Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/426

378 also has its claims. But how much nobler will be the sovereign s boast, when he shall have it to say that he found law dear and left it cheap ; found it a sealed book, left it a living letter ; found it the patrimony of the rich, left it the inheritance of the poor ; found it the two-edged sword of craft and oppression, left it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence ! &quot;

The death of Canning, the failure of Lord Goderich, and the accession of the duke of Wellington to power, again changed the aspect of affairs ; but the resolution of mini sters to carry Catholic Emancipation disarmed the Opposi tion, whilst it split the Tory party. Graver events were impending. The French Revolution of 1830, following close upon the death of George IV., awakened a passionate excitement throughout Europe, and especially in this country. The days of Tory government were numbered. The cry of &quot; Reform &quot; was raised; and the leader to &quot; ride the whirlwind and direct the storm&quot; was Henry Brougham. Then it was that the united county of York spontaneously returned him to the new House of Com mons as their representative. It was the proudest moment of his life, for he was literally not only the representative of the county of York, but of the people of England. A stranger by birth to that great province, and without an acre of land in it, he, by his talents, eloquence, public services, and love of freedom alone, triumphed over the proud Yorkshire families, and took his seat in the House of Commons with a power no Englishman of this age has possessed. The Parliament met in November. Brougham s first act was to move for leave to bring in a bill to amend the representation of the people ; but before the debate came on the Government was defeated on another question; the duke resigned, and Earl Grey was commanded by William IV. to form an administration.

Amongst the difficulties the new premier and the Whig party had to encounter and to surmount, none was greater than that arising from the position, the attitude, and the talents of Mr Brougham. He was not the leader of any party ; he had no personal following in the House of Com mons ; he was distrusted by the Whigs, who looked up to Lord Althorp as their chief ; he was dreaded alike by friends and foes ; but there stood, in solitary might, the formidable member for the county of York, armed with invincible eloquence, and backed by the suffrages of the people. He himself had repeatedly declared that nothing would induce him to exchange his position as an inde pendent member of Parliament for any office, however great ; and, no doubt, as an independent member of Parlia ment he exercised at that moment a power greater than any office could give. On the day following the resigna tion of the Government, he reluctantly consented, in low and angry tones, to postpone for one week his motion on parliamentary reform. The attorney-generalship was offered to him by Lord Grey ; it was indignantly rejected. Brougham himself affirms that he desired to be master of the rolls, which would have secured him a large income for life, and left him free to sit in the House of Commons. But this was positively interdicted by the king, and objected to by Lord Althorp, who declared that he could not undertake to lead the House with so insubordinate a follower behind him. Meanwhile Brougham had discovered, at a meeting of several leading members of his party at Holland House, that he was not taken freely into their counsels ; he came home exasperated and vowing venge ance against them. Lord Grey, personally, would have preferred to retain Lord Lyndhurst as his chancellor ; but it was impossible to leave Brougham out, and he was only to be brought into the ministry by the offer of the great seal. When the question was considered at the first meet ing of the inchoate ministry at Lansdowne House, Lord Holland said to his colleagues, &quot; I suppose it must be so, but this is the last time we shall meet in peace within these walls.&quot; Brougham himself hesitated, or affected to hesitate. He was undoubtedly reluctant to quit the House of Commons and his seat for Yorkshire. His mother, with great wisdom, dissuaded him from accepting these treacher ous gifts and honours. He alleged that, as the ministry might be of short duration, he was making a large sacrifice in giving up his professional income for a pension of .4000 a year and a peerage which he had no other means to support. But he yielded to the representations of Lord Grey and Lord Althorp, that without him as Chancellor the Government could not be formed. On the 22d November 1830 the great seal was delivered to him by the king, and he took his seat on the Woolsack that evening as speaker of the House of Lords, being still a commoner. On the following day, after he had sat to hear a Scotch appeal, the patent of his peerage as Baron Brougham and Vaux was brought down. The Lord chancellor then quitted the woolsack, robed, and was introduced as a baron by the Marquis Wellesley and Lord Durham. The mind of man can conceive nothing more vivid and more various than the chancellorship of Lord Brougham. It lasted in all exactly four years no more ; but the times were burning with excitement, and the chancellor embodied and expressed the fervour of the times. To rival Lord Bacon in the philosophy of the closet and Lord Hardwicke in the courts of equity, to declaim like Chatham in the House of Lords, and jest like Sheridan at Lord Sef ton s dinners, seemed alike easy tasks to Brougham. He never doubted of his own capacity to play every part in turn, judge, statesman, orator, philosopher, buffoon; and he did play them all with as much success as an imitation can bear to a reality. Unhappily the verdict of time has proved that there was nothing of permanence, and little of originality, in the prodigious efforts of his genius. He affected at first to treat the business of the Court of Chancery as a light affair, though in truth he had to work hard to master the principles of equity, of which he had no experi ence. His manner in court was desultory and dictatorial. Sometimes he would crouch in his chair, muffled in his wig and robes, like a man asleep ; at other times he would burst into restless activity, writing letters, working problems, interrupting counsel, Mortal offence he gave to Sugden, then the leader of the Equity bar, who detested his person and despised his law. But upon the whole Brougham was a just and able judge ; and if few of his decisions are cited as landmarks of the law, still fewer of them have been overruled. His wonderful powers of despatch enabled him to work off the arrears of the court in ten months, a thing which had never before occurred in human memory, and in September 1831 he boasted that not a cause re mained for hearing before the Lord Chancellor. Yet towards the close of his tenure of office in the spring of 1834, he complained to his colleagues of the tremendous drudgery he had undergone ; he had sat up all the nights of winter, he said, to write seventy elaborate judgments, and he conceived that he was ill requited for the sacrifices he had made. His duties as a judge, however, ranked second in his eyes to his duties as a politician and a legislator; and he took a most active and prominent part in the defence of all the great measures of Lord Grey s Government. We say in the defence of them, for he had less hand in the preparation of them than he wished it to be believed. His own statement that he had called his friends together and submitted to them a complete scheme of parliamentary reform is entirely unsupported, and, indeed, formally contradicted. The draft of the Reform Bill was prepared by a committee of four other members of the Cabinet, and accepted with some hesitation by Brougham. But once launched in the contest,