‘I can no more play the game of life than I can play the game of whist’, admitted Mackintosh.
At the start of this period Mackintosh combined his parliamentary career, in which he occupied a position of some eminence among the Whig opposition, with his undemanding role as professor of law at the East India Company’s training college at Haileybury, Hertfordshire, occupying a rented house, described by Henry Fox* as ‘lamentable’, at Mardocks, near Ware. There he tried also to advance his too numerous and ambitious literary and historical projects, which included a continuation of Hume’s and Fox’s history of Britain from 1688.
a little too much made up in his manners and conversation, but ... at the same time very exact, definite, and logical in what he says ... As a part of a considerable literary society ... he discourses most eloquent music, and in private he is mild, gentle, and entertaining. But he is seen to greatest advantage, and in all his strength, only in serious discussion, to which he brings a great disciplined acuteness and a fluent eloquence, which few may venture to oppose, and which still fewer can effectually resist.
After visiting him at Mardocks, Ticknor concluded that ‘on the whole, I have never met with an Englishman [sic] whose conversation was more richly nourished with knowledge, at once elegant and profound’.
I knew Sir James well in former times and cannot agree in his fitness as a leader. He has neither sufficient confidence in himself, nor sufficient energy and independence of spirit ... [He is] mild, liberal and with just and enlarged views on almost every subject; but without much dignity or firmness of mind. Indeed he has several times lamented his want of firmness and resolution.
Losh Diaries ed. E. Hughes (Surtees Soc. clxxi), i. 95.
Mackintosh had offended the radicals, for whom he had no time, and even some Whigs by failing to oppose root and branch the coercive legislation introduced by the Liverpool ministry in the aftermath of Peterloo. He disputed Lord Holland’s assertion that the Cato Street conspiracy of February 1820 could be attributed to anger and frustration at repression, as ‘the disposition to assassinate must have existed long before the passing of the seditious meetings bill’.
In examining the case calmly I cannot pretend to deny to myself that his determination was right. But to be deprived of so great a distinction which seems to have been brought within reach by a most unexpected concurrence of circumstances must be felt to be painful even while it is acknowledged not to be unreasonable. The state of my health during the present journey compels me to own the justice of the present exclusion, but it is not an agreeable ground of conviction ... From Tierney I have experienced no kindness. He has never trusted or consulted me, nor did he tell me this important determination till it was no longer a secret.
Add. 52444, ff. 87-88, 93.
It is safe to say that he would have been a broken man within weeks had he become leader.
Unwell with persistent ‘nausea’ after his return, he promised his absent wife ‘whenever you are pleased to come ... a still more complete forbearance from offence and a more unresisting submission to any censure which you may deem still to be necessary’.
It is a question in which better health, perhaps longer life, ease in my private affairs and the probability of completing my history are placed on one side; on the other side political importance and parliamentary reputation. These last objects are so dazzling that it would probably [be] difficult to compare them calmly ... [with] those for which they would be sacrificed if it were not for the peculiarly uneasy circumstances of my parliamentary situation. Our party is in a state of the greatest division and dissension and ... there seems little doubt of final schism.
He was still miffed at Tierney’s casual rejection of his pretensions to leadership, and the prospect of acting as second string to a headstrong Brougham, determined to involve the party in the queen’s cause, did not appeal, particularly as Brougham was currently ‘at war’ with Devonshire and his family. Yet he feared that if he turned his back on the professorship he ‘must lay my account with having no position of that sort to fall back on when the time comes (which probably will come) of Parliament becoming too uneasy to remain in it’. Holland and Lansdowne, whom he consulted, were utterly hostile to the idea of his leaving Parliament, the latter urging him not to sacrifice ‘a situation of great authority independent of all official situation [and] ... no inconsiderable share of following and popularity both in and out of Parliament’. Even though Mackintosh complained to his wife that Lansdowne, ‘the best example of sincerity without frankness of any man I know’, had ‘said nothing explicit about the place which he wished me to fill in the House of Commons’, these views were decisive with him, the more so when Lansdowne reacted with ‘unwonted frankness and even warmth’ to dismiss the fanciful notion, held out to him by his Edinburgh friends, that he might take the chair and retain his seat, attending Parliament for only the last three months of each session after completing his lectures, ‘which though not enough for the leader leaves room for a respectable situation’.
In early May 1820 Mackintosh was pressed by a deputation from Gibraltar to take steps to become their London agent, which opened to him the enticing prospect of an income of £600, possibly £1,000, a year with an office and a clerk; nothing came of it.
an angry letter from Brougham complaining that I should do that for Grattan which I thought in general a bad practice and which we had agreed not to do for [Sir Samuel] Romilly†. I answered him mildly that I was too far advanced to retreat and stated ... the difference between a recent death where the praise might be natural and a death some time before the motion when it must seem cold and studied. I spoke for about half an hour with more than usual satisfaction to myself and with evidently strong impression on the House.
He had written plaintively to his wife the previous day that ‘I go on journalising, though you don’t vouchsafe to give me any signs that you are satisfied with my attempts to amuse you’.
It seems to me that a dangerous spirit spreads among the soldiery ... Full of these really alarming stories I went to bed at one and had a disturbed night with dreams of revolutionary horrors soothed only by visions of kindness from those from whom I dare not hope for it in my waking hours.
Despite having diarrhoea, he attended ‘a Whig council at John Lambton’s* beautiful house’ next day, when he confided to his wife, ‘I often sigh for the professorship’. He voted with his friends against the appointment of a secret committee on the queen’s case, 26 June.
Mackintosh had assumed Romilly’s mantle as the parliamentary champion of criminal law reform. On 9 May 1820 he secured the reappointment of his select committee of 1819 and, on the basis of its report, got leave to introduce four bills, which he presented that day, to abolish capital punishment for a variety of offences. On 19 May he introduced two general bills to repeal the whole or part of certain statutes imposing the death penalty, withdrew his original measure relating to the punishment for forgery and brought in an amended one. After consultations with the crown law officers, he withdrew the latter and his measures dealing with robberies in dwelling houses and on navigable rivers, which they would have opposed. On 4 July Mackintosh, who had earlier that day made an unsuccessful personal appeal to Lord Sidmouth, the home secretary, for clemency for a young man sentenced to death for uttering forged notes (Sidmouth pointed out that ‘though a married man he had uttered one in a brothel’, which prompted in Mackintosh the silent reflection that the miscreant was ‘thus in part hanged for adultery’), secured the third reading of the two general bills and the privately stealing in shops bill. He had been forced to modify all of them and felt no personal elation but, as he told his wife, he still felt that if the Lords sanctioned them he would have achieved a significant mitigation of the severity of the criminal code. After passing ‘two hours very tiresomely’ at the Scottish burghs committee, 5 July, he went to the Lords with his bills, ‘and felt more nervous in delivering them to the chancellor than I have of late been used to do on public occasions’. The measures were further emasculated by the Lords, but became law on 25 July 1820 as 1 Geo. IV, c. 115 (capital felonies punishment); c. 116 (capital felonies repeal); and c. 117 (privately stealing in shops).
Soon afterwards he fell ill, but he recovered during the autumn with the aid of a lengthy course of Cheltenham waters, to the extent that in late October he could ‘begin to think myself a new man’. However, Lansdowne, with whom he stayed at Bowood a month later, was far from convinced that he was ‘well’.
Mackintosh’s want of observation in common life, and his helplessness in the House of Commons from that circumstance. Tierney ... has rather a slighting opinion of his consequence; and says he is a ‘very good historical man, and may be relied upon for a sound opinion about Cardinal Wolsey or so; but for anything of the present day’, etc.
Moore Mems. iii. 177.
Tierney and Lord Grey were accordingly happy to exploit Mackintosh’s literary skills, which he applied to the composition for the Edinburgh Review of an article advocating a measure of parliamentary reform. Tierney observed to Grey that ‘if you like the whole, or any part of his suggestions, you will have the means of drawing up what you may avow as your own creed, and if you disapprove of his project it can be considered only as the speculation of the writer, and binds no one’. Writing the piece, which was ostensibly a review of Russell’s speech of 14 Dec. 1819 advocating the transfer of the franchise from corrupt boroughs to unrepresented large towns, convinced Mackintosh, as he told Holland, that
something substantial and serious must be proposed. Without such a plan I doubt whether the country can be kept quiet and whether you can become ministers. I am sure you cannot without a measure of that sort continue ministers.
Grey mss, Tierney to Grey, 7 Dec.; Add. 51653, Mackintosh to Holland, 22 Dec. [1820].
He advocated the immediate addition to the Commons of 20 Members for unrepresented large towns, to be elected by ‘a widely diffused franchise’ adapted to local conditions. He proposed the adoption of more effectual machinery for the disfranchisement of ‘delinquent boroughs’: the first ten such forfeitures were to be used to restore the membership of the House to its current size; and thereafter transfers of the franchise were to be made piecemeal as necessary. He wanted a significant widening of the Scottish county franchise and an unspecified reduction in the duration of Parliaments. To Losh, the article, which earned Mackintosh some credit, ‘looks like feeling the pulse of the reformers, by proposing a plan which might suit what is called the Whig faction’.
Mackintosh voted against the omission of the queen’s name from the liturgy, 23 Jan., and spoke and voted in the same sense, 26 Jan. 1821, when the Whig George Howard*, a spectator in the gallery, thought he was ‘very good and able, but his voice and lungs were unequal’, while the ministerialist Lord Ancram* admitted that his speech was ‘excellent’. The ‘Mountaineer’ Henry Grey Bennet wrote that his ‘very able, clever and eloquent speech ... made mincemeat’ of the attorney-general Gifford.
perhaps there never was a session in which the balance turns out so much against our party as the present. The queen and the Neapolitans have proved wretched adventures, and the Catholic question, which has had a partial success, is not all our own.
He was ‘very much perplexed’ as to what to do on Lambton’s planned parliamentary reform motion, feeling that if it was for inquiry he would be obliged to vote for it to ‘avoid being thought an enemy of reform’, but that it was ‘very difficult’ for him to speak on the issue. Relieved to find that Lambton intended to ‘open his motion in such a way as to deliver us moderate reformers from the necessity of speaking merely to disavow his plan’, he voted silently for it, 18 Apr.
On 11 Apr. 1821 he introduced a bill to abolish capital punishment for all forgery offences except that of Bank of England notes, the defence of which he largely entrusted to his coadjutor Fowell Buxton. He had a ‘glorious’ victory, 23 May, when, to his own great surprise, he carried his motion to go into committee on the measure against ministerial resistance by 118-74.
I did not satisfy myself on criminal law, but ... I thought I did tolerably on Sicily and the French slave trade. I had however no great reason to believe that others thought so, for as I never before was so scurrilously treated by the enemy, so on the other hand I never received so little countenance and civility from those whom the world calls my political friends. John Bull and a villainous paper at Edinburgh called the Beacon have pursued me with libels.
He could not ‘catch at such straws’ as the belief of some Whigs that ministerial conflict with the king would bring them down, though he was ‘vulgar enough to wish that the Whigs were in power (by any means) if it were only for a few months and to do two or three things’, notably carry Catholic emancipation. He had little interest in the coronation, which he nevertheless attended, and the dispute over the queen’s right to be crowned, preferring to dwell instead on the death of Buonaparte, ‘the greatest of conquerors and nearly the best’: ‘No one who forced himself into the supreme power from a private station and conquered so great a part of the bravest and most intelligent of mankind ever did so little evil’. On a personal note, he found it painful to ‘recollect how little of the business of life has been accomplished’ in the last 20 years. In early August 1821 he felt that ‘the Whigs in London are doing all they can by their present clamour to frustrate all good intentions which the king may feel’. Later in the month he observed to Lansdowne, ‘I am displeased with the sublimities of some of our friends who seem to think that if once in half a century a favourable breeze should spring up at Court the Whigs should take no advantage of it’.
In October Mackintosh’s son-in-law Claudius Rich, the husband of his daughter Mary, died suddenly in Persia. Mackintosh secured a pension of £200 a year from the East India Company for Mary (who eventually came home and contributed to his domestic unease by not getting on with his wife) and negotiated the sale of Rich’s papers to the British Museum for £7,000.
I do not think the Whig affairs were in so bad a state since Mr. Fox was first a leader as they are now. We have lost such help as we received from the radicals and the queen. The odium of both connections remains.
Add. 51653, Mackintosh to Holland, 18 Dec., reply, 20 Dec. 1821; Add. 52445, f. 7; O’Leary, 31-33, 84-85, 145-6.
At the end of the month he commented to Lansdowne that by accommodating the Grenvillites ‘the ministers have considerably secured themselves by taking off all those with whom opposition might have coalesced to make a government’. He considered Peel’s appointment as home secretary to be
a step to a higher Toryism and consequently to a more undistinguishing resistance of all novelties. With that opinion I am perplexed about my criminal law. On the one hand it is not advisable to damp the spirit of the friends of those measures by inactivity. On the other it is dangerous to multiply parliamentary decisions against them.
Lansdowne mss, Mackintosh to Lansdowne, 28 Dec. 1821.
Three weeks later Whishaw found him
remarkably well [at Mardocks] and seriously engaged upon his history, in which he is now more in earnest than I have ever known him. He works at it regularly some hours every day, and his conversation shows that his mind is full of the subject. He is inclined to give only an occasional attendance in Parliament.
Yet the same day Mackintosh, seeking instruction from Holland House as to what line opposition intended to take at the opening of the session, prophetically observed that although ‘history occupies every hour ... I often have painful misgivings that after all I only collect materials for some man of greater powers who will begin the arduous work in a season of more leisure, cheerfulness and strength’.
Mackintosh is much improved in the art of conversation since we saw him. Mixing more with the polished world and being engaged in great affairs and with great men and women has perfected him in the use and management of his wonderful natural powers and vast accumulated treasures of knowledge. His memory now appears to work less, his eloquence is more easy, his wit more brilliant, his anecdotes more happily introduced. The whole is brought into better compass and proportion and he has the high-bred touch and go of the man of the world as well as the classical high and deep advantages of the scholar and orator. Altogether his conversation is the most delightful I ever heard.
Edgeworth Letters, 332.
He went to London on 1 Feb. 1822 and occupied lodgings in Cork Street, found for him by the Hollands. Almost immediately he was afflicted with deafness and stomach trouble. He felt that ‘the parliamentary prospect is very disheartening’, for ‘we are no longer a party’, and ‘every man is in a great measure left to act according to his own judgement or according to his want of it’. Unsure what line to take on Hume’s anticipated amendment to the address on 5 Feb., Mackintosh, who thought that the ‘Mountaineers look rather adversely on me’ and that he was ‘weakened’ by Brougham’s current ‘inactivity’, consulted Lansdowne ‘about speaking’. Lansdowne seemed ‘well pleased that the dissolution of the party should clearly distinguish the moderates from the Mountain’; but in the event Hume gave up his amendment and opposition decided to keep quiet. Mackintosh apparently attended on the opening day, although he was ill, and described it as ‘one of the most suffering days of the last eleven years of ill health’. He voted against the Irish insurrection bill, 7 Feb.
in the course of 12 years suffering I have not had so vexatious an interruption to my usefulness as during the last month. The rude have expressed and even the more refined have betrayed their surprise at my silence in Parliament.
Add. 52445, ff. 56-61.
He was in the House on 6 and 7 Mar., when he broke his silence with a few unreported words on the records of Parliament. He was appointed to the select committee on that subject, 12 Mar., and to the one on the police of the metropolis, 14 Mar. He spoke and voted for abolition of one of the ‘totally and absolutely useless’ joint-postmasterships, 13 Mar., delivering what the Whig backbencher Moulton Barrett considered ‘a most brilliant speech’.
At Brooks’s on 22 Apr. 1822 Mackintosh ‘lamented the irreparable injury done to the Catholic cause by such animosities among its supporters’ as the one anticipated in the Commons that day between Plunket, recently appointed Irish attorney-general, and Newport. Like most of the Whigs, he was won over by Plunket’s brilliant performance in the debate. He paid the price of his late night with
a very miserable day of constant headache and languor, frequent efforts to prepare my parliamentary business and very melancholy apprehensions that after having sacrificed so much to it I shall be under the sad necessity of relinquishing it altogether.
He was well enough to speak in support of the remission of Henry Hunt’s* prison sentence, 24 Apr., deploring ‘the maxim that any illegal severity could be practised upon any individual because he was odious’.
Mackintosh, who claimed to ‘find industry the best remedy against depression’ caused by the ailing state of his daughter Elizabeth and his worries for the safety of Mary Rich, whose ship from the East was overdue, considered the death of Londonderry a ‘great blow’ to the Catholic cause, and did not think Canning’s admission to the cabinet would restore the balance.
looking unwell and old, but ... in better spirits than I expected. He is however too much cast down by the crises and afflictions he has had lately to think of leaving home ... He seems to be living indolently and quietly, feeding himself as usual with new books.
As for his history
he ... [seemed] more worried by study and the responsibility of an historian than anything else. He seems to have advanced very much ... Five or six years is after all not much for such a work considering he has had a liver, and risen to great fame as an orator and reformer of laws within the same time. To say nothing of reviewing, a species of eminence not easily classified.
Add. 51679, Russell to Lady Holland [18, 20 Oct. 1822].
At the same time Whishaw reported that Mackintosh, who was additionally distracted by having been given notice to quit Mardocks at next Lady Day [25 Mar. 1823] and by recent disturbances at Haileybury, was ‘altogether much better than I expected’, though he ‘complains of the effects of constant anxiety upon his health, and has lately had some returns of the giddiness which affected him two years ago’. He feared that the history had been neglected for an article on foreign politics for the Edinburgh: ‘It is become an unpleasant subject, and I could not press him upon it’.
I am indeed daily frightened about finishing the history at all. I despair of doing it well. Yet I cannot relinquish it and as I have at last got into the habit of daily application to it I am very anxious that the habit should be interrupted as rarely and shortly as possible.
After Christmas he was at Althorp, where Agar Ellis greatly enjoyed ‘his most agreeable and instructive conversation’: ‘I know no man whose society gives me so high an admiration for his talents ... such clearness of expression, such cultivation of intellect, such memory, wit, everything in short that gives grace and amusement and dignity to social intercourse’.
an utter and inconceivable failure. I cannot tell whether the conception or the execution of it was worst [sic]. It has baffled all my speculative powers to discover how such an absolute want of tact and effect could be evinced by such a master.
A correspondent of Fox informed him:
The speech was brilliant in some passages and very Mackintoshian in all. The spirit just and philosophic, the expression copious and refined, but the manner nothing better than the parliamentary see-saw and sing-song. The chief fault was length and a total misconception of the audience. He never seemed to recollect that the great majority of his hearers were almost boys and could not be interested in long details and historical allusions. But on the whole it was well received, though I must not conceal from you that disappointment was the general impression.
Cockburn Letters, 76; Fox Jnl. 152.
He did rather better at the Fox dinner, 14 Jan. 1823. Cockburn thought he was ‘didactic’ but ‘good’, while Abercromby wrote that he ‘did on the whole very well’, though he doubted ‘the taste and judgement of having made his speech not only a eulogy of Mr. Fox but also an attack on Mr. Pitt’. Grey, on whom he called at Howick on his way south, noted, with some slight misgivings, ‘how deeply he and all our friends pledged themselves to the question of reform’. Mackintosh also descended on Sydney Smith at Foston:
About half after five in the evening (3 feet of snow on the ground and all communication with Christendom utterly cut off) a chaise and four drove up to the parsonage and from it issued Sir James and his appendages. His letter of annunciation arrived the following morning ... Mackintosh is always agreeable, but is a little older than he was 20 years ago. His daughter [Frances, his favourite] is a pleasant girl, rather overpraised. The most valuable gift Providence could have presented him with, would have been a daughter addicted to arithmetic, and needle-work, a cunning sempstress and one who could cast up a bill. Unfortunately this young woman is as helpless as her father, without having I am afraid so valid an excuse for the deficiency ... Mackintosh had 70 volumes in his carriage; none of the glasses would draw down or let up but one. He left his hat behind him at our house.
Cockburn Mems. 378; Add. 51574, Abercromby to Holland [21 Jan.]; Grey mss, Grey to same, 22 Jan. 1823; Smith Letters, i. 394-5.
On the address, 4 Feb. 1823, he applauded ‘many of the just principles’ enunciated in the king’s speech, but deplored Allied aggression against Spain and held out the spectre of ‘a Muscovite army lining the shores of the continent, from Amsterdam to Cadiz’; as Gurney saw it, he ‘proved we ought to go to war out of Cicero and the speeches of William III’.
the king of the men of talent. He is a most elegant converser ... He is uncommonly powerful in his own line; but it is not the line of a first-rate man. After all his fluency and brilliant erudition, you can rarely carry off anything worth preserving. You might not improperly write on his forehead, ‘Warehouse to let!’ He always dealt too much in generalities for a lawyer. He is deficient in power in applying his principles to the points in debate.
Specimens of the Table Talk of Coleridge (1835), i. 24-25.
He was in a minority of 14 for an attempt to prevent the reappointment of insolvent collectors under the Irish county treasurers bill, 2 May. He contributed to the Dublin inquiry, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9 May, arguing that witnesses should not be compelled to dispense with their previous oaths. On 21 May he questioned Canning about Russian threats to British maritime rights, before moving nine resolutions for extensive revision of the criminal code. Although Peel secured their defeat by 86-76, he made it clear that ministers intended to introduce reforms, which Mackintosh recognized as the best chance of achieving significant results. He supported Lord Nugent’s proposal to place British and Irish Catholics on the same footing as regarded civil rights, 28 May, when he said that the refusal to concede emancipation had the appearance of ‘one of those acts of infatuation which had sometimes preceded the downfall of empires’; and he presented a petition for legalizing Catholic marriages by Catholic clergy, 12 June. He voted in condemnation of the lord advocate’s treatment of the Scottish press, 3 June, and for inquiry into chancery delays, 5 June. He spoke and voted in favour of referring the silk manufacture bill to a select committee, 9 June, when he was in the opposition minorities on the Leeward Islands duties and the coronation expenses. He spoke at a London Tavern meeting in support of the Spanish liberals, 13 June.
Later that month Mackintosh, who contrived, with the assistance of Brougham, to keep out of the press reports of the scandal involving his daughter Catherine, who had abandoned her husband Sir William Wiseman for another man, went on a tour of private archives, seeking material for his history, which took him to Welbeck, Netherby and Brougham. In early August, even ‘especially abominable heartburn’ did not diminish his pleasure at ‘the good accounts from Spain’.
I see more clearly ... that attempts to question our foreign policy are at present unseasonable and serve only to exalt Canning. Shall I for that reason withdraw my notice about South America? It might perhaps be done on the avowed ground of Canning having said on ...[the 18th] that he should consider a Spanish armament against America while the occupation lasts as being in effect French. Do you think that it might be thought shabby after Canning’s triumph? I lay no stress on my own bad speech for I think myself rather entitled to credit for having thrown myself into the breach when I was very unwell and when I was not only unprepared to speak but had resolved not to speak. Neither do I say anything of some from whom I expected more friendly treatment and who I think would have done better to have dissuaded myself from the motion than to have run it down in the world.
He accordingly withdrew his notice on that pretext, 25 Mar. 1824. Bedford commented that it was ‘a pity’ that Mackintosh, ‘with all his great talents and lofty mind, should injure himself by fulsome and ridiculous compliments to such a man as Canning’.
Speaking early in the evening because he was still not well, he opposed the aliens bill, 23 Mar. 1824. He voted silently against it, 2, 12 Apr. He voted to refer the reports of the Scottish justice commission to a committee of the whole House, 30 Mar. He spoke and voted for George Lamb’s bill to permit defence by counsel in felony cases, 6 Apr. The previous November Fowell Buxton had pressed him to give his ‘full, hearty, and unreserved co-operation’ to the abolitionist cause; and he presented an anti-slavery petition, 25 Mar., and welcomed the slave trade piracy bill and the pending treaty with America, 26 Mar. He presented a petition from the London Missionary Society complaining of the prosecution of the Methodist missionary John Smith in Demerara, 13 Apr., and supported Brougham’s motion on the subject, 11 June, when Wilberforce wrote that his speech was ‘most beautiful, his mind teemed with ideas’.
That month, still afflicted by poor health which ‘not only deprives me of enjoyments, but either hinders or enfeebles the performance of duties, and often crowds with indispensable business the intervals when it is itself more tolerable’, he gave up the Haileybury professorship and took a pension of £200.
one of the ablest and most accomplished men of the age, both as a writer, a speaker, and a converser. He is, in fact, master of almost every known topic ... He has lived much in society, and is deeply conversant with books. He is a man of the world and a scholar; but the scholar gives the tone to all his other acquirements and pursuits ... By education and habit ... [he is] a college man; and perhaps he would have passed his time most happily and respectably, had he devoted himself entirely to that kind of life ... In company he talks well, but too much ... In writing he overlays the original subject and spirit of the composition by an appeal to authorities and by too formal a method ... In public speaking the logician takes the place of the orator ... and he fails to give effect to a particular point or to urge an immediate advantage home ... As a political partisan, he is rather the lecturer than the advocate ... The chief characteristics of his mind are retentiveness and comprehension, with facility of production; but he is not equally remarkable for originality of view, or warmth of feeling, or liveliness of fancy. His eloquence is a little rhetorical; his reasoning chiefly logical ... He is distinguished more as a man of wonderful and variable talent than as a man of commanding intellect ... He makes a respectable ally, but not a very formidable opponent.
W. Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age ed. E.D. Mackerness (1969), 151-3.
Mackintosh denounced the Irish unlawful societies bill and attacked Plunket to ‘loud cheers’, 14 Feb. 1825; Sir John Nicholl* thought it a ‘fine speech ... though not much grappling with the real question; but the biased Bankes was scathing:
Mackintosh ... laboured at it with tiresome and curious infelicity, applying all the subtleties and discriminations of metaphysical sophistry to the interpretation of a sentiment addressed to the most common and least educated understanding. Never was indeed a more wretched failure than the whole of his long speech.
Merthyr Mawr mss F/2/8 (14 Feb. 1825); Bankes jnl. 153.
He voted against the measure, 15, 21, 25 Feb. He presented a Knaresborough petition in favour of the county courts bill, 25 Feb.
I soon felt a whirl in the head and in about ten minutes I was compelled (in spite of brandy and water) to rush out into an adjoining room where I retched and vomited for twenty minutes over or into an immense pail (used for washing decanters, plates, etc.), surrounded by fifty servants, till I was carried home in a chair and put to bed where I gradually got into a quieter state.
Add. 52447, ff. 1-6; O’Leary, 161-2.
On 21 Apr. he presented and endorsed a Glasgow petition in favour of Catholic claims and voted for the relief bill. He paired for its third reading, 10 May 1825.
His health was by now so poor (he made his will on 30 Jan. 1826, having on the 1st noted that he was ‘unwell on the first morning of perhaps the last day of my life)
That summer, when Lady Holland reckoned that he was ‘better, but ... still tremulously alive to any symptom that denotes a change in health or sensations’, he was in agonies of indecision as to whether to go to Switzerland or Belgium or his brother-in-law’s residence at Cresselly in Pembrokeshire for a lengthy period of seclusion. Apart from wishing to devote himself to his flagging history, he needed to economize, having lost money in some unwise speculations as a result of the commercial crash of 1825-6. The Hollands came to his rescue by placing Ampthill at his disposal as a temporary retreat offering ‘a very agreeable and undisturbed retirement’ within easy reach of London, where he could attend meetings of two obscure insurance companies, for his chairmanship of which he received modest fees. He moved in there with his books and household goods at the beginning of September 1826.
My time is spent in exercise, writing and struggling with my megrim, which, if I could trust appearances which have already deceived, I should almost think subdued. I know that the few who will think of me for a moment when I am dead will call me a hypochondriac. If they knew my whole condition in mind and body and estate they would rather wonder at my cheerfulness.
He was worried that he might be obliged to appear in the Commons to defend the ill-fated Colombian Association, of which he was chairman, against the petition of disgruntled settlers sent out under its aegis, but nothing came of this. He was present to vote, despite being tormented by headache and toothache, for Catholic relief, 6 Mar., resting in a committee at intervals during the debate. Disappointed at the defeat of the motion, and fearful that `the high Tories if they become rulers’ in the aftermath of Liverpool’s stroke would ‘ruin the country’, he attended a meeting at the duke of Norfolk’s, 8 Mar., at which it was decided to ‘do nothing till the administration is formed’. After further dental treatment he returned to Ampthill. He was given three weeks’ leave on account of ill health, 23 Mar., when he complained of ‘frequent fits of weakness and languor’, but talked optimistically of going to press with the first volume of his history by October 1827. A week later he observed that ‘had I begun this continued labour ten years ago unseduced by a little transient and accidental success of another kind, I should have had better faculties as well as more leisure for my undertaking’.
He was at Ampthill when he heard of the negotiations for the formation of Canning’s ministry. By his own account, composed three months later, he was initially ‘presumptuous enough’ to think that if Canning offered the Whigs three cabinet places in the Commons, he would have one of them, along with Tierney and Lord Althorp. He was ‘withheld by a perhaps foolish delicacy’ from going to London, but wrote to Holland and Lansdowne to express his view, as a professedly ‘disinterested spectator’, that however circumscribed Canning might be by the king’s known aversion to Catholic relief, the Whigs should coalesce in government with him as perhaps ‘their last chance of contributing to the pacification of Ireland and mitigating Toryism in this country’.
I was not ashamed to own how much office was desirable to me; that I was ambitious of it through him as a public token of the satisfaction of my friends with my public services; that for adequate office I would undertake to attend some part of every night and live within call; that I was aware this rule might stand in my way in almost every department; but that I placed my hopes in obtaining a relaxation of rule in one case when he was bringing so great an accession of strength as the whole Whig party to Canning.
Lansdowne assured him that he would press this on Canning and that ‘if a vacancy occurred at the board of control which might be soon he thought means might be found of making matters easy to me’. Mackintosh privately objected to the reported suggestion of Lord Lyndhurst, the new lord chancellor, of a barony of the exchequer, because of ‘the great occasional fatigue and exertion of circuit’; but he rejected nothing out of hand, and hinted to Lansdowne that he might after all prefer a diplomatic appointment. After sleeping on the matter he told his wife:
My prospects seem to be that I am likely to be offered a seat at the board of control with £1,500 a year about the end of the session. For this I must sacrifice much leisure and some health. I must live six months of the year within reach of a message from the House of Commons and I must obey every message. I say nothing of the humiliation. But the expense of that London residence is a material consideration. I am at present determined to prefer an envoyship and doubtful whether I should accept the other.
Through Lansdowne he wrote to Canning in the second week of May to stake his claim and preference for a diplomatic posting, though without ruling himself out for domestic employment; but in passing the letter on to Canning Lansdowne commented that ‘it appears to be the opinion of his friends, that if it is found practicable, a situation connected with the legal, would probably suit him better than that which he designates for himself in the diplomatic service’. On 20 May Mackintosh wrote to Lansdowne in an attempt to make it clear that he had not intended to give the impression that he did not want a place on the Scottish bench or a domestic political appointment: ‘I pretend to no exclusion and only venture to mention preference’. Desperate for office, he was in fact extremely sore at his treatment, and admitted to Lady Holland, with Lansdowne in mind, that he would have been ‘less mortified with the result whatever it may be if I had been informed of the suggestions relating to myself as they passed and if there had been some appearance of consulting me on them as far as circumstances allowed’. ‘In a further outburst at the end of May he told her:
The want of forethought which has helped to keep me poor has the good effect of lessening the ills of poverty to me. I did not suspect myself of much pride and perhaps I have not much. But a sharp mortification has found out a proud corner and I feel the smart more because I cannot divert it into another channel by harbouring dissatisfaction with those who (I am sure) were full of good will towards me. Whatever may be done below and long after everyone else must be merely a personal provision without any disguise. That is my main reason for wishing to pass the remainder of my days out of England, or at least at a distance from the scenes where the last 14 years of my useful life have been misspent.
The filling up of a vacancy at the board of control without a word to him a few days later prompted another complaint to Lady Holland, in which, despite having received assurances of Canning’s ‘desire to consult my wishes and of his readiness to communicate with me as soon as he was released from the session’, he moaned that ‘the moment which would have rendered an appointment at home gratifying to me has been missed and will probably not return’:
In the secret of my thoughts I may sometimes doubt whether a little less precipitancy, modesty and facility might not have saved me from being lowered so very much. I am therefore obliged to countenance that opinion of my bodily inability of which I am not convinced. If the whole of the administration were driven into opposition I should then honourably try to confute it by parliamentary exertion and such a trial I should in that case certainly make at any risk.
Add. 51655, Mackintosh to Lady Holland [1] [6], 11, 27 May, 1 June; 52447, ff. 61-68, 107-8; 52453, ff. 132, 134; Canning’s Ministry, 299; Lansdowne mss, Mackintosh to Lansdowne, 20 May 1827.
Two weeks later Whishaw, whom Lady Holland had evidently reproved for failing to make Mackintosh’s feelings clear to Lansdowne, defended himself, claiming that ‘it was with great surprise I heard by your note early last week that he was seriously annoyed and mortified by what had taken place’.
He had expressed on 20 May 1827 ‘some desire of speaking in Parliament’, having ‘been so well ... for the last two months’, perhaps for repeal of the Test Acts, when, as he told Lansdowne, ‘I could take the oath of allegiance to your government very naturally in such a speech’. He added that ‘a man’s first appearance after two years’ silence is of importance to himself’; but a week later he confessed to Lansdowne that ‘my fancy for speaking has rather gone off or at any rate would without watering it’. At the same time, he professed to be ‘perfectly satisfied to put off whatever related to myself’, in terms of office.
I had a headache but I brushed up my matters as best I could and went to the House, took my seat on the treasury bench and ... rose at eight o’clock and spoke for three quarters of an hour, for the first few minutes with some nervousness, but afterwards easily and agreeably to myself and with fair success. The House heard me very handsomely and seemed not displeased to renew their acquaintance with an old friend. I was not exhausted and sat down with my nerves strengthened. The sound of my own voice gave me courage. Canning took me by the hand with very kind congratulations on success and enquiries after health. I went home and suffered nothing worse than an entirely sleepless night, which a speech in my best times has sometimes inflicted on me.
Canning told the king that Mackintosh had ‘made a splendid speech’. Encouraged by his doctor to believe that ‘moderate exertion in public may be more serviceable than hurtful and that at present I need nothing but great attention to eating, drinking and exercise’, he went to the House to say ‘a few words’ in favour of the disfranchisement of East Retford, 11 June. He was present to vote for the ministerial corn bill, 18, 21 June.
I believe that if the administration and my life last something will be done for me. They are much fettered, they must wait for vacancies, and often fill them up with a view to strengthen the government. I thought it absurd to affect resentment though I did not profess to be satisfied and I shall not now throw away such hold as I have. Had the Whigs come in on a footing of reasonable equality, had Lord Holland not been actuated by an ill requited regard for the capricious and unamiable feelings of Lord Grey [towards junction with Canning], had I been in town at the first negotiation, had I then entertained as tolerable an opinion of my health as the trial in the House of Commons helped to give me I should probably have been in some respectable office. I am as sincere an adherent of the present government as if I were a cabinet minister ... I think it honourable as well as prudent to take all proper means of obtaining office. I by no means despair of being placed in a situation somewhat proportioned to my former place in Parliament, if the ministers succeed in withstanding the very formidable combination or conspiracy of peers against them.
Add. 52447, ff. 85-97, 108-10; 52453, f. 146.
He wrote that Canning’s death soon afterwards was ‘deplored as that of a guardian by every friend of liberty from Philadelphia to Athens’. He attended his funeral with an eye to ‘the possibility of advantage besides propriety’. In mid-August 1827, unwell once more, he went with his wife and Frances to stay for several months with their Wedgwood relatives at Maer, Staffordshire, from where he wrote to Lady Holland, 27 Aug., that ‘I am neither well nor cheerful’ and was worried by rumours that the Lansdowne Whigs were about to resign from the fledgling Goderich ministry; the same day he wrote to Lansdowne encouraging him to stay in office with his associates if decently possible.
I am not sorry at the end of five mortifying months to receive some mark of distinction which may a little conceal from the vulgar the estimate formed of me by the most competent judges. I wish the lesson against conceit had been given when I had more life left to profit by it.
At the same time, he did
not like the provision intended for me. But my claim would be so strengthened by the public pledge that it might be considered as distinct enough to be the subject of negotiation; and it appears to me that if a vacancy in the Scotch exchequer should occur it would be more easy to promote me to it in my surrender of the promise than professional etiquette might allow it to be after an actual appointment to a political office.
Add. 38750, f. 180; 51655, Mackintosh to Lady Holland, 7, 20 Sept.; 51687, Lansdowne to Holland, 2, 5 Sept.; 51690, to Lady Holland, 16 Sept. 1827; Greville Mems. i. 189.
Being ‘in the highest degree desirous of bringing my first volume to a conclusion’, but ready with a litany of excuses, including ‘autumnal bile’, for his lack of progress, he was unable to fulfil a tentative agreement with Brougham to supply tracts for the Useful Knowledge Society. Anticipating a summons to London in November to be sworn in to the privy council, he fretted about where he was to settle between then and the opening of Parliament, and asked Lady Holland for permission to use Ampthill. It was given, but he still hesitated between moving there lock, stock and barrel or remaining in Staffordshire.
This will delay my poor appointment perhaps for a month after the opening of the session ... There is one advantage ... If I were now to be appointed I should vacate my seat and so be disabled from taking a part in defence of the measures of government for the Greeks. Perhaps I may gain an opportunity of usefully and creditably discharging an important duty.
Add. 51655, Mackintosh to Lady Holland [19 Nov. 1827]; 52447, ff. 117-18, 127, 140-1.
He was worried by the ‘formidable’ opposition forming against government in defence of the Turks and in condemnation of Navarino; but two days spent in reading the relevant correspondence in the foreign office files convinced him that ‘we have a case which I should not fear to defend’. He had ‘some thoughts of showing myself at the opening of Parliament’ and of returning to Ampthill until the Greek question came on, and thereafter waiting until ‘constant attendance became my official duty or till the hope of it was destroyed by the Turks of England and Constantinople’.
I now consider my ship as just about to sink and I cannot enter in another. I can neither prevent nor profit by the fall of my friends. I see no object for striving.
He felt that his only hope lay in the remote possibility of the formation of ‘an universal coalition’; and when this was dashed by the duke of Wellington’s accession to power he told Lady Holland that ‘as my last card is trumped I am turning my thoughts to some retreat suitable to my income and where I am not likely to be disturbed or drawn away’. He elaborated on this in a letter to Allen:
I cannot pretend that I have not been a good deal vexed ... These vexations have sunk through my spirits into my health and have brought back some of my former uneasinesses, though not in their worst state. I am once more at sea with respect to a plan of residence for my little remaining life. At my age and with my health and income it would be madness to think of regular attendance and active opposition in Parliament. All that I should even wish to do would be to attend say six times in the session on great questions and when I was well. To do that with ease my residence should be within a short ... [distance] of London ... On the other hand it is question[able] whether it would not be more conducive to health, peace of mind, and to some chance of being able to publish some part of my history, if I were to go to some distant retirement either in England or abroad where I should be beyond the reach of all temptation to intermeddle with public broils. The choice is so difficult that it has little chance of being prudently made.
Add. 36464, f. 212; 51653, Mackintosh to Holland, 1 Feb.; 51655, to Lady Holland [5], 23 Jan.; 52182, to Allen, 11 Jan. 1828; 52447, ff. 146-7; 52453, f. 172.
On 14 Feb. 1828 he defended the Treaty of London of July 1827, welcomed ministers’ promise to implement it and argued that ‘the intervention in favour of the Greeks was an office of humanity to them’. He backed Wilson and Burdett in their denunciation of the Turkish treatment of the Greeks, 3 Apr., when he also approved Williams Wynn’s proposals to revise the laws governing controverted elections. He voted silently for repeal of the Test Acts, 26 Feb., and belatedly presented petitions to that effect, 1 Apr. He spoke and voted for the transfer of East Retford’s seats to Birmingham, 21 Mar. He presented and endorsed a petition from New South Wales for the introduction there of popular representation and jury trial, 18 Apr., and on 1 May he secured papers concerning the state of the colony in 1822; he moved but did not press amendments to the New South Wales bill, 20 June. He presented and warmly supported the prayer of a petition from Edinburgh University for relaxation of the restrictions on dissection, 21 Apr., and brought up a similar one from British students in Paris, 4 July. He presented two petitions of grievance from the inhabitants of Lower Canada, 1 May, and on Huskisson’s motion for inquiry into its civil government the following day spoke at length in favour of a liberal colonial policy; he was named to the select committee. He presented petitions in favour of Catholic relief, 8 May, spoke for it, 9 May, when Croker thought he was ‘long and laborious, and puzzled himself and tired us with references to papers’, and voted for it, 12 May.
That month he moved to Clapham Common. Soon afterwards he contracted with Macvey Napier to write for his Encyclopaedia Britannica a history of ethical philosophy, which allowed him not only to set aside his onerous history but to borrow money in advance to ease his financial difficulties. Almost immediately he was put out of action for two months by a recurrence of illness. (He told Lady Holland in September 1828 that ‘my health has been so unprosperous since I saw you as to render my life equally joyless and useless.’) He continued to miss deadlines, the project got out of hand and there was a misunderstanding as to exactly what was required. It was eventually published as a somewhat perfunctory Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy in 1830.
seemed tolerably well in health, but not in very good spirits, though he talked with all his usual powers about the books he had been lately reading, which I was sorry to observe had no reference to his historical work. Reading, indeed, and collecting information from books, is become his principal literary pleasure. Composition, except on the spur of an occasion or to answer some temporary purpose, seems no longer to give him any delight.
Add. 51659.
He agreed with Brougham that ‘there should be a general call of our friends from all quarters for the first day and the most vigorous opposition if the speech be silent or unsatisfactory on Ireland’. After recovering from ‘a pain in my face and cough’, he spoke on the address, 4 Feb. 1829, when, welcoming the announcement that government intended to concede Catholic emancipation, he said that ‘I have felt greater joy at the transactions of this day, than I yet have at any public event’.
I have felt the great fatigue more yesterday and today than when the exertions were going on. But I am very thankful for my escape from more serious consequences. We (Whigs) have performed a great duty which is its own best, and will probably be its only reward ... Distant generations will I trust pronounce that we have employed our strength for the preservation of our country without any angry remembrance of the past or selfish expectations from the future.
Add. 52447, ff. 148-51; Cockburn Letters, 211.
He presented a pro-emancipation petition from Glasgow University students, 8 Apr. 1829.
‘Three weeks of a more fatiguing parliamentary attendance than I believe ever was encountered with impunity by a man of my health’ took its toll, and he was confined to his house for most of the rest of the month, complaining to Lady Holland that ‘my indispositions are embittered by the necessity of employing every half hour of remission in drudgery. This is the punishment of idle youth’.
In the autumn of 1829 Mackintosh’s wife left him for the last time, travelling first to Paris and on to the Sismondis near Geneva. Mackintosh, who had contracted to write a popular History of England for The Cabinet Cyclopaedia, went with Frances to visit the duc de Broglie in Normandy. On his return he told Lady Holland that ‘I began to grow well almost as soon as we landed and have ever since been improving in strength, spirits and appetite’. He accepted her offer of a room at Holland House during the next session, although he could not ‘afford many days to Parliament’.
It was uncommonly agreeable ... I never was more filled with admiration. His prodigious memory and the variety and extent of his information remind me of all I have heard and read of Burke and Johnson; but his amiable, modest, and unassuming character makes him far more agreeable ... while he is probably equally instructive and amusing ... I do not know of a greater treat than to hear him talk ... I could not help reflecting what an extraordinary thing success is in this world, when a man so gifted ... has failed completely in public life, never having attained honours, reputation, or wealth, while so many ordinary men have reaped an abundant harvest of all ... His virtues are obstacles to his success; he has not the art of pushing or of making himself feared; he is too doucereux and complimentary, and from some accident or defect in the composition of his character, and in the course of events which have influenced his circumstances, he has always been civilly neglected.
Greville Mems. i. 328-30.
Wilberforce, a Clapham neighbour, who regarded him as ‘a paragon of a companion’, heard at this time that he
spends ... much of his time in the circulating library room at the end of the Common, and chats with the utmost freedom to all the passengers in the Clapham stage as he goes and comes from London. It is really to be regretted that he should thus throw away time so valuable. But he is at everybody’s service, and his conversation is always rich and sparkling.
Life of Wilberforce, v. 314-15.
Holland told Russell in December 1829 that Mackintosh had ‘settled the state of our friends as usual in a phrase: "He never saw, he will not say, such difference of opinion, but such strong divergences of inclination among them"’.
The first volume of Mackintosh’s popular History of England was published that summer. It sold well, as did the second volume, which appeared in 1831, and had the approval of Russell, who thought its observations on European history were ‘masterly’.
Many such triumphant displays of superiority in an opposition will be a trying test to the House of Commons ... Nevertheless I believe they [ministers] will try to swim ... The Tories seem to be dispirited and divided ... In the meantime the state of Europe is very alarming. We have lost in Guizot and Broglie our best security for the pacific character of the French government. Their successors are all what we should call a party between Whigs and Radicals ... They will not desire war. But the world is a step nearer to the danger of war since their promotion.
Add. 51655, Mackintosh to Lady Holland, 3 Nov. 1830; 52453, f. 194.
He presented petitions for the abolition of slavery, 9, 10 Nov. He voted in the majority against the Wellington ministry on the civil list, 15 Nov. He wanted to be judge advocate in the Grey administration, but heard nothing definite and agonized in his suspense. Holland assured him that there were ‘circumstances unknown to you which might if you had the option, alter your present preference ... to board of control’. This was what he was offered (at £1,500 a year) and accepted, apparently satisfied, as Holland reported, ‘though aware that the other was £1,000 better’. Grey, who privately thought that ‘with all his extraordinary talents and acquirements he was, practically, quite useless’, disingenuously assured him that he had ‘wished to offer you a situation more suited to your views and expectations, and I should have done so, had I found the spirit of accommodation which I had a right to expect in others’.
He was obliged to go to Knaresborough for the 1831 general election, when he was returned unopposed and his speech was ‘very well received’. He told Lady Holland that he had been led to believe by some of the electors that
there is no doubt of my having one of the Knaresborough seats after the reformation. But it is hard to foresee the movements of the popular mind for a year or two which in these times may be equal to as many centuries in times of quiet. It would I suppose be best for me to retire and I am disposed to wish that I had done so in November.
He subsequently took the waters at Harrogate, claiming to be ‘better than I have been for eight years’, and promising to be in London in the first week of June:
Notwithstanding our numbers we shall have no strength in the House of Commons for any purpose but the bill. We shall continue to be outspoken there. We are outweighed in respectable opinion out of doors. All the most faithful and old reformers of this country are I suspect more alarmed at the extent of the bill than they choose to confess. I believe that the more decent radicals would have liked the banquet better if there had been less of it. Those who are forced by the popular tide to vote for this reform may I fear take their revenge on other matters.
Ibid. Mackintosh to Lady Holland [24 Apr.], 4, 18 May 1831.
Early in the new Parliament he wrote to Lady Holland from the Commons that ‘I had no idea how unpleasant a parliamentary life that of a subaltern placeman is and I am not sure that it is worth while to continue it’.
remarkable. Overflowing with thought and knowledge, containing sound general principles as to government, undisfigured by the violence of party spirit, it pleased and instructed those who took the pains to listen to it attentively; but it wanted the qualities which attract or command attention ... The speaker’s person ... was gaunt and ungainly, his accent Scotch, his voice monotonous, his action (the regular and graceless vibration of two long arms) sometimes vehement, without passion, and sometimes almost cringing, through good nature and civility.
Broughton, iv. 119; Le Marchant, Althorp, 328; Add. 51573, Rice to Lady Holland [4 July 1831]; Bulwer, Hist. Characters, ii. 51.
The following day Mackintosh corrected the impression given by press reports that he had stated that ‘political privileges were property’: he had said exactly the opposite. He was in the majority for the bill, 6 July. He had taken a pair for the all-night divisions on adjournment motions, 12 July.
far from rising in general estimation. Most people own to their intimate friends that the campaign in the committee has shown no generalship. They have neither firmly adhered to their rules nor liberally relaxed them with an equal hand. I and many others when we voted with them in some cases were obliged to consider the votes as given to protect them from the consequences of their own fluctuation.
Add. 51655.
He was in the ministerial majorities on the 1831 census, 19 July, St. Germans and Saltash, 26 July, Dorchester, 28 July, Guildford, 29 July, and Greenwich, 3 Aug.; but a ‘stomach attack’ which turned out to be ‘a bilious fever’ and, so he claimed, endangered his life, put him out of action for the rest of that month; he was sent ‘by medical advice and political permission’ to Ramsgate on the 21st ‘in hopes of quickening my recovery by change and by the sea’.
He remained ‘weary’ of his junior situation at the board of control, and told Lady Holland that he had applied ‘in strict confidence’ to his chief Charles Grant* for the vacant office of chief justice of Bengal: ‘as I rather expected he for reasons perfectly satisfactory to me declined to appoint me’. In late October 1831 Macdonald told Brougham that he was willing to retire from the board of control to accommodate the rising star Tom Macaulay* if ministers wished to bring him in. Brougham, informing Holland, said that any promotion of Macaulay over Mackintosh’s head would be ‘preferring interest to gratitude’, and was ‘not to be thought of’. Holland replied:
I quite agree in all you say about Mackintosh. You had better say as much to Grey, who is himself well prepared, for he asked me if Robert Grant* [the judge advocate] would not like to go chief justice to Bengal, and if you would approve such an appointment, to which I could only answer from conjecture, not knowledge, that I thought and hoped both would approve of such an arrangement if, as he had before hinted, it was for the purpose of making Mackintosh king’s advocate, and introducing Macaulay into the board of control. Grey dropped something about Mackintosh’s health or want of energy, but you and I and above all the truth can remove that impression, for Mackintosh is more than equal to the business of king’s advocate, which he would do admirably, and being pleased would be infinitely more active and useful in the Commons than he is now, and to the full as much as Robert Grant.
Holland House Diaries, 72; Add. 51563, Brougham to Holland [bef. 27 Oct.]; 51655, Mackintosh to Lady Holland, Sat. [Oct.]; Brougham mss, Holland to Brougham, 27 Oct. [1831].
Nothing came of this.
Mackintosh, who moved his London residence to Langham Place at the end of the year, voted for the second reading of the final reform bill, 17 Dec. 1831, and for the borough disfranchisement clauses, 20, 23 Jan. 1832. He was in the ministerial majority on the Russian-Dutch loan, 26 Jan. He supported the principle of restricting factory hours for children, 1 Feb., placing considerations of humanity above devotion to the principles of political economy. He voted for clause 27 of the reform bill, 3 Feb. In his last speech in the Commons, 9 Feb., he opposed Courtenay’s motion for papers on Portugal, defended the British and French governments and condemned Dom Miguel. After leaving the House on the evening of Friday the 17th he had an accident while ‘hurrying through a lonely dinner’, as he explained to Allen:
I unwarily suffered a large morsel of chicken containing a pointed bone to go over almost unchecked or rather unscratched by teeth. I was nearly suffocated and ... I continued very ill Saturday and Sunday. But [Dr.] Kennedy ... with the help of well mixed coaxing and command on Monday got me to take a mustard emetic which produces its effect in three or four minutes and removes the contents of the stomach without an instant’s loathing. In my case it brought up immediately one of the largest pieces of flesh and bone which has been commonly removed from a living gullet. This mishap has caused a complete salivation which is very much better today. But I am advised not to venture abroad till it quite ceases.
Mackintosh, who was still privately ‘very anxious about the determination of our leaders’, was able to vote for the enfranchisement of Tower Hamlets, 28 Feb.
Macaulay had a soft spot for Mackintosh, who had been kind to him in his early days in Parliament, and wrote that
his proper place was his library, a circle of men of letters, or a chair of moral and political philosophy. He distinguished himself highly in Parliament. But nevertheless Parliament was not exactly the sphere for him. The effect of his most successful speeches was small when compared with the quantity of ability and learning which was expended on them.
He observed that Mackintosh was ‘a man who would have done something if he had concentrated his powers instead of frittering them away’:
He halted between two opinions. He fell between two stools. He attended too much to politics for a man engaged in a great literary work, and too much to literature for a man who aimed at great influence in politics. Society, too ... stole away too much of his time both from Parliament and from his study.
Edinburgh Rev. lxi (1835), 268; Macaulay Letters, iii. 151; iv. 23, 96.
Lytton Bulwer wrote perceptively of Mackintosh:
Though it was difficult to fix on any one thing in which he was first-rate, it was generally maintained that he was a first-rate man ... Though mixing in the action of a great and stirring community ... [he] never arrived at an eminence in law, in letters, or in politics that satisfied the expectations of those who, living in his society, were impressed by his intellect and astonished at his acquirements ... [He] was not fit for the daily toil and struggle of Parliament; he had not the quickness, the energy, the hard and active nature of those who rise by constant exertions in popular assemblies ... He was ... inclined by his nature rather to repose than to strife ... His striking, peculiar, and unrivalled merit ... was that of a conversationalist. Great good nature, great and yet gentle animation, much learning, and a sound, discriminating, and comprehensive judgement, made him this ... He knew everything and could talk of everything without being tedious ... He ever remained the man of promise; until, amidst hopes which his vast and various information, his wonderful memory, his copious elocution, and his transitory fits of energy, still nourished, he died ... universally admired and regretted, though without a high reputation for any one thing, or the ardent attachment of any particular set of persons.
Bulwer, ii. 3-4, 59, 91-92.