DUEL BETWEEN CANNING AND CASTLEREAGH.
As the scheme took shape in July Camden was to resign, and thus make possible a shifting of offices, which was to result in the Marquis Wellesley succeeding Castlereagh as secretary for war. At last, on September 6, the duke informed Canning of his own intention to retire on the ground of ill-health, and at the same time disclosed the fact that no steps had been taken to prepare Castlereagh for the proposed change in his position. Thereupon Canning promptly sent in his own resignation, the duke resigned the same day, and Castlereagh, learning what had passed, followed his example two days later.39 Believing that Canning had been intriguing against him behind his back, under the guise of friendship, he demanded satisfaction on the 19th, and on the 21st40 the duel was fought, in which Canning received a slight wound. Such events provoked little censure in those days, and it is pleasant to know that Canning and Castlereagh afterwards acted cordially together as colleagues. Their enmity broke up the government. The Duke of Portland did not long survive his withdrawal from office, and died on October 29; Leveson-Gower insisted on following Canning into retirement.
Perceval was entrusted with the task of forming an administration, but the new ministry was not formed without considerable negotiation. Canning vainly endeavoured to impress first on his colleagues and then on the king his own pretensions to the highest office, while attempts, to which the king gave a reluctant assent, had been made to enlist the co-operation of Grenville and Howick, who succeeded his father as Earl Grey, in 1807, but they failed as all later attempts were destined to fail. The most influential motive governing their conduct was, doubtless, their feeling that they would not as ministers possess the king's confidence. Sidmouth's following had also been approached. Sidmouth himself was considered too obnoxious to some of Pitt's followers to be a safe member of the new cabinet, but Vansittart was offered the chancellorship of the exchequer and Bragge, who had taken the additional surname of Bathurst, the office of secretary at war. They refused, however, to enter the ministry, unless accompanied by Sidmouth himself.
Perceval eventually became prime minister, retaining his former offices; Lord Bathurst, while remaining at the board of trade, presided temporarily at the foreign office, which was offered to the Marquis Wellesley, then serving as British ambassador to the Spanish junta at Seville, and taken over by him in December. Hawkesbury, now Earl of Liverpool, succeeded Castlereagh as secretary for war and the colonies, and was followed at the home office by Richard Ryder, a brother of Harrowby. Harrowby himself gave up the board of control in November to Melville's son, Robert Dundas, who, however, was not made a member of the cabinet. Lord Palmerston, who had been a junior lord of the admiralty under Portland, declined the chancellorship of the exchequer, and though he accepted Leveson-Gower's post as secretary at war, he was by his own desire excluded from the cabinet.
NEW BRITISH CONQUESTS.
While the close of the year 1809 was darkened by national disappointment and political anxieties, the honour of British arms had been amply vindicated in the Spanish peninsula, and the brilliant exploit of Lord Cochrane in Basque Roads had recalled the glories of the Nile. Cochrane had already achieved marvels under Collingwood in the Mediterranean, and notably off the Spanish coast, when he was selected to conduct an attack by fireships on the French squadron blockaded under the shelter of the islands of Aix and Oléron. This he carried out on the night of April 11, with a dash and skill worthy of Nelson, and unless checked by Gambier, the admiral in command, who had been raised to the peerage after the seizure of the Danish fleet in 1807, he must have succeeded in destroying the whole of the enemy's ships. Gambier was afterwards acquitted by a court martial of negligence, but the verdict of the public was against him. In the autumn Collingwood reduced the seven Ionian islands, and gained an important advantage by cutting out a considerable detachment of the Toulon fleet in the Bay of Genoa. In the course of the year, too, all the remaining French territory in the West Indies, as well as the Isle of Bourbon in the Indian Ocean, was captured by the British navy. But this unchallenged supremacy on the high seas did not prevent the depredations of French gunboats on British merchantmen in the channel. Indeed after the battle of Trafalgar, the French "sea-wasps" infesting the Channel were more active and destructive than ever.
On October 25, being the forty-ninth anniversary of his accession, the jubilee of George III. was celebrated with hearty and sincere rejoicings. His popularity was not unmerited. He was politically shortsighted, but within his range of vision few saw facts so clearly; he was obstinate and prejudiced, but his obstinacy was redeemed by a moral intrepidity of the highest order, and his prejudices were shared by the mass of his people. Having lived through the seven years' war, the war of the American revolution, and the successive wars of Great Britain against the French monarchy and the French republic, he was now supporting, with indomitable firmness, a war against the all-conquering French empire – the most perilous in which this country was ever engaged. The colonial and Indian dominions of Great Britain, reduced by the loss of the North American colonies, had been greatly extended during his reign in other quarters of the globe. His subjects regarded him as an Englishman to the core; they knew him to be honest, religious, virtuous, and homely in his life; they justly believed him, in spite of his failings, to be a power for good in the land; and they rewarded him with a respect and affection granted to no other British sovereign of modern times before Queen Victoria. They had good cause to desire the continuance of his life and reason, knowing the character of his heir-apparent, and contrasting the domestic habits of Windsor with the licence of Carlton House.
CHAPTER IV.
PERCEVAL AND LIVERPOOL
The administration of Perceval, covering the period from October, 1809, to May, 1812, coincided with a lull in the continental war save in the Peninsula, though it saw no pause in the progress of French annexation. Nor was it marked by many events of historical interest in domestic affairs. When parliament was opened on January 23, 1810, it was natural that attention should chiefly be devoted to the Walcheren expedition, which the opposition illogically and unscrupulously contrived to use to disparage the operations of Sir Arthur Wellesley, now Viscount Wellington, in Spain. Grenville, who argued with some reason that 40,000 British troops could have been employed to far better purpose in North Germany, would have been on stronger ground if he had complained that for want of them the British army had been unable to occupy Madrid. Castlereagh, indeed, had confessed to Wellesley that he could not spare the necessary reinforcements, after the reserves had been exhausted in Walcheren; but it is by no means certain that Wellesley could have collected provisions enough to feed a much larger force, or specie enough to pay for them. Liverpool was driven in reply to Grenville to magnify the value of the capture of Flushing, as the necessary basis of the naval armaments which Napoleon had intended to launch against England from the Scheldt. The government was also defended by the young Robert Peel, lately elected to parliament. As the calamity was irreparable, a committee of the whole house spent most of its time on a constitutional question, regarding a private memorandum placed before the king by Chatham in his own defence. So irregular a proceeding was properly condemned, and Chatham resigned the mastership of the ordnance, but the policy of the Walcheren expedition was approved by a vote of the house of commons. Mulgrave received the office Chatham had vacated, and was himself succeeded by Yorke at the admiralty.
Parliament was next occupied by a question of privilege, in which Sir Francis Burdett, member for Westminster, then a favourite of the democracy, played a part resembling that of John Wilkes a generation earlier. Burdett had been for fourteen years a member of parliament, and had been conspicuous from the first for the vehemence of his opposition to the government, and more especially to its supposed infringements of the liberty of the subject. He had more recently taken an active part on behalf of Wardle's attack on the Duke of York and had supported the charges of ministerial corruption in the previous session. On the present occasion one John Gale Jones, president of a debating club, had published in a notice of debate the terms of a resolution which his club had passed, condemning in extravagant language the exclusion of strangers from the house of commons. This was treated as a breach of privilege, and Jones was sent to Newgate by order of the house itself. Burdett, in a violent letter to Cobbett's Register,