connection with charges whereupon to frame an impeachment, and when the articles were settled it fell to him to obtain the assent of the house to the one relating to the begums or princesses of Oude. The speech in which he brought the matter before the house on 7 Feb. 1787 occupied five hours and forty minutes in delivery, and was one of the most memorable in the annals of parliament. When he sat down ‘the whole house—the members, peers, and strangers—involuntarily joined in a tumult of applause, and adopted a mode of expressing their approbation, new and irregular in that house, by loudly and repeatedly clapping their hands’ (Parliamentary Hist. xxv. 294). Pitt moved the adjournment of the debate on the ground that the minds of members were too agitated to discuss the question with coolness and judicially. No full report of the speech has been preserved; the best appeared in the ‘London Chronicle’ for 8 Feb. 1787. The excitement which Sheridan had aroused in the House of Commons spread throughout the nation. Sheridan began his speech as a manager of the impeachment in Westminster Hall on 3 June 1788. The event was the topic of the day. Fifty pounds were cheerfully given for a seat. His speech lasted, not, as Macaulay wrote, ‘two days,’ but for several hours on Tuesday the 3rd, Friday the 6th, Tuesday the 10th, and Friday the 13th of June. Gibbon asserted that Sheridan sank back into Burke's arms after uttering the concluding words, ‘My lords, I have done.’ Macaulay repeated this story with embellishments, writing that ‘Sheridan contrived, with a knowledge of stage effect which his father might have envied, to sink back, as if exhausted, into the arms of Burke, who hugged him with the energy of generous admiration’ (Collected Works, vi. 633). Sir Gilbert Elliot, one of the managers who sat beside Sheridan, wrote to his wife, ‘Burke caught him in his arms as he sat down. … I have myself enjoyed that embrace on such an occasion, and know its value’ (Life and Letters, i. 219). Sheridan paid Gibbon a graceful compliment by speaking of ‘his luminous page.’ Moore is responsible for the fiction that Sheridan afterwards said he meant ‘voluminous.’ Dudley Long told Gibbon that Sheridan had spoken about his ‘voluminous pages’ (Sir Gilbert Elliott, Life and Letters, i. 219).
The trial of Hastings lasted till 1794, and Sheridan was constant in attendance. On 14 May in that year he replied to the arguments of Plumer and Law, counsel for Hastings, relative to his charge concerning the begums, and the speech which he then delivered was described by Professor Smyth, who heard it, as an extraordinary rhetorical triumph (Memoir of Mr. Sheridan, pp. 31–5). While the trial was in progress Sheridan suffered much domestic affliction. His father died at Margate on 14 Aug. 1788. Sheridan thereupon took charge of his sister Elizabeth, and, on her marriage with Henry Lefanu, provided for her maintenance. His wife died at Hot Wells on 28 June 1792. He remarried on 27 April 1795, his second wife being Esther Jane, eldest daughter of Newton Ogle, dean of Winchester.
He was unremitting in the discharge of his parliamentary duties, and he gave special attention to finance, saying to Pitt, on 11 March 1793, that he did not require to watch with vigilance all matters relating to the public income and outlay, as ‘he had uniformly acted on that principle upon all revenue questions.’ He laboured to abate the rigour of the game laws and to repress the practice of gaming. Whenever a question relating to social improvement and progress was before the house he gave his support to it, and when, in 1787, the convention of Scottish royal boroughs had failed in getting a sympathiser with their grievances, they enlisted him in their service, and they thanked him in after days for his earnestness in their cause, which he twelve times upheld in the house. What he had vainly urged between 1787 and 1794 was effected for the Scottish burgesses in 1833 in a reformed parliament. The parliamentary reform which rendered this improvement possible had been advocated by Sheridan, and, when others despaired of its attainment, he wrote, on 21 May 1782, to Thomas Grenville: ‘We were bullied outrageously about our poor parliamentary reform; but it will do at last in spite of you all’ (Courts and Cabinets of George III, i. 28).
When the revolution in France tried men's souls in Great Britain and made many friends of progress recant in a panic the convictions of their wiser years, Sheridan stood firm with Fox in maintaining the right of the French to form their own government, and upheld, with him, the duty of this country to recognise and treat with any government which exercised authority there. The Earl of Mornington (afterwards Marquis Wellesley) made an elaborate appeal to the house on 21 Jan. 1794 to prosecute the war with France till the French should have discarded their republican principles. The reply on this occasion was one of Sheridan's finest debating speeches, and a most able argument against illegitimate interference with the domestic concerns of
