Perilous Question Read online

  Various questions arose. Conventionally, a Queen of child-bearing age – and Adelaide was only thirty-eight at her husband’s accession – had provisions made for her regency, if the King died leaving her either the mother of the heir or potentially so because she was pregnant. There were also provisions to be made for her welfare as a widow. In fact the first clash came over Adelaide’s welfare as a Queen. There was opposition to her outfit allowance from Charles Grant, the Canningite MP for Inverness-shire who had joined the Government as part of its coalition element and was currently President of the Board of Control. Previously regarded as congenitally lazy, on this occasion Grant showed a stubborn energy, threatening to resign if the Queen’s outfit allowance continued to be mooted. It was Palmerston, the new Foreign Secretary and a man of the world where ladies were concerned, who observed: ‘This might be, I will say it, Disastrous.’15

  In the end the crisis was solved when the King and Queen gave way. Adelaide showed ‘good sense and good humour’, as tactfully reported by Sir Herbert Taylor; but suspicions about the intentions of the Government towards matters royal were not allayed. Where the coronation was concerned, it was decided that Parliament would not grant the Consort a new crown, as had happened with previous queens: there had to be some more economical solution.16 All this inevitably deepened the tension between Court and Government. There was not yet a vicious spiral whereby the press attacked the Queen for her Tory political influence over the King, while the King was moved by chivalry to show her public sympathy in the face of such attacks. But the possibility was there.

  The press in the early nineteenth century was certainly no respecter of royal persons. The attacks and satires of the previous reign might pale compared to those to which Marie Antoinette had been subjected in France in the pre-Revolutionary days; but they were still vicious. As 1831 dawned, the press in general was entering a new period of popular influence, much as the unions were exploring the possibilities of popular opinion as a force. In consequence, a clever Tory like John Wilson Croker, who referred to journalists as ‘needy adventurers’, foresaw a time when a member of the Cabinet would be trusted with that important duty of state, ‘the regulation of public opinion’. Every large provincial town had its newspaper despite the fourpenny stamp tax, which meant selling it at seven pence a copy when an agricultural wage averaged at something like nine shillings a week.17 Illicit lending meant that readers avidly interested in Reform extended far beyond the number of papers actually sold.

  One of the most respected provincial papers at this stage was the Leeds Mercury, which had been bought from its printer-proprietors in 1801 by Edward Baines; by now Baines had so built up its fortunes that it was regarded as a responsible advocate of moderate Reform, with sales in excess of 5,000 (and a readership of course far in excess of that). His son Edward Baines junior, who would take over the proprietorship, first emerged as a journalist defending the cause of peaceful protest at Peterloo. The Nottingham Journal, for example, was characterized as a Tory newspaper yet it too proved a strong proponent of Reform; whereas the Manchester Guardian, founded in 1821 following Peterloo, had shown liberal sympathies from the first.18

  The press was not allowed to exist unrestrained. William Blackstone, in his celebrated Commentaries on the Laws of England in the later eighteenth century, had called the free press essential to the nature of a free state, but this freedom did not count when there were ‘previous restraints upon publication’. It has been calculated, for example, that there were eighteen convictions for seditious libel and seventy-five for blasphemous libel between 1821 and 1834.19 In contrast to the respectable provincial papers and the established London papers such as The Times or the Morning Chronicle, which all had to pay a stamp tax, there were a host of unstamped extreme Radical sheets and newspapers written by John Wilson Croker’s ‘needy adventurers’. But they were adventurers in the cause of Reform who, in papers like the Gorgon and the Poor Man’s Guardian, founded by Henry Hetherington, reached the ear of the public. The Radical philosopher James Mill summed up the situation: the press, he said, could be a grand instrument for the diffusion of knowledge – or error: a judgement which, it might be argued, has stood the test of time.20

  Thomas Barnes, editor of The Times since 1817 (early journalistic efforts had included the exciting life of a theatre critic), would have definitely ranged himself and his paper among the former instruments.21 An extraordinarily handsome man in youth – he was described as having ‘a profile of Grecian regularity’ by Leigh Hunt, which may have helped him in his early life as ‘a complete voluptuary’ – Barnes was now in his mid-forties. He had put on weight since that Grecian youth, the curls were iron grey; but he still cut an impressive, broad-shouldered figure, with an agility maintained by frequent swimming in the Thames between Chelsea and Parliament. Barnes also made it his business to have strong links to politicians: for example, he saw a lot of Brougham, The Times having backed Queen Caroline when Brougham defended her. They frequently took informal breakfasts together for the exchanging of information. This was in contrast to another organ of opinion favouring the Whigs, the Morning Chronicle, which, under its editor John Black, had deplored the Peterloo Massacre, but attacked the conduct of the then Queen.

  On 26 January 1831 Barnes in The Times made it quite clear where his newspaper stood. ‘We repeat our earnest counsel to the people to be strenuous, indefatigable and uncompromising in their demands for Reform.’ Three days later he repeated this encouragement of popular intervention in even stronger terms: ‘Unless the people – the people everywhere – come forward and petition, ay, thunder for reform, it is they who betray an honest Minister – it is not the Minister who betrays the people.’ For the time being, however, The Times remained supportive of the new monarch; in mid-February it announced that ‘no credence should be put in the rumours that an illustrious personage [that is to say the King] was insincere in his attachment to the popular cause’.22

  Lord Grey, in his letter to the King, had promoted the idea of ‘the rational public’, in contrast presumably to the irrational mob. Certainly the cogitations of the Committee of Four, however removed from the public gaze, were held against a background of virtually countrywide violence, rational or otherwise being a matter of opinion. Parliament was due to sit again at the beginning of February. There was an inauspicious beginning in which Lord Althorp presented to the Commons a Budget which, with its proposed transfer tax on exchange of funded property, aroused cries of furious protest from the City; after a notably fine speech from Sir Robert Peel the offending clause had to be withdrawn (perhaps there was a lesson here on the interrelationship of finance and government).23 More optimistically, on 3 February Grey announced in the House of Lords that ‘ministers had at last succeeded in framing a measure’; Lord John Russell would present the Reform Bill in the Commons on 1 March.24

  In the meantime, the great estates (whose masters were very often away in Parliament but kept in touch with the message from the countryside) had to cope with the problems of seemingly random attack. At Eaton Hall in Cheshire, the estate of Earl Grosvenor (created Marquess of Westminster later this year), a gamekeeper spoke out stoutly: ‘he only wished the rioters would come here; we would defend the house against 3,000 people’. Lord Grosvenor had his pistols loaded and his grooms were ready to gallop prisoners off to Flint Castle, as he told his daughter-in-law Elizabeth. In mid-February she watched fifty-one yeomen being drilled in the ‘driving snow and sleet’ for two and a half hours in front of the house, by her husband. Sir Stephen Glynne at nearby Hawarden was a great deal more timid; said to be ‘in the greatest fright’ and wondering if he could trust his 200 constables, he sent to Manchester for troops.25 At Belvoir Castle, home of the Duke of Rutland, a leading Tory, 100 staves were acquired for the use of Special Constables in January 1831.26

  In London the Tories, feeling their way in the unaccustomed role of the Opposition, held a series of meetings before the terms of the Reform Bill were announ
ced. At a meeting at Peel’s house in Whitehall Gardens on 20 February – amid the exquisite pictures which were part of his rich collection – it was decided not to offer initial resistance to this unknown Bill (whose proposals still remained secret). If, as has been suggested, Peel was uneasy with this decision, he was certainly right to be concerned at such tactics, as future events would demonstrate. Nevertheless at a further meeting at Apsley House on Sunday 27 February, under the aegis of the Duke of Wellington, there was general agreement not to make a concerted attack from the start which might lead to a dissolution of Parliament, with a consequent General Election – all at a time of violent uncertainty regarding the future of parliamentary Reform. So the two sides mustered with their parliamentary staves at the ready, but on the Tory side there was no precise sense of when they might most efficiently wield them.

  Lord John Russell rose to move the first reading of the Bill for Parliamentary Reform in England and Ireland (Scotland would be the subject of a separate bill) on Tuesday 1 March 1831.27 The House of Commons, which of course at its utmost could only accommodate two-thirds of its Members, was packed. Before Russell spoke, one Member showed the eagerness with which seats had been sought by asking the Speaker, Charles Manners-Sutton, whether it was in order for MPs to put their names on the back of a seat. The Speaker merely observed that the House was ‘remarkably full’ when he came into it, but after prayers and before voting there appeared to be more papers marking seats than Members. Members of the House of Lords crowded into their gallery, including the royal Duke of Sussex, who was known to favour Reform.

  From the first moment of his long speech, Russell paid due respect to the general concern felt about the present situation. ‘I rise, Sir, with feelings of deep anxiety and interest, to bring forward a question, which, unparalleled as it is in importance, is likewise unparalleled in difficulty’ – an echo of Grey with his employment of that word ‘perilous’ which the King had picked up. Russell reminded his hearers that he had raised the question of parliamentary Reform previously as an individual; now the measure was not so much his but that of the Government: ‘the deliberate measure of a whole Cabinet’. There might be ‘a crowded audience’ here but he wanted to refer them to the millions outside the House of Commons ‘who look with anxiety – who look with hope – who look with expectation, to the result of this day’s deliberations’.

  Russell then went on to stress the essentially conciliatory position of the present Government. Standing in the middle between ‘the Bigotry’ of the one who thought no reformation necessary, and the ‘fanaticism’ of the other who thought that only one particular kind of Reform could be satisfactory, ‘we fix ourselves on what is, I hope, firm and steadfast ground, between the abuses we wish to amend and the convulsions we hope to avert’. It was all good stirring stuff. Russell’s next point invoked history: there had been a time when the House of Commons had represented the people of England – the 1628 Petition of Right had alluded to the ancient statutes of Edward I – and that happy state of affairs must be restored.

  It was his appeal to reason which most clearly represented Russell’s own point of view. A stranger from some distant country would be told that England’s proudest boast was its political freedom. What would be his surprise, then, to be taken to ‘a green mound’ and told that this green mound actually sent two Members to Parliament. Or he might be shown an equally green park with many signs of luxurious vegetation but none of human habitation, which was entitled to the same privilege. Then this innocent stranger would be shown large, flourishing towns in the north of England, ‘full of trade and activity’ – this time he would be told that these towns were entitled to send no MPs at all to London. Furthermore, at an election in Liverpool he might be shocked by the ‘gross venality and corruption’. No wonder the whole people were calling loudly for Reform. It would be easier, reflected Lord John, to move the ‘flourishing manufactories’ [sic] of Leeds and Manchester to Gatton and Old Sarum, the green park and the green mound.

  Lord John Russell then proceeded to outline in great detail the plan on which the Committee of Four had agreed, and the Cabinet as a whole had endorsed. For a while his audience could hardly believe what they were hearing as his small, high, old-fashioned voice proceeded relentlessly onwards (The Times frequently complained about its inaudibility). Then, as the extraordinarily radical – one has to use the word – nature of what he was proposing began to sink in, his speech was punctuated with cheers: some of these were cheers of enthusiasm, others of disbelieving derision. After a while there were bouts of what Sir John Hobhouse called ‘wild, ironical laughter’. The colour came and went in Sir Robert Peel’s face. Towards the end of Lord John’s speech, Peel actually put his head in his hands. Whatever he had anticipated, it was not this.28

  There were two main propositions: redistribution, and clarification of the right to vote.29 As a result of the first, all boroughs with less than 2,000 inhabitants were to be disenfranchised (Schedule A), a total of sixty boroughs; those with less than 4,000 were to be robbed of one of their two MPs (Schedule B), a total of forty-seven. The second proposition limited the right to vote in the boroughs to those £10 householders, and in the counties to 40s freeholders. This would have the effect of simplifying a byzantine system of qualifications for the vote.

  There were to be twenty-seven new boroughs and 168 MPs would lose their seats; half a million (adult males) would be added to the electorate. The most violent reaction of the House came when Russell started to read out the names of the boroughs which would thus be disenfranchised, while others would be reduced. By their very nature, these were likely to have historic resonances: the past was one thing, and good for oratory, but of course actual live Members of Parliament listening to Russell found their seats blandly eliminated.

  In his final peroration, Russell took on his opponents squarely. The argument to history – our ancestors granted Old Sarum representatives, so we should do the same – he firmly demolished. He even invoked the name of Edmund Burke, the great man who had once been the inspiration of Whig freedom, finally the enemy of the French Revolution. First, our ancestors granted these representatives simply because Old Sarum was a large town; which is just why they proposed to give representatives to Manchester. To quote Burke, you might just as well say that the principles of the Roman Empire under Augustus had to be the same as those of the Roman Republic under the first Brutus. The Bill, he believed, would not destroy the power of the aristocracy by removing their nominated boroughs. They would continue to enjoy large incomes and property, by which they could relieve the poor by charity, and thus evince ‘private worth and public virtue’.

  This kind of influence would remain; what would be removed was the influence of the idle aristocrat, cut off from the people. He appealed to them: ‘the gentlemen of England have never been found wanting in any great crisis . . . I ask them now when a great sacrifice is to be made, to show their generosity – to convince the people of their public spirit – and to identify themselves for the future with the people. Upon the gentlemen of England, then, I call . . .’

  When Lord John finally sat down there was disbelief, astonishment and finally a tempestuous reaction. In the general hubbub, it was some time before Sir Robert Inglis, for the Tories, could make himself heard. Unfortunately this gentleman of England was verging on the apoplectic in his response to Lord John’s call. Inglis’s father was a self-made man who had three times been Chairman of the East India Company and been made a baronet. Sir Robert, the same generation as Althorp, was a dedicated believer in the Tory Protestant interest as guarding the proper order of the State. Although he was against the slave trade, and had liberal views on India, he had spoken out frequently against Catholic Relief and Catholic Emancipation. As a result he had defeated Sir Robert Peel (who finally supported it) in the fight for the Oxford University parliamentary seat, which he would occupy for twenty-five years.

  Sir Robert had been involved in public affairs for many yea
rs. An intelligent, cultured man, he was a Fellow of the Royal Society, acted as a Commissioner of Public Records and as a Trustee of the British Museum. Normally his ‘rosy, corpulent, beaming appearance’, graced with one of his splendid trademark floral buttonholes, was a harbinger of goodwill.30 On this occasion Sir Robert was not beaming.

  He felt, he said, ‘a sensation of awe at the contemplation of the abyss, on the brink of which we stand’. It was the first time for nearly fifty years that someone had come to the House from the Government declaring their own incompetence at carrying out legislative functions. As for the demands of ‘the people’, he reacted with horror at the very idea. Had they not survived other periods of crisis, such as 1793, or the year of Peterloo? The danger had been ‘met, averted and beaten down’. Therefore although he did not deny ‘that there does exist at this time . . . a state of diseased and feverish excitement’, it was purely temporary, due to the three days of ‘Paris’ (the July Revolution). In short, whatever Lord John Russell’s intentions might be, the object of his Bill ‘cannot be Restoration, cannot then be Reform, but, in a single word, is and must be Revolution’.

  By invoking from the first the dreaded word ‘revolution’, Sir Robert instinctively conveyed the sheer shock and horror of what had been outlined. This shock, on which everyone agreed whatever their opinions, took many different forms. Part of it was certainly due to the closeness with which the secret had been kept. ‘I hope God will forgive you on account of this Bill,’ said Lord Sidmouth to Lord Grey on the day of Russell’s speech. ‘I don’t think I can.’ Sir John Hobhouse wrote: ‘Never shall I forget the astonishment of my neighbours as he [Russell] developed his plan. Indeed, all the House seemed perfectly astounded.’ An MP called Baring Wall, who sat for Guildford, kept exclaiming: ‘They are mad! They are mad!’ Princess Lieven – surely she was the favoured confidante of Lord Grey? – confessed herself ‘absolutely stupefied’ at the extent of the Bill, and confirmed that ‘the most absolute secrecy’ had been maintained until the last moment.31