[49] John Southey, 15th Lord Somerville, President
of the Board of
Agriculture.
[50] Spencer Perceval.
[51] Robert Bankes Jenkinson (1770-1820), 2nd Earl
of Liverpool, was Lord
Hawkesbury from 1796 to 1808.
[52] Lord Hawkesbury was appointed Lord Warden of
the Cinque Ports at a
salary of L3000 a year.
[53] “The allusion is to the Orders in Council
under which Mr. Perceval
endeavoured to retaliate on
Napoleon’s Baltic decree by regulating
British trade with the Continent.
Under these orders the exportation
of all goods to France was
prohibited which were not carried from this
country and had not paid an
export-duty here. But there were certain
articles which the Minister
decided that the Continent should have on
no terms, and amongst others
quinine, or Jesuit’s Bark, as it was
called. Sydney Smith,
writing as Peter Plymley, said, ’You cannot
seriously suppose the people
to be so degraded as to look for their
safety from a man who proposes
to subdue Europe by keeping it without
Jesuit’s Bark.’”—SIR
SPENCER WALPOLE, Life of Lord John
Russell.
[54] In 1839 Sydney Smith pronounced this “a
very unjust imputation on Lord
Castlereagh.” Robert
Stewart (1769-1823), Viscount Castlereagh, became
Marquis of Londonderry in
1821.
[55] Henry Addington (1757-1844), created Viscount Sidmouth in 1805.
[56] Spencer Perceval had recently taken a villa on
Hampstead Heath, for
the benefit of his wife’s
health.
[57] Spencer Perceval’s elder brother, Charles
George Perceval (1756-1840),
was created Lord Arden in
1802.
[58] John Archibald Murray (1779-1859), a Judge of the Court of Session.
[59] In October 1844 Eugene Robin, reviewing Sydney
Smith in the Revue
des Deux Mondes, wrote
as follows:—“Cache sous le pseudonyme
de
Peter Plymley il adresse ces
nouvelles provinciales a un
reverend pasteur, qui est
bien le parfait modele de la sottise
protestante, la quintessence
des docteurs Bowles et des archidiacres
Nares.”
CHAPTER IV
FOSTON—“PERSECUTING BISHOPS”—BENCH AND BAR
At the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the most serious evil which beset the Church of England was the system of Pluralities and Non-Residence. A prosperous clergyman might hold half-a-dozen separate preferments, and, as long as he paid curates to perform the irreducible minimum of public duty, he need never show his face inside his deserted parishes. The ecclesiastical literature of the time abounds in quaint illustrations of the equanimity with which this system, and all its attendant evils, was regarded even by respectable and conscientious men. Thomas Newton, the commentator on Prophecy,