It is painful and disturbing to think of the tender-hearted Melbourne as involved in such events at all, let alone as responsible for setting them in motion. But in fact his conduct in the matter is not so uncharacteristic or so unjustifiable as might at first be supposed. After all it was not he who had made the laws. Or who tried the cases; that was the judges’ affair. And he had no reason to suppose that the judges did not carry out their duties correctly and conscientiously. Melbourne’s concern was with general policy. That policy was in harmony with his whole political outlook. He had always thought civil disorder the worst of all evils. “To force,” he said, “nothing but force can be successfully opposed. It is evident that all legislation is impotent and ridiculous, unless the public peace can be preserved and the liberty and property of individuals saved from outrage and invasion.” If this were true at any time, it was especially true in 1830. Melbourne, in common with most responsible people in England, was sure the country was tottering on the edge of bloodstained chaos. Not unnaturally, when they woke every morning to hear of mobs burning down houses and robbing harmless citizens, without anyone being able, apparently, to stop them! What made these events more ominous was that the men who composed the mobs were no worse off than they had often been during recent years; yet never before had they broken out in this sinister fashion. It looked as if these disturbances must be deliberately provoked by some revolutionary plot. Now if ever, Melbourne felt, was the time for a Government to act strongly. Above all, a reforming Government! He thought reform a risky business at best: the risk was only justified if the country was kept under iron control while it was going through. The surest, and ultimately the most humane way to do this, was to stamp hard and at once on the first stirrings of rebellion. People needed a fright. Even when he did not intend that a prisoner should be executed, Melbourne approved of sentencing him to death. “The death sentence,” he remarked, “is an example more strict.”
In all this he showed thorough good sense. Only too often have Governments of moderate change brought catastrophe on a nation by a weak, timid inability to control the disruptive forces which they themselves have let loose. Melbourne deserves some of the credit for the fact that England, alone of European countries in the nineteenth century, succeeded in getting rid of the old régime without a revolution. Nor indeed, by the standards of his age, was he unusually severe. On the contrary, many people thought he was not nearly severe enough. William IV in particular was always writing him endless agitated letters urging him to forbid trades unions, to increase the legal penalties for rioting, to call out the military. And many persons more intelligent than William IV said the same things. To their excited urgings, Melbourne remained blandly impervious. The existing law, he said with truth, was quite severe enough if it was properly enforced. Trades unions were no doubt undesirable institutions; but to suppress them was illegal and a dangerous blow at liberty. Calling out the soldiers was an hysterical, tyrannous proposal. And when one of his colleagues suggested employing spies and agent provocateurs in order to discover the ringleaders of revolt, Melbourne sent him away with a polite flea in his ear. “I am sure you must feel,” he wrote, “that in our anxiety to discover the perpetrators of these most dangerous and atrocious acts we should run as little risk as possible of involving innocent persons in accusations, and still less of adopting measures which may encourage the seduction of persons now innocent, into the commission of crime.” Firmly and unsentimentally, he chose as usual to follow a rational and middle way.
All the same, it is disconcerting to find him so very unhesitating and unruffled about it all. Surely so kind a man should have had more qualms about applying, however moderately, a criminal code of this ferocity. There are moments when an air of philosophic detachment is out of place. Here we come up against the limitations alike of Melbourne’s circumstances and his outlook. A man born in 1779 was all too used to people being hanged and transported for small offences: if, in addition, his life moved on the Olympian heights of Melbourne House and Brooks’s Club, he was unlikely to enter imaginatively into the sufferings of agricultural labourers, unless he made a considerable effort. Melbourne did not make the effort. No doubt this was partly due to his good sense. He knew that all statesmen had to do disagreeable things sometimes; having decided a disagreeable thing was necessary, why make it worse by fruitless worrying? But his apparent imperturbability was also, paradoxically, the defect of his very soft-heartedness. Just because he hated the painful so much, he tended to shut his eyes to it. He shrank from imagining the labourers’ feelings for the same reasons that he was later to shrink from reading Oliver Twist. And of course his sympathies were further frozen by secret fear: that stab of uncontrollable fear which always attacked him at a serious threat to the tranquillity and stability which he valued more than anything else in the world.
Anyway, if he had felt a qualm, it might well have been stifled by the chorus of congratulations with which his policy was greeted. Everyone whose opinion he could possibly be expected to value, thought he had done admirably. The Tories were profoundly relieved to discover that a Whig Minister could be as firm against revolution as they were: Liberals were delighted the country should realize that reform could be carried through without disorder. Macaulay, the typical man of the new progressive middle-class, asserted that the sins of reactionary landlords were no excuse for Jacobin outrage. Even Miss Harriet Martineau, stern pioneer of feminism and popular economics—though in general she disapproved of Melbourne as a reprehensible example of aristocratic frivolity—felt bound to praise him for the mingled firmness and moderation with which, in her view, he had dealt with the disturbances of 1830. His colleagues backed him to a man. And when the Radical Hunt proposed a general pardon for offenders in the House of Commons, his motion was rejected by a huge majority. Melbourne’s reputation as a statesman was growing steadily higher.
Besides putting down disorders, he also took steps to see they should not break out. Highly characteristic steps; into the Home Office in London he imported the free and easy methods of conducting business which surprised the officials of Dublin. He was ready to see people at the most unconventional times and places—notably in his dressing-room when he was getting up in the morning. His eyes concentrated on his shaving glass and his chin white with soap, he would listen inscrutably to what his visitor had to say. From time to time he jerked out a brusque, acute question. After he had found out what he wanted to know, genially he brought the interview to a close. People were disconcerted too by the men he employed. What were they to think, for instance, of his secretary Tom Young, a sharp vulgarian of dubious connections and breezy over-familiar manners, whom Melbourne had somehow managed to pick up when he, Young, was acting as Purser on the Duke of Devonshire’s yacht. Melbourne, however, was too sure of his own dignity to mind his familiarities; while Young’s doubtful connections he found a positive advantage. “He’s my weather gauge,” Melbourne remarked, “through him I am able to look down below; which is for me more important than all I can learn from the fine gentlemen clerks about me.”
He had special need of information from below at this period. The revolutionary movement was not confined to the countryside. Beneath a smooth and orderly surface, London was seething with unrest, murmurous with discontent. Every evening that autumn when dusk had fallen on the great city, groups radical and revolutionary, would meet in shops and obscure upper rooms, to discuss schemes, sometimes legal, sometimes illegal, by which the defeat of the anti-reformers might be assured. Melbourne wanted some first-hand information about these people; to find out what they were really plotting and, if possible, to influence them towards lawful courses. As at Dublin, he saw that it was hopeless to try and do this through official channels and by means of decorous civil servants. What he wanted was a man like Tom Young, accustomed to knocking about in all sorts of queer company and who did not take no for an answer.
Conspicuous among these radical groups was one which gathe
red at a sort of combined bookshop and political club called the Charing Cross Library and was dominated by Francis Place, a maker of leather breeches who has left his name in history as a pioneer of democratic radicalism. A dour-faced, bristle-haired person, capable, aggressive, self-educated and self-satisfied, he represented that important middle section of his party which combined a bitter hostility to lords and landowners with an equally bitter contempt for unpractical extremists on his own side. In the days of his festive youth, Melbourne had bought his breeches from him; in fact Place had once dunned him for an unpaid bill. This inauspicious circumstance, however, did not now stop Melbourne from picking him out to be the means by which he might get into contact with the working-class movement. Accordingly in November he sent his brother George Lamb to ask Place to appeal publicly to the agricultural labourers to stop rioting; he also set up regular communications with him through the medium of Tom Young. Place received these overtures with shrewdness and suspicion; he refused to have anything to do with George Lamb’s proposals and was not taken in by Young’s false joviality; “A cleverish sort of fellow who has a vulgar air of frankness which may put some people off their guard,” he noted caustically. On his side, Melbourne did not put much confidence in Place. That type of man in his experience was always, in fact, ready to break the law, whatever he may say to the contrary beforehand. He also noted that Place’s information always seemed to support the policy Place wanted the Government to adopt. However, each felt he had something to gain from the other. On a healthy basis of mutual distrust, the connection established itself.
Meanwhile, the battle for reform thundered on. After passing its Second Reading in the House of Commons by one vote, it was beaten in Committee. Clearly the Whigs would never get it through without a larger Parliamentary representation. Prompted by Lord Grey, William IV therefore hurried down to Westminster and cramming his crown hastily on to one side of his head, entered the Chamber and dissolved Parliament. A stormy general election followed in which the Whigs got their increased majority. Once again, the Bill was brought in: this time it passed the Commons and proceeded to the House of Lords. Its first appearance there was the occasion of a memorable full-dress debate. The outstanding speakers were Lord Grey, who revived for the wonder and delight of a new generation the stately splendours of eighteenth century oratory; and Lord Chancellor Brougham, a master of the more trenchant modern style. His speech culminated in a peroration in which, falling on his knees and with outstretched hands, he implored the peers not to throw out the Bill. Unluckily, in order to stimulate his eloquence, he had during his speech drunk a whole bottle of mulled port, with the result that once on his knees he found he was unable to get up until assisted to do so by his embarrassed colleagues.
Melbourne did not emulate the rhetorical feats of his leaders. But he supported the Bill in a characteristic speech, full of detachment and digression and apt quotations from Livy and Lord Bacon; and in which he frankly explained the reasons for his changed attitude to reform. He did not believe in it any more than before, he said, certainly its results were likely to disappoint its more enthusiastic advocates. But the popular demand for it had become so widespread that, according to his theory of statesmanship, there was less danger in passing it than in turning it down.
These cool and prudent reflections did not succeed in converting their Tory-minded lordships. On the morning of 9th October, the pro-reform papers announced, in an edition specially printed on black-edged paper, the House of Lords had thrown the Reform Bill out. The effect of this news on the country seemed to justify Melbourne’s reading of the public mind; and his belief in the danger of revolution as well. Riot and outrage broke out even more violently than the year before; and this was not only in the country, but also in the great centres of population. Towns blazed as well as ricks. In Derby the jail was broken into and several people killed; Nottingham Castle was destroyed; Bristol was a scene of spectacular destruction with the red-coated soldiers firing on the crowd and the Bishop’s palace in flames against the dim November dawn.
More alarming to those in power, because more generally formidable, were the signs of organized revolution which were beginning to show themselves. The Political Unions for instance; they protested that their only function was to maintain law and order while Reform was going through. But they were disciplined, they had the advantage of efficient middle-class leadership, and their moving spirit, Attwood, was as bitter a radical as Place himself. What purpose might not he turn them to, if he began to think that the cause of Reform was in danger! Moreover, in the North workingmen’s unions had sprung up, whose aims were openly revolutionary. There were the usual sinister rumours of secret drilling and arms practice after dark. Civil War looked close. In the polite circles of London feeling reached a new height of tension. Ladies in drawing-rooms repeated to each other horrific reports of respectable squires’ wives torn brutally from their beds by savage mobs, who broke up their furniture and made merry in their cellars; in clubs gentlemen had it on good authority that a rebellious army was at that very instance marching on the capital. The King’s letters to his ministers grew more and more frantic. Even Lord Grey wondered if the Government had taken the trades union movement seriously enough. Indeed almost alone among Ministers Melbourne appeared his ordinary smiling self. People were even more struck by his coolness than they had been the year before.
This was the more remarkable because the times were more anxious. Once more it was his responsibility to repress disorder. Once more he rose to the occasion. London was the chief danger spot; the seat of government must at all costs not be allowed to get out of hand. Nonchalantly, unconventionally, effectively Melbourne took his steps. Troops and private negotiations were his means. He posted soldiers at strategic points, forbade public meetings and sent Young off to see Place. Within a week or two all danger of disturbances in London had passed. In the country with equally successful results, he got into touch with Attwood and dispatched military detachments to especially unruly districts. For the rest, his time was taken up with soothing down the King and his colleagues and with dealing with his official correspondence. Panic had started a new flood of letters to the Home Office, passionately adjuring the Minister to do something drastic and to do it at once. Melbourne noticed they seldom said what. He was not impressed. “When in doubt what should be done,” he reflected, “do nothing.”
But he was not as calm as he looked. How should he be, when the strife and chaos he dreaded loomed apparently ever nearer! Underneath his indolent surface, throbbed a growing nervous tension. Once for an instant it betrayed itself. There was in September a debate in the House of Lords about the spring-guns which some landowners had set up in their fields to keep off rick burners. Melbourne defended them in a speech marked by a strange and uncharacteristic note of hysteria. “Rick burning,” he cried, “seems to have no object or motive; but to arise from a pure unmixed and diabolical feeling of senseless malignity.” His heightened state of emotion also showed itself in a change of attitude towards the Reform Bill. What with the House of Lords on the one side and the Political Unions on the other, it was clear that it was not going through as easily as the Government had once hoped. A crisis was approaching in which Ministers would have to decide whether to pacify the Lords by modifying the Bill or satisfy the reformers by creating enough peers to force it through. They began to divide themselves into two groups according as to how far at heart they really wanted to reform. Melbourne inevitably inclined to that group which did not want it. Indeed the effect of his anxiety was to bring out all his latent prejudice against it. What nonsense it all was! What a nuisance that anyone should ever have raised the question! Secretly he would not have been sorry to see the Government go out and the whole issue drop. He found himself feeling suddenly exacerbated by those of his colleagues who clamoured that the Bill be put through at all costs. The excitable Lord Durham in particular, shouting abuse at Lord Grey in Cabinet for what he considered his w
eakness in hesitating to create peers at once—“If I’d been Lord Grey,” said Melbourne, “I’d have knocked him down.” And again when Durham fulminated against any proposals to alter the Bill in order to conciliate its opponents. “I doubt if he knows what the alterations are,” commented Melbourne tartly, “as he will not let anyone tell him.”
On the other hand Melbourne’s emotions were not so out of control as to silence the voice of that good sense which had previously brought him round to agree to reform. In some ways it had been reinforced by the disturbances in the autumn. Melbourne had been quite right in thinking that the popular demand for reform was now so strong as to make it risky to refuse it. More risky than before as their hopes had now been raised! “It is a very dangerous way of dealing to retract what you have once offered to concede,” he said.
The Young Melbourne & Lord M Page 21
