November 5th, 1822
I have been to Newmarket, Euston, Riddlesworth, Rendlesham, Whersted, besides going to town several times and to Brighton. Since I left London for the Doncaster races I have travelled near 1,200 miles. At Riddlesworth the Duke of York told me a great deal about the Queen and Brougham, but he was so unintelligible that part I could not make out and part I do not remember. What I can recollect amounts to this, that the Emperor of Austria was the first person who informed the King of the Queen’s conduct in Italy, that after the enquiry was set on foot a negotiation was entered into with the Queen, the basis of which was that she should abdicate the title of Queen, and that to this she had consented. He said that Brougham had acted a double part, for that he had acquiesced in the propriety of her acceding to those terms, and had promised that he would go over to her and confirm her in her resolution to agree to them; that he had not only not gone, but that whilst he was making these promises to Government he had written to the Queen desiring her to come over. The Duke told me that a man (whose name he did not mention) came to him and said, ‘So the Queen comes over?’ He said, ‘No, she does not.’ The man said, ‘I know she does, for Brougham has written to her to come; I saw the letter.’ If Lord Liverpool and Lord Londonderry had thought proper to publish what had been done on the part of Brougham, he would have been covered with infamy; but they would not do it, and he thinks they were wrong. The rest I cannot remember.11
Notes
11 [This is an erroneous and imperfect account of this important transaction, the particulars of which are related by Lord Brougham in his ‘Memoirs,’ cap. xvi. vol. ii. p. 352, and still more fully by Mr. Yonge in his ‘Life of Lord Liverpool,’ vol. iii. p. 52. Mr. Brougham had sent his brother James to the Queen at Geneva to dissuade her from setting out for England, but, as he himself observes, ‘I was quite convinced that if she once set out she never would stop short.’ He met her himself at St. Omer, being the bearer of a memorandum dated the 15th of April, 1820, which contained the terms proposed by the King’s Government. He went to St. Omer in company with Lord Hutchinson, but Mr. Brougham, and not Lord Hutchinson, was the bearer of these propositions. Lord Hutchinson had no copy of the document. The extraordinary part of Mr. Brougham’s conduct was that he never at all submitted or made known to the Queen the memorandum of the 15th of April; and she knew nothing of it till she had reached London, when all negotiation was broken off. This fact Lord Brougham does not explain in his ‘Memoirs;’ but Lord Hutchinson declared in his report to Lord Liverpool that in truth Brougham ‘did not appear to possess the smallest degree of power, weight, or authority over the mind of the Queen’ when at St. Omer.]