Perilous Question

by Antonia Fraser

  In a leader on the day of the Opening of Parliament, The Times expressed the pious hope that His Majesty would mention ‘the dreadful occurrences at Bristol’. They were satisfied: putting on his spectacles to read his speech from the throne, William IV sounded duly shocked by recent events: ‘My Lords and Gentlemen, the scenes of violence and outrage which have occurred in the city of Bristol and some other places, have caused me the deepest affliction’; therefore, foremost in the coming session the King wanted ‘a speedy consideration of the measures of Reform in the House of Commons’.20

  Fortunately, the King was in one of his ebullient moods, according to Sir Denis Le Marchant who, as the Lord Chancellor’s Private Secretary, happened to be near him in the robing room when he was putting on his crown. When Grey remarked that this would be one of the longest speeches ever delivered from the throne, the King boasted that his boyhood tutor had believed that ‘no lesson could be too long for him to learn’. He confided to Brougham that since he usually learnt his speeches by heart, he was not afraid of being put out by any accidental interruption.21

  Lord John Russell presented the new Bill on 12 December.22 Perhaps his manner could never be heroic, given the limitations of his old-fashioned ‘Whig’ voice and his slight figure. Sydney Smith once wickedly suggested that when the electors were worried by Russell’s small size, they should simply be assured that he began by being much larger, but had been worn away by the anxieties and struggles of the Reform Bill.23 Nevertheless Russell’s words were stirring and his message forthright: there was no one who had attended to ‘this great question’ and noticed the manner in which it has agitated the country, ‘the agitation increasing with every returning period of distress’, without being convinced that the time had now arrived when speedy and satisfactory settlement was of an importance ‘very nearly equal to the Bill itself’.

  It was not the identical Bill that was now presented. There had been small but distinct alterations, as for example a reworking of Schedule B, whereby the number of towns to lose one Member was reduced, including Bodmin, Guildford and Huntingdon, and ten of the newly enfranchised towns got an extra seat. These alterations were at the suggestion of the so-called Waverers; but it could be argued that the Tory restitutions were neatly balanced by the increased influence of the more Radical towns.24

  Besides Lords Wharncliffe and Lyndhurst, the Waverers now included the veteran Earl of Harrowby. Just on seventy, Harrowby had originally been the Tory MP for Tiverton, and a personal friend of Pitt; later, as a peer, he had occupied various prestigious posts and acted as Lord President of the Council for fifteen years until 1827. Greville paid tribute to him in his Memoirs: Harrowby, he wrote, if he lacked imagination and eloquence, had ‘a noble, straightforward, independent character’ who in the course of a long political life never incurred any blemish or suspicion.25

  Obviously it was in the best interests of the Government for the hostile majority to be gradually eroded by changes of mind before the next vote. Harrowby was just the kind of man whose presence in the voting lobby of the Lords would be most valuable to them. Although meetings with the Waverers were liable to be described as treacherous by both sides, Radicals and Ultra Tories, they were an obvious pacific route towards the progress of the Bill. The Whigs had an excellent natural conduit to them in the shape of Edward Stanley, the Chief Secretary for Ireland. In the way such things worked, he had been at Oxford with Lord Wharncliffe’s son and visited North America with him. Then Stanley called at the Harrowby home at Sandon Hall in Staffordshire on his way to Ireland, allowing Harrowby to establish a discreet relationship with the Cabinet.

  So the new Bill included various modifications. For one thing the Census of 1831 (as opposed to 1821) was used, the absence of which had always been a legitimate grievance on the part of its critics. The number of houses and the number of assessed taxes were employed to calculate Schedules A and B, rather than the population; also the number of MPs was not to be reduced – as General Gascoyne had demanded in his amendment back in April, leading to the famous dissolution. In this way, dozens of boroughs could be taken out of Schedule B, and other well-populated towns such as Rochdale could be enfranchised.

  The changes enabled Sir Robert Peel in reply to refer to ‘the great escape from the previous Bill’ and to express his gratitude to those – the Lords and the objectors in general – who had brought it about. At this point, therefore, the result could well be described as a triumph for compromise; in other words there was more than one way of putting down the aristocrats in the House of Lords, other than violence and burning effigies. Cobbett and Hunt both approved the Bill, The Times thought it very little changed and Ultra Tories like Croker considered the details a great triumph for the fuss made by his own party. Baring Wall, the MP for Guildford who had cried out ‘They are mad!’ when he first heard the provisions of the Bill in March, took the line that the concessions were due not so much to the Opposition as to ‘reason and justice’.26

  However, Croker went on to point out more gloomily that the Bill left ‘the great objection’ – to Reform in the first place – just where it was: ‘Nay, by removing anomalies and injustices, it makes the Bill more palatable and therefore more dangerous.’ Sir Charles Wetherell, admirably undaunted by recent experiences in Bristol, gave one of his history lessons. He recalled the attack on the Anglican Church in 1641; once again bishops were being treated as ‘malignants’. And he quoted the lines from Hudibras, the popular poem by the seventeenth-century Samuel Butler, which referred to the sectarian female dissidents of the time:

  When oyster women locked their fish up

  And trudged away to cry ‘No Bishop!’

  Wetherell was also keen to pour scorn on Russell’s notorious reference to ‘the whisper of faction’, that is the House of Lords. Like Croker, he believed that the Bill had been defeated not by a whisper but by ‘the well-grounded conviction of reasoning men’.27

  Not all the five days of debate were on the highest level. Hunt and Lord Morpeth got into a squabble over an entry in the Leeds Mercury following Hunt’s visit to the city. Lord Morpeth took the line that the Mercury had never advocated physical assault against Hunt’s person, to which Hunt (not unreasonably) replied that the words ‘cracking open his skull’ were difficult to interpret otherwise; in an argument reminiscent of that of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Hunt queried how this could take place without loss of blood.28

  The speech of Lord William Lennox, MP for King’s Lynn since 1831, was on a more elevated level. Brother of the Duke of Richmond, Lord William took a similar interest in colonial matters. The Duke had advocated giving votes to the colonies (the right types, as ‘a sure counteraction to the force of popular clamour’, were expected to emerge in the House of Commons as a result). It was a measure which, despite being argued ‘very ingeniously’, was rejected by his colleagues as too large and late. Lennox was a spirited fellow who really preferred the theatre and sport to politics – he had made an unwise marriage to a singer which ended in disaster – but during his short-lived occupation of a parliamentary seat, he spoke out boldly and critically on the subject of nominated Members. He saw no difference, he said, between ‘the vested right of a West Indian planter over the body of his slave’ and the vested rights of nomination; ‘for I see no distinction between mental and corporeal enthralment’.29

  There were two fine speeches which impressed all who heard them, both by men who were young in parliamentary terms – Thomas Babington Macaulay and Edward Stanley were thirty-one and thirty-two respectively.30 Macaulay’s speech, an extraordinary compound of ‘deep philosophy, exalted sentiments and party bitterness’, was said to have had ‘a prodigious effect’. Physically unimpressive, Macaulay created a greater impression with his oratory every time he spoke. Now he waxed both eloquent and furious on the subject of the new Bill and refused to give an inch on the subject of the Lords’ rejection: ‘. . . in truth, we recant nothing – we have nothing to recant – we support t
his Bill – we may possibly think it is a better Bill than that which preceded it. But are we therefore bound to admit that we were in the wrong – that the opposition was in the right – that the House of Lords has conferred a great benefit on the nation? . . . Is delay no evil? Is prolonged excitement’ – the word generally used for crowds out of control – ‘no evil? Is it no evil that the heart of a great people should be made sick by deferred hope?’

  Macaulay then went on to dispose of the idea that the great Parliamentarians of the past had arrived via nominations; in fact the five largest represented urban districts – Westminster, Southwark, Liverpool, Bristol and Norwich – had produced among others Burke, Fox, Sheridan, Canning and Huskisson. There would, of course, always be some ‘extravagances’ at a time of change: the Anabaptists had flourished at the time of the Reformation. But the history of England was one of government ‘sometimes peaceably, sometimes after a violent struggle, but constantly giving way before a nation that has been constantly advancing’.

  Examples Macaulay produced were the forest laws, the law of villainage, the oppressive power of the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestant establishment subsequently, the prerogatives of the Crown and the censorship of the press. The Stuarts could not govern as the Tudors had, nor the Hanoverians as their predecessors the Stuarts had done; the age of the last four Hanoverian monarchs was also over. As so often at this period, the French Revolution was brought into play; the government of Louis XVI had been ‘much better and milder’ than that of his ancestor Louis XIV, but the latter had been admired and loved, while Louis XVI died on the scaffold. Why? Simply because the French government had not advanced as rapidly as the French nation.

  Stanley, the future ‘Rupert of Debate’, began with a well-argued defence of the new Bill in detail, allaying the fears of his friends who knew he could do the stirring stuff, but worried that this political firebrand might be ‘stranded in a studied speech’. The concessions, he said, were responsible and in answer to genuine grievances; and in order to avoid a crisis it was essential the Bill should be passed as soon as possible. But his speech was also remarkable for his intervention in the long-running intellectual battle between John Wilson Croker and Macaulay. This was a matter which had involved not only the staple of such conflicts, bad-tempered reviews, but also acid references in Parliament. (Croker never willingly let Macaulay forget that he entered the House of Commons, sitting for Calne, at the whim as it were of Lord Lansdowne.)

  Now Stanley lashed into Croker, who had made what was, as it turned out, an unfortunate reference to Charles I and his Parliaments – another historical period constantly invoked at this time. ‘In the course of his extraordinary misrepresentation of the history of the country,’ declared Stanley, ‘he has given us events for causes and causes for events. What he describes as a consequence had actually preceded it. What he represents as a cause . . .’ and so forth and so on. The trouble was that Stanley was right. Having demonstrated the complete falsity of Croker’s contention, Stanley memorably observed: ‘Inaccurate reading is as dangerous as a little reading.’ This public putting-down of Croker was not totally unwelcome to his own side. Edward Littleton was told afterwards that Peel had remarked: ‘I wonder how our biographer, Croker, likes the dressing [down] he got from Stanley.’ Croker for his part went very pale, and pulled his hat down over his eyes. An Irishman in the gallery, listening to Croker’s violent declamations, had once described him as being ‘like a hen on a hot griddle’. For now the ‘hen’ was quiet.31

  On 17 December, the last day of the debate, Peel spoke again and made an important statement of his position for the future.32 There was a conventional tribute to the Constitution ‘under which I have lived hitherto, which I believe is adapted to the wants and habits of the people’ followed by a declaration: ‘I will continue my opposition to the last, believing as I do, that it is the first step, not directly to Revolution, but to a series of changes which will affect the property, and totally change the character of the mixed constitution of this country.’ But at the end Peel added an important caveat: ‘On this ground I take my stand, not opposed to a well considered Reform of any of our institutions which need reform, but opposed to this Reform.’ There was a hint of flexibility here – very different from the inflexibility of his leader, the Duke of Wellington, in the Lords in November 1830 and ever since.

  On the same day, voting took place: 324 MPs voted for the Bill and half that number against; the 162 majority made it clear that there were Tory abstentions. Parliament was adjourned. The landowners now went to their country houses, the Duke of Richmond to his Sussex palace whose name was beginning to be used for ‘the Goodwood Set’. This comprised those, such as the Duke himself, Palmerston and Melbourne, who were uneasy about the direction that Reform was taking, and the whole subject of creation of peers in particular.

  There was no escaping the decision which had to be taken in some form or other early in the New Year. Given that the House of Commons had once again passed the Bill, and given that it seemed inevitable that the Lords would reject it – in clear defiance of the popular will – the creation of new peers had to be considered. The aristocrats were not so much to be watered down as swamped with new Members. Otherwise, wrote The Times in its report of the passing of the Bill, Great Britain would be ‘one scene of blood and terror’. Joseph Parkes put it succinctly in a letter to Harriet Grote: ‘All say New Peers or d–m–n to Lord Grey and co.’33

  * The big gun is still to be seen today at Belvoir Castle.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE FEARFUL ALTERNATIVE

  ‘It was impossible, therefore, to delay looking to the fearful alternative which was thus forced upon our consideration . . .’ –

  Lord Grey to William IV, 4 January 1832

  On 1 January 1832, Lord Holland wished his close friend the Prime Minister a happy New Year. 1831 had been, he noted in his Diary, the first full year of Whig rule for seventy years. To Grey he gave his New Year wish regarding the recalcitrant House of Lords: ‘I hope you will prove yourself (pardon the blasphemy) a famous Creator.’ And on the subject of numbers to be created, Holland proceeded to make merry with the rules of tennis, of which he was a veteran player; he said that he liked that way of counting – fifteen, thirty, forty, Game.1 Unfortunately the subject was by no means so light-hearted as Lord Holland’s sprightly comments suggested. Nor was creation – the question of enlarging the House of Lords in order to nullify the large natural Tory majority – quite as simple as the Radical Joseph Parkes had indicated in his letter to Harriet Grote on the universal demand for ‘New Peers’.

  At a Cabinet meeting on 18 December, Grey raised the matter in a voice which was rather faint: what would happen if the second reading of the Bill was defeated once more in the Lords?2 In November he had quoted to Sir Francis Burdett a Latin tag on the subject: quieta prius tentanda – first of all, a peaceable approach must be tried. There was nothing however to suggest that a peaceable approach, when it came to the vote, would prove effective. Nevertheless, Grey’s evident diffidence masked a real difficulty which was felt by aristocrats themselves where the enlargement of their class was concerned. It is too simple to describe this as being purely a jealous sense of superiority. No doubt that came into it in some cases, as such emotions generally do where exclusivity is apparently being threatened from outside. But the whole matter was more complicated than that.

  There was also a sincere feeling for the aristocracy as a special caste which was certainly not dishonourable; this caste was part of the natural order of society, along with Crown and People, which, by its establishment and maintenance, prevented any kind of unnatural upheaval. Like any other class, they were expected to show a sense of responsibility commensurate with their privilege: in this case, a sense of responsibility towards the government of the country and the people in it, as Grey in particular had felt so strongly all his life. But then so had the traditional Tory aristocrats. This patrician feeling was an essential s
trand woven into the fabric of the time, as much part of it as the Radical feelings of a Parkes or an Attwood.

  Of course it was understood that this caste would be enlarged from time to time, most recently by the traditional coronation creations. Grey’s own earldom, for example, was only second-generation, although he came from a long line of landed gentry. The new entrants were expected to be worthy of their new estate, which at least partially meant in a material sense. These kinds of creations, however, were individual honours, and while political allegiances obviously came into it – after all, the famous Tory majority had come about during the stretched-out years of Tory government – that was a different matter from a large block of creations at one particular time for the sake of one political measure.

  This had occurred 120 years earlier in the reign of Queen Anne in order to bring about the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession. But this was not necessarily regarded as a good precedent. In 1711 twelve peers were hastily created by a reluctant Queen in order to assist the new Tory Government at the expense of the Whigs; among them were Samuel Masham, the husband of her favourite Abigail Masham. When she was warned by Lord Dartmouth that this measure would have ‘a very ill effect in the House of Lords and no good one in the kingdom’, the Stuart Queen replied that she liked it as little as he did, but no one had proposed ‘a better expedient’.3 It remained to be seen whether her Hanoverian cousin William IV, faced with the same choice, would with similar reluctance make the same decision.