Perilous Question Page 14

  The answer symbolized the urgency felt by the Whigs about Reform.

  ‘Not at the moment,’ replied Durham. ‘But there will be if you stay to finish your breakfast.’

  According to this story, Albemarle hastened to the Palace in alarm, with the news that the horses’ manes needed time to be appropriately plaited. ‘Then I will go in a Hackney carriage,’ King William replied cheerfully.19

  There was then enacted a scene which was ‘never exceeded in violence and uproar by any bear-garden exhibition’. The House of Lords was crammed, including a multitude of peeresses as spectators. As Lord Wharncliffe was actually on his feet in the House of Lords speaking, with a view to moving to dismiss the idea of dissolution, the sound of cannon was heard. In the Commons it was Sir Robert Peel who was in mid-oration when the thunderous noise interrupted him, together with ‘loud and vehement cries’ (in Hansard’s phrase) of ‘To the Bar! To the Bar!’ – the signal to go to the House of Lords.20 Peel struggled to keep on speaking until the Usher of the Black Rod appeared at the bar of the House and said: ‘I am commanded by His Majesty, to command the immediate attendance of the honourable House in the House of Lords.’

  So the MPs flocked down the narrow passage between the two Houses, where glass from a broken watch led to at least one moment of jocularity. The MP John Campbell, crunching it underfoot between Peel and Russell, said that he hoped that there would be a clause in the Bill for better communication between the two Houses; to which Peel bantered back that there was surely a case for a compensation clause. The Tory MP Sir Henry Hardinge, a gallant soldier who had been Wellington’s political and military ADC and lost his left hand at Quatre Bras, had a grimmer take on the proceedings: he told Sir John Hobhouse that the next time he heard those guns, they would be ‘shotted’, that is loaded, ‘and take off some heads’.21

  The MPs, some shocked, some excited, all surprised, were headed by the Speaker, Charles Manners-Sutton, who was said to be red-faced and quivering with rage at the King’s unexpected and imminent arrival to dissolve Parliament. Lord Lyndhurst, recently the Tory Lord Chancellor, shook his fist at the Duke of Richmond, the Tory who had joined the coalition for Reform. The violent Ultra Tory the Marquess of Londonderry did not so much speak as scream abuse. As Jeffrey put it, it was a scene of ‘bellowing and roaring and gnashing of teeth’.22 Inevitably such extraordinary noise reached the ears of the King when the doors of the Chamber were thrown open. In bewilderment, he asked his Lord Chancellor what the noise was. This gave Brougham his chance. ‘If it please Your Majesty,’ he replied smoothly, ‘it is the Lords debating.’

  William IV himself was resolute in the face of the confusion; perhaps the sound of battle was rather more to his taste than the manipulative chicanery of party politics. There was some doubt as to whether a (so far) uncrowned king could properly wear the crown. William would have none of this. He turned to the courtier beside him and said: ‘Lord Hastings, I wear the crown, where is it?’ The crown was brought and Hastings was about to put it on his master’s head when the King intervened. ‘Nobody shall put the crown on my head but myself,’ he declared, suiting the action to the word. In view of his innate reluctance to have a coronation in the first place on grounds of expense, William then allowed himself the barbed comment to Grey: ‘Now, my Lord, the coronation is over.’ 23

  This display of royal spirit behind the scenes was one thing. From the opposite point of view, the twenty-three-year-old Viscount Villiers, MP, heir to the Tory Earl of Jersey, shuddered at the sight of the King on the throne with his self-imposed crown loosely on his head and Lord Grey’s tall, gaunt figure towering over him: ‘It was as if the King had got his Executioner by his side’; the whole image was ‘strikingly typical of his and our future destinies’.24 In short, forty years of politics had turned the beautiful patrician youth admired by Byron that Grey had once been into a sombre figure of Fate.

  King William’s declaration was all that the Whigs (and the reformers in the country generally) could have wanted. He explained the coming dissolution: ‘I have been induced to resort to this measure for the purpose of ascertaining the sense of my people, in the way in which it can be most constitutionally expressed, on the expediency of making such changes in the representation as circumstances may appear to require’ – in other words, dissolution was intended to bring about a General Election on the subject of Reform. It was no wonder that Grey wrote to Lord Anglesey, following the period of doubt about the royal intentions: ‘The King has behaved like an angel. There is no extent of gratitude that we do not owe him for the confidence and kindness with which we have been treated.’25

  The City was similarly enthusiastic. When the news reached it, a Court of Lieutenancy was sitting at the Guildhall; those present included the Lord Mayor and directors of the Bank of England. Members of the Court of Common Council called for a general meeting at the Royal Exchange ‘to express our sentiments on the occasion of His Majesty having so promptly and patriotically determined to exercise his Royal Prerogative’ by dissolving Parliament. Subsequently the Lord Mayor ordered a general celebration by means of illuminations on 27 April.

  Queen Adelaide’s attitude to it all in her Diary was naturally rather different; it constituted an interesting indication of the way the Tory element at the Court was thinking. ‘The Ministers prevailed on the King to prorogue the Parliament and dissolve it in his own person,’ she wrote, adding, ‘May God will that the step be not dangerous for the welfare of the Country.’ As for her own reaction: ‘I was very much moved and upset.’26 At least she kept up her poise when questioned anxiously by William’s twelve-year-old nephew, Prince George of Cambridge, who had gleaned that something exceptional had happened. ‘What has the King done?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Has he not done something odd?’ Queen Adelaide responded with dignity: ‘The King can do odd things.’

  The whole episode aroused the most passionate feelings in which families were divided and friends abused each other; there was ‘heat, fury, discussion and battling’, in Haydon’s phrase. The Hon. Robert Smith, heir to the first Lord Carrington, a wealthy banker, had been Member for Buckinghamshire for the last ten years; he had presented petitions for the Bill from his constituents (as well as anti-slavery petitions) and voted against Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment on 23 April. Lord Carrington was described by Maria Edgeworth as ‘most amiable and benevolent’ and he was certainly extremely philanthropic. On this occasion, his amiability was apparently stretched too far. He wrote to his son: ‘My dear Bob . . . It would be as well for you not to come to this house for sometime as I would be tempted to use language which you would never forget, and [for] which I myself might never forgive myself.’27

  The disgust of Lord Carrington was at least expressed in a letter. Among the Tories, General Gascoyne himself, whose amendment had wreaked this havoc, was hooted, hissed and pelted in his own constituency of Liverpool. An eyewitness recorded: ‘When I saw him his face, his hair and his clothes were covered with filth and spittle . . . not from a mob of the lowest sort, but from men his own equals.’ Gascoyne would in fact be defeated in the coming election.28

  Certainly the incident added to the enormous popularity of William IV. The very different stages in his feelings were hidden from his grateful subjects as they hallooed their joy. Much was made of the happy coincidence of the King’s nickname – ‘Vote for the Two Bills’ was a favoured cry. John Doyle produced an amusing drawing of the King, unmistakable with his stout figure and turnip-like face, gazing at a wall on which were the words: ‘The Bill and nothing but the Bill.’ William asked: ‘Is that me?’ At the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the actor-manager William Charles Macready scored great success with Alfred the Great or the Patriot King by James Sheridan Knowles. The play was announced within days of the dissolution and ‘God Save the King’ was incorporated into the text. Lines appropriate to recent events included the following:

  Thus to a people faithful to their King

  A faithful King an
institution gives

  That makes the lowly cottage lofty as

  The regal dome . . .29

  Unfortunately William’s admirers celebrated not only with further illuminations ‘sagaciously’ ordered by the Lord Mayor – the phrase was Elizabeth Grosvenor’s as she and her husband wandered down Regent Street ‘dressed in plain clothes’ – but by breaking windows. This left Princess Lieven to record picturesquely that the Tories who refused to illuminate in honour of the dissolution were obliged to sleep ‘in fresh air’.30 The Lord Mayor’s order found the crowds in no mood to tolerate dissent, which was freely interpreted as meaning any unlit window in a great house. For all that, Elizabeth and her husband, home at midnight, found it ‘a very pleasant and entertaining walk’ in their plain clothes, others were not so lucky. The Duke of Wellington at Apsley House was one of the victims. The Duke was not there; his house was in darkness and there was certainly no sign of the candles with which other grandees had lit up their windows (either with joy or in a bid to preserve them). As the mob swept up Piccadilly, Apsley House seemed to present an inviting target.

  There was in fact a far more solemn reason for the darkness which mantled the great house than mere political disappointment. Kitty, Duchess of Wellington, the neglected wife, had died on 24 April and her body lay there in its coffin while the Duke made preparations for her funeral in the country. The Duke reported afterwards that his servant John had saved the house, or the lives of the mob – ‘possibly both’ – by firing gunpowder over their heads: ‘They certainly intended to destroy the House,’ he wrote, ‘and did not care one Pin for the poor Duchess being dead in the house.’31

  On the subject of Reform itself the Duke felt an equivalent gloom. He followed the current trend for looking for a disastrous precedent in the events leading up to the English Civil War: ‘I don’t believe that the King of England has taken a step so fatal to his monarchy,’ he wrote of the dissolution, ‘since the day that Charles I passed the Act to deprive himself of the power of proroguing or dissolving the long Parliament.’32

  The representative of the banking house of Rothschild in London, Nathan Rothschild, also found his windows suffering from association: he was known to be a friend of the Duke. But it was his brother James in Paris who was almost as gloomy as the Duke, due to his recent experiences there of revolution in which stocks had fallen sharply. He compared events in the two countries. To start with, in France no one viewed the matter as giving cause for concern, ‘but then we fell some 30 per cent and I hope To God this will not be repeated this time in England . . . Let us get down to the nitty gritty, I am not pleased with the situation in England.’ It was high time for England to put a stop to the progress of ‘the infamous liberal spirit’.33

  Meanwhile that country itself, watched by the wary financiers, settled down to the joys – or dangers – of a General Election. It was less than six months since the Whigs had come to power but already the whole political climate had changed. Public opinion on the subject of Reform – ‘the expectations of the people’ – had just been quoted by that ‘angel’, the monarch himself, in justifying his dissolution of Parliament.

  * Since the text purported to be written about a revolution 'now above a century ago', in theory this imaginary historian could have been looking back from 1945, a time when the actual coming of the Labour Government produced similar predictions of disaster.

  * An important surviving witness to all this was Grey’s son, then Lord Howick, who subsequently edited his father’s correspondence with William IV: he reported the dismay when Wharncliffe’s cunning plan of attack was discovered.16

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AWAY WENT GILPIN

  ‘Away went Gilpin, neck or naught;

  Away went hat and wig.

  He little dreamed, when he set out

  Of running such a rig’ –

  William Cowper, The Diverting History of John Gilpin, 1782

  ‘The cause of Reform looks cheerily!’ declared The Times on 29 April 1831, six days after the King had dissolved Parliament. ‘Indeed it is triumphing. What Dryden called “The Royal Plant”, the true British oak . . . is now seen to yield the fruit along with the blossom – fruition along with hope.’ All the same, the Thunderer felt that there was a warning to be given: ‘Let no man listen to any terms of compromise . . . A half Reform is no Reform.’ In terms of the election, let the country be ‘precise, rigid and memorable’. What was needed was a majority of 100.1

  This note of caution following the initial triumphalism was understandable. Paradoxically, the General Election of the early summer of 1831, although fought on the issue of Reform, took place under exactly the same rules as that of July 1830, against which the angry protests had been mounted countrywide. At this time, there was no universal polling day: the returning officer for each constituency (or group of constituencies) worked out the timetable; if the election was contested, polling (which was of course held in public) might take place over several days. Thus the first voting took place on 28 April, only five days after William IV’s dramatic dissolution, and the last on 1 June.

  The total number of seats to be filled was as before 658, of which nearly 500 were in England, 24 in Wales, 45 in Scotland and 100 in Ireland. These were to be found in borough or burgh constituencies, which accounted for the vast majority, and included freeholds of various types, so-called potwallopers (those residents who ‘boiled a pot’ in the district), soc-and-lot payers (those who paid the poor rates, the equivalent of the medieval ‘pay lot and bear lot’), and so forth, esoteric descriptions indicating the ancient roots of the whole business. Then there were county constituencies and universities – four seats in total for Oxford and Cambridge.2

  During the five weeks which followed, there were two strong trends in the country as a whole. On the one hand there was a surge of resolution that Reform should take place; on the other, there were those who felt the Whig Government was galloping to destruction in a manner and with a swiftness which had not been anticipated. John Doyle, vivid as ever, captured this contrast with spirit when he adopted William Cowper’s rhyme concerning John Gilpin, that ‘citizen of credit and renown’ whose horse bolts with him and takes him on a hectic and unexpected journey. Just as the word ‘Bill’ for William lent itself to double meanings, so the adjective ‘Grey’ could be similarly employed for a runaway horse (as well as for a tailor’s fustian).

  In Doyle’s image dated 13 May 1831, an unhappy-looking William IV is seen on the back of a galloping steed, whizzing past a shocked-looking John Bull. The unmistakable figure of the Prime Minister salutes him with his hat, but one spectator cries: ‘I think the Grey is evidently running away with him.’ Ladies of the Court in huge hats are watching and wailing on the balcony, headed by Queen Adelaide, who calls out: ‘Good Mr Gatekeeper Stopham . . . he doesn’t know where he’s going.’

  In real life two incidents in royal circles seemed to indicate the way the wind was blowing with regard to Reform – except that they pointed in opposite directions. On 4 June William IV’s eldest son by the actress Mrs Jordan, George FitzClarence, was given the peerage he had long coveted as due to his semi-royal status; in the process of securing it, he had even made hysterical threats of suicide. The Earl of Munster, as he now became, was a professionally disgruntled character; much later Lord Melbourne suggested that it was perhaps that ‘unfortunate condition of illegitimacy’ which distorted the mind and feelings of men like Munster, rendering them incapable of ‘justice or contentment’.3 On this occasion Munster felt deprived of the dukedom which the bastards of Charles II had received; but he now concentrated his efforts on securing the right to place the crown on his father’s head at the coronation in September.4

  There were more histrionics from the aggrieved son: ‘Who is more fit than your own flesh and blood?’ he pleaded. Munster entertained hopes that the Garter would follow as an appropriate acknowledgement of his new position. The King, feeling he had already rewarded his son adequate
ly, reacted with anger.5 But this did not stop him promoting the man who was indeed his eldest son to the position of Governor of Windsor and Constable of the Round Tower, making him in addition a member of the Privy Council. Munster also remained very much within the tight, affectionate circle in which King William – and the ever indulgent Queen Adelaide – liked to dwell. And Munster was a known, vociferous anti-reformer. Fears of the influence of the Tory Court were not allayed by Munster’s elevation.

  At the same season, the person who actually received the Garter was the Prime Minister, Lord Grey. This was a particularly marked honour, given that the ranks of the Knights of the Garter, designed to be limited to twenty-five, were in theory full.6 There were even those who suggested that the King had no right to swell the ranks of the chivalric order in this manner. The Duke of Wellington (who had personally been nominated a Knight of the Garter nearly twenty years previously) described it to the Duke of Rutland as ‘a gross impropriety . . . not justified by services or by precedent’. It hadn’t even the ‘merit’, he complained, of being a grant from a Sovereign to a favourite; or, as Princess Lieven wryly commented, ‘the Blue Riband [for Grey] is not at all to the taste of our hero’. It is fair to say that the ‘hero’s’ temper at this time was not of the best; he had difficulty controlling it, reported Mrs Arbuthnot, and it was all the fault of this ‘nonsensical Bill . . . so preposterous, so unjust’.7 There were Tory rumbles that Grey was being given a pay-off for agreeing to the ennoblement of Munster; the royal Dukes of Cumberland and Gloucester pointedly stayed away from the ceremony of installation.

  It was true that in recent years monarchs had laid down rules designed to limit the numbers of ordinary knights; while ordaining that royal (male) descendants should be received into the order by virtue of their blood. Yet pace the Duke of Wellington, Grey’s elevation as an Extra Knight was not without precedent. In 1814 the Earl of Liverpool and Viscount Castlereagh were appointed for ‘political expedience’, bringing the number up to twenty-seven, even though the Prince Regent (the future George IV) agreed that numbers should thereafter be allowed to sink back. In a similar fashion William IV, while appointing Grey, once again reaffirmed the general principle of twenty-five: in short, this was a striking demonstration of his favour to his Prime Minister – at a time of political ferment. From the Whig point of view, the King did indeed show himself ‘a prime fellow’, in the words of Grey.