THREE:After the flight from Ballingarry, and the desertion of his followers, Smith O'Brien abandoned the cause in despair, and concealed himself for several days among the peasantry in a miserable state of mind. He had none of the qualities of a rebel chief, and he had not at all calculated the exigencies of the position that he had so rashly and criminally assumed, involving the necessity of wholesale plunder and sanguinary civil strife, from which his nature shrank. Besides, he soon found that the people would not trust a Protestant leader, and that there was, after all, no magic in the name of O'Brien for a Roman Catholic community. But to the honour of the peasantry it should be spoken, that though many of them were then on the verge of starvation, not one of them yielded to the temptation of large rewards to betray him or his fugitive colleagues, and several of them ran the risk of transportation by giving them shelter. In these circumstances, on the 5th of August, Mr. O'Brien walked from his hiding-place in Keeper Mountain into Thurles, where he arrived about eight o'clock in the evening. He[570] went immediately to the railway station to procure a ticket for Limerick. On the platform there were seventeen constables in plain clothes, who did not know him; but a railway guard named Hulme, an Englishman, recognised him, and tapping him on the shoulder, he presented a pistol at him and said, "You are the Queen's prisoner." A strong escort of police was immediately procured, and the prisoner was conveyed in a special train to Dublin, where he was lodged in Kilmainham gaol.
FORE:In architecture the first place is due to the patriarch of the science, Sir John Soane, who was[434] employed in erecting or improving numerous public edifices in the metropolis and elsewhere. The atrocious law-courts, which he added to Westminster Hall, were happily removed in 1883. In 1826 he built the Freemasons' Hall, in Great Queen Street, having been chosen grand superintendent of works to the fraternity of Freemasons some years before. In 1833 he completed the State Paper Office in St. James's Park. He was now in his eightieth year, and he retired from the active labours of the profession in which he had been engaged for sixty years, during forty-five of which he had been in the service of the Bank of England. At his death, which occurred on January 20th, 1837, his house and museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields became the property of the public.MRS. ARABELLA HUNT SINGING TO QUEEN MARY. (See p. 155.)
THREE:Buonaparte now prepared for his coronation. Whilst at Mayence, on the Rhinewhere the German princes flocked to pay abject homage to him as their protector, no nations, except Great Britain, Russia, and Sweden, keeping aloofhe despatched one of his aides-de-camp, General Caffarelli, an Italian, to invite the Pope to go to Paris to crown the new emperor and empress. Pius VII. had already been compelled to submit to the terms of the Concordat, which had made such inroads into the ancient power of the Church; and he knew very well that to refuse this request would bring down upon him fresh humiliations. Buonaparte, who affected to imitate Charlemagne as the founder of the French nation, passing over all the kings of France as unworthy of notice, determined to inaugurate the Second Empire by a still bolder stretch of authority than Charlemagne himself. That monarch had condescended to make the journey to Italy to receive the privilege of coronation from Pope Leo; but Buonaparte resolved that poor old Pope Pius VII. should come to him in France. His desire was carried out to the letter, and Pius arrived at Fontainebleau on the 25th of November. The 2nd of December having been fixed for the coronation, the Cathedral of Notre Dame was gorgeously decorated for the occasion, and the ceremony was performed amidst the utmost pomp and magnificence, Napoleon himself putting the crown on his head and then placing the Empress's diadem on the head of the kneeling Josephine. During the whole proceedings the Pope was made to play a secondary part. He simply "assisted" at the function. The ceremony was followed by a profuse creation of marshals and nobles.Not only in Parliament, but everywhere the cry for Reform rose with the distress. Hampden Clubs were founded in every town and village almost throughout the kingdom, the central one[121] being held at the "Crown and Anchor" in the Strand, London, its president being Sir Francis Burdett, and its leading members being William Cobbett, Major Cartwright, Lord Cochrane, Henry Hunt, and others. The object of these clubs was to prosecute the cause of Parliamentary reform, and to unite the Reformers in one system of action. With the spirit of Reform arose, too, that of cheap publications, which has now acquired such a vast power. William Cobbett's Political Register, on the 18th of November, 1816, was reduced from a shilling and a halfpenny to twopence, and thence-forward became a stupendous engine of Reform, being read everywhere by the Reformers, and especially by the working-classes in town and country, by the artisan in the workshop, and the shepherd on the mountain. The great endeavour of Cobbett was to show the people the folly of breaking machinery, and the wisdom of moral union.
FORE:General Lake had no sooner seen Delhi clear of the enemy than he marched to Agra, which he reached on the 4th of October, and carried on the 17th. But Scindiah had availed himself of his absence, and made a sudden rush on Delhi, with[493] seventeen well-disciplined battalions of infantry and between four thousand and five thousand cavalry. The Mahratta troops had been well trained by the French, who hoped, by their means, to crush the power of the British in India, and had shown throughout this war wonderfully increased efficiency, yet General Lake did not hesitate, with his small force, to go in quest of them. He started on the 27th of October, and after marching in heavy rains and through dreadful roadsthe country having been purposely inundated by Scindiah's officers cutting down the banks of reservoirshe came upon the Mahrattas on the 31st, near the village of Laswaree, their left flanked by that village, their right by a stream, and their front protected by seventy-two pieces of cannon. A furious battle took place, in the course of which Lake's troops were repeatedly repulsed, but returned to the attack undauntedly, and the successive charges by the bayonet, and the gallant conduct of the cavalry, at length, in the face of terrible discharges of grape-shot and canister, drove the Mahrattas from all their positions. The enemy had fought desperately, and step by step only had given way, but in the end the rout was completecannon, baggage, and almost everything, being left in the hands of the British (November 1st, 1803). This division of Scindiah's army was thus annihilated, and all the territory watered by the Jumna left in the hands of the British.At the opening of 1810 a peace was contracted with Turkey; but not with the Sultan Selim, with whom we had been at war, nor with his successor, Mahmoud. Whilst the throne of Turkey was occupied by a mere boy, and whilst his regular troops were dispersed, Alexander of Russia, famed for his piety, thought it a fine opportunity to seize on his neighbour's lands. His Ministers, at the commencement of 1809, at the Congress of Jassy, demanded, as a condition of peace, the cession of the Turkish provinces on the left bank of the Danube. The Turks, of course, refused to thus dismember their empire for the aggrandisement of Russia; and Alexander, who was resolved to have those provinces by hook or by crook, immediately declared war on Turkey, on the shameless plea that it had made peace with Britain. The Russians were supported by the Greeks, and other inhabitants of Moldavia and Wallachia; but on crossing the Danube and pushing forward into Bulgaria they were beaten on every occasion. On the 22nd of October, 1809, a desperate conflict took place between them under the walls of Silistria, which continued from morning till night, in which the Russians were driven back, and, in a second engagement, routed with such slaughter that they retired from Bulgaria, and went into winter-quarters in Moldavia and Wallachia. In this campaign it was found that the guns were served by French officers, though Buonaparte professed to be willing that Alexander should possess himself of Constantinople. By the peace with Turkey, the trading ports of that empire were again opened to us, and our manufactures, entering there, spread over all the Continent, and were sold and worn in Hamburg, Bremen, and other towns where they were strictly excluded by sea.