History of the Four Georges, and of William IV, Volume 4 — lxvi. The Close of Canning's Career, Part 2

Then the King sent for Canning, and Canning made his own course quite clear.

He came to the point at once.

He assumed that the great difficulty was to be found in the pressure of the Catholic question, and he advised the King to form a Ministry of his own way of thinking on that subject and to do the best he could.

The King, however, explained that it would be futile for him to think that any Ministry so composed could carry on the work of administration just then, and he gave Canning many {56} assurances of his own entire approval of his foreign policy, and declared that no one knew better than he did how much the power of England had increased with Continental States since Canning had obtained the conduct of her foreign affairs.

Thus urged, Canning consented to undertake the formation of a Ministry, but he did so on the express condition that he should not only have the King's full confidence and be free to take his own course, but that he should be known to hold such a position and to have the absolute authority of the sovereign to sustain him.

Canning's mind was, in fact, clearly made up.

He would either be a real Prime Minister, or he would have no place in the new Administration, and would become once again an independent member.

There was nothing else to be done, and the King gave Canning full authority to make his own arrangements.

[Sidenote: 1827--Defection among Canning's supporters] The task which Canning had nominally undertaken was the reconstruction of the Ministry, but no one knew better than he did that it really amounted to the formation of a new Ministry.

Canning was well aware that the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel would not consent to serve under him in any Administration.

The Duke of Wellington was at this time entirely opposed to any recognition of the Catholic claims, and, more than that, he had never been in favor of the principles of foreign policy adopted and proclaimed by Canning.

Between the two men, indeed, there was very little political sympathy, and Canning had got it into his mind, rightly or wrongly, that the Duke of Wellington had done his best to disparage him and to weaken his authority as Foreign Minister.

Sir Robert Peel occupied a somewhat different position.

He, too, was opposed to the Catholic claims; but he was a statesman of a far higher order than the Duke of Wellington, and it might always safely be assumed of him that he would rightly estimate the force of public opinion, and that when a great movement of political reform had proved itself to be irresistible Peel would never encourage a policy of futile resistance.

Peel's attitude is well described in the admirable life of {57} George Canning published by Mr. Frank Harrison Hill in 1887. "Peel," says Mr. Hill, "did not believe in governing against Parliamentary and public opinion."

"To him the art of government was the measurement of social forces, and the adaptation of policy to their direction and intensity.

When it was clear to him that a thing must be done, and that his help was essential to the doing of it, his duty was plainly marked out."

Up to this time, however, Peel did not see that the Catholic question had reached such a stage, and he probably did not believe that it would ever reach such a stage.

He had opposed Catholic claims thus far whenever the opportunity arose, and he could not undertake to serve under a Prime Minister who was openly in favor of recognizing those claims.

We shall have to tell, before long, in the course of this history, how Peel came to see that Canning was right in his policy, and how he came to be the Prime Minister by whom it was carried to success, and how he brought the Duke of Wellington along with him.

But at the time which we have now reached Peel still believed his own policy on the subject of Roman Catholic Emancipation to be the rightful policy for the guidance of the sovereign and the State, and he therefore found it impossible to serve in the new Administration.

Five other members of the existing Government, besides Sir Robert Peel, resigned their places on the same grounds.

One was, of course, the Duke of Wellington, and another was Lord Chancellor Eldon.

Some influential peers who were not members of the Government made it known that they could not give their support to any Administration which admitted the possibility of recognizing the Catholic claims.

Canning's heart might well have sunk within him for a time when he found himself abandoned by such colleagues and thrown over by such supporters.

He actually waited upon the King, and asked his permission to give up the undertaking for the formation of a new Ministry.

The King, however, probably felt that he had gone too far in his support of Canning to draw back at such a moment.

It is very likely that he was displeased by the pertinacity of {58} the resistance which men like Wellington and Peel and Eldon offered to any act of policy approved by him, and he had undoubtedly by this time come to have a strong faith, not only in Canning's capacity, but also in Canning's good fortune.

Whatever may have been his chief inspiration, he certainly had an opportune season of enlightenment, and he refused to allow Canning to withdraw from the task assigned to him.

Accordingly Canning became Prime Minister, and united in his own person the offices of First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

[Sidenote: 1827--Canning and Lord Grey] Sir John Copley, raised to the peerage under the title of Lord Lyndhurst, became Lord Chancellor in succession to Lord Eldon, and the House of Lords thus obtained a member who was destined to be one of its foremost orators, to maintain a rivalry in Parliamentary debate with Brougham and the great Tory orator and leader, Lord Derby, and to be listened to with admiration by men still living, who are proud to remember that they heard some of his great speeches.

It may be observed that Lord Eldon, whose retirement made way for Lord Lyndhurst, had been Lord Chancellor for twenty-six years, with the exception of one year when he was out of office.

Huskisson became Treasurer of the Navy and President of the Board of Trade in the new Administration.

Lord Palmerston was Secretary at War, and Frederick Robinson, now made Lord Goderich, who was in thorough sympathy with Canning and Huskisson on questions of financial policy, was Colonial and War Secretary, the latter office according to the arrangements of that time a position having quite different functions from those of the Secretary of War.

The arrangements for the new Ministry were completed in April, 1827. Canning had now reached the highest point of his career.

His policy had already been marked out for him, for England, and for Europe.

The treaty between England, France, and Russia for the protection of Greece, which became a formal instrument after his accession to the office of Prime Minister, was the result of the efforts which he had made before Lord Liverpool's sudden illness {59} led to the break-up of the Liverpool Administration.

Canning had little time left him to turn his new and great position to account.

Fame, as Mr. Hill well says, was a sucked orange to George Canning when he accepted the office of Prime Minister.

The difficulties against which the new Ministry had to contend were many and great.

Canning had the support of such Whigs as Brougham in the House of Commons, but in the House of Lords he had many powerful opponents, and the influence of the House of Lords then counted for more than it does at present.

In the House of Lords, too, Lord Grey bitterly and pertinaciously opposed him.

Grey was then one of the leading advocates of Parliamentary reform, and Canning could not see his way to ally himself with the Parliamentary reformers.

Lord Grey, moreover, seems to have distrusted the sincerity of Canning's support of Catholic emancipation, a distrust for which no possible reason can be suggested; and, indeed, Grey would appear to have had a feeling of personal dislike to the great statesman.

Accordingly he made several attacks on Canning and Canning's policy in the House of Lords, and Grey was an eloquent speaker, whose style as well as his character carried command with it.

Canning was a man of singularly sensitive nature.

Like many other brilliant humorists and satirists, he was somewhat thin-skinned and very quick of temper.

He could bear a brilliant and even a splendid part in the Parliamentary battle, but it was a pain to him to endure in silence when he had no chance of making a retort.

The attacks of Lord Grey exasperated him beyond measure, and it is believed that he had at one time a strong inclination to accept a peerage and take a seat in the House of Lords, thereby withdrawing forever from the inspiriting battle-ground of the House of Commons for the mere sake of having an opportunity of replying to the attacks of Lord Grey, and measuring his strength against that of the great Whig leader.

The fates, however, denied to Canning any chance of making this curious anticlimax in his great political career.

His health had always been more or less delicate, and he was {60} never very careful or sparing in the use of his physical powers.

He was intensely nervous by constitution, and was liable to all manner of nervous seizures and maladies.

In the early days of 1827 he caught a severe cold while attending the public funeral of the Duke of York in the Chapel Royal, Windsor.

[Sidenote: 1827--Death of Canning] The Duke of York was the second son of George the Third, and for some time had been regarded as heir-presumptive to the crown.

The Duke's public career was in almost every way ignoble.

He had proved himself an utterly incapable commander, although a good War Office administrator, and his personal character was about on a level with his military capacity.

His death in January, 1827, may be said to have had two serious consequences at least--it made the Duke of Clarence the next heir to the crown, and it brought on Canning the severe cold from which he never recovered.

It may be mentioned here, although the fact is of little political importance, that Canning when he became Prime Minister made the Duke of Clarence Lord High Admiral.

The office was probably bestowed as a token of Canning's gratitude to the King who had stood by him, not indeed to the last, but at the last.

It certainly could not have been given because of any conviction in Canning's mind that the Duke of Clarence was likely to render signal benefit to the royal navy, to the State, or to the country by his services in such an office.

Canning seemed for a while to rally from the cold which he had caught at the Duke of York's funeral, but the months of incessant anxiety which followed cast too heavy a burden on his shattered nerves and feeble physical frame.

It was hoped by his friends that the adjournment of the Houses of Parliament, which took place after the Ministry had been formed, might give him rest enough from official work to allow him to repair his strength.

But Canning's was not a nature which admitted of rest.

The happy faculty which he had once possessed of getting easily to sleep when the day's work was done had long since deserted him, and of late he took his official cares to bed with him, and they kept him long awake.

The early {61} summer of 1827 brought him no improvement, and his friends already began to fear for the worst.

He suffered from intense agonies of nervous pain, and the agonies seemed to grow worse and worse with each return.

The Duke of Devonshire offered him the use of a summer residence which he had at Chiswick, and Canning gladly accepted the offer.

It was remarked at the time by some of his friends that an evil omen hung over this summer retreat.

The former Duke of Devonshire, father of Canning's friend, had offered the same villa as a temporary retreat to Charles James Fox;

the offer was accepted by him, and Fox actually died in the bedroom which was now occupied by Canning.

The omen soon made good its warning.

Canning gradually sank under the influence of his fatal illness.

He said to a friend that during three days he had suffered more pain than all that had been compressed into his life up to that time, and we know that his was a frame which was always liable to acute pain.

He sank and sank, and on August 7 he talked for the last time coherently and composedly to those who were around him.

Then he met his approaching death with a resigned and cheerful spirit, and his latest words showed that he knew where to repose his trust for the great change which was so near.

Shortly before four o'clock on the morning of August 8, 1827, the struggle was over and the great statesman was at rest.

Even at that early hour the villa was surrounded by a large crowd of anxious watchers, who could not leave the grounds until they heard the last tidings that were to come from the sick-chamber.

The funeral of Canning in Westminster Abbey, although it was in name a private ceremonial, was followed by a throng of sorrowing admirers, among whom were princes and nobles, statesmen and prelates, politicians of all orders, and men and women of all ranks down to the very poorest, who thus bore their spontaneous tribute to the services and the memory of the great Prime Minister, and expressed in the only way left to them their sense of the loss which his country and the cause of peace and freedom had sustained by his death.

{62} [Sidenote: 1827--Canning and the English ministers] Canning had only just completed his fifty-seventh year when his career came to a close.

He died before his old friend and colleague whose sudden illness had left open to him the place of Prime Minister, for Lord Liverpool did not die until December 4 of the following year.

The place of Canning in English history is more clear to us now than it was to the world even when the anxious crowd was watching round the villa at Chiswick and when the throng followed his remains to Westminster Abbey.

He was, as we have already said, the founder of that system of foreign policy which English statesmanship has professed ever since his time.

His was that doctrine of conditional non-intervention for which, in later days, men like John Stuart Mill contended as the doctrine which ought to be the governing principle of a great council of European States, if such could be established.

Canning's idea was not that England should proclaim such a principle of non-intervention as that which Cobden and Bright, and other men equally sincere and patriotic, endeavored to impress on public opinion at a later day.

Canning's principle was that England should not intervene even on the right side of any Continental struggle in which she had no direct concern, unless some other State equally free from any direct share in the controversy were making preparation to intervene on the wrong side.

Then, according to his doctrine, England was bound to say to the interposing State: "If you, an outsider to this controversy, are making up your mind to intervene on what we believe to be the wrong side, then it may become our duty to intervene on what we believe to be the right side."

It was in accordance with this principle that Canning prevailed upon the Governments of France and Russia to enter into that engagement with England which secured the independence of Greece, as it was in accordance with this principle that he had made the proclamation of policy which secured the independence of the Spanish-American colonies, and thus called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old.

Canning must, on the whole, be ranked among great Liberal statesmen, although there were some passages in {63} his career which showed that he had not advanced quite so far in Liberal principles as some of the statesmen of his own day.

It is hard now to understand how such a man could have stood out against the principle of Parliamentary reform and popular suffrage, and could have resisted the efforts to give full rights of citizenship to the members of dissenting denominations.

It is especially hard to understand why a man who was in favor of abolishing religious disqualifications in the case of Roman Catholics should have thought it right to maintain them in the case of Protestant Dissenters.

The explanation of this latter inconsistency may be found, perhaps, in the assumption that when Canning thought of the grievance to Roman Catholics he had in his mind the grievances to the Roman Catholics of Ireland, a separate country with a nationality and traditions of her own, and a country in which the vast majority of the population belonged to the one religious faith.

He may have thought that the English Protestant Dissenters who did not see their way to class themselves with the Protestants of the English State Church had not so distinct a claim to the recognition of their grievance.

It may seem strange that a mind like Canning's could have been beguiled from the acceptance of a great principle by a curious distinction of this kind, but it must be remembered that down to a much later day many of the professed supporters of religious equality contended for some limitation of the principle where political privileges were concerned, and that only in our own time has admission to the House of Commons been left open to the professors of every religious faith, and even to those who profess no religious faith at all.

So far as Parliamentary reform in the ordinary sense of the words is concerned, we may feel quite sure that if Canning had lived a few years longer his mind would have accepted the growth of public opinion and the evidences which justified that growth, and he would not have been found among the unteachable opponents of popular suffrage and a well-adjusted Parliamentary representation.

As a financial reformer he was distinctly in advance of {64} his time, and even such men as Sir Robert Peel only followed slowly in the path which Canning and Huskisson had opened.

Canning's fame as a Parliamentary orator is now well assured.

He has been unduly praised, and he has been unduly disparaged.

He has been described as the greatest Parliamentary orator since the days of Bolingbroke, and he has been described as a brilliant and theatric declaimer who never rose to the height of genuine political oratory.

The common judgment of educated men now regards him as only inferior, if inferior at all, to the two Pitts and Fox among great Parliamentary orators, and the rival of any others belonging to his own, or an earlier, or a later day in the history of the English Parliament.

Of him it may fairly be said that his career made an era in England's political life, and that the great principles which he asserted are still guiding the country even at this hour.

{65} CHAPTER LXVII.

"THE CHAINS OF THE CATHOLIC."