Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 04.djvu/307

 nearly become his colleague; Lord John Cavendish was quite ready to resign the exchequer to him, but he was reluctant to admit all Pitt's friends.

After the fall of the coalition cabinet, the Duke of Portland was regarded as the head of the Rockingham whigs. He was not a great speaker, but he had exactly the character which had enabled Rockingham to hold his party together ; he could always be trusted, and his rank and wealth were sufficiently preeminent to prevent others from being jealous of his position. He did not make a good leader of an opposition ; he left all party tactics to Fox and Burke, and devoted himself more and more to his country - life at his favourite seat, Bulstrode, and to the study of music, of which he was passionately fond. From this easy life he was awakened by the rapid progress of the French revolution. Like Pitt and Fox, he had sympathised with that great movement at first, but as its tendency became more and more manifest, he shrank, like every other great landowner, from the idea that 'French principles' might spread to England. Pitt saw his opportunity. He had always been weak in parliament; and he saw that by sternly declaring against French principles he would gain the support of the great whig families. His repressive bills were warmly taken up by them, and the war discussed with enthusiasm. It only remained for him to make a formal alliance with these 'Burkite' whigs and their acknowledged leader, the Duke of Portland. The negotiation was managed by Lord Malmesbury and Lord Loughborough on either side, but it was very difficult, from sheer nervousness, to get the duke to make a public declaration of his alliance with Pitt. At last it was made, and Pitt, in his delight, largely rewarded the duke himself. He had been elected chancellor of the university of (Oxford in succession to Lord North in 1792; he was now made secretary of state for the northern department, that is home secretary, a knight of the Garter, and lord-lieutenant of Nottinghamshire, while his eldest son, the Marquis of Titchfield, was made lord-lieutenant of Middlesex.

The most important and useful years of the Duke of Portland's life were the seven years from 1794 to 1801, during which he held the home secretaryship. No one who has not studied the papers in the Public Record Office can have any idea of the amount of work done by him during these seven years. The new repressive acts, such as the Alien Act, the Treason Act, and the Sedition Act, had thrown an enormous arbitrary power into the home secretary's hands. Yet the Duke of Portland's administration was marked by no straining of his powers and no consequent unpopularity of the government, by no outrage worse than trade processions with seditious flags at Sheffield, and the breaking of the king's carriage windows on his way to open parliament, while Lord Sidmouth's administration, in the corresponding period of repression in 1816-22, was signalised by the Peterloo massacre and the Cato Street conspiracy. The contrast is due to the difference between the Duke of Portland and Lord Sidmouth. The duke was a tolerant man of the world, not a man of great ability, but of great experience, who knew the advantage of leaving the expression of opinion as free as possible.

In yet another point the behaviour of the Duke of Portland is worthy of all praise. Irish affairs and Irish correspondence were included in his department, and during his period of office the Irish insurrection of 1798 broke out and was suppressed, and the Act of Union carried. In the published despatches of Cornwallis and Castlereagh there is evidence of the steady support Portland gave them in every point, excepting in his reluctance to ratify the disgraceful bargaining in honours, by which the Irish peers took advantage of the necessity of their support to the government in carrying the Act of Union, to obtain peerages for themselves (Cornwallis Correspondence, iii. 269-62). But his attitude towards the Roman catholics is particularly noteworthy. The king once remarked, according to Sir. Cooke (Castlereagh Correspondence, iv. 81), that 'the Duke of Portland was weak and of no use, and that he was governed by the bisliop of Meath.' This refers to the scheme proposed by Lord Castlereagh of subsidising the Roman catholic church in Ireland, and making it a state church as well as the reformed episcopal church of Ireland. This statesmanlike solution of the Irish question was highly approved of by the Duke of Portland, and in a passage in the 'Castlereagh Correspondence' (iii. 400), the Bishop of Meath, the propounder of the scheme, speaks of the warm sympathy he has received from the duke.

In spite of his sentiments on Irish affairs, the Duke of Portland consented, at the earnest request of the king and Mr. Addington, to remain in the latter's cabinet in the nominal capacity of lord president of the council ; but he soon perceived the feebleness of Addington and his friends, and the necessity of forming a really strong administration after the fresh outbreak of war with Napoleon in 1803. Pitt's return to office was anxiously demanded by the country, and, after some 