Masters of the legions, the kings were in conclave, resettling Europe after their own mind. Europe for an hour was theirs. With their selfish and feeble policy they had fallen before Napoleon, and most of them at last had kissed his feet, nor when their people rose against his tyranny had they very readily drawn the patriot sword. But for the time they engrossed the fruits of victory. Their guiding principles, as they at first proclaimed, in regulating the world, were to be those of the Gospel; Christian charity, peace, and justice, not less binding on the councils of princes than on private men. This programme was the fancy of Alexander of Russia, 1815 at once Emperor of Cossacks and sentimental dupe of a female mystic, Madame Krudener. When it was propounded to the Duke of Wellington, the duke replied that the British parliament would require something more precise. The religious mysticism of Alexander soon gave place in those councils to practical reaction in the person of Metternich, who undertook to make the world stand still. The members of the conclave proceeded to dispose of Europe as though it had been the personal property of kings, cutting and carving as their own interests dictated, handing over the north of Italy to the foreign and hated domination of Austria, forcing alien communities, such as Holland and Belgium, into uncongenial union, and rearranging territory everywhere without regard for the sentiment of nationality or for the wishes of the people. The establishment of a European settlement with a balance of power was the object ostensibly in view. The next care was to extinguish the desire of freedom which the struggle with Napoleon had kindled in the hearts of nations, and to restore absolute monarchy with its con genial priesthood. Hopeless in the end the attempt proved. The spirit of liberalism, once awakened, might be repressed, but would not die. To re-enforce it presently came the spirit of reviving nationality, fostered by historical studies and impatient of the stranger's yoke, such as was that of Austria in Italy, and that of Russia in Poland. We come to the opening of a new era. CHAPTER VII GEORGE IV. AND WILLIAM IV GEORGE IV. BORN 1762; SUCCEEDED 1820; DIED 1830 THE Tories had conducted the struggle with Napoleon. They had won Waterloo, at least Waterloo had been won under them. They were left in possession of the glory and the power. The Whigs were justly discredited by their factious opposition to the war and their unpatriotic sympathy with Napoleon, in whose fall they fell. The prime minister still was Liverpool, the experienced and sure-footed administrator, equal to the business of state and not above it, whose respectable mediocrity was now found useful as a centre of union not only for rival ambitions but for divergent sentiments. For in his cabinet there were both advocates and opponents of Catholic Emancipation; there were men who went thoroughly with the absolutist re-settlement of the continent; and there were men who, though enemies to revolution, were British and friends to the independence of nations. Of the opponents of Catholic Emancipation and of change of every kind the type and chief was the chancellor, Eldon, a great technical lawyer who cherished the very cobwebs of the old law, and whose hesitations and delays amounted to a denial of justice. In politics Eldon clung not only to catholic disabilities and the unreformed House of Commons, but to every anomaly and abuse, as a stone which could not be removed without shaking the sacred edifice of the constitution. He clung even to the cruel absurdities of the criminal law. He prided himself upon being the special guardian of the protestant church establishment, on the plethoric revenues and the abuses of which he would not let a profane hand be laid. Being little of a church-goer, he was likened to a buttress supporting the church from without. His orthodoxy was refreshed by copious libations of port. He shared with Addington the fond affection of George III., who, when Eldon was made chancellor, buttoned up the seals in the breast of his coat that he might give them, as he said, from his heart. Addington, the "doctor," was now home secretary under the title of Lord Sidmouth, which gilded, without changing, his mediocrity. Like Eldon, he was a thoroughgoing reactionist, and in all questions between the government and the people a believer in prompt and vigorous repression. Not that he was by nature other than a kind and courteous gentleman, but his medicine. for the disease of popular discontent was legal grapeshot administered in good time. With Eldon and Sidmouth at present, though destined memorably to break with them and with reaction in the end, was the young Robert Peel, whose father, a wealthy cotton-spinner, had laid the promise of the youth, shown in Oxford honours, on the altar of Toryism. Perceval had welcomed to office the recruit, who thus gained the advantage of early initiation into public affairs, while by swearing allegiance to a party he forfeited the political independence which, as his mind opened, it became the pathetic struggle of his life to regain. Castlereagh, foreign minister and leader of the House of Commons, was in European affairs as much of an absolutist as a man not devoid of British spirit could be, and on that account an object of detestation to Liberals. By the people, of whom he did not conceal his scorn, he was so intensely hated that after his tragic death by his own hand his corpse was hooted into its grave. His oratory was almost a jest. But he was a high-bred aristocrat, the pride as well as the type of his order, and a man of undaunted courage. When he rose in the House of Commons, with his lofty bearing and blue ribbon, Tories, we can believe, would forgive broken sentences and false metaphors. On the question of Catholic Emancipation Castlereagh was liberal. He was an Irishman, had taken a leading part in carrying the Union, and being a man of great sense was open to light on the Irish question. With Castlereagh, rather than with Tories like Eldon or Sidmouth, may be ranked the great soldier whose victory over Napoleon had given him an immense ascendancy, not in his own country only, but in Europe. When Wellington, a few years later, became premier, he was reminded of his saying that if ever he accepted the premiership he would be mad. He had, however, undergone political training, having been Irish secretary in his youth, and in his management of men and affairs in Spain, where he had to deal with the impracticable Junta, he had shown, as his despatches prove, in a very high degree some of the qualities of a statesman. In the councils of Europe his authority was great. Nor was there in him the slightest tendency to military usurpation or sabre sway. Strict allegiance to duty fixed the boun |