The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  The new ministry was led by the Duke of Portland, who had been the victim of the king’s advice to the House of Lords in 1783, who had negotiated the coalition with Pitt in 1794 but who had recently conspired with the king to remove the ‘Talents’ in 1807. The new ministry was very similar in its structure to Pitt’s second administration: a coalition of groups which looked to Pitt and regarded themselves as his heirs. Its functions were to wage the war with vigour at a time of relentless French success and to unite against the friends of Catholic emancipation. With this latter object in mind, the government dissolved Parliament and at the general election of 1807 were able to win perhaps 50 seats. In the new Parliament, indeed, it carried the Address of Thanks by 350 to 155. Yet the standing of Portland’s government was weakened by the revival of radical campaigning in the country and, in particular, was dogged by the disrepute attaching to the Duke of York, who was forced to resign his post of Commander-in-Chief after a scandal involving the sale of military commissions by his mistress. It was also disrupted by the mutual detestation of Canning and Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary and War Secretary respectively, the former constantly scheming for the removal of the latter from the cabinet.

  The fatal illness of Portland in September 1809 led to the patching up of a new administration led by Spencer Perceval, but it lacked the support of Canning and Castlereagh, whose bitter feuding had led to a duel between the two in September 1809.31 Perceval had been Chancellor of the Exchequer since 1807 and was a leading Commons spokesman for the government. His experience, good sense and personal integrity rendered him an effective, if not an outstanding, leader of the post-Pittite Tory factions. He was nimble enough to accept the principle of J. C. Curwen’s bill of 1809 to outlaw the sale of parliamentary seats, and after suffering heavy amendments it became law. Moreover, after the onset of George Ill’s final illness towards the end of 1810, Perceval managed to negotiate the conditional regency which the future George IV was to occupy without bringing the Whigs into office. Imitating Pitt’s tactics of 1788–9, he restricted the Regent’s right to create peers, to bestow offices in reversion or to grant pensions for at least a year. The queen, furthermore, was to have custody of the person of the king. Taking advantage of fatal differences between the Prince of Wales on the one hand and Grenville and Grey on the other, Perceval managed to strengthen the ministry by bringing in the groups led by Castlereagh and Sidmouth. In its last months Perceval’s government became the strongest since 1801 and had gone far towards absorbing the Pittite factions into a true Tory ministry, opposed to parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation. At just that moment, the assassination (in May 1812) of Spencer Perceval by John Bellingham, a deranged, commercial agent, ruined by the economic effects of the war, precipitated its collapse.

  After three weeks of negotiation, essentially the same structure was taken over by Lord Liverpool, who was to remain in power for fifteen years. One of its first actions was to repeal the Orders in Council. In 1812 Liverpool dissolved Parliament and strengthened the government’s majority by up to sixty at one of the quietest general elections to the unreformed Parliament. Indeed, with military success enhancing its reputation and forging its unity, the government went from strength to strength. In 1814 the government absorbed what was left of Canning’s group and, with the solitary exception of Grenville’s group, now completed the re-establishment of the old Pittite coalition. Even Grenville, who did not join the ministry until 1821, abandoned the Whigs in 1817.

  Secure in the Regent’s confidence and enjoying considerable administrative and managerial skills, Liverpool enjoyed a Commons majority of over 100. His dogged pursuit of victory in the war and, later, his hard line towards popular movements attracted the support of the Independent members. That support could not always be taken for granted and Liverpool was often anxious about, not to say obsessed with, the possibility that it might be withheld. In 1816, for example, the House threw out the hated property tax by 238 to 201, a defeat caused by the desertion of eighty government supporters and the abstention of a similar number. Too much should not be made of the political context of this upset. It was a crushing defeat on a particular measure but by no stretch of the imagination was it a call for a new government. The real significance of the event, however, lies in the mounting role of public opinion, in the shape of over 400 petitions against the tax. Coming so shortly after the repeal of the Orders in Council, the failure of the Liverpool government to renew the property tax stands as a remarkable indication of the increasing attention that politicians were having to give to extra-parliamentary opinion. Liverpool tried thereafter to protect his majority and his policies more carefully, but he suffered no fewer than twenty defeats between 1816 and 1826, three-quarters of them on major issues.

  There was talent aplenty in Liverpool’s cabinet, especially in the later years, when the early promise of talented individuals like Peel was beginning to mature.32 Liverpool kept the government together and managed its (often prickly) individuals with tact and patience, but it cannot really be said that he welded it into a coherent force. In the earlier years there was also considerable dead wood in Liverpool’s cabinet. Many of the heavyweights of the ministry, like Sidmouth, Wellington and, of course, Liverpool himself, sat in the House of Lords. The government was in somewhat less reliable hands in the Commons, where the responsibility of defending the ministry fell on Castlereagh, who was leader of the House of Commons as well as Foreign Secretary. Neither a popular nor a charismatic individual, Castlereagh at least had the weight to impress the Commons and convey the impression of solid, responsible government. Liverpool was neither an inventive nor an original politician but he certainly did not deserve Disraeli’s description of him as an ‘arch mediocrity’ nor of his government as a ‘government of departments’. No ‘arch mediocrity’ can stay in power for fifteen of the most convulsive years in modern British history. Indeed, Liverpool was sustained by his awareness of his place in a Pittite tradition going back to the Younger Pitt. He was unsympathetic to popular agitation, he was the opponent of radical reform, the defender of Britain’s institutions, and he looked to market forces to improve the condition of the masses. Further, he consciously modelled his government’s policy towards the radicals on that of Pitt in the 1790s. He was prepared to allow, even to encourage, local propertied men to pursue radicals in the name of loyalism as Pitt had in 1792–3; he was willing to appoint Committees of Secrecy to pursue their one-sided ‘inquiries’ into the existence of treasonable plots as Pitt had in 1794; in the end, he was ready to use the powers of statute against radicals and to enable magistrates to license public meetings, as Pitt had done in 1795. The Six Acts of November 1819 regulated the holding of public meetings, encouraged magistrates to search for arms, increased the stamp duty on newspapers and tightened the law against seditious publications.

  In economic policy, too, Liverpool consciously modelled himself on Pittite precedents, adopting his policy of encouraging commerce and industry whilst protecting the landed interest. There is little evidence that the ministry entered a ‘liberal’ phase in the early 1820s. It had always been a liberal government in its pursuit of commerce and free markets, but the financial consequences of the war dominated everything in the early years of the ministry. In those early years, no less than 80 per cent of government income was swallowed by national debt repayments and a further 11 per cent in other fixed charges (such as war pensions). Liverpool had very little room for manoeuvre with expenditure when the government controlled only 9 per cent of the monies available to it. Worse, government expenditure was running at £13 million a year over its income. The 1819 budget announced a plan for a staged return to the gold standard while interim deficits were to be mainly financed out of the sinking fund. In the long term, increased yield from indirect taxes like the excise would have to bridge the gap between income and expenditure. Such increased yields could only result from a higher level of economic growth which, in turn, could best be achieved by the stimulation
of commerce and consumption and thus the lowering of tariffs. His great ‘free trade’ speech of 1820 outlined Liverpool’s economic ambitions. Like Pitt, he looked to a greater liberalization of trade but not to free trade as an end in itself. Indeed, there was little general demand for free trade in the mercantile community at this time and Liverpool was willing to raise tariffs when necessary, as he did that on wool in the years 1815–22.

  The government’s repressive policy towards popular agitation has received massive condemnation from historians in the past, touched by the pitiful plight of many sections of the labouring poor. Other historians, however, have been struck less by the callousness of the Liverpool government’s approach than by its uncertainty and by the fact that it was motivated by a mixture of considerations.33 Like Pitt in the 1790s, Liverpool wished to uphold strong government, not to establish a legal tyranny. He was very much aware of the need to set an example to the propertied classes and to respond to their fears and anxieties. He wished to act with firmness but did not wish to make martyrs out of the reformers. The Six Acts were intended to deter reformers from agitation, but the legislation was enforced with some restraint. Indeed, it was very little used. Its real function was to rally the propertied classes, to encourage local justices to exercise vigilance and to satisfy parliamentary opinion. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to draw too many comparisons with the repressive legislation of the 1790s, because there were at least three notable differences. The first, obviously, is that the country was no longer at war, and it follows that the tactic of labelling all reformers as traitors was no longer credible. The second is that while conservative opinion was, of course, horrified at the mass rallies organized by the reformers in the years after 1815 there was nothing equivalent to the witch-hunting hysteria of, say, the winter of 1792–3. The Prevention of Seditious Meetings Act of 1817 was not the action of a panic-stricken government; it was that of a government which naturally wished to uphold the traditional social hierarchies and to defend them against the attacks of popular agitators. Third, Liverpool had fewer resources with which to maintain law and order than Pitt had enjoyed. The armed forces and the Volunteer regiments had been hugely reduced. It was simply not in the power of central government to patrol the country. Peterloo, after all, had occurred because of the miscalculations of the local yeomanry.

  If the reaction of Liverpool’s government to the challenge of popular unrest vividly illustrates both its social objectives and its political limitations, then the same issue reveals the dilemmas and confusions in the Whig Party, which was led by Grey after the death of Fox. For example, most of the party followed Grey’s cautious lead in opposing the suspension of habeas corpus while accepting the principle of the Prevention of Seditious Meetings Bill of 1817. The opposition was anxious to support legitimate public complaints against the high-handedness of the executive while opposing violent and revolutionary activity. Retrenchment, economic reform and cheap government were to be its watchwords. Even this moderate position was too much for Grenville, who abandoned his coalition with Grey in the same year. It was just as well that he did, for he would have been horrified at the Whigs’ response to Peterloo and its aftermath. They leapt to the defence of popular liberties in their savage denunciations of the Six Acts. Buoyed up with the support of public opinion, they continued to play the popular card during the Caroline agitation in 1820. Initially, the Whigs took up her case with some reluctance, finding the matter distasteful. Yet, Brougham, who had done so much to nail the party’s colours to the mast of the queen’s cause, vividly hinted at the party’s ultimate motive by noting that she was ‘a Constitutional means of making head against a revenue of 105 millions, an army of half a million, and 800 millions of debt’.34 In short, Caroline became a sort of reversionary interest which the Whig Party was prepared to use against the king, as they had used successive princes of Wales against their fathers many years before. Here, as elsewhere, eighteenth-century patterns of politics were recurring amidst social and political conditions, not least the rising power of the press and of public opinion, which belonged to a different age. The Whig opposition was capable, on certain carefully chosen occasions, of energetic and effective action in carrying the political battle beyond Westminster, as it had done in helping to secure the repeal of the Orders in Council in 1812 and in creating the climate of opinion in which the property tax was abandoned in 1816. It was not, however, willing to adopt parliamentary reform as an immediate objective. The principle that Grey pursued was that the party should not bring the issue forward until public opinion had become favourable to the measure. In many respects the aristocratic leaders of the party were suspicious of extra-parliamentary opinion which they could neither effectively control nor easily influence. Furthermore, sheer indolence played its part. Grey, in particular, preferred the sheltered life of his own estate to the invigorating and boisterous world of extra-parliamentary politics. Finally, deference to Grenville and his friends and their reluctance to offend an increasingly reactionary heir to the throne for many years inhibited their handling of the reform issue. It did not, however, stop their followers from raising it. In March 1809 Samuel Whitbread tried to commit his party to a policy of reform, and in May 1810 Thomas Brand’s motion for a moderate reform attracted a fairly respectable 115 votes, against a majority of 234.35 This was all very well, but it effectively gave the Whig Party the worst of both worlds. Such motions horrified conservative opinion while failing to impress extra-parliamentary radicals.

  While the Whig Party was uneasy and sometimes unconvincing on such issues, it could be frivolous and even irresponsible on others. Constant criticism of the war policy of the ministry lent a factious appearance, while continued attachment to the old Foxite policy of peace on the part of several of its members did them no good with the public whatsoever. In February 1808 Whitbread lost a motion for peace by 253 to 108. Grenville was aghast at these pacific tendencies within the Whig Party. His group wanted the overthrow of Napoleon and war to the death against France. Grey and his friends preferred the old Foxite formula of non-intervention in the internal political arrangements of other states. Somehow, they managed to stumble on to the end of the war without making their differences the subject of excessive public embarrassment.

  It was during these years that the party and the heir to the throne began to drift apart. The watershed was the ‘Talents’ ministry, when the prince resented what he took to be the ministers’ neglect of him. Grenville, in particular, disliked and distrusted him and was unwilling to fawn over him. After the death of Fox relations between the Whig Party and the heir were never the same. Consequently, the Whigs were unable to take advantage of no fewer than four opportunities to enter governments between 1809 and 1812. The events of 1782, 1783, 1792–4 and 1806–7, and the mythology to which they had given rise, had taught the Whigs that they should never again be victims of the court; that, therefore, they should only serve in a completely new administration; that the old one must be declared to be at an end; and that they should have ultimate control over men and measures in the new one. Thus, on the fall of Portland’s ministry in 1809 the Whigs were invited to participate in ‘an extended and combined administration’. Grey was unwilling to shore up the existing ministerial structure, refusing to have anything to do with men who, in his opinion, had ruined the country in recent years. The second occasion came early in 1811 with the final illness of George III and the establishment of the Regency. The Whig leaders were concerned at the influence of Lord Moira36 and Sheridan in the counsels of the prince, and demanded assurances about their position in a future government. On this rock the negotiations foundered, and the prince decided against a change of administration. A further attempt to bring the Whigs into the ministry in 1812 arose out of the Regent’s detestation of Perceval and his desire for a broad-bottom administration. This, too, came to nothing because the Whigs resented the prospect of being junior partners in the new arrangement and because they advocated measures, particularly i
n Ireland, with which the Regent could not agree. Finally, in the political vacuum which followed the assassination of Perceval the Whigs, yet again, had an opportunity to play a part in a new administration, but they were offered only four cabinet places out of twelve, the others going to men over whom they had no influence and whose measures they might not approve. Believing that it was better to enjoy freedom of movement than to compromise themselves, as they had in the past, by entering arrangements with which they were in less than total sympathy, they decided to remain in opposition.

  The Whig Party, then, stranded in a semi-permanent opposition partly of its own making, occupied a political ground separate from that of the radicals in Parliament but distinct also from that of the government. Members of the Whig Party shared many of the social and economic assumptions of the Liverpool ministry – Grey, for example, supported the Corn Law of 1815 – but their hostility to its repressive policy, their belief in Catholic emancipation and their (admittedly unenthusiastic) support for parliamentary reform gave them a coherent identity as the heirs of the Foxite Whigs. Their numbers held steady between 1807 and 1818 at about 150, until the general election of 1818 brought them about 30 gains. Like all oppositions in the unreformed Parliament, however, they had little chance of defeating the existing administration. They were capable of appealing to the people, embarrassing the ministry in debate and even, occasionally, defeating a ministerial measure. Even if they had been able to overthrow the government, there existed no legitimate constitutional mechanism by which they might have forced themselves on the king. They had perforce to wait on events outside their own control to bring about their return to office: for the succession of a new monarch, perhaps for disastrous military defeat in some undeclared war or, conceivably, for some distant convulsion in public opinion.