CLIII. CHAP. ministration, except by assenting to them. He probably took no active part in the discussions in Council respecting conciliation or coercion, and when blood began to flow, he offered no opinion respecting the manner in which the war should be conducted. Even in Parliament he very rarely spoke, except on some subject connected with the law; and unlike Lord Camden and some other lawyers, who have greatly extended their oratorical fame when placed among the Peers, he seems never to have been well listened to in either House. He draws and defends the Royal Marriage Act. March 2. 1772. His maiden speech as a Lord was in defence of the Royal Marriage Act, which was framed exactly as we now see it under the directions of King George III., and which, although several of his ministers disapproved of it, his Majesty was resolutely determined to carry through without any alteration, so that his family might not again be degraded by misalliances — as he thought that it had lately been. Lord Bathurst, although when Attorney General to Frederick Prince of Wales, his master being at variance with George II. he had seen great reason to doubt the asserted authority of the King respecting the marriage of his descendants, now, as Chancellor to George III., had all his doubts cleared up, and thus in answer to the Marquis of Rockingham he addressed their Lordships: "I confess, my Lords, that I had a share in drawing this bill, and I should be unworthy of the situation which I have the honour to fill if I were not prepared to justify every clause, every word, and every letter in it; and I am free to confess that I will not give my consent to any amendment whatever that may be proposed to it. Better than alter it, throw it out. But your Lordships will see its importance to the state. The King's right to the care of the royal family, and the approbation of their marriages, rests on the public good, and cannot be doubted. As to who are the royal family, all the descendents of George II. are ; —and so is the Prince of Wales. They are paid out of the civil list, and therefore they are of the royal family. If any inconvenience arise, parliament will take care to remedy it a hundred years hence. The power may be abused; but so may all power. It is not against religion to annul marriages - as we know by the general Marriage Act from CLIII. which the marriages of the royal family are excluded. The СНАР. public necessity now requires that they should be regulated, and no mode would be effectual, other than that which this bill prescribes." * At the commencement of the new parliament in November, 1774, a scene was enacted which must have afforded some amusement to those who recollected Sir Fletcher Norton's biting sarcasm upon the appointment of Bathurst as Chancellor. The same Sir Fletcher Norton being elected Speaker of the House of Commons, had to appear before the same Chancellor at the bar of the House of Lords to "disqualify himself," and to pray that the Commons might be directed to make a worthier choice. However, this was not the occasion to retaliate, and the Chancellor, in expressing his Majesty's approbation of the choice of the Commons, declared that "no person in Mr. Speaker's situation ever stood less in need of apology."† Lord Bathurst gives King's consent to the election of Sir Fletcher NorSpeaker of the House ton as of Com mons. American In the course of the same session, the Chancellor sup- He supported the bill for cutting off the commerce of the rebellious ports the provinces in America with the rest of the world ‡, and the non-intermeasure of sending Hanoverian troops to Gibraltar and course Act. Minorca, the legality of which turned on the just construction of the "Act of Settlement."§ to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act spect to The Americans having now declared their " Independence," A. D. 1777. and there being flagrant war with them, a great difficulty He introarose as to the treatment of prisoners taken by us in battle. We still said they were the King's subjects who were guilty of "levying war against him in his realm." But if so, they with reought immediately to have been brought to trial for high American treason, and they could not legally be detained in custody. prisoners. To have treated them as prisoners of war would have been to acknowledge the authority of Congress as the legislature of a separate state. To have executed them as traitors would not only have been contrary to the rules laid down by jurists, respecting the mode of conducting a contest which assumes the aspect of civil war, but would inevitably have led to CLIII. CHAP. retaliation, there being many "loyalists" in the power of the "rebels." To extricate the government from this dilemma, the Chancellor brought in "A Bill to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act with respect to his Majesty's subjects taken fighting against him in America;" — whereby power was given to detain them in custody without bringing them to trial. He said, "if ever there was a bill that deserved the appellation of humanity it was this. It was certainly necessary that some punishment should be inflicted on persons taken in the act of enmity against us; but what ought it to be? Since it was plainly not expedient that they should be discharged, and not politic, from the apprehensions of retaliation, to put them to immediate death, what was the alternative? In his opinion, the only just medium had been adopted that of preserving them till the conclusion of the war so that their offence might still be visited upon them without endangering the lives of our fellow subjects now in a similar situation in America." * The bill passed, though strongly opposed by the Duke of Richmond and other Peers. Question as to the legality of raising regiments. Lord Bathurst was always desirous of getting up Lord Mansfield to defend the government, and of avoiding a personal conflict with Lord Camden; but in the session of 1778 he was driven to give his opinion in favour of the legality of a plan which ministers had adopted of allowing regiments to be raised and maintained by individuals without the authority of parliament, contending that, although the "Bill of Rights" declared that "to keep up a standing army in time of peace was contrary to law, this not being a time of peace, the provision did not apply to it." Lord Camden was now very severe upon him, insisting "that the arguments in support of the measure from the woolsack would lead to the utter subversion of the constitution, and that to raise troops without the consent and during the sitting of parliament was not only illegal and unconstitutional, but a violation of the fundamental privileges of parliament." The subject was resumed on a subsequent day, when Lord Camden reiterated * 19 Parl. Hist. 52. 561. his doctrine, but the Lord Chancellor did not venture again CHAP. to take the field against him. * CLIII. Feb. 16. Lord Ba acknow. indepen After the calamitous surrender of General Burgoyne and his army at Saratoga, the Earl of Thanet having produced in 1778. the House of Lords a letter to him from the victorious thurst opAmerican General GATES, recommending peace between the poses the two countries, and having moved that it should be laid upon ledgment of the table, "the Lord Chancellor asked their Lordships if it American could possibly be deemed right to accept a letter which held dence. out such terms as were not only exceedingly unequal, but grossly insulting? What! acknowledge the independency of America! and withdraw our army and our fleet! Confess the superiority of America, and wait her mercy! He desired the House to consult their own feelings for an answer."† The motion, though supported by the Duke of Manchester and the Duke of Grafton, was negatived without a division. 1778. to Lord Soon after, the Chancellor showed that he could be excited March 31. by great provocation, and that, with a larger stock of moral His indigcourage to support him, he might have made a better figure nant reply in life. The Earl of Effingham, making a motion for papers Effingham. respecting the public expenditure, and anticipating the rejection of it, declared "that if the proofs of the extravagant and wasteful conduct of administration were denied him there, he would take care to produce them elsewhere. The public had a right to know in what manner their money was spent, and he would furnish them with information. It was in vain, he saw plainly, to attempt in that House to move for any thing which the ministers were not willing to give. In the present instance, the first Lord of the Admiralty knew his strength in a division. He would go below the bar, and take with him his he had like to have said- servile majority; he should not, therefore, rest satisfied, but would use proper 19 Parl. Hist. 625. Ib. 734. 742. Notwithstanding this public declaration which the Chancellor considered it his duty to make in parliament, it appears from letters which I have seen, but which I am not at liberty to make public, that on the 9th of December, 1777, he had strongly expressed his private opinion to Lord North on the necessity of opening a negotiation with the Americans for the acknowledgment of their independence, and that he had subsequently tendered his resignation because his advice was rejected. This correspondence is very creditable to Lord Bathurst, and shows that he was much respected by his colleagues. CHAP. means to come at the truth, which he would certainly communicate to the public." The Lord Chancellor, leaving the woolsack in great warmth, thus spoke: "My Lords, I feel myself called on to support the honour of the House. If such language is allowed to pass unnoticed, your Lordships will no longer be moderators between the King and the people. The noble Earl has talked of a servile majority; are your Lordships to be so grossly insulted without even administering a rebuke? I have sat in this House seven years, and never before heard so indecent a charge a servile majority! The insinuation is not warrantable. I, for one, have been in the habit of voting for the measures of Government; but will any noble Lord venture to say that I am under undue influence? The Ministers of the Crown know that the place I hold is no tie upon me; they know that I always act freely according to my conscience. I was born heir to a seat in this assembly *; I enjoy a peerage by hereditary right. I could not therefore sit silent and hear the noble Earl talk of a servile majority. I am amazed that the members of the Government should so long have suffered themselves patiently to be traduced. In future I hope they will know how to check such a strain of invective. The ministry, my Lords, will always have a majority, they being independent and the majority independent,- for the moment that the opposition have a majority, the ministry will be no more."† So great was the superiority of Members which the government still commanded, that Lord Effingham, to conceal the weakness of his party, suffered the motion to be negatived without a division. This is not strictly correct, although the peerage had been conferred upon his family three years before his birth, as he was a younger brother, till he had reached manhood. I have known a few and a very few peers who have gained distinction though born to a peerage,―the late Lord Holland, the present Lord Stanley, and others, might be held out as examples—but almost all the peers who have displayed much energy and talent in my time, have either themselves been created peers or were born before their fathers were created peers, or had begun their career as younger brothers. The res angusta domi is not so hard to struggle with as the enervating influence of wealth and high position without the necessity for exertion. † 19 Parl. Hist. 995. |