that he acquiesced in it from perfect confidence in the advice of his physicians, and on the sound judgment and personal attachment of his ministers.
For the present, therefore, no change was made in the administration; but when, in the spring of the following year, Mr. Perceval was murdered, the necessity for a new arrangement which this strange and calamitous atrocity forced upon the Regent-who by this time had come into possession of his full authority-led to his making offers of the conduct of affairs to more than one prominent statesman, all of them, as is somewhat remarkable, being peers. And, though the proposals eventually came to nothing, and the negotiations terminated in the re-establishment of the former ministry, with Lord Liverpool at its head, yet some of the causes to which their failure was publicly or generally attributed seem desirable to be recorded, because the first, and that most openly avowed, bears a not very distant resemblance to the complication which baffled Sir Robert Peel's endeavors to form an administration in 1839; and another corresponds precisely to a proposal which, in 1827, the Regent-then King George IV.-did himself make to the Duke of Wellington. It is unnecessary to dwell on the singular manner in which the Regent first professed to give his confidence to Lord Wellesley, then transferred it to Lord Moira,[167] and then to a certain extent included Lord Grey and Lord Grenville in it. Nor would it be profitable to discuss the correctness or incorrectness of the suspicion expressed by Mr. Moore, in his 'Life of Sheridan'-who was evidently at this time as fully in the Regent's confidence as any one else-that 'at the bottom of all these evolutions of negotiation there was anything but a sincere wish, that the object to which they related should be accomplished.'[168] The reason avowed by Lord Grey and Lord Grenville for refusing a share in the projected administration was the refusal of Lord Moira, who had been employed by the Prince to treat with them on the subject, to allow them to make a power of removing the officers at present filling 'the great offices of the household'[169] an express condition of their acceptance of ministerial office. They affirmed that a 'liberty to make new appointments' to these offices had usually been given on every change of administration. But Lord Moira, while admitting that 'the Prince had laid no restriction on him in that respect,' declared that 'it would be impossible for him to concur in making the exercise of this power positive and indispensable in the formation of the administration, because he should deem it on public grounds peculiarly objectionable.' Such an answer certainly gives a great color to Moore's suspicion, since it is hardly possible to conceive that Lord Moira took on himself the responsibility of giving it without a previous knowledge that it would be approved by his royal master. In a constitutional point of view, there can, it will probably be felt, be no doubt that the two lords had a right to the liberty they required. And the very men concerned, the great officers of the household, were evidently of the same opinion, since the chief, Lord Yarmouth, informed Sheridan that they intended to resign, in order that he might communicate that intention to Lord Grey; and Sheridan, who concealed the intelligence from Lord Grey, can hardly be supposed, any more than Lord Moira, to have acted in a manner which he did not expect to be agreeable to the Prince. But, in Canning's opinion, this question of the household was only the ostensible pretext, and not the real cause, of those two lords rejecting the Regent's offers; the real cause being, as he believed, that the Prince himself had already named Lord Wellesley as Prime-minister, and that they were resolved to insist on the right of the Whig party to dictate on that point to the Regent,[170] just as, in 1782, Fox had endeavored to force the Duke of Portland on the King, when his Majesty preferred Lord Shelburne. As has been intimated in a former page, it will be seen hereafter that in 1839 a similar claim to be allowed to remove some of the ladies of the royal household, and the rejection of that claim by the sovereign, prevented Sir R. Peel from forming an administration. And, as that transaction was discussed at some length in Parliament, it will afford a better opportunity for examining the principle on which the claim and practice (for of the practice there is no doubt) rest. For the present it is sufficient to point out the resemblance between the cases.
But it is remarkable that, unwarrantable as the pretension of the Whig leaders was to dictate to the Regent to whom he should confide the lead of the government (if, indeed, Canning be correct in his opinion), yet it was not one to which the Regent felt any repugnance, since, in 1827, when Lord Liverpool's illness again left the Treasury vacant, he, being then on the throne as George IV., proposed to the Duke of Wellington to desire the remaining members of the administration themselves to select a chief under whom they would be willing to continue in his service; but the Duke told him that the plan of allowing them to choose their own leader would be most derogatory to his position; that the choice of the Prime-minister was an act which ought to be entirely his own, for that, in fact under the British constitution, it was the only personal act of government which the King of Great Britain had to perform.[171] Though not generally a great authority on constitutional points, we apprehend that the Duke was clearly correct in this view, which, indeed, has been so invariably carried out in practice, that the King's suggestion would not have deserved mention had it not been a king's. So far from it belonging to any individual subject or to any party to name the Prime-minister, to do so is even beyond the province of the Parliament. Parliament decides whether it will give its confidence to an administration of one party or the other; but not only has no vote ever been given on the question whether one member of the dominant party be fitter or not than another to be its head, but we do not remember a single instance of any member of either House expressing an opinion on the subject in his place in Parliament. To do so would be felt by every member of experience to be an infringement on the prerogative of his sovereign; and it may be added that a contrary practice would certainly open the door to intrigue, or, what would be equally bad, a suspicion of intrigue, and would thus inevitably diminish the weight which even the Opposition desire to see a Prime-minister possess both in Parliament and in the country.
Notes:
[Footnote 148: It is somewhat remarkable that Lord Macaulay, in his endeavors to estimate the population in 1685, takes no notice of any of these details mentioned by Mr. Abbott.]
[Footnote 149: The details of this census of 1801 are given in a note in the preceding chapter (see page 185), from which it appears that the entire population of the United Kingdom was in that year 16,395,870. Sir A. Alison, in different chapters of the second part of his 'History of Europe,' gives returns of subsequent censuses, from the last of which (c. lvi., s. 34, note), it appears that in 1851 the population amounted to 27,511,862. an increase of 11,116,792 in half a century.]
[Footnote 150: 'Lives of the Chief-justices,' by Lord Campbell, iii., 87, life of Lord Kenyon.]
[Footnote 151: 'What is this,' said George III. to Mr. Dundas, 'which this young lord (Castlereagh) has brought over, which they are going to throw at my head? The most Jacobinical thing I ever heard of! I shall reckon any man my personal enemy who proposes any such measure.'-
[Footnote 152: 'Lives of the Chancellors,' c. clxxxiv., life of Lord Erskine.]
[Footnote 153: 'Lives of the Chancellors,' c. clix., life of Lord Thurlow.]
[Footnote 154: See 'Memoires de M. de Metternich,' ii., 156.]
[Footnote 155: 'Lives of the Chief-justices,' iii., 175.]
[Footnote 156: Lord Stanhope, 'History of England,' i., 133.]
[Footnote 157: 'Lives of the Chief-justices,' ii., 451. He is quoting H. Walpole.]
[Footnote 158: Ibid., iii., 187.]
[Footnote 159: Campbell's 'Lives of the Chief-justices,' II., 139, life of Chief-justice Holt; and p. 418, life of Lord Mansfield.]
[Footnote 160: 'Life of Wilberforce,' i., 158.]
[Footnote 161: The division in the Lords was 100 to 36; in the Commons, 283 to 16.]
[Footnote 162: Afterward the Earl Grey of 1831.]
[Footnote 163: See especially his 'Letters to Lord Castlereagh,' p. 814; and 'Life of Lord Liverpool,' i., 512; ii., 35, 49, 127.]
[Footnote 164: Lord Colchester's 'Diary,' ii., 49, dated April 3, 1806, says eighteen years. But Mr. Windham's speech, as reported in the 'Parliamentary History,' second series, vi., 685, says sixteen years; and as he divides the ages into three classes, the two latter of which, from twenty-four to thirty-two, and from thirty-two to forty, are of eight years each, it is probable that the younger class was of the same duration, i.e., from sixteen to twenty-four.]
[Footnote 165: Lord Colchester's 'Diary,' ii., 300.]
[Footnote 166: See 'Diary of Lord Colchester' (Speaker at the time), c. xxxvi., p. 316. He gives the whole of the Prince's letter to Perceval (which had been composed by Sheridan), and of Perceval's reply. The Regency Bill became law February 5, 1811.]
[Footnote 167: A letter of Lord Wellesley to Lord Grey, June 4 (given by Pearce, 'Life of Lord Wellesley,' iii., 270), shows that Lord Moira had been in communication with Lord Grey and Lord Grenville before Lord Wellesley had given up the idea of forming a ministry. And though Lord Grey in his reply (p. 272) expresses his conviction that
