of his domination, that Parliamentary history acquires its usual interest, and the animation of party government is restored. So far as regards the latter half of Pitt's career, the interest of home politics centres almost exclusively upon the net-work of difficulties which arose out of the political necessity of Catholic Relief and the King's conscientious aversion to it.

Lord Stanhope has devoted a great deal of research to the strange complication of political manoeuvres which caused the interregnum of Addington, and so seriously hampered Pitt's closing days. The changes which in that brief time passed over the political scene are very curious. In the beginning of 1801 Lord Grenville was Pitt's attached colleague; Mr. Addington was Speaker, by his nomination; Mr. Fox was in bitter opposition both to Lord Grenville and Mr. Pitt. In the spring of 1804, Pitt, Fox, and Grenville were fighting side by side for the purpose of displacing Addington. In the autumn of 1806, Grenville, Fox, and Addington were fighting side by side against Pitt. And yet all this time there was no definite question of domestic, and scarcely of foreign, policy at issue; and Fox, the only man among the four who can be fairly charged with want of principle, was the only man among the four whose course, for this interval at least, was thoroughly consistent.

Lord Stanhope certainly succeeds in removing from Pitt much of the blame that has been cast upon him. The difficulty under which Pitt laboured both in 1801 and 1804 was a difficulty which must be of perpetual occurrence in every constitutional State-the difficulty of marking the exact point at which the responsibility of the Sovereign ceases, and the responsibility of the Minister begins. In governments where the theory of responsibility has been worked out with greater care, and the attributes of each particular officer are more sharply defined, this difficulty never can arise. Mr. Seward carries out President Lincoln's views, and is not held to have disgraced himself if those views differ from his own. M. Walewski and M. de Persigny must have been made a score of times the instruments of a policy in which they could not coincide; but no one thinks the worse of them on that account. It is a well-understood fact that the Emperor in the one case, and the President in the other, bear the sole responsibility of the acts which are done in their name. But in England the case is very different. We have eased the descent from a monarchy that once was absolute to the indefinable balance of power under which we at present live, by the convenient help of constitutional fictions. Our theory, as it stands, is that the Sovereign exerts all the power of the executive, while his Minister bears all the responsibility. Of course in its literal sense this never has been true, and never can be. No

honourable

honourable man, scarcely any sane man, would accept the responsibility of all that another might think fit, without consulting him, to do. Ministers have always insisted, as a condition of their retaining office, that in the main the policy of the Sovereign shall be guided by their advice. But no Minister has ever yet succeeded in pushing this claim so far as to reduce the Sovereign to a mere cypher. Notorious cases have more than once arisen— and doubtless there have been many more which have never come to light-in which the Sovereign has, as it were, turned to bay, and has adhered to his refusal to adopt some distasteful course in spite of the Minister's threats of resignation. 'I had rather go back to Germany,' was the common form in which Sovereigns of the House of Hanover were wont to announce to their Ministers that the limits of pliability had been reached. It is difficult, when matters have come to this pass, to say what a constitutional Minister ought to do. On the one hand, it seems hard to say that he is to remain in office, to bear the responsibility of a policy that is not his own, and to endure the reproaches of his enemies, perhaps of his former friends, for sacrificing his principles and his pledges to the fascinations of place and power. On the other hand, his resignation may involve the most serious dangers. The condition of the House of Commons, or of the Sovereign, or the state of affairs at home or abroad, may be such, that his continuance in office is the only mode of averting evils which may threaten the deepest interests, perhaps the very existence of the realm. Either alternative seems equally intolerable. Every Minister will decide the question more in accordance with his own feelings than in deference to any fixed rule of action. But the insoluble difficulties of the problem ought to be a bar to the condemnation of bystanders or historians. One Minister may elect to be true to his pledges: another may elect to break them for his country's sake. But it is impossible to say with justice. that one is more culpable than the other.

It is obvious that such difficulties must arise. Keen constitutionalists seem to have assumed that in all cases the King, somehow or other, must be made to give way. But Sovereigns are men, and have scruples and strong convictions like other men. For the sake of the public weal they renounce the freedom of speech and action which the meanest of their subjects enjoy. They bow their necks silently to a yoke which must often be galling to men of warm feelings and active minds. It is happy for England that, since the Revolution, her Sovereigns have been almost uniformly willing to offer what must frequently have been felt as a humiliating submission to views and wishes the most repugnant to their own. It would have scarcely been possible, considering the gravity of the subject-matters that have

often

often been in issue, antecedently to have calculated on so uniform a facility of disposition. But it would have been madness to expect that such a complaisance should be absolutely without limit. There are subjects upon which no man of common spirit or common conscience can tolerate to be made the tool of opinions not his own. There are compliances that leave behind them a remorse and a self-contempt for which ten times the greatness of an English Sovereign would be a miserable repayment. Such a subject was Catholic Emancipation. It would be idle labour to blow up again the embers of a controversy that is thoroughly forgotten. It is a subject on which there is no difference of opinion now. All are agreed that it was no breach of the Coronation Oath, and that whatever evil fruits it has in practice borne, far greater evils would have resulted from its being withheld. But, in the year 1800, the mass of English opinion was the other way. Enlightened men, like Mr. Pitt, and Lord Castlereagh, and Mr. Canning, who saw beyond their age, recognised the fact that it must be granted, and that it would be granted under worse conditions if the grievance should be made the subject of systematic agitation. But neither the mass of the members of the Established Church, nor the majority of the two Houses, shared this view; and the King, who, though shrewd, was not far-seeing, held it in especial detestation. He had conceived the idea that it was a breach of his Coronation Oath. Such an interpretation of the Coronation Oath, though probably contrary to the intention of those who framed it, was far from being untenable. Ancient oaths, framed with a regard to circumstances that have ceased to operate, are apt to ensnare tender consciences by their ambiguity. But whether the King was right or wrong in the interpretation of his oath, there is no doubt that he held it very sincerely, and that he was confirmed in it by the two highest authorities to whom he could appeal. Both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chancellor took the strong Protestant view of the question. Whether Lord Loughborough's convictions on this point were purely disinterested, it is not worth while to discuss. The more his character and career are examined by successive historians, the more pitifully they show. But he contrived thoroughly to inoculate the King's mind with the scruples which he only simulated himself. The letters which passed between the King and Mr. Pitt, some of which are printed by Lord Stanhope for the first time leave no doubt upon the reader's mind of the entire sincerity of the King's convictions, and of the pain it caused him to carry them out. The style in which they are written is slovenly to the last degree; but the very haste and carelessness of their composition is in some sense an evidence that they were a faithful

faithful and unvarnished picture of his thoughts. The language which he is recorded to have held in conversation about this time is equally decisive of his sincerity:

6

Under such circumstances, and as if to tranquillize his mind, he reverted again and again to the religious obligation which he conceived to bind him. One morning-so his faithful equerry General Garth many years afterwards related-he desired his Coronation Oath to be once more read out to him, and then burst forth into some passionate exclamations: "Where is that power on earth to absolve me from the due observance of every sentence of that oath? . . . . No—I had rather beg my bread from door to door throughout Europe than consent to any such measure!"

'Another day, at Windsor-this was on the 6th or 7th of the month -the King read his Coronation Oath to his family, asked them whether they understood it, and added: "If I violate it, I am no longer legal Sovereign of this country, but it falls to the House of Savoy."

years

In the middle of February the King fell ill. His illness was at first no more than a feverish cold. On the 17th he saw Mr. Addington, and on the 18th he saw the Duke of Portland. With the latter he talked very calmly on the general aspect of state-affairs. "For myself," said His Majesty, "I am an old Whig; and I consider those statesmen who made barrier-treaties and conducted the ten last of the Succession War the ablest we ever had." The Duke only noticed as unusual that the King spoke in a loud tone of voice. But it is remarkable in this conversation that George the Third discerned, what since his time has become much more apparent, how, not by any sudden change, but by the gradual progress of events, the Whig party has drifted away from its first position in the reign of Queen Anne, and come round to occupy the original ground of its opponents.'vol. iii. pp. 292, 293.

It was inevitable that with such feelings he should have refused to entertain the propositions upon which Mr. Pitt and his Cabinet had agreed. As soon as his resolution was intimated to the Minister, the latter appears to have recognised the hopelessness. of struggling against it, and resigned without even demanding a personal interview. The suddenness with which this step was taken at a moment when his power in Parliament was more unquestioned than ever, caused much surprise and some suspicion. The suspicion was without ground. The rumours which were current at the time to the effect that the Catholic claims had only afforded a colourable pretext for escaping from the humiliation of making a peace which had become inevitable, have been laid aside by general consent. The documents which have been published in later times sufficiently dispose of the malignant insinuations with which Lord Auckland took occasion to repay the favour of his early patron. At least, if Pitt ever entertained Vol. 111.-No. 222.

2 M

any

any such idea, he never breathed it to any human being. Nor were the colleagues who acted with him the most cordially upon this question, Lord Grenville and Lord Spencer, either conscious of any such manœuvre, or aware of any point in his conduct which would suggest the need of such an explanation. Fox's 'juggle,' and Lord Auckland's 'mystery,' were figments of their own distempered minds. With the exception of Lord Brougham, no modern authority of importance has adopted them. In truth the grounds of Pitt's conduct were so obvious that the mystery is rather that any party spirit can have mistaken them. Without passing an actual pledge, he had allowed it to be intimated to the Catholics of Ireland that the Ministry was favourable to them, and that it would be in a much better position for considering their claims when the Union with England had become law. On the strength of these assurances, which probably did not lose either in force or precision in the hands of the inferior agents of the Government, the Catholics gave the project their support. It is very clear that opposed as it was both by the secret treason of some, and the unconcealed self-interest of many, it never could have been carried if the Catholics had opposed it. Pitt felt himself bound to pay a fair price for value received. He did not think himself at liberty, after he had gained his object, to repudiate the understanding on which the votes that gained it were given. And when he found in the King's persistency an unexpected and insuperable obstacle, his only mode of fixing the responsibility where it really lay was to resign. A contrary view of political morality has been so often sanctioned within the last thirty years by distinguished statesmen of all parties, that Pitt's scruples upon the subject of breaking implied promises may appear Quixotic. But no one who applies to public affairs the morality of private life, will doubt that Pitt was in the right.

It by no means follows that the King was in the wrong. Of the two, his grounds of action were the strongest: for while Pitt was only fulfilling an implied engagement, the King was keeping what he believed to be a solemn oath. Such has not, however, been the judgment which it has been fashionable with Liberal historians and critics to pronounce. In fact their principal motive for sparing Pitt in respect to this transaction, appears to have been that they might be better able to turn the full force of their animosity upon the King. Fox's opinion of the scruple entertained by the King was, that the mention of the Coronation Oath was one of the most impudent and disgusting pieces of hypocrisy he had seen.'* If he judged of

*Fox's Mem. and Corr., iii. 153.

the