V
Without going into many details, I have thus said enough to show that Mr. Canning had, in his new post, to contend—first, against the disfavour of the Crown; secondly, against the dislike, jealousy, and suspicion of a large portion of his colleagues; thirdly, against the bitterest hostility of the most able and eloquent amongst his parliamentary opponents.
It is necessary to take into consideration all these difficulties in order to appreciate the rare abilities, the adroit adaptation of means to ends, the clever profiting by times and occasions, the bold bearing-up against powerful antagonists, the conquest over personal antipathies, which in a few years placed England—humbled to the lowest degree when Lord Castlereagh expired—in the highest position she ever occupied since the days of Lord Chatham; and, at the same time, ended by making the most unpopular man with the nation, and the most distasteful minister to the Sovereign, the people’s idol and the monarch’s favourite.
I have asserted that England was never in a more humbled position than at the death of Lord Castlereagh. I had myself the opportunity of seeing this illustrated in a private and confidential correspondence between Prince Metternich and a distinguished person with whom he was on terms of great intimacy, and to whom he wrote without reserve;—a correspondence in which the Prince, when alluding to our great warrior, who represented England at the Congress of Verona, spoke of him as “the great Baby,” and alluded to the power and influence of England as things past and gone.
It was, in fact, too true that all memory of the long efforts of twenty years, eventually successful in liberating Europe, had wholly lapsed from the minds of those military potentates, who having during war experienced every variety of defeat, appeared at the conclusion of peace to have recovered unbounded confidence in their arms.
The institutions which had nourished the pride and valour to which we had owed our victories, were daily denounced by the sovereigns in whose cause we had fought; and every new expression of opinion that came to us from the Continent, manifested more and more that Waterloo was forgotten by every nation but the French. Nothing, in short, was wanting to complete our degradation after the false and impudent conduct of M. de Villèle, but its disrespectful avowal; and painful and humiliating must have been the sentiments of an English statesman, when he read the speech of the French minister in the Chamber of Deputies, and found him boast of having amused our Government by misrepresenting the force on the Spanish frontier as merely a cordon sanitaire, until it was made to act as army of invasion.