Perilous Question: Reform or Revolution? Britain on the Brink, 1832

by Antonia Fraser

  Parliament was dissolved on 3 December 1832, with the new Parliament due to meet on 29 January 1833. The General Election took place over a month – that long duration of the electoral period by modern standards had not changed – the earliest ballot taking place on 10 December and the latest on 8 January 1833; although voting in individual constituencies was now limited to two days.

  Three symbolic elections showed the path of progress – and also lack of it. Thomas Attwood was returned unopposed as MP for the new borough of Bromsgrove, along with Joshua Scholefield, another Birmingham Political Union activist; although Attwood’s subsequent parliamentary career did not flourish as he had hoped. His currency theories were, he discovered, no more welcome now than they had been before, and his long speeches, so effective at Newhall Hill, were much less so at Westminster. Nevertheless he survived to form part of the next surge of reforming energy, the Chartist movement, at the end of the decade; in 1838, for example, he was converted to the idea of Universal Suffrage.

  It could be argued that Attwood’s career ended in disappointment with both popular and parliamentary action; nevertheless he could be proud of the seminal part he had played in the events of the Reform Bill. His social philosophy, which led him to believe that the economic interests of master and man were tied together, spurred him on fruitfully to improve the electoral representation of the country. Much later he observed that there was no instance in history in which political movements had been successful without leaders, ‘and in almost every instance these leaders have been men of wealth and influence’.11 Attwood, the middle-class banker, could be proud of exercising that leadership.

  In contrast to the new MP for the new seat, the Marquess of Blandford, the Ultra Tory, heir to the Duke of Marlborough, was now chosen without contest for the Marlborough family seat at Woodstock – he who had furiously and, as it seemed to his fellow Tories, perversely advocated Reform in order to prevent Roman Catholics, newly emancipated, getting hold of parliamentary power (and been rewarded by being made a member of the Birmingham Political Union). Thirdly, it seemed only right that Macaulay, once nominated for Calne by the grandee Marquess of Lansdowne, now transferred to Leeds. Here he was made happy by the vigour and intelligence of the men and women – he did not of course mention that the latter did not vote – in contrast to ‘dumb agricultural workers’: by his own standards, Macaulay had come to the right place.12 The fact that the returning officer was called Dr Calne may have served to emphasize the contrast.

  In terms of this General Election there was a fourth, less happy situation. Joseph Parkes did not secure a seat either in Birmingham or the new constituency of Dudley; lacking an independent income, he was obliged to return to the life of ‘an obscure country attorney’, as he put it to Edward Littleton in January 1833, ‘sunk in the low and to me disgusting occupation of a county lawyer’s office’.13 Later, however, he played a prominent part in what had become Liberal electioneering, and the topic of municipal reform, in which his experiences in 1832 stood him in good stead. (Francis Place joined forces with him on this issue.) Parkes still hankered after a parliamentary seat, yet did not have the financial means to support the life – showing that not everything had changed with the Reform Act.

  Joseph Parkes had toiled long and hard and, as he put it to Place after the election, ‘I had rather go to the Swan River, or even Botany Bay, than go through the sacrifices and labour of the last eighteen months. I have read no books, I have not slept half enough, I have collected money, I have neglected my business.’14 He spoke for many who were not so fortunate as the Whig grandees, relaxing at last on their country estates. Parkes signed off to Francis Place: ‘Goodnight, old firebrand.’ And it was true that Place continued his energetic Radical career, convinced that if enough action was taken ‘king and lords will of themselves, if permitted, in time go quietly out of business’ – a prophecy, like that of Lord Grey that the unions would now vanish with the passing of the Bill, so far unfulfilled.

  When the new House of Commons met for the first time, it was gratifying to all reformers that the result was a large Whig majority – and, as Russell had pointed out, everyone was now discovering that they had been reformers all along. The Whigs were rewarded with 441 seats and the Tories not even half as many with 175; the Irish party secured 42 seats. The Whig majority over the Tories was 276.15

  John Doyle duly saluted the occasion with a merry take-off of David Wilkie’s celebrated picture The Reading of the Will, issued on 1 February 1833. Here an unmistakable William IV, looking distinctly disgruntled, is seen as an old lawyer reading the will of the late John Bull, Gent. As the widow, Lord Grey, recognizable beneath an appropriate white cap, is the chief beneficiary; but he looks worried at whatever malice the Duke of Cumberland is whispering in his ear. Perhaps the boy in the corner of the picture is intended as that enquiring youth, Prince George of Cambridge. A striking figure entering the door is the Duke of Wellington as John Bull’s discarded mistress, the Marquess of Londonderry in attendance. Lord Brougham is also shown as a female figure – nursing the tiny baby Reform.

  To subsequent generations, reared on a very different kind of franchise, something approaching Universal Suffrage, one obvious question occurs: how much had actually been achieved in practical terms? The House of Commons remained large, the idea of reducing it having been abandoned at an early stage, but the worst of the rotten boroughs had gone. There remained several oddities: one example has been cited of Rutland with 800 electors, controlled by two aristocratic families, compared to Westminster with around 50,000 electors, fought over by different local interests: both were represented by two MPs. Yet the overall size of the electorate was increased from 439,200 in 1831 to 656,000 in 1832 – a 49 per cent increase.16

  Another estimate gives an approximate increase from 3.2 per cent to 4.7 per cent of the population.17 This figure has to be matched against a population roughly estimated at 16,000,000. The franchise was still based on property, as all contestants had believed was desirable, although the use of a £10 freehold as a measure obviously enlarged it. The enfranchised were now about 18 per cent of the male adult population in England and Wales, and in Scotland about 12 per cent. The Irish electorate, already overhauled at the time of the Union, now had well over twice as many county votes at 61,000, and borough votes were also increased from 23,000 to 29,000.18 There were also changes the importance of which would only be properly appreciated as time passed. One example was the need for voters to have their names registered in order to vote, officially introduced for the first time by the Reform Act. Registration of electors had the further consequence of developing party organization, hitherto a ramshackle affair, at the local level; just as the shortening of the polling period and the increase in the number of polling booths tightened control over corruption.

  Yet the bare recounting of these details, fought over as they were, underestimates the truly radical nature of what had taken place. In 1835, the year before his death, James Mill reflected with wonder on ‘the shortness of the time in which the spirit of Reform in this nation has grown to such a degree of strength’, even if later generations may reflect with equal wonder at the slow pace of progress – but that is with the benevolent assistance of hindsight. The floodgates had been opened and, once open, could never be closed again. The Reform Bill was destined to be the first of such, spread forward across the nineteenth century and beyond, 1918 being a significant end date; although women were not fully enfranchised until 1928. As Mr Brooke, quizzical uncle of Dorothea Casaubon in Middlemarch was made to remark during the period of the Reform Bill (in a novel also benefiting from hindsight; it was published forty years later): ‘This Reform will touch everybody by and by, a thoroughly popular measure – a sort of A, B, C, you know, that must come first before the rest can follow.’19

  Could they have achieved more in 1832? The Whigs themselves never denied that there was a spirit of compromise about their Bill. From the first moment, it was specifically de
scribed as conciliatory. When Lord John Russell introduced it in the House of Commons on 1 March 1831, on that famous occasion when the amazed Tories felt that they had been ambushed, he stressed this middle position between ‘Bigotry’ on the one hand and ‘fanaticism’ on the other: ‘we place ourselves between the two,’ he declared. The Government did believe that Reform was necessary but it did not consider that Reform had to be limited to one particular type. The Whigs hoped to occupy ‘firm and steadfast ground between the abuses we wish to amend, and the convulsions we hope to avert’.

  It is fair to say that after many months of drama, anguish and violent disturbance, they did succeed in establishing themselves on this ground – firm for the time being, steadfast for the time being, but inevitably destined for development and improvement in the long term, as any historical measure must be. In the spirit of conciliation, it should be noted that the House of Lords did in fact emerge with its membership intact – the Whigs never did demand creation when they had the opportunity, despite the continuing hereditary Tory majority there. The Bill was considered to be enough. Sydney Smith wrote in the Edinburgh Review: ‘all great alterations in human affairs are produced by compromise’. This was certainly true of the Great Reform Bill. One verdict which has stood the test of time is that of the Radical reformer John Bright. A young man in 1832, he remembered ‘horses galloping and carriages coming at speed’ as the thrilling news was conveyed from London to the provinces. Thirty years later, he declared in a speech at Birmingham: ‘It was not a good Bill but it was a great Bill when it passed.’20

  How much did character and personality matter? This perennial subject of debate, which can surely never be finally solved, leads to counterfactual questions. Lord Holland wrote in his Diary at the end of 1831 when matters were beginning to warm up: ‘Improve and legislate as you will, how much the good government of Mankind depends on accident and individual character.’21 What if the Duke of Wellington had been less savagely intransigent from the first? (Francis Place called it his ‘blind courage’.) The Tory Party was already in disarray, thanks to the highly divisive effects of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, a factor which must never be ignored in this period. Undoubtedly his open, angry hostility led milder Tories to see how a more conciliatory course could be achieved, while his volte-face in May 1832, suggesting a Tory government might take on Reform, shocked the Ultra Tories. So it could be argued that, paradoxically, the great Duke of Wellington, by showing himself to be clearly unreasonable, helped the chariot of reason to drive forward.

  Peel’s principled refusal, during these same Days of May, to head this government if it meant introducing the Reform he had denounced obviously contributed to the eventual peaceful outcome. If Peel had agreed to head a Tory government in May, he would have had to deal with a hostile House of Commons, to say nothing of a hostile country; the resulting disturbances can only be conjectured but they can hardly have helped towards stability in such a turbulent situation. Peel’s own take on the turbulence, and how to damp it down, is illuminated in a significant fashion by his attitude to the new National Gallery.22 Like the triumphalist Whigs, but in a very different way, he too called in art in the interests of politics. The transference of the National Gallery from its previous overcrowded site in Pall Mall to a new building designed by William Wilkins at King’s Mews, Charing Cross,* gave him the opportunity for speaking up on the subject in Parliament. The location was felt to be of especial importance because it was where the wealthy classes from the west of the city met the poorer classes from the east.

  In the House of Commons at the end of July 1832, Peel quoted Dr Johnson on the subject of Charing Cross: this was where ‘the great tide of human existence is fullest in its stream’. He also suggested that art might be invoked to calm the people down. ‘In the present times of excitement,’ he declared, ‘the exacerbation of angry and unsocial feelings might be much softened by the effects which the fine arts ever produced upon the minds of men.’ Such an institution, he suggested, cemented ‘the bonds of union between the richer and the poorer orders of the state’, on which subject no one felt more keenly than himself. It was William Cobbett who angrily rejected the idea of publicly funded galleries: ‘If the aristocracy want the Museum as a lounging place, let them pay for it.’ The poor wanted bread, he said, not an exhibition. Like other great matters in 1832, the perceived struggle between culture and welfare was not a debate which would end there. Nevertheless Peel’s desire to bring back harmony to a disturbed nation by means of the arts did him honour by later standards, if his stance against Reform did not.

  Figaro in London, the satiric paper, had printed an impertinent piece immediately after the passing of the Bill in June 1832: ‘It is said that Ministers, having passed the Reform Bill, intend to try and bring the King to a better understanding. They must first bring a better understanding to his Majesty.’23 Yet as in the case of Wellington, if not in such an extreme manner, it could be argued that the peculiar character of William IV, if it led to obstacles in the Bill – the crisis of the spring of 1832 was a real crisis – allowed him to be managed to good effect in the end. The stone thrown at him at Ascot was in a way an unfair stone, as stones often are. Rumbustious, sometimes crude as he might be, not innately intelligent, William IV was at the same time no tyrant, and took the responsibilities of his position, as he understood them, seriously. His consort, Adelaide, gave him a happy home life – never to be undervalued where royalty is concerned – but her peculiar Continental obsession against change, thanks to her upbringing, was an alarming element in the equation. Nevertheless, a great and beneficial transformation in the make-up of the country took place on his watch for which he deserved credit (even if he refused to take it at the last minute). The crown which his niece Victoria inherited five years later still shone brightly.

  It is interesting that the Whig Lord Holland gave a highly favourable verdict on him at his death in 1837. William IV, he wrote, was ‘the best King of his [Hanoverian] race and perhaps of any race we have ever had, and the one who has left the greatest name as a Constitutional Sovereign, and the first Magistrate of a free and improving nation’.24 This was of course written just as Queen Victoria ascended the throne, the prolonged nature of whose reign contrasts with the brevity of her uncle’s and casts it inevitably into shadow.

  The character of Lord Grey, on the other hand, provided an inspiration to later generations. In 1834 Samuel Rogers saluted him in verse:

  Grey, thou hast served, and well, thy sacred cause

  That Hampden, Sydney died for . . .

  Scorning all thought of self from first to last

  A hundred years later Winston Churchill would write sonorously in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: ‘It is given to few men to carry out late in life a great measure of reform which they have advocated without success for forty years.’ When Thomas Coke of Norfolk wrote to congratulate Grey on the Reform Bill immediately after its passing, the Prime Minister replied: ‘It is the unbidden approbation of men like you that I feel to be most valuable’; this was the approbation that was never denied to Grey during the agonized period of creation in the spring of 1832.25 However much his opponents might hysterically denounce him for his reforming actions, it was impossible plausibly to depict Lord Grey as a dangerous revolutionary; and in that lay one of his great strengths, when combined with his true reforming zeal.

  Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting England in 1833, noted from the French perspective that there was not at all the same hatred of the aristocracy in England as had, all too palpably, existed in late-eighteenth-century France.26 For one thing the whole caste was far more porous than it was in France, with the middle classes never seeing desirable attainment of upper-class status as utterly beyond their reach. In de Tocqueville’s words: ‘The English aristocracy can therefore never arouse those violent hatreds by the middle and lower classes against the nobility in France where the nobility is an exclusive caste’ offering no hope of joining their ranks.
‘The English aristocracy has a hand in everything; it is open to everyone; and anyone who wishes to abolish it or attack it as a body, would have a hard task to define the object of his onslaught.’ Where Reform was concerned, although the House of Lords in theory had made every effort to defeat the Bill, no one could deny that aristocrats had also led the charge in its favour: Grey was one manifestation of this, Althorp another. As a reforming pamphlet had it: ‘If those who have most to lose appear to have least to fear, is this not rather a strong argument in favour of Reform?’27

  Two years later, at the age of seventy, Lord Grey retired from Government: his return to his beloved north was saluted by a vast public dinner held in his honour in Edinburgh in September 1834, of nearly 3,000 people in a pavilion on Carlton Hill. He was also given the Freedom of the City. There were banners of ‘O Happy Day!’ and ‘Welcome to the Champion of Reform’. In his speech responding to the toast, Lord Grey proclaimed: ‘I desire no better remembrance for posterity, or any other inscription on my tomb, than that I have assisted in restoring the people of England and Scotland their fair, just, and necessary representation in Parliament.’ Grey told his friend Lord Holland afterwards that his reception had exceeded ‘everything I could have imagined’.28