Perilous Question Read online

  PERILOUS QUESTION

  Also by Antonia Fraser

  NON-FICTION

  Mary Queen of Scots

  Cromwell: Our Chief of Men

  James VI of Scotland, I of England

  King Charles II

  The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-century England

  The Warrior Queens: Boadicea’s Chariot

  The Six Wives of Henry VIII

  The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605

  Marie Antoinette: The Journey

  Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King

  Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter

  FICTION

  Quiet as a Nun

  The Wild Island

  A Splash of Red

  Cool Repentance

  Oxford Blood

  Jemima Shore’s First Case

  Your Royal Hostage

  The Cavalier Case

  Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave

  Political Death

  PERILOUS

  QUESTION

  Reform or Revolution?

  Britain on the Brink, 1832

  Antonia Fraser

  PUBLICAFFAIRS

  New York

  Copyright © 2013 by Antonia Fraser.

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

  Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

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  The Library of Congress Control Number: 2013933913

  ISBN 978-1-61039-332-4 (EB)

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In Memory of

  HAROLD PINTER and FRANK LONGFORD

  who were not afraid to ask perilous questions

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE: A new King, a new people

  CHAPTER ONE: The clamour

  CHAPTER TWO: I will pronounce the word

  CHAPTER THREE: Believing in the Whigs

  CHAPTER FOUR: The gentlemen of England

  CHAPTER FIVE: Russell’s Purge

  CHAPTER SIX: King as angel

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Away went Gilpin

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Confound their politics

  CHAPTER NINE: What have the Lords done?

  CHAPTER TEN: A scene of desolation

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: The fearful alternative

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Bouncing Bill

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Seventh of May

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Prithee return to me

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Bright day of liberty

  EPILOGUE: This great national exploit

  References

  Sources

  Index

  Photo insert between pages 146-147

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Page 1: William IV by Sir Martin Archer Shee, 1835, aged 70. (© Royal Academy of Arts, London; John Hammond)

  Page 2, top: Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, c.1831, by Sir William Beechey. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Page 2, bottom: Mary Countess Grey with two of her daughters. (Private collection)

  Page 3: Charles 2nd Earl Grey, by Sir Thomas Lawrence. (Private collection)

  Page 4, top: Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, by John Simpson, c.1835. (Apsley House, The Wellington Museum, London / © English Heritage Photo Library / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Page 4, bottom: Sir Robert Peel by Henry William Pickersgill. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Page 5, top: Old Sarum by John Constable (1776–1837). (Private collection / The Stapleton Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Page 5, bottom: High street market, Birmingham. Engraving by William Radclyffe, 1827, from a drawing by David Cox. (SSPL / Getty Images)

  Page 6, top: Thomas Attwood. Engraving by C. Turner, 1832, after portrait by George Sharples. (Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Page 6, middle: ‘The Preston Shoe Black in Parliament Showering a few of his Brilliant Ideas out at the Expence of Some of the Rotten Members’. (By permission of the People’s History Museum)

  Page 6, bottom: Captain Swing, c. December 1830. ‘An original portrait of Captain Swing’, published by Orlando Hodgson, 1830. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

  Page 7, top: Lord John Russell and Lord Holland. Portrait by George Hayter (attributed to). (The Congregational Memorial Hall Trust (1978) Limited. Image supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation)

  Page 7, bottom: Lord and Lady Holland in the Library at Holland House. ‘Holland House Library’ by C. R. Leslie. (Private collection)

  Page 8, top: William Cobbett. Etching by Daniel Maclise, 1835. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Page 8, bottom: Thomas Babington Macaulay. Drawing by I.N. Rhodes, 1832. (Private collection)

  Page 9, top: ‘An After Dinner Scene (At Windsor)’ by John Doyle. Lithograph published by Thomas McLean, 12 October 1831. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Page 9, bottom: ‘Handwriting Upon the Wall’ after John Doyle. Published 26 May 1831. (Shelf mark: Reform Bills 2 54. The Art Archive / Bodleian Library, Oxford)

  Page 10, top: ‘House of Commons’ by James Stephanoff, 1821. (© Palace of Westminster Collection, WOA 276)

  Page 10, bottom: ‘The Reformers’ Attack on the Old Rotten Tree; or the Foul Nests of the Cormorants in Danger.’ Cartoon published by E. King, May 1831. (By permission of the People’s History Museum)

  Page 11, top: The City of Bristol on Fire, 30 October 1831, from a sketch taken from Brandon Hill by C.H. Walters (Bristol Record Office: BRO 43207/20/3/1)

  Page 11, bottom: ‘Bombarding the Barricades or the Storming of Apsley House’. Hand-coloured etching published by J. Bell, February 1832. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

  Page 12, top: ‘Dame Partington and the Ocean (of Reform) by John Doyle. Lithograph published by Thomas Mclean, 24 October 1831. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

  Page 12, bottom: ‘New Reform Coach’ by John Doyle. Lithograph published by Thomas McLean, 17 June 1832. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Page 13, top: ‘The Dog Billy Led Astray by a German B----’. Woodcut published by G. Drake, 1832.

  Page 13, bottom: Shoemakers’ banner. (By permission of the People’s History Museum)

  Page 14, top: John Gilpin!!! by John Doyle. Lithograph published by Thomas McLean, 13 May 1831. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  Page 14, bottom: Scorton 1832–Celebrating the First Reform Act. Artist unknown. (Kiplin Hall)

  Page 15: The banquet given in the Guildhall, 7 July 1832, to celebrate the passing of the Bill. Painting by Benjamin Robert Haydon. (Private collection)

  Page 16: ‘A memento of the Great Public Question of Reform’. Designed and engraved for the Bell’s New Weekly Messenger, 15 April 1832. (By permission of the People’s History Museum)

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I wrote this book to satisfy my own curiosity: what were they like, the people who fought for (or against) the Reform Bill of 1832? What was it like, the reality of the precise, short period – J
uly 1830 until June 1832 – in which it all took place? I wanted to investigate the flavour of the times, rather than write a history of Reform. During the period I was working on this book, British politics sometimes seemed to be tracking my early-nineteenth-century course, as topics like voting and the House of Lords regularly came up for discussion, to say nothing of popular demonstrations; any parallels are however for the reader to draw. Essentially, I was interested to pursue the perennial mixture of idealism and self-interest which permeates the politics of great events.

  With this in mind, wherever appropriate I have quoted the contemporary accounts and comments – with special attention to the dramatic debates in both the House of Lords and the House of Commons. I have borne in mind the words of F.W. Maitland, which are at the heart of writing history: ‘We should always be aware that what now lies in the past, once lay in the future’; that is to say, we know the Reform Bill will pass, but the people who fought for it did not. And it was a fierce fight. There is a memorial in a Harrow church to a Member of Parliament, John Henry North, who died at the age of forty-four in 1831 as a result of ‘a mind too great for his earthly frame in opposing the Revolutionary Invasion of the Religion and Constitution of England’ which was Reform. Not everyone suffered a nervous breakdown and died of it, but many people, unaware of the outcome, were beset with anxiety; the large majority of them deserve honour for the role they played.

  In my researches, I have been enormously helped by the many existing great works on parliamentary Reform – histories of the subject are listed in the Sources and acknowledged individually, with gratitude, in the References. My work would have been impossible without them. I have also much pleasure in acknowledging specific help from the following:

  I wish to thank Her Majesty the Queen for permission to quote from Queen Adelaide’s Diary in the Royal Archives; also the Hon. Lady Roberts, Librarian and Curator of the Print Room, Royal Collection, Miss Pam Clarke, Senior Archivist, Royal Archives and Mrs Jill Kelsey, Deputy Archivist, Royal Archives.

  I give special thanks to: Professor Carl Chinn, Professor of Community History, University of Birmingham; Phil Dunn, People’s History Museum, Manchester; Miranda Goodby, Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent; Dr Bendor Grosvenor for permission to reproduce the Fuseli drawing of Lord Brougham; Christopher Hunwick, Archivist, Northumberland Estates and Secretary, Historic Houses Archivists Group; Rosa Jarvie and Laura Lindsay, Christie’s; Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, for permission to quote from the Stanhope MSS, and Danielle Watson, Public Services Assistant; the Duke of Marlborough for permission to reproduce the portrait of the Marquess of Blandford, and Heather Carter, Head of Operations, Blenheim Palace Estate Office; Sheila O’Connell, Curator of British Prints before 1880, British Museum; Victoria Osborne, Curator, Fine Art, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery; David Raymont, Librarian, The Actuarial Profession; Margaret Richards, Archive Assistant, Arundel Castle; Professor John Rogister; the Duke of Rutland for permission to quote from the Rutland MSS, Peter Foden, Archivist, Belvoir Castle and Emma Ellis; Colin Shearer, Collections Manager, Holkham Hall; Caroline Shenton; Mrs Anne Smith, Curator & Archivist, Sherborne Castle Estates; Earl Spencer for permission to reproduce the portrait of Viscount Althorp and his prize bull; Dawn Webster, Curator, Kiplin Hall; Mrs Pamela Woolf, Wordsworth Trust; Adam Zamoyski.

  I thank the following for advice and encouragement in many different ways: Dr John Adamson; Professor Helen Berry, University of Newcastle; Lord (Asa) Briggs; Professor Robert Bucholz; Professor Sir David Cannadine; my son Orlando Fraser; Sir Martin Gilbert; Victoria Gray; the late Professor Eric Hobsbawm; Louis Jebb; Linda Kelly; Alan Mallinson; Sir Geoffrey Owen; Dr David Parrott; Professor Munro Price; Frank Prochaska; Professor Miles Taylor; Hugo Vickers; Katie Waldegrave.

  The staff of the British Library, British Museum, Institute of Historical Research, London Library and the National Archives were all most helpful. My agent Jonathan Lloyd and publisher Alan Samson with Lucinda McNeile were as ever extremely supportive as was Linda Peskin at the computer. My daughter Flora Fraser shared her expertise on the period. I am grateful to Paul Foote and Stephan M. Lee for research and corrections, remaining errors being of course my own. Caroline Hotblack provided valuable picture research, and Linden Lawson admirable copy-editing.

  Lastly this book is jointly dedicated to my husband Harold Pinter and my father Frank Longford, who did not live to see it published but would undoubtedly have had individual and vigorous views on the subject of Reform.

  Antonia Fraser

  27 November 2012

  Note: For the sake of the reader, I have attempted from time to time to give the modern equivalent of sums of money in 1830. Such calculations can only ever be approximate. The Bank of England Inflation Calculator for 2011 (based on figures supplied by the Office of National Statistics) gave the figure £9,371.71 for £100 in 1830. (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/inflation/calculator /flash/index.htm)

  I have therefore in principle rounded this figure up to £10,000, both to allow for further inflation and for convenience in providing what is only a rough picture.

  ‘The perilous question is that of Parliamentary Reform, and as I approach it, the more I feel all its difficulty.’–

  Earl Grey, 13 January 1831

  PROLOGUE

  A NEW KING, A NEW PEOPLE

  ‘A Patriot King is the most powerful of all reformers ...

  A new people will seem to arise with a new King’ –

  Lord Bolingbroke, The Idea of a Patriot King, 1738

  The struggle for the Great Reform Bill of 1832 took place at the crossroads of English history. One road wound down from the long eighteenth century which, it could be argued, only ended with the victory of Waterloo in 1815. Another road led forward to the reign of Queen Victoria which began in 1837 and a nineteenth century which finally terminated with the beginning of the First World War in 1914. This was the Britain from which the imagination of J.M.W. Turner drew inspiration; in a famous picture of the 1830s, The Fighting Temeraire, a ship distinguished at the Battle of Trafalgar twenty-five years earlier, was shown being tugged away at sea, to be broken up; in another exquisite sunset landscape, a new industrial town existed as a dark, even menacing blur in the corner.

  Communications were being transformed. This was the time when the first railways were nosing their way round Britain. Mrs Harriet Arbuthnot, confidante of the Duke of Wellington, waxed lyrical at the opening of the Liverpool–Manchester Railway: ‘I don’t think I ever saw a more beautiful sight than at the moment when the car attached to the engine shot off on its journey.’1 To others they seemed a more baleful presage of disaster, as when the diarist Thomas Creevey reflected, on a five-mile journey from Croxteth at twenty miles an hour, that it was impossible to divest himself of ‘the notion of instant death’.2 The police force, a new concept of managing public order other than by military reaction, was founded in London in 1829. At the same time slavery in the British Empire had not yet been abolished, nor were Jews admitted to Parliament. Penal reform was becoming a topic of discussion although it was a rare citizen who questioned capital punishment – the Whig grandee Lord Holland was one of them – yet the bodies of the executed were still publicly visible: as the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon exclaimed, ‘What a day! I saw a man just hanging at Newgate.’3

  During the struggle, the famous names of the coming reign were already present, albeit in very junior capacities. Here was the nineteen-year-old Charles Dickens as a cub reporter in Parliament and a youthful Thomas Babington Macaulay, first elected MP in 1830, making his name. A promising student at Oxford attended the debates in the gallery: his name was William Ewart Gladstone. Victoria herself, who was twelve in 1830, struck an observer as ‘a young, pretty, unaffected child’; Sir John Hobhouse added: ‘What will become of her?’4

  Among the politicians at Westminster, Daniel O’Connell made his first appearance from Ireland – the man who would be known as The Liberator.
At the same time the leading Whig politician, Charles 2nd Earl Grey, had worshipped at the liberal shrine of Charles James Fox in the 1780s and as a young man had been the cavalier of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, centre of the glittering Whig world of that time. The Tory Prime Minister, the great soldier the Duke of Wellington, whose mother had taken part in the coronation of George III in 1761, was in his sixties, as indeed was Grey.5 The reign of George IV might have lasted only ten years, although he was Regent during his father’s madness before then; that of George III stretched back to 1760. There were even old men to be found like General Dalrymple who remembered the trial of Lord Lovat following the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. Compared to this the Marquis of Huntly, the ‘charming Scot’ who as a young man had danced in Highland dress before Marie Antoinette, was a comparative newcomer.6

  During the struggle, there would be frequent references to the troubles of Charles I with his Parliament and the English Civil War which followed. Then there was the last traumatic period in English reforming history, the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Whig oligarchy imposed their choice of the Protestant William III upon the throne and ejected the Catholic James II. The diarist Charles Greville referred to Prince Talleyrand, born in the 1750s, a veteran survivor of international politics, as ‘that great Treasury of bygone events’.7 In 1830, when Talleyrand was appointed French Ambassador to London, there were many such treasuries. One prominent young Whig, Lord John Russell, was descended from the ducal Bedford family which had been so active in the oligarchic cause in the late seventeenth century. It was 140-odd years since 1688 – not a great length of time in human generations.

  More recently the American War of Independence and the founding of the American nation, with its written Constitution, provided other memories to draw upon and another example of change. To some the American struggle was ‘the torch which lighted the world for the last fifty years’.8 To others it was proof that constitutions did not have to ‘grow like vegetables’: they could be fashioned outright.9 But there was also the folk memory of a rebellious people.