Lord George Bentinck : a political biography

Front matter

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ACCESSION

BOOK NO.

Introduction

The Life of Lord George Bentinck is in a sense the most serious of Disraeli’s works. It was composed at a time when he had abandoned fiction for the more sternly engrossing pursuit of politics. During the years, which had passed since the writing of his novels, he had devoted himself with - all his inspired energy to the business of the House of Commons, and Sybil and Tancred were but interludes in a life of affairs. ‘Literature he has abandoned for politics, wrote Mrs. Disraeli to Peel as early as 1841, and when, in 1852, he essayed in Lord George Bentinck the portraiture of an English worthy, Disraeli was already better known as a statesman than as a novelist. His brilliant and pitiless campaign against Peel had overshadowed the victories won in another field; and his political biography was received with a respect not always shown to those who have practised successfully the art of fiction.

And it deserved all the respect accorded to its sound judgment and well-balanced style. Fashioned after the best models, it is embellished, like the works of Livy and Thucydides, with deftly-drawn characters and authentic speeches. The biographer, moreover, was writing of what he had seen and heard: not merely were all the documents ready to his hand; he himself had taken a foremost part in the events which he chronicled. But nowhere in his book will you find the taint of journalism. On every page there is a sense of great issues and lofty purposes. Though

Disraeli was removed but a year or two from the battles Vv vi LORD GEORGE BENTINCK of wit and reason, which are the matter of his history, his imagination allowed him to see the immediate past in a just perspective, and his one defect, amiable and deliberate, is to underrate with a true modesty the importance of his own part. So gravely does he consider the personages in his drama, that they might have been ancient Romans, or the subjects of a despotic doge. And then how skilful is the narrative, how right the feeling of proportion! None but a master could interweave pages of Hansard, ‘the Dunciad of Downing Street, into the substance of his book, and make every chapter interesting. Sternly political though it be, the biography is always dramatic, and the two chief actors in the drama, Lord George Bentinck and Sir Robert Peel, are brilliantly disengaged from the dingy background of the House of Commons. Of these he writes in the true spirit of romance. The picture of Peel sitting unmoved and unconscious in the deserted House can never be forgotten. ‘The benches had become empty,’ thus runs the passage, ‘the lights were about to be extinguished; it is the duty of the clerk of the House to examine the chamber before the doors are closed, and to-night it was also the strange lot of this gentleman to disturb the reverie of a statesman.’

But, while Disraeli saw even the arch-enemy through the softening mist of imagination, Lord George, as he drew him, seems to have stepped straight out of the pages of fiction. ‘One man alone brooded over the unexampled scene,’ says he at the outset, and you are reminded straightway of Henrietta Temple or The Young Duke. Again, he tells us that, to make his first speech, ‘Bentinck rose long past the noon of night.’ It is such touches as this that make the book acceptable to those who do not regard politics as the end of life, and his admirers will surprise the true Disraeli upon every page. Like all great men, he

INTRODUCTION vu rises with the occasion, and the description of Lord George’s death is the work of a true artist. With the noble extravagance, characteristic of his style, he takes leave of his hero ‘upon the perron of Harcourt House, the last of the great hotels of an age of stately manners, with its wings, and courtyard, and carriage portal, and huge outward walls. And when he tells the last sad tale in a few pages of admirable dignity, he is inspired to quote the Ajax—Q, @avate, Oavate, viv pw érickepat worov—though Greek quotations seldom came from his pen. In brief, the whole work is cast in the mould of fancy, and, accurate and impartial though it be, it never sinks to the arid prose of conventional biography.

Disraeli, moreover, being always sincere, does not suppress his own qualities, even in so impersonal an affair as biography. The narrative sparkles with humour, and is alive with wit. The Sugar question, not a lively one, is an excuse for a jest, that has not yet lost its point. ‘Strange,’ says he, ‘that a manufacture which charms infancy and soothes old age, should so frequently occasion political disaster.’ And, while he gives free play to his wonderful gift of irony, he does not mitigate his stern convictions. Though he proclaims with enthusiasm the fortunate truth that ‘the history of England is the history of reaction, he admits that ‘progress and reaction are but words to mystify the million. They mean nothing, they are nothing; they are phrases, and not facts. All is race’ So he returns to the gospel preached with eloquent sincerity in his novels; and it may be said of him, as of few men, that, whatever may be the subject of his discourse, he is always honestly and candidly himself. He conceals nothing, he attenuates nothing; he deals not in ‘ifs’ and ‘ans’; and thus he presents the strongest contrast to the politician who in after years was his fiercest opponent and most dangerous rival.

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His obiter dicta are always sound. He is equally wise in the discussion of men and manners. Whether he writes of Hume, who ‘never once lost his temper, or of the aristocracy, which does not ‘yield its confidence grudgingly,’ he finds the right word for the sane thought. But it is Lord George Bentinck’s loyal championship of religious equality, his stout advocacy of the admission of Jews to Parliament, that excuses his longest and most eloquent digression. This digression is an echo, subdued to a deeper note, of the pean sung to Judaism by Sidonia in the pages of Coningsby. But it is something else than a pan: it is an argument as well; and, though it was written by one happily unaccustomed to the theological jargon of the day, it is closely reasoned and ingeniously conceived. Throughout this chapter Disraeli shows a genuine pride in his race, and exults, like the aristocrat that he was, in his ancient lineage. Having declared that the dispersion of’ the Jewish people was not a penalty incurred for the commission of a great crime, that such an allegation is ‘neither historically true nor dogmatically sound,’ he applauds the courage and persistence which have survived the worst trials ever put upon a wandering race. ‘The Hebrew,’ he says, ‘is sustained by a sublime religion.’ ‘The trumpet of Sinai still sounds in his ear, and a Jew is never seen upon the scaffold, unless it be at an auto-da-fé’ Strengthened, moreover, by an inherited virtue and energy, and justly proud of his blood, the Hebrew despises the doctrine of human equality. ‘Thus it will be seen,’ says Disraeli, ‘that all the tendencies of the Jewish race are conservative. Their bias is to religion, property, and natural aristocracy: and it should be the interest of statesmen that this bias of a great race should be encouraged, and their energies and creative powers enlisted in the cause of existing society,’

In these days of violent anti-Semitism, it is pleasant to

INTRODUCTION ix read so eed a defence of a once down-trodden people. While the prejudice against the Jews is not altogether unnatural—for has not Disraeli himself told us ‘that all is race’?—the most bigoted partisan must still be grateful for the genius that Jewry has sent us. And if it be true that every nation harbours the Jews, which it deserves, England may justly be proud of her forbearance. Nowhere else have they been received with a better welcome, and nowhere else have they rewarded the hospitality shown to them with a finer sense of statesmanship and a more grateful patriotism. But, having established the conservatism of the Jewish race on a basis of pride and wealth, Disraeli goes a step further, and attempts to prove that Christianity is but perfected Judaism. To profess the whole Jewish faith is, in his eyes, to ‘believe in Calvary as well as in Sinai.’ If some millions of Hebrews believe only in a part of their ‘religion, that is an accident which he deplores, and which he attributes to the Romans. And thus we arrive at the religious position of Disraeli himself. In his own phrase, he was ‘on the side of the Angels.’ He was a loyal and devout Jew, who held that the religion of his race was not petrified by Moses. ‘Christians may continue to persecute Jews, said he in his famous peroration, ‘and Jews may persist in disbelieving Cliistians, but who can deny that Jesus of Nazareth, the Incarnate Son of the Most High God, is the eternal glory of the Jewish race?’ This, however, is a digression. The real purpose of the book is to set forth the part which Lord George Bentinck played in the drama of the Corn Laws, and Disraeli has performed the delicate and difficult task of writing contemporary _ history with the quick humour and shrewd observation one expects of him.

x LORD GEORGE BENTINCK

II

In 1845 Sir Robert Peel, the leader of the Protectionist Party in the House of Commons, suddenly changed his opinions. Cobden’s prophecy that ‘three weeks of showery weather when the wheat is in bloom or ripening would repeal the Corn Laws’ was amply fulfilled. The autumn rain, which destroyed so much, rained away whatever scruples Peel may still have cherished. The failure of the potato crop in Ireland drove him into a panic, and he saw in that panic an excuse for legislation. The symptoms of his change instantly showed themselves in his letters. ‘The accounts of the state of the potato crop in Ireland are becoming very alarming,’ he wrote to Sir James Graham in October 1845, and the correspondence which followed proves that Sir James Graham was less master of himself even than the Prime Minister. As to Peel’s excitement there is no lack of evidence. The Duke of Wellington told Sir Edward Knatchbull that ‘he never saw a man in such a state of alarm. He was hardly himself—the potato disease seemed to occupy his whole mind.’ But, whatever alarm he may have felt, the illogicality of his ultimate action would have appealed to any one whose sense of humour was keener than Peel’s. ‘The Irish potato crop, said he in effect, ‘has failed in 1845. Therefore in 1849 I will admit corn free of duty into the ports of Great Britain,’ The evil and its remedy had no sort of relation one to the other, except that, as the evil inspired the panic, so by the remedy the panic was allayed.

But there were other influences working upon the plastic mind of Peel. The Anti-Corn Law League, which had long been ‘hiring theatres, and making its ‘tawdry speeches in tawdry places,’ was not likely to lose its opportunity. As has been said, there was nothing better than a bad

INTRODUCTION x1 harvest for the success of its schemes. ‘The Anti-Corn Law pressure,’ wrote Sir James Graham, ‘is about to commence, and it will be the most formidable movement in modern times.’ Cobden, in truth, knew precisely what was his strength, and how to apply it. With perfect cynicism he acknowledged, six months later, that there were ‘not a hundred men in the Commons, or twenty in the Lords, who at heart are anxious for total repeal, and in October 1845 there were still fewer. But Peel was coerced by out-of-doors opinion. Like Sir James Graham, he feared the League, and bowed his head in horror before its ‘forty-shilling bludgeons.’ And what makes his position the stranger is that he and the League were pursuing opposite aims. If Peel may be said to have had any clear object, it was to help the people. He asked the Irish to tighten their belts until 1849, and then he promised them the boon of cheap corn. Cobden and Villiers, on the other hand, had little interest in the masses. They were the champions of the employers, and their end and aim was to reduce the wages of the workmen.

Mr. Gladstone has told us that Villiers’ argument was as follows: ‘Under the present Corn Laws, the trade on which we depend is doomed, for our manufacturers cannot possibly contend with the manufacturers of the Continent, if they have to pay wages regulated by the protection price of food, while - their rivals pay according to the natural or free trade price.’ And Cobden, frank as his colleague, does not hide the truth. He confesses that the working-men have neither attended his meetings nor signed his petitions, that his agitation, in fact, has been ‘eminently middle-class.’ ‘We have carried it on by those means,’ says he, ‘by which the middle-class usually carries on its movements. We have had our meetings of dissenting ministers; we have obtained the co-operation of the ladies; we have resorted to tea-parties,

Xil LORD GEORGE BENTINCK and taken these pacific means for carrying out our views, which mark us rather as a middle-class set of agitators.’ This confession is candid enough, and it increases our wonder that Sir Robert Peel, once the leader of ‘the gentlemen of England, should have adopted the policy of Cobden on a false ground, and have ensured its triumph in a hostile House of Commons.

However, so strong was Peel’s panic, that he could no longer endure the responsibility of office, and he resigned with a patient and loyal majority behind him. The many meetings of the Cabinet held in November 1845 arrived at no certain conclusion, and Lord John Russell, whose letter addressed from Edinburgh to his constituents had hastened the unnecessary crisis, was asked to form a Government. Having failed in this enterprise, he could do nothing else than ‘hand back the poisoned chalice to Sir Robert,’ who thus became Prime Minister for the third time. Bound by all the ties of custom and honour to protect the Corn Laws and to defend the agricultural interest, Peel re-assumed the duties of government with the firm purpose of opposing those who had sent him to Westminster. Yet so complete was his ascendency, so easy was his management of the ministers, that in the shuttle of opinions he lost but a single colleague—Lord Stanley. One other minister—Lord Lincoln—had a glimmering whither the path of duty led him. In his eyes the ‘manly and honourable course’ would be that ‘in the session preceding the dissolution Peel should propound to the country his intention to propose to the new Parliament either a modification of the Corn Law, expressly framed with a view to its abolition within a given time, or a total repeal of the law.’

But Sir Robert was far too clever to expose his policy to the hazard of a dissolution. Though he knew as well as Cobden that the country and the House of Commons were

INTRODUCTION Xill both against him, he had made up his mind to carry through the measures of his opponents, and the sound advice of Lord Lincoln fell upon a deaf ear. Indeed, so accurately did Peel gauge the temper of the country that after an ominous defeat in Westminster and a pitiful collapse in North Notts, he resolved not to risk another bye-election, and two Cabinet Ministers — Mr. Gladstone and Lord Lincoln —remained during his last Parliament without seats in the House of Commons.

Now Peel’s position is perfectly intelligible: he was an expert at the quick change. It is not so easy to explain the conduct of the Duke of Wellington and the rest. The Duke did not pretend that he had been converted to the doctrine of Free Trade; he claimed it as a sort of virtue in himself that in not deserting Peel he was helping to govern the country. As Lord Stanley said, the Duke ‘talked of supporting the Queen’s Government in measures of which he disapproves, as if he were not a member of the Government to be supported.’ ‘The principle laid down, to cite Disraeli’s words, ‘may be an excellent principle, but it is not a principle of the English Constitution.’ But the Duke with some reason believed his presence in the Cabinet essential to the public welfare, and by staying in he hoped that he was keeping Cobden out. Disraeli’s attitude was more honest. ‘For my part,’ said he, ‘if we are to have Free Trade, I, who honour genius, prefer that such measures should be proposed by the member for Stockport, rather than by one who by skilful parliamentary manceuvres has tampered with the generous confidence of a great people and a great party.’ Peel, being an egoist, took another view, and, while he adopted Cobden’s opinions, he suppressed Cobden’s name until the hour of his doubtful victory. ‘The Manchester Confederates,’ wrote Disraeli, ‘seemed to be least in favour with Parliament and the country on the very eve of their triumph.’ The Front x1V LORD GEORGE BENTINCK

Bench might have sung with one accord, ‘Oh no, we never mention him, His name is never heard’; and so sincere was it at first in its suppression of the League and all its works that it wore an air of martyrdom, as who should say, ‘We sacrifice our opinions to save the country from Mr. Cobden.’ But resignation was soon changed to pride. That which Peel and his friends at first defended as merely expedient, they presently boasted to be virtuous.

III

Thus the contest was engaged, and the champions on either side fought with a courage and pertinacity worthy the occasion. First and foremost, in the attack upon the Corn Laws, was Sir Robert Peel, whose position alone made a sudden and complete change of opinion possible. He had sat in the House of Commons for five-and-thirty years. He had served the Crown in many offices and under many administrations. A long experience, added to a natural faculty for affairs, had given him a unique place, a unique influence. ‘In the Senate, says Disraeli, ‘he was the readiest, easiest, most flexible and adroit of men. He played upon the House of Commons as on an old fiddle.’ And he played upon it because his method of speech was perfectly adapted to its purpose. He was neither eloquent - nor impassioned. His was not the art of oratory, which’ aroused sudden enthusiasms, or swayed vast multitudes. ‘His flights,’ in Disraeli’s words, ‘were ponderous; he soared with the wing of the vulture rather than the plume of the eagle; and his perorations, when most elaborate, were most unwieldy. In pathos he was quite deficient; when he attempted to touch the tender passions, it was painful. His face became distorted, like that of a woman who wants to cry but cannot succeed. Orators certainly should not shed

INTRODUCTION XV tears, but there are moments when, as the Italians say, the voice should weep.’ Peel’s voice never wept; there was no taint of the histrion in his nature,—that taint which in later years made his pupil and successor, Mr. Gladstone, a danger to the State.

On the other hand, his style was always clear, logical, and persuasive. His command of facts was as rare as his industry, and years of practice had made his talent for speaking ‘the most available that has ever been brought to bear upon the House of Commons.’ Thus by the exercise of useful rather than brilliant gifts, he had become by far the greatest political force of his time. It had been his good fortune to rally, even to recreate, the Tory Party, and for many years he led the English aristocracy with a success which was never repeated save by Disraeli. One would not have thought that there was a strong bond of sympathy between the aristocracy and Sir Robert Peel, yet Disraeli tells us it was complete. ‘An aristocracy, he says, with a marvellous prescience of his own career, ‘hesitates before it yields its confidence, but it never does so grudgingly’; and Peel could not complain that his parliamentary followers lacked either troth or cordiality. They followed him wherever he led them in blind obedience, and he accepted their allegiance without question, as a tribute justly paid to his masterful intelligence. In Westminster, then, his - supremacy was undisputed. He managed the assembly, which registered his decrees, with perfect tact and dignity, and he deserved the compliment paid him by the fiercest of his opponents, that he was ‘the greatest member of Parliament that ever lived.’

But Peel’s ascendency was bounded by the walls of the House of Commons. A frigid and unsympathetic manner destroyed whatever influence he might have exercised in the worid outside. If we may believe Greville, he had ‘no popular

XVi LORD GEORGE BENTINCK and ingratiating qualities, and few intimate friends.’ It was not his business to argue with his colleagues or convince his party, but to impose his views upon the House, and through the House upon the country. ‘The right honourable Baronet’s horror of slavery, exclaimed Disraeli in an immortal passage, ‘ extends to every place, except to the benches behind him. There the gang is still assembled, and there the thong of the whip still sounds.’ And it was not only his avowed opponents who condemned his autocratic temper. He strained the forbearance of his loyal supporters to breaking-point. Sir Edward Knatchbull,’ a leader of the Country Party and the staunchest of Tories, has left a character of Peel, which in every point is an undesigned confirmation of Disraeli, The character was sketched in his Political Journal some three years before the repeal of the Corn Laws, and was thus unbiassed by the violent passions aroused. by the defection of 1846.

‘T never in my time, wrote Sir Edward, ‘saw a minister who possessed more absolute power in the House of Commons than Peel. His influence and power are most extraordinary In the House he is everything—but there his power ceases If he was the same in Council, and in all his intercourse with mankind, he would exceed anything this country, or perhaps any other, ever saw, but I fear he is not equal to the situation he fills, and to the times in which he lives. By his power in the House of Commons alone does he keep his party together. Out of the House his conduct is well calculated to destroy it. Cold and uncourteous to every one —even to his colleagues in office, who appear to me to be afraid to differ from him—at times in manner he is almost

1 The extracts here given from Sir Edward Knatchbull’s Political Journal are printed for the first time, and my thanks are due to the Hon. C. M.

Knatchbull-Hugessen, who has permitted me to make use of a document as valuable as it is sincere.

INTRODUCTION XVil insolent. It will be found when he dies that no minister ever possessed fewer friends, or would be personally less lamented. In his policy he is deficient in vigour and in courage. He rather looks too much to popularity, and if any great emergency were to arise. ..I feel that Peel would be found wanting.’ Sir Edward’s sketch of Peel does not merely justify his own distrust and consequent retire- ‘ment from politics; it explains Peel’s sudden success in the conversion of his Cabinet, and his equally sudden defeat in what seemed the moment of victory.

But Peel’s influence gained in intensity from its very narrowness. He exacted obedience, and he got it. So stern a tyrant was he that he thought it a patent disloyalty if his party did not follow him in all the tortuous twists and turns of a changing policy. To-day it was treachery to support Free Trade; to-morrow none but a traitor dare say a word in favour of Protection. In truth, Peel deemed himself far superior to the principles of his party. He demanded allegiance for himself alone, and he would, if he could, have forbidden his supporters the right of private judgment. So convinced was he of his supremacy, that he believed he would encounter no other than a fat-cattle opposition, and when a solid phalanx of Tories resolved to secede, he regarded their secession as a perfidy. ‘I am fighting a desperate battle here,’ he wrote to Hardinge in 1846; ‘ shall probably drive my opponents over the Sutlej ; but what is to come afterwards I know not.’ Hardinge was fighting his country’s foes; Peel was fighting against his friends of yesterday; so that his Sutle] was a very different river from that which Hardinge had recently crossed. But Peel was implacable. He put an end to a friendship with Croker, which had lasted for more than thirty years, because Croker did not change his views on the same day and in the same direction as bpaunelf end it is not difficult to say

XVlii LORD GEORGE BENTINCK which of the two men behaved with the truer faithfulness and the finer courtesy. And as he treated Croker, so most unreasonably he treated all those who dared to preserve their ancient opinions. If Croker and his friends were ‘convinced that the Corn Laws were essential, as Greville said, ‘not merely to the prosperity, but to the existence of the landed interest, Peel had been mainly instrumental in confirming this conviction, and it was not for him to regard a conviction, which he had confirmed, as a rock of offence. Moreover, Peel had already sacrificed his party once, and it was a monstrous indiscretion to repeat the mancuvre. What is done once may be an accident; done twice, it wears the sad appearance of a habit. Sir Robert was long an energetic and consistent enemy to Catholic Emancipation. «.

He resisted the arguments of colleagues and opponents alike. Not even the persuasive eloquence of Canning availed to move him. Nor had he formed his judgment hastily and without experience. He had been Chief Secretary in Ireland; he was familiar with the facts and prejudices of either side. And then, having remained upright for some seventeen years, he threw a_ political somersault, turned his head in the air, and landed on his feet a staunch supporter of the Catholic claims. What - argument and reason could not achieve, was achieved in a moment by Canning’s death and the Clare Election. For Peel, being first minister of the Crown, might now claim the glory of all his actions, and O’Connell’s majority spoke with an eloquence denied to Canning. But the minister cannot be extricated from both horns of the dilemma. Either his sincerity or his prudence was at fault. It was he who had changed, not the situation; and, leaving out of the question

1 The last letters exchanged between Peel and Croker, printed in the Croker Correspondence (vol. iii. 96-97), leave no doubt as to Croker’s loyal conduct and Peel’s unjust resentment.

INTRODUCTION xi the justice of the case, his party had a perfect right to resent what seemed a betrayal.

Sir Edward Knatchbull declared that Sir Robert Peel was ‘deficient in vigour and courage. Disraeli, with a keener subtlety, noted that he was without imagination and without the creative faculty. In effect the two critics agree. To want imagination is, as Disraeli said, to want prescience ; to want prescience, is to want vigour. So Peel, not knowing what was to come, supinely accepted the views of his opponents, and made of necessity an ostentatious virtue. To a more energetic statesman there would have been no necessity. He would have fought for his own cause to the last ditch. Peel surrendered at the lightest hint of panic, and accused of treachery all those who did not throw down their arms with him.

But while he lacked the creative faculty, he had, as Disraeli pointed out, ‘a dangerous sympathy with the creations of others.’ He was always learning, absorbing, appropriating, and so fierce was his egoism that whatever he appropriated he deemed his own exclusive possession. He followed many leaders; he picked up his policies in many corners. ‘In his sallet days, says Disraeli, ‘it was Mr. Horner or Sir Samuel Romilly; in later and more important periods it was the Duke of Wellington, the King of the French, Mr. Jones Loyd—some others—and finally, Mr. Cobden.’ How, then, could he lead his party with courage, when he knew not what lesson he would learn on the morrow, or what new influence was destined to turn his mind or shape his opinion ?

Yet after his defeat in 1846 he made a bold attempt to prove that he had been a consistent Free Trader since 1841. And it is not surprising that this attempt to throw the responsibility of defection upon his Cabinet should have failed. If ever a statesman were pledged to a policy, Peel

XX LORD GEORGE BENTINCK was pledged to the protection of the agricultural interest. ‘I believe that the abolition of the Corn Laws, said Peel in 1844, ‘would produce great confusion and distress’; and again, ‘I can say with truth I have not contemplated and do not contemplate an alteration in the present Corn Laws.’ Politicians have short memories; and not merely did Peel contemplate in 1845 the change that he had never contemplated in 1844, but in 1848, after the episode was closed, he asserted in a certain letter that the measures taken by his Cabinet in 1842 were preparatory to and intended to lead up to the Repeal of the Corn Laws.