438 BREAKING THE LINE. [1782. furnished an example which was gloriously imitated by Duncan at Camperdown, by Howe, and by Nelson. There have been pages of controversy on the question whether Rodney is entitled to the merit of the idea of breaking the line, for the first time carried into effect on this 12th of April. About the period that Rodney left London to take the command in the West Indies, was printed "An Essay on Naval Tactics," by Mr. John Clerk, of Eldin. This treatise contained a very able exposition of the different principles of maritime warfare pursued by the English and the French-the one making an attack from windward, the other courting a leeward position; which difference, the author contended, had produced many of our failures in general engagements, where the results were indecisive and totally inadequate to the bravery of our sailors and commanders. He compared the meeting of two fleets, on contrary tacks, to a rencounter of horsemen, where the parties pushed their horses at full speed, in opposite directions, exchanging only a few pistol shots as they passed; and thus two great armaments had often engaged and separated, without any serious damage or loss on either side. But Mr. Clerk held that if an enemy's line be cut in twain, that portion which is separated from the rest can more readily be destroyed. He alleged, in a later edition of his book, that before its publication he had communicated his views to Mr. Atkinson, a friend of Rodney; and that the admiral himself, before quitting London in 1782, said he would bear them in mind in engaging an enemy. On the other hand, sir Charles Douglas maintains, by a comparison of dates, that Rodney could not have acquired this information before he left to take his command at the beginning of 1782; and that his father, the captain of the Formidable, made the suggestion to the admiral in the heat of the engagement, when he saw a favourable opportunity of breaking the line.* In these rival claims to what has in some degree the character of an invention, most persons will be inclined to consider that the greater merit rests with the man who first gives a practical value to a theory, and especially so in the case of a naval or land commander, who, in the hurry and tumult of a battle, seizes the right moment for carrying a principle into operation. The engagement of the 12th of April terminated in the most signal success. The admiral held that it was the severest sea-fight on record. The great triumph of the day was the capture of the Ville de Paris. De Grasse continued the fight in this mighty vessel-mighty as compared with the usual size of seventy-fours, and even ninety-gun ships, in that day-till the victory was decisive over the other portions of his fleet. The last broadside from the Barfleur, commanded by Hood, compelled him to strike. Five large ships. were captured, and one sunk. Those that escaped fled to various ports, and were not again united for any continuance of the naval warfare. Jamaica was saved from the joint attack of the French and Spanish; for which vast preparations had been made in the trains of artillery that were found on board the captured vessels. Lord Cranston, an officer who was sent, after the Ville de Paris had struck, to receive De Grasse's sword, described the carnage which he beheld on board the great ship as altogether terrible. Only Clerk's claims are advocated in the "Edinburgh Review," vol. vi. p. 301. The pretensions of Clerk and Douglas are minutely examined in the "Quarterly Review," vol. xlii. p. 50. 1782.] CHANGE OF COSTUME AND CHANGE OF MEASURES. 439 De Grasse himself, with two or three others, remained on the quarter-deck. The French admiral was only slightly wounded, though the fire of so many hours had swept away most of his officers. De Grasse could scarcely recover from his astonishment at seeing his vessel taken, and himself a prisoner— that vessel which, on the news arriving at Plymouth, provoked an exclamation from some French officers, of "Impossible! Not the whole British fleet could take the Ville de Paris." It was held that Rodney ought to have followed up his success by chasing the ships that escaped. But in those latitudes total darkness comes on immediately after sunset. He attempted a pursuit the next morning, but his fleet was becalmed for three days off Guadaloupe. On the 19th of April, Hood came up with five French vessels, in the Mona Passage, and captured two seventy-fours, and two frigates. Two of the French ships taken in this action never came as trophies to England. The Ville de Paris, and the Glorieux, went down in a great storm off the banks of Newfoundland in September, when three English vessels of a fleet from Jamaica also perished; leaving only two remaining of those that had sailed homeward with admiral Graves. On the 8th of April the Parliament met after a short recess, during which the re-elections had taken place of those members who had accepted office in the new ministry. An eye-witness describes the change of costume which the House of Commons presented, when lord North and his friends took their seats on the opposition benches, in great coats, frocks, and boots; and their successors, having thrown off the Whig livery of blue and buff, appeared in all the dignity of swords, lace, and hair-powder. One tenacious holder of office, Mr. Welbore Ellis, appeared on that 8th of April, for the first time in his life, in an undress.* The new ministers came from the Levée and the Drawing-room in their unfamiliar and uncomfortable finery; and Fox and Burke had to hear the whispered joke circulating amidst the joke-loving Commons, that lord Nugent, whose house had been robbed of many articles of dress, fancied that he saw some of his laced ruffles on the hands of the gentlemen who now occupied the Treasury bench. The change of measures was far more remarkable than the change of costume. The opportunity for carrying those plans of salutary reform which were once so hateful to the Court, appeared to have come. George III. did not even look frowningly upon the men whose advent to office was to have been the signal for his abdication. "The king appears more and more good-humoured every day," writes Fox on the 12th of April. "I believe he is really pleased with the full levées and drawing-rooms which he sees every day, and which he thinks flattering to him." But the administration had the elements of decay and dissolution in its own bosom. Thurlow, who had continued on the woolsack because "the Tiger," as he was called, growled so ominously that the hunters were afraid to disturb him in his lair, began at the very onset to give trouble to his coadjutors. On the 12th, a royal message on the subject of Burke's measure for economical reform was discussed in the Cabinet. Thurlow was decidedly opposed to the Bill; Fox as resolute that it should be carried. The king's counsellors were wrangling till the 15th, when it was * Wraxall's "Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 172. 440 BURKE'S BILL FOR ECONOMICAL REFORM. [1782. arranged that Fox should that day carry a message to the House of Commons, "which looks and points to Burke's Bill." * The royal message was very indefinite. It recommended the consideration of an effectual plan of economy through all the branches of the public expenditure, "towards which important object his majesty has taken into his actual consideration, a reform and regulation in his civil establishment, which he will shortly lay before the House." Burke declared to the Commons that the message was the genuine effusion of his majesty's paternal care and tenderness for his subjects. Shelburne pledged himself to the Peers that the present message was the voluntary language of the sovereign himself. Horace Walpole describes Burke and Shelburne as "ridiculously extravagant in panegyrics on his majesty for this magnanimity, which certainly was no measure of his, but an artifice of their own, and but a shallow one, to persuade the people that they meant to adhere to their former principles." + Burke did not desert the principles which he had advocated in the original introduction of his great scheme of reform; but, like most other reformers, he was compelled to a compromise-to tolerate the continuance of some evil for the sake of securing some portion of a comprehensive good. Burke had no seat in the Cabinet, and he was thus compelled to adopt the decisions of those who were divided amongst themselves, and could only hope to hold together by mutual concessions. His Bill did not interfere with the mode of supplying the Royal Household; did not abolish the two ancient offices of Treasurer and Cofferer,-great functionaries who carried white wands, and whose abolition might appear an encroachment upon the splendour and dignity of the Crown. He left untouched the principality of Wales and the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall. The Ordnance and the Mint were continued in the enjoyment of their own anomalous relations with the other branches of the public service. Nevertheless, a great reform was effected. A number of useless and mischievous offices, usually held by members of parliament, were abolished, by which an annual saving of seventy-two thousand pounds was effected, and one of the readiest modes of corruption was taken away from the power of a ministry. The pension-list was limited to an annual amount of a very moderate extent, but not before extravagant pensions had been granted to Barré and Dunning. Burke, who held the office of Paymaster of the Forces, which had been a fountain of monstrous wealth to rapacious politicians, had the honour of proposing a distinct Bill for the regulation of that office, by which no balance could in future accumulate in the hands of the Paymaster, enabling him at the public expense to pocket the interest even of a million sterling, whilst the Chancellor of the Exchequer was raising new loans, to be followed by increased taxation. There were two important reforms with reference to the constitution of Parliament which the Rockingham ministry lost no time in carrying. The one was to exclude Contractors from sitting in the House of Commons; the other to prevent Revenue Officers from voting at elections for representatives in Parliament. These measures for limiting the influence of the Crown did not pass without opposition from the Lord Chancellor and from lord Mans *Russell-"Memorials of Fox," vol. i. p. 315. 1782.] PITT'S MOTION FOR PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. 441 field. To indicate how prodigal contracts were obtained through parlia mentary influences, lord Shelburne pointed to the splendid palaces of contractors, that stared the people in the face all round the metropolis-the sumptuousness and expense with which they were known to live, which rivalled those of the most successful nabobs. The contractor and the nabob were not without reason the great marks for the finger of scorn to point at. To show the power of revenue officers at elections, lord Rockingham declared that in seventy boroughs the returns to parliament chiefly depended upon those functionaries. The constitutional principle of these disqualifications has never been contested since these measures became law, in spite of that opposition which Thurlow headed and Mansfield supported. A more extensive principle of Parliamentary Reform was at this time advocated by William Pitt. He held no place in the government; but he was deemed a supporter of more liberal doctrines than some of the most influential holders of office. A large addition to the number of county members, and the repeal of the Septennial Act, had been the constant petition of the Associations in Yorkshire and other counties. The livery of London invariably maintained that the inequality of the representation was the main cause of calamitous wars and profligate expenditure. Mr. Pitt was speaking therefore the sentiments of a large body of the people, rather than representing the opinions of a party, when, on the 7th of May, he moved for a Committee to inquire into the present state of the Representation of the Commons of Great Britain. His motion pledged the House to no definite plan, but his speech sufficiently indicated the necessity for "a calm revision of the principles of the constitution, and a moderate reform of such defects as had imperceptibly and gradually stole in to deface, and which threatened at last totally to destroy, the most beautiful fabric of government in the world." There were boroughs wholly under the command of the Treasury. There were others which had no actual existence but in the return of members to the House-they had no existence in property, in population, in trade, in weight-the electors were the slaves of some person who claimed the property of the borough, and who in fact made the return. There were other boroughs where the return to parliament was sold to the best purchaser; and thus it was well understood that the nabob of Arcot had no less than seven or eight members in that House. Mr. Pitt made a pointed allusion to one, now no more, of whom every member could speak with more freedom than himself. It was the opinion of that person that without the establishment of a "more solid and equal representation of the people, by which the proper constitutional connection should be revived, this nation, with the best capacities for grandeur and happiness of any on the face of the earth, must be confounded with the mass of those whose liberties were lost in the corruption of the people." Such were the opinions advocated by the son of Chatham, "with the ardour for melioration characteristic of ingenuous youth."* The Lord Advocate of Scotland, Dundas, with that assurance which never failed him, told the ingenuous youth that he must be mistaken with regard to the opinions of his father; for on searching the Journals, he had not found that lord Chatham had ever brought in any reform whatever, and therefore plainly saw the constitution wanted no such alteration. * Aikin-Annals of George III." vol. i. p. 306. 442 PROPOSITION FOR ARMING THE PEOPLE. [1782. Mr. Pitt's motion was rejected by a majority of twenty. Fox thought the defeat upon this proposition would have many bad consequences. The late ministry voted against it in a body. Of the new administration and their supporters friend was against friend. Fox had great difficulty to persuade Burke not to vote against the motion, but to leave the House; and Sheridan describes Burke on a subsequent debate for shortening the duration of parliaments, as having "attacked William Pitt in a scream of passion, and swore parliament was, and always had been, precisely what it ought to be, and that all people who thought of reforming it wanted to overturn the constitution." Arguments such as those proclaimed by the younger Pitt, in 1782, were left to smoulder, with occasional flickerings of combustion, under the subsequent policy of himself and his followers, till, after the lapse of fifty years, they burst out into a flame, which realized the prophecy of his father, in 1775, that "either the Parliament will reform itself from within, or be reformed with a vengence from without." Chatham assigned a term for the realization of this prediction. To the question of lord Buchan, “what will become of poor England, that doats on the imperfection of her pretended constitution ?" he answered, "The gout will dispose of me soon enough to prevent me from feeling the consequences of this infatuation." He assigned the end of the century as the period when the necessity for a general reform could no longer be resisted. † Whether the Reform was to come from within or from without, it is clear that in 1782 the younger Pitt, if he had taken a statesman's view either of the power of the aristocracy or the influence of the people, could not have considered that the time had arrived for carrying to its logical conclusion of a practical change, the unquestionable theory of the inequality of the representation. It may be doubted whether Burke could have affirmed, except in a paroxysm of that temporary violence which sometimes clouded his marvellous comprehension of the great elements of a political question, that " Parliament was, and always had been, precisely what it ought to be." But we may well understand how, in his intimate knowledge of the composition of Parties, he might believe that an agitation for Reform would then be dangerous because it would be useless. It has been truly said of Burke, "that he recognized in all its bearings that great doctrine, which even in our own day is too often forgotten, that the aim of the legislator should be not truth, but expediency." We must not too hastily accept the epigrammatic reproof of his contemporary, the most delightful of writers, but no very sound judge of political action or political philosophy, that he was "too fond of the right to pursue the expedient." Three days after the debate on Mr. Pitt's motion for reform, a discussion of a very interesting nature came on in the House of Commons. A Circular Letter had been issued by the earl of Shelburne, addressed to the chief magistrate of the principal cities and towns, submitting for their opinion a plan for augmenting the domestic force of the nation, by raising battalions or companies of volunteers in each locality, who were not to be moved from their places of abode except in times of actual invasion or rebellion. This plan had the support of the leading men of both parties; but some alarmists * Russell-"Memorials of Fox," vol. i. P. 322. |