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2. Canning Prime Minister. 1827.-Before Liverpool left office a resolution in favour of Catholic emancipation was defeated in the House of Commons by the slight majority of four, and almost imme diately afterwards Canning, who had spoken and voted for it, was appointed Prime Minister. Seven of the former ministers, including Wellington and Peel, refused to serve under him. On the other hand he obtained the support of the Whigs, to a few of whom office was shortly afterwards given. The Whigs had been long unpopular, on account of the opposition which they had offered to the war

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with France even whilst Wellington was conducting his great campaigns in the Peninsula; but they had now a chance of recovering public favour by associating themselves with domestic reforms. There can hardly be a doubt that Canning's ministry, if it had lasted, could only have maintained itself by a more extended admission of the Whigs to power. Canning's health was, however, failing, and on August 8 he died, having been Prime Minister for less than four months.

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3. The Battle of Navarino and the Goderich Ministry. 1827.Canning was succeeded by Goderich, who had formerly, as Mr. Robinson (see p. 886), been Chancellor of the Exchequer. His colleagues quarrelled with one another, and Goderich was too weak a man to settle their disputes. Before the end of the year news arrived which increased their differences. On July 6, whilst Canning still lived, a treaty had been signed in London between England, France, and Russia, binding the three powers to offer

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mediation between the Turks and the Greeks, and, in the event of either party rejecting their mediation, to put an end by force to the struggle which was going on. Instructions were sent to Codrington, the admiral commanding the Mediterranean fleet, to stop supplies coming into Greece from Turkey or Egypt, but to avoid hostilities. On September 9 a fleet composed of Turkish and Egyptian ships, laden with men and supplies, reached Navarino, close to the ancient Pylos, in the south-west of Peloponnesus. Codrington arrived two days later, and was afterwards joined by French and Russian squadrons. The combined fleet compelled the Turkish and Egyptian fleet to remain inactive. On land, however, Ibrahim (see p. 884), who commanded the army transported in it from Egypt, proceeded deliberately to turn the soil of Peloponnesus into a desert, slaying and wasting as he moved. On October 20, the allied admirals, unwilling to tolerate the commission of such brutalities, entered the Bay of Navarino, in which twenty-two centuries before Athenians and Lacedæmonians had contended for the mastery. A gun was fired from a Turkish ship, and a battle began in which half of the Egyptian fleet was destroyed, and the remainder submitted. The victory made Greek independence possible. There can be little doubt that Canning, if he had lived, would have been overjoyed at the result. Goderich and his colleagues in the ministry could not agree whether Codrington deserved praise or blame. There were fresh quarrels amongst them, and, on December 21, Goody Goderich,' as the wits called him, went to the king to complain of his opponents. George IV. told him to go home and take care of himself. It is said that on this the Prime Minister burst into tears, and that the king offered him his pocket handkerchief to dry them. On January 9, 1828, Goderich formally resigned.

4. Formation of the Wellington Ministry. 1828. The Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister, and Peel again became Home Secretary and the leading minister in the House of Commons. The new ministry, from which the Whigs were rigorously excluded, was to be like Lord Liverpool's one, in which Catholic emancipation was to be an open question, each minister being at liberty to speak and vote on it as he thought fit. Those who supported it, of whom Huskisson was one, were now known as Canningites, from their attachment to the principles of that minister. It was, however unlikely that the two sections of the ministry would long hold together, especially as the question of Parliamentary reform was now rising into importance, and the Canningites showed a disposition to break away on this point

from Wellington and Peel, who were strongly opposed to any change in the constitution of Parliament.

5. Lord John Russell and Parliamentary Reform. 18191828. The cause of Parliamentary reform had suffered much from the sweeping nature of the proposals made after the great war by Hunt and Sir Francis Burdett (see p. 879). In 1819 the question was taken up by a young Whig member, Lord John Russell, who perceived that the only chance of prevailing with the House of Commons was to ask it to accept much smaller changes than those for which Burdett asked, and thought that, whilst it would not listen to declarations about the right of the people to manhood suffrage, it might listen to a proposal to remedy admitted grievances in detail. In 1819 he drew attention to the subject, and in 1820 asked for the disfranchisement, at the next election, of four places in Devon and Cornwall: Grampound, Penryn, Barnstaple and Camelford, which returned two members apiece, and in which corruption notoriously prevailed. His proposal, accepted by the Commons, was rejected by the Lords. In a new Parliament which met later in the same year Lord John proposed to disfranchise Grampound only, and to transfer its members to Leeds, thus touching one of the great political grievances of the day, the possession of the right of returning members by small villages, whilst it was refused to large communities like Birmingham and Leeds. The House was, however, frightened at the idea of giving power to populous towns, and in 1821, when the Bill for disfranchising Grampound was actually passed, its members were transferred, not to Leeds but to Yorkshire, which thus came to return four members instead of two. A first step had thus been taken in the direction of reform, and Lord John Russell from time to time attempted to obtain the assent of the House of Commons to a proposal to take into consideration the whole subject. Time after time, however, his motions were rejected, and in 1827 Lord John fell back on his former plan of separately attacking corrupt boroughs. In 1827 Penryn and East Retford having been found guilty of corruption, he obtained a vote in the Commons for the disfranchisement of Penryn, whilst the disfranchisement of East Retford was favourably considered. As this vote was not followed by the passing of any act of Parliament to give effect to it, it was understood that Lord John would make fresh proposals in the following year.

6. Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. 1828.—In 1828, after the formation of the Wellington Ministry, before the question of the corrupt boroughs was discussed, Russell was successful in

1828

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removing another grievance. He proposed to repeal the Corporation Act (see p. 585), and the Test Act (see p. 607), so far as it compelled all applicants for office and for seats in Parliament to receive the Communion in the Church of England. By this means relief would be given to Dissenters, whilst Roman Catholics would still be excluded by the clause which required a declaration against transubstantiation and which Russell did not propose to repeal. Russell's scheme was resisted by the ministers but accepted by the House, and it finally became law, passing the House of Lords upon the addition of a clause suggested by Peel requiring a declaration from Dissenters claiming to hold office or to sit in Parliament or in municipal corporations that they would not use their power 'to injure or subvert the Established Church.' It was thus made evident that Peel could not be counted on to resist change as absolutely as Sidmouth could have been calculated on when the reaction against the French Revolution was at its height. He was practical and cautious, not easily caught by new ideas, but prompt to discover when resistance became more dangerous than concession, and resolutely determined to follow honestly his intellectual convictions.

7. Resignation of the Canningites. 1828.-The ministry had been distracted by constant squabbles, and at last, in May, 1828, Huskisson and the other Canningites resigned, the ministry being reconstructed as a purely Tory ministry. The Tories were in ecstasies, forgetting that their leaders, Wellington and Peel, were too sensible to pursue a policy of mere resistance.

8. The Catholic Association. 1823-1828. The main question, on which the Tories took one side and the Whigs and Canningites the other, was that of Catholic emancipation. That question now assumed a new prominence. In Ireland Catholic emancipation was advocated by Daniel O'Connell, who was himself a Roman Catholic, and was not only an eloquent speaker whose words went home to the hearts of his countrymen, but also the leader of a great society, the Catholic Association, which had been formed in 1823 to support Catholic emancipation. In 1824 the Catholic Association became thoroughly organised, and commanded a respect amongst the majority of Irishmen which was not given to the Parliament at Westminster. O'Connell's words sometimes pointed to the possibility of resistance if Parliament rejected the Catholic claims. In 1825 Parliament passed an act to dissolve the Association. The Irish were, however, too quick-witted to allow it to be suppressed by British legislation. They dissolved the Association, but started

a new one in which the question of Catholic emancipation was not to be discussed, though the members naturally thought the more about it. In Parliament itself many who had voted for the dissolution of the Association voted for Catholic emancipation, and, in 1825, a Bill granting it passed the Commons, though it was rejected by the Lords.

9. O'Connell's Election. 1828. In 1828 Vesey Fitzgerald, member for the county of Clare, was promoted to an office pre viously held by one of the Canningites, and had, consequently, to present himself for re-election (see p. 674). O'Connell stood in opposition to him for the vacant seat. All the influence of the priests was thrown on his side, and he was triumphantly returned, though it was known that he would refuse to declare against transubstantiation, and would thus be prevented by the unrepealed clause of the Test Act (see p. 890) from taking his seat in the House of Commons.

10. Catholic Emancipation. 1829.-When Parliament met in 1829 it was discovered that the Government intended to grant Catholic emancipation, to which it had hitherto been bitterly opposed. Wellington looked at the matter with a soldier's eye. He did not like to admit the Catholics, and had held the position against them as long as it was tenable. It was now, in his opinion, untenable, because to reject the Catholic claims would bring about a civil war, and a civil war was worse than the proposed legislation. He felt it, therefore, to be his duty to retreat to another position, from which civil order could be better defended. Peel's mind moved slowly, but it moved certainly, and he now appeared as a defender of Catholic relief on principle. To show his sincerity, Peel resigned his seat for the University of Oxford, and presented himself for re-election in order to allow his constituents to express an opinion on his change of front; and, being defeated at Oxford, was chosen by the small borough of Westbury. A Bill, giving effect to the intentions of the Government, was brought in. The anger of the Tories was exceedingly great, and even Wellington had, after the fashion of those days, to prove his sincerity by fighting a duel with the Earl of Winchilsea. The king resisted, but the resistance of George IV., now a weak old voluptuary, was easily beaten down. The Commons passed the Bill, throwing open Parliament, and all offices except a few of special importance, to the Roman Catholics, after which the House of Lords, under Wellington's influence, accepted it. The Bill therefore became law, accompanied by another for disfranchising forty-shilling freeholders

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