Sitting of 10 June 1825

Duke OF CUMBERLAND'S ANNUITY BILL.
On the order of the day for the third reading,
The Marquis of Tavistocksaid, that as this was the last opportunity the House would have of discussing the subject, he rose to state the grounds upon which he objected to this grant. He objected to it upon three grounds; first, because it was more than was wanted for the purpose to which it was to be applied; secondly, because it established a bad precedent; and lastly, and more than all the rest, because it was demanded for one purpose, and was going to be applied to another. If the grounds on which this grant was called for, were not as he had stated, he called upon the chancellor of the Exchequer to state that the whole of it would be required for the education of the young prince of Cumberland. If the right hon. gentleman would lay his hand upon his heart and say, that he believed that the whole of the grant would be so expended, he would believe it, though at the same time he must think that the expenditure would be most extravagant. He was, however, sure, that the right hon. gentleman would not make any such declaration. He had a high opinion of the integrity of the right hon. gentleman, and was sorry that he had not fairly faced the real question, and asked of the House to make an additional grant of 6,000 l. to the income of the duke of Cumberland. If the right hon. gentleman had proposed such a grant, he for one would not have objected to it [hear]. As far as he had heard, there was no specific charge ever brought forward against his royal highness, and though it was true, that he had somehow or other forfeited the good opinion
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of the public, he had been sufficiently punished already; and it would be harsh to withhold from him that allowance which had been already granted to the other members of the royal family. Though he should not have objected to a direct grant to the duke, he disliked granting money for one purpose, which was to be applied to another; and objected to the dishonest way in which it was now attempted to obtain it from the public. He was certain that in private life the right hon. gentleman would not condescend to practise so paltry a trick. He had another objection to this grant. By giving so large a sum to so young a child, the House would be establishing a precedent which it would be extremely inconvenient to follow. He had witnessed with pleasure the wise and liberal policy which had recently been adopted by ministers, and especially by the right hon. Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He was, therefore, at a loss how to express the astonishment he felt at seeing them risking the great popularity they had so justly acquired, by making themselves parties to a juggle like the present.
General Palmersaid, he had hitherto taken no part in the question, as he could not give a silent vote, and was unwilling to trouble the House with his opinion; but further consideration, and justice to the party whose honour and interests were at stake, determined him to combat his reluctance to address it. He was one of those, who, in the former instance had supported the motion for the same increased allowance to the duke of Cumberland that was voted to his brothers under the same circumstances; and had always considered the rejection of that measure an act of injustice to his royal highness, and an insult to the honour and feelings of the Crown. It was, therefore, solely upon that ground that he must vote for the present bill, condemning it in all other respects. He had before declared, and now repeated his conviction, that the only real enemies of the Crown were its own ministers; nor, since he had been in parliament did he remember a single question wherein its honour and interests were concerned, that all the discredit brought upon it was not solely to be imputed to them. They, and not the people, were its constitutional advisers, and their neglect compelled others to the painful and invidious task of doing their duty for them. Either they dared not tell the

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Crown the truth, or purposely brought it into collision with the people to divert their attention from acts of deeper mischief, and thus throw a tub to the whale. As to the present bill, had they only renewed it in its former shape, with the simple statement that his royal highness, after ten years' absence, was desirous of returning to England with his family, in the only way that, consistently with his honour and interest, he could return, viz. by being placed upon the same footing as the other branches of the Crown, the present ground of objection to the bill would not have existed; instead of which ministers had not only run their heads against a wall, but actually built it for the purpose. In place of a grant of 6,000 l. to the only party wishing it, they called upon parliament for double the amount, for reasons false in themselves, or which, if true, were revolting to the sense and feelings of the people, and humiliating to all the parties brought forward, excepting that illustrious female whose exemplary conduct had gained her the esteem and admiration of the country. But the individual who, if not a party to the act, had been placed by ministers in an invidious light, was he whose splendid means, afforded him by the country, had hitherto prevented that application to parliament, which the chancellor of the Exchequer had now deemed to be necessary, and to whom he must say, that upon the face of that application, discredit attached somewhere; and whoever the cap fitted, the party ought to wear it. But his chief object in addressing the House, was to defend the individual whose personal character had been the sole ground of opposition to that grant in a former instance, the real object of the present bill; and with respect to which, no member of that House had at that time, felt a stronger prejudice against the party than himself, for reasons connected with his political conduct; but the same motive which had dictated his former vote, called on him now to declare his conviction, that no man had been more grossly calumniated than his royal highness. As to his politics, was it unnatural that, born and educated at Court, with a bishop for his tutor, he should be a Tory in his principles, and like all others, whatever they might pretend, an enemy to civil and religious liberty? But in private life, he knew that his royal highness was in all respects, a manly, open,
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honourable character, a most kind and affectionate husband, further, that he was neither a spendthrift nor a gambler; but from the liberality of his nature, had been led into difficulties which had compelled him to reduce his establishment and live abroad, because the House of Commons had withheld that assistance which would have prevented the necessity. Lastly, as to the cause of his unpopularity, which a right hon. gentleman had ascribed principally to his marriage; the real ground had been stated by another hon. member—viz. his zeal in the service of those who by their "No Popery" cry had turned out their opponents: but the crime brought its own punishment, in the resentment of the persons he had offended; whilst he was deserted by his own party, especially that individual who had made a tool of him, as he had since made of another, and who, for which last act, deserved impeachment as much as any minister who had yet been brought to the scaffold.
The Chancellor of the Exchequersaid, he must still maintain the necessity of placing additional means at the disposal of the duke of Cumberland, for the education of his son. Over and over again, he must declare, that this grant was not intended as an addition to the income of his royal highness; and that, if that son had not been born, the proposed addition would not have been made. The king's ministers, upon contemplating the necessity of securing for the royal child an education in England, felt that the means of effecting such a purpose should be placed at the disposal of the father, and more particularly as his royal highness did not enjoy the addition of 6,000 l. a-year, which had been made a few years ago to the incomes of the other princes. It would be most unjust of the House to require his royal highness to reside in this country for the purpose of educating his child, and thereby to place him in a worse situation as to pecuniary matters than he stood in before.
Mr. Tierneysaid, he could not allow the bill to pass, without expressing the reasons which influenced him to oppose the grant. He begged of the House to believe him, when he declared, that in judging of this proposition, he threw out of his mind the former transactions relating to the duke of Cumberland. Were his royal highness the most popular prince in England, still he should oppose such a motion as this, from the unwarrant-

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able precedent which it set. How could the government draw a distinction between the step which they now proposed, and that which the House had already twice rejected? What had occurred since to alter the relation of the parties? Nothing but the birth of a child, still in early infancy; while a parliamentary provision of 6,000 l. a-year was required for his education, forsooth! In bringing this question forward, the government had thought proper to couple the cases of two children who were very differently situated. The alteration which had taken place in the families of the dukes of Kent and Cumberland, since their marriages, when additional incomes were applied for, was this—the duke of Kent had died, leaving his widow not the income which he had himself enjoyed from parliament, but merely her jointure, and an infant daughter. For the education of that daughter her royal highness applied not to parliament, although it was manifest her means would not enable her to maintain it suitably with its destined station, were it not for the kind and liberal supply afforded her by her brother the prince of Saxe Cobourg, who not only volunteered to defray the expenses of this child now, but for many years to come; so that the mother was relieved from, the burthen cast upon her, without any further call upon the country; nor had it been her intention to make any when the grant in her case was proposed. What was the case of the duke of Cumberland since the former period? He, too, had had a child, but one four degrees removed from the Crown; and yet this child, in the tender age of infancy, was put forth with a claim of 6,000 l. a-year, for purposes of education, as some gentlemen stated; but he would plainly ask, was it for such an object, this large sum was called for? He would plainly say—no. It was a grant to the duke of Cumberland and not to his child; and his objection was that it was so. But he had strong objections to this bill on a variety of grounds. It differed in the preamble from all former bills of supply for the members of the royal family. All that the House could find in the preamble of this bill was, that "it is expedient to provide for the education of a son of the duke of Cumberland." He utterly denied any such expediency. Let the House, then, remember the ages at which it was thought fitting to apply to parliament for a provision for the princes of the royal
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family. The duke of Sussex was twenty-eight years of age before such an application was made for him; the duke of Cambridge was twenty-nine; the duke of Kent thirty-two; and the duke of Cumberland twenty-eight. Why, then, with these precedents, was it deemed expedient to grant this little prince 6,000 l. a-year? Nobody had asked for it. With whom, then, did the notion originate? At first, he confessed he was caught with the idea of having this young prince educated in England; but, on more consideration, he had changed his opinion; for if, as was said, the duke of Cumberland preferred a foreign residence, it would be cruel to tear from him a child of such tender years. And then, how came the sudden aversion for having a young prince educated in Germany? Did they not know, that his late majesty of beloved memory was in the habit of sending his children to Germany for education? What the mischief was, he really did not know. He could quite understand, that if this child had grown up, it might be right to guard him against the chance of any inoculation of the abominable principles of the Holy Alliance; but, how a child of six years old could be in danger he was at a loss to comprehend. All former grants to the royal family were expressly guarded by the king's control; but now they were called upon to give the money, by virtue of letters patent, not to the king, but to the duke of Cumberland. He disliked this departure from the old practice, which always recognized the king as the head of the royal family, and, further, gave the constitutional responsibility of the ministers for the due appropriation of the money. Here all these guards were broken down; and if the duke of Cumberland should pocket the money, and not leave his son a sufficient time in England for his education, he was convinced that no man would step in, and insist upon the unnatural separation of father and child; and this he knew, that his majesty was too good to insist upon such a breach of natural affections. A good deal had been urged respecting proper assurance of the education of the child in England, and but little comparatively upon the constitutional principle of the grant. In 1806, when an additional 6,000 l. a-year had been granted to the members of the royal family, 7,000 l. a-year was placed at the disposal of the king for the education of

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the princess Charlotte: the present king, the father of her royal highness, was then prince of Wales, but the money was not intrusted to him, but to the king, the grandfather of the young princess. Let the same course be pursued on the present occasion, and then he should get rid of the greater part of his objection to the motion. He would defy any man to put his hand to his heart and state any reason why they ought to part from the old and wholesome precedent. He could not comprehend the meaning of all this, nor why the ministers chose to commit themselves thus with the country.
Mr. Secretary Canningsaid, that among the topics introduced by the right hon. gentleman, he had principally dwelt upon the form of the bill, and complained that it left his majesty without that due control over the application of the money, which had been interwoven in all former grants to the royal family. Now, he denied that the right hon. gentleman had put a fair construction upon the meaning of the bill; for, as the bill was drawn, the House had a sufficient guarantee for the application of the money to the purpose for which they had intended it. For it was provided, that two things should be ascertained before a single payment was made by virtue of the bill: first, whether it pleased his royal highness to reside with his family in England, and superintend in person the education of the young prince; for in that case there was no doubt the money was intended immediately to pass into the hands of the royal duke. But, supposing it did not please the duke of Cumberland to take up his residence in England, and that he determined still to reside abroad—and really upon that point his majesty's government were at present without any information to guide their opinions—then, unquestionably, it would be the duty of his majesty's government, before they issued the money, to take such steps as would ensure the application of it according to the conditions upon which the grant was framed. So that in either alternative, the House had the assurance that their intentions could not he frustrated. Why it now pleased the duke of Cumberland to select a foreign residence, it was not their province to inquire; and while, on the one hand, it would be harsh to make this grant the positive condition of his return, so on the other they had every chance of tempting him to reside in this country. But, in any view of the
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subject, whether he resided here or not, still they secured a British education for a British prince. Indeed, the right hon. gentleman himself admitted, that he was first struck with the propriety of securing such an object, though he had afterwards altered his opinion: so that the only difference between the right hon. gentleman and his majesty's ministers was this—that they maintained the opinions they had set out with, while the right hon. gentleman had abandoned his. The government thought the young prince should be brought up here in England, and thus recorded the expediency of that opinion in the bill. And they must, in looking at the subject merely in a pecuniary view, at once see, that the duke of Cumberland did not benefit in that sense, when they considered the great additional expense which would be entailed upon his royal highness by the transference of his residence to this country, or by the arrangements here for the education of his child. Whether the whole of this money would be, pound by pound, applied to the education of the young prince in the first year or in the second year, he was not prepared to say; but this he would say, that as the grant was intended by his majesty's ministers to cover the public allowance for the whole minority of the prince of Cumberland, he thought it no more than a fair average of the actual expenses of such a personage until he had attained his full maturity. It was, he thought, the fair and preferable, the more respectful and delicate, course, to come at once with the general sum which was adequate to the general purpose, and not year after year be recurring to parliament for fresh supplies to meet a growing expenditure in the royal family. He knew not why such a proposal should be stigmatized by the epithets of dishonest, uncalled-for, and unconstitutional. No man could deny the principle, that it was proper to have a British prince educated at home. Neither could it be asserted that, covering the whole minority, the proposed grant was more than enough for carrying that principle into effect. He denied the application of the right hon. gentleman's precedents to the case before the House. In all the previous cases, the increase of income was at the time common to all the members of the royal family in whose behalf it was made; but here was a case in which they had denied one member of the illustrious family upon the throne,

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a grant which they had conferred upon the rest; and that personage having had subsequently born to him a son, in whose education the public had an interest, it was deemed right to secure to the parent the means of fulfilling that public expectation. Undoubtedly, it was right for the House, in that as well as in every other case, to guard the expenditure of the public money; but, it was unfair to impute motives to government which were not warranted upon the face of the transaction. He for one disclaimed any hidden motive in proposing this grant. It was to enable the duke of Cumberland to give his son a British education; it was to promote a subject of national importance; and, neither in the principle nor in the manner of its application, did he see any thing from the responsibility of which he shrunk to participate.
Mr. Broughamsaid, he gave the right hon. gentlemen opposite entire credit for their declaration, that they were on this occasion uninfluenced by sinister motives. And it was further due to them to say, that they had at length put this question upon its fair issue, and had frankly avowed, that the only reason for conferring this grant upon the duke of Cumberland, was, because his royal highness had not obtained this 6,000 l. a-year. In other terms, that the object in which the chancellor of the Exchequer had been frustrated in the years 1815 and 1816, was to be carried into execution in the year 1825. But, though the ministers said this, the bill did not; for the bill said the money was to be given for the education of the child. But he differed with the right hon. gentleman as to the power which he thought he would possess over this bill when it passed through parliament; he differed from him as to the construction of the law; and was sure his view would be sustained by the Crown lawyers and the lord chancellor, were the case referred to them as the legal advisers of the Crown. The act of parliament was imperative; and, from the moment it passed, the money became, as of right, vested in the duke of Cumberland. It would be then too late to negociate about its application to any other purpose than that to which it should please his royal highness to appropriate it. The right hon. gentleman would recollect, that in a late bill, the Catholic bill, the omission of the two words "shall and may," in the optional commission for regulating certain matters touching the
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question then at issue, had so altered the legal construction of that part of the bill, that they were obliged to re-cast it, and take from the Friday to the Monday before they could send it to that place, where it met the fate of all other bills which had for their object toleration for civil and religious liberty. It had been said, that there was a difference between the case of this infant and that of the other princes of the royal family who had been previously provided for; because they, meaning his late majesty's sons, had lived under the royal paternal roof, with all the advantages which attended it. Now, he must deny that to be the fact. The princes of the blood were completely emancipated from the paternal roof in early life—unless, indeed, the paternal roof could be supposed to cover the towns of Lisbon, and Gibraltar, Halifax, and Nova Scotia, and to have formed the garrisons where some of these illustrious princes had resided. The duke of Gloucester's case was still more in point; for there the income was rendered dependent upon the natural demise of his royal father. There was no getting rid of such a precedent; nor any seeing the length to which it was capable of being unconstitutionally carried. The duke of Sussex, except the allowance made to him by parliament as one of the royal offspring, had never received one shilling of the public money, in any manner, or form, whatsoever. It was the lot of that illustrious prince to have married a lady in a foreign country, and by that most unfortunate of all acts, the royal marriage act, such foreign marriage was illegal in England, by the very worst of all human laws—that same identical royal marriage act, which had been well described by Mr. Wilberforce as the most unconstitutional act that disgraced the Statute-book; and for the violation of such an act had his royal highness suffered by a heavy diminution of his income. The pecuniary effect of that step had been, to reduce the income of his royal highness, to 13,000 l. a-year. The duke of Sussex had never applied for an increase of income—he had never dreamt of applying for it; never had he compounded with his creditors; always had he ensured for each of them a course of payment for 20 s. in every pound of debt which was contracted. By his royal highness's excellent management, with the assistance of a learned person who superintended his affairs, his debts had been reduced from 100,000 l. to a very

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inconsiderable residue. They were now sunk to a sum hardly worth mentioning; and, this had been effected without exposing his royal highness to any circumstances, whereby the royal dignity could be degraded in his person. He trusted he had now redeemed his pledge by resisting this bad measure, to the utmost of his power. The last stage was at hand, and he hoped to God the House might still do its duty, and act so as to look back on that night's vote with satisfaction. But, be the event what it might, they on his side had done their duty, and could look confidently to the people for support. Nor had they any reason to expect that even the prince, whose wishes they had opposed, would misconstrue the integrity or their motives. The illustrious House to which he belongs, is renowned for a magnanimous spirit towards fair and honourable adversaries. The duke of York freely overlooked, both officially and as an individual, the part taken by those who, in 1809, had the painful task to perform of censuring his conduct. Her late majesty, the most persecuted of women, was also the most forgiving. She had left behind her an illustrious personage closely connected to her by blood and affinity, who partook of that magnanimous spirit of forgiveness, which so eminently characterized that royal lady. The late Mr. Perceval received his forgiveness and enjoyed his favour. The same forgiveness had been extended to his successors in place; and a much less important person, the individual who then addressed them, though far removed from such conflicts, yet by the accident of the times, having come into what inferior minds might deem a collision with that highest quarter, where false rumours were propagated by interested malice or by intrigue, as if the faithful discharge of his public and professional duties had incurred the personal displeasure of the sovereign, had the extraordinary satisfaction of knowing that a gracious, and the more gracious because a voluntary, assurance had been given by that illustrious personage, that all such rumours were utterly without foundation. The duke of Cumberland would after that night's vote, he had no doubt, show, by his candid construction of their motives, that he belonged to the same family with the duke of York, the late queen, and the sovereign himself.
The House divided: Ayes 170; Noes 121. The bill was then read a third time.