conspiracies. Accordingly, in 1817, when the Prince Regent's carriage was surrounded by a howling mob on the occasion of his opening parliament, Sidmouth, under the lead of the home secretary, Action of ment. The who was firmly convinced of the imminent danger of the time, the Governdecided to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act. This was followed by the issue of a circular authorising magistrates to apprehend persons whom they considered guilty of disseminating libellous publications, by which were meant all writings against the government. The suspension of Habeas Corpus was, of course, opposed by the Whigs, but unsuccessfully. They had, however, no difficulty in showing that Lord Sidmouth's circular was illegal, and it had to be withdrawn. government was also defeated in a prosecution instituted against William Hone, a bookseller, who had written and printed several attacks on the government, in the form of parodies on well-known religious writings, such as the Lord's Prayer and the Litany. He was prosecuted for bringing the Christian religion into disrepute, but as he had no difficulty in showing that exactly the same thing had been done by Canning and other persons of repute without blame being attached, he was acquitted. Had it not been for Fox's Libel Act (see page 863), the jury must have convicted him of publication, and the judges would have declared his publication libellous. Among the persons arrested under the suspension of Habeas Corpus was Samuel Bamford, well known in after years for his Autobiography of a Radical. Nothing, however, was proved against him, and his examination before the privy council, where he saw and spoke to Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth, seems to have convinced him that the ministers were not such terrible tyrants as they were believed in Lancashire to be. Reform. Meanwhile, the question of parliamentary reform was coming to be recognised as the question of the day. It was heartily advocated by Sir Francis Burdett in parliament, and by Cobbett outside. The Parlialarge unrepresented towns, such as Manchester, Birmingham, mentary and Leeds, began to seriously interest themselves in the question. Their antipathy to the corn laws, especially, made them loudly demand a voice in the government of the country; and large meetings often attended with riots were held from time to time, sometimes with a view to the election of delegates to take part in smaller meetings. The election of these delegates suggested the idea of a convention-a name rendered formidable to the timid by its French associations The 'Massacre.' -and when it was known that a meeting for this purpose Peterloo was to be held in St. Peter's Fields on the outskirts of Manchester, there was much question among the local magistrates as to what course to take. On the appointed day, August 26, the 'Radicals' marched in procession to Manchester from all the neighbouring villages, carrying flags, and accompanied by their wives and children. They met in St. Peter's Fields, an open space of two or three acres. They numbered some forty thousand persons, and were to be addressed by Henry Hunt, an Essex squire and notable orator, whose emptiness had not yet been discovered by his followers. Meanwhile the magistrates, who had plenty of troops at their disposal, adopted the foolish resolution of arresting Hunt after the meeting had begun. For this purpose the chief constable was escorted towards the platform by forty men of the Manchester Yeomanry. These advancing, without much order, were soon lost in the crowd, and the magistrates, who were watching from a distant house, thinking they were being attacked, ordered the crowd to be dispersed by the charge of a regiment of cavalry. The result was a scene of indescribable confusion. As the hussars, for the most part, used the flats of their swords, only three 'Radicals' were killed, with one constable and one yeoman, but, perhaps, one hundred persons all told were injured more or less by sword-cuts, stones, and crushing. The blame of this unfortunate occurrence long-remembered as the 'battle of Peterloo'-was clearly to be laid to the incapacity of the local magistrates; but the government was unwise enough, without further inquiry, to praise their conduct and sanction what had been done. This mistake roused much indignation in the country, and confirmed the bad opinion held of the government. Hunt and other prominent 'Radicals' were arrested, and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment for conspiring to alter the law by force and threats. The Six The events at Manchester appeared to the minister to give a suitable pretext for strengthening the law. Accordingly parliament met in November, and before the end of the year passed a series of acts Acts. known collectively as the 'Six Acts.' These were of varied importance. The first made it easier to prevent out-of-door meetings for political purposes, and was to be in force for five years. The second enabled trials for misdemeanour, which was the usual charge under which political agitators were prosecuted, to be held with less delay. The third, very properly, forbade private persons to engage in military drill, a proceeding tolerated in no civilised state. The fourth was for the more effectual prevention and punishment of blasphemous and seditious libels. The fifth authorised magistrates to seize arms in sixteen counties said to be disturbed, and was to be in force for three years. The sixth was a distinct check on the liberty of the press, for it required all publishers of newspapers to give security in advance for any fines they might incur by uttering blasphemy or sedition. Such an enactment made it harder for a poor man to start a newspaper, and, as it stood, was an insult to the press at large. All these Acts were stoutly opposed by the Whigs, and, with the exception of the third, were sooner or later repealed. inal Code. Though unsuccessful in effecting much, the labours of Sir Samuel Romilly towards making the criminal code more lenient require notice as the first step to an immense reform. In the early growth The Crimof civilisation, as in England before the Conquest, reparation rather than punishment was the object of the criminal code. As property increases in value, the tendency is to defend it by more stringent enactments, and as the prolonged imprisonment of numerous convicts is a serious difficulty, the tendency is to allot the punishment of death to all offences as the simplest way of dealing with the criminal. Under such a system an immense number of persons were hanged, and as time went on, though the moral sense of the community revolted against such wholesale massacre, a mistaken view of the best way to secure respect for the law led to one offence after another being made capital Accordingly, between 1660 and 1820, no less than 160 new offences were made punishable by death. This severity, however, defeated itself. Sufferers refused to prosecute, juries to convict, and judges to hang; so that not one sentence in twenty was actually carried into effect. Such uncertainty was fatal to the deterrent effect of the law, to say nothing of its brutalising results on the community at large. No serious attempt, however, was made to remove the evil till 1808, when Sir Samuel Romilly carried a law to exempt the crime of picking pockets from capital punishment. This was carried; but the upper House, led by Eldon, threw out a bill for remitting the death sentence on shop-lifting to the value of five shillings; and though, till his death in 1819, Romilly was indefatigable in his exertions, he only succeeded in removing stealing from bleach-yards from the death category. Though in practice he effected so little, Romilly was successful in awakening public opinion, and within a generation a complete change was effected in our criminal code. Within a month of the passing of the Six Acts, in January 1820, George III. passed away, and his eldest son, George, became in name, as well as in fact, the ruler of the country. CHAPTER V GEORGE IV.: 1820-1830 Born, 1762; married 1795, Caroline of Brunswick CHIEF CONTEMPORARY PRINCES France. Louis XVIII., d. 1824. Charles X., expelled 1830. The Queen's Trial-Signs of Progress-Death of Castlereagh-Policy of Canning and Huskisson-Affairs of Greece-Roman Catholic Emancipation. GEORGE IV.'s short reign of ten years forms one of the turning-points in English history, for it is a transition period between the Toryism which prevailed under the regency and the Whig policy Accession. which prevailed under William IV. The The first event of the new reign was the discovery of a conspiracy more real and more sanguinary than anything the last reign had proCato Street duced. This was the Cato Street Plot, devised by ThistleConspiracy. wood, who had formerly held a commission in the army, and had already been tried but acquitted for his share in the Spa Field Riots. He associated with himself some dozen desperate characters of no social position or influence, and proposed to get admission to the earl of Harrowby's house while the cabinet ministers were dining, and to murder them all. The heads of Sidmouth and Castlereagh were to be exhibited to the mob; the Tower was to be seized, the soldiers overpowered, and a provisional government set up. The plan was as absurd as it was cruel; but fortunately the government were warned by a man named Edwards, who is suspected of having urged on the unhappy men whom he intended to betray. The conspirators were left unmolested till the very day, February 22, which had been fixed for their attempt, and were attacked by the police as they were arming themselves in a hayloft connected with some stables in Cato Street, off the Edgware Road. The arrest was not well managed; one of the police-officers was killed, and Thistlewood himself escaped. He was, however, captured next day, and, being tried and convicted of treason, suffered the extreme penalty of the law with four of his accomplices. The cruelty and absurdity of such a plot were sufficient to disgust the strongest opponents of the existing government. Fortunately the policy of parliamentary reform began to form a rallying-point for both Whigs and Radicals. The alliance stimulated the one, while it moderated the other; while the rapid revival of trade-now that the special causes of depression produced by the war had disappeared-removed some, at any rate, of the hardships of the labourers and artisans. One effect of his change of title from regent to king was to bring into most unpleasant notoriety the family life of the new sovereign. In 1787 George had contracted a marriage with a Roman Catholic lady named George's Mrs. Fitzherbert. The sole ground of the illegality of the married life. marriage was that the prince had not the consent of his father, as required by the Royal Marriage Act of 1772. Had the marriage been fully legal the prince would have been excluded from the succession by the Bill of Rights of 1689. At the time of the marriage the prince was hopelessly burdened with debts-most of them contracted at the card-table-and in asking parliament to pay them he actually authorised Fox to deny the marriage, at the same time expressing to Mrs. Fitzherbert his surprise that Fox had done so. Such conduct forfeited the prince's reputation as a man of honour; but in spite of it, Fox and some of the Whig leaders allowed themselves to be still called his friends. His debts were paid, but others were soon contracted, and in 1795 his position was as embarrassed as before. In these circumstances, he was approached by his father with a proposition that if he would contract a legal marriage his debts should again be paid. To this proposal he reluctantly agreed, and allowed his father to name his future wife. The young lady chosen was Caroline of Brunswick, daughter of the duke and of the sister of George III. The prince had never seen her till three days before the marriage, which took place in 1795. One daughter, the Princess Charlotte, was born; and three months afterwards, George left his young wife and returned to Mrs. Fitzherbert. Such abominable conduct on the part of her husband would have been hard for any woman to bear; and, unfortunately, Caroline's character was not such as to dignify her anger. She had been badly trained and ill educated, and appears to have been extremely frivolous. Her home at Blackheath soon began to be the subject of gossip; and, in 1806, urged on by the prince and his brothers, the ministry conducted a secret inquiry, known as the 'Delicate Investi |