Meanwhile, through the influence of the Duke of Devonshire, Lord John was elected in November for the Irish borough of Bandon Bridge, and in February, fresh from prologue-writing for the private theatricals which Lord Normanby was giving that winter in Florence, he took his seat in the House of Commons. Lord Liverpool was struck down with paralysis on February 18, and it quickly became apparent that his case was hopeless. After a few weeks of suspense, which were filled with Cabinet intrigues, Mr. Canning received the King's commands to reconstruct the Ministry; but this was more easily said than done. 'Lord Liverpool's disappearance from the political scene,' says Lord Russell, 'gave rise to a great _debacle_. The fragments of the old system rushed against each other, and for a time all was confusion.' Six of Canning's colleagues flatly refused to serve under him in the new Cabinet--Peel, Wellington, Eldon, Westmoreland, Bathurst, and Bexley--though the latter afterwards took advantage of his second thoughts and returned to the fold. Although an opponent of Parliamentary reform and of the removal of Nonconformist disabilities, Canning gave his support to Catholic emancipation, to the demand for free trade, and the abolition of slavery. Canning's accession to power threw the Tory ranks into confusion. 'The Tory party,' states Lord Russell, 'which had survived the follies and disasters of the American war, which had borne the defeats and achieved the final glories of the French war, was broken by its separation from Mr. Canning into fragments, which could not easily be reunited.' [Sidenote: CANNING IN POWER] Sydney Smith--who, by the way, had no love for Canning, and failed to a quite noteworthy extent to understand him--like the rest, took a gloomy view of the situation, which he summed up in his own inimitable fashion. 'Politics, domestic and foreign, are very discouraging; Jesuits abroad, Turks in Greece, "No Poperists" in England! A panting to burn B; B fuming to roast C; C miserable that he can't reduce D to ashes; and D consigning to eternal perdition the first three letters of the alphabet.' Canning's tenure of power was brief and uneasy. His opponents were many, his difficulties were great, and, to add to all, his health was failing. 'My position,' was his own confession, 'is not that of gratified ambition.' His Administration only lasted five months, for at the end of that period death cut short the brilliant though erratic and disappointed career of a statesman of courage and capacity, who entered public life as a follower of Pitt, and refused in after years to pin his faith blindly to either political party, and so incurred the suspicions alike of uncompromising Whigs and unbending Tories.