THREE:It was the lot of the Earl of Clarendon to govern Ireland during the most trying period of her history. It was a trying crisis, affording great opportunity to a statesman of pre-eminent ability to lay broad and solid foundations for a better state of society. But though a painstaking and active administrator, Clarendon was not a great statesman; he had no originating power to organise a new state of things, nor prescience to forecast the future; but he left no means untried by which he could overcome present difficulties. The population had been thinned with fearful rapidity; large numbers of the gentry had been reduced from affluence to destitution; property was changing hands on all sides; the Government had immense funds placed at its command; a vast machinery and an enormous host of officials operating upon society when it was in the most plastic and unresisting state, a high order of statesmanship could have made an impress upon it that would have endured for ages. But Lord Clarendon's government, instead of putting forth the power that should have guided those mighty resources to beneficial and permanent results, allowed them to be agencies of deterioration. The truth is, he was frightened by a contemptible organisation, existing openly under his eyes in Dublin, for the avowed purpose of exciting rebellion and effecting revolution. The conspirators might have been promptly dealt with and extinguished in a summary way; but instead of dealing with it in this manner, Clarendon watched over its growth, and allowed it to come to maturity, and then brought to bear upon it a great military force and all the imposing machinery of State trials; the only good result of which was a display of forensic eloquence worthy of the days of Flood and Grattan.Halifax, possessed of this authority, returned to the House of Lords, and announced that, by the king's permission, he proposed the re-commitment of the bill, with the names only of the queen and the sons of the late king now living. Thus, the Princess Dowager was publicly stigmatised, on the authority of her own son, as incapable of reigning. The amendment, as the royal pleasure, was agreed to. The country was struck with astonishment. The Duke of Bedford is represented by Horace Walpole as almost dancing about for joy; the consternation of Bute and his party was indescribable. To cover the disgrace, they represented it as the wish of the Princess Dowager herself. But when the king was left to his own reflections, it began to dawn upon him that he had, by his weak compliance, openly insulted his own parent in the grossest manner. He bitterly upbraided Halifax with having thus stolen his consent by a surprise. But Grenville, with his usual obstinacy, declined to replace the princess's name unless it were strongly pressed upon him in the House. He trusted, however, that the Opposition, who hated the princess, would relieve him of this necessity by voting against the reinsertion of the name. But he was mistaken. Mr Morton, the chief justice of Chester, one of the Bute party, moved for the insertion of the princess's name in the bill, and the Opposition made no objection; they only too much enjoyed Grenville's embarrassment. He was therefore compelled to insert the name, whichthus falsifying Halifax's assertion to the king, that, if left in, it would be struck out by Parliamentwas carried by an overwhelming majority.
