Lord George Bentinck a Political Biography Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. The proceedings of those four councils in a week, which in November '45 agitated England, perplexed the sagacious Tuileries, and disturbed even the serene intelligence of the profound Metternich, are no longer a secret. The prime minister of England, in bringing before the consideration of his colleagues the temporary measures which in his judgment a menaced exigency required, intimated to them at the same time his change of opinion as to the principles on which our commercial system ought to be established, entirely rejecting those conclusions, the maintenance of which only four years before had raised him, after an official ostracism of ten years, to thepinnacle of power by a national demonstration scarcely inferior to the triumph of Mr. Pitt in 1783. This momentous conversion had for some time been known to more than one of his principal colleagues who sympathized with his mutability, and had perhaps been suspected by most, who however were not anxious to press for any definite disclosures, so long as his defection was limited to the domain of speculation. Sir Edward Knatchbull however, who seceded in silence both from the cabinet and parliament in the previous year, when pressed for the cause of his retirement by an anxious friend confidentially replied that he could not remain with satisfaction and felt that he could not long remain with honour, and that at his time of life he shrank from again mixing in the bitter strife which attended the break-up of a great party from the defection of its leaders. It was the wish and perhaps the hope of Sir Robert Peel to have postponed the public announcement of his recantation until the opinion of the country might at a general election have been again constitutionally taken on the subject of protection. The present par...Read More