Perilous Question

by Antonia Fraser

  Perhaps Burdett summed up his own character best when he described its finest part as being ‘a strong feeling of indignation at injustice and oppression and a lively sympathy with the sufferings of my fellows’. Naturally Burdett had been an early and passionate advocate of Reform. At the same time that paternalistic side of his nature, which made Whigs call him a Tory and Tories a Whig – as he himself joked – led him to see the Crown as the natural protector of the poor. This certainly made him an appropriate Chairman for this particular occasion. It was notable that ‘God Save the King’ was sung with particular vigour, with special emphasis on the lines concerning the scattering of his (and their) enemies:

  Confound their politicks

  Frustrate their knavish tricks

  On Thee our hopes we fix

  God Save the King!

  Lord Althorp, he whose easy, unforced manner of management had been responsible for so much of the successful outcome of the ‘dreary warfare’, in Le Marchant’s phrase, made various speeches to his colleagues. His style was to be brief: ‘I have never been ambitious of power, or of high degree,’ declared Althorp, one of the few Ministers who could say such a thing with conviction, ‘but I have been, am still, ambitious of that popularity which is the true result of an honest and consistent discharge of public duty.’ How, he asked, had the recent happy result been obtained? Certainly by the support of the men before him, but also by ‘the support of the people of England’.9 This was the Whig philosophy which needed to be emphasized, in case the cause of Reform, now officially sailing forward, was threatened by shipwreck some time in the future.

  As for the people of England themselves at this juncture, much was anticipated with regard to the passing of the Bill – and much was feared by the men who were their rulers. In particular the rising number of trade unions were the subject of apprehension. The idea of workmen combining to secure better working hours and more appropriate wages, together with limiting the right of entry to a profession, went right back to the medieval craft guilds. It was in the eighteenth century that the potentially dangerous – to the employers – idea of combination among workers led to a series of so-called Combination Acts. Repealed in 1824, they were replaced the next year by measures intended to limit at the very least this kind of activity. In the autumn of 1831, therefore, it was not absolutely clear either to the authorities or the uniting workers what might be legal and what was not. Although the Birmingham Political Union, founded late in 1829, led the way and continued to act as a template, there were many others, not all necessarily with that commitment to non-violent protest on which the charismatic Thomas Attwood insisted.

  A significant figure in the Radical movement at this stage in his ambivalence towards protest was Joseph Parkes. He had been born in Warwick and moved to Birmingham in 1822, playing a role in the earlier attempts to enfranchise it. On several occasions this ‘shrewd little fellow’, in Carlyle’s description, had acted as an election agent. On the one hand Parkes, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, regarded Francis Place as his ‘political father’ from whom he, as ‘a raw miseducated boy’, learnt much that was ‘sound and honest’. He abandoned hopes of a life at the Chancery Bar in London when his father’s business failed, but his air of erudite intelligence common to that profession remained; that enabled a local paper to sneer at him in 1828 as possessing ‘the light of wisdom ting’d by folly’s shade’, in the words of a satirical poem, Chancery Court, published shortly before.10

  On the other hand Parkes had originally deplored the founding of the Birmingham Political Union as ‘ill-contrived and worse timed’. Suspecting that Attwood rated currency reform above that of Parliament, he described the Union as a ‘burning lava of red hot radicalism’ which ‘devastated the fair field of reform’. Then he threw his energies and his dissenting idealism into supporting it (and if necessary modifying it). In May 1831 he wrote that, although he was a Radical and ‘may be a Republican in the year 1900, if by the grace of God I so long live [he would have been 104] I am a great advocate for the respect of caste and order’.

  On 30 September Parkes organized a Birmingham meeting with the stirring declaration: ‘if the Lords throw out the Bill, the question of the utility of the hereditary peerage will infallibly arise.’11 The King’s prerogative (to create peers) was not an ornament but something for use. There was a subtle change here – even a hint of a threat – from the loyal declaration of the previous December, when William IV was thanked for getting rid of Wellington, and ‘entire confidence’ was placed in his ‘wisdom, patriotism and firmness’. But Parkes, with his lightly balanced scales dipping between a desire for progress and respect for the status quo, stood for many sincere men, both governors and governed, at this delicate moment.

  From the opposite point of view, Lord Melbourne, as Home Secretary, had his own concerns. He was in touch with the King’s secretary, Sir Herbert Taylor, immediately after the Bill passed through the Commons. ‘So far as I can learn,’ wrote Melbourne, ‘the political unions are undoubtedly extending themselves, increasing their numbers and completing their arrangements’ in case the Bill was defeated. He believed that plans to resist taxes while preserving the peace – an interesting challenge in itself – were constantly discussed. Melbourne, by no means an ardent reformer, reported ‘the most serious fears’ of those who knew the people well, of the consequences of rejecting the measure of Reform.12

  As a matter of fact, Melbourne was indirectly in touch with Radical opinion: he used his younger brother, the MP George Lamb, to make contact with the agitator-cum-tailor Francis Place. In good Whig fashion, Melbourne had appointed Lamb Under Secretary at the Home Office and his spokesman in the House of Commons. Lamb was a rumbustious fellow – ‘very diverting’ in Macaulay’s estimation – who had defended the use of force by the military at Merthyr in June on the grounds that it was necessary to maintain public order; but he was sound generally on the need for Reform.13 Immediately after the Government was formed in November 1830, Lamb had been used by Melbourne to ask Francis Place to calm down the Swing rioters; that overture had not worked but the connection, via Lamb’s own Private Secretary, Thomas Young, existed.

  *

  The great debate starting in the House of Lords on 3 October began inauspiciously with a squabble between two marquesses: Cleveland quarrelled with Londonderry over a petition from Durham for Reform.14 Londonderry was sure the inhabitants of Durham at large ‘by no means partook of these sentiments’, to which Cleveland retorted that there was no counter-petition to be considered. But Londonderry was not done yet. The Duke of Sussex now presented a petition from merchants, bankers, traders and so forth of Bristol: nearly 26,000 names altogether. Care had been taken, the Duke reported, that none of those who had signed were under sixteen. Londonderry jumped up and announced that he had received certain knowledge from a correspondent that 5,000 or 6,000 of the signatures were fake. But the petitions rolled on: there were for example over 33,000 signatures from Manchester, and lesser amounts from towns throughout the country from South Shields in the north-east to Weymouth on the south coast. Finally the bickering ceased.

  Lord Grey now rose to his feet and moved the second reading of the Reform Bill in the House of Lords. He was, however, a man only very recently pierced by the personal tragedy so long feared – none the easier to bear for that. On 24 September, Durham’s son Charles Lambton, Grey’s favourite grandchild, gave up his struggle to survive tuberculosis and died. Grey was devastated. To Princess Lieven he uttered the heartbreaking cry of the old who have survived the young: ‘Why did the blow fall on this heavenly boy, while I and so many others who would be no loss to the world are spared?’

  The pathetic funeral cortège of the thirteen-year-old boy was actually passing north as the devastated grandfather rose to speak. Perhaps it was appropriate under the circumstances that his ‘grave and beautiful eloquence’ was felt by the young Gladstone, intently listening to every debate for nine or ten hours a day, to be that of ‘an
older time’;* there were surviving Members of the House of Lords who were reminded of their own youth as they listened to the rippling, majestic oratory emanating from the sixty-seven-year-old Prime Minister.15

  ‘In the course of a long political life,’ began Grey, a phrase he was certainly entitled to use, given that he had entered Parliament as MP for Northumberland forty-five years earlier. Then he had to sit down.16 He was evidently labouring to master strong emotion – the consciousness of that sad little coffin travelling north was too much for him. Recovering, Grey described himself as the advocate of principles from which he had never swerved, and declared boldly that if Reform had sometimes appeared to ‘slumber’ – a convenient way of dealing with the twists and turns of its history, including his own participation – it had never slept. There were cheers and counter-cheers. Grey then reminded his audience of that ‘imprudent declaration’, Wellington’s denunciation in principle of ‘all Reform whatever’, before pointing out that he himself had only accepted office from the King on condition that he could bring in ‘a measure of peace, safety and conciliation’ – in short, Reform.

  Yet ‘men of learning and character have actually been found elsewhere’, continued Grey, who have ‘gravely’ told their audience that unless Members of the House of Commons were allowed to be ‘the nominees of Peers, of loan contractors, and of speculating attorneys, rather than the Representatives of the people, all security for the happiness, the prosperity, and the liberty we enjoy, will fall from under us’. Was this really to be the case in modern times, ‘in this hour – in the nineteenth century – when the schoolmaster is abroad, and when the growing intelligence of all classes of the community is daily and hourly receiving new lights?’ Grey would have supposed that the mere mention of nomination would have brought about ‘universal derision and contempt’.

  In the course of a long speech, the Prime Minister made prolonged excursions into past history: the Spanish Netherlands, the execution of King Charles I, the deposition of James II, the loss of British America, the extinction of the old French monarchy under Louis XVI with ‘the utter sweeping off of the French nobility as a power in the State’ – all found mention, all were cited as examples of the tragedies which occurred when the will of the people was ignored. It was, wrote The Times afterwards, ‘a grave, dignified, earnest and impressive speech’, in other words ‘a model of luminous statement’.17

  Grey did not receive universal acclaim from his fellow peers, as he had hardly expected to do. When he touched on the suggestion, made by some Lords, that removing the nominations was ‘an act of spoliation and robbery’, there were loud cries of ‘Hear, hear!’ Grey responded swiftly: the right to nominate MPs was ‘not property but a trust’. As to the argument that the present system worked well enough, there was one vital thing it had not achieved: it had not ‘conciliated the affections and feelings of the people’. Witness the fact that petitions on the subject of Reform had been presented ‘to an extent which, I believe, was never equalled on any other occasion’. If his opponents in the Lords still doubted the sentiments of the people, still imagined that this anxiety for Reform would pass away, he conjured them: ‘do not lay that flattering unction to your souls!’

  A particularly serious passage in Grey’s speech – from the point of view of the future – was what he designated an address to ‘the Prelates’. Bishops – the Lords Spiritual as opposed to the Lords Temporal – were by ancient historical tradition Members of the House of Lords, some ex officio such as the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, others by appointment; there was a long-standing connection between the Church of England and the Tory Party, parallel to the Whig connection to dissent. There were of course clerics who were ‘good Whigs’, in the revealing phrase of Lord Holland, drawing up a document for Lord Grey which discussed various clerical claims to preferment. (To be ‘a thorough old Whig’ was the highest praise and there was a conspicuous lack of emphasis on spiritual values.)18 But once again it must be remembered how long the Tories had been more or less exclusively in office. During this period ‘good Whigs’ were not first in line for promotion. Under the circumstances, there had been dire predictions from some Tories that the Church of England as well as the monarchy – all part of the established order – would be threatened by Reform.

  Contemporary attacks on the bishops were not infrequent, suggesting that they were a set of worldly men ignoring their pastoral function. From their point of view, the bishops upheld anti-revolutionary values to the general benefit of a hierarchical society. Critics of the Anglican Church took a different line: here was a politicized extension of the State (with the Sovereign as its supreme governor). Attacks ranged from the crude designation of them as ‘black locusts’, to Francis Place’s more florid malediction – ‘luxurious, rich, overbearing, and benumbing’. Then there was Sydney Smith’s characteristic barb that the bishops deserved to be ‘preached to death by wild curates’. The fact was that the need to pay Church tithes – literally a tax for the support of the Church – caused much unpopularity for obvious reasons at times of economic distress. One John Saville, thought by some to be Captain Swing himself, was responsible for such ‘inflammatory’ notices as this: ‘Oh ye Church of England Parsons, who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, woe woe woe be unto you, ye shall one day have your reward.’ Among the lower classes, it was not forgotten that a clergyman had actually read the Riot Act at Peterloo.19 And where the higher echelons of the Church were concerned, so many ‘Prelates’ had of course votes in the House of Lords.

  The current Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley, was in his mid-sixties like the King and Grey, and had been appointed in 1828. A strong opponent of Catholic Emancipation, as also of that repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts which allowed offices previously disbarred to dissenters, Howley was a man whose strong religious convictions made him highly conservative in his politics. For the Whigs his was not a reassuring presence on the ecclesiastical benches. No one could accuse Archbishop Howley of being a thorough old Whig, although his spiritual values, in the tradition of High Churchmen since the seventeenth-century Caroline divines, were not in doubt.

  Addressing the prelates as he moved towards a conclusion, Lord Grey implored them to consider what would happen to their standing in the country if the Bill was demonstrably rejected by their votes. Were they not ‘the ministers of peace’? So their actions should lead in the direction of peace. He ended not in the pastures of the Church, but where the true rocks of Reform lay. Grey announced fairly and squarely that he was not prepared to compromise, putting an end to the hopes of moderate Tories in that direction. Nor would he submit to them any ‘delusive’ measure of Reform. It was the Bill and the whole Bill. ‘My Lords,’ he said, ‘I have now done.’

  In Birmingham on the same day, the Union held a meeting on Newhall Hill. Shops and factories closed early for the event, bells rang and flags were to be seen in every hand with slogans such as ‘William IV – the People’s Hope’ and ‘Earl Grey – the just rights of our order secured, we will then stand by his order’. Newhall Hill, certainly a more salubrious setting than the crammed and claustrophobic Chamber of the House of Lords, was to prove a crucial environment for the all-important protests of the Birmingham Political Union; Joseph Parkes described it as ‘a natural amphitheatre on twelve acres of rising ground’, although a placard of sale three years later showed it to be something less than half of that. Parkes also erred on the side of generosity when he estimated the crowd on this occasion as 100,000; it was probably more like 30,000, although sceptics went even lower.20 *

  All the same, whatever the numbers, this was a cheerful crowd, dressed up as though for a gala day, with plenty of women present, some in bonnets, others in practical shawls. There was also loud patriotic music, which must have been easier for the crowds to hear than the actual words of the speeches, despite the favourable slant of the hill. The Times wrote that there never was ‘we may safely assert, any previous occasion upon which
such a deep and universal excitement pervaded the public mind of Birmingham and its neighbourhood’; it was the most important public meeting since 1688 (a report later copied in the Birmingham Journal and the Scotsman).22

  In his speech, Attwood cited with a flourish the Marquis de Lafayette forty years ago: ‘for a nation to be free, it is sufficient that she wills it.’ He then asked the whole assembly, having bowed their heads, to ‘look up to the Heavens’, where the just God ruled both Heaven and Earth and cry ‘God bless the King’. Everyone present duly uncovered their heads and shouted out in enthusiastic acclamation of their Sovereign. All this was in line with the Radical medals now beginning to be struck: Thomas Attwood’s fine profile might be on one side of the medal, but on the other the words ‘God Save the King’, with protestations of loyalty, would be found. The next day the Birmingham Political Union’s petition to the House of Lords was presented by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham, along with seventy-nine others.

  The expressions of loyalty to William IV among the reformers were almost universal; as at the Whig dinner, the confounded politics of opposition were contrasted with loyalty to the Sovereign. Yet in Whig circles an uneasiness was beginning to be felt about the King’s precise stance, as Grey reported privately. It was of course all a question of that cloud on the horizon, creation of peers for a particular political purpose, as opposed to the traditional coronation creations, which had gone off smoothly. The Times for one, with its excellent contacts (preeminent among them the indiscreet maverick Lord Brougham), picked up on this development.

  As the debate itself was in progress, it ran a story expressing sympathy for the King as being in a difficult position. The ‘female part of his family’ were said to differ generally from him in opinion on the important question of reform. ‘Heaven bless the amiable babblers!’ exclaimed the patriarchal newspaper, hoping they would all live to see the happy effects of that measure to which they now fancied themselves averse. In general, of course, ‘petticoat politicians’ were not to be heeded and The Times consoled itself with the thought that the King, as a sailor, was used to separating himself ‘by whole seas’ from the persons to whom he was most attached.23 This begged the question as to what would happen when the King was not so much separated by whole seas from his family, as marooned in their midst.