8

THE PRIME MINISTER OF THE REGENCY.

character was one of the forces which shaped the character of his people; and for the second, if not for the first half of his reign, he was as honest and plaindealing as his politicians and his traders.

For four whole years before the commencement of the year 1815 he had been incapable of taking any part in business or in ceremonies. His heir-apparent, who signed State papers as Regent, was not a man of sound character. As artists use a lay figure to throw into this or that posture, and to hang this or that cloth upon, so did the rulers of England employ George, the Prince Regent; and when visited by real kings in the summer of 1814, he would have been thought a satisfactory representative of the English aristocracy, had he not been seen driving to his house in unseemly haste to escape from the hisses of the Londoners.

The real head of the Government was Lord Liverpool. He was forty-five years old; he had been in Mr. Pitt's Cabinet at the age of thirty-one as Foreign Secretary; he had been First Lord of the Treasury, or Prime Minister, for three years. He was a patient and discreet man, more fit for power than many men then alive whose intellects were more brilliant. He knew how far he must defer to men of genius, and he was not too proud to learn new lessons in politics; but he betrayed no fear of orators, and he behaved as if he knew that eloquence, if it was to rule Britons, must be the outward sign of character. He courted neither the Prince nor the populace. By the conscientious exercise of authority he did as much

LORD LIVERPOOL'S RULE.

9

as any of his successors, and more than any of his predecessors, to make statecraft acceptable to virtuous citizens. His tenure of power lasted fourteen years without a break; it gave the nation time to choose between the more and the less trustworthy advocates of liberal principles.

Next to Lord Liverpool stood Lord Castlereagh. Though called by the title of lord, he was not a member of the House of Lords. He was in the House of Commons, and was its leader; that is to say, he initiated and controlled the proceedings of the majority of the Commons, in the name and with the full authority of the Government, and he was in all debates on international proceedings the defender of the Cabinet against the Opposition. He had been the strenuous, and not over scrupulous agent of Mr. Pitt in bringing about the Union with Ireland; and he was avowedly under a pledge to the Irish Catholics, which was to be redeemed if he ever had the opportunity. In the year 1809 he had been responsible for the conduct of the greatest armament that ever left the coast of Britain; and his appointment of Mr. Pitt's surviving brother to the command of that force had caused the failure of a good scheme. The nation, however, had proved more indulgent than free nations used to be; perhaps because the reason of the miscarriage was at once explored, and the lofty aristocrat gave account of his actions with the unaffected frankness of an honest patriot.

He was the only politician of Irish birth that was not skilful in oratory, and yet a great Member of

IO LORD CASTLEREAGH THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON.

Parliament. His speaking was clumsy, yet he never said, in the way of threat or promise, either more or less than he meant to say, or his colleagues meant to have said through him. He encountered with the simplest audacity the most versatile and showy rhetoricians; and he was treated with high respect by the wisest of his opponents, Sir James Mackintosh. He was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs during three years of military success, which rewarded him for all past disappointments, and he was the first Foreign Secretary that ever left England to conduct affairs on the Continent. Though perhaps the least intellectual, he was the most dignified and courageous of all those personages, whether emperors or ministers, who invaded France in 1814 with the allied armies of Eastern and Northern Europe; and at the last crisis of the campaign, when the others were bewildered and dismayed, he compelled them in spite of etiquette to take troops from Bernadotte, King of Sweden, and give them to Blücher, the Prussian general, that he might prevail in the final combat of Laon. It may be safely conjectured, that if Castlereagh had been a professional soldier, he would have done as well as any English general, save one.1

The English general who stood first without a rival was the Duke of Wellington. He was probably the greatest man that ever was sincerely content to serve. During his fifty years of conspicuous public life he accepted every opportunity of serving the State as naturally as a horse takes food, and he conformed to

1 Lord Castlereagh, in the last few years of his life, by inheritance became a Peer, and was called Marquis of Londonderry.

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON'S PECULIARITIES.

II

all law and all social obligation just as if he had no self-love. He never set up for a statesman, but in giving counsel and in getting things done he suppassed those Englishmen and those foreigners who made it their business to frame and execute a policy. If he had been enthusiastic, he could not have been more daring; if he had been trained in philosophy, he could hardly have been more judicious. So far from being an enthusiast or a philosopher, he was substantially a man of pleasure, and he was not without hardness of heart. It cost him no effort to be perfectly truthful, although he could not always so completely rule his tongue or his pen as not to scold or scoff a little more than he intended. Though not a professor of friendship, he was attached to his likeminded master in politics, Lord Castlereagh; and when the meeting of Parliament compelled the First Commoner to go home, he took his place at Vienna just as one partner succeeds another in trading.

:

For sitting in council with the envoys, and for holding interviews with those monarchs who interfered with the envoys of the great Powers, the Duke of Wellington had one special qualification which no one else, not even Lord Castlereagh, could share he was the friend of France. Once when he went to a French theatre he was applauded; a French lady was rebuked for clapping her hands by a fellowcountryman, who said to her: 'Don't you know that he has always beaten us?' and she answered, 'Yes; but he has always beaten us like a gentleman.' He had refused to take advantage of traitorous intrigue

12 SUBORDINATION OF FRENCH RULERS TO ENGLAND.

when French malcontents offered help against Soult, their leader. He had sent home his froward allies when they plundered French villages. He had compelled, with gentle reasoning, the son of the Bourbon who claimed the French crown to desist from premature rebellion against the provisional government which came between Napoleon and Louis. He was well acquainted with this Louis, the first Frenchman that ever understood English institutions; and he was on terms of friendship, not of entangling intimacy, with M. Talleyrand, the inimitably clever representative of the new French monarchy.

A hundred years had passed since England and France had pulled together; then, as in 1815, the bigger nation had been worsted mainly by the combinations of an English warrior, and had in its comparative weakness followed the guidance of the English aristocracy ruling in the name of a Hanoverian George. In 1815 the beaten nation disguised its defeat under a change of dynasty, and being blessed with sagacious liberal leaders, was able to give effective support to the liberal policy of its most honoured rival; for the Lords Castlereagh and Wellington, although they belonged to the party which repressed democracy at home, were the advocates of liberal principles at Vienna.

It was their duty to restore the old governments overthrown by Napoleon, but not to reconstruct without modifying the absolute monarchies which had before the French Revolution disposed at will of the fortunes of Europe. Not that they insisted on a con