impossible to the impartial biographer of the marquis of Londonderry.

The insurrection which broke forth in May, 1798, though the loudest, was but the last peal of the tempest which had been raging with little intermission, in various parts of the island, for five years before. As early as 1793, the "Jacobin Club" of Belfast, and the "United Irish Club" of Dublin, established a correspondence with the French government, which was carried on by these bodies, their successors and affiliated associates, without interruption, until the final extinction of the republican form of government in France. At Wexford, in 1793; and in Cavan, Longfort, Westmeath, and Leitrim, in 1795, the rebels had joined with the king's troops in open combat. An invasion by the French solicited by the heads of the United Irish party, had been attempted in 1796; and at the commencement of the year 1798, as has been calculated, more than a thousand of the friends of the government had fallen by private assassination. Lord Castlereagh, therefore, is not in any respect chargeable with having excited the rebellion which, on coming into office, he found in an advanced stage, and upon the eve of its most formidable eruption.

The state of the Irish government was at this time highly perilous. While the insurrection was confined to unconnected and temporary explosions, it had been possible to meet it with the small force, of militia fencibles and regular soldiers, which had been allotted for the protection of Ireland; but when the rebel force had been consolidated by time and a regular

organization,

the

government found itself wholly unprepared for. the great simultaneous effort, which it was known the leaders of the insurrection had in contemplation. Little aid was to be expected from England. The then inadequate military force of the empire, had been so mis-applied by Mr. Pitt, the most inefficient military minister that ever directed its resources, as to be utterly unavailable for the defence of Ireland. The Irish government had, therefore, no alternative, but to rouse a sectarian feeling in the Protestants, and to throw itself into the hands of the party of whose loyalty it was assured. Unable to defend those upon whom it relied for safety, the government could not with much pretence of justice, dictate the mode in which the Protestants should defend themselves; and when the rebellion broke out, it necessarily assumed the character of the most savage civil war. On the side of the rebels, it was indeed a war of extermination; but on the part of the Protestants, it was more barbarous than sanguinary.

Under the impression that the insurrection might be successfully resisted by seizing the arms of the insurgents, and feeling, that to disarm, was more humane than to destroy, the Irish magistrates and yeomanry had recourse to flagellation (the appointed punishment of vagrancy in England, which until lately was commonly inflicted upon female vagrants) as the means of extorting a discovery of secret magazines of deadly weapons. Such a practice is unjustifiable upon the principles of British law, which, as we have seen, appropriates the punishment of whipping to a class of offences

very far removed from treason; and it would be a rash distinction of the Irish from every other civil war, to assert that this measure of extorting information (not evidence*) was never unjustly or cruelly employed; but it has been asserted, and never contradicted except in one case, that the infliction of stripes was always successful in eliciting a confession sufficient to prove a guilty knowledge, not unworthy of the punishment of death; and whatever may have been the wickedness or innocence of the use of flogging, the marquis of Londonderry can scarcely be held accountable for a practice which commenced before his accession to power, and which he could not have caused to be discontinued, without the danger of an universal extermination of all engaged in the rebellion. For, whatever benefits might have resulted from taking all discretionary power from the magistrates and yeomanry, the sparing of blood would not have been of the number.

The marquis Cornwallis_succeeded to the vice-royalty in June, 1798, and continued lord Castle

In the law of England the distinction is perfectly recognized by the old practice of extorting a plea by the detestable torture of the Peine forte et dure. Torture for any purpose is abominably cruel, but for the purpose of obtaining evidence, it is also productive of injustice. It is no palliation of such atrocities as were practised in Ireland, to say that they did not lead to injustice, but it is always right to tell the truth when falsehood has been successfully employed to pervert history. The only extenuation of which the use of torture admits, if it admit any, must be found in seasons of igno

reagh in the office of chief secretary. The rebellion had, in effect, been suppressed by the yeomanry before lord Cornwallis's arrival, and his lordship bringing with him a considerable military reinforcement, enjoyed the enviable privilege of receiving the vanquished rebels to mercy.

Humbert's invasion, which was swelled to importance merely by the cowardice of those who had the first opportunity of meeting the French army, served, by the alarm which it excited, to repeat the lesson so often inculcated by events during the five preceding years; and the English government saw that Ireland could be saved by an union alone, and an union was decided upon, at whatever cost.

It is the misfortune of statesmen, that necessity drives them to measures repugnant alike to honour and honesty. If it is difficult to defend the means employed for the suppression of the rebellion, it is perfectly impossible to justify or even to palliate, that by which the Union was effected. The Protestant gentry were assailed by the most gross and flagrant bribery; and the Catholic peasantry were made the dupes of a scandalous delusion. It is impossible to acquit lord Castlereagh of a participation in the guilt of Mr. Pitt, as far as respects the debauching of the Irish parliament; but there is no reason to suppose that he, ignorant, as he necessarily was, of the fixed determination of the king, and the temper of the English people, was a party to the fraud practised upon the Catholics.*

The following letter of which a

of relaxation from political toil; but they are utterly unfounded. Of his private pursuits during the period which elapsed from his retirement from the Irish government to his taking office in England, little is known even by his nearest friends, and it is therefore, not unreasonable to suppose, that it was wisely employed in preparing, by study, for the arduous course which he had assigned for himself.

At the general election, in 1802, lord Castlereagh had to encounter his first serious political reverse. The marquis of Downshire, who had previously been closely connected with the government, on the question of Union, like most of the independent members of the Protestant aristocracy, took a decided part against that measure; and his opposition was so indis creetly violent as to induce lord Cornwallis to deprive him of the command of his militia regiment, and to dismiss him from his rank as lord lieutenant of the county of Down. These disgraces were supposed to have broken the marquis's heart, and he died within a few months after the Union, bequeathing to his widow the quarrel with the Irish government, in exaspe rated bitterness.

The marchioness of Downshire spared no expence nor exertion to avenge the insult offered to her husband; and lord Castlereagh was eventually driven from the representation of the county, by which his ancestors and himself had been returned through more than half a century.

In the beginning of 1802, lord Castlereagh was appointed a privy

councillor of Great Britain and president of the board of Control. He remained in office during the VOL. LXIV.

Addington administration, and, in 1805, after Mr. Pitt had re-established himself in power, he was promoted to the seals of the war and colonial department, which he retained until he resigned with the whole of the cabinet, upon Mr. Pitt's death, in 1806.

Upon the dissolution of the Grey and Grenville administration, in 1807, lord Castlereagh resumed the office of war minister, which he was unfortunate enough to hold at the time of the ill-fated Walcheren expedition. The total failure of this absurd enterprise, in the arrangements for which he had so principal a share, was not the only mortification which lord Castlereagh had to encounter in that year. The report of the committee of the House of Commons upon the sale and purchase of boroughs, displayed a series of transactions between his lordship, the marquis of Sligo, and Mr. Reding, which, though perfectly conformable to the means which Great Britain had sanctioned, to effect the Irish Union, were held too gross for a repetition in England.*

The Autumn of the same year, found lord Castlereagh in a new perplexity. In the month of October, he learned from the earl of Camden, his kinsman, that Mr. Canning, then secretary for Foreign affairs, had extorted from the duke of Portland (the head of the cabinet), an engagement that he (lord Castlereagh) should be dismissed, as inefficient, upon the first favourable opportunity. Indignant at this ungenerous intrigue, lord Castlereagh demanded from his unfriendly colleague an honourable satisfaction. A duel

ensued, in which Mr. Canning was severely but not dangerously wounded. Lord Castlereagh and his antagonist both retired from the cabinet, but the former suffered nothing in the estimation of the public, and Mr. Canning subsequently recanted his imputations in the most unequivocal manner, by serving in various offices as subordinate to the minister whom he had rashly denounced as incapable.

In 1812, when the cabinet was re-modelled, in consequence of the death of Mr. Percival, lord Castlereagh was named to the office of Foreign secretary, which he continued to fill to the time of his death, through a period when the diplomatic, no less than the military achievements of the empire, obtained a success unexampled for brilliancy and importance in any former reign,

From the Union to the overthrow of Napoleon, in 1814, the history of lord Castlereagh belonged to the history of the British empire, from the peace of Paris forward, his history is identified with the history of the civilized world.

In 1817 a feeble attack was made upon lord Castlereagh in the House of Commons, upon the presentation of a petition complaining of cruelties practised by him in the suppression of the Irish rebellion nineteen years before. His lordship repelled the imputations of the petition with indignation, and Mr. Canning made a generous atonement for his former injuries by pronouncing an admirable speech in defence of the noble secretary.

"What," said Mr. Canning, "is the situation of my noble friend compared with that of his unnamed accusers? Men who have shared in repeated pardons, and

hid their degraded heads under a general amnesty, now advance to revile the individual to whom they owe their despicable lives: a pardoned traitor, a forgotten incendiary, a wretch who escaped the gallows only by the clemency of my noble friend, is now to be produced as the witness for his conviction. If the legislature has consented to bury in darkness the crime of rebellion, is it too much that rebels, after twenty years, should forgive the crime of having been forgiven?"

In 1818, lord Castlereagh attended the congress of sovereigns and ministers at Aix la Chapelle; and, in 1820, when attending the king, in his majesty's visit to Ireland, he received that which must always be the most grateful meed to a generous mind, the longwithheld acknowledgment of his country's respect and gratitude.

The retirement of Mr. Canning from the cabinet, in 1820, upon occasion of the prosecution of the late Queen, threw the whole weight of public business in the House of Commons upon the foreign secretary; and, in the busy session of 1821, this weight was aggravated beyond the power of the strongest to sustain it.

Those who had the best opportunity of observing lord Castlereagh (become, by his father's death, marquis of Londonderry), saw, with pain, that his body and mind were equally sinking under the exertion. In the Spring of 1821 a severe attack of gout was followed by a fever, which, though it threatened no fatal result at any time, was observed to affect, occasionally, his lordship's understanding. The first instance of mental wandering was remarked in the House of Commons.