However, he had always made it his practice to fall in gracefully with whatever destiny circumstances indicated for him. It was universally accepted that the eldest son of a great family should go into the House of Commons; into the House of Commons, therefore, he went. As a matter of fact he did it with a very good will. If politics were not the best profession for him, they were far from being the worst. He had been brought up in the world of affairs; it came naturally to him to take a part in it. His chief interest, too, was human nature, and politics exhibited this on the most spectacular scale. Even if he had never taken an active part in them, they would always have formed a chief subject of his thought. Nor were they without their appeal to his imaginative side. He was acutely responsive to the romance of history in the making, to the drama of great events: and to national sentiment. Among the many contradictory elements of his complex nature lurked a strain of mystical patriotism. The thought of England—her great destiny, her majestic and immemorial past—sent a mysterious thrill of awe and veneration vibrating through the deepest fibres of his being.
He was further encouraged to like politics, by the privileged conditions in which he entered them. The society into which he was born might force eldest sons into public life: but in return it admitted them under special advantages. In those pre-democratic days, members of influential families had a prior claim on all the prizes of the profession. Even a stupid Whig magnate had a considerable place in his Party. One as clever as William was almost certain of achieving a commanding position at an early age. From the first, he was treated in a manner to make the mouths of ambitious young politicians of to-day water with envy. There was no need to make himself known. He had lived among the leaders of his Party since childhood. And as soon as he entered the House, they took him into their confidence, told him their private views; and, what was still more flattering, asked him his. Already in 1807 Lord Holland was writing to consult him about the choice of a leader: he was invited to informal councils at Holland House, where he would sit listening to Lord Grey and his host, as they discussed over the port, who should speak for the Opposition in a forthcoming debate. Altogether there was a great deal to please him in his profession. When in 1809 he began to throw his full energies into it, he did so without effort.
It was lucky he could. For the state of affairs that confronted him was not in itself one to inspire enthusiasm. During the first years of the nineteenth century, the Whig party was in a state of chaotic frustration. It was long indeed since it had stood for any active policy. Originally formed to support Parliament in its struggle with the King for ultimate sovereignty in the Constitution, it had achieved its essential object nearly a hundred years before, by expelling the Stuarts. During the long period of placid prosperity which followed, it had nothing to do but sit back and consolidate its victory. Now and again this involved a little work. Under the direction of Sir Robert Walpole, the Whigs established the Cabinet system: they also resisted the misguided efforts of George III to retrieve the lost powers of the Crown. But in the main they found themselves sufficiently occupied in drawing large sinecures, and extolling the principles of the glorious revolution of 1688. Nor was their inertia unpopular. The people of England were glad enough of a period unvexed by fundamental issues. But towards the end of the century a change came. The industrial revolution, by turning England from an agricultural to a manufacturing country, began to disturb that balance which must exist in any society between political and economic power. No longer were the land and its aristocratic owners the sole masters of the country’s wealth. This position was shared by a new and rising class, part manufacturers, part workmen; who now demanded a voice in the government of the nation, proportionate to their economic influence. Nonconformists, free-traders, and of humble birth, they noted with irritation that the country was run in the interests of Protectionists, Anglicans and Lords. They clamoured for legal reform, fiscal reform, religious emancipation; above all they asked for that Parliamentary reform which, by destroying the aristocratic monopoly of seats, would readjust the balance of government in their favour. And they invoked all manner of novel and alarming doctrines, Equality, the Rights of Man, the Principle of Utility, to give moral justification to their claims. How far and in what manner these claims might be granted, by what means existing institutions could be modified in harmony with the new balance of power, were to be the problems that occupied the next forty years of English history.
Once more fundamental issues were raised. And the old parties had to decide which side they were going to take in the struggle. This was easy enough for the Tories. They had always approved of privilege, and disliked tradesmen. But the Whigs were more ambiguously placed. For, though in theory they considered themselves the upholders of progress and liberty, in fact they had a vested interest in the existing régime. Composed as they were largely of landed proprietors, they did not, any more than the Tories, like the idea of surrendering their power to a set of blackguardly commercials with Yorkshire accents and nonconformist consciences. A few exalted spirits among them threw in their lot with the cause of the future. The Duke of Norfolk drank to Our Sovereign the People; Mr. Whitbread took up Penal Reform; young Mr. Grey developed an interest in the representation question. But they were not enough to carry the Party with them. It was to need the pressure on a powerful public opinion outside Parliament to drive the Whigs as a whole on to the Reform side. For the first thirty years of the century Whig opinion was bewildered, divided and wavering.
Anyway, before these new problems had come clearly to the front, before indeed the average M.P. had realized their existence, all forward movement was suddenly checked by two events abroad. First the French Revolution frightened the respectable people of every party to such a degree as to put them for the time being against any drastic changes: and then the Napoleonic War disposed them to shelve all domestic problems, till victory was won. At its beginning, some advanced Whigs had opposed the war; but by 1807 all the most influential were united to resist the common enemy. The natural outcome of such a situation should have been a Coalition between Whig and Tory. And after Pitt’s death it was tried. But it collapsed within two years of William’s entry into Parliament. The aged George III took the opportunity of one of his rare intervals of sanity to perform the last of his many acts of political folly. Obsessed by a confused idea that his right to the throne depended on the penal laws against Roman Catholics, he suddenly demanded that all his Ministers should pledge themselves not to bring in Catholic emancipation. Catholic emancipation was one of the few measures that all the Whigs were agreed in approving; the Whig Ministers therefore had to go out of office.
The effect of this combination of circumstances was to leave the Whigs in a parlous condition indeed. It was bad enough to find themselves indefinitely in opposition. But what made it far worse was that they could discover nothing they could agree to oppose. The chief question of the day was the war: and on this, most important Whigs sympathized with the Government. The problems of home affairs were in abeyance: in any case on every one of them, except the forbidden topic of Catholic emancipation, they were at odds with one another. As long as Charles Fox was alive, people had been prepared to sink their differences out of loyalty to him. But after his death no one was left with sufficient personality to impose his will on the party. For the time being the Whigs were kept together only by their family and social traditions. Though they disagreed on every political issue, they continued all the same to marry one another’s daughters, to dine at Holland House and to spend their leisure hours at Brooks’s. These practices however, delightful though they might be, were not in themselves enough to supply the want of a faith or a leader. Gradually party spirit weakened, party organization disintegrated; till by 1809 it had become such a smoky confusion of shifting opinions, bickering factions, and competing individuals, as to plunge the unfortunate historian, who tries to disentangle it, into baffled despair.
Three groups dominated the ge
neral chaos: the Grenvillites, the Foxites, and the Mountain. Of these the Grenvillites, composed of the powerful Grenville family and their hangers-on, represented Whiggism in its strictly dynastic aspect. They abhorred change as much as the Tories; from whom they differed mainly in their conviction that only the great Whig families, and more especially the Grenville family, had the right to govern England. The Foxites, on the other hand, led by Lords Holland and Grey, regarded themselves as the repository of the pure milk of Whig doctrine. Academic, intransigent, and tremendously aristocratic, they rejected all proposals not in accordance with the principles of Charles Fox; scorned economics; approved reform in theory, but shrank from it in practice; and made it a matter of conscience not to work with anyone with whom they disagreed about anything. The Mountain was a more heterogeneous body, made up, partly of lively young patricians with a taste for advanced ideas, and partly of clever members of the middle class, brought into Parliament by noble patrons. They were openly against the war, vociferously in favour of any kind of reform; such vigour as remained in the party resided in them.
Around these main groups hovered a motley mob of smaller combinations and isolated personalities. All sections quarrelled with each other, and among themselves. Some were for the Whigs taking a strong line, some for their retiring from Parliament altogether, some for their coming to terms with the Tories. Connections were all the time crumbling and reshaping themselves; all the time, ambitious men flitted from one group to another, according as each seemed more likely to retrieve the fortunes of the Party. The Whig lobbies buzzed with a continual rumour of baseless hopes and abortive intrigues. By the time William was ready to turn his full attention to his party, it presented a deplorable spectacle; an army in rout, without order, purpose or morale.
He approached it in a detached spirit. Long before he entered the House of Commons, he had begun to outgrow his youthful idealism. And by now his attitude to politics had matured, to be of a piece with his attitude to everything else; sceptical, realistic, cautious. Natural prudence was intensified by the age in which he lived. It is very difficult for us, hardened as we are by the daily spectacle of catastrophes far more appalling, to realize the extraordinary shock given to our forefathers by the French Revolution. Just across the Channel they saw what seemed at first to be no more than a mild constitutional movement, change within four years to a bloody terror, in which people just like themselves, whom they had dined with on their visits abroad, were stripped destitute of all their possessions, and often horribly murdered. These events undermined their root confidence in the stability of civilization. If such things happened in France, why not in England? The idea that they might, began to obsess them.
To such an obsession William was peculiarly susceptible. Detached hedonism is not less dependent on material circumstance than other human philosophies. Its sunny suavity, its easy broadmindedness, can flourish only in security. During mortal conflicts people inevitably grow morose and partisan. Once he had come to years of political discretion, William saw only too clearly that revolution would mean the end of all that made his life worth living, the destruction of the foundation on which his precariously adjusted peace of mind was built. Fear of popular violence loomed ever at the back of his consciousness. It was the single thing that was able to throw his poised judgment off its balance: throughout his life it was a determining motive in his political views. Yet it did not drive him into blind reaction. Belief in liberty, in toleration, was of the very fibre of his thought. Moreover, his vigorous understanding had combined with his Glasgow education, to make him a man of his time. He realized that the world he lived in was changing, and that there was no use in trying to stop it. Poised between two extremes, his point of view was necessarily impartial. And this impartiality was increased both by his intellectual self-confidence and by his lack of ambition. He did not particularly want to get on; he did not care if others agreed with him. And he had no interest in politics except in so far as he was able to speak his honest opinion about them. Thus, disinterested and unenthusiastic, inquisitive and unprejudiced, the comers of his mouth turned down in ironic amusement, he stepped on to the political stage.
One wonders what the other actors thought of him. For he differed strikingly from the ordinary member. William, like most philosophical persons, was not naturally an orator. He was too self-critical to be able to let himself go in public. Stammering and colloquial, as if he were thinking aloud, his words would trickle forth; wandering away into generalization, or pausing as with fastidiousness he sought out the phrase that might most precisely express his shade of meaning. Moreover, the line he took was generally so unexpected, as to make it difficult to know precisely where his political sympathies lay. “I know he will be reckoned too scrupulous and conscientious for a good Party man,” said Lady Bessborough, “but I cannot help admiring the firm integrity of his character.” This was a friendly way of putting it. To those less personally prejudiced in his favour, William’s conduct, during his first few years in Parliament, might well have seemed a mere exhibition of caprice. At one time we find him refusing to back his Party in their attack on Lord Ellenborough’s position in the Ministry; on another, voting in favour of the advanced Sir Samuel Romilly’s proposals on Penal Reform. He was strongly against the Government over Catholic emancipation, strongly on their side about the war. When the Duke of York was assailed by the extreme Whigs for selling commissions in the Army through the convenient agency of his mistress, Mary Ann Clarke, William followed them. But not, he was careful to say, because he was certain of the Duke’s guilt, but for reasons of public policy. And two years later he voted for the Duke’s reinstatement.
He kept a journal of his early Parliamentary impressions. And this also reveals a contradictory spirit. He seems to take an impish pleasure in discovering the disillusioning paradoxes of public life: the harm done by good intentions, the weaknesses of revered institutions. It amused him to note that Napoleon, one of the worst men in the world, made his subjects happier than most virtuous rulers; that human beings, so it appeared from the Peninsular War, seemed more likely to get what they wanted by behaving violently than by being reasonable. Nor could he feel much respect for the wisdom of the Sovereign People. “It is impossible not to laugh,” he said, “at their blunders, ignorance and fury; at the same time it is impossible not to be struck with the most serious alarm upon the subject.”
None the less, his opinions were not so negative, nor his actions so capricious, as appearances might suggest. Coming fresh to the game, it was inevitable that he should roam inquisitively around from one set of views to another; getting a sort of wilful enjoyment from finding out the faults of each. But as he lived, he learned. Bit by bit, a store of experience accumulated itself in his mind; and on the strength of it his own political ideas began to take shape. They were not those of the Party to which he was officially attached. His detached mind was unlikely to be impressed by the welter of squabble and wobble, in which the Whigs floundered. William thought them factious. “The fault of opposition,” he remarked, “is a determination to make differences where few exist and those trifling.” Nor, in point of fact, did he agree with any of the main groups of Whig opinion. The Grenvillites had nothing to offer a man who liked ideas; for they had none. The Foxites, on the other hand, bristled with them. But theirs were obsolete. Of what interest was it to William to preserve the purity of a creed formulated forty years before? As for the Mountain, they were the worst of the lot; against the war, and in favour of all sorts of risky changes. He could agree with the Tories sooner than with them. Yet he was against the Tories too. Their views were out of date, and they themselves stupid. William was still young enough to have a horror of being thought stupid.
As usual, he found himself adopting a middle course. He wanted a policy moderate and rational; that faced modern problems, but involved no threat to that aristocratic supremacy on which in his view the security of civilization depended. He soon found he was
not alone. Similar thoughts had been circulating among a number of young men from both parties, headed, ironically enough, by that peculiar object of William’s youthful contempt, Canning. Canning is an ambiguous personality. Few people liked him in his lifetime; nor is it possible to feel enthusiastic about him to-day. There is something indefinably charlatanish about the impression he makes, with his flashy eloquence, his restless intriguing ambition, his sharp, arrogant, egotistic face. Yet, as is so often the case in this mysterious world, he was more genuinely creative than many sincerer persons. It was he who, first among English statesmen of the nineteenth century, offered conservative-minded people a constructive political creed. Himself, he was against Parliamentary reform. England in his view did very well under an aristocracy. Besides, he thought the whole democratic philosophy great nonsense. “It is the business of the legislature,” he once said, “to remedy practical grievances, not to run after theoretical perfection.” On the other hand he thought some of the practical measures demanded by the reforming parties reasonable. He was all for legal reform, and emancipation, and considered that many people had taken up Democracy, because they thought it the only means of getting these measures through. And the way to prevent this, in his opinion, was to show that the old system could be made to do the same work equally well. “Those who resist improvements as innovations,” so he put it, “will soon have to accept innovations that are not improvements.”
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