Canning's Way
George Canning. By P. J. V. Rob. (Macmillan, 36s.)
CANN1NG has had a better press from posterity than from his contemporaries. Part of the explanation is that both Gladstone and Disraeli, seldom in accord on anything else, deeply revered him. In Gladstone's case the connection was almost hereditary. Canning represented his father's home town, Liverpool. The young Glad- stone was carried in by his nurse at the age of two, carefully coached to lisp the words, 'Ladies and gentlemen,' to a dinner party in honour of the great man, and, on a more intellectual plane, could not Canning be regarded in retro- spect as an early champion of small nations struggling rightly to be free? As for Disraeli, it was natural for him, apart from any other con- siderations, to vindicate Canning in order to condemn Peel, and if Canning was a brilliant adventurer of reckless tongue and boundless ambition struggling against Tory mediocrities, what else was Disraeli himself?
Those who actually had to deal with Canning felt less kindly. It is no exaggeration to say that to the very end of his life he was detested and distrusted. Peel's old Christ Church tutor, ex- plaining why the university preferred Peel to Canning as their Member in 1817, said, 'they did not believe in the sincerity, the consistency, the honesty of the man.' In 1827, when at last his highest ambition had been achieved and George IV reluctantly 'sent for him, forty-one members of the administration, including half the cabinet, resigned, although he had been Foreign Secretary, Leader of the House and linch-pin of the Government for the last five years. When every allowance is made for the looseness of party ties, and the genuine political rift over the Catholic question, this takes some explaining.
Mr. Rob's able study helps us to do so. His book is based exclusively on printed sources, but this is not necessarily a defect. If more historians appreciated that most—though, of course, not all—unpublished material remains in that state because it is not worth publishing, we would be spared a great deal of dull stuff. The only work of importance which Mr. Robo does not seem to have taken into account is Mr. Denis Gray's excellent life of Spencer Per- ceval, which throws new and discreditable light on Canning's conduct in 1809. A more serious criticism, perhaps, is the arrangement of the book into three sections, the Man, the Politician and the Statesman. There are advantages in this procedure, but it involves some arbitrary divi- sions, and I suspect that chronological order, except in rare cases, is nearly always better. This said, one should pay full tribute to Mr. Rob's penetrating judgment. His book is most readable and it puts Canning's policies and character into their historical perspective with admirable clarity.
Canning's ability was transcendent. He was the greatest orator of his day, taking infinite pains over every speech, planning each gesture like an actor-manager. As a minister, he worked with almost fanatical zeal at his papers and he never relaxed. His dispatches, over which he took infinite trouble, were models of vigorous lucidity—with one exception, the famous joke rhyming dispatch about 'the fault of the Dutch,' which so puzzled the ambassador at The Hague. Canning was incurably addicted to jesting of every sort, practical or verbal. His witticisms were famous and scathing. As with a later and somewhat similar figure, Sir William Harcourt, he soon forgot them, but his victims did not.
This was perhaps part of the reason for the animosity which he inspired. It was not the only one. His intense and unconcealed ambition disconcerted most people. George III was astounded at the confidence with which he de- clared, unasked, his readiness to accept the premiership in 1809. 'Not,' the King told Per- ceval, 'that he would consider of it, that he would advise with others, as you or any other person would have said, but that he was fully prepared to take it.' Canning never even paid lip-service to the convention that the highest office should be accepted with a reluctant sense of duty. Twice he overreached himself and after the second time, in 1812, paid the penalty of ten years in relative obscurity. Then at last power came to him, five splendid years as Foreign Secretary, followed by the hundred days as Prime Minister, tragically cut short by prema- ture death.
Yet even in his heyday at the Foreign Office he was clearly a maddening colleague, a gadfly, like Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Randolph Churchill, perpetually stinging his chief with ad- monitory letters and restless reminders. 'I have not strength and nerves to bear Mr. Canning's notes,' complained poor Lord Liverpool. 'He sends me a dozen a day; every trifle, a remark from one of his Secys, a pamphlet, a para- graph in a newspaper, is cause for his firing off a note. : . . Some people whose nerves are less irritable might not mind it but I cannot bear it.' Alas, this was all too true. A few weeks later the unhappy Prime Minister was found uncon- scious at his breakfast table after a paralytic stroke, clutching in his hand a letter—from Canning. But politicians contemplating this tech- nique for advancement should remember that it does not necessarily pay with a more robust chief. Gladstone never gave way to Chamber- lain and it was Lord Salisbury, not Lord Randolph, who was in the position when some- one suggested a rapprochement to ask whether any man who had got rid of a boil on his neck wanted it back again.
Mr. Rob o well shows how much Canning's policies were misconstrued, both at the time and later. The famous duel with Castlereagh was not, as some have seen it, a symbol of a struggle between two conflicting Tory philosophies, but the upshot of intrigue, ill temper and the com- peting ambitions of two men whose views on the public interest did not deeply differ. Both were great Foreign Secretaries, and the massive studies of Temperley md Webster show how little they diverged on fundamental principles. As for domestic affairs, the notion that Canning was notably liberal is a myth. He was, it is true, a rather lukewarm 'Catholic' on emancipation, but he supported the Six Acts and strongly opposed parliamentary reform. In short, he was a robust Tory patriot with no special ideas beyond preserving the social order at home and defending Britain's interests abroad What Can- ning did possess to mark him out from the rest of Pitt's friends was 'style,' that indefinable political magic which can lend glamour to a con- ventional policy and gloss over an unpopular one. In that sense he was the true heir to Pitt, and in that sense Disraeli really was his spiritual descendant.
Previous page
