Ward, a protégé of Pitt and brother-in-law of the cabinet minister the 1st earl of Mulgrave, had attached himself like a limpet to the 1st earl of Lonsdale, who returned him again for his borough of Haslemere at the general election of 1820.
Extracts from Ward’s political journal during the period of Queen Caroline’s trial, 14 Oct.-22 Nov. 1820, were published by his biographer in 1850: they convey a vivid impression of ministers’ anxieties, as the affair seemed to threaten their hold on power. For his own part, Ward passed on to members of the cabinet on 15 Oct. a hint from an ‘opposition man’ that some of the queen’s ‘violent friends’ were so sure of her guilt that, while they would not swallow the bill of pains and penalties, they would settle for a lucrative divorce. In a conversation with the Whig Commons leader Tierney two days later Ward
observed, the only remedy, the only possibility of things returning to their former state, was a rebellion, and the troops ... quelling it with a high hand. He replied, that was the disease. I said, neither he nor I should live to see society where it had been and ought to be; to which he assented. I have no doubt he is sincere; yet he and his party are the real authors of the spirit we deplore.
Conscious of the weakness of government, especially in the Commons, where they ‘seemed like victims’, and believing that it had come to a question of whether the country ‘would ... be governed by any administration’, he encouraged Wellington to consider stepping in to form a stronger ministry. The duke looked askance at the idea. Ward thought that ministers were entitled to disregard the popular support for the queen, as expressed through the ‘ridiculous’ medium of petitions ‘carried by force’:
The House would be much more formidable, indeed, after all, the only thing that was formidable, but with a verdict of guilty, which the second reading must amount to, I did not fear it. I thought the country gentlemen would stand by us ... The Radicals might mouth, and the Whigs might support them, but these latter never gained one inch of ground, and we should triumph as we had done before.
Once the second reading of the bill had been narrowly carried in the Lords, which constituted ‘a complete justification of ministers’, he hoped it would never be sent to the Commons. He duly applauded its abandonment, though he had some doubts about Lord Liverpool’s speech on the occasion, which he felt amounted to ‘a confession that radicalism had triumphed by the threats and clamour out of doors’. In a broader view, he deplored the Whigs’ ‘admirable policy of questioning motives, and attributing everything in office, or friends to office, to corruption, by which they have nearly destroyed the very roots of society’. Sickened by ‘the scoundrel spirit of the times’, he reflected:
There was a time when I should have felt such things acutely; but with many feelings as warm, nay as romantic as ever, to political feeling I am almost dead, and the nil admirari is to me, not only the most just, but the only maxim by which I wish to govern myself. There is not a leader in the state capable of swaying parties with proper authority, nor do I think (such is the change on the side of personal vanity throughout all ranks) Mr. Pitt himself could lead as he did. Everyone is for himself - of course everyone differs. Authority is gone.
Phipps, ii. 58-101.
Although Ward’s wife was in poor health from late 1819, she rallied ‘so often’ that he ‘blindly and presumptuously refused to believe in her danger’ until her death two years later. He was ‘bent before the blow’, and was also afraid that the government reshuffle of January 1822 might ‘take me from the ordnance’; but Wellington shielded him for the moment. Seven months later his ‘sunk heart’ seemed to have ‘lost all interest with the rest of the world’: it was as though ‘everything’ had ‘receded from me in one great loss’. Yet he appears to have recovered some of his spirits by September 1822, when he informed Lonsdale of Canning’s impending appointment as foreign secretary.
I gave up £2,000 a year at the bar, on the invitation of Mr. Pitt, and the promise to be taken care of in proportion to what I gave up. Hence the late king’s order recognizes the principle in terms, when it says that in order to compensate to me or my family the sacrifice I made, my wife should have £1,000 a year, so long as I had not two under the government. My place is reduced to less than one ... Yet though the defalcation of the peer gave them the fairest opening to raise the salary, though the committee of finance would have willingly raised it to £2,000, they neither have the courage to raise this miserably paid place, nor to renew the pension according to the intentions of the king; nor to make the least attempt at such a arrangement as to any other parliamentary office as might, by being tenable with my parliamentary pension, equalize my government income with what was promised and intended ... Thus ... I am fairly forced out of Parliament by the cowardice of those who say ... they want to keep me there.
He was further miffed at being pressed to retain his seat until he had dealt with the ordnance estimates, though he could hardly refuse. If he hoped that Lonsdale would intervene with ministers on his behalf he was disappointed, for his patron’s reply ‘pointed all to retirement’.
This was far from the end of the affair. On 28 Feb. 1823 Lowther wrote that Ward had now opted to become auditor of the civil list by which, ‘united to his pension’, he would enjoy £2,000 a year ‘with easy duty’, though he would still have to vacate his seat. Within a fortnight he changed his mind again and reclaimed the tax office place, but it had been given to another man.
He began by asking me if you had fixed upon anyone to succeed him at Haslemere; I told him you had ... [and] that I believed you had made the proposition and that it was accepted. He then told me that he was in negotiation with some member of one of the boards to exchange his auditorship for a place tenable with Parliament, and wished to know if he could retain his seat if this arrangement was made; that he had never announced his intention of accepting the tax office or the auditorship if he could have got a place to improve his income and at the same time sit in Parliament, and that all his negotiations were coupled with this reservation. I observed upon this that it was perfectly understood he was going; that he himself had consulted me which of the two offices that were offered he should accept; and that even the government were so impressed at his having accepted the auditorship that they had made an application to bring in a friend of theirs to succeed him at Haslemere. To this he had nothing to say, but shifted his tack to inquire if you were anxious to have his seat. I repeated again that as it was understood he was retiring from Parliament you had provided yourself with a person to supply the vacancy ... He will write you a letter today setting forth his hopes of making an arrangement with someone to change offices ... but I am sure that Lord Liverpool has not yet been consulted, and from what I have heard I do not think that he is likely to agree to such a proposition. Now it comes to the point I perceive Ward is catching at every straw to save himself from retiring from Parliament. He will very likely tell you that the government are very anxious that he should remain in the House of Commons; from what I heard today I should be inclined to draw quite another inference.
Ibid. Lowther to Lonsdale, 21 Mar. 1823.
Ward duly wrote to Lonsdale, claiming that it had all along been understood that his preferred option was an office tenable with a seat, advising him that he had a good chance of effecting an exchange and asking permission to pursue this negotiation with a view to continuing to sit for Haslemere. The exchange which he had in mind was with William Henry Fremantle*, secretary to the board of control, whose patron the duke of Buckingham and chief Charles Williams Wynn* approved the swap, though it had not yet been submitted to Liverpool. Ward also told Lonsdale that ‘circumstances might arise to make me content to remain even at the ordnance itself’, namely a ‘difficulty’ about finding a successor and the prospect of war. In his answer, which Lowther thought ‘very proper and conclusive’, Lonsdale evidently made it clear to Ward that there was to be no reneging on the arrangement with Thompson, mentioned the supposed approach from government as further proof of the understanding that he had decided to retire and rapped his knuckles for his shuffling conduct.
a most intemperate oration of the ill usage he had experienced from the treasury in having informed you that he was about to accept the auditorship ... He added that it was now proved that he had enemies and that they wished to get rid of him and that no one had ever been so ill treated. He was in much too great a tantrum and so wrongheaded that he could not be reasoned with. I told him that the fact of his having accepted the auditorship was too notorious to be denied ... Ward keeps writing long letters to Lushington, which he puts in the fire and does not answer ... Ward has plagued the government so much about his concerns that if this place had not been given him he would have got nothing at all. It seems singular that he should appear in ill humour when he has got a permanent situation of £1,400 a year, added to which he can hold half his pension ... His great wrath is against the government [for] having proposed someone to succeed him; he does not know who it was that made the proposition and who the person was that they wished to come in, and upon this point he had better remain in ignorance ... Ward is searching ... with such watchfulness for a grievance that it is quite dangerous to talk to him without a witness. Lushington and Arbuthnot will have no further communication with him.
Ibid. Lowther to Lonsdale, 24 Mar. 1823.
Ward tried to explain himself to Lonsdale by letter later that day, but he evidently received a dusty answer. He may well have had some cause to complain of Arbuthnot’s characteristically officious interference, which turned out to have been on his own initiative. He soon identified the culprit and on 26 Mar. wrote at length to Lonsdale, mixing sycophancy with defiance, to allege that Arbuthnot’s ‘manoeuvres’ had cheated him out of his seat. As parting shots, he threw out his suspicion (which was unfounded) that the person on whose behalf Arbuthnot had approached the Lowthers was Lushington’s son, and rather unconvincingly cited his own personal feelings as the true reason for his reluctance to surrender his seat: ‘I, too, have a son, who when his father is forgotten is not likely to be remembered’.
No person could possibly have been treated with more kindness, consideration and indulgence ... He had the offer of two offices; he made a selection, and now coming with an afterthought and saying it was always with an understanding that it was provided he could not get a place tenable with Parliament is quite idle and I think quibbling ... Even if his own statements or allusions were admitted I should think he was much to blame for not being more explicit ... about the plans that were working in his own mind ... Your delicacy and kindness to him ... seem to have produced these unreasonable demands ... Ward appears to me to be exerting his ingenuity ... to endeavour to catch at an expression or a word to found a grievance upon ... Taking all the circumstances into consideration, I think you are very lucky to have got rid of him.
‘Any stranger to the transaction’, Lowther observed next day, ‘would imagine he was turned out without a sixpence’.
I found I was supposed to be neither more nor less than out of humour, and ill used both at the ordnance and the treasury, and not ill disposed to show my feelings upon it. I put the matter to rest in an instant by a very simple explanation; for I found to my amusement, though also to my vexation, that I was supposed to have quitted the ordnance in a quarrel with the duke [of Wellington], and had left Parliament in disgust. I felt bound therefore to set things right, and say that I had parted from the duke the best friends possible, and still admired him, as I still loved Lord Lonsdale ... That it was very true I felt I had been tricked out of the seat, and betrayed in my best interests, either from negligence or design, by others; but this would not make me quarrel with old friends, whom, though I felt little obligation to, I could not oppose with pleasure or credit in the way hinted at.
Buckingham, Mems. Geo. IV, ii. 129.
In his retirement Ward became a successful novelist. His Tremaine, or, the Man of Refinement, published anonymously in 1825, received considerable acclaim, as did its successor De Vere, or, the Man of Independence (1827), one of whose principal characters was a composite of Bolingbroke, Canning and Pitt. Benjamin Disraeli† admired it, and Ward’s friend Peter George Patmore put him on a par with Scott; but both works, together with De Clifford, or, the Constant Man (1841), have long been buried in deserved obscurity.
You looked for mine or my son’s name, you say, in the late changes; mine you will see no more. All my feelings forbid it. I have now lost every man to whom I looked up, or could ever follow, and I would not lead, even if I could. In short I am grown old, and am content to be so, knowing what I know, and feeling what I feel. The place I have is just the very best I could have with these feelings, keeping me just enough in the political world to say I am not out of it, and giving me, therefore, precisely the quantum of public interest to make me the more relish my dear private life. Hence nothing Mr. Canning could have given me could have equalled what I have. Had he doubled my public income (which he could not), I must have spent the difference, exchanged a certainty for an uncertainty, and quiet for turmoil, by no means compensated by returning to Parliament and being Right Honourable. This I fairly told a noble friend of mine, who came twice to me, observing, that he believed they wanted me in more active office ... But though I had lost all ambition as to myself, I had occasion to observe its workings in others, with no very raised opinions of its effects on human nature ... In short, it is no affectation to say, that I have realized what Tremaine only dreamed, and view the world at a distance.
Phipps, ii. 171-2.
(No evidence has been found to suggest that Ward was even considered for office, let alone made an offer.)
Marriage to a widow in 1828 brought him an estate on the borders of Hertfordshire and Essex and an extra name; but a succession of calamities awaited him. In August 1830 the two eldest of his three daughters died on consecutive days. Soon afterwards, Charles Russell* met him in the street: ‘He is quite a cripple from rheumatic gout, very deaf, and instead of his former animated manner, or of any appearance of melancholy, he spoke with a silly vacant simper’.
The illness of his surviving daughter in 1832 drove Ward to Brighton, where he met his third wife. She brought some domestic happiness to his last years, despite the death of his daughter in 1835. After a period of residence abroad he returned to England in 1837 and the following year, abandoning Gilston to his son, who was ‘very welcome to all the cockneys and radicals of Herts’, he went to live at his stepson’s home in Staffordshire. In addition to his third novel, he published Illustrations of Human Life (1837), an Historical Essay on the Revolution of 1688 (1838) and Pictures of the World at Home and Abroad (1839).
I am in the greatest danger of going off in a fit of indolence; for I have no other complaint. Lounging, in both body and mind, gets more and more hold of me, and this soft climate makes it worse ... My life ... passes in a happy, if indolent reverie, which I take to be the true paradise of fools; and while that is the case, I don’t want to be among the wise.
Phipps, ii. 224.
Later that year he suffered ‘severe attacks of painful indigestion’. Early in 1846, riddled with ‘perpetual and painful illness’, he moved into his father-in-law’s official residence at Chelsea hospital.