of his heir-apparent, and contrasting the domestic habits of Windsor with the licence of Carlton House.
CHAPTER IV.
PERCEVAL AND LIVERPOOL
The administration of Perceval, covering the period from October, 1809, to May, 1812, coincided with a lull in the continental war save in the Peninsula, though it saw no pause in the progress of French annexation. Nor was it marked by many events of historical interest in domestic affairs. When parliament was opened on January 23, 1810, it was natural that attention should chiefly be devoted to the Walcheren expedition, which the opposition illogically and unscrupulously contrived to use to disparage the operations of Sir Arthur Wellesley, now Viscount Wellington, in Spain. Grenville, who argued with some reason that 40,000 British troops could have been employed to far better purpose in North Germany, would have been on stronger ground if he had complained that for want of them the British army had been unable to occupy Madrid. Castlereagh, indeed, had confessed to Wellesley that he could not spare the necessary reinforcements, after the reserves had been exhausted in Walcheren; but it is by no means certain that Wellesley could have collected provisions enough to feed a much larger force, or specie enough to pay for them. Liverpool was driven in reply to Grenville to magnify the value of the capture of Flushing, as the necessary basis of the naval armaments which Napoleon had intended to launch against England from the Scheldt. The government was also defended by the young Robert Peel, lately elected to parliament. As the calamity was irreparable, a committee of the whole house spent most of its time on a constitutional question, regarding a private memorandum placed before the king by Chatham in his own defence. So irregular a proceeding was properly condemned, and Chatham resigned the mastership of the ordnance, but the policy of the Walcheren expedition was approved by a vote of the house of commons. Mulgrave received the office Chatham had vacated, and was himself succeeded by Yorke at the admiralty.
Parliament was next occupied by a question of privilege, in which Sir Francis Burdett, member for Westminster, then a favourite of the democracy, played a part resembling that of John Wilkes a generation earlier. Burdett had been for fourteen years a member of parliament, and had been conspicuous from the first for the vehemence of his opposition to the government, and more especially to its supposed infringements of the liberty of the subject. He had more recently taken an active part on behalf of Wardle's attack on the Duke of York and had supported the charges of ministerial corruption in the previous session. On the present occasion one John Gale Jones, president of a debating club, had published in a notice of debate the terms of a resolution which his club had passed, condemning in extravagant language the exclusion of strangers from the house of commons. This was treated as a breach of privilege, and Jones was sent to Newgate by order of the house itself. Burdett, in a violent letter to Cobbett's Register, challenged the right of the house to imprison Jones by its own authority, and, after a fierce debate lasting two nights, was adjudged by the house, on April 5, to have been guilty of a still more scandalous libel. Accordingly, the speaker issued a warrant for his committal to the Tower. Burdett declared his resolution to resist arrest, the populace mustered in his defence, the riot act was read, and he was conveyed to prison by a strong military escort, on whose return more serious riots broke out, and were not quelled without bloodshed. On his release at the end of the session a repetition of these scenes was prevented by the simple expedient of bringing him home by water. During his imprisonment he wrote an offensive letter to the speaker, and his colleague, Lord Cochrane, presented a violently worded petition from his Westminster constituents. In the following year he sued the speaker and the sergeant-at-arms in the court of king's bench, which decided against him on the ground that a power of commitment was necessary for the maintenance of the dignity of the house of commons, and its decision was confirmed, on appeal, by the court of exchequer chamber and the house of lords.
THE CURRENCY QUESTION.
The most important subject of internal policy discussed in the session of 1810 was the state of the currency. Since 1797 cash payments had been suspended, the issue of banknotes had been nearly doubled, and the price of commodities had risen enormously. Whether these results had in their turn promoted the expansion of foreign commerce and internal industry was vigorously disputed by two rival schools of economists. The one thing certain was the increasing scarcity of specie, and the serious loss incurred in its provision for the service of the army in the Peninsula. Francis Horner, then rising to eminence, obtained the appointment of what became known as the "bullion committee" to inquire into the anomalous conditions thus created, and took a leading part in the preparation of its celebrated report, published on September 20. The committee arrived at the conclusion that the high price of gold was mainly due to excess in the paper-currency, and not, as alleged, to a drain of gold for the continental war. They attributed that excess to "the want of a sufficient check and control in the issues of paper from the Bank of England, and originally to the suspension of cash-payments, which removed the natural and true control". While allowing that paper could not be rendered suddenly convertible into specie without dislocating the entire business of the country, they recommended that an early provision should be made by parliament for terminating the suspension of cash-payments at the end of two years. These conclusions were combated by Castlereagh and Vansittart, who afterwards, in 1811, succeeded in carrying several counter-resolutions, of which the general effect was to explain the admitted rise in the price of gold, for the most part by the exclusion of British trade from the continent, and the consequent export of the precious metals in lieu of British manufactures. The last resolution, while it recognised the wisdom of restoring cash-payments as soon as it could safely be done, affirmed it to be "highly inexpedient and dangerous to fix a definite period for the removal of the restriction on cash-payments prior to the conclusion of a definitive treaty of peace". These counsels prevailed, and the restriction was not actually removed until Peel's act was passed in July, 1819.
The last domestic event in the inglorious annals of 1810 was the final lapse of the king into mental derangement in the month of November. For more than six years his sight had been failing, but he had suffered no return of insanity since 1804. Now he lost both his sight and his reason. This event, impending for some time, was precipitated by the illness and death of the Princess Amelia, his favourite daughter, and was perhaps aggravated by the Walcheren expedition and the disgrace of the Duke of York. Parliament met on November 1, and was adjourned more than once before a committee was appointed to examine the royal physicians. Acting on their report, the ministers proposed and carried resolutions declaring the king's incapacity, and the right and duty of the two houses to provide for the emergency. It was also determined to define by act of parliament the powers to be exercised in the king's name and behalf. This implied a limitation of the regent's authority, and was resented by the Prince of Wales and his friends. Perceval, however, was able to rely on the precedent of 1788, to which Grenville, for one, had been a party, and, after considerable opposition, the prince was made regent under several temporary restrictions. With certain exceptions, he was precluded from granting any peerage or office tenable for life; the royal property was vested in trustees for the king's benefit, and the personal care of the king was entrusted to the queen, with the advice of a council. In this form, the regency bill was passed on February 4, 1811, after a protest from the other sons of George III. and violent attacks upon Eldon by Grenville and Grey. On the 5th, the regent took the oaths before the privy council, but, in accepting the restrictions, he delicately expressed regret that he should not have been trusted to impose upon himself proper limitations for the exercise of royal patronage. The interregnum thus established was to be provisional only, and was to cease on February 1, 1812, but the queen and her private council, with the concurrence of the privy council, were empowered to annul it at any time, by announcing the king's recovery, when he could resume his powers by proclamation.
THE REGENCY BILL.
The hopes of the opposition had been greatly excited by the prospect of a regency, and it was generally expected that a change of ministry would be its immediate consequence. Private communications had, in fact, passed between the prince and the whig lords, Grenville and Grey, but they were rendered nugatory by the dictatorial tone assumed by those lords and by the unwillingness of the prince to dispense with the advice of Moira and Sheridan. The two whig
