Routledge Library of British Political History by S. Maccoby

Author:S. Maccoby [Maccoby, S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138867598
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

Fortunately for Ministers, there was hardly any imitation of London’s hostile example. In numbers of hard-hit trading towns1 the dominant elements were more concerned to petition for ending the Orders in Council and opening the India trade. And as Government had moved this way by granting an inquiry, Perceval could safely regard the London agitation rather as a nuisance than a peril. Moreover, the military and diplomatic situation had been changing steadily in Ministers’ favour for months, justifying them, with apparent completeness, both against those who, like Wellesley, had criticised their war-effort as too feeble and those, who like the bulk of Opposition, had criticised it as too wasteful and extravagant. A war-effort, capable of the coups de main which had captured Ciudad Rodrigo in January and Badajoz in April, hardly seemed as feeble as Wellesley had depicted it, and a Peninsular position, which encouraged Alexander of Russia to abandon the Continental System and prepare to fight Napoleon, could hardly ever have been as hopeless as Opposition had been in the habit of depicting it. And on a much-canvassed domestic matter, meanwhile, the need of taking some action in regard to two “great sinecures”, the Tellerships of the Exchequer, whose yields, increasing with the public expenditure, had long passed £23,000 per annum each, Opposition seemed, early in May, to be completely stultifying itself between a Radical wing, calling for abolition, and a leadership, holding apparently as firmly as Perceval, that the “public faith” would be violated if the life-tenure of the Marquis of Buckingham and Earl Camden were, in any way, interfered with.2

A sudden new turn was given to politics, at this point, so favourable to Ministers, by the assassination of Perceval on May nth. Nobody pretended, or desired to pretend, that there was the slightest political significance in the assassination, which was the work of one who had long brooded over imagined private grievances.1 But Ministers’ position in the House of Commons had, of late, seemed to be so exceptionally dependent on Perceval’s debating talents that few believed that the existing Ministerial groups, somewhat reshuffled, perhaps, under Lord Liverpool, would make an adequate Government for such perilous times.2 Liverpool, in fact, thought fit to approach Wellesley and Canning almost at once with an offer of Ministerial place, and these two politicians were confident enough to reject it, though baited with an offer of consideration, not only for themselves but for their friends. Canning was not even afraid to let the public know that, if Ministers’ unsatisfactory attitude on the Catholic question was one of the things that motivated his refusal of office from them, another was the proposition that Lord Castlereagh was to be regarded as his senior in the direction of the House of Commons.3 And if Wellesley did not avowedly demand the Premiership but preferred to justify his rejection of Liverpool’s overtures on the ground of Ministers’ unsatisfactory attitude towards Catholic Emancipation, the Peninsular War, and the Opposition, that, of course, concealed from nobody Wellesley’s own opinion of Liverpool’s incapacity for the burdens of Prime Minister.

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