A work has recently been published which tells us very plainly now many things which it would have been treasonable even to suspect sixty years ago. It is entitled The Cornwallis Correspondence, and contains the private papers and letters of the first Marquis Cornwallis, one of the foremost Englishmen of his time. Bred a soldier, he served with distinction in Germany and in America. He then proceeded to India in the double capacity of governor-general and commander-in-chief. On his return from that service he filled for some years the post of master-general of the Ordnance, refused a seat in the Cabinet, offered him by Mr. Pitt; and, although again named governor-general of India, on the breaking out of the Irish rebellion of 1798 was hurried to Dublin as lord-lieutenant and commander-in-chief. He was subsequently employed to negotiate the peace of Amiens, and, in 1805, died at Ghazeepore, in India, having been appointed its governor-general for the third time.
From the correspondence of this distinguished statesman and soldier, we may now ascertain whether, sixty years ago, the people of England had or had not good grounds for dreading invasion by the French, and whether the governing classes or the governed were most in fault on that occasion for the doubtful condition of their native land.
George the Third was verging upon insanity. So detested and despised was the Prince of Wales, his successor, that those who directed his Majesty's councils, as well as the people at large, clung eagerly to the hopes of the king's welfare; trusting that the evil days of a regency might be postponed. And it would seem from the Cornwallis Correspondence, that the English were just in their estimation of that bad man. H. R. H. having quarrelled shamefully with his parents, and with Pitt, had thrown himself into the hands of the Opposition, and appears to have corresponded occasionally with Cornwallis, who had two votes at his command in the Commons, during that nobleman's first Indian administration. In 1790, Lord Cornwallis, writing to his brother, the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, says: "You tell me that I am accused of being remiss in my correspondence with a certain great personage. Nothing can be more false, for I have answered every letter from him by the first ship that sailed from hence after I received it. The style of them, although personally kind to excess, has not been very agreeable to me, as they have always pressed upon me some infamous and unjustifiable job, which I have uniformly been obliged to refuse, and contained much gross and false abuse of Mr. Pitt, and improper charges against other and greater personages, about whom, to me at least, he ought to be silent."[1]*
- ↑ Three or four of the Prince of Wales's letters are given at length. They all prove "the first gentleman and scholar of his day" to have been a very illiterate and unscrupulous jobber. In one of them he proposed to the Governor-General to displace "a black, named Alii Cann," who was chief criminal judge of Benares, in order that a youth, named Pellegrine Treves, the son of a notorious London money-lender, might be appointed to that office. Lord Cornwallis replied, that Ali Ibrahim Khan, though a native, was one of the
