cash payments were suspended. A year later Gillray commenced CHAP. a series of the Whig leaders under the title of French Habits.' IX. The third plate, Les Membres du Conseil des Cinq Cents,' represents Stanhope, followed by Lauderdale, Derby, Byng, and Michael Angelo Taylor. Thus a month seldom elapsed in which Gillray's coarse but powerful brush did not hold him up to the detestation of his countrymen. III After celebrating the acquittal of the reformers in the State Trials of 1794 Stanhope virtually withdrew from active politics for some years, and devoted himself to his scientific pursuits. From time to time, however, he emerged from his retirement to plead for peace. On December 5, 1795, a most numerous and respectable meeting of many thousands of the nobility, clergy, yeomen, freeholders, and other inhabitants of the county of Kent,' was held at Maidstone,1 and Stanhope moved the following address: 'TO THE KING'S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY. 'May it please your Majesty,-WE, the underwritten Freeholders and Inhabitants of the County of Kent, beg leave to approach your Majesty with sentiments of sincere concern for the late outrage and attack made against your Majesty's person, on the day your Majesty went to the Parliament House, and to express the happiness we feel at your Majesty not having received any personal injury therefrom. We must, in duty to ourselves and to our country, avail ourselves of this opportunity humbly to request your Majesty to take into consideration the present critical situation of this nation occasioned by the present disastrous war and the dangers which may result from impending scarcity, and speedily to adopt the most effectual mode of averting calamities so dreadful. And we earnestly entreat your Majesty immediately to set on foot a negotiation in order to procure for this country a speedy, honourable and lasting peace.' A year later he delivered an address at the celebration of the landing of William III. He gave his audience the new name of citizens, and proposed the following toast, which was adopted with applause. To the eighty thousand incorrigible 1 A printed report is at Chevening. CHAP. citizens who are friends of liberty, humanity, justice and peace, IX. and who, for this reason, are regarded by Edmund Burke as incapable of amendment.'1 In 1797 he drew up yet another strongly worded petition for peace.2 'TO THE KING'S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY. 'THE HUMBLE PETITION OF THE NOBLEMEN, GENTLEMEN, FREEHOLDERS AND INHABITANTS OF THE COUNTY OF KENT, APRIL 19, 1797. 'That this nation is now unfortunately involved in a war the most bloody as well as the most expensive which perhaps ever existed, and that suffering humanity calls aloud for peace. 'That the said war has been solely occasioned by the hostility of your Majesty's Ministers to the sacred and inalienable Rights of Man. 'And that, if the present ruinous war were to continue, it must prove fatal to the commerce, manufactures, credit and remaining prosperity of this nation. 'Your Majesty's petitioners further shew that this bloody war has been unnecessarily protracted, because your Majesty's Ministers, who have been at last obliged formally to acknowledge the French Republic, did wantonly refuse to make such acknowledgment at a time when peace, founded on good will and confidence, would have been obtained thereby. 'Your Majesty's petitioners further shew that last year Lord Malmesbury did agree with the French Republic that "proportionable restitutions" should be adopted as the basis of peace. But that, notwithstanding such actual agreement so made, your Majesty's Ministers, contrary to their duty and in defiance to the national faith thus solemnly pledged, did instruct your Majesty's Ambassador to depart from such agreement by proposing terms of peace utterly inconsistent therewith. 'Your Majesty's petitioners therefore humbly pray that your Majesty will take speedy measures to make an honourable, sincere and lasting peace; and that all these men who either have acted in the unjustifiable manner above described or are systematically hostile to a sincere, durable and cordial peace, be excluded from your Majesty's councils for ever.' Friends and foes alike knew that his sentiments were unchanged. In 1797 an anonymous pamphlet appeared, entitled 1 Moniteur, xxviii. 504. In The First Letter on a Regicide Peace Burke had estimated the pure Jacobins' of Great Britain at about 80,000. 2 Chevening Papers, in his handwriting. |