ABSTRACT
The ultras were delighted at their champion’s excoriation of the Whigs in the last part of the 1839 parliamentary session. At the end of August the greatest Tory feast since his installation as Chancellor of Oxford was held to honour him as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. About 3000 people attended. Lord Brougham, rejected by the Whigs and trying to ingratiate himself with the Tories as well as the Radicals, managed to insinuate himself into the proceedings and improved the occasion with one of his celebrated orations. Charles Greville, reading it in the Times to which Brougham had characteristically sent a copy in advance, thought it ‘tawdry … stuffed with claptraps and commonplaces,’ but the Duke pronounced it one of his best speeches. 1
