15th Lord Somerville, President of the Board of
Agriculture.
[50] Spencer Perceval.
[51] Robert Bankes Jenkinson (1770-1820), 2nd Earl of Liverpool, was Lord
Hawkesbury from 1796 to 1808.
[52] Lord Hawkesbury was appointed Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports at a
salary of L3000 a year.
[53] "The allusion is to the Orders in Council under which Mr. Perceval
endeavoured to retaliate on Napoleon's Baltic decree by regulating
British trade with the Continent. Under these orders the exportation
of all goods to France was prohibited which were not carried from this
country and had not paid an export-duty here. But there were certain
articles which the Minister decided that the Continent should have on
no terms, and amongst others quinine, or Jesuit's Bark, as it was
called. Sydney Smith, writing as Peter Plymley, said, 'You cannot
seriously suppose the people to be so degraded as to look for their
safety from a man who proposes to subdue Europe by keeping it without
Jesuit's Bark.'"--SIR SPENCER WALPOLE, _Life of Lord John
Russell_.
[54] In 1839 Sydney Smith pronounced this "a very unjust imputation on Lord
Castlereagh." Robert Stewart (1769-1823), Viscount Castlereagh, became
Marquis of Londonderry in 1821.
[55] Henry Addington (1757-1844), created Viscount Sidmouth in 1805.
[56] Spencer Perceval had recently taken a villa on Hampstead Heath, for
the benefit of his wife's health.
[57] Spencer Perceval's elder brother, Charles George Perceval (1756-1840),
was created Lord Arden in 1802.
[58] John Archibald Murray (1779-1859), a Judge of the Court of Session.
[59] In October 1844 Eugene Robin, reviewing Sydney Smith in the _Revue
des Deux Mondes_, wrote as follows:--"Cache sous le pseudonyme de
Peter Plymley il adresse ces nouvelles _provinciales_ a un
reverend pasteur, qui est bien le parfait modele de la sottise
protestante, la quintessence des docteurs Bowles et des archidiacres
Nares."
CHAPTER IV
FOSTON--"PERSECUTING BISHOPS"--BENCH AND BAR
At the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth,
the most serious evil which beset the Church of England was the system of
Pluralities and Non-Residence. A prosperous clergyman might hold
half-a-dozen separate preferments, and, as long as he paid curates to
perform the irreducible minimum of public duty, he need never show his face
in
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