HL Deb 25 February 1876 vol 227 cc903-9
EARL GRANVILLE

My Lords, I rise to ask your Lordships' forbearance on a personal question, It would not have been necessary, if as I am informed, my Colleagues had not been constrained to remain silent last night by the Parliamentary custom of allowing the Prime Minister to have the last word—a custom which is convenient to the House, and certainly is not without advantage to the Government, but which imposes a greater responsibility as to the statement of facts upon which the immediate division is to be taken. It has happened on two occasions on the debate on the Address—one last year and one this—that I appealed to the noble Marquess the Secretary of State for India and the noble Earl the Secretary for the Colonies, as to whether they did not disclaim the particular grounds on which their administration had been praised by the Prime Minister. Out of mere consistency I must therefore refuse any compliment such as that which has been paid to me in the other House by the Prime Minister, and which was grounded, as it appears to me, on a misapprehension of facts. I have read a report of the Prime Minister's speech in the debate which closed this morning. I do not wish to give the slightest cause for a debate on the matter, and I will not refer to that speech further than to say that the greater part of it appears to have consisted in a just and eloquent tribute to Lord Palmerston and Lord Clarendon in respect of their course in regard to fugitive slaves, and who, it was claimed, had furnished the precedents that justified the policy lately pursued by Her Majesty's Government. I will not go into that question now; though I trust that an opportunity may occur when I hope to show that those precedents are not so apt and so continuous as may be supposed, and that none of them apply exactly to the present case. For the present, I will confine myself to some allusions which the right hon. Gentleman made to me in very courteous terms, and in which he did me the great honour of associating me with Lord Clarendon and claiming me as a supporter of the present policy of the Government. Mr. Disraeli is reported in The Times to have said, and one or two gentlemen have assured me that the report is not inaccurate— I must call your attention particularly to this East Indies Station Order of 1871, because it embodies in it all the instructions and sentiments of Lord Clarendon in his despatches on the subject. It embodied, and at the same time simplified, but that is nothing. Mr. Disraeli proceeded— But Lord Clarendon, according to the right hon. Member for Bradford, acted without communicating with his colleagues. Now I think I have proof that one at least of Lord Clarendon's Colleagues"— I shall spare your Lordships' ears and my own blushes by not reading some expressions complimentary to myself— was aware of what he was doing. The Lord President of the Council became Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs,…. and it is he who sends these instructions to the East Indies Station. It is Lord Granville who sends this Article 147, announcing that' Her Majesty's Minister for Foreign Affairs has decided that slaves coming on board ships of war within the territorial jurisdiction of the country from which they escape, that is to say, within three miles from the shore, should he returned to their owners.' Look at this short despatch—I will not venture to call it a letter:— Earl Granville to Sir C. Murray.—I transmit to you, for your information, copies of a correspondence, respecting the results of an inquiry into certain proceedings, complained of by the Portuguese Government, of Captain Sulivan, of Her Majesty's ship "Daphne," off the coast of Mozambique. The particulars of this case will be found at pages 98 to 101 of Class B of the Slave Trade Papers laid before Parliament last Session. I am, &c., GRANVILLE.' That shows that Lord Granville sent the whole of the correspondence on the subject of Captain Sulivan, of the Daphne, to our Minister at Lisbon without a single syllabic of disapprobation. He sent it freely, with his sanction and approval. Well, I think I have at last vindicated Lord Clarendon, who, we have been told, never communicated with his Colleagues. But the note was taken up by another distinguished Member of the late Government—the hon. and learned Member for Taunton. He followed the cry; the right hon. Member for Bradford gave the note that Lord Clarendon acted without any communication with his Colleagues. The note is caught up by the hon. and learned Member for Taunton, who states that Lord Clarendon's despatches were kept secret from the House of Commons, who were free from the knowledge of any wickedness of that kind. But the noble Lord who has just addressed the House has fully vindicated the character of Lord Clarendon in this matter, because he has referred to the Papers, which I myself was prepared to quote if necessary, relating to the slave question, which were laid upon the Table of this House in 1871, in which those despatches may be found. What, therefore, becomes of the statement of the right hon. Gentleman and of the hon. and learned Member, first of all that Lord Clarendon acted without communicating with his Colleagues, and secondly, according to the hon. and learned Member, that he so acted without the House of Commons having the slightest inkling of what he was doing? And yet these are the two Gentlemen who have formed the opinion of the country during the Recess. Those are the two Gentlemen who have been parading England and inveighing against the retrograde policy of the horrible Tory Party—the horrible 'Tory Party—who certainly have not yet written any despatches to the effect that they have decided that slaves coming on board our ships when within the territorial jurisdiction of a slave-holding country shall be returned to their owners. My Lords, I may remind your Lordships that I stated to the House in the debate on the Address that it had never happened to me to hear the subject of the regulations as to slaves coming on board Her Majesty's ships brought before the Cabinet, and that I had never been called upon officially to give an opinion on the question. Your Lordships will remark from the extracts which I have just read that the grounds on which I was complimentarily associated with Lord Clarendon were—first, that I was aware of what Lord Clarendon was doing; secondly, that I sent Lord Clarendon' scorrespondence to Sir Charles Murray freely with my sanction and approbation; and, thirdly, that it is I who sent instructions to the East Indies Station, I who sent the Article 147, the contents of which you have heard read. With regard to the first ground of compliment, I have to state that privately I never knew at the time that any such correspondence was going on. It was not likely I should, and for this you must take my word. But I have the authority of all my Colleagues for asserting that it never was brought before the Cabinet. As to the second, it is true that I signed the routine despatch formally transmitting the correspondence of my Predecessor on a closed case to our Minister at Lisbon for his information. The noble Earl opposite will, I think, bear me out in saying that hundreds of such routine despatches are sent from the Foreign Office every year, which the Secretary of State issues without making himself fully and intimately acquainted with their contents. I can, however, discover no trace of sanction and approbation unless it is meant to show that my disapproval of a past correspondence—which I believe I never read—on a subject which was closed I was to keep our Minister ignorant of what had passed between Lord Clarendon and the Portuguese Minister.

As to the third ground of compliment, with respect to my having sent the Instructions to the East Indies, and to my having sent the now well-known Article 147, I can only say that the Instructions were sent by my Predecessor; that I never sent any Instructions at all; and that the Order issued by the Admiral on the station never came back to the Foreign Office during my time; and I never heard of it till some three months ago, when a gentleman whom I do not know sent it to me as an extract from an Indian paper. My Lords, I think I have stated enough to show that there is not the slightest ground for compliments intentional or unintentional, nor any ground for praise or blame, in connection with my part in this matter. As to Lord Palmerston and Lord Clarendon, I never knew two persons more anxious for the total abolition of slavery. It is one of my proudest reflections that I was introduced to public life by Lord Palmerston, and that my relations with him closed only with his death, and that I was politically and personally associated with Lord Clarendon, one of the ablest, most popular, and successful Foreign Ministers who have ever filled office in this country.

THE EARL OF DERBY

My Lords, I do not rise for the purpose of raising any controversy on the large subject of the regulations regarding slaves coming on board Her Majesty's ships. I think it was reasonable in my noble Friend (Earl Granville) to wish to make a personal explanation. If he had confined himself to that—if he considered that any statement was made, here or elsewhere, which affected him, and which did not accord with his own recollection of transactions in which he had been himself engaged—nothing could have been more natural than that he should take the earliest opportunity of correcting what he regarded as a misapprehension, and of placing the matter in what appeared to him to be the proper light. But I think that no one, either here or in the other House of Parliament, would have considered what was said in the other House of Parliament last night as any reflection on the noble Earl. What I understand the noble Earl to state is, that the Circular which has been referred to in "another place" never was discussed in the Cabinet of which the noble Earl was a Member, and never came under his personal notice. The noble Earl goes on to deny having any knowledge of Lord Clarendon's Correspondence; on that point I, of course, accept his statement; but I do not understand that the noble Earl denies that he transmitted in October, 1870, to Sir Charles Murray, an official Correspondence containing that expression of opinion, in consequence of which the instructions which have been referred to were issued. I think, therefore, my right hon. Friend (Mr. Disraeli) was justified in saying that the noble Earl had at least official knowledge of the Correspondence in question: since he forwarded it for the information of our Minister at Lisbon. The noble Earl says that he sent that Correspondence in his despatch of October, 1870, without having personally acquainted himself with its contents. That is an explanation I can well understand; but still I think, in the face of that despatch, my right hon. Friend was perfectly justified in assuming that the noble Earl had knowledge of the contents of the Correspondence. If the noble Earl says—" Officially I had something to do with it, because I had to forward it, though I did so without approval or comment; but personally I was not acquainted with it, because I did not look at or read the Papers," that is an explanation we accept, and the accuracy of which we do not doubt; but it is an explanation founded on a circumstance which could have been only within the knowledge of the noble Earl himself, and with which my right hen. Friend could not possibly have been acquainted.

EARL GRANVILLE

I thank the noble Earl; but he has not said a word as to the assertion of my having sent the instructions to the station on which the Station Order was founded.

THE EABL OF DERBY

I fully admit that the Station Order was issued by the Admiral on the station, and not by the Admiralty; and that it was founded on instructions issued in the time of Lord Clarendon, and before the noble Earl was connected with the Foreign Office. In that matter of detail my right hon. Friend may have been misled; but his general argument was correct—because whether or not the noble Earl was cognizant of the instructions, yet they had been issued by the Admiralty; and had my right hon. Friend substituted for the name of the noble Earl the name of the First Lord of the Admiralty, he would have been correct in detail as well as in principle. The argument of the noble Earl is that the act was Lord Clarendon's alone, and not that of the Cabinet. We contend that it is one for which the Cabinet of which the noble Earl was a Member must be held responsible, inasmuch as two Members at least of that Cabinet personally concurred in it.