ONE:In the midst of this prosperous career the two brothers-in-law, the Ministers, began to differ in their views, and Lord Townshend was soon driven by the overbearing conduct of Walpole to resign. Lady Townshend, the sister of Walpole, and even Queen Caroline, exerted their influence for some time to put an end to these feuds; but Lady Townshend soon died, and the queen, finding the breach inevitable, took the side of Walpole as the more indispensable servant of the Crown. There were serious topics on which Townshend and Walpole differed, both domestic and foreign. Townshend did not approve of the length to which matters were carried against the Emperor, and he was weary of the timid temper of the Duke of Newcastle, and strongly urged his dismissal, and the employment of Lord Chesterfield in his place; but a Pension Bill brought the quarrel to a crisis. The object of the Bill, which was warmly supported by the Opposition, was to prevent any man holding a pension, or who had any office held in trust for him, from sitting in Parliament. The king privately styled it "a villainous Bill, which ought to be torn to pieces in every particular." Both Walpole and Townshend were of the same opinion; but Townshend was for openly opposing it, Walpole for letting it pass the Commons, and be thrown out in the Lords. Townshend, to whom the odium of rejecting it was thus carried in the Lords, protested against this disingenuous conduct on the part of Walpole, and assured him that the trick would soon be fully observed, and bring more unpopularity on him in the end than a manly, open oppositionwhich it did.But Ministers were too sensible of the unconstitutional character of their deeds to rest satisfied with the mere justification of an accepted report. A Bill of Indemnity was introduced to cover "all persons who had in 1817 taken any part in apprehending, imprisoning, or detaining in custody persons suspected of high treason, or treasonable practices, and in the suppression of tumultuous and unlawful assemblies." Thus Ministers were shielded under general terms, and to avoid all appearance of personal movement in this matter by those in the Cabinet the most immediately active, the Bill was introduced by the Duke of Montrose, the Master of the Horse.
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ONE:But the great glory of this session was not the exposure of Davison and his fellow thieves, but the stop put to the operations of a much larger class of rascals. The death of Fox had been a sad blow to Wilberforce and the abolitionists, who had calculated on his carrying the prohibition of the slave trade; but Lord Grenville and his Cabinet seemed to have made up their minds to have the fame of achieving the grand object of so many years' exertion for the suppression of the African slave trade. Wilberforce, to his inconceivable joy, discovered that Spencer Perceval, the leader of the Opposition, and his party were willing to co-operate for this purpose. The king and royal family alone remained as adverse to the abolition of slavery as they were to the emancipation of the Catholics. The abolitionists, however, had so imbued the country with the sense of the barbarity and iniquity of the traffic, that royal prejudice could no longer swamp the measure, nor aristocratic apathy delay it. Lord Grenville brought in a Bill for the purpose into[532] the Peers on the 2nd of January, 1807: the 12th was fixed for the second reading. Before this took place, counsel was heard at the bar of the House against the measure, who repeated all the terrible prognostics of ruin to the West Indies and to Britain from the abolition, with which the planters and proprietors of the West Indies, the merchants and slave captains of Liverpool and Bristol, had so often endeavoured to alarm the nation. The emptiness of these bugbears had, however, been now too fully exposed to the people by the lectures, speeches, and pamphlets of the Abolition Society, and Wilberforce had all along merely to use the arguments in Parliament with which they had abundantly furnished him. Lord Grenville now introduced the second reading by an elaborate speech, in which he condensed and summed up these arguments. He was warmly supported by the Duke of Gloucestera liberal exception to his familyby Lords King, Selkirk, Rosslyn, Northesk, Holland, Suffolk, Moira, and the Bishops of Durham, London, and others. The Dukes of Clarence and Sussex as zealously opposed him, as well as Lords Sidmouth, Eldon, Ellenborough, Hawkesbury, St. Vincent, and many others. The second reading was carried, after a debate which continued till five o'clock in the morning, by one hundred against thirty-six. The third reading was also carried with equal ease, and the Bill was brought down to the Commons on the 10th of February. Lord Howick proposed its reading in an eloquent speech, and it was opposed, with the usual prediction of ruin, by Mr. George Hibbert, Captain Herbert, and General Gascoyne, who said the nation was carried away by sentimental cant, the result of an enormous agitation by the Quakers and Saints. The first reading, however, passed without a division, and the second on the 24th of February, by two hundred and eighty-three against sixteen. The House gave three cheers. Seeing the large majority, and that the Bill was safe, Lord Grenville recommended Wilberforce to strengthen it by inserting the penalties, which he did; but they left a great advantage to the slave merchants by allowing them to clear out their vessels from Great Britain by the 1st of May, and gave them time to deliver their human cargoes in the West Indies till the 1st of January, 1808a liberty which was sure to create a great sending out of vessels for the last occasion, and a fearful crowding of them. However, the accursed trade was now doomed, as far as British merchants could go, though it was soon found that it was not so easy to suppress it. When it was seen that the Bill must pass, Lords Eldon, Hawkesbury, and Castlereagh, who had hitherto opposed it, declared themselves in favour of it. It was carried in both Houses by large majorities, and received the royal sanction on the 25th of March. So easily was the Bill passed, at last, that Lord Percy, the day after it had left the Commons, moved in that House for leave to bring in a Bill for the gradual emancipation of the slaves; but this being deemed premature, and calculated to injure the operation of the Bill for the abolition of the trade, and to create dangerous excitement in the West Indies, the motion was discouraged, and so was dropped.In the month of April arrived the permission for Sir William Howe to retire, and, although he was one of the five Commissioners named for carrying into effect the proposals in Lord North's Bill, he determined to leave at the earliest day for England. Lord Howe, the Admiral, was equally impatient to return, but Lord Sandwich had informed him that it would be considered a great misfortune for him to quit his command in the present circumstances. This was, in fact, an order for his remaining, which the breaking out of the war with France, and the expected arrival of a French fleet, rendered doubly imperative.[256] Sir Henry Clinton was appointed to succeed Sir William Howe, and, the former having arrived in Philadelphia, Howe departed. Scarcely had Clinton assumed the command, when an order arrived from the Government at home to abandon Philadelphia, and concentrate his forces at New York. The French fleet under D'Estaing was on its way, and it was considered that we had not a fleet of sufficient strength to beat them back from the mouth of the Delaware.
