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

The Death of the Marquis of Lansdowne.

Lord Lansdowne, in a gsod old age, died on Saturday
Saturday evening at 6 o'clock. On Wednesday, the 21st,
he fell as he was walking on the terrace at Bowood, and
cut his head. \ On the following Tuesday he began to sink,
and he never rallied after. His life is the history of the
Whigs during the past century. In youth he was the hope
of the party, and in declining years he was the sage on
whose counsel they relied. His views, like theirs, were
formed in the two great schools of politics—the historical
school of Edinburgh and the utilitarian school of London,
which so moulded public opinion as ultimately to secure
the ascendancy of Liberal principles. Of refined manners,
of cultivated tastes, with an intellect not indeed command-

ing, but yet extremely acute; with a nature by no means
impassioned, yet in its calm current most genial ; and with
oratory that, if seldom brilliant, was always effective, he
was, in his glossy buff and blue attire, the best repre-
sentative of the
,leading Whigs, as we have known them

in these latter days—a pleasant family party, who,
with abundance of sound sense and social tact, have
combined aristocratic likings with literary fellow-
ship, oligarchical ideas with popular favour, and a

cautious policy with inflammatory speeches. The most
influential, the mcst sensible, the most amiable, the most
elegant of Whig,, Lord Lansdowne retired in the hey-day

of youth into the House of Lords. For 20 years the party
was disorganised ; it had no leader of mark among the
Commons, and it may be said to have existed only in the
saloons of Lansdowne-house and Holland-house. There,
perhaps, were congregated more of wit and wisdom, more
of brain and beauty than could be assembled anywhere else
in the three kingdoms—more, in a word, of that fine essence
which ultimately moulds opinion, creates a party, and rules
the State. The Whigs have always been worshippers of
talent, and few men had a more keen appreciation of all
that is brilliant in letters, powerful in debate, or useful in
administration than the late Lord Lansdowne. Who ever
gave the budding genius a warmer welcome ? Who was a
more certain friend to the rising man? By an instinct
that, if not genius, was the next thing to it—a noble taste
—he surrounded himself with men of mark, and gave splen-
dour to a party which had to endure all the ignominy of
defeat. At length, through the disorganisation of the
Tories, the party began once more to make a figure; and,
in fart, with the exception of a short interval during which,
to use the metaphor of Mr. Disraeli, Sir Robert Peel, who
found the Whigs bathing, had run away with their clothes,
the great Whig lords, with the deceased Marquis at their
head, ever since the formation of Lord Grey's Cabinet, the
first meeting of which WAS held at Lansdowne-house, kept
the Government of the country entirely in their hands,
Lord Lansdowne, more than the leader of a party, became
the patriarch of the Upper Douse; he became the personal
friend and adviser of the Queen, as the Duke of Wellington
had been, and he has now died in a good old age, after a
most useful and most prosperous career, in as high honour
as can be enjoyed by a subject.
The fortunes of the Lansdowne family were formed by a
man chiefly known as the founder of a new science—the
science of Political Arithmetic, but whose life involved so
many of the modes of activity which a very remarkable
period afforded that one is surprised to find that it has been
almost entirely overlooked by the biographers. Sir William
Petty, the son of a clothier at Romsey, fought his way
desperately to fame and fortune in the times of the Com-
monwealth and the Restoration. He entered the navy, and
soon left it ; he tried merchandise for a time, and left that
also ; he then invented a copying machine, but received no
profit from it ; he turned to medicine, and dissected in Paris
under the guidance of Hobbes ; he became Professor of
Anatomy at Oxford ; to anatomy he added music, and be-
came professor of this art at Gresham College ; subse-
quently he became physician to the Irish army during the
Protectorate ; not content with these occupations, he con-
tracted for the admeasurement of lands in Ireland forfeited
by the rebellion, his survey being still of great value in the
law courts as a work of reference; he became a member of
Parliament under Oliver ; he was knighted by Charles II.;
he was one of the founders of that Royal Society which has
had so much influence on the development of science ; he at
length became a shipbuilder, inventing a double-bottomed
vessel to sail against wind and tide; and, finally, by vari-
ous important works on taxation and national wealth, he
established, as we have said, the new science of Political
Arithmetic. He died, leaving what in these times would
be considered very large possessions—personal estate to the
amount of £45,000, and landed property to the value of
£6,500 a year. Such are the self-made men who supply
our English aristocracy with new blood, and preserve it in
vital connection with the hearts of the people. He married
a lady who was Baroness Shelburna in her own right, and
by her daughter, his only surviving child, who had inter-
married with the Kerry family, he became the great grand-
father of the celebrated Earl of Shelburne, the first Mar-
quis of Lansdowne, and the father of the deceased Marquis.
Bentham remarked of Lord Shelburne that he was the only
Minister he ever heard of who did not fear the people. As
a Minister, however, his career cannot be regarded as very
successful. His countenance was said to resemble that of
Louis XVI., and his fate was in this also like that of the
monarch,—that when to all appearance he had reached the
summit of power he was politically beheaded. On the dis-
solution of the Fox and North Ministry, the whole nation
expected that his Majesty would have sent for Lord Shel-
burne, who had already been Premier; but the King sent
for his subordinate, young Pitt, and Shelburne was con-
soled for the loss of his ambition by the coronet of a mar
quis. Probably it was not difficult to console him, and
now—in order to prove what he once said to Johnson, that
a man ought to have every gratification and to be perfectly
happy in the enjoyment of £5,000 a year,—he retired to in-
dulge more congenial tastes in the adornment of Lansdowne
House, which he purchased when half finished from Lord
Bute, and where he collected a splendid gallery of ancient
and modern pictures, together with a library of 10,000
volumes, comprising the largest assortment of pamphlets
and memoirs on English history and politics possessed by
any man of his time, as well as a series of manuscripts
which were subsequently sold to the British Museum
for £5,000. The library itself was exquisitely de-
corated by Cipriani in imitation of the antiquities
found in Herculaneum, and it was while occupied in
this superb temple as the librarian, philosopher, and friend of
Lord Shelburne, that Priestly made the discovery of oxygen.
It was at Lansdowne-house, then known as Shelburne-
house, that Lord Henry Petty was born on the 2d of July,
1780, so that at the time of his decease he had attained the
great age of 82. His father was twice married. By his
first wife, a daughter of Earl Granville, he had two sons,
the younger of whom diei early, while the latter, who suc-
ceeded his father in the title, died without issue. By his
second wife, a daughter of the Earl of Upper Ossory,
Lord Shelburno had, besides a daughter who did not long
survive, one son, the subject of this memoir, who became
the third and most distinguished Marquis of Lansdowne.
In his childhood, however, Lord Henry Petty had only the
prospects of a younger son; and, seeming to be a precocious
boy, he was destined at an early age, like so many of the
youthful scions of the great houses, to the service of the
State. As Pitt and Fox were specially trainel, so Henry
Petty and John Russell were cradled lawgivers; the Con-
stitution was their rockinghorse, and when other boys were
sucking barleysugar and playing at cricket, they were ad-
miring Magna Charta and studying the tactics of Ministers.
Almost all our leading statesmen of these latbr times have

been trained in this way ; they have chosen politics for
their profession from the first, and they have practised la-
boriously in the Senate as other men practise at the bar.
It was with this view that Lord Henry Petty was sent to
Westminster School, where he wee placed under the special
superintendence of one of the masters, the Rev. Mr.Debarry.
Ono rare privilege was then, as it still is, possessed by the
Westminster boys, of which Henry Petty fully availed him-
self—the privilege of attending the debates in Parliament;

and in those days, when oratory was studied more as an
than it is now—when at times the manner seemed of art
m
importance than the matter—when the " action, hetioere
action," of Fos made the Ministers seem to be traitors action,
their own eyes—when the showy rhetoric of Sheridan,
which now seems dull and unprofitable as the scenes
of a theatre in the daylight, told with such effect that on
one occasion Pitt had to ask the house to postpone its vote
—when Burke was rendering his argument dark by exces-
sive brightness of imagery, till his auditors, dazzled by the
glare, were at last blinded into sleep; and when—not to
speak of Erskine and the other luminaries of the law—Pitt
himselfe was elaborating those stately periods in which he
A so little and seemed to say so much that some one ex-
claimed with admiration, "I do believe he could deliver a
King'a Speech off hand," the sight must have been pecu-
liarly inspiring to a boy especially since all this mastery of
language was used with the most deadly designs in the
most•furians philippics, not so much for the establishment
of principles
of parties andanthdeimpeachment passing of laws as for the demolition
of Ministers. Henry Petty
was sadly disappointedcm night in attending these debates.
He had missed by a very few fe
intended to
that strange scene,
really ridiculous, although to be terrific, in which
during a debate on the Alien Act,e Burke drew a dagger
from his breast, and, throwing it h the floor, cried, "This
is what you will Baia by an alliance it
completeFrance.' political
bably, no man of his time had suet
ettha boy, sedu-
lously as this young lord, who,
hile
y,enacfeterpasesed
lously attended the debates in Parliameilph
to Edinburgh to study history and philoso
graduated at Cambridge, now studied Benthamism wunrddear
the best possible guidance, and soon—for the Peace of
Amiens was of short duration--returned to England to
learn the arts and imbibe the traditions of Lansdowne-
house and Holland-house. Great were the hopes enter-
tained of him, and in the following year, when barely
age, he entered the House of Commons as member fur the
family borough of Caine. He immediately turned his atten-
tion to finance. Was not his great ancestor a financier ?
'Were not the Whigs, always bad arithmeticians, in want
of a financier ? Waa not he himself, as well as his friend
fitaorner, fitted by his Edinburgh training to shine in
Therefore, as a worthy descendant of William
Petty,c ?
and as a worthy rival of William Pitt)
ho delivered his maiden speech on the Bank Restriction
Act. .But his most important effort, and that which de-
cided his position in the House of Commons,
delivered in support of the attack on Le
Treasurer of the Navy. Melville i
w asa
Lord
re of was a speech
d Melville as
various public moneys to his own use, and of perraitti
his
his paymaster Trotter to do the same, and even to use applying
opportunities on the Stock-Exchange, Eventually, all that

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 t y 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, 105, the case.
as reported by commissioners appointed to inquire into the
abuses of the Naval Department, looked b-id 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
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 set,
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. Hawkesbury would refuse it
—so would a much more likely man, the Marquis Welles-
ley. Some of the courtiers, as we learn from " Horner'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 the re not something sym-
metrical in now playing over again the game of 1781, in
detaching Shelburne's ymithful son from his allegiance to
Fox, and in setting him up as the head of the Cabinet to
carry out the wishes of the King ? " They mistake their
man," writes Homer, " 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 i
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
most 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 halt-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 in poenible 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
Some 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
'lister, it surely mattered very little, as far as the money-
market was concerned—to adopt ono of Byron's lines,
6' 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 aceountsnot passed to theamount 0f£167,000,000
—that there were accounts not proceeded with to the
amount of £58,000,000---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 country 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 6i 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 1
eonnt
foundcoul d
trtesne
fe r
at t hae
oi ms
sp o
fors t
to,
leearsauhrt oe haenl dd owuht e tno
Gtohveernnanati
k
alluring more and more funds with whitcuhnetothcraorruyooonutthe great
war now raging with various Europe,for
out another scheme, of the most allur f
taxa-
tion
and, indeed, the whole world, Lord HenchryaraPcetettry,
wsthriucch,
if it were only feasible, would solve the mystery o
for ever, and evoke any amount of revenue to cover
for
the amount of expenditure. Assuming that charges
the future could not be greater than those for the 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 he 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
kind should the war continue. This precious plan, the fal-
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 before 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 tho 13th
of September, 1806. After his departure there was no
more life in the Cabinet. Lord Cirenville, it is true,