ernment and then, after the prime minister’s assassination and Liverpool’s
assumption of power in June, as Home Secretary. (There were rumours that
Sidmouth might be asked to become PM again but he was sure he would
not be and clear that, if he were, he would refuse.)
Sidmouth was to be the longest-serving Home Secretary in British history,
holding that office for nine and a half years until January 1822. It was the
sort of senior departmental position he had wanted and was best suited for,
saying in 1808 he ‘would not be a Noun adjective to any Government’ and
looked for ‘a situation of perfect and unqualified responsibility’.
8
His par-
liamentary group was now (re)absorbed into the Tories and Sidmouth
ceased to function as a separate parliamentary leader. He was largely left a
free hand, and although he had friendly enough relations with Liverpool he
was never an intimate of the prime minister or part of the government’s
inner group.
Sidmouth’s strengths were as a steady, calm, patient and industrious
administrator, on top of the heavy workload and not afraid to take deci-
sions. He could be personally kindly, humane and fair. His limitations were
a narrow and inflexible conservatism, a profound hostility to reform and a
lack of imagination. Faced by the great social hardships and unrest, popular
agitation and disturbances which followed the war and the pressures of
economic and industrial change, Sidmouth’s reaction was alarmist and
repressive. Strongly committed to laissez faire and to the existing order,
he believed government could do little or nothing to alleviate social prob-
lems and, with his fears fed by lurid reports from government spies and
informants, he found it easy to believe in the dangers of revolution and
subversive plots and conspiracies. There were real conspirators, and in 1820
Sidmouth personally supervised the operation which foiled the ‘Cato Street
Conspiracy’, a plot to blow up the Cabinet. But as the Home Secretary who
hanged Luddites, suspended Habeas Corpus, introduced panic legislation to
restrict public meetings and shackle the popular press, and defended the
‘Peterloo massacre’ killing by troops of 11 people at a large demonstration
in Manchester (even though the local magistrates had disobeyed his private
instructions not to disperse the mob unless there were a riot), he acquired a
reputation as blinkered, harsh, authoritarian and reactionary.
In January 1822 Sidmouth left the Home Office but remained in the
Cabinet as a minister without portfolio. Now in his mid-60s he was in
reasonably good health but starting to feel the strain and thinking about
retirement. He had struck up a good relationship with the new King,
George IV, who urged him to stay in the government and who twice (in
1820 and 1821) when Liverpool was threatening resignation, pressed him
to become prime minister (Sidmouth would not hear of it and told the
King to stick with Liverpool). In 1822 the King granted him a pension of
£3,000 a year, something welcome after the loss of his Home Secretary’s
salary, but the prime minister, Liverpool, was unhappy about it and there
Addington to Melbourne 45