in his
"Autobiography," is too important to be here omitted. "I considered,"
wrote the great champion of public economy, on the 10th of May, 1852,
"that you were incapable of taking the means that were resorted to by
Mr. Cochrane Johnstone, and for which you suffered; and I was pleased to
learn that you had been restored to your rank. I considered that act a
proof that the Government which had restored you to the rank and honours
of your profession, and had afterwards appointed you to the command in
the West Indies, must have come to the same conclusion; and, until the
perusal of your draft petition, I concluded that you had all your
arrears paid to you as a tardy, though inadequate, return to your
lordship, whose early exploits did honour to yourself, and gave
additional lustre to the naval service of the country to which you
belonged.... His Majesty King William IV. was satisfied with the
innocence of Sir Robert Wilson, and he was restored to the service--was,
I understand, paid all the arrears of pay and allowances during his
suspension, and afterwards appointed to the command of Gibraltar. I was
pleased at the result; and it would give me equal pleasure to learn that
your application to her Majesty should be attended with an act of
justice to you equally merited." Lord Palmerston subsequently, in answer
to an application from Lord Dundonald--forgetting Sir Robert Wilson's
case--said there was no precedent for such an act. Lord Dundonald
answered that there was no precedent for such injustice as had been done
to him.

Shortly after that event Lord Dundonald sought to be elected one of the
Scotch representative peers in the House of Lords. Now that his load of
unmerited disgrace was shaken off, he desired to resume his old
functions as a legislator--and this with no abatement of his zeal for
the welfare of the people; but with none of the violence which his own
heavy sufferings at the time of their first and heaviest pressure had
partly caused him to show during his former parliamentary career. Being
now a peer, he could not return to his seat in the House of Commons, and
being a Scotch peer, he could only sit in the House of Lords as one of
the delegates from the aristocracy of his native land. Among these he
therefore asked for a place at the election in September, 1847. He did
not, however, begin to seek it early enough. Other candidates had,
according to custom, obtai