Political passion and tumults were reduced after 1822 thanks to an upturn in the economy. From 1815 until the mid-Victorian boom, Britain’s economy oscillated between good and bad times. Their features were described in a survey of the past decade compiled in the Economist early in 1845. ‘In 1835 commerce was prosperous, manufactures flourished, labour was in great demand with ample wages. In 1839 all was the reverse – ruin, discredit, and sinking finances.’7 These were accompanied by chronic unemployment and an upsurge in popular political violence in the northern and Midlands industrial areas. All this had occurred during the post-Waterloo years.
There was no consensus as how to escape from the cycle of booms and slumps, or how to ameliorate the consequences of the latter. One view, known as laissez-faire, which was gaining ground during this period, insisted that the economy possessed its own dynamic and operated under the laws of the market, and should be trusted to do so in the general interest. Correcting mechanisms existed and, if allowed to function freely, would provide the remedies for recession; state intervention hindered natural processes and distorted the market. In particular, the Corn Laws passed in 1815 to limit the imports of grain from the Continent drove up the price of bread and, with it, wages. High labour costs reduced competitiveness and profit margins, as businessmen repeatedly told successive governments.
Against the iron laws of economics were the older considerations of the moral responsibility of the rich for the poor and their modern offshoot, the Christian humanitarianism of the Evangelical movement. The nature of philanthropy was being transformed; traditional charity was supplemented by political action, which involved the conversion of the public and then mass lobbying and petitioning of Parliament. This form of campaigning had secured the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and was being adopted by movements against slavery and the abuse and exploitation of men, women and children in mines and factories. Laissez-faire dogmatists, chiefly plantation and factory owners, insisted that philanthropists were endangering profits. Humanitarian sentiments transcended partisan politics. In 1832 the anti-reform Tories Lord Eldon and the Bishop of London joined forces with a self-proclaimed ‘liberal’ Whig, the third Lord Suffield, to present a bill against child labour in the Lords. Suffield was also an opponent of slavery and the game laws and he backed measures to reduce cruelty to animals; he died after a fall from his horse while riding on Constitution Hill.8
The slave trade had been abolished by an unreformed Parliament. How long it remained in that condition depended upon the capacity of the Tory Party to keep the monopoly of power it had secured in 1794. The Tory mind was not wholly indisposed to reform. Between 1780 and 1825 successive ministries had cut the number of state sinecures from two hundred to ten, and the amount doled out in civil list pensions had fallen from £200,000 in 1810 to £75,000 in 1830.9 Nonetheless, substantial perks remained: as Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool had received £4,100 a year as Constable of Dover Castle and the Marquess Wellesley nearly £5,000 as remembrancer of the Irish Exchequer. Chipping away at what was called the ‘old corruption’ was not really a concession to the spirit of reform, but part of the reduction of government expenditure in response to pressure from landowning taxpayers.
The Tory ascendancy was shattered between 1829 and 1830. The cause had been a major reform – the political emancipation of Catholics – taken with great reluctance by the Prime Minister Wellington and against a background of rancorous bickering within his own party, which split. Wellington was a humane man and a pragmatist who believed that this concession would forestall an insurrection and possibly a civil war in Ireland. His opponents disinterred atavistic anti-Popery and alleged that, in the interests of expediency, he had jeopardized the spiritual prestige and authority of that sturdy prop to Toryism, the Church of England. Tempers snapped. George IV wailed that he had been ‘deserted by the aristocracy’ and Wellington was forced to fight a duel with another bigot, the tenth Earl of Winchilsea. Both men fired wide. The Duchess of Richmond, who had been hostess to the famous ball in Brussels before Waterloo, reviled the peers who had voted for emancipation as ‘rats’ and placed stuffed rats in glass cases on a table in her drawing room, each labelled with the name of an apostate lord. It was rumoured that a mischievous peer had released a live rat during the Lords debate.10
Disunited Tories turned on each other. There were already signs that the party was losing its hitherto tractable supporters in the shires; in recent Cornish elections farmers had refused their landlords’ bidding and rejected ultra candidates.11 Loyal Oxfordshire defected in the 1830 general election, an early symptom of what turned out to be a general defiance of the Tory aristocracy and the electoral machinery it controlled.12 Early in 1831, when the Whigs introduced the first Reform Bill, two Tory grandees, the Duke of Buccleuch and the Earl of Lothian, faced a ‘mutiny’ by Borders’ voters, much to Minto’s delight. He also noticed that many MPs were suddenly taking the trouble to consult their constituents as to how they should vote. In previously docile pocket boroughs tenants risked and sometimes suffered eviction to vote for pro-reform candidates.13
The will of the nation was clear. The Tories disregarded it and, as Minto told his wife in March 1831, were bent on ‘wrecking’ the bill in the Lords. A clash was unavoidable, for ‘the people certainly would not allow itself turned out by a vote in the Lords’.14 The Tory peers rejected the bill and their mulishness transformed its passage into a prolonged and bitter contest between the Lords and the people.
Tensions increased and, during the winter of 1831–2, there were large-scale riots in Nottingham and Bristol, where a combination of arson, looting and cavalry charges led to heavy casualties. In October Minto feared a proliferation of popular violence and his pessimism was widely shared. The painter Benjamin Haydon sensed that popular feeling went far deeper than his Tory friends thought, and he gloomily wondered whether Britain was about to undergo a revolution of the sort that had occurred in America. The monarchy, the aristocracy and the Commons would all be extinguished. Some fearful Tories, including the poet laureate Robert Southey, contemplated flight from what seemed an imminent and inevitable revolution by emigrating to the United States.15
There is something bizarre about the exaggerated reactions to a measure designed to redistribute Parliamentary constituencies and create an extended and theoretically uniform franchise in Britain and Ireland. In common with other Whig lords, Minto imagined that the bill would simultaneously rescue Parliament from ‘the mischievous influence of the great boroughmongers’ and revive the influence of the aristocracy in general.16 He was right insofar that fewer and fewer seats were being contested in general elections and more and more were being settled by private compacts made to spare contestants’ money. The value of pocket boroughs had soared, and in 1820 Gatton in Surrey had changed hands for £180,000. After Parliamentary reform, Minto predicted a return to elections which would be won not by high spenders, but by peers asserting their influence over boroughs close to their estates. The Prime Minister, now Lord Grey, attempted to calm the Tory peers by arguing that the enfranchisement of ‘large, wealthy and populous towns’ in no way encroached on the ‘privileges’ of the aristocracy, or the ‘prerogatives’ of the Crown.17
Why then did the Tory peers resist so tenaciously? Speeches made during the last-ditch resistance to the bill in April and May 1832 reverberated with fury, hyperbole and predictions of impending revolution. There were also expressions of a deep and sincere veneration for the past. The Bishop of Durham described the bill as a ‘dangerous example of destruction and annihilation’ and merely ‘change . . . for the sake of change’. He dismissed the so-called ‘march of intellect’ as a ‘restless disposition’ which sought to erase everything that was ‘ancient’. Innovations would accumulate until all the institutions ‘on which our ancestors had prided themselves’ had disappeared. Some peers protested that the abolition of their pocket boroughs was an assault on the rights of property. The Earl of Malmesbury correctly predicted
that the landed interest for which the peers spoke would eventually become subservient to that industry.18
There was rage too about the public clamour for reform. The sometime duellist Lord Winchilsea denounced all political unions as ‘illegal combinations’, and Lord Haddington was infuriated by the way in which the Lords was excoriated in the press and on public platforms. Lord Wynford, a former judge, melodramatically declared that he would vote against the bill even if it meant that he would be hanged from ‘the nearest lamp iron’ the moment he walked into the street.19 (He died in his bed in 1845.) Outside the Lords, there was braggadocio; Haydon heard tales that some younger and wilder spirits hoped for a violent showdown. Some ‘dandies’ were ‘longing for a fight’ and Lord John Churchill, brother to the fifth Duke of Marlborough, was looking forward to a civil war. ‘It will come to blood [which will] do ’em good.’20 The spirit of 1642 was evident among a few Whigs, some of whom resigned their yeomanry commissions rather than suppress protests against the House of Lords.
Wellington and William IV (1830–7) resolved the impasse. The Duke, who believed that a good general always knew when to retreat, persuaded the hardline peers to stay away from the Lords rather than vote, scupper the bill and provoke a confrontation with the Commons. It would lead to disorders which might easily be beyond the capacity of the government to control. The King reminded the Lords that, if necessary, he would create as many peers as were needed to secure the bill’s passage. The diehards submitted with a bad grace. A handful fired a Parthian shot after the Reform Act was passed, proclaimmg that the country and the throne were imperilled and all ancient institutions were now in jeopardy.21
Tory anguish was a product of a genuine fear that any tampering with the old order would bring about its demolition, which suggests unspoken anxieties about its fragility. There was also sullen puzzlement, for the Tory peers had misjudged the temper of the country and overestimated the residual loyalty of their traditional supporters. They had defected in droves, but, unchastened, the Tory peers imagined that the will of the Commons (and the nation) could be frustrated by a show of aristocratic solidarity. Wellington and William IV brought them to their senses by reminding that they could not flout the will of the nation and the Crown.
But were the lamentations and dire prophecies of Tory peers the swansong of the aristocracy? Historians agree that the Reform Act was pivotal insofar as it opened the way towards a fuller democracy. This had not been the aim of the Whig aristocracy. Rather they saw themselves as fulfilling the ancient function of the nobility: national leadership. Men like Minto, Lord John Russell and Earl Grey had accepted the popular will, directed it in a sober and moderate manner and through compromise preserved some of the political power of the aristocracy. Reform in the wider sense had triumphed: the Whig ministry elected in 1832 proceeded to abolish slavery within the British empire, reorganised local government and passed a national Poor Law.
In broad terms the character of political life had been changed. There were more voters, most of them from the middle classes. The United Kingdom electorate increased from 290,000 to 495,000 with a rise from 5,000 to 60,000 in Scotland. The newly enfranchised voted for a House of Commons which was now supreme, for the events of 1832 had proved beyond question that the Lords veto could not override the will of the Commons.22
With hindsight, the Reform Act was a turning point in the history of the aristocracy. It set a constitutional precedent, and henceforward the predominantly Tory peers could only camel trade with the lower house by amending legislation or sending back bills for further consideration. Aristocratic power was on the wane, but the pace of its deterioration was halting and often barely perceptible to contemporaries. Early in 1833, an army officer angling for promotion tried to secure the patronage of Lord Seafield on the grounds that ‘Lord Palmerston is an old college friend of yours’. He added: ‘I suppose even in this reformed Parliament, private friendship has something to do with these appointments.’23 Businessmen in the big cities agreed in principle and preferred MPs whose aristocratic connections made them more effective as lobbyists.
Members of Parliament were still expected to pull strings for their supporters in the old style. Minto’s eldest son, Lord Melgund, who was MP for Hythe between 1837 and 1841, was bombarded with requests for patronage from Whig voters. David Page, whose straitened circumstances could be offset by a minor administrative post, reminded Melgund that ‘my brothers, my sons and myself have invariably supported your lordship’s interest and that of the present government both in the borough and the county’ and that he had never before asked for the ‘favour of any Parliamentary gentleman’. Ten electors backed Edward Thomas’s application for the pursership on HMS Ocean on the grounds that he was about to settle in Hythe and ‘is likely to be politically useful’.24
The Reform Act had not outlawed electoral corruption. Aristocratic pressure continued to be vigorously applied during election campaigns, particularly in small and middle-sized boroughs in the shadow of great houses. In 1832 Lord Dimsdale told the seven hundred voters of Hertford that he expected ‘all my tenants and friends’ to vote for his favoured candidate, the Tory Lord Ingestre. Samuel Sedgewick, a draper, disobeyed, allowed the Whig candidate to address a crowd from a window above his shop, and was evicted. ‘Bullies’ wandered on the streets during polling and voters were invited to the ‘Rat’s Castle’ inn where there was free beer, bread, cheese, onions and gallons of port. The reckoning was sent to Lord Salisbury at Hatfield, or so the Whigs alleged. Not surprisingly, the defeated Whigs challenged the result and the election was scrutinised by a Common’s committee. This legal procedure cost the plaintiffs two hundred and fifty pounds a day; only rich men could hope to expose electoral corruption.25
There were occasional attempts to escape the stranglehold imposed by peers. In 1852 the electors of Peterborough rebelled against Earl Fitzwilliam, whose family had controlled the city since the 1790s in the Whig interest. A populist Tory prevailed, but the result was overturned after charges of corruption.26 The following year the Edinburgh Review regretted the venality of the newly enfranchised urban middle classes who treated the vote as a marketable asset to be sold to the highest bidder. During the 1866 election the price of a householder’s vote varied from seven pounds in Lancaster to sixty pounds in Totnes.27 Worse still was widespread political apathy; in the 1859 election well over two hundred constituencies were uncontested.28
These included many of the fifty-nine constituencies at the beck and call of forty-four peers.29 Some were handed to younger sons in the old fashion. In Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) the Countess of Marney resolves that her younger son Lord Egremont will have the borough of Marney with the help of his elder brother’s cash and a thousand pounds from her. For her it was a matter of ‘regaining the family influence and letting us hold up our heads again’.
Seen from the perspectives of a provincial shopkeeper with brandy in his belly and the nobleman who had paid for it to get the man’s vote, the Reform Act seemed to have changed very little. Intransigent Tory peers had had a pyschological shock in 1832 when they had been isolated and reviled, but they quickly recovered their confidence under a new leader, Sir Robert Peel. He was the son of a textile manufacturer (one of the first non-landed millionaires) and a shrewd pragmatist. Peel made it clear to the new electorate that his party was no longer hostile to the spirit of reform. A fictional Conservative in Trollope’s The Prime Minister, set in the 1870s, remarks:
You’ can’t have tests and qualification, rotten boroughs and the divine right of kings, back again. But as the glorious institutions of the country are made to perish, one after another, it is better they should receive the coup de grâce tenderly from loving hands than be roughly throttled by radicals.
The clock could not be turned back and it was electoral suicide to imagine otherwise. The Conservatives wanted power and Peel understood that it could only be secured if his party compromised with the spirit of reform. There were exceptions, most f
amously Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp, the Tory MP for Lincoln, who, until his death in 1855, upheld the old aristocratic principle and denounced every manifestation of the modern age from railways to the Great Exhibition. A tall, striking figure dressed in the fashion of the Regency and with bushy dragoon’s whiskers, he entertained the Commons with his tirades. In Lincoln, he courted voters in the old style and they gratefully sang:
Come then, Freemen, let us sing,
‘God save Sibthorp, Church and King’
Bacchus sure will mirthful fling
Round us wreathes of jollity: . . .
Sibthorp diverted a House of Commons that was a more balanced body in terms of the range of interests represented than it had been when he had been first elected in 1826. The supremacy of the landed interest was over; it now stood on equal footing with those of the City, manufacturing, railways and shipping, which were now generating more and more of the nation’s wealth.
21
Thoroughbred: Sport
Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present Page 26
