he Cato Street Conspiracy.--The
Queen's Return to England, and the Proceedings against her.--The King
Visits Ireland and Scotland.--Reform of the Criminal Code.--Freedom of
Trade.--Death of Lord Liverpool.--The Duke of Wellington becomes
Prime-minister.--Repeal of the Test and Corporation Act.--O'Connell is
Elected for Clare.--Peel Resigns his Seat for Oxford.--Catholic
Emancipation.--Question of the Endowment of the Roman Catholic
Clergy.--Constitutional Character of the Emancipation.--The Propriety of
Mr. Peel's Resignation of his Seat for Oxford Questioned.

In the first month of 1820 George III. died. His had been an eventful
reign, strangely checkered with disaster and glory; but, if we compare
its close with its commencement, it was still more remarkably
distinguished by a development of the resources and an increase in the
wealth and power of the nation, to which the history of no other country
in the same space of time affords any parallel.

Regarded from the first point of view, our successes greatly outweighed
our disasters. The loss of our North American Colonies, the only event
which can be so described, was far more than counterbalanced by our vast
acquisitions in India, at the Cape of Good Hope, and Malta; while to our
maritime supremacy, in the complete establishment of which Rodney and
Nelson had crowned the work of Anson and Hawke, was now added a splendor
of military renown far surpassing that achieved by any other of the
nations which had borne their share in the overthrow of Napoleon.

The increase of our resources is sufficiently shown by a single fact. At
his accession George III. found the kingdom engaged in the great seven
years' war; one British army employed beyond the Rhine, another in
India; fleets traversing the seas in every direction, capturing the
Havana, in the West Indies; Manilla, in the East; and routing French
squadrons in sight of their own harbors. While, to maintain these varied
armaments, supplies were voted by Parliament in 1761 to what Lord
Stanhope calls "the unprecedented amount of almost twenty millions." In
1813 the supplies reached nearly six times that amount,[182] and that
prodigious sum was raised with greater ease than the revenue of 1761,
the interest on the necessary loans being also lower than it had been on
the former occasion.

The philosophical man of science will point with at least equal
exultation to the great discoveries in art and science; to the
achie