Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 08.djvu/430

 availed themselves. But Canning of course accepted it as a fait accompli on his return to office, and upheld it on all occasions as the international law of Europe.

It was on the nature of the obligations entailed by the congress of Vienna on the contracting powers that England differed from her allies, partially during the lifetime of Lord Castlereagh, and more widely on the accession of Canning. While president of the board of control he had attended the congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, which provided for the evacuation of France by the allied troops, and had consented to the pledge given by England to join in resisting any fresh efforts of the French Jacobins to disturb the Restoration government. But this was an exceptional case, and by no means committed us to a similar co-operation against insurrectionary movements in general. Lord Castlereagh was as strong on this point as Canning. In a circular addressed to our ambassador while the congress was sitting at Laybach in 1821, Castlereagh pointed out that the congress of Vienna bound us to support, if necessary by force of arms, the territorial arrangements concluded in 1815, but nothing more. As Canning said afterwards, our guarantees were territorial, not political. But then arose the further question, whether the treaty of Vienna not only did not enjoin political intervention, but actually forbade it, and entitled neutral powers, if they chose, to interfere to prevent it. Castlereagh and Wellington seem to have answered this question in the negative, Canning in the affirmative. The letter of the treaty is certainly in favour of the former interpretation; for, while it distinctly prohibits aggressive intervention, it is altogether silent on protective. But Canning may have rightly judged that it was difficult to draw any abiding line between the two; that the one was very likely to run into the other; and that, if the treaty was not to become a dead letter, intervention must be forbidden altogether, and the right of nations to do as they liked inside the boundaries allotted to them by the public law be unreservedly recognised. It is to be added, however, that resistance to political intervention was, in Canning's opinion, a right merely and not a duty, and a question to be determined entirely by our own interests at the moment.

We shall now be able to understand the new point of departure taken by English foreign policy on the return of Canning to the foreign office in 1822. The new revolution, which had begun originally in Spain in 1820, had spread to Portugal and Naples. The Austrians had already intervened, and in 1821 stamped out the movement in Naples. In Spain the people themselves, then under the influence of the priesthood, had rebelled against the new constitution, and kept up a species of guerilla warfare on its adherents. In Portugal something of the same kind had occurred. The king, John VI, hurried back from Brazil in 1821, and, having at first accepted the constitution, afterwards revoked it, promising at the same time to give his subjects a better one. There was at this time in Portugal what there was not either in Spain or Naples, a moderate constitutional party which, while utterly hostile to the absurd scheme of government put forward by the Spanish revolutionaries, and known to history as ‘the constitution of 1812,’ were still of opinion that the people must be admitted to some share in the government, and that the old system of purely paternal absolutism could no longer be maintained. Of this party the king himself and the Marquis Palmella were at the head, and it was to this party that Canning gave his own support.

In 1823, the revolutionary party in Spain still holding their ground, the king of France marched an army into the Peninsula under the command of the Duc d'Angoulême, which speedily reduced the rebels to submission. Canning protested, but protested in vain; and, not thinking it for the interest of this country to exercise her right of going to war in order to drive the French away, he retaliated in another fashion by acknowledging the independence of the Spanish American colonies. If French influence was henceforth to predominate in Spain, it should not be ‘Spain with the Indies.’ He called the new world into existence to redress the balance of the old. These words have been supposed to shed immortal lustre on both the eloquence and the principles of Canning. But it is only due to Lord Castlereagh to say that in the instructions which he drew up for the Duke of Wellington on his setting out for the congress of Verona in 1822, occurs the following passage: ‘But the case of the revolted colonies is different. It is evident from the course which events have taken that their recognition as independent states has become merely a question of time.’

On the Portuguese absolutists the presence of the French army in Spain produced the worst possible effect. At their head were the queen and her second son Don Miguel, the eldest, Don Pedro, preferring to remain at Brazil, half as emperor, half as regent for his father, his daughter, Donna Maria, being the direct heiress to the throne. In 1824, encouraged by French emissaries, the absolutists began gradually to assume a very