The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald Thomas Barnes Cochrane [ebook reader 8 inch .txt] 📗

they denied that any fault attached to them, and fiercely reprobated every complaint as sedition, every opponent as a lawless and unpatriotic demagogue. Hence the Government and the people came to be at deadly feud. Most right was with the people, and their bold assertion of that right, albeit sometimes in wrong ways, has secured memorable benefits in later times; but power was still with the Government, and it was used even more roughly than in former years.

That Lord Cochrane, having suffered so much from the vindictive persecution of the Tories, should have thrown in his lot with its most extreme opponents, is not to be wondered at. During 1817 he was intimately associated with the popular party in all its efforts for the redress of grievances and in all the assertions of its real and fancied rights. In and out of Parliament he was alike active and outspoken. The history of his public conduct at this time forms no small section of the history of the Radical movement during the period. It resulted naturally from the circumstances in which he had lately been placed. Energetic in thought and action, a ready writer and an able speaker, his recent sufferings helped to place him in the foremost rank of patriots, as they were called by friends—demagogues, as they were called by enemies. With the exception of Sir Francis Burdett, than whom he even went further, the people had, outside their own ranks, no sturdier champion.

If there had been any doubt before as to his line of action, there could be no doubt after the re-assembling of Parliament in January, 1817. During the recess, monster meetings had been held in all parts of the country to consider the popular troubles and to insist upon popular reforms. Lord Cochrane agreed to present to the House of Commons many of the petitions that resulted from these meetings, and this he did on the 29th of January, the very day of the re-opening of Parliament.

In anticipation of this measure, there was a great assembling of reform delegates from all parts of England, and of others favourable to their purpose, in front of Lord Cochrane's residence at No. 7, Palace Yard, Westminster. Shortly before two o'clock Lord Cochrane showed himself at the window, and announced that he was now on his way to the House, there to watch over the rights and liberties of the people, and that he would shortly return and let them know what was passing. This he did at four o'clock, part of the interval being occupied with a fervid address from Henry Hunt. On his reappearance, Lord Cochrane stated that the speech with which the Prince Regent had opened Parliament had not disappointed his expectations, for it was wholly disappointing to the people. The Regent had complained of the disaffection pervading the country, and had announced his intention of using all the power given him by the Constitution for its suppression. Lord Cochrane expressed his confident hope that the people, having the right on their side, would so demean themselves as to give their enemies no ground of charge against them; for those enemies desired nothing so much as riot and disorder.

Thereupon an immense bundle of petitions was handed him, and he himself was placed in a chair, and so conveyed on men's shoulders to the door of Westminster Hall, where the crowd dispersed in an orderly way.

In the House, before the motion for an address in answer to the Prince Regent's speech, Lord Cochrane rose to present a petition, signed by more than twenty thousand inhabitants of Bristol, setting forth the present distress of the country, the increase of paupers and beggars, the grievous lack of employment for industrious persons, and the misery that resulted from this state of things. In these circumstances, the petitioners urged, it was in vain to pretend to relieve the sufferers by giving them soup, while, for the support of sinecure placemen, pensioners without number, and an insatiable civil list, half their earnings were taken from them by the enormous taxation under which the country groaned. After considerable opposition, the petition was allowed to lie on the table.

Lord Cochrane then presented a smaller but much more outspoken petition from the inhabitants of Quirk, in Yorkshire. "The petitioners," it was there urged, "have a full and immovable conviction—a conviction which they believe to be universal throughout the kingdom—that the House does not, in any constitutional or rational sense, represent the nation; that, when the people have ceased to be represented, the Constitution is subverted; that taxation without representation is a state of slavery; that the scourge of taxation without representation has now reached a severity too harassing and vexatious, too intolerable and degrading, to be longer endured without resistance by all possible means warranted by the Constitution; that such a condition of affairs has now been reached that contending factions are alike guilty of their country's wrongs, alike forgetful of her rights, mocking the public patience with repeated, protracted, and disgusting debates on questions of refinement in the complicated and abstruse science of taxation, as if in such refinement, and not in a reformed representation, as if in a consolidated corruption, and not in a renovated Constitution, relief were to be found; that thus there are left no human means of redressing the people's wrongs or composing their distracted minds, or of preventing the subversion of liberty and the establishment of despotism, unless by calling the collected wisdom and virtue of the community into counsel by the election of a free Parliament; and therefore, considering that, through the usurpation of borough factions and other causes, the people have been put even out of a condition to consent to taxes; and considering also that, until their sacred right of election shall be restored, no free Parliament can have existence, it is necessary that the House shall, without delay, pass a law for putting the aggrieved and much-aroused people in possession of their undoubted right to representation co-extensive with taxation, to an equal distribution of such representation throughout the community, and to Parliaments of a continuance according to the Constitution, namely, not exceeding one year."

A long discussion ensued as to whether this petition should be accepted by the House or rejected as an insulting libel. Several members of the House denounced it. Other members, while objecting to its terms, urged its acceptance. Among them the most notable was Mr. Brougham. The petition, he said, was rudely worded, and its recommendations were such as no wise lover of the English Constitution could wholly subscribe to; but it pointed to real grievances and recommended improvements which were necessary to the well-being of the State, and therefore it ought to be admitted. Mr. Canning was one of those who insisted upon its rejection, and this was ultimately done by a majority of 87, 48 being in favour of the petition, and 135 against it.

Four other petitions presented by Lord Cochrane, being to the same effect, were also rejected; and two, more moderate in their language, were accepted. Lord Cochrane thus succeeded, at any rate, in forcing the House during several hours to take into consideration the troubled state of the country, and the pressing need, as it seemed to great masses of the people, of thorough parliamentary reform.

"You will see by the 'Debates,'" he wrote next day to a friend, "that I presented a number of petitions last night, and had a hard battle to fight. Today I am quite indisposed, by reason of the corruption of the Honourable House. It is impossible to support a bad cause by honest means. God knows where all these base projects will end." That his own cause was a good one, and that the means used by him were honest, he had no doubt. In the same letter he referred to the opposition offered to him, even by some of his own relatives, on account of his conduct. "Mr. Cochrane has thought proper to disavow, through the public papers, any connection with my politics. The consciousness that I am acting as I ought makes that light which I should otherwise feel as a heavy clog in following that course which I think honour and justice require."

Therefore he persevered in his Herculean task. Having presented and spoken upon others in the interval, he presented another monster petition to the House on the 5th of February. It was signed, he said, by twenty-four thousand inhabitants of London and the neighbourhood. It complained of the unbearable weight of taxation and the distresses of the country, and of the squandering of the money extracted from the pockets of an oppressed and impoverished people to support sinecure placemen and pensioners. "It appears to me," he said, "surprising that there should be any set of men so cruel and unjust as to wallow in wealth at the public expense while poor wretches are starving at every corner of the streets." He represented that the petition was drawn up in temperate, respectful language,—more temperate, indeed, than he should have employed had he dictated its phrases. He urged that the people had good cause for complaint as to the way in which Parliament neglected their interests, and good ground for asserting that the system of parliamentary representation then afforded them was no real representation at all. Members entered the House only in pursuit of their own selfish ends, and the Government encouraged this state of things by fostering a system of wholesale bribery and corruption, degrading in itself and fraught with terrible mischief to the community. What wonder, then, that the people should pray, as they did in this petition, for a thorough reform, and should point to annual Parliaments and universal suffrage as the only efficient remedies?

It is needless to recapitulate all the arguments offered again and again by Lord Cochrane, with ever fresh-force and cogency, in presenting massive petitions to the House, and in introducing into the occasional debates on reform with which the House amused itself a vigour and practicalness in which few other members cared to sympathize. Nor need we enumerate all the meetings, in London and the provinces, in which he took prominent part. It is enough to say that in Parliament he always spoke with exceeding boldness, and that upon the people, notwithstanding the contrary assertions of his detractors, he always enjoined, if not conciliation and forbearance, at any rate such action as was within the strict letter of the law, and most likely, in the end, to obtain the realization of their wishes. On all occasions he defended them from the charges of sedition and conspiracy brought against them by their opponents, and proved, to all who were open to proof, that their objects were patriotic, and were being sought in patriotic ways.

Of this, however, the Government did not choose to be convinced. Taking advantage of some intemperate speeches of demagogues, making much of some violent handbills circulated by police-officers under secret instructions, mightily exaggerating a few lawless acts,—as when a drunken old sailor summoned the keepers of the Tower of London to surrender,—they procured, on the 26th of February, the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. Therefrom resulted, at any rate, some good. The Whigs, who had hitherto mainly supported the Tory Government, were now turned against it, and with them the wiser Radicals, like Lord Cochrane, sought to effect a coalition. "You will perceive by the papers," he said in a letter dated February the 28th, "that I have resolved to steer another political course, seeing that the only means of averting military despotism from the country is to unite the people and the Whigs, so far as they can be induced to co-operate, which they must do if they wish to preserve the remainder of the Constitution. The 'Times' of yesterday contains the fullest account of the late debates on the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and by that report you will perceive that the Whigs really made a good stand."

In that temper, Lord Cochrane spoke at a Westminster meeting, held on the 11th of March, "to take into consideration the propriety of agreeing to an address to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, beseeching that he will, in his well-known solicitude for the freedom and happiness of His Majesty's subjects, remove from his royal councils those ministers who appear resolved to adopt no effectual measures of economy and retrenchment, but, on the contrary, to persevere in measures calculated to drive a suffering people to despair."

There was some flattery or some mockery, or something of both, in that announcement; and both, with much earnest enunciation of popular grievances, were in Lord Cochrane's speech on the subject. He said that the Regent had as much cause as the people to complain of his present ministers, seeing how shamelessly they sought to hide from him the real state of the country. It was to be expected, from the early habits and character of the Regent, that he would anxiously pursue the interests of the nation, if,