he had advocated in 1788. The prince's friends accordingly sought to exclude him from the council which was to be associated with the prince during the first year of the regency; and to this end the expedients by which a semblance of the royal assent had been given to bills while the king was presumably unfit to transact business in 1801 and 1804 were magnified into acts of usurpation, the responsibility for which it was sought to fix upon Eldon individually. Instead of relying on his true defence—the extreme gravity of the emergencies in which he had acted—Eldon took refuge in evasive circumlocutions and appeals to his conscience. He triumphed, however: the motion was negatived by a large majority; nor had the year of restricted regency expired before the prince had flouted his ‘early friends,’ and the administration had received a new lease of life. Eldon meanwhile had renounced the princess, and devoted himself to his ‘young master,’ who invited him to his supper parties, gave him the endearing nickname of Old Bags, and trusted him implicitly in all matters public and private. His influence was paramount during the crisis which followed the assassination of Perceval, when with the skill of an old parliamentary hand he secured the failure of the overtures, which for the sake of appearances were made first to Lord Wellesley and Canning, and then to Lords Grey and Grenville; and eventually formed Lord Liverpool's durable administration (8 June 1812). He advised the prince and supported his parental authority during the first treaty for the marriage of the Princess Charlotte, and arranged her eventual marriage with Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg.
Eldon concurred in conferring on Scotland in 1815 the somewhat questionable boon of trial by jury in civil causes (55 Geo. III, c. 42); and in 1819 in the abolition of trial by battle, and appeals of treason and felony (59 Geo. III, c. 46). A few other modifications of legal procedure are traceable to his suggestion. But his normal attitude towards innovations of all kinds continued to be one of determined hostility. He resisted the reforms of Sir Samuel Romilly [q. v.] as stubbornly as catholic emancipation; and, though he took no part in carrying the corn laws, he could conceive for the consequent disaffection no remedy but repression, and gave in 1817 his unqualified approval to Lord Sidmouth's circular instructing magistrates to hold to bail before indictment for libel, to the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, to the revival without limit of duration of the expired Treason Act of 1796, and to the new and stringent Seditious Meetings Act (57 Geo. III, cc. 3, 6, 18). After the Peterloo affair (1819), the Six Acts, which placed public meetings at the mercy of magistrates, authorised domiciliary visits for the seizure of arms, provided a more summary procedure in cases of seditious libel, and subjected pamphlets to the same duty as newspapers, seemed to him the only means of preserving the constitution (60 Geo. III and 1 Geo. IV, cc. 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9).
On the accession of George IV the unpopularity of the administration evinced by the Cato Street conspiracy was aggravated by their treatment of the queen, the odium of which attached in an especial degree to Eldon. But though he supported the reference of the report of the Milan commission to a secret committee (7 June 1820), he had had no hand in its initiation [see Leach, Sir John]; and in refusing the queen permission (27 June) to attend the subsequent debates on her case, he merely enforced the rule excluding ladies from the house; nor is he fairly censurable for declining to present her petition, or deviate from the long-established parliamentary procedure by granting her discovery of the evidence against her. On moving (2 Nov.) the second reading of the bill of pains and penalties, he summed up the case for and against her with the strictest impartiality; and it was as much in her interest as in that of the king and the administration that he deprecated the abandonment of the bill after the third reading. He was now in as ill odour with the populace as in 1794; but as the coryphæus of the gallant ‘thirty-nine who saved the thirty-nine’—i.e. who defeated (17 April 1821) Plunket's statesmanlike measure of catholic emancipation—he was enthusiastically toasted by loyal church and state men.
In anticipation of his coronation George IV, by patent dated 7 July 1821, conferred on Eldon the titles of Viscount Encombe and Earl of Eldon. The patent was sealed on 9 July, and on the same day the new earl took his seat as such in the House of Lords. But while he thus reached the summit of his honour, his ascendency was already passing from him. The king was now swayed by Lady Conyngham, who had espoused the catholic cause. The death of the queen opened the way for Canning's return to place. The administration was in need of new blood; and on his return from Ireland, where he had treated Plunket with marked distinction, the king consented (January
