The Sun.
London, England, 1847-01-08 00:00:00

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LONDON, FRIDAY, JANUARY 8, 1847.

CABINET COUNCIL

A Cabinet Council was held at twelve o'clock this
day, at the Foreign-office, Downing-street.
Lord JOHN RUSSELL, Lord PALMERSTON, Earl
GREY, and most of the Ministers were present.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer is out of town,
in consequence of the death of his father.

Before many days have elapsed the " vexed ques-
tion" of the Spanish marriages will have been sub-
mitted to the deliberation of the Chambers of Peers
and Deputies in France, and: the Houses of Lords
and Commons in England. After the voluminous
and elaborate commentaries of the newspaper press
in both countries, we are loath to revive a subject
which has already been examined perhaps too cu-
riously, and discussed perhaps too precipitately. Par-
ticularly when we bear in recollection the circum-
stance already mentioned, namely, that this com-
plicated and discreditable transaction will be soon
considered by the collected wisdom of the several
deliberative assemblies, we are disinclined to recur to
a matter, the mysteries of which we ourselves have
long since divulged to the very core. The be.'
haviour of Great Britain in reference to
the nuptials of the Due DE MONTPENSIER has, how-
ever, been so egregiously and wilfully misrepresented
in an article in the Westminster and Foreign Quar-
terly Review, just published, that some refutation of
the fallacies contained therein appears to us to be ab-
solutely requisite. In the first place, the writer stands
aghast with astonishment because the peace of conti-
nental Europe appears to be actually endangered by the
matrimonial alliance ofa very youthful Royal High-
ness and an Infanta not yet out of her girlhood.
" Surely the world must have made little progress in
civilisation during the last century, if the destinies of
great nations are to depend on the marriages of the
members of royal families," says the Westminster
Review. Surely it must. That is precisely the
consideration which has operated as such a powerful
incentive to Lord PALMERSTON in the transmission
of protests from the Foreign-office to the British
Ambassadors accredited to Paris and to Madrid.
That is precisely the consideration which has influ-
enced Mr, HENRY Bunwaa and the Marquis of
NORMANDY in their expressions of displeasure to
the Ministers of the Iberian peninsula, and the
Cabinet of the Tuileries. The national mind of
England revolts at the mere supposition that the
destinies of great nations are to be in any man-
ner dependent upon the intrigues of a palace,
or the machinations of an ambitious prince-
ling. It is sufficient, assuredly, to excite the
indignation of every dispassionate spectator to
observe the liberties of a people once so great as
the Spaniards staked upon the hazard of a wedding
garland, and rendered the toys of an aspiring dynasty.
The disgust excited by that spectacle has given em-
phasis to the remonstrances of her MAJESTY'S Minister
for Foreign Affairs, and pungency, and tartness, and
enthusiasm to the popular wrath, which has found a
willing voice in the Press. But the construction of
the reviewer's sentence implies a very different mean-
ing from that which we have here expressed. He in-
sinuates that the English Government has shown
itself ready to draw the sword, and even to fling away
the scabbard, merely "because a Royal Duke and a
Royal Princess have married." That is a casus
belli most conceivable under a system of feudality,
but is it possible at this period, is it possible in 1847,
that the populace should be prepared to engage in a
brutalising contest, to trample the golden wand of
peace into the dust, and pour forth again bloody
libations to Mars, as men did in the old days, because
forsooth a marriage has been solemnized between a
Royal Duke and a Royal Princess? Not so. The
scales have been removed from the eyes of the
multitude. When the British Ministry and the
several organs of public opinion evince their
indignation at the nuptuals of Donna LUISA,
that indignation is aroused, not because of the alliance
of the Infanta So-and-so and the Duke of This-and-
that (qui n'iinporte rien), but, because by that union
of the Duke of This-and-that with the Infanta of
So-and-so, the independence of an illustrious race is
jeopardized, and the balance of European power
endangered. Any different explanation of the senti-
ments entertained upon the matter in Downing-
street, and throughout the length and breadth of
Great Britain, would be an absurdity and a deli-
berate distortion of the truth.
In regard to the celebrated interview between Queen
VICTORIA and King Louis PHILIPPE at the Chateau
d'Eu, the Westminstsr Review is again filled with the
most surprising astonishment. Instead of recognising
in the compact between the two Sovereigns (to the
effect that the Due DE MONTPENSIER would be at
liberty to seek the hand of the Infanta whenever a
Coburg Prince was advanced by Great Britain as a
candidate for the hand of Queen ISABELLA, and vice
versa), instead of recognising in that compact a
guarantee of the unanimity of the Cabinets of St.
James's and of the Tuileries, upon the problematic
question of the Spanish marriages, the re-
viewer considers it merely as an index to the
selfishness of the two Governments. If the
stipulation at the Chateau d'Eu had been tantamount
to the perpetual incarceration of the children of FER.•
DINAND, or to their compulsory marriage with some
Most Noble Sawney Bean or some Serene Blue-
beard, then might the arrangements of her Most
Gracious MAJESTY and the KING of the FRENCH be
stigmatised thus emphatically. Not otherwise.
The reviewer is indignant with Mr. BULWER
for " a most remarkable breach of diplomatic
etiquette," namely, the transmission of his first
letter to a member of the Spanish Cortes ; but
no mention whatever is made cf that most remarkable
breach of political honour and royal honesty, which
alone elicited that letter, which palliates everything
unprecedented in the publication of that letter, which,
indeed, renders that letter a memorable testimony of
the shameless duplicity and ungraceful guile by
P
which Lours HILIPPE.aIon realised his most ardent
aspirations. The withdrawal ofthe British Minister
from the Court of Madrid, and the a bsefice
of the British Ambassador from the Court of
Paris, are designated by the Westminster Review
as " undignified and petty exhibitions of temper."
There never was an imputation more utterly pre-
posterous than this. Can any sensible man for one '