In 1844, O’Connell was tried for conspiracy, and convicted by a Protestant jury, and was put into prison. He appealed to the House of Lords; and there, it will not perhaps be too much to say, that the matter was tried on its political, rather than on its legal bearings. There were five lords, and the three who reversed the decision of the Court below were Liberals. Palmerston continually alludes to the subject in the letters to his brother. He speaks of the trial without any violence, and almost without the expression of an opinion. When the House of Lords had decided, he wrote as follows;--“The ending of the O’Connell trial has surprised us all; but the man most surprised is Chief Justice Tindal, who, having given the opinion of the majority of the judges in the House of Lords, thought the matter settled, and set off the same night for his summer excursion. Upon arriving at Frankfort, the day before yesterday, he met Bellenden Kerr, one of our Commissioners for digesting the criminal law, who immediately made an experiment on his legal digestion by telling him of the decision of the House of Lords. Tindal could hardly believe it possible. I agree with the _Times_ that it would only be fair by O’Connell to allow him to stay in prison a few days longer, to consider what he is to do next.” But O’Connell and the trial soon died away, and in the Session of 1846 the Maynooth grant was the subject which chiefly filled the minds of politicians. Mr. Gladstone resigned upon it, because he would not, while in office, support Sir Robert Peel’s measure. Sir Robert endeavoured to strengthen his Cabinet by various changes, as to which Lord Palmerston makes the following suggestions as to his own office;--“If he would but shift Aberdeen to any other less important office, and put to the Foreign Office some man of more spirit, energy, and sagacity, it would be a great gain for the country; but that seems now hopeless!”
Then there came the step in English politics which Sir Robert Peel took in this Session, and by taking which he has obtained a place among the half-dozen greatest statesmen whom England has produced. He determined to repeal the Corn Laws altogether. “The Minister was honestly convinced,” says Morley, in his “Life of Cobden,” “but the party was not.” How far the intention of his purpose came from the immediate necessity of his position,--how far, that is, we owed the repeal of the Corn Laws at that moment to the scarcity of food in Ireland,--or how far it was due to the actual conversion of the statesman’s mind to the truth of Adam Smith’s teaching, is, to my thinking, doubtful. There were yet five years before his death, and during those five years the conversion was completed. But the audacity with which he acted on the spur of the moment, resolving that a people must be fed even though he might have to abandon all his old political alliances, betokened a great man; and a great man he will remain as long as English history is read and understood. The political position at the moment, and that of Lord Palmerston as a person concerned, is so well described by Mr. Ashley that I will venture to quote his own words:--“The immediate cause of events, however, which came so suddenly on the political world, was a scarcity of the Irish potato crop. The population of Ireland had to be provided for; and, after two or three meetings with his Cabinet, and propositions made by him and rejected by Lord Stanley, the Prime Minister declared that he saw no satisfactory course to adopt short of the total abolition of the Corn Laws, which it had been hitherto only proposed to modify; and the Administration broke up, Lord John Russell being entrusted with the construction of a new Ministry. This task, after a short effort to fulfil it, he resigned, giving as his principal reason for not forming a Government the refusal of Lord Grey to join it.” This Lord Grey was the son of him who had refused to come back to the Government after Lord Althorp had become a peer. “If, as it was generally said, Lord Grey’s refusal was because the Foreign Office was to be placed in the hands of Lord Palmerston, this would prove that all his former colleagues were not his friends, but that he still remained more powerful than his opponents. At all events, Sir Robert, exalted by the thought that he had a high duty to perform, once more sacrificed his past life to what he believed the future of his country, or perhaps (to speak more correctly) to the exigencies of the hour; and it was this disinterested conversion of an old and experienced statesman that gave the Manchester doctrines the unquestioned authority they have exercised from that time.”