"On one side lay unread Petitions, On t'other hints from five Physicians; _Here_ tradesmen's bills,--official papers, Notes from my Lady, drams for vapours-- _There_ plans of saddles, tea and toast, Death-warrants, and the _Morning Post_."
Four years later, the Regent had actually allowed fifty-eight death-warrants to accumulate.
As already mentioned, he was hardly invested with the signs of power before he quarrelled with his Whig friends and became a Tory. The great, long-lasting Tory Government was formed. At its head was the Earl of Liverpool, an obstinate, but lazy and good-natured reactionary; the displeasure of the public never fell upon him, but always on his colleagues; he was, as Prime Minister, a kind of monarch with limited power, honest intentions, and modest abilities. He and his colleague, Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, enjoyed the privilege of not being envied and feared for the force of their characters or the splendour of their talents. The most notable and most fiercely criticised member of the ministry was Lord Castlereagh, a moderately gifted man of energetic character, whom Wilberforce once declared to be as cold-blooded as a fish. He had a handsome face and a commanding voice, and to these added the outward show of honours which had not been bestowed on a commoner since the days of Sir Robert Walpole. He was "the noble lord in the blue ribbon." He had a natural leaning towards arbitrary principles, and his intercourse with the irresponsible rulers of the continent tended to strengthen him in ideas which were extremely dangerous for a constitutional minister. No consciousness of the narrowness of his intellect and the defects of his education prevented him from pouring out torrents of unformed sentences and disjointed arguments. These often aroused the laughter of the House; but he withstood all attacks with unflinching determination; none of the hostility or suspicions expressed moved him a hair's-breadth from his path; in his intercourse with Parliament, he again and again adopted the standpoint of absolutism: "We alone know." Byron, Shelley, and Moore all flagellate him in their poetry. There remains to be named Lord Chancellor Eldon, the personification of Toryism, whose thought by day and dream by night was the maintenance of what he called the constitution. In his opinion the man who attempted to do away with any ancient privilege, any antiquated restriction of the liberty of the subject, and still more the man who attempted to repeal any cruel penal law, was laying his hand on the constitution. Yet no one was more ready than he himself to suspend the laws of the country whenever they stood in his way. The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the gagging of the press, &c.--such amputations as these were life to the constitution; to infuse new blood was death.