Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/135

 government which could not have existed for a week, except upon a promise of such a measure of reform as he could not in his conscience approve. Before this Croker had determined to retire altogether from public life, as, ‘besides all other reasons, he felt his health could not stand the worry of business.’ This resolution he carried out upon the passing of the Reform Bill. Several seats were placed at his disposal, and the Duke of Wellington importuned him to re-enter parliament, but without success. ‘All my political friends,’ he writes (28 Aug. 1832) to Lord Fitzgerald, ‘are very angry with me, the duke seriously so.’ The reason he gave might well account for their anger. It was that he could not ‘spontaneously take an active share in a system which must in my judgment subvert the church, the peerage, and the throne—in one word, the constitution of England.’ This was nothing less than to run away from the colours. But probably his real reason, though he did not like to make it public, was a consciousness of that growing weakness of the heart under which he ultimately succumbed, and which would have been fatal under the fatigue and excitement of parliamentary warfare. It was at the same time not so serious as to prevent his prosecuting his literary labours, and indeed from this time forward it was from his library that he fought the battle of his party. He continued to maintain the most intimate relations with the Duke of Wellington and Sir R. Peel, doing his best to keep up the spirits of his party, but at the same time oppressed with the gloomiest anticipations. The Grey administration soon began to totter, and indeed was kept on its legs mainly by the assistance of the tory opposition. Strongly urged by Croker, Peel had made up his mind, if the occasion arose, to take office and try to rally into something of its old compactness the scattered forces of what Croker was the first to call ‘the conservatives.’ (Croker seems to have first employed the appellation in an article in the ‘Quarterly’ for January 1830, p. 276. In July 1832 Macaulay, in his article on Mirabeau for the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ p. 557, refers to the term ‘conservative’ as ‘the new cant word.’) When Lord Melbourne had to resign (July 1834), Peel hurried back from Italy to take the reins of government. His first letter on reaching England was to Croker asking him to call, and saying: ‘It will be a relief to me from the harassing cares that await me.’ Croker was ill, but he wrote at once in reply. He was not by any means sanguine that Peel could succeed in forming a ministry that would stand. His advice was: ‘Get, if you can, new men, young blood—the ablest, the fittest—and throw aside boldly the claims of all the “mediocrities” with which we were overladen in the last race. I don't promise that even that will insure success; but it is your best chance.’ Would Croker himself take office? was Peel's first question when they met. Nothing, was his answer, would induce him again to enter the House of Commons. But he did what he could for his friend by a strong article in the ‘Quarterly Review,’ in which he defended the policy set forth by Peel in what is known as the ‘Tamworth Manifesto.’ He stood by Peel throughout the gallant struggle maintained by him during his short-lived administration, constant communication upon political affairs being maintained between them of a most confidential kind. During this period Croker availed himself of this intimacy to urge the claims of literature and science upon the prime minister's consideration. Through his intervention a grant of 200l. a year was made to Mrs. Somerville, he procured help for Dr. Maginn, ‘though I believe,’ as he wrote to Peel, ‘he has libelled you and me,’ and he also pressed for some relief to Moore, who was then in great financial straits. To Lord Lyndhurst, then chancellor for the second time, he appealed to give a living to another struggling literary man, the Rev. George Croly [q. v.] In the incidents of the administration it is clear from Croker's published correspondence that nothing gave greater pleasure to Peel to write and Croker to learn than that the chancellor had given a living to Crabbe, one of Croker's favourite poets, and that liberal pensions had been awarded to Professor Airy, Sharon Turner, Southey, and James Montgomery. When the Peel administration came to an end in 1835, this caused no cessation in the intimate friendly correspondence on all topics, literary and artistic, as well as political, between himself and Croker. When he resumed the reins of office in the autumn of 1841, Croker supported his friend's measures in the ‘Quarterly Review’ with the same confidence that he had all along shown in Peel's powers as the only man who could be relied on to maintain sound constitutional principles. By this time the faith of not a few of Peel's followers had begun to be shaken; and it is apparent from his published correspondence with Croker, that so great a change had begun to take place, that it is surprising Croker himself had not caught the alarm. The attacks of Disraeli and his friends on the Peel policy found no sympathy from Croker, who in one of his political articles spoke of the ‘extreme inconsistency and impolicy of endeavouring to create distrust of the only