Government, and in reply to my questions he admitted
that the Pope had generally conferred the appointment according to the
wishes of the Government."

These facts must be borne in mind on the part of those by whom the
admitted support given by the Whig Catholic "Castle Bishops" of the
early part of the nineteenth century to the Government is urged as
evidence of a consistent tendency on the part of the Church in Ireland,
the political views of the prelates of which, so soon as in the second
half of the nineteenth century Governmental lobbying ceased, were of an
entirely different colour.

At a later date Greville returned to the topic and noted that[12]
"Palmerston said there was nothing to prevent our sending a minister to
Rome; but they had not dared to do it on account of their supposed
Popish tendencies. Peel might." Melbourne was not alone among Prime
Ministers of the time in his appeals to the Holy See. In 1844 the
Government of Sir Robert Peel, when troubled with the manifestations of
sympathy which O'Connell was arousing, made an appeal to Gregory XVI. to
discourage the agitation, and three years later, when the Whigs under
Lord John Russell were in office, Lord Minto, Lord Privy Seal, who was
Palmerston's father-in-law, was sent to Rome in the autumn recess to
secure the adherence of Pius IX., then in the first months of his
Pontificate, to the same line of action, and to bring to the notice of
His Holiness the conduct of the Irish priesthood in supporting
O'Connell. The fact that neither Gregory XVI. nor Pio Nono made any
response to these appeals lends point to the sardonic comment of
Disraeli on the Minto mission--that he had gone to teach diplomacy to
the countrymen of Machiavelli. The views of Palmerston, on the other
hand, are to be seen from a letter addressed to Minto, which is extant,
in which, with characteristic bluntness, the Foreign Secretary wrote
that public opinion against the Irish priests at home was so exasperated
that nothing would give English people more satisfaction than to see a
few of them hanged.

"Can anything be more absurd," Greville had written concerning the
relations which Melbourne revealed to him as subsisting between Downing
Street and the Vatican, and the quotation is as appropriate to these
later overtures. "Can anything be more absurd or anomalous than such
relations as these? The law prohibits any intercourse with Rome, and the
Government, whose business it is to enf