tholic question, and I must say out of that alone. If I agreed with Canning on that question, or if his opinions had been the same with Lord Liverpool's, I should not have hesitated to remain in office, had his Majesty commissioned Canning to form a Government, and had Canning proposed to me that I should form a part of it.

"My own position, with respect to the Catholic question, and with respect also to the particular duties which my office devolves upon me, is a peculiar one. I have, for many years, taken a leading part in the House of Commons in opposition to the Roman Catholic claims; and for the last five years (God knows not without serious difficulty and embarrassment) I have filled that office which is mainly responsible for the administration of affairs in Ireland.

"Can I see the influence of the office of Prime Minister transferred from Lord Liverpool to Canning, and added to that of leader of the House of Commons, without subjecting myself to misconstruction with respect to my views on the Catholic question? Can it be so transferred without affecting my particular situation as Secretary for the Home Department, and my weight and efficiency in the administration of Irish affairs? It is with deep and unaffected regret that I answer these questions in the negative. You will perceive, at the same time, that no small part of my difficulty is a peculiar and personal one. It arises partly from the very marked course I have taken on the Catholic questionpartly from the particular office in which circumstances have placed me, and the particular relation in which I stand to Ireland and Irish affairs. Others of my colleagues, who concur with me generally on the Catholic question, may not feel this difficulty. I will not seek, directly or indirectly, to influence their judgment: my first wish is to see the present (perhaps I should rather say the late) Administration reconstituted precisely on the footing on which it stood when Lord Liverpool was at its head. If this be impossible, can it be reconstituted by Canning, I alone retiring?

"If it can, I shall retire in perfect good humour, and without the slightest disappointment, though certainly not without regret.

"I shall continue, out of office, to act upon the principles on which I have hitherto acted; and cannot but feel that, if the Government shall remain in the hands of my former colleagues, I shall be enabled, in conformity with those principles, to give it a general support. I have writ ten this in great haste; and as you are so soon to see his Majesty, I have hardly had time to read it over.

"Ever, my dear Lord,

"Most faithfully yours,
"ROBERT PEEL."

"P. S.-I hope that I explained, entirely to your own satisfaction, the reason why I had not opened my lips to you on the subject of the present state of affairs as connected with the position of the Government until this morning."

Mr. Peel to the Lord Chancellor.

"MY DEAR CHANCELLOR,

"Whitehall, April 9th, 1827.

"What I said with respect to a Protestant peer at the head of the Government was this,―That if a peer of sufficient weight and influence could be found whose general principles were in accordance with those of Lord Liverpool-the appointment of such a peer to be head of the Government would be quite unobjectionable to me, so far as I am personally concerned. It might be difficult to find such a person, because I think he ought to be a peer of name and character, and ability also sufficient to sustain the part of Prime Minister.

"I certainly did say to his Majesty that I could not advise the attempt to form an exclusive Protestant Government; that I could not be a party even to the attempt, should it be contemplated; but his Majesty was, I am confident, of the same opinion.

“I said, also, that I was out of the question as the head of a Government, under that arrangement which I consider by far the best that could be made—namely, the reconstitution of the late Administration; because it was quite impossible for Canning to acquiesce in my appoint

ment.

'I wish to remain as I am, acting with him, he being leader of the House of Commons, with the just influence and authority of that statión, subject, of course, to what I stated in my first letter. "Ever yours,

"ROBERT PEEL.”

Lord Eldon had another audience of the King on the morning of the 10th, when his Majesty intimated to him that, although Mr. Peel was inflexible, and his valuable services for the present must be lost, yet, as there seemed no way in which the Government could be reconstructed on the principle he suggested, his Majesty had resolved to commission Mr. Canning to lay before him the plan of a new Administration, of which himself was to be the head. It is a curious fact, that Lord Eldon not only did not then disclose any intention of resigning, but actually gave the King reason to believe that he would continue in office and support the new Prime Minister. Still more curious is it, that the same day he held the same language to Mr. Canning himself. He is, therefore, entirely free from the charge-afterwards most pertinaciously brought against him-of having combined with other Anti-Catholic members of the Cabinet to deprive the King of the choice of his Ministers by a threat that, if Mr. Canning were put at the head of the Treasury, they would all resign, although he seems by no means entitled to the credit he took to himself, of having resolved from the beginning that he never would hold the Great Seal under a Pro-Catholic Prime Minister.

What changed the purpose which he certainly appears to have entertained on the 10th of April, we can only conjecture; for the next fact which we positively know is, that early on the 12th, without any

previous communication of his intention, he sent his resignation to Mr. Canning, who received it when he was actually in the King's closet, about to kiss hands as First Lord of the Treasury. The probability is, that Lord Eldon, in the intermediate time, had formed his resolution to resign-finding that not only Sir Robert Peel, but all the Anti-Catholic members of the Cabinet, had resigned, so that he could not remain with any decency, and believing that, upon such a general defection, Mr. Canning could not stand,-so that they must all be speedily restored.

There can be no doubt that he might have continued to hold the Great Seal if he had been so inclined; for George IV., at this time, being strongly Anti-Catholic, it was arranged that he should have an Anti-Catholic "Keeper of his Conscience,"—and who so fit for that purpose? But no farther attempt was made to retain him, and the resolution was formed to offer the Great Seal to Sir John Copley, who -of course without any reference to the King's opinion on the requisite condition of Anti-Catholicism in the Chancellor-luckily happened at this moment to be much alarmed by the danger to the Church from any further concession to the Catholics.

It was accordingly stated to Lord Eldon, with all the forms of civility, that his resignation was accepted; and he himself announced from the bench, that he only held the Great Seal for the purpose of giving judgment in cases which had been argued before him.

He continued to sit in the Court of Chancery nearly three weeksthe time being prolonged from the difficulty Mr. Canning had experienced in filling up his Cabinet. When he understood that the ministerial arrangements were nearly completed, he courteously wrote to Lord Lyndhurst to congratulate him, and to inquire when it would be convenient that the transfer of the Great Seal should take place. He received the following becoming answer:

"MY DEAR LORD,

"George Street, April 26th.

"I thank your Lordship for your kind congratulations with respect to the change of the custody of the Seal. Nothing more has been stated to me than a wish that it should take place before the meeting of the House of Lords. I beg your Lordship will, in every particular, consult your own convenience, to which it will be my greatest pleasure to conform. If your Lordship will permit me, I will wait upon you after 1 have made the necessary inquiries, and inform your Lordship of the result. Believe me, my dear Lord (with the deepest sense of your. uniform kindness to me,) to remain, with unfeigned respect, "Your Lordship's faithful servant, “LYNDHURST."

The Great Seal was actually delivered up by Lord Eldon, at Carlton House, on Monday, the 1st of May, 1827. We have an account of this ceremony from himself, in the following letter to his daughter:

“MY EVER DEAR FRANCES,

"May 2d, 1827.

I took my final leave of the King on Monday. The King to me

personally behaved with kindness. He sent for me on the Sunday, as he said he could not prevail upon himself to part with me having only the short interview which the hurry of Monday, when the whole change was to be made, would admit. His conversation to me was very kind, certainly; and it discovered a heart that' had such affectionate feelings as one cannot but deeply lament should, from intrigue and undue influence, not be left to its own operations upon the head. Bessy will have told you of the memorial of his feelings towards me, which he has sent me; and her pen I think more likely to describe its beauties than mine would be, and so I leave that subject.

To-night, I presume, we shall have some account to give of our conduct in the House of Lords, as Peel did last night of his in the Commons, in a speech you will of course see in the papers. We who are to account to-night, are Wellington, Bathurst, Melville, Westmoreland, and myself. Mine will be short, but I hope satisfactory to those who I should wish should be satisfied with my conduct.

"I have now taken my farewell of office. Johnson, in the 'Rambler,' or 'Idler,' I forget which, in his concluding essay, speaks of every person's being affected by what is the last,' by the finishing of his labours. Is the mind so constituted that it cannot be otherwise than that, for a short season, the change from a station of labour and vast importance, to a state of comparatively no labour and no importance, must feel strange? I bless God, however, that He has enabled me, in that state of change, to look back to a period of nearly half a century spent in professional and judicial situations and stations, with a conviction that the remembrance of the past will gild the future years which His providence may allow to me, not merely with content, but with that satisfaction and comfort, and with such happiness, of which the world cannot deprive me.

Notwithstanding the conviction of Lord Eldon that the complacent remembrance of the past would gild his future years, I cannot help suspecting that when he drove home from Carlton House, without the Purse to bear him company, he suffered under what he considered a sad bereavement, and that when he awoke next morning, and looked to the chest in which the bauble had been so long carefully guarded by him, he felt a bitter pang at the recollection that it was gone, and that he should see its face no more. What a sinking of the heart must have come over him when the hour arrived for his train-bearer and his mace-bearer to announce to him that the carriage was ready to take him to Westminster Hall, and, instead of the bustle of the daily procession, he was left undisturbed in his breakfast-parlour, to pore over a newspaper giving an account of the installation of the new Ministers! Now he would have been pleased to endure the eternal "din of the tongues of counsel," though more grating than the drone of a Scottish bagpipe.*

* 1st Aug. 1824. "I have some and no small comfort to-day in having my organs of hearing relieved from the eternal din of the tongues of counsel. I am sometimes tormented by the noise of Lady Gwydir's Scotchmen playing under

Called upon to sign his name having written Eldon, he inadvertently added C.; and when he blotted out this letter, the thought came into his mind that signatures would no longer produce fees, and that quarter-day would come round without bringing a gale of salary.-But what must have been his sensations when he entered the House of Lords, and walking, as if by instinct from the habit of twenty-five years-to the woolsack, he actually found it occupied by another, and he had to take his seat on the Opposition bench, which he had so long viewed with contempt and abhorrence! Great must have been his agony in seeing a Pro-Catholic the organ of the Government in this as well as in the other House of Parliament-notwithstanding the vaunted steady orthodoxy of his successor on the woolsack.

Nature kindly mitigates our severest sufferings; and I suspect that Lord Eldon, in the sharpness of his grief, found some consolation by anticipating the speedy downfall of Mr. Canning, and-all Papists being banished from power-the establishment of a purely Protestant Cabinet.

Yet he was dreadfully shocked by the valedictory harangue of Mr. Peel, "which," he said, "might have come from the

mouth of the vilest Whig. The fact is undenia- [MAY 1, 1827.]

I

bie," boasted the retiring Secretary, "that when I first entered on the duties of the Home Department, there were laws in existence which imposed upon the subjects of this realm unusual and galling restrictions; the fact is undeniable that those laws have been effaced. I have the further satisfaction of knowing that there is not a single legislative measure connected with my name which has not had for its object some mitigation of the severity of the criminal law,—some prevention of abuse in the exercise of it, or some security for its impartial administration. may also recollect, with pleasure, that during the severest trials to which the manufacturing interests have ever been exposed, during the last two years, I have preserved internal tranquillity without applying to Parliament for any measures of extraordinary severity.' So much was Lord Eldon alarmed by such latitudinarian sentiments respecting Suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act, Coercion Bills, and the mitigation of the Criminal Code, that he said to an old friend,† “ You and I may not live to see it, but the day will come when Mr. Peel will place himself at the head of the democracy of England, and will overthrow the Church."

Mr. Canning, in his explanation in the House of Commons, stated distinctly, that "he did not understand from the Lord Chancellor, on the evening of the 10th of April, that it was his intention to resign, and that, so far from anticipating his resignation, the King and himself were

my windows upon the Scotch instrument vulgarly called the bagpipes; but there is music in that droning instrument compared to the battle of lawyers' tongues." -Letter to Lady Frances..

* 17 Hansard, 411.

† Mr. Pennington, the apothecary, who physicked Westminster Hall for half a century.