by Simon Heffer
Mayne’s initiative caused outrage. Bright told the League that ‘if a public meeting in a public park is denied you, and if millions of intelligent and honest men are denied the franchise, on what foundation does our liberty rest; or is there in the country any liberty but the toleration of the ruling class?’46 Spencer Walpole, the Home Secretary, said: ‘I had hoped that those who had proposed to convene that meeting would have forborne from calling it together. Should they still persevere in their intention, which I trust they will not, I have no other course left open to me but to desire the police to act on the notice issued by Sir Richard Mayne.’ The League told Walpole they had a legal right to hold the meeting; and they would hold it. If the police stopped them entering the park, they would march four deep past Parliament and up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square. They urged their followers to stay within the law.
By five o’clock on the evening of the rally groups of protestors met at points around the capital. The Times report said that by early evening there were ‘vast crowds’ near the park, but also between 1,600 and 1,800 policemen, mounted and on foot.47 Also at five o’clock, the gates were closed, despite there being large numbers already inside, waiting to meet the groups marching there. The quality stood on the balconies of houses in Park Lane to get a perfect view; every approach to the park was thronged with people. Beales and his lieutenants arrived at Marble Arch at 7 p.m., having led a march from Clerkenwell (though they did not march, but rode in a fleet of hansom cabs). As he went to talk to the line of police blocking his entrance, ‘the crowd immediately closed in, and endeavoured by an “ugly rush” to effect admission.’ The police started lashing out with staves, and both Beales and his confederate Colonel Dickson were hit. They made a tactical retreat, and pointed the fleet of hansoms towards Trafalgar Square. However, the blood of those less mature in years and less well bred than Beales and the Colonel was up. They decided to forget Trafalgar Square. Disregarding the gates, which were barricaded, they charged and broke down the railings. This was an image that flew around England in the succeeding days, signalling anarchy.
The Times wrote: ‘The police, indeed, hastened to every point that was attacked, and for a short time kept the multitude at bay; but their numbers were utterly insufficient to guard so long a line of frontier, and breach after breach was made, the stonework, together with the railings, yielding easily to the pressure of the crowd. The first opening was made in the Bayswater-road . . . the police brought their truncheons into active use, and a number of the “roughs” were severely handled.’ St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner received both civilian and police casualties. One youth, aged seventeen, was found dead in the park, crushed between two carriages. Mayne had stones thrown at him, and was hooted. Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist, was among leaders of the League who sought to restore calm. For his pains he was accused of being a government spy. As darkness fell the crowd dispersed, but not until speeches had been made calling for Derby’s resignation and deploring ‘the attempt to rule the country by force’. A gang of ‘ruffians’ broke windows in Great Cumberland Street until after one o’clock in the morning, and left half a mile of broken park railings and ruined flower beds behind them.48 This loss of control, and potential for anarchy, seems to have terrified Beales and his well-to-do friends. Lord John Manners saw Beales shortly after the event and told his brother that the League’s leaders were ‘more frightened than those they had frightened’.49 Mill, who saw Beales and Dickson too, felt the same.50
Next day forty or so demonstrators were before the magistrates at Marlborough Street, charged with a variety of offences from throwing stones to assaulting police officers. ‘The prisoners’, wrote The Times, ‘generally were of the class known as “roughs”. About half a dozen might be considered as belonging to the better order of the working classes.’51 There was no exemplary act of official retribution: most were given fines or short terms of imprisonment, seldom more than a month. Over the next few days a steady procession went through the courts. There were many claims of mistaken identity: the police estimate after the event was that 10,000 had been present. The Times, as the voice of the Establishment, railed against the damage done by a ‘ruthless mob, who appear for the most part to comprise the lowest scum of the London population’, but all the Establishment could now do was roar: power was shifting.52
It was not only Tories who were shocked: so were some of the old Whigs, who with the departure of Russell had lost the last Whig prime minister. Emily Eden, a friend of Clarendon and with old Whig blood, was livid at the spectacle, and at the support given to it by some Liberals. ‘I do not see how we are to die peacefully in our beds without having exterminated that wretched coward Bright,’ she wrote. She also went for Layard. ‘Did you like that man when he was your under-secretary?’ she asked Clarendon. ‘Or did you only put up with him? . . . I could forgive Layard for having discovered Nineveh . . . I could not forgive Nineveh for having discovered Layard.’53
The riots, and the size of the protest, convinced the government that the mood had changed, and menacingly so. Ministers were attacked in the Commons and in the press for the stupidity of closing the park gates against so large a crowd. Acton Smee Ayrton, the future Commissioner of Works, castigated the government for allowing the Commissioner to impose the ban: and warned that ‘it is a very dangerous doctrine for the Government to act upon, that the army is a machine to be used against the people’.54 It seemed that in more ways than one battle lines were being drawn up, and such talk only inflamed the idea of insurrection. Layard called Walpole’s measures ‘most injudicious and foolish’.55
Mill said that ‘noble Lords and right hon Gentlemen opposite may be congratulated on having done a job of work last night which will require wiser men than they are many years to efface the consequences of.’56 Beales kept his high profile, demanding the right to stage further meetings in Hyde Park, and issuing a veiled threat of the consequences if the League were to be denied that right. He warned that ‘the Duke of Wellington granted Catholic Emancipation rather than risk civil war in Ireland. It might seem as if it were better to concede the holding of a meeting for an hour or two in Hyde Park than risk further sanguinary conflicts between the people and the police.’57 The Conservative party realised that if it were not to be rendered incredible for another twenty years – as, effectively, it had been by being on the wrong side of the Corn Laws debate – it had better follow public opinion on the franchise. The party line had been to claim that working men were indifferent to reform: no one could pretend that now. Branches of the League held meetings around the country in the days after the riot, and showed they were prepared to continue to demonstrate their commitment to their cause. The message was clear.
Disraeli was shaken by the riot, and for him at least the message hit home. Ever prepared to change course to preserve his own power, he proposed to Derby that there should be an immediate Reform Bill. Whereas the Liberal bill had been based upon rental value, Disraeli’s would give the vote to men in urban boroughs whose property had a £6 rateable value, and to men in rural county constituencies whose property’s rateable value was £20. This would enfranchise slightly fewer men than the Liberal measure would have done. New constituencies would be created in the northern boroughs. Derby remained cautious.58 To use Gladstone’s phrase, he had time on his side. Parliament would rise on 10 August and would not return until 5 February 1867, allowing the government time to think. There was none of the acute hardship that in the early 1840s had given impetus to the Chartists; but Bright spent his autumn touring the country, addressing great gatherings in Birmingham at the end of August (where 150,000 people turned up), Manchester the following month and Glasgow in October. The momentum from the working-class movement remained strong. However, Bright’s rhetoric was deemed to have terrified many on the centre ground, who might, it was thought, now be in favour of such moderate change as the Conservatives contemplated. Even Mill, never at his best in appreciating those who might be consider
ed uncouth, had long considered Bright ‘the mere demagogue and courtier of the majority’.59
In September 1866 Derby saw the Queen at Balmoral, and found her trembling at the prospect of renewed civil unrest: she wanted the matter resolved quickly. However, Disraeli was rattled by Cabinet disunity, and tried to persuade Derby to delay discussion until well into the parliamentary term. Derby, however, resolved to proceed. Days before the Queen’s Speech the Cabinet agreed to mention reform in it. Derby got The Times onside, and the paper started to call for a resolution of the problem. The Queen’s Speech said attention ‘will again be called to the State of the Representation of the People in Parliament; and I trust that your Deliberations, conducted in a Spirit of Moderation and mutual Forbearance, may lead to the Adoption of Measures which, without unduly disturbing the Balance of political Power, shall freely extend the Elective Franchise.’60
Disraeli told the Commons on 11 February 1867 what was meant by those words: it was Her Majesty’s wish that the Commons should ‘divest themselves of that party spirit’ that was normally ‘legitimate’, but which was now, clearly, dangerous.61 This, he said, was necessary because of the polarisation of views in the country. Gladstone regarded this approach as ‘altogether novel’, which was not meant as a compliment.62 He was dismayed that the Speech from the Throne had engaged in ‘instructing this House as to the temper in which it was to deal with this subject’, a ploy, he said with some understatement, that was ‘not very commonly found’ in such speeches. However, all that was feasible was engineering a vote of confidence to remove the Conservatives from power: Russell, at a meeting at Gladstone’s house the day after Disraeli had spoken to the Commons, argued for just that. Gladstone, better understanding the poisoned chalice this would present, was more cautious.
Derby realised a bill would have to be brought forward sooner rather than later. Getting Cabinet agreement was not easy. An attempt was made at a meeting on 16 February. Cranborne, the Secretary of State for India, objected to Disraeli’s initial proposal of awarding the franchise according to rateable value. This in turn upset General Jonathan Peel, the Secretary of State for War, and younger brother of the late prime minister. Peel was leant on by the Queen and did not resign. Gladstone promised support for a Conservative proposal if it satisfied his principles. The Cave of Adullam wanted household suffrage to forestall further agitation. Since this would create a large number of borough electors, Derby ruled that household suffrage on the basis of rateable value would form the core of the bill, since it should bring in support both from the Cave and from Liberals.
However, Cranborne claimed that many small boroughs would be thrown ‘into the hands of the voter whose qualification is less than £10’.63 This meant enfranchising unskilled and semi-skilled men below the artisan class. He told Derby he would have to resign if it were proposed. His leading role in bringing down Gladstone’s bill – which he considered far less damaging than Disraeli’s – was fresh in the memory: he was not a man to seek a charge of hypocrisy. ‘If I consent to this scheme now that I know what its effect will be I could not look in the face those whom last year I urged to resist Mr Gladstone,’ he wrote to Derby on 24 February. ‘I am convinced that it will, if passed, be the ruin of the Conservative party.’64
Carnarvon, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, felt similarly; and Peel became restive again. Carnarvon, who had been at Oxford with Cranborne, told him their mistake had been to imagine Disraeli was acting in good faith: he had played a game, instead, of divide and rule.65 When Derby was told of the resignation threats he wrote to Disraeli, exclaiming: ‘Utter ruin! What on earth are we to do?’66 He summoned a Cabinet on 25 February, just two hours before a gathering of Tory MPs would debate the matter. The cabinet meeting was ‘of a most unpleasant character’, Derby told the Queen, and almost the whole time was taken up with vitriolic argument.67 It was agreed to proceed on the basis of rateable value.
There was scarcely more enthusiasm in the Conservative party for the proposals than in Cabinet; but it was agreed to support Derby. Disraeli went straight to the Commons to outline the new plan. This was a disaster. He was thinking on his feet, so new was the plan, and even his skills of rhetoric were not equal to his being convincing. He was ridiculed by Lowe, who urged him to stop prevaricating and bring in a bill: though Lowe suggested that the meetings of the working-class movement had not captured the imagination of the country, and that there was, therefore, no urgency. Lowe suspected – and he was largely right – that the main motive driving Tory plans was fear. Bright said, with great percipience, that ‘I do not believe that among the ranks opposite me there is a single Member of the Treasury Bench who really believes that the course that has been taken by the Government is a wise one, or ought to be persisted in.’68 Gladstone continued the attack, and Disraeli, battered, asked for a delay of three days before considering matters further. However, after hearing that the Opposition was organising against the government, he came back the next day and said that by the following Thursday week at the latest he would present a Reform Bill. Some feared insurrection, although with the exception of the occasional outburst there was none of the seditious rhetoric used by the Chartists before the 1848 damp squib. The numbers protesting were, however, unquestionably greater, and the Reform League mobilised people all over the country. Disraeli now took the initiative, to the point that when the bill eventually came into committee he would accept amendments of a far-reaching nature without even asking Derby first, let alone the rest of the Cabinet.
After this shambles, Derby reverted to a policy of offering the vote to every householder, and sought on 2 March to persuade the Cabinet of the sense of this. Cranborne, Peel and Carnarvon all resigned, Derby thought the Tory party was ‘ruined’, but Disraeli took the opportunity to have three of his friends promoted to the Cabinet, securing his power base when Derby finally left office. When Disraeli announced the resignations to the Commons on 4 March he announced, too, that the bill would now be introduced a fortnight later. It was not until during the week before the first reading that the Cabinet finally agreed on what would be in it. All men resident in a borough who had lived there for two years or more and had paid poor rates – the tax on property that paid for the upkeep of the parish workhouse – would get the vote. It was also agreed to allow plural voting – to give a second vote to those who paid 20s in direct taxes as well as the poor rate. This decisive act by Derby pulled his party behind him, with the faction led by Cranborne in the wilderness. Derby’s health had, though, been wrecked by the strain. The inevitable legacy was bitterness. When, a few evenings after Cranborne’s resignation, Derby saw Lady Cranborne on the stairs of a grand party, he asked her cuttingly, in a reference to Cranborne’s agonising about the numbers who would be enfranchised: ‘Is Robert still doing his sums?’ Lady Cranborne brilliantly replied: ‘Yes – and he has reached rather a curious result. Take three from 15 [the number of members of the Cabinet] and nothing remains.’69
Disraeli introduced the bill on 18 March, only to have Gladstone assail him because of its inconsistencies and bureaucratic difficulties, and notably on plural voting, which Gladstone called ‘a gigantic engine of fraud’ because of the corrupt ways in which one could engineer liability for the taxes that qualified one to vote and, worse, ‘a proclamation of a war of classes’. Gladstone was reading Walter Bagehot’s new book, The English Constitution, and it stimulated him: ‘the author of this dual vote is the man who strikes at the British constitution.’70 Gladstone refused to commit himself against the bill in toto: but said he would in no circumstances support dual voting.
The Tories became angry at the extent to which they were being forced to contradict themselves. A process of rapid and confusing amendment began. Clarendon told Gladstone on 22 March that ‘the Govt are expecting amendments in a radical sense on going into Committee and are thinking that this will unite their party’.71 He reported that ‘Cranbourne [sic] deeply regrets the determination [of the Liberals] n
ot to oppose the 2nd reading, but he hopes that Mr G will be able to arrange for simple rejection of the proposal and go into Committee. He does not think on consideration that any amendment cd be so framed as to make it easy for Mr G’s party and the Conservative Cave to unite.’ The Duke of Buccleuch spoke for the Tory grandees when, after the heavily amended bill had been enacted, he quipped that the only word in it that remained unaltered was the first one, ‘whereas’.72 Disraeli had created a suspicion among his opponents in the Tory party, and especially among the three resigned ministers and their adherents, that would take years to dispel. Cranborne, writing to Carnarvon on 1 April, observed the impossibility of getting Disraeli to tell the truth about his intentions. ‘Privately they assure the Radicals that they mean to give up everything, and the Tories that they meant to give up nothing except duality.’73
Disraeli and Derby’s successful management of the bill and of their party undermined Gladstone. His attempt to amend the bill to remove the rating qualification for household suffrage, so all householders could vote, was defeated with the help of fifty-two Liberal and Radical MPs, despite his having colluded with Cranborne to try to defeat the government. Success is the great unifier of parties, and Gladstone withdrew from the front line of opposition to the bill. Lord Houghton, formerly Richard Monckton Milnes, met Gladstone at breakfast a few days later and described him as having been ‘quite awed with the diabolical cleverness of Dizzy, who, he says, is gradually driving all ideas of political honour out of the House, and accustoming it to the most revolting cynicism.’74
The Conservative proposals were insufficient for the League, however, which considered it to be ‘trammelling the principle of household suffrage’. It chose to renew its campaign of protest.75 A small meeting, of only ‘a few hundred respectably dressed working men’ took place in the park on 19 April, organised by the Working Men’s Rights Association.76 They marched under the red flag while the police circled on horseback and on foot. The main speaker was a Mr Henwood, of the Fitzroy Branch of the Reform League. He told the crowd that ‘the people did not want revolution, but the Tory government were driving them to it.’ On 24 April Beales and his lieutenants agreed to hold a mass meeting in Hyde Park on 6 May: this shocked the political establishment, and had those who lived near the park writing to the newspapers to demand that, following the previous year’s ‘disgraceful scenes’, it be banned.77
