FORE:William IV. then sent for the veteran Grey, who formed a Ministry with unusual ease, chiefly of the Whig and Canningite elements. His chief difficulty was how to dispose of the volatile Brougham. The king had no objection to accept him as one of the Ministers, and Brougham himself wished to be Master of the Rolls, assuming that Sir John Leech was to become Lord Chancellor of Ireland, with a peerage, and that Mr. Plunket was to be Lord Chancellor of England. To this arrangement, however, the king and Lord Grey peremptorily objected. Brougham was then offered the Attorney-Generalship, which he calmly refused, upon which Lord Grey declared that his hopes of being able to form an Administration were at an end, and he waited on his Majesty for the purpose of communicating to him the failure of his negotiations. "Why so?" inquired the king. "Why not make him Chancellor? Have you thought of that?" The answer was, "No; your Majesty's objection to the one appointment seemed to preclude the other." "Not at all, not at all," replied the king; and the reasons for one appointment and against the other were very clearly stated by his Majesty, namely, that Brougham as Master of the Rolls and member for Yorkshire would be far too powerful. Mr. Brougham was left in the dark for some time about the intentions of Lord Grey, for on the 17th of November he said he had nothing to do with the Administration, except in the respect he bore them, and as a member of the House. On the 19th he presented petitions, and spoke on them in the Commons, without intimating any change of position. Hence it may easily be supposed that he surprised the world, as well as his friends, by suddenly appearing on November the 22nd in the House of Lords as Lord Chancellor of England. This was certainly a high office to which he was elevated, and for which the exigencies of party made him necessary; but, in accepting it, he sacrificed a great position which seemed to gratify all the desires of intellectual ambition; and, in order to induce his compliance, Lord Grey was obliged to appeal to his generous sympathies, his public spirit, and his devotion to his party. Lord Brougham and Vaux became, said a wag, "Vaux et praeterea nihil."Thus ended the rebellion of 1848, which had so long kept the country in a state of alarm. It is true that some of the leaders headed small bodies of insurgents in the county of Waterford, and attacked several police barracks, but in none of the affrays were the insurgents successful. The police, who were not more than one to fifty of the rebels, routed them in every instance without any loss of life on their part. The constabulary were then 10,000 strong in Ireland, and Smith O'Brien confidently counted upon their desertion to his ranks; but though the majority of the force were Roman Catholics, they were loyal to a man. Dillon and O'Gorman had escaped to France, but Terence McManus, a fine young man, who had given up a prosperous business as a broker in Liverpool, to become an officer in the "Army of Liberation," was arrested in an American vessel proceeding from Cork to the United States. A special commission for the trial of the prisoners was opened on the 21st of September, at Clonmel, high treason having been committed in the county Tipperary.
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