“I hope to remain ever yours sincerely,
“R. B. SHERIDAN.
“The sooner the reference I propose the better.”
The second letter, which is still further explanatory of the misconception, was addressed by Sheridan to Lord Grenville:
“MY DEAR LORD,
“Since I had the honor of Your Lordship’s letter, I have received one from Mr. —— , in which, I am sorry to observe he is silent as to my offer of meeting, in the presence of a third person, in order to ascertain whether he did or not so report a conversation with Your Lordship as to impress on my mind a belief that my pretensions would be considered, before the support of Government should be pledged elsewhere. Instead of this, he not only does not admit the precise words quoted by me, but does not state what he allows he did say. If he denies that he ever gave me reason to adopt the belief I have stated, be it so; but the only stipulation I have made is that we should come to an explicit understanding on this subject, — not with a view to quoting words or repeating names, but that the misapprehension, whatever it was, may be so admitted as not to leave me under an unmerited degree of discredit and disgrace. Mr. —— certainly never encouraged me to stand for Westminster, but, on the contrary, advised me to support Lord Percy, which made me the more mark at the time the fairness with which I thought he apprised me of the preference my pretensions were likely to receive in Your Lordship’s consideration.
“Unquestionably Your Lordship’s recollection of what passed between Mr. —— and yourself must be just; and were it no more than what you said on the same subject to Lord Howick, I consider it as a mark of attention; but what has astonished me is, that Mr. —— should ever have informed Your Lordship, as he admits he did, that I had no intention of offering myself. This naturally must have put from your mind whatever degree of disposition was there to have made a preferable application to me; and Lord Howick’s answer to your question, on which I have ventured to make a friendly remonstrance, must have confirmed Mr. — — ‘s report. But allow me to suppose that I had myself seen Your Lordship, and that you had explicitly promised me the support of Government, and had afterwards sent for me and informed me that it was at all an object to you that I should give way to Lord Percy, I assure you, with the utmost sincerity, that I should cheerfully have withdrawn myself, and applied every interest I possessed as your Lordship should have directed.
“All I request is, that what passed between me and Mr. —— may take an intelligible shape before any common friend, or before Your Lordship. This I conceive to be a preliminary due to my own honor, and what he ought not to evade.”
The Address which he delivered, at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, in declining the offer of support which many of the electors still pressed upon him, contains some of those touches of personal feeling which a biographer is more particularly bound to preserve. In speaking of Mr. Fox, he said, —
“It is true there have been occasions upon which I have differed with him — painful recollections of the most painful moments of my political life! Nor were there wanting those who endeavored to represent these differences as a departure from the homage which his superior mind, though unclaimed by him, was entitled to, and from the allegiance of friendship which our hearts all swore to him. But never was the genuine and confiding texture of his soul more manifest than on such occasions; he knew that nothing on earth could detach me from him; and he resented insinuations against the sincerity and integrity of a friend, which he would not have noticed had they been pointed against himself. With such a man to have battled in the cause of genuine liberty, — with such a man to have struggled against the inroads of oppression and corruption, — with such an example before me, to have to boast that I never in my life gave one vote in Parliament that was not on the side of freedom, is the congratulation that attends the retrospect of my public life. His friendship was the pride and honor of my days. I never, for one moment, regretted to share with him the difficulties, the calumnies, and sometimes even the dangers, that attended an honorable course. And now, reviewing my past political life, were the option possible that I should retread the path. I solemnly and deliberately declare that I would prefer to pursue the same course; to bear up under the same pressure; to abide by the same principles; and remain by his side an exile from power, distinction, and emolument, rather than be at this moment a splendid example of successful servility or prosperous apostacy, though clothed with power, honor, titles, gorged with sinecures, and lord of hoards obtained from the plunder of the people.”
At the conclusion of his Address he thus alludes, with evidently a deep feeling of discontent, to the circumstances that had obliged him to decline the honor now proposed to him: —
“Illiberal warnings have been held out, most unauthoritatively I know, that by persevering in the present contest I may risk my official situation, and if I retire, I am aware, that minds, as coarse and illiberal, may assign the dread of that as my motive. To such insinuations I shall scorn to make any other reply than a reference to the whole of my past political career. I consider it as no boast to say, that any one who has struggled through such a portion of life as I have, without obtaining an office, is not likely to I abandon his principles to retain one when acquired. If riches do not give independence, the next-best thing to being very rich is to have been used to be very poor. But independence is not allied to wealth, to birth, to rank, to power, to titles, or to honor. Independence is in the mind of a man, or it is no where. On this ground were I to decline the contest, should scorn the imputation that should bring the purity of my purpose into doubt. No Minister can expect to find in me a servile vassal. No Minister can expect from me the abandonment of any principle I have avowed, or any pledge I have given. I know not that I have hitherto shrunk in place from opinions I have maintained while in opposition. Did there exist a Minister of a different cast from any I know in being, were he to attempt to exact from me a different conduct, my office should be at his service tomorrow. Such a Minister might strip me of my situation, in some respects of considerable emolument, but he could not strip me of the proud conviction that I was right; he could not strip me of my own self-esteem; he could not strip me, I think, of some portion of the confidence and good opinion of the people. But I am noticing the calumnious threat I allude to more than it deserves. There can be no peril, I venture to assert, under the present Government, in the free exercise of discretion, such as belongs to the present question. I therefore disclaim the merit of putting anything to hazard. If I have missed the opportunity of obtaining all the support I might, perhaps, have had on the present occasion, from a very scrupulous delicacy, which I think became and was incumbent upon me, but which I by no means conceive to have been a fit rule for others, I cannot repent it. While the slightest aspiration of breath passed those lips, now closed for ever, — while one drop of life’s blood beat in that heart, now cold for ever, — I could not, I ought not, to have acted otherwise than I did. — I now come with a very embarrassed feeling to that declaration which I yet think you must have expected from me, but which I make with reluctance, because, from the marked approbation I have experienced from you, I fear that with reluctance you will receive it. — I feel myself under the necessity of retiring from this contest.”
About three weeks after, ensued the Dissolution of Parliament, — a measure attended with considerable unpopularity to the Ministry, and originating as much in the enmity of one of its members to Lord Sidmouth, as the introduction of that noble Lord among them, at all, was owing to the friendship of another. In consequence of this event, Lord Percy having declined offering himself again, Mr. Sheridan became a candidate for Westminster, and after a most riotous contest with a demagogue of the moment, named Paul, was, together with Sir Samuel Hood, declared duly elected.
The moderate measure in favor of the Roman Catholics, which the Ministry now thought it due to the expectations of that body to bring forward, was, as might be expected, taken advantage of by the King to rid h
imself of their counsels, and produced one of those bursts of bigotry, by which the people of England have so often disgraced themselves. It is sometimes a misfortune to men of wit, that they put their opinions in a form to be remembered. We might, perhaps, have been ignorant of the keen, but worldly view which Mr. Sheridan, on this occasion, took of the hardihood of his colleagues, if he had not himself expressed it in a form so portable to the memory. “He had often,” he said, “heard of people knocking out their brains against a wall, but never before knew of any one building a wall expressly for the purpose.”
It must be owned, indeed, that, though far too sagacious and liberal not to be deeply impressed with the justice of the claims advanced by the Catholics, he was not altogether disposed to go those generous lengths in their favor, of which Mr. Fox and a few others of their less calculating friends were capable. It was his avowed opinion, that, though the measure, whenever brought forward, should be supported and enforced by the whole weight of the party, they ought never so far to identify or encumber themselves with it, as to make its adoption a sine-qua-non of their acceptance or retention of office. His support, too, of the Ministry of Mr. Addington, which was as virtually pledged against the Catholics as that which now succeeded to power, sufficiently shows the secondary station that this great question occupied in his mind; nor can such a deviation from the usual tone of his political feelings be otherwise accounted for, than by supposing that he was aware of the existence of a strong indisposition to the measure in that quarter, by whose views and wishes his public conduct was, in most cases, regulated.
On the general question, however, of the misgovernment of Ireland, and the disabilities of the Catholics, as forming its most prominent feature, his zeal was always forthcoming and ardent, — and never more so than during the present Session, when, on the question of the Irish Arms Bill, and his own motion upon the State of Ireland, he distinguished himself by an animation and vigor worthy of the best period of his eloquence.
Mr. Grattan, in supporting the coercive measures now adopted against his country, had shown himself, for once, alarmed into a concurrence with the wretched system of governing by Insurrection Acts, and, for once, lent his sanction to the principle upon which all such measures are founded, namely, that of enabling Power to defend itself against the consequences of its own tyranny and injustice. In alluding to some expressions used by this great man, Sheridan said: —
“He now happened to recollect what was said by a Right Honorable Gentleman, to whose opinions they all deferred, (Mr. Grattan,) that notwithstanding he voted for the present measure, with all its defects, rather than lose it altogether, yet that gentleman said, that he hoped to secure the revisionary interest of the Constitution to Ireland. But when he saw that the Constitution was suspended from the year 1796 to the present period, and that it was now likely to be continued for three years longer, the danger was that we might lose the interest altogether; — when we were mortgaged for such a length of time, at last a foreclosure might take place.”
The following is an instance of that happy power of applying old stories, for which Mr. Windham, no less than Sheridan, was remarkable, and which, by promoting anecdote into the service of argument and wit, ennobles it, when trivial, and gives new youth to it, when old.
“When they and others complain of the discontents of the Irish, they never appear to consider the cause. When they express their surprise that the Irish are not contented, while according to their observation, that people have so much reason to be happy, they betray a total ignorance of their actual circumstances. The fact is, that the tyranny practised upon the Irish has been throughout unremitting. There has been no change but in the manner of inflicting it. They have had nothing but variety in oppression, extending to all ranks and degrees of a certain description of the people. If you would know what this varied oppression consisted in, I refer you to the Penal Statutes you have repealed, and to some of those which still exist. There you will see the high and the low equally subjected to the lash of persecution; and yet still some persons affect to be astonished at the discontents of the Irish. But with all my reluctance to introduce any thing ludicrous upon so serious an occasion, I cannot help referring to a little story which those very astonished persons call to my mind. It was with respect to an Irish drummer, who was employed to inflict punishment upon a soldier. When the boy struck high, the poor soldier exclaimed, ‘Lower, bless you,’ with which the boy complied. But soon after the soldier exclaimed, ‘Higher if you please,’ But again he called out, ‘A little lower:’ upon which the accommodating boy addressed him— ‘Now, upon my conscience, I see you are a discontented man; for, strike where I may, there’s no pleasing you.’ Now your complaint of the discontents of the Irish appears to me quite as rational, while you continue to strike, only altering the place of attack.”
Upon this speech, which may be considered as the bouquet, or last parting blaze of his eloquence, he appears to have bestowed considerable care and thought. The concluding sentences of the following passage, though in his very worst taste, were as anxiously labored by him, and put through as many rehearsals on paper, as any of the most highly finished witticisms in The School for Scandal.
“I cannot think patiently of such petty squabbles, while Bonaparte is grasping the nations; while he is surrounding France, not with that iron frontier, for which the wish and childish ambition of Louis XIV. was so eager, but with kingdoms of his own creation; securing the gratitude of higher minds as the hostage, and the fears of others as pledges for his safety. His are no ordinary fortifications. His martello towers are thrones; sceptres tipt with crowns are the palisadoes of his entrenchments, and Kings are his sentinels.”
The Reporter here, by “tipping” the sceptres “with crowns,” has improved, rather unnecessarily, upon the finery of the original. The following are specimens of the various trials of this passage which I find scribbled over detached scraps of paper: —
“Contrast the different attitudes and occupations of the two governments: — B. eighteen months from his capital, — head-quarters in the villages, — neither Berlin nor Warsaw, — dethroning and creating thrones, — the works he raises are monarchies, — sceptres his palisadoes, thrones his martello towers.”
“Commissioning kings, — erecting thrones, — martello towers, — Cambaceres count noses, — Austrians, fine dressed, like Pompey’s troops.”
“B. fences with sceptres, — his martello towers are thrones, — he alone is,
France.”
Another Dissolution of Parliament having taken place this year, he again became a candidate for the city of Westminster. But, after a violent contest, during which he stood the coarse abuse of the mob with the utmost good humor and playfulness, the election ended in favor of Sir Francis Burdett and Lord Cochrane, and Sheridan was returned, with his friend Mr. Michael Angelo Taylor, for the borough of Ilchester.
In the autumn of 1807 he had conceived some idea of leasing the property of Drury-Lane Theatre, and with that view had set on foot, through Mr. Michael Kelly, who was then in Ireland, a negotiation with Mr. Frederick Jones, the proprietor of the Dublin Theatre. In explaining his object to Mr. Kelly, in a letter dated August 30, 1807, he describes it as “a plan by which the property may be leased to those who have the skill and the industry to manage it as it should be for their own advantage, upon terms which would render any risk to them almost impossible; — the profit to them, (he adds,) would probably be beyond what I could now venture to state, and yet upon terms which would be much better for the real proprietors than any thing that can arise from the careless and ignorant manner in which the undertaking is now misconducted by those who, my son excepted, have no interest in its success, and who lose nothing by its failure.”
Delphi Complete Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan Page 157
