TWO:The proceedings of Parliament having ceased to occupy public attention, the time had come for political demonstrations of various kinds in the country, giving expression to the feelings that had been excited by the state of public affairs and the conduct of the Government. The first and most remarkable of these was a banquet, given at Dover, on the 30th of August, to the Duke of Wellington as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, at which nearly 2,000 persons sat down to dinner. The toast of the day was proposed by Lord Brougham, who occupied a peculiar position, as a Liberal ex-Chancellor opposing a Liberal Administration, and wishing to see them supplanted by their Conservative opponents. He was greeted with tumultuous cheering when he rose to propose the health of the Duke of Wellington. He had, according to Greville, intruded himself upon the company, and made a speech in which bombast alternated with eloquence. The reply of the Duke of Wellington was a perfect contrast to Brougham's oratorical flight, in its quietness and modesty. But if the great chiefs of the Conservative party were moderate in the expression of their feelings during the vacation, some of their followers went to the opposite extreme of violence and indiscretion. At a dinner of the Conservative Registration Society, on the 30th of October, Mr. Bradshaw, the member for Canterbury, dared to speak of the young Queen in the following terms:"Brought up under the auspices of the citizen King of the Belgians, the serf of France, and guided by his influence, the Queen thinks if the monarchy lasts her time, it is enough," and so on. In proportion to the violence of the manifestations of disloyalty among the Tories, was the fervour of loyalty evinced by Mr. O'Connell and his followers in Ireland. At a meeting at Bandon, on the 5th of December, the famous agitator, in the midst of tremendous cheering, the entire assembly rising in response to the concluding appeal, said:"We must be, we are, loyal to our young and lovely Queen. God bless her! We must be, we are, attached to the Throne, and to the lovely being by whom it is filled. She is going to be married. God bless the Queen! I am a father and a grandfather; and in the face of heaven I pray with as much honesty and fervency for Queen Victoria as I do for any of my own progeny."
THREE:Blucher's headquarters were at Namur, his right extending to Charleroi, near the left of Wellington, and his left and reserves covering Gevil and Lige. His force amounted to eighty thousand men, supplied with two hundred cannon. On the 15th Buonaparte addressed his army, telling them that the enemies arrayed against them were the same that they had so often beaten, and whom they must beat again if they were the men they had been. "Madmen!" he exclaimed, "the moment of prosperity has blinded them. The oppression and humiliation of the French people are beyond their power. If they enter France they will there find their tomb!" This address had such an effect that the French advanced with all the spirit of their former days. They swept the western bank of the Sambre of the Prussian outposts; they advanced to Charleroi, drove out the Prussians under Ziethen, and compelled them to fall back on the village of Gosselies, and thence to Ligny and St. Amand. It was now seen that the object of Buonaparte was to cut off the communication between the Prussians and British, and defeat the Prussians first, instead of having to fight the two armies at once. To complete this Ney had been dispatched to attack and drive back the British advance at Quatre Bras and Frasnes; but, hearing firing in the direction of Charleroi, which was the engagement with Ziethen, he sent a division to support the French there, and thus found his main body too weak to move the British at Quatre Bras. For doing this without orders, Buonaparte reprimanded Ney, as he afterwards did Grouchy for too implicitly following his orders in pursuit of Blucher.It was very generally understood that it had been definitely arranged that Lord Londonderry should represent England at the Congress of Verona, and it was universally believed, as we have seen, that this fact weighed on his mind and led to his suicide; but Mr. Gleig states that in consequence of the reluctance expressed by Lord Londonderry to undertake the mission, it had for some time been settled that England should be represented there by the Duke of Wellington, and that he had begun to make his preparations, when a severe illness fell upon him, from which he did not sufficiently recover to set out upon his journey till after Lord Londonderry's death. The Duke of Wellington started for his mission when Mr. Canning had been only forty-eight hours in office. Stress has been laid upon the fact that he received his instructions from Mr. Canning, and this has been declared to be the turning-point in our foreign policy, when England began to disengage herself from the Holy Alliance. She was not formally a party to that alliance, but the despots composing it had counted on her aid and influence in keeping down the nations which they oppressed. But Mr. Gleig states that Lord Londonderry himself had compiled a letter of instruction for the representative of England at the Congress, and that this was transferred without a single alteration to the Duke of Wellington. It is, he says, "a very interesting document. It touches upon every point which could be expected to come under consideration at the Congress, and it handles them all so as to guard with scrupulous care not only the honour of Great Britain, but the rights of foreign peoples as well as of their Governments. It assumes that the subjects of general discussion would be three: first, the Turkish question, external and internal; secondly, the Spanish question, European and American; and, thirdly, the affairs of Italy. With this last question the representative of England was directed not to concern himself at all. As England had been no party to the military occupation of Naples and Sardiniaas she had merely acquiesced in it with a view to prevent worse thingsso she felt herself precluded from advising upon the arrangement now that it was complete, lest by so doing she should appear to admit the justice of a proceeding against which from the outset she had protested. The representative of Great Britain was therefore instructed to hold aloof from all meetings at which Italian affairs were to be discussed, and, if possible, to avoid connecting himself with the Congress till these should have been settled."