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THREE:[See larger version]Thus was the man who had been put down by all the assembled armies of Europe not twelve months before, who had quitted Paris weeping like a woman, and threatened, in his exile southward, with being torn limb from limb—thus was he as it were miraculously borne back again on men's shoulders, and seated on the throne of the twice-expelled Bourbons! It was far more like a wild romance than any serious history. The peace of the world had again to be achieved. The Bourbons had been worsted everywhere, even in loyal Vendée, and in Marseilles, which had so recently set a price on Buonaparte's head. The Duke of Angoulême was surrounded in Marseilles, and surrendered on condition of quitting France. The Duke of Bourbon found La Vendée so permeated by Buonapartism that he was obliged to escape by sea from Nantes; and the Duchess of Angoulême, who had thrown herself into Bordeaux, found the troops there infected by the Buonaparte mania, and, quitting the place in indignation, went on board an English frigate.

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THREE:The Duke arrived at Paris on the 9th of December, having spent more than two months at diplomacy with very unsatisfactory results. He found the king and his Minister, M. de Villele, much cooled in their feelings towards the Spanish Government, in consequence of the tone of moderation it had assumed after its defeat of the Royalist insurgents. The king was now disposed to recall his army of observation, if he could do so with honour, and all he pressed for now was that Spain should so modify her system as to make the Constitution emanate from the king, by resting it upon a royal charter and not upon the will of the people. If this were done, and done in time for him to explain the case to the Parliament, when they met on the 28th of January, everything else, every matter of arrangement and detail, would be left to the undisturbed management of the Spanish Cabinet and Cortes. This was truly very accommodating. If Spain would only recant her constitutionalism, and adopt the absolutist creed of Divine Right, the Allies would not send their armies into the country for the protection of the king against his people. The Duke having reported the altered state of feeling in the French Government, and all that had passed, to Mr. Canning, the Foreign Secretary instructed him to deliver an official note to M. de Villele, containing a direct offer from England to mediate. This offer was declined. On the 20th of December the Duke quitted Paris, and arrived in London early in January. Subsequently the diplomatic war was carried on between M. Chateaubriand and Mr. Canning, both men of genius, and masters of a brilliant style of rhetoric, to which the Duke of Wellington had no pretensions. Mr. Canning, alluding to the[236] proposed armed intervention in Spain, with a view to stamp out the revolution, said, "The spirit of revolution—which, shut up within the Pyrenees, might exhaust itself with struggles, trying indeed to Spain, but harmless to her neighbours, when restricted—if called forth from within these precincts by the provocation of foreign attack, might find, perhaps, in other countries fresh aliment for its fury, and might renew throughout Europe the misery of the five-and-twenty years which preceded the peace of 1815."

THREE:It was now expected by the Whigs, and by a[10] great part of the public, that they should come into office. At first the conduct of the Prince Regent favoured this supposition. He applied to Grey and Grenville to draw up the answer that he should return to the two Houses on their addresses on his appointment. But he did not quite like this answer, and got Sheridan to make some alterations in it. He then returned the paper to Grey and Grenville, as in the form that he approved. But these noblemen declared that they would have nothing more to do with the paper so altered; and Sheridan, on his part, suggested to the prince that he would find such men as Ministers very domineering and impracticable. Nor was this all—Lord Grenville and his family held enormous patronage. Like all the Whigs, the Grenvilles, however they might study the interests of the country, studied emphatically their own. Grenville had long held, by a patent for life, the office of Auditor to the Exchequer; and in accepting office in "All the Talents" Ministry, he managed to obtain also the office of First Lord of the Treasury. The Auditorship of the Exchequer was instituted as a check on the Treasury, but neither Lord Grenville nor his friends saw any impropriety in destroying this check by putting both offices into the same hands. They declared this union was very safe and compatible, and a Bill was brought in for the purpose. But when the King had become both blind and insane, and no Regent was yet appointed, Lord Grenville, being no longer First Lord of the Treasury, but Perceval, he suddenly discovered that he could not obey the order of the Treasury for the issues of money to the different services. It was strictly necessary that the Great Seal, or the Privy Seal, or the Sign Manual, should be attached to the Treasury orders, or, failing these, that they should be sanctioned by an express Act of Parliament. As neither Great nor Privy Seal, nor Sign Manual was possible until a regent was appointed, Lord Grenville's conscience would not let him pass the orders of the Treasury, and all payments of army, navy, and civil service were brought to a stand. Perceval, after in vain striving hard to overcome the scruples, or rather the party obstinacy of Grenville, was compelled to go to the House of Parliament, and get the obstacle removed by a resolution of both Houses. The notice of the public being thus turned by Grenville to his holding of this office, and his readiness to unite the two offices in his own person, which his pretended scruples of conscience now invested with so much danger, produced a prejudice against him and his party, which was hostile to their coming into power. Besides this, the Opposition were greatly divided in their notions of foreign policy. Grey and his immediate section of the party felt bound, by their advocacy of Fox's principles, to oppose the war; Grenville and his friends were for a merely defensive war, and for leaving Portugal and Spain, and the other Continental nations, to fight their own battles; whilst Lord Holland, who had travelled in Spain, and was deeply interested in its language and literature, was enthusiastic for the cause of the Peninsula, and the progress which Wellington was making there. It was utterly impossible that, with such divided views, they could make an energetic Ministry at this moment, and it was equally certain that they could not again form an "All the Talents" by coalition with the Conservatives. And, beyond all this, it does not appear that the Regent was anxious to try them. Like all heirs-apparent of the house of Hanover, he had united with the Opposition during his youth, but his friendship appeared now anything but ardent. Sheridan still possessed something of his favour, and the Earl of Moira was high in it; but for the rest, the prince seemed quite as much disposed to take the Tories into his favour; and he, as well as the royal dukes, his brothers, was as much bent on the vigorous prosecution of the war as the Tories themselves. No Ministry which would have carried that on languidly, still less which would have opposed it, would have suited him any more than it would have done his father. The King, too, was not so deeply sunk in his unhappy condition but that he had intervals lucid enough to leave him alive to these questions, and he showed so much anxiety respecting the possible change of the Ministry, and fresh measures regarding the war, that his physicians declared that such a change would plunge him into hopeless madness and probably end his life. The Queen wrote to the prince, saying how much satisfaction his conduct in regard to these matters had given to his father, and he wrote to Mr. Perceval, declaring that this consideration determined him not to change the Ministry at all. At the same time he expressed to the Minister his dissatisfaction with the restrictions which had been imposed upon him. Perceval, even at the risk of offending the prince, justified the conduct of Ministers and Parliament. In this he might be the more bold, as it was clear that there was no longer any danger of a Whig Government.Next morning Mr. Denman spoke nearly two hours for the queen, strongly maintaining her right of recrimination against the king, who, when seeking for a divorce, should come into court with clean hands. He commented on the several clauses of the Bill as he went along. He said the person who framed it had worked himself up into an ebullition of moral zeal, and used expressions for the full support of which the bribes and schemes of the prosecutors would produce witnesses. Referring to a former investigation, he called the attention of the House to the letter of Mrs. Lisle, in 1806, when flirting and familiarity were the worst things alleged against her Royal Highness. On the subject of familiarity he referred to a note addressed by a waiter to the Prince of Wales—"Sam, of the Cocoanut Coffeehouse, presents his compliments to his Royal Highness, and begs" so and so. That illustrious person remarked, "This is very well to us, but it won't do for him to speak so to Norfolk and Arundel." He concluded by apologising to the queen for putting even the hypothesis of her guilt, which he never could believe would be established; and whatever might be enacted by means of suborned perjury or foul conspiracy, he never would pay to any one who might usurp her situation the respect to which the laws of God and man entitled her alone.

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