pose upon them at first as he had on the world, please them by his joviality, and then grow sullen and quarrel with them (Letters, v. 61). The sudden death of Charles Townshend on 4 Sept., only a week or two after the appointment, and the anarchy that thereupon ensued in the cabinet (Grenville Papers, iv. 169, 171; Junius, Grand Council upon the Affairs of Ireland after Eleven Adjournments), rendered his task even more difficult than he had expected; but he possessed the confidence of the king, and in October he set out for the seat of his government. The boons he was authorised to grant included a restriction of the pension list, a limitation of the duration of parliaments, a habeas corpus act, and a national militia. Never had an administration opened under more promising conditions; but the indiscreet announcement in his opening speech to parliament on 20 Oct. of a bill to secure the judges in their offices, as in England, quamdiu se bene gesserint, elicited a sharp rebuke from Shelburne (Lecky, England, iv. 374 n.), and when it was found that the bill, on being returned from England, contained a clause rendering Irish judges removable upon an address of the two houses of the British parliament, it was indignantly rejected and the promise regarded as deceptive. Neither for this result nor for the appointment of James Hewitt (afterwards Viscount Lifford) [q. v.] to the chancellorship (cf. Walpole, George III, iii. 78, with Le Marchant's note, from which it appears that Townshend supported Tisdall's claim) was he wholly responsible, and there was much force in the ridiculous pictures he drew of himself with his hands tied behind his back and his mouth open; but it wrecked his popularity, and rendered the task of obtaining an augmentation of the army, on which the administration had set its heart, extremely difficult. The project was indeed most distasteful to the Irish, and Townshend, who had a keen as well as a sympathetic eye for the sufferings of the peasantry (cf. his Meditations upon a late Excursion in Ireland, especially the verses beginning ‘Ill-fated kingdom with a fertile soil, Whose factors mock the naked peasants' toil’), was obliged to confess that the state of the revenue did not justify the proposed additional expenditure. But his remonstrances were disregarded. A bill shortening the duration of parliaments to eight years was returned in February 1768, and it was hoped that the general satisfaction with which it was received would secure the passing of the augmentation. But the hope proved fallacious, and, having dissolved parliament on 28 May, Townshend at once threw himself with characteristic vehemence into the task of breaking the power of the undertakers. To this end several new peerages were created, places extravagantly multiplied, and, despite the royal promise, new pensions granted. Parliament met on 17 Oct. 1769, and the indignation which his proceedings had aroused showed itself in the rejection by the House of Commons of the customary privy council money bill, expressly on the ground that it had not taken its rise with them. But having, as they thought, sufficiently asserted their privileges, the commons not only voted liberal supplies of their own, but also conceded the desired augmentation in the army. Townshend, who had silently acquiesced in their proceedings, now that he had obtained all that he wanted and more than he expected, protested against their conduct over the rejected money bill as an infringement of Poynings' law, ordered his protest to be entered on the journals of both houses, and prorogued parliament. His action drew down upon him a storm of abuse far exceeding in violence anything meted out to Henry Sidney, viscount Sidney (afterwards earl of Romney) [q. v.], on a similar occasion. The public press teemed with lampoons in which neither his person, his character, nor his habits were spared. His administration was ridiculed and himself held up to scorn as a second Sancho Panza in a series of powerful letters, after the style of Junius, by Sir Hercules Langrishe [q. v.], Flood, and Grattan, afterwards collected in a little volume under the title of ‘Baratariana,’ with a frontispiece exhibiting Townshend with his tongue tied and underneath the words: ‘In Cœlum jusseris, ibit’ ‘And bid him go to Hell, to Hell he goes.’ Angry but not discouraged at this display of hostility towards him, Townshend held resolutely to his determination to break the power of the undertakers by the purchase of a majority in the House of Commons. Parliament was prorogued from three months to three months, and in the meanwhile public credit and the trade of the country suffered from the suspension of the legislature. When it again met on 26 Feb. 1771, Townshend had accomplished his purpose. An address, thanking the king for maintaining him in office, was carried by 132 votes to 107; but the speaker, John Ponsonby [q. v.], rather than present it, preferred to resign. The majority Townshend had thus obtained by corruption of the most flagrant description he managed to maintain by the same means to the end of his administration, though more than once defeated and mortified by seeing a money bill altered by
Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 57.djvu/131
