CHAP. VIII. Effect of the Inquiry upon the Public. Parliamentary Proceedings arising from it. Colonel Gordon's Lease at Chelsea. Lord Folkestone's Motion for a Committee of General Inquiry. Mr Perceval's Bill for the Prevention of the Sale of Offices. Motions against Lord Castlereagh. Meeting at the Crown and Anchor. Mr Curwen's Reform Bill. THE affair of the Duke of York was continually before Parliament for two months, occupying a third of the whole session, to the grievous interruption of public business, and the more grievous excitement of the people, even to the extinction in most minds of all other public interest whatever. The result was at least as much matter of honour as of dishonour to the English government. The king's second son, a prince enjoying the favour of his father, and o near the throne himself, had been driven from office by a member of the House of Commons who was unheard of before this transaction, and who Reither possessed any influence of character, property, nor talents. It had been proved to the conviction of the country that his royal highness was so far culpable as to render his resignation proper; that resignation had taken place in consequence, and public opinion had thus obtained a signal triumph than could be parallelled in the history of any other age or nation. The subject had been more debated at unexampled length, and on no former occasion had more ingenuity or more ability ever been displayed in Parliament. Yet the immediate consequences of the inquiry were prejudicial to the House of Commons, to the ministry, and to the government. The complete acquittal of the duke had been carried by a majority of only 82; but the opinion of the public was so decidedly against him, that the people would not believe it possible for any man conscientiously to have acquitted him. They did not consider that their own minds had been prejudiced upon the subject; that they were predisposed to believe the charges; and that the evidence was dealt out to them daily and weekly by journalists desperately hostile to the duke, who suffered no argument which bore against him to pass unenforced, and slighted or slur. red over all that could be urged in his defence. Neither did they ask themselves what was the extent of the criminality which they supposed had been established; for this was so little, admitting even the whole to have been proved, that when the power of the commander-in-chief, the power of the courtezan over him, and the profligacy of her character were taken into the account, the few who judged dispassionately of what was passing were astonished that the abuses were so much less than had been supposed, and might reasonably have been expected. Enough, however, had been substantiated to render his removal necessary; and yet he had been acquitted in the face of the evidence, as it appeared to the people, and by the exertion of the whole influence of administration. This produced an impression upon the public mind highly unfavourable both to the House and to the ministry. The ministry had been placed in a most unfortunate situation. From the duke they received the most positive assurances of his innocence, assurances which, according to all reasonable presumption, could have proceeded from nothing but innocence; for his royal highness challenged inquiry, desiring that it might be as full as possible, and constantly affirming that nothing could appear against him. Had he indeed apprehended any thing from Mrs Clarke, a trifling sum of money would effectually have secured him; her sole motive being to obtain money, whether from him or from his enemies she cared not. This conduct on the part of the duke must be admitted among the reasons for clearing him of the heaviest part of the charge. Kennett's case, which was a case of corruption, had no relation to Mrs Clarke or the army, and was not likely to rise in judgement against him; and for the conversation and correspondence which had taken place be tween him and his mistress upon the affairs of the army, it was so utterly impossible that such things should not have occurred, that the duke would not even recollect them as im prudencies. But when it appeared in the hand-writing of the duke himself that his mistress had been suffered to interfere with him upon these subjects, ministers should themselves have proposed the milder vote, which, while it acquitted him of corrupt connivance, censured him for having permitted the existence of an undue influence. Even if the alternative had been to forfeit the favour of the crown, or shock the sense of justice in the people, a right view of their own interest should have led them to this course; but in their zeal to clear the character of his royal highness, they forgot what was due to their own. The mere circumstance of voting in a party upon points of evidence was sufficient to render the integrity of their motives suspected. This conduct was injudicious as it respected themselves. The great cry of their antagonists, who reckoned in their own ranks almost all the old families and leading aristocracy, was, that they were men of no influence in the country, and that they held their places solely by the favour of the crown. It was indeed true, that the crown had chosen them of its own free pleasure; but the total unpopularity of their opponents had given them strength, and they had acquired a hold upon public opinion by the spirit with which they maintained the honour of England. That hold they in great measure forfeited by their obsequiousness to the royal family in this unhappy transaction,a transaction which rendered it more than ever essential to the interests of the crown that its ministers should possess the confidence of the people. For it could not be doubted that the enemies of government would avail themselves to the utmost of the disgraceful facts which were brought to light in the course of the inquiry, and that no means would be spared to exasperate and inflame the populace. There was less real disaffection in the country at the commencement of the anti-jacobin war, and that disaffection was of a less danger ous kind. The success of jacobinism in England at that time was impeded by many causes, and by none more than by the contradictory views and characters of the jacobins themselves. The better spirits, who were led astray by the hopes which the French revolution seemed to open for human kind, mingled their politics with principles which were equally too generous and too wild to become popular; and the baser crew, who aped the follies of the French, and felt no horror at their crimes, shocked their countrymen by open professions of irreligion and of profligacy. Jacobinism in those days had not reached the populace; in spite of the demagogue writers, the popular cry was against it; wherever riots took place the mob were loyal, and their object was the destruction of those whom they were taught to consider as the enemies of their king and country. Things were now entirely changed, Jacobinism had disappeared from the middle ranks, and sunk down to the lowest; it had lost its generalizing spirit and its metaphysics; whatever also had made it alluring to the young and the ardent was gone; it was become selfish and grovelling, yet from its very deterioration the more dangerous. Its watch-word had formerly been the rights of man, and its cause of complaint against govern. ment was, that government was engaged in war against a people who were fighting for liberty. The disaffected of the present times adapted their arguments more wisely to the vulgar. The reform for which they pleaded was to save money. Ac cording to them, the wisdom of public measures was to be estimated exclusively by their expence: Government was a combination of the rich to raise money from the people, and divide it among themselves and their dependants. Never before had sedition appeared in so sordid a shape. To the writers of this faction nothing could be more welcome than this inquiry into the conduct of the commander-in-chief. During the whole progress of the investigation they devoted their whole attention to it. This, they said, was of paramount importance; it mattered not what was going on on the continent, it mattered not what became of Spain, nothing was now worthy the consideration of the people of England except the business of the Duke of York and Mrs Clarke! They who shall read the history of this eventful era hereafter, when temporary politics will be reduced to their proper insig nificance, will wonder that such language could have been successful. Such, however, is the temper of this generation, that for three months the public attention was monopolized by this miserable subject. The provincial newspapers, now almost as universally anti-ministerial as they were otherwise in Mr Pitt's time, carried it into every ale-house throughout the kingdom, and there was not a hovel in which the Duke and Mrs Clarke were not the topic of conversation. "Every penny paid to Mrs Clarke," the people were told, "was out of their pockets. The money annually lavished upon her was equal to the poor-rates of fifty parishes, to all the direct taxes of twenty, to the maintenance of above six hundred labouring families. By these means the farmer was deprived of his comforts, the labourer pinched in his food, and fuel, and raiment. Oh how many widows, how many hundreds and thousands of the people were suffering for her, and for the accursed system of corruption and profligacy, of which this was but a single sample! What we had yet seen was but a verse of one of the chapters of one of the books of one of the volumes of corruption-it was but as a blade of grass to a whole meadow." Those writers, who deluded the people by these inflammatory and preposterous exaggerations, desired nothing more than that the duke should be acquitted by ministerial influence. It afforded them new grounds for vilifying the House of Commons, and bringing government into disrepute. Overlooking, therefore, the signal triumph which public opinion had actually obtained, overlooking also the important fact, that, constituted as the House of Commons is, the business had undergone the most full and open examination and discussion, they kept in view the vote of acquittal. This, they asserted, was the work of Parliament; and for what little justice had been obtained, the people were indebted, not to their representatives, but to the judgement which they themselves had so universally and loudly expressed upon the evidence. Colonel Wardle was at once raised to the very height of popularity; the city of London voted him its freedom; he was proposed with general applause as a member at the Whig Club; and addresses of thanks were poured in upon him from almost every town in England, all accompanied with resolutions condemning the corruption of govern ment, and asserting the necessity of radical reform. In this state of the public mind, the prosecutions which had been commenced against the libellers of the duke, and the newspapers which had extracted from their works, were necessarily dropt, and his enemies did not fail to take advantage of the licence which they had obtained. As if some political Saturnalia had been proclaimed, they gave free scope to all the insolence and brutality of vulgar exultation. This spirit was easily instilled into the lowest classes of society. Among the vilest of the rabble the duke was made a bye-word of reproach and mockery; the very link-boys, and young ruffians who gamble in the streets, cried "Duke or Darling" when they tost their pence in the air. This temper was especially conspicuous in a circumstance which would have been honourable to English generosity, had it not been thus disgraced. That ruin which Miss Taylor had anticipated, if she were compelled to appear in evidence before the House of Commons, had fallen upon her. She and her sister, under all the disadvantages which the misconduct and the misfortunes of their parents had brought upon them, were struggling to support themselves by honourable means. Their sole re liance was upon the school which they had just established; but no sooner was their connection with Mrs Clarke made known by means of this inquiry, the baseness of their birth, and the character of their parents, than all their scholars were immediately taken from them; their creditors, whom the continuance of the school might have enabled them to satisfy, became urgent for payment, their goods were seized for rent and taxes, and they were threatened with imprisonment for debts, amounting to 1501. beyond what they had any possibility of discharging. A subscription to pay those debts, and purchase an annuity for their joint lives sufficient to support them in decent comfort, was proposed by Cobbett, and this object was speedily effected: but the subscription list was made a vehicle for fresh scurrility, and so many blackguards gave sixpences and shillings, for the sake of conveying an insult to the duke in the name or motto which they affixed to their donation, that the more respectable newspapers soon found it necessary for their own character to decline the insertion of the lists. Meantime, the parliamentary proceedings which grew out of the inquiry contributed to keep up this state of political agitation. Sir Francis Burdett discovered that Colonel Gordon had obtained a piece of ground belonging to Chelsea hospital, lying along the bank of the river, and particularly calculated, he said, for the air and exercise of the pensioners. When Sir Francis menApril 13. tioned this in the House, Mr Huskisson admitted that what he said was not altogether unfounded. The commissioners of the hospital had thought that the ground which could not be better disposed of should be let for building, and under these circumstances Colonel Gordon had become a holder of part of it. The next day Sir Francis entered more minutely into the subject. He had been, he said, that morning to survey the ground, and he thought it impossible for any person to see the spot upon which Colonel Gordon was preparing to build, or to have any idea of its relative situation to the hospital, and particularly to the infirmary, without being convinced that such a building should not be permitted, and that the whole bargain ought to be revoked. An infirmary appropriated to our sick soldiers was cooped up and deprived of the free air, so essential to their recovery, merely for the sake of gratifying an individual. He moved therefore for a copy of the warrant of treasury under which the grant was made to Colonel Gordon, which warrant was dated on the 11th of March last. In reply to this statement, Mr Long rose, as being one of the commissioners for superintending the concerns of Chelsea hospital. The ground in question, he said, had been pur. chased by government, on the representation of the physicians to the hospital that an infirmary was wanted. All that was deemed necessary for this purpose was set apart for it; the rest was valued by the surveyors, according to the act for the disposal of the crown lands. Colonel Gordon became the purchaser: better terms could not have been obtained for it if it had been put up to public auction, and special provision was made in the lease granted to him that he should not build or plant in any way to inconvenience the infirmary. Mr Huskisson confirmed this statement, adding, in contradiction to an assertion of Sir Francis, that the corner in which the sick were cooped up was not a twentieth part of the ground granted to Colonel Gordon; that the surveyors had on oath valued the land for the infirmary at 60001., and on the same oath the land of Colonel Gordon was only valued at 521. ayear. Mr Perceval remarked, that |