a good naval and military position, and an excellent basis for further operations on the Mississippi, the Bay of Mexico, the rivers Mobile, Alabama, &c. During the progress of the war, the British government had made several overtures, direct as well as indirect, for a reconciliation, and every royal speech at the opening of Parliament had expressed, with a determination to yield or commit none of our maritime rights, regret for the quarrel, or a wish that it might not be lasting. At first the overtures were met as a confession of fear and weakness as an avowal that we were sinking under the weight imposed upon us by a war with France in the Old World, and with the republic of the United States in the New World; and, when their ship-of-the-line-like frigates had made old British frigates strike, it was fancied that our spell was broken, that the trident was falling from our hands. Bonaparte's grand disaster in Russia, which was well known all over the United States early in the year 1813, damped, but did not destroy, the hopes of the war party; for they could not conceive that so gigantic a power as that of the Emperor of the French could be destroyed at one blow. They hoped that the Man of Destiny would prevail against all the embattled crowned despots of Europe in the plains of Germany in 1813. This hope was shattered by the battle of Leipzig. But in the beginning of 1814, when Bonaparte was fighting on the soil of France, -when the armies of the allies were engaging, far from their own frontiers, in the very heart of the most warlike nation of Europe, they trusted that the star of Napoleon would shine forth again more luminous than ever. It was needful for them to cling to this hope, for the most ardent lover of this war with England well knew that it could not be continued without ruin to the United States, if England should be relieved from the great and exhausting French war, and be enabled to direct her whole attention to this little episode in America. But Bonaparte was beaten inside of France, as he had been beaten outside of France; and the 1814 hope was finished by the capture of Paris, and the abdication of Fontainebleau. Then, and not until then, President Madison and his party utterly despaired of the policy they had adopted, and became really eager for peace. Before this time, however, it had been sufliciently demonstrated that the conquest and annexation of Canada-incontestably the main object for which Madison had provoked this war-was not to be achieved by such troops and military resources as the central government could command; and the seat of sensibility had been violently affected, by the very many bags of dollars which had been spent in those useless expeditions beyond the lakes and the river St. Lawrence. Moreover, the opposition of the north-eastern states of the Union to a line of policy which they had never supported, and to a war which was threatening to make bankrupts of them all, compelled the pupil of Jefferson to pretend a wish to treat with England, even at the end of 1813. On the 7th of January, 1814, he communicated to Congress copies of a correspondence between Lord Castlereagh and Mr. Munroe. From these letters, it appeared that Lord Castlereagh had proposed the appointment of plenipotentiaries to treat respecting terms of peace either at London or at Gottenburg, and that the American diplomatist, preserving his proper dignity, had acceded to his lordship's proposition, being authorized so to do by the president, who had made choice of Gottenburg for the scene of the negociations. The anti-war and anti-French party bitterly assailed the president for not assenting to a like amicable proposition made on the part of England long before: they accused him even now of a design to protract the negotiations, and they told him that this delay would not be borne by the impatient and ruined people of the eastern states. Besides repeating the threat of breaking up the federal union, the people of these eastern states began to declare that they would contribute no money, no men, no stores to the armies set on foot by the central government; that they would keep their own militia at home for their own defence; that perhaps they might be driven, by their necessities, to seek a separate reconciliation with Great Britain, &c. In the State of Massachusetts these threats were loudly expressed by Governor Strong, before the legisla ture of that state. So terrible, indeed, were these gales from the north-east, that President Madison, his government, and whole system were well nigh blown away by them. Nor did the president escape without yielding to them: prostrating himself before the blast, he repealed his embargo and non-importation acts! This, he hoped, would tend to allay some of the discontents occasioned by the restrictions on commerce, and remove, at the same time, some of the evil and ruinous effects of those restrictions on the American revenue, which was already in a deplorable state. But England frustrated these hopes by the extension of the British blockade along the whole coasts of the United States, which was announced in April, 1814, by Admiral Cochrane. And throughout this last year of the war, Madison had no reason to complain, as he used to do in former times before the war began, that British blockades of coasts were merely paper blockades; for so closely were the rivers, the great outlets of America, watched; so incessantly was the coast scoured from south to north, and from north to south; so vigilant was the look-out, even close in shore, that a trading vessel could hardly put out to sea nay, could hardly creep along the coast from one harbour to another, without the dead certainty of being captured by the English. The year 1814 must have been altogether a blank and black year for Madison. He saw Washington burned under his nose; he could do nothing more on the side of Canada; great part of the province of Maine was wrested from the republicans by our expedition on the Penobscott River; he had scarcely a gleam of satisfaction, except in the results of Sir George | way, and we ought to have finished it in our Prevost's wretched Plattsburg expedition. The negotiations for peace, which had been removed by mutual consent from Gottenburg to Ghent, commenced in earnest in August, 1814. By means of various applications, and condescensions not quite consistent with the severity of republican principles, though not inconsistent with American practice, Madison and his friends secured the mediation or friendly offices of the Emperor Alexander of Russia. In the mouth of October the president laid before congress an account of the proceedings at Ghent. He made it appear that the British government had advanced certain demands, respecting the integrity of the territory of the Red Indians, the military possession of the lakes, and the settlement of the boundaries, which the American plenipotentiaries had not hesitated to reject as wholly inadmissible. The congress by a large majority confirmed this rejection; and measures were determined on for purely defensive preparations if the continuance of the war should be found inevitable. But it was easier to vote resolutions than to raise the money necessary to carry them into effect, or to reconcile the people of the north-eastern states to the prospect of any prolongation of hostilities. So low was the state of public credit that no loans could be negotiated. A system of taxation was resorted to which added fuel to fire. In none of the New England states would those war taxes ever have been paid. Six months of sternness and perseverance on the part of Great Britain would have taught the Americans a salutary lesson; twelve months' perseverance and energy in carrying out our blockade, and without any more expeditions by land, or any other risks or expenses, and the feeble ties which kept the northern and southern states together would have been snapped like a scorched thread. But it was a season of triumph and magnanimity in Europe:-the Emperor of Russia was very magnanimous, Lord Castlereagh was very magnanimous, and the people of England were very forgiving, and cared more for a completeness of peace than for the prospective advantages to be derived from the wholesome chastisement which might have been inflicted (perhaps as much to the benefit of the Americans as to our own benefit). The restoration of peace in Europe, with the overthrow of the founder of the continental system, of the new navigation code, and of the new system of international law, had indeed removed for the present many of the causes of differences between England and the United States. For example, we had no longer any present necessity to insist on our right of search, or on our right of excluding neutral vessels from the blockaded ports of an enemy. But we must deny that the prosecution of a war which could not by any possibility have lasted a year longer would have been a useless expenditure of money and an unjustifiable harshness on our part. The Americans had forced the war upon us in their way. No principle ought to have been left unsettled, no question relating to boundaries or to anything else left open to be a perennial source of quarrel as soon as America should feel herself strong enough or bold enough to quarrel. As it was, the plenipotentiaries at Ghent agreed to waive every question at issue between us, and to take no notice whatever of the circumstances which had occasioned the war. On the 24th of December, 1814, they concluded and signed a treaty of peace and amity, which was ratified by both governments. The longest of the articles of the treaty related to the disputes respecting boundaries, yet still they left those disputes to be settled and determined by commissioners of the two nations who were to meet and discuss the questions hereafter. Each nation engaged to put an end to all hostilities that might be subsisting between them and the Indian tribes, and to restore to those tribes all the possessions and privileges which belonged. to them previously to the war. Both parties likewise covenanted to continue their efforts for the entire abolition of the slave-trade. All the northern and eastern states of the Union were thrown into transports of joy by this peace. The Englishman who carried out the ratification of the treaty was carried by the citizens and people through the streets of New York in triumph and jubilee. Virtually the long reign of George III. terminated in 1810 with the establishment of the regency; and, having brought the great events which were then in progress to their close, we may with propriety abstain from giving details of the minor events which took place between the year 1815 and the death of the old king. As it now rests there is a kind of epic unity and completeness in the history of this actual reign of nearly fifty years. To proceed would be to enter upon or merely touch the skirts of another era. Even with the noble episode of Lord Exmouth's bombardment of Algiers in the month of August, 1816, the story of Orator Hunt and his white hat, the doings of the Radical reformers, the Spa-fields mobs, the Manchester meetings and the affray at Peterloo, would be but as a farce after a sublime drama. The great events of the reign-more numerous, complicated, and important than those that were crowded in any two preceding centuries-have already occupied a space considerably exceeding the limits we originally proposed. The three great subjects-the consolidation and extension of our Indian empire, the war of American independence, and the wars arising out of the French Revolution-have been discussed very fully, as it was always intended they should be ; and great pains have been taken to give a correct notion of the real character of the French Revolution, of the men who made it, and of the effects and tendencies of that convulsion. From 1790 this history is, for a quarter of a century, not merely the History of England, but the History of Europe. George III. died in Windsor Castle on the night of Saturday the 29th of January, 1820, in the 82nd year of his age, and (counting the ten years of the regency) in the 60th year of his reign. For some years before his death he had been totally blind; and it does not appear that any temporary return of reason allowed him to comprehend and rejoice at the issue of the momentous struggle in which he left his country engaged in 1810, when his malady drove him into retirement. We only know that when others desponded his hopes were high, and that, so long as he had reason, he never despaired of the final triumph of England. No man within his realms had a more thoroughly English heart, or a more ardent desire to promote the welfare of the people and the interests and honour of the country. Unpopular in his youth and earliest government, he became endeared to the people in the midst of the misfortunes of the American war; and perhaps no sovereign had ever been more popular than he was during the last twenty-five years of his reign. When aged, afflicted with blindness, and with a still more awful calamity, he became to every truly British heart "the dear old king," "the good old king"-and the mingled feeling of affection, reverence, and grief, for the poor blind old recluse of Windsor Castle was honourable to the vast body of the English nation. The whole feeling was expressed by a decent London mechanic, who was viewing the festivities and rejoicings in Hyde Park for the peace of Paris, and the magnificent cortége of the Prince Regent, the Emperor of Russia, the King of Prussia, with the long array of warriors of fame, marshals and generals. | The man's face was radiant with joy and exultation; but a cloud came over it-" Why is not our good old king well, and here, to see this sight!"-and as he said the words tears stood in his eyes. Of the character of George III., both as a man and as a sovereign, the facts which have been narrated in the body of our history will enable the reader to form a pretty correct opinion. The time is not yet come for drawing up an impartial, dispassionate, and complete character; but it may be well remarked now, that nearly every circumstance concerning him which has been brought to light of late years, and nearly every conversation which has been reported, or letter written by him which has been published, have tended to clear away the prejudices of former times, and to raise our estimate not merely of the goodness of his heart and intentions, but also of the powers of his intellect, and of his capacity for public business. Our part of this work is done; and the pen drops from a weary hand which has known little rest since the work began. In the performance of our task, numerous errors may have been committed, and false conclusions may have been drawn from correct premises; but we have never, wittingly, tampered with a fact or falsified a figure. We are of no party, but we are of a country; and this, we trust, we have shown in the whole course of our labours. And it remains with us as a principle, and as a point of faith, that one of the greatest uses of National History is to maintain or minister to a high National Spirit. CHAPTER II. THE HISTORY OF RELIGION. HE first question connected with religion or the church that came before the legislature after the union with Ireland, was that of the eligibility of persons in holy orders to sit in the House of Commons. This question arose in consequence of the return of the celebrated John Horne Tooke, long distinguished as a reformer of the first water both in politics and in philology, as one of the representatives for the rotten borough of Old Sarum, on the nomination of the aristocratic and autocratic patron Lord Camelford, to the first imperial parliament, which met on the 2nd of February, 1801. Tooke, introduced by his friend Sir Francis Burdett and another member, took the oaths and his seat on the 16th of February; when Earl Temple immediately rose and gave notice that, if no petition should be presented against the honourable gentleman's return within the allotted fourteen days, he should then submit a motion on the subject. Nothing farther, however, was done in the matter till the 10th of March. Tooke, according to his own account, had attended in his place at the expiration of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen days, without. receiving any communication from Temple. This he stated in a speech which he made when the case came on. "On the seventeenth," he continued, severe indisposition kept me away: I found on the eighteenth that his lordship, in my absence, had given notice that he should on this day (the 10th of March) make a motion respecting the eligibility of the Reverend John Horne Tooke to a seat in this House. I attended on that day: his lordship then came to me, and very handsomely said he would tell me what sort of a motion it would be. The lawyers, his lordship said, had not been able to determine what sort of a motion he should make on the subject; but he told me he should be able to tell me what would be the motion on Tuesday. I attended; and then his lordship, instead of informing me of anything, made a new motion for the examination of witnesses." Meanwhile, Tooke had, with his characteristic dexterity, been manifestly steering his course in the House with a view to conciliate the quarter from which he had most to fear. In a debate, for instance, on 66 VOL. 1V.-GEO. III. the 19th of February, on a motion for censuring one of the late continental expeditions, the renowned champion of reform and democracy, who had already consented to enter the House of Commons as the nominee of a peer, and to sit as a representative without a constituency, surprised the public by making his debut as a parliamentary orator with a speech in defence of ministers. In another debate on the 2nd of March, again, he took occasion to proclaim the first principle of his political creed to be an attachment to the ancient institutions of the country. "I am supposed," he said, "to be a great friend to innovations of every kind. I have been represented as an innovator, but I do not deserve that title. . . . I look to what is established, and approve of it-not because it is the best, but because it is established. Let any man examine what have been the sentiments that, upon every occasion, have fallen from me, and he will find that I have uniformly been against innovation." Temple's motion on the 10th of March was merely to call witnesses to the bar to prove the fact of the member for Old Sarum having taken holy orders; it was carried, after some debate, by a majority of 150 to 66; the witnesses were examined, and proved what was wanted; a select committee was then appointed to search the journals of the House, and the records of parliament, for precedents. This committee did not give in its report till the 2nd of April; and the matter was not again taken up till the 4th of May. Long before this, fortunately for Tooke, if he himself had not come to be regarded a ministerialist, Lord Temple, formerly a steady adherent of Pitt, had, on the accession of the Addington ministry, passed over to the opposition. On the 12th of March, we find the member for Old Sarum coming forward, at the close of an animated debate on a motion by Sheridan for resisting the continuance of the Irish Martial-law Bill, with a proposal to mediate between the two contending parties, or, as he phrased it, to reconcile both sides of the House, and admitting that, although martial law might not be necessary for Ireland, martial force undoubtedly was. On the 25th of the same month, on the other hand, after the change of ministry, when Mr. Grey moved for a committee on the state of the nation, Temple joined the opposition, and both voted and spoke in favour of Grey's motion. All this, no doubt, told upon the final decision of the House as to Tooke's case, notwithstanding that he still continued to profess himself a patriot, and had indeed not only voted for Grey's committee as well as Temple, but had afterwards, 4 G on the 14th of April, made a speech against the Habeas Corpus Suspension Bill-an occasion on which the minister could scarcely have expected him to sit silent unless he had actually sold himself for a sum of money, and then he would not have been worth purchasing. At the same time, in his speech on the 10th of March, on Temple's motion for calling witnesses to the bar to prove the fact of his ordination, he took care to hold himself out to the public as a martyr to his principles, to the democratic or ultra-liberal politics of which he had been so noted a professor. "I believe," he said, "this motion springs not from personal enmity to me (for I do not believe there is any personal enmity to me upon earth), but from political animosity." The motion also was resisted by Fox, Sheridan, Erskine, and the opposition or whig party generally. The evidence taken at the bar proved that Tooke, then Mr. John Horne, B.A., of St. John's College, Cambridge, had been ordained a priest so long ago as on the 23rd of November, 1760, and that he had officiated as such for some time at the chapel of New Brentford, administering the sacraments, performing all the other duties, and receiving his" small tithes and other things by way of composition as ecclesiastical dues." In fact, Tooke, who had now entered parliament at the mature age of sixty-five, had been for about thirteen years minister at New Brentford, although, indeed, he had twice during that time managed to get away to the Continent with pupils in the capacity of a travelling tutor, and nearly all the while. he remained at home had been much more of a political agitator than a parson. It appeared, from the cases stated in the report of the committee, that the practice throughout the seventeenth century had been to consider persons who had taken holy orders as disqualified to sit in the House; and their first report did not quote any case of later date than 1661. But in a second report they gave the entries from the journals respecting the case of a Mr. Edward Rushworth, a clerk, returned in 1784 as one of the members for the borough of Newport, in the Isle of Wight, who was petitioned against, but eventually allowed to retain his seat.* On the 4th of May, after the order of the day had been read for taking the report of the committee into consideration, Earl Temple moved that "a new writ should be issued for the election of a burgess to Mr. Rushworth was probably one of the two ministers of the Church of England whom Sir James Johnstone, in his speech in the debate on the Test and Corporation Acts, on the 8th of May, 1789, said he understood to be then sitting as members of the House. See ante, vol. iii. p. 565. Rushworth sat throughout that parliament, dissolved in June, 1790; and he was again returned to the parliament which met in September, 1796, both for Newport and for Yarmouth, in Hampshire, when he made his election for the latter place; but he resigned his seat in March, 1797. He was, however, still alive, and he petitioned the House in the course of the present proceedings that no law might be passed depriving him of his right of being again elected. In his petition, presented by Mr. G. Vansittart on the 13th of May, he stated that it was twenty-one years since he had been ordained a deacon, that he had never exercised that office for above two mouths, and that he had for upwards of twenty years given up that order. He informed the House that he had been first returned in October, 1780 (which must have been immediately after his ordination), for Yar mouth (in Hampshire). That appears to have been the fact, but he immediately, or very soon, afterwards resigned his seat by accepting the Chiltern Hundreds. serve for the borough of Old Sarum, in room af the Reverend John Horne Tooke, who, being a the time of his election in priest's orders, was, and is, incapable of sitting in this House." His lordship prefaced his motion by a long speech, into the general reasoning of which we cannot here follow him. The case of Mr. Rushworth, whom he described as having taken his seat unnoticed and unknown, and not professing to be in holy orders, "but, like the reverend gentleman opposite, appearing in a lay habit, and assuming lay functions," he endeavoured to get rid of by placing before the House what was known to be the fact (although not noticed in the journals) that Rushworth was only a deacon, and that it had been upon this point that his counsel rested the strength of his case. "It is not for us to inquire," said his lordship, "whether that distinction was or was not a proper one; the fact is, that the distinction was made, and on that distinction the committee formed their opinion. At best it is but the opinion of individuals, who, however respectable they might be, were liable to error; whose opinion may be reversed by another committee to-morrow, which again may be overturned by another the next day; and certainly is not sufficient, naked, unsupported, and alone, to counterbalance every precedent upon your journals, and the decided testimony of your parliamentary history." "I may be told," he afterwards observed, "that other clergy have actually sat in this House. The fact may be so, yet it does not alter my case. It is a very old and a very true law adage, that no blot is a blot till it is hit. Peers, minors, aliens, clearly ineligible, may have sat, and may at this moment be sitting, in this House: . . . All I contend for is, that, in every instance, without one solitary exception, where the House has noticed priest within its walls, the individual so noticed has been expelled, and the principle laid down of the ineligibility of the clergy.' The opposition to Temple's motion was led by Mr. Addington, the prime minister. His argument was somewhat perplexed; but the main drift of what he said seemed to be that, by the principle of Mr. Grenville's bill, every case of a disputed election ought to be left to the decision of a committee, and that the House should never interfere in any such case except when circumstances made it absolutely necessary. He admitted the abstract principle that persons in holy orders were ineligible; but he was convinced there was no real distinction between the state of a deacon and that of a priest; and, as a committee had decided that a deacon was eligible, another committee might possibly find Mr. Tooke's return good, if he should be again elected for Old Sarum, which he might very possibly be in the face of such a resolution as it was now proposed to pass. He seemed to think, too, that there was something in the point that previous to the year 1664 the clergy had been wont to tax themselves, but that then they gave up that power, and had been ever since taxed by parliament along with the laity.* See Pict. Hist. of Eng., vol. iii. p. 851. 1 |