The Greville Memoirs, Part 2 (of 3), Volume 3 (of 3): A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852Greville, Charles
History
The Greville Memoirs, Part 2 (of 3), Volume 3 (of 3): A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852
Greville, Charles
Great Britain -- History -- Victoria, 1837-1901
Graham called on me on Thursday to talk over this debate. He thought it
very damaging and very bad; John Russell wretched; he thought after
Baillie's speech he ought to have refused the Committee and abided by
the consequences, standing up and manfully defending both his colleague
and his employÈ. He said he had observed that Peel had latterly been
more ill-natured to the Government, and that he still bitterly resented
Lord John's speech reviving the old dispute on the Appropriation Clause.
Lord Aberdeen says the same thing, adding that Peel had never liked Lord
John, and that he thought his conduct in attacking him, after the
support he had given him, was very bad, and he resented it accordingly,
and this was not the last proof he would give of his resentment.
[Sidenote: A BREACH OF NEUTRALITY.]
_March 2nd._--A day or two ago Bankes asked a question in the House of
Commons about the stores furnished to the revolutionary Sicilian
Government, to which Palmerston made a reply, and the matter dropped. It
is very singular that none of the Opposition leaders got hold of it, for
there never was a stronger case coupled with all the rest of
Palmerston's Sicilian doings. They have so entirely mismanaged their
case, and contrived to give him so great a triumph, and to establish
such a prestige of his success and dexterity, that it is now difficult,
if not impossible, to take the field against him afresh with any
prospect of success. But the Sicilian case is so strong and so bad, that
even now, when the papers are published, they may make a good deal of
it, and do Palmerston some damage if they manage the case well. His case
for the maritime interference after the capture of Messina has been
thrown over completely by the speech of General Filangieri in the
Neapolitan Parliament, which bears every mark of truth; and I have since
heard how he got up the story of atrocities supposed to be committed,
which he put into the mouth of the Queen in her speech in Parliament,
and which he repeated himself with so much effrontery in the House of
Commons, and made Lord Lansdowne so innocently repeat in the House of
Lords. Long after, I believe two months after the intervention, he wrote
to Lord Napier, and desired him to instruct the British Consul at
Messina to collect details of the Neapolitan atrocities, and to send
them to him, and this was the evidence on which he made the statements
which so materially assisted in carrying him through the debate the
first night of the session. The mention in the Queen's Speech of the
'King of _Naples_,' instead of the King of the Two Sicilies, is now said
to have been a mere inadvertence, but I have no doubt it was overlooked
by his colleagues, but put in by him intentionally and with a
significant purpose. It is his whole antecedent conduct from first to
last which confers such importance on the case of the stores. Sicilian
agents came over here and applied to the Government contractor to
supply them, with stores.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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