13. The Misfortune of Wellington (4)
Wellington accepted the position of Prime Minister, after Canning had been worried to his grave in 1827, as the avowed leader of the Tory party. Unfortunately the Tory party was rent by ill-concealed dissensions between the bulk of its members, who were still in the state of mentality caused by the twenty-odd years of the great war with France, and the minority, who thought that the times of political stagnation should come to an end, and that improvements of various kinds might be made in the details, though not in the fundamentals, of the Constitution. To both sections Wellington was at first the deus ex machina whose ripe wisdom and tried ability would guide the State out of the difficulties which had been obvious for so many recent years. To people like Lord Eldon, or Lord Sidmouth, to the majority of the House of Lords, the Duke appeared destined to vindicate the old Tory creed with all the prestige of his dominating personality and his unrivalled reputation. I suppose that it was, in effect, inevitable that he should offend one or other of these sections. To have kept both Canningites and admirers of Lord Eldon and the Duke of Cumberland in his Cabinet would have required talents of management surpassing even those of Lord Liverpool.
The misfortune of Wellington was that he continued to irritate both factions, and to be accused by each of inconsistency, and perverse illogical autocracy. When he passed his Catholic Relief Bill, the old Protestant Church-and-State party regarded him as a traitor to the Altar and the Crown. When he definitely rejected all proposals for Parliamentary Reform, and directed the House of Lords to throw out Lord Grey’s first Reform Bill in October 1831, the Tories who believed in the necessity of some sort of a change in the national representation, the “waverers” as he called them, naturally concluded that he was what we should now call a “die-hard”, or a “last ditcher”. And yet in May 1832 he was found endeavouring to patch up a Cabinet which would engage to pass a Reform Bill of his own, guaranteed to be liberal rather than “moderate”—though six months before he had declared in very solemn phrases that the present state of the constitution of the House of Commons was ideal, and that it could not be improved or rendered more satisfactory than it was in 1831. To the old Tories his dealings with the Catholic Relief Bill looked like cynical opportunism. Not only to old Tories, but to Canningites also, his proposal to pass a Reform Bill in 1832 appeared not only inappropriate but immoral. Sir Robert Peel put on paper the statement that he considered that to take any part in producing such a Bill would be a personal degradation to himself—it would be to assume responsibility for changes which he had declared a hundred times over to be dangerous and revolutionary.
Yet Wellington was undoubtedly neither an opportunist, ready to change his policy in any way that would keep him in office, nor a deliberate hypocrite, nor a man destitute of any real political creed. He was simply one who honestly believed that he and his personality were the only things that stood between Great Britain and anarchical revolution. Not that he thought that Lord Grey or Lord Melbourne, or even Lord Brougham, were themselves Jacobins, or deliberately resolved to ruin their country, but that he was under the impression that they were recklessly opening the flood-gates through which the inundation must come, to sweep them and all Whigs as well as all Tories to destruction. Hence it was his duty to keep them out of office, even if it had to be done by fighting a series of rear-guard actions, by defending each outlying position, and retiring to the next when his flank was turned or his centre driven in. The acts which imposed disabilities on Catholics were an untenable outwork, as he concluded. If it were no longer possible to maintain it, he had better evacuate it himself, rather than endure a ruinous defeat in defending it. The constitution of the unreformed Parliament was a much more important item in his system of fortification against Jacobinism; but if it had to be sacrificed, it was better that the details of the retreat should be settled by himself, rather than by the enemy.
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