SIR ROBERT PEEL - AT TAMWORTH.
Sio. ROBERT PEEL assembled a party of his tenants, retainers, and relations, in the Town-hall of Tamworth, on the 16th instant, and gave them first a capital dinner, and then a prosy oration, *Lich cecupied an hour aLd a half in the delivery. Of course the grateful guestli, after they had eaten and drunk their fill at the expense oldie light honourable founder of the feast, could do no
less than reward his eloquence with what Sir ROMERT, who cor- rected his speech for the newspapers himself, calls " rapturous applause." It was all very ]roper for the PEELS, HARDINGS, W IL LOCKS, YATESES, and the rest of his relations and dependents, to applaud Sir ROBERT ; but it required considerable assurance in him to suppose that this well-fed squad in little Tamworth spoke the sentiments, and were the fair representatives, of the middle classes of the country. Sir ROBERT, choosing to forget that the millions of the Metropolis, with Edinburgh and Dublin into the bargain, had passed a sentence of condemnation on his Ministry by electing Members pledged to turn him out, actually pretended to find public opinion Thirty expressed at this dinner-. party of his own connexions and humble servants, assembled ex- pressly for the purpose of hearing the patron of their insignificant rotten. borough hold forth to his own honour and glory 1 Although the Tory journals, in their usual hyperbolical style, laud the speech as a sort of wonder, we find it, in sooth, but a very commonplace affair, though good enough for the company. It had few ideas, and not one of them new ; the rhetorical artifices were of the kind that Sir ROBERT delights in, and the misrepre- sentations not only gross, but easily detected. Sir ROBERT PEEL affects utter innocence of the plot by which the MELBOURNE Ministry was displaced, because he had no correspond- ence or conversation with the Duke before his departure for the Con- tinent. But did not he tell the Tories last spring that he would take office with them ; and was not that all they wanted from him? Was
lie not cognizant of the intrigues to poison the Court and undermine the Liberals? It would not have answered the purpose for Sir ROBERT himself to have been found earwigging the King, pouring false siories of" reaction" into the Royal ear,and obviously supplant- ing Lord MELBOURNE, whose place he was anxious to occupy. WILLIAM the Fourth may not be the most acute of mortals, but such behaviour would have been too gross, and its object too pal- pable to escape his perception. Nobody suspects Sir ROBERT or the Duke of WELLINGTON of directly and personally mixing in the Lack-stairs intrigue at the Palace. The Tories are too experienced in their arts to commit such a blunder. But Sir ROBERT' PEEL, by consenting to take office with the intriguers, said what was equivalent to this—" If you succeed in getting out MEL- BOURNE, I am ready to take his place, and do your work.- And this was all that they desired at his hands. The plot, no doubt,. exploded inconveniently soon; but that was no fault of Sir RO- BERT PEEL, who would have been content to wait till next Easter for Lord MELBOURNE'S shoes.
The stale and often-exposed trick of confounding Lord MEL- BOURNE with Earl GREY, is repeated by Tamworth's chosen. He insinuates that Lords GREY, STANLEY, RIPON, the Duke of Ram-
o No, and Sir J AMES GRAHAM, had retired from Lord Melbourne's Ministry, of which they never formed a part. Sir ROBERT chooses to assume that no arrangement was entered into by the King with Lord MELBOURNE:, and that Lord Grey's Ministry was in ex- istence an the 1-ith of November last. No political charlatan ever descended to a more paltry subterfuge than this. For it is as noto- rious as any thing can be, that the MELBOURNE Ministry was new, distinct, and far more popular than Earl GREY'S had become. It had not lost the support of the House of Commons, and had gained favour with the Country, when it was dissolved. There was a disposition in the Ministry to carry on needful reforms with prudent vigour ; there was a disposition in the Country to give it credit fur honesty and the capacity to do much good. And there- fore—not because Lords GREY, RIPON, and STANLEY had retired from this Cabinet, which they never belonged to—was its destruc- tion doomed at Court.
Sir ROBERT still hopes for a " fair trial"-
'• Notwithstanding all the ominous predictions of our inability to carry on the Government, I own to you that I do entertain the greatest confidence that those predictions will not be verified, and that the Representatives of the country will uut refuse to give to the King's Ministers a fair trial. A few weeks only can elapse before the experiment will be made. I am not alarmed at the lists that are published, dividing the Members of Parliament into Conservatives' and Reformers.' I cannot but think that many of those who are classed as Refwmers entertain opinions not far different from my own."
Mark this, all ye who have been returned by Reforming con- stituencies under the guise of Reformers ! Sir ROBERT PEEL be- lieves that many of you agree in political opinions with him; whose opinions are, he tells us, in conformity with those of KNATCHBOLL, STORMONT, RODEN, GOULBURN, and the High Orange, Ultra Tory party. If Sir ROBERT is right in his con- jectures, never was hypocrisy and treachery equal to yours. We , shall soon see.
Previous page
