CANNING, GEORGE 7o-182 7 ), British statesman, was born in London on April 1I, 177o. The Cannings came originally from Bishop's Canynge in Wiltshire, but in 1618 one of the family received the grant of the manor of Garvagh in London derry, Ireland. The father of the statesman, also named George, was the eldest son of Mr. Stratford Canning of Garvagh. He quarrelled with and was disowned by his family. Coming to London he was called to the bar, eking out a precarious livelihood, partly in the wine trade and partly in literature. In May 1768 he married Mary Annie Costello, and died on April i 1, 1771, exactly one year after the birth of his son. His widow, left entirely des titute and cut off by her husband's family, went on the stage in order to support herself and her son, and married a dissolute and brutal actor of the name of Reddish. From his evil influence and upbringing Canning was rescued by the good offices of Moody, another actor, who approached his relatives in order to secure a more suitable education for the talented boy. An uncle, Strat ford Canning, his father's younger brother, took charge of him, and his grandfather relented sufficiently to settle on him an estate to the value of £200 a year. Sheridan arid Fox frequented the house, and it was Fox who persuaded Stratford Canning to send his nephew tc Eton in 1781. There and later at Oxford he became an accomplished classical scholar. His oratory was of so high an order that Sheridan referred to him as the rising hope of the Whigs, while his contributions to the Microcosm, a journal pub lished by a group of Etonians, showed already the subtle humour and boisterous wit for which he later became famous.
In 1792 he came down from Oxford, where, according to Lord Holland, he had been noted as a Jacobin and hater of the aris tocracy. He intended to read for the bar, but politics proved too great an attraction. In Sheridan's company he at first frequented Devonshire house and Carlton house, the strongholds of the Whigs, but when he entered parliament for the borough of New ton, Isle of Wight, in July, 1793, it was as a supporter of Pitt. There were three reasons for this change of party. First must be ranked the personal influence of Pitt, whose acquaintance Can ning had made soon after his arrival in London. Self-interest. dictated separation from a party controlled by the great "revolu tion families"—Cavendishes, Russells, Bentincks—who never al lowed any man, however able, who did not belong to their con nection to rise to the first rank. Lastly, the development of the French Revolution into a militant power for the overthrow of existing institutions in other countries drove him into opposition to its principles, and he regarded the Whig reformers as Jacobins and distrusted them accordingly. He soon won the reputation of being the most brilliant speaker on the Ministerial side, in oppo sition to such famous orators as Burke, Fox and Sheridan. His political patrons took care to provide for his private as well as his official prosperity, and their favour secured him a marriage with Miss Joan Scott, who possessed a fortune of f ioo,000, on July 8, 1800. One of the four children of this marriage became known to history as Earl Canning.
The public life of Canning falls into four stages. From 1793 to 1801 he was the devoted follower of Pitt, was in minor though important office, and was the wittiest of the defenders of the Ministry in parliament and in the press. From 1801 to 1809 he was partly in opposition, partly in office, fighting for the fore most place. Between 1809 and 1822 there was a period of com parative eclipse, during which he was indeed at times in office but in a very subordinate capacity, and was regarded with general mistrust. From 1822 to his death in 1827 he was the most power ful influence in English, and one of the most powerful in Euro pean politics.
In 1796 Canning became under-secretary for foreign affairs, an office of extreme delicacy, placed as he was between Pitt, his friend and prime minister, and Lord Grenville, his immediate chief. During the negotiations for peace with the Directory at Lille in 1797 he was the medium through which their often conflicting in structions reached Lord Malmesbury, the ambassador conducting the negotiations. Pitt and Grenville were mutually suspicious, al though they were united in deceiving the Cabinet as to the real nature of the discussions. The part he was forced to play gained for Canning an unfortunate reputation for trickery. From Nov ember 20, 1797, until July 9, 1798, he was one of the most active and certainly the most witty of the contributors to the Anti-Jacobin, a weekly paper started to ridicule the French re publicans, and to denounce their brutal rapacity and cruelty. In 1799 he left the Foreign Office and was named one of the twelve commissioners for India and became in 180o joint paymaster of the forces. Although debarred from a seat in the Cabinet by the difficulties which then existed for a poor man to attain high office, and by the prejudice due to his defection from the Whig Party, a prejudice increased by his merciless wit, which "would have fetched the hide off a rhinoceros," he exercised more influence as the chief confidant of Pitt than most Cabinet ministers.
When Pitt resigned in 18o1 Canning resigned with him, but proved an insubordinate follower. In 1802 he resigned his can didature for Newport and was returned as an independent mem ber for the Irish borough of Tralee. His violent attacks on Ad dington damaged his own reputation as much as his victim's, while his attempts to act as a political go-between in Ministerial ar rangements were unfortunate. On the formation of Pitt's second Ministry, he took the post of treasurer of the navy on May 12, 1804, but left office on Pitt's death on January 21, 1806. He refused to take office in Fox's Ministry of "all the talents," al though he was offered the leadership of the House of Commons. After the death of Fox he joined the duke of Portland's Admin istration as secretary of state for foreign affairs, a post which he held from March 25, 1807, to September 9, 1810.
During these years Canning had a large share in the vigorous policy which defeated the secret articles of the Treaty of Tilsit by the seizure of the Danish fleet. This high-handed action did not pass without censure, but his defence in the House of Com mons silenced his accusers, although he could not disclose the source from which he had gained his secret information. He threw himself eagerly into the prosecution of the Peninsular War, for he realised that Spain was Napoleon's vulnerable point. Un fortunately his tenure of office ended in circumstances which left. him in deep discredit. Canning found that the War Office continu ally hampered him in the carrying out of his schemes, and he suggested to the duke of Portland that Castlereagh, secretary for war and the colonies, should be given another office, not on the ground of incompetence, but of incompatibility of policy. The duke, a sickly and vacillating man, took no steps in the matter, and after six months, when he found that his wishes were dis regarded, Canning resigned. At that point Castlereagh heard of the negotiations but was misinformed as to their true content. Thinking that Canning had demanded his dismissal on the ground of incompetence and yet had continued to be his colleague, Castle reagh challenged him on September 19, 181o. In the duel on Putney heath which followed Canning was wounded in the thigh. Public opinion was strong against him, especially as the death of the duke of Portland made it impossible for him to clear himself, and he was regarded with mistrust. For twelve years he remained out of office or in inferior places, but his ability made it impossible that he should remain obscure. In 1810 he was a member of the bullion committee, and his speeches on the report showed his mastery of the subject. His reputation for economic knowledge recommended him to the electors of Liverpool, which city adopted him as its member in 1812, a connection which lasted until 1822 and which taught him a great deal of the commercial and democratic needs of the time. In 1816 he entered office as presi dent of the board of control in Lord Liverpool's Cabinet, in which Castlereagh, with whom he had become reconciled, was secretary of state for foreign affairs. Under his direction Hastings waged a successful war against the Pindaris and the Mahratta confeder acy, whereby their dominions were brought under the rule or protectorate of Great Britain. He also began the practice of ap pointing distinguished members of the East India Company to high administrative posts, instead of filling them invariably with men sent out from England. In this way Monro and Elphinstone owed their original appointments to him. In 1820 he resigned his post in order to avoid taking any part in the proceedings against a lifelong friend of his wife, Queen Caroline, the wife of George IV.
Canning returned to office on the suicide of Castlereagh in 1822. He had accepted the governor-generalship of India, and he refused to remain in England unless he received the "whole inheritance" of Castlereagh—the foreign office and the leadership of the House of Commons. He held that position from September 1822 until April 1827, when he became prime minister in succession to Lord Liverpool, but even before this he was the real director of the policy of the Cabinet—as Castlereagh had been from 1812 to 1822.
His fame as a statesman is based mainly on the foreign policy which he pursued in those years—the policy of non-intervention —and of the patronage, if not the actual support, of national and liberal movements in Europe. This policy had already been laid down in a State paper of May 5, 1820, so that it can safely be asserted that Castlereagh's views must have been influenced by Canning, since the policy therein contained was contrary to that pursued by Castlereagh during most of his term of office. At the congress of Verona the duke of Wellington defined England's position according to his instructions as one of "neutrality but not of indifference," and the point-blank refusal of England to join the Powers in their intervention in Spain was the death-blow to the system of congresses and the beginning of a new era in Europe. His eloquence has associated with his name the responsibility for British policy. No speech of his is perhaps more famous than the one in which he claimed the initiative in recognizing the inde pendence of the revolted Spanish colonies in South America in 1823: "I resolved that, if France had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies. I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old" (December 12, 1826).
It has been well said that Portugal owed to Canning her se curity, Greece and the South American republics their existence, while it was owing to his influence that the Holy Alliance was dissolved and liberalism introduced into European diplomacy, for he was the first statesman to advance the doctrine of nationality.
When Lord Liverpool was struck down in a fit on February 17, 1827, Canning was obviously marked out as his only possible successor. Although the duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel and several other members of the Ministry, moved perhaps by per sonal animosity and certainly by dislike of advocacy of the claims of the Roman Catholics, refused to serve under him, he suc ceeded in forming a Ministry in April. His health, however, broke down under the strain. He had caught cold at the funeral of the duke of York in January and never recovered. He died on August 8, 182 7, at Chiswick in the house of the duke of Devonshire, in the same room in which Fox had died, and was buried at the feet of Pitt.
See Speeches, with a memoir by R. Thierry, 6 vols. (1826) ; A. G. Stapleton, Political Life of Canning, 1822-1827 (2nd ed., 1831) ; Canning and his Times (1859) ; Lord Dalling and Bulwer, Historical Characters (1868) ; F. H. Hill, George Canning (1887) ; Some Polit ical Correspondence of George Canning, edit. E. J. Stapleton, 2 vols. (1887) ; J. A. R. Marriott, George Canning and his Times (1903) ; W. Alison Phillips, George Canning (1903), with reproductions of con temporary portraits and caricatures; H. W. V. Temperley, George Canning (1905) ; The Foreign Policy of Canning 1822-27, etc. (1925).
(E. F. M.-S.)