a gallery which now comprises 200 pictures
of rare interest and value, but miscellaneous in'their cha-
racter, no school nor master predominating unless it be
Sir Joshua Reynolds. Some of the portraits in this col-
lection are of great interest. There is the celebrated por-
trait of Pope by Jervas ; Reynolds's wonderful portrait of
Sterne; one of Franklin, by Gainsborough ; a beautiful one
of Peg Woffington, by Hogarth ; Lady Hamilton appears
twice—as a bacchante and a gipsy, from the pencil of Rom-
ney ; Horner, the old College friend of Lord Lansdowne,
is not forgotten; but, most interesting of all, there is the
lovely portrait of Mrs. z;heridan, as St. Cecilia, painted by
Reynolds. It may recall with some vividness the fashion
of those times if we record a little incident connected with
this portrait. During the short-lived Ministry of " All the
Talents," the Whig leaders celebrated their return to
power by a continual round of festivities, in which Sheri-
dan outvied all his colleagues. One Sunday (25th of May,
1806) he gave a grand dinner; on the Monday following a
supper and ball, at which the dancing was prolonged to past
8 o'clock next morning ; on the Tuesday a christening, a
masque, and another ball, the Prince being present on each
occasion, and the Lord Chancellor Erskine and the young
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Henry Petty, being conspi-
cuous among the dancers. On the occasion of the dinner
the portrait of Mrs. Sheridan was redeemed for one night
only from the pawnbroker's, and exhibited in its place in
the dining-room ; when poor Sheridan died it was still in
possession of the pawnbroker; it then fell into the hands of
Sheridan's solicitor, and from him it was purchased for
£6OO by Lord Lansdowne. In this little incident we get
some glimpses of that conviviality for which the Whigs
were distinguished. "Le Whig est la femme de votre
Gouvernement," says Balzac, and the truth of the remark
is especially illustrated in that social influence which the
Whigs have always cultivated more than the Tories.
For more than 20 years after the death of Fox a brilliant
social existence was almost all that the Whigs had to boast
of as a party. It is useless to deny that they were unpo-
pular with the nation ; and we naturally ask, how was it
that they were so long excluded from power. Lord Jeffrey
in one of his reviews tries to answer this question, and
would have us believe that, by a necessity of their posi-
tion as friends of progress in advance of the age, the
Whigs must always be content to forego the sweets
of office in virtue of their superior enlightenment. The
theory is, at all events, flattering to the party. It is pleasant
to forget that the Whig leaders in the House of Commons
were incapable, and that the Whig policy bequeathed
by Fox was anti-national ; that these two causes acted and
reacted upon each other, so as more and more to estrange
men of ability who might be disgusted with Tory manage-
went, arid to render contemptible a policy that before was
only disliked and dreaded. Fox was dead; Henry Petty
had gone to the Upper House, where, with Grey and Gren-
ville, the best part of Whiggism was to be found—found,
however, as effectually hidden under the three coronets as
a light under a bushel, The Whig Lords were dispirited,
the Whig Commons were disorganised, the whole party was
at a discount. In the Lower House there were still Wynd-
ham and Whitbread and Sheridan, but those were men
who could not lead, and who very soon died out. Wynd•
ham died from the effect of an accident ; Whitbread com-
mitted suicide; poor Romilly, before long, followed his ex •
ample; Sheridan died a pauper; and:Ponsonby, the leader
of the Opposition, died of apoplexy the day after Sheridan.
He was succeeded by Tierney, who led the Whig knights
of the people through many a dreary desert of debate.
What could be done under such direction ? Brougham was
much the most able man of the party ; but he had no fol-
lowing, and the Whig magnates refused to grant him the
leadership of the Commons. If anything can clearly illus-
trate the mediocrity of the Opposition, it is the medi-
ocrity of the Cabinet. These were the inglorious
days of Castlereagh and Liverpool, who, in spite of a
domestic policy that was not only invidious but stupid, re-
tained power—so strong was the national feeling—simply
from the zeal with which they carried out a foreign policy
that had been bequeathed to them by greater men. Gradu-
ally the Whig policy began to make way. At first Whig
measures were carried by Tory Ministers. The severity
of the criminal code was mitigated; but this is a question
rather of humanity than of politics, so that no wonder
if all parties are agreed on the point. It is a nearer ap •
proach to genuine politics to meddle with the currency of
the country; still, when Peel worked up the Whig bullion
scheme into a Bank Act, the question presented itself rather
as one of commercial safety than of political rivalry. But
next turned up the claims of the Catholics, and now the
great struggle commenced that was completely to remodel
parties, that was to give life and vigour to the Whigs, and
that was to inaugurate a new epoch in our domestic legis-
lation.

The question of the Catholic claims was not, strictly
speaking, a question of Whig and Tory. In point of fact,
it was the Whigs who wera originally to blame for that
sectarian franchise of which the Catholics complained, and
it was the Whigs who now sought to undo their own work.
On the other hand, their opponents had never forgotten that
Catholicism useci to be a synonym for Toryism, and the
strength of their opposition to Emancipation consisted
7t
rather of religious than political objections. These objec-
tions
el
ere not insuperable. Pitt had been in favour of the
Catholic claims ; so among his successors were Castlereagh,
Canning, paimertaton
and others; and, as it turned out,
those who ultimately carried Emancipation
t
vehemently. On this groat
were precisely
those who had opposed it moat