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should, from among those associates, have chosen the members of my administration. During the discussion of the terms of the regency, I was careful to avoid giving any pledge of the line of policy I might find it expedient to adopt. A short previous administration, composed of those political friends by whom it was conjectured my councils would have been directed, had enabled me to form some opinion of their executive talents; and notwithstanding, an overture was made by me to them, to propose an administration. But when I found the conditions required would have reduced me to a mere political automaton, of which they were to possess the key; that, not content with forming the administration, they required also, that I should be surrounded in my household by their adherents, and left to no choice in the appointment of my own attendants; when with this, I compared the candour and the unequivocal absence of all personal feeling with which the bill creating the regency was carried by the then ministry; and above all, the frank, loyal, and respectful regret which was shewn to the calamity of my revered parent; and the so immediate provision made for the resumption by him of the regal dignity, that should it have pleased Providence so to have restored him; my royal father would have awakened, as if from a dream, and have found himself unreminded of his affliction; when to this I added the important consideration, that the flame of freedom was beginning to glimmer in Spain: that the then administration were prepared to take advantage of every circumstance favourable to the destruction of the military tyrant of Europe; and when all these various considerations were upheld by the weight of personal character which was contained in the then cabinet; I felt sufficiently justified in not suffering former prepossessions to stand for one moment in the way of newly created du ties. I felt that an existing experienced executive was, at such a time, safer than a theoretical cabinet. I had also a doubt in my own mind, whether, during my Sovereign's life, I ought, as Regent, to adopt the principles of those who had been violently opposed to my royal father's measures, or pursue a line of policy unchanged, and such as my King would have continued had he remained the active head of the Empire. This was a feeling of the heart; it was mine.

"This, my determination, produced two consequences; 1. A series of unbroken, glorious, and important victories, attended with such results, as the history of the world, within a similar period of time, cannot produce; 2. The conversion of my matrimonial differences into a political attack upon my authority.

"From this moment then, the Queen, by becoming the tool of party, gave to her cause and her conduct a new feature, and an importance which required the vigilant eye of the government.

"I have been led into this digression, that the distinction I still endeavoured to uphold between my marital and royal station, might be plainly and easily comprehended. I return now to the consideration of the offer made to the Queen, of an allowance upon certain stipulations; viz. that the Queen should cease to use the name and style of Queen of England, and remain abroad, where she had voluntarily seceded.

"The period when this determination was decided upon must not be forgotten; it must not only, not be forgotten, but it should be allowed its due weight in the decision of so momentous an affair. It appears almost indeed to be overlooked, that I met my first parliament in the month of April, at the very period and while a set of infuriated, misguided, and unhappy culprits were on their trials for a conspiracy to overturn the constitution and government of these realms, of which the commencement was intended to be, the indiscriminate assassination of my cabinet ministers. The general situation of the country, at that precise moment, appears also to have been thrown into the back ground. I cannot better recall those unhappy inauspicious moments, than by repeating again to my subjects the topics addressed to the Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, upon our first meeting.

66 6

"My Lords and Gentlemen,

Deeply as I regret that the machinations and designs of the disaffected should have led, in some parts of the country, to acts of open violence and insurrection, I cannot but express my satisfaction at the promptitude with which those attempts have been suppressed by the vigilance and activity of the magistrates, and by the zealous co-operation of all those of my subjects whose exertions have been called forth to support the authority of the laws.

"The wisdom and firmness manifested by the late parliament, and the due execution of the laws, have greatly contributed to restore confidence throughout the kingdom; and to discountenance those principles of sedition and irreligion, which had been disseminated with such malignant perseverance, and had poisoned the minds of the unwary and ignorant.

"I rely upon the continued support of parliament, in my determination to maintain, by all the means entrusted to my hands, the public safety and tranquillity.

"Deploring, as we all must, the distress which still unhappily prevails among many of the labouring classes of the community, and anxiously looking forward to its removal or mitigation, it is, in the mean time, our common duty, effectually to protect the loyal, the peaceable, and the industrious, against those practices of turbulence and intimidation, by which the period of relief can only be deferred, and by which the pressure of the distress has been incalculably aggravated. "I trust that an awakened sense of the dangers which they have incurred, and of the acts which have been employed to seduce them, will bring back by far the greater part of those who have been unhappily led astray, and will revive in them that spirit of loyalty, that due submission to the laws, and that attachment to the constitution, which subsist unabated in the hearts of the great body of the people, and which, under the blessing of Divine Providence, have secured to the British nation the enjoyment of a larger share of practical freedom, as well as of prosperity and happiness, than have fallen to the lot of any nation in the world.'

"If to the pending trials alluded to, and this general reference to the state of the kingdom, suffering under severe privations in some of

its provinces, are added the numerous cases of treason, libel, and minor political offences under the progressive cognizance of the courts of law; I think my subjects and countrymen will admit, that to such previously existing evils no addition was wanting to renew internal agitation which was beginning to subside. The return of the Queen, under the circumstances in which she must necessarily meet, was, of all others, calculated to revive that internal agitation; and why was it so calculated? because the Queen had (as I have previously remarked) given by her conduct a political feeling to the differences between us. Had this not been the case, she could not have had, at least she ought not to have had, any motives for her return; or had she any, she ought to have sacrificed them to the welfare of our country.

"From 1796 we had been separated, a period now of twenty-four years; disturbed by an almost constant suspicion of her conduct: the Queen had been estranged from court, our royal daughter was no more; and her Majesty had but one duty to perform towards me, the performance of an agreed separation.'

"A Queen consort of England has no political rank, she possesses, in ease of the Sovereign, certain inherent prerogatives; those prerogatives are capable of being enjoyed by her, in her absence; they required not her presence. The presence of the Queen could neither revive trade languishing in some of its branches, tranquillize the irritation of distress, or conciliate the clamour of faction; and indeed, many records of English history hand down to us the impolitic and dangerous counsels, which have ensued from the interference of Queens Consort in the political contests of the times." (Letter from the King, p. 25-30.)

"The declaration of the People of England to their Sovereign Lord the King" is the only other pamphlet engendered by the state of the times, which it has fallen in our way to notice. The object of this production is to excite the people of England to zeal and unanimity in defence of their King, their laws, and their genuine liberties, against what it considers an unprincipled faction in the country, composed of persons calling themselves Whigs, and those who are stigmatized by the name of Radicals. By way of specimen of its style and matter we extract the following passage.

"16. It is not, however, this ignorant multitude alone we have to contend with. We observe with astonishment, that not only the ruder and democratical part of our population; not only those who, from their desperation of character, owe nothing to decency and decorum; nothing to the regards of good men; nothing to the fears and feelings of society; but the very aristocracy of the realm, the very members of your Majesty's Parliament, though few we trust in number, yet sufficiently appalling in influence, are accessaries in the shaking, we had almost said in the subversion, of your Majesty's throne. In no other light can we view those stated appeals to the headstrong passions of

the people; those defamations, increasing in virulence and vulgarity, which certain of the Whig members of the House of Commons, seconded by their allies in the Upper House, are daily pouring forth. More like mountebank stagers than members of a British parliament, we see them leaving their native representations, and migrating from place to place to play the demagogue, and to root up the authorities of the land, whevever they can spread the strife between our Sovereign Lord the King and their Sovereign Lord the people.

"17. A conduct like this, we know not whether to treat with more abhorrence than disgust. For the services of such patriots, flattered as they may be by the minions of their own faction, neither your Majesty nor the people of England can feel much predilection. They can only hope to be called to the helm when revolution has left the field at their own disposal. Addressing disaffected assemblies, and applauded by disaffected assemblies, they are becoming, like their radical coadjutors, deaf to the voice of reason and hardened against the reproaches of conscience. In a few months more, the assimilation will be complete "bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh." With every cause to be satisfied, this wretched part of our aristocracy are eternally discontented. With every inducement to be grateful, they are cold-hearted and frozen. With every call upon them, if they value life or property, to look at home and rally round their Sovereign, they desert the vernment, the altar, and the throne!" (Declaration of the People of England, p. 15-17.)

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This is what may be called putting the case strongly, perhaps somewhat too gloomily. We are not, we trust, on the margin of a revolution, though it may with truth be said, that the his tory of the country presents no parallel to the present crisis: no case in which efforts have been so combined and systematized for the palpable purpose of vilifying all legitimate authorities, and finally dissipating all the elements of a free and constituti onal government. It is going rather far to say, that the two classes of malecontents above named have alike in view these sacrilegious ends. The Whigs of the present day are not the Whigs which Lord Somers would have acknowledged; but their ultimate purpose is clearly not that general destruction in which they themselves would of necessity be comprehended; a conse quence to which they cannot be blind: but what simplicity is so great as not to see that the difference between these classes lies less in the principles by which they are actuated, than in the circumstances in which they stand. They severally pursue their own designs, which by the one are only to be accomplished by a promiscuous overthrow; while the consummation of the others' hope, stops, we presume, at the acquisition of the power which is vilified only because not possessed. Either party seems disposed to join the other, and to shelter their projects under the same pretext. Reform is the ragged ensign with which they both proceed

to the battle, each having in reserve an appropriate banner, that waits to be unfurled when the common enemy being defeated, the field is to be disputed by combatants contending for the: spoil, exasperated by the reproach of mutual treachery.

We will give another short extract from the last mentioned publication, and then we will have done with our pamphlets.

"9. In this view, contemplating with an equal eye our Government, our Laws, and our Religion, all together making up the glorious fabrick of the British Constitution, and taking them in the full soul. of their design, we behold them originating in the spirit of wisdom, and adapted to the purposes of virtue. The desire of rendering us a great nation, they have not fettered by the fear of allowing us to be a free one. From the operation of government in an established monarchy like our own, we expect, Sire, much practical good, but we look not for perfection. We think, that if it be administered so as to consult the general comfort, and thereby to insure the general, tranquillity, it has accomplished the main purposes for which it was formed. If, in a growing empire, and with much of civil liberty, heated into licentiousness, to contend with, it be fitted to produce that portion of good in the heterogeneous mass of society which our corrupt natures admit of, it is a valuable government; is such a government as in reason we must approve, in policy we must uphold. That its regulations do not embrace every local interest, is no argu ment against its more comprehensive efficacy. That it is incompe tent to awe into obedience all who live under its authority, will surprise no one who considers the changes in human objects, the violence of human passions, and the imperfection of human institutions. Government cannot reform, it can only curb and restrain; it cannot change, it can only humanize the evil propensities of man, and can only so far humanize them as it is seconded in its endeavours by the sober voice of the community.

10"The spirit of disobedience, indeed, which is gone abroad, a crime of no light magnitude where conscience has to hold the scales of judgment and Heaven to punish the perversion of righteousness; this spirit opposes alike every institution, and calumniates every means used for the public peace and happiness. But no man will be forward to accuse civil government of increasing his poverty, or diminishing his comforts, who considers how much of individual suffering may be laid to the charge of passions which he has taken no pains to subdue, and of indulgencies, which, without the means of support, he might have known would end in his disgrace. That we are willing, when the insanity of our conduct comes home to us, to charge our misfortunes where we can, and to impute defect to any one rather than to ourselves, is no proof that our rulers are incapable, or unprincipled; that they either see not our interest, or care not for our happiness. With better views men would find civil regulations of a better tendency would discern them in the exercise of a fuller wisdom and of a more beneficent influence. Public measures have Farely been known, in their general operation, to be against the

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