avert the necessity of such a creation, he conceived the idea of authorizing his private secretary, Sir Herbert Taylor, to request the chief peers on the Opposition side to absent themselves from the division on the third reading.  It seemed to him, and indeed to many of them, the only thing that could be done.  Their judgment of the character and eventual consequences of the ministerial bill was unaltered; but they saw the violence of the public feeling on the subject, and the danger to the state of too stubborn and uncompromising a resistance to it, and, yielding loyal obedience to their royal master’s wish, they retired from the House without voting.  Those who remained passed the bill, and in the beginning of June, 1832, it became law.

We have ventured in a previous chapter to call in question the propriety of the conduct of the King’s father, George III., in using his personal entreaties to influence the House of Lords against the India Bill of Mr. Fox.  The transaction which has been related here is the second and only other instance since the Revolution of a sovereign having recourse to such a device to sway the votes of members of either House.  But the circumstances were so entirely different, nay, so diametrically opposite, that an opinion of the impropriety of the sovereign’s deed in the former case imposes no obligation on the ground of consistency to censure it in the later instance.  The interference of George III. was designed to thwart and defeat his ministers on a measure of which he had not previously intimated any disapproval.  William IV., on the other hand, was exerting himself to support his ministers, not, as it seems probable, without some sacrifice of his own judgment.  His father acted as he did to avert an inroad on his prerogative and independence, which he had been persuaded to apprehend, but the danger of which can hardly be said to have been proved beyond all question; so that even those who think the result of his action fortunate for the nation cannot defend the action as one that on any constitutional principle can be justified.  The son, at a far more critical moment, adopted the course which he did adopt as the only means which he saw of extricating the state and the nation from an alternative of great calamities:  the extinction of, or at least a deep wound to, the legislative independence of the House of Lords, by the following of a single precedent[218] which had ever since been universally condemned; or, on the other hand, a continuance of outrages and tumults which had already disgraced the nation in the eyes of the world, and which, if renewed and continued, could not fail to imperil the safety of the state.  Such a motive may certainly be allowed to excuse the irregularity of the act.