Perilous Question Read online

  The monarch as father enhanced the status of his child (and as grandfather, for William adored his grandchildren, including Munster’s newly ennobled seven-year-old son Viscount FitzClarence); the monarch as a political figure publicly elevated his Prime Minister. As rumours spread into the press of the persistent Tory tittle-tattle at Court, William IV was for the time being still exempted from criticism. On 23 May The Times reported that ‘a certain Earl, connected with the Royal Household’ – the reference was to Queen Adelaide’s favourite, Earl Howe – ‘has received a severe rebuke from the King on account of his continued meddling and incessant chatter about the Reform Bill’.8 It remained to be seen whether the King would maintain this dignified posture of impartiality if it were the Queen herself who took part in the meddling and the chatter.

  Since the General Election was fought under the same rules, the same extent of venality and its shadow, corruption, was to be expected, as was the astonishing cost of the whole business. In his bold attempt to bring about Reform (to soften the effects of Catholic Emancipation), the unabashed Ultra Tory the Marquess of Blandford had made the excellent point that corruption could not be justified by results. ‘The thing retains the same character of corruption, whether it generates the venal statesman or the useful MP, the splendid fly that soars in this House upon the wings of eloquence or the grub that feeds upon the vitals of the country – Corruption is the father of them all.’ Certainly some of the sums spent at this period beggared belief, in terms of cost-effectiveness. The 1830 Liverpool by-election caused by the death of Huskisson found over £100,000 (£10 million today) being dispensed for the benefit of a mere 4,400 voters.* Three pilots who arrived by sea on the last day of the poll were said to have received £150 each for their votes.9

  Leaving aside by-elections, the whole country had been submitted to the expensive electoral process only eight months previously. As Lord Althorp, standing for Northamptonshire, wrote to his father on 13 May 1831 in a matter-of-fact way: ‘the votes are now becoming very expensive, for we must send so far for them’.10 In this context, it was easy to see why pocket boroughs were regarded as property, since so much money had been spent in acquiring them. Earl Grosvenor had received the news of Lord John Russell’s Bill in March with ‘as much good humour’, according to his daughter-in-law Elizabeth, as if he had gained £150,000 (roughly £15 million in today’s money) instead of losing it – which was the sum he told her that he had spent acquiring the pocket boroughs.11

  The future Marquess of Westminster remained very good-natured about his losses, determined to support the Bill ‘for the safety of the country’; but others were not so high-minded, as when the Duke of Newcastle gave vent to that notorious expostulation, ‘May not I do what I like with my own?’ The Reform Bill, it should be noted, had not called for any kind of compensation to be paid to these owners, although this proposal had been made much earlier in suggestions for Reform in the late eighteenth century; this was in contrast to the £2 million compensation finally paid to slave-owners. There was a Welsh attorney named Williams who, having speculated in coal mines, invested the proceeds in buying the two seats at Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire, paying the voters £15 (£1,500) each at election time; the indignation of such a man at being disappropriated is comprehensible.12

  It could be said that the attitude of Whigs to payments belied their reforming views. Grey had not grudged paying out £15,000 (£1.5 million) for his son’s attempt to secure the Northumberland seat – an attempt which actually failed.13 The attitude of the grandees like Lord Lansdowne to nomination was equally relaxed: Macaulay was the most famous beneficiary, induced by his patron to do a little gracious canvassing for the look of the thing.

  Meanwhile another whole group of middle-class reformers was gaining influence: the group headed by Thomas Attwood, whose attitude to violence was summed up by fervent chants such as this:

  See, see, we come! No swords we draw

  We kindle not war’s battle fires,

  By union, justice, reason, law

  We’ll gain the birthright of our sires.14

  Members of the Birmingham Political Union were happily active during the election campaign with such a good cause to promote. Attwood himself made numerous personal appearances, during which he took care to praise not only the Whigs but also the King: indeed the authority of William IV was persistently invoked – that Patriot King who was being celebrated in the theatre in London. In consequence, all the candidates backed by the Union were successfully elected; whereupon the order was given for illuminations, accompanied by the victorious ringing of church bells.

  Unfortunately, even if Attwood and his associates were determined not to draw their swords, there were others who found the sheer pleasure of physical protest irresistible. When the Revd Thomas Moseley of St Martin’s refused to admit the bell-ringers, they climbed in through a belfry window, treating the clergyman roughly thereafter. This was just the kind of behaviour that Attwood deprecated. He met the clergyman’s vociferous complaints with an excuse which was diplomatic even if it lacked chivalry: a few children and ‘loose women’ were responsible, not ‘frenzied unionists’. But the violence was at least as much, if not more, due to the reformers as their opponents. The wind of change was blowing them forward, not always the softest of breezes. Edward Bulwer, future Lord Lytton, for example strongly urged his Tory mother to lie low on purely worldly grounds: ‘I see great reason why for your own sake you should not even quietly and coldly oppose Reform. The public are so unanimous and so violent on the measure, right or wrong, that I do not hesitate to say that persons who oppose the Reform will be marked out in case of any disturbance. It is as well therefore to be safe and neuter, especially when no earthly advantage is to be gained by going against the tide.’15

  And there were random brutal episodes, not specifically connected to the election, which led to the unease of the country as a whole. The punitive incident at Merthyr Tydfil in early June was a case in point. Despite the rise in population there due to the presence of steelworks, Merthyr had not actually been enfranchised. The violence occurred over the reduction of wages by the owner of the Cyfarthfa works. Strikes followed by riots ensued, in course of which soldiers shot over twenty of the demonstrators; a man who wounded a soldier was subsequently hanged. At least Merthyr was now granted a seat although it would be an ironmaster, naturally, not a steelworker who occupied it.16

  Opponents of the Bill were keen to promote any dramatic stories of disturbance which suggested that the people – the rabble – were getting out of control, with the further hideous possibility of a successful popular rising. There was a rumour that groups of servants were declining to be hired for more than six months: after that the Bill would have been passed, and they would never need to work again.17 It was significant that the celebrated Radical William Cobbett, put on trial for encouraging sedition among the rural classes, was acquitted in the summer of 1831 because the jury could not agree among themselves. (Thereafter he resumed his advocacy of the Bill.)

  One young man who was ‘misled’ – as he said later – was William Ewart Gladstone, then twenty-two. During the autumn he had written to his father to the effect that the Whigs could make speeches, but they were not men of business. Now he argued with a certain man of the people along the familiar Wellingtonian lines that Reform meant Revolution, citing the recent events in France and Belgium. His interlocutor looked hard at the young Gladstone and responded fiercely: ‘Damn all foreign countries, what has old England to do with foreign countries?’ It was, Gladstone would reflect, an important lesson from a humble source.18

  In May 1831 the lesson had still to be learnt. There were three nights of debate at the Union in Oxford, where Gladstone was an undergraduate. In a speech of three-quarters of an hour, short by his future standards but long by those of the Union, he argued that the Reform Bill threatened to change the form of British government and ultimately break up the whole frame of society. At the subsequent vote
the undergraduates, influenced perhaps by this eloquence, divided 94:38 against Reform. This was along the lines of Wellington’s reaction at the end of May: ‘I don’t in general take a gloomy view of things,’ he wrote – not entirely accurately – ‘but I confess that, knowing all I do, I cannot see what is to save the Church, or property, or colonies, or union with Ireland, or eventually monarchy if the Reform Bill passes.’19

  The tide in the early summer of 1831 proved to be too strong for the opponents of Reform and certainly Lytton’s advice to his mother was tactically correct. The new Parliament which was summoned for 14 June contained Members overwhelmingly in favour of Reform – in the House of Commons, that is. The hereditary House of Lords was another matter: what the Whigs called ‘the frightful superiority of our enemy’ – the inbuilt Tory majority in the Upper House, compounded by the Tory creations of George III – continued to be a source of anticipatory concern.20 What would happen if this House absolutely refused to pass a Bill which had been endorsed by the Commons? There was one radical solution which Grey discussed with Lord Holland in a letter as early as 2 June. That was the creation of new peers by the Sovereign. That, of course, immediately raised the question of how many peers would be necessary to secure a majority; at this point Grey mentioned a mere half-dozen. This would be followed by the second – vital – question of King William’s reaction to such a request. Would he refuse? Could he refuse and still expect to retain in his service a lawfully elected Government which had made the request?

  Various calculations concerning the new Parliament have suggested that in the Commons there was a potential majority of between 130 and 140, although, as one authority has written, ‘Figures are less precise than under a system of sharply defined parties.’ The calculations of John Wilson Croker came up with 380 in favour and 250 against, with the rest undecided.21

  There were casualties, of course. Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, was one of them. As one of those brought into Grey’s Government to underline its character of coalition. Reform was not a personal preoccupation, although he believed in it. For the time being, he was able to pursue his patriotic agenda abroad without too much interference; in August 1831 he admitted that it might have been different if everybody had not been ‘so entirely engrossed’ in domestic affairs.22 However, his detachment did not prevent him from losing his seat at the University of Cambridge. Although one voter talked of subversion of the Church and State, others acknowledged the need for Reform, but rather differently implemented.

  With characteristic hauteur Palmerston described the upset after twenty years of tenure as ‘a terrible bore’; he complained lightly that ‘all the anti-reformers in England are concentrated in Cambridge; there is no end of them here’. By contemporary standards, it seemed convenient rather than ironic that he was found a seat at Bletchingley in Surrey, a rotten borough for which much money had to be paid – one of the seats on the list to be disenfranchised when and if the Reform Bill was passed.

  On 24 June Lord John Russell introduced the Second Reform Bill in the House of Commons; he was now, like Edward Stanley, in the Cabinet.23 This new Bill was only very lightly modified from the previous one, even though members of the Cabinet like Palmerston and Stanley would have been happy with further concessions. It remained sufficiently intact for it to be regarded still as nothing but the Bill. Counties would not now be divided and single-Member constituencies were not for the time being envisaged. One suggested modification concerning eligibility would have substantially reduced the number of voters in places like Birmingham. The £10 franchise voter was going to be limited to those who paid their rates at six-monthly intervals or longer. A letter of remonstrance from Attwood to Grey secured its deletion – an example of how seriously the Whigs took their middle-class supporters in the provinces.24

  Russell moved, he said, a measure in the name of the Government which, ‘in their opinion, is calculated to maintain unimpaired the prerogatives of the crown, the authority of both Houses of Parliament, and the rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom’. Among the possible obstacles he listed, with a hint of menace, were ‘those most dangerous weapons, unwarranted and slanderous as they were, which imputed to the Sovereign . . . a will different from that of his constitutional advisers’. But he had nothing but praise for the people of England: ‘the sacrifices made and the devotedness shown in the recent election’. Certainly this was an election in which passion had been displayed – but it was ‘a noble passion’, love of country.

  If this was the point of view of the Government, that of the Opposition was expressed by Sir Robert Peel on 6 July.25 He began with some general criticisms, denouncing the frequent use of quotations from this great authority and that, such as Bacon and Burke; whenever he heard these citations, ‘I know that sometimes in the next page, and more frequently in the same, a passage might be found, which, if taken separately, might be relied upon as an authority for opposite doctrines’: one example he gave was that of Clarendon on Cromwell, which could be taken in many different ways. But Peel’s main message was this: ‘I have been uniformly opposed to Reform upon principle, because I was unwilling to open a door which I saw no prospect of being able to close. In short, the advantages of such a measure were not sufficient to counterbalance the evil of altering the constitution of Parliament, and agitating the public mind on the question of Reformation.’ Peel acknowledged that the feeling of the country was currently in favour of Reform, but questioned whether the excitement would not soon die down. As for Russell’s reference to the Sovereign having the same will as his constitutional advisers, Peel showed his own hint of menace when he attacked ‘the lavish use of His Majesty’s name’.

  This was an intense period of debate and late-night argument in the House of Commons, as the Bill went towards the Committee stage. Outside this narrow world, society had its own preoccupations. There was for example the chilling news of the arrival of cholera in the country – cholera morbus or Asiatic cholera – coming from Russia. It had made its first appearance during the previous November; by June 1831 there was general alarm at the idea of an epidemic. Although the capital was as yet untouched, Macaulay told his sister Hannah in July that the great topic in London was cholera, not Reform.26 There, the vast population of British dog-lovers were also busy being concerned over the new edict of the royal Duke of Sussex, appointed King’s Ranger of Hyde Park. In order to avoid disturbance to the deer, and preserve the does and fawns, all dogs found in Hyde Park were to be summarily shot by the keepers. The executions were said to be indiscriminate, from ladies’ lapdogs to huge Newfoundland dogs. As a change from wrangles about Reform, there were protests in the House of Commons, emphasizing the danger from the shootings to the children playing there, to say nothing of the horses; Daniel O’Connell, that lover of liberty in all its forms, joined in the attack on the keepers.

  This was a diversion. The country as a whole basked in magic weather; at one point the Tory Lord Ellenborough, a close friend of the Duke of Wellington, noted in his Diary that it was ‘very hot and quite beautiful’, adding a pointed reference to last year’s French Revolution: ‘It is the anniversary of the first of the glorious days which have produced so much mischief in Europe.’ For the MPs conditions were much less idyllic as they argued on the great issue, seemingly without end, in the stifling heat of their cramped and old-fashioned abode. (In such conditions, predicted Stanley, MPs would start dying off – although in fact he underestimated the toughness of the breed and there were no deaths.)27 Late-night – or rather early-morning – sittings were the norm; irritability grew to a new high as the parties took to drafting in fresh Members after dawn broke, who returned to the attack with zest, to the horror of their sleep-deprived opponents. The Bill passed on 7 July with a majority of 136.

  Attempts to scupper the Bill from going to Committee had included the use of counsel arguing against the disenfranchisement of Appleby in Westmoreland in Schedule A (boroughs which lost all their Members). I
f this objection had been sustained, all the disenfranchised boroughs could have claimed the same privilege and the delay in going to Committee – the object of the exercise – would have been infinite. The argument was that the Reform Bill was a Bill of Pains and Penalties, to which Althorp sturdily replied that no bill could be so called with any show of justice, whose only aim was the public benefit. The Opposition queried any decision which was not based on hearing counsel. Nevertheless the motion was denied by a majority of 97 – at seven-thirty in the morning. It was in the spirit of these endless dawn wranglings that Sir John Brydges, an ancient Tory MP, threw ridicule on the whole drawn-out filibustering process by proposing simply to draw lots whether to adjourn or not. Sir Denis Le Marchant, who lived through it, certainly had a point when he described the process as ‘this dreary warfare’.28

  In all this Lord Althorp, stout figure of integrity that he was, played an important part as Leader of the House, while bemoaning the circumstances which kept him away from his country estate (and his prize bulls). Althorp’s reaction to a performance by the great violinist Paganini at St James’s Palace sums up his discomfort in London society. ‘He certainly made every noise that could be made with a fiddle, and a great many more than I ever heard before,’ but once was enough, wrote Althorp: ‘I never wish to hear him again.’ Regarding politics he told his father: ‘I hate my situation more and more every day, and really go down to the House of Commons as if I was going to execution.’ Yet Althorp confided to a friend that, although it was all he could do not to drive right away when his carriage came to fetch him, once in the mêlée of the House he recovered his spirits.29 In a meeting of 350 Whigs held on 11 July at the Foreign Office, Althorp made his feelings about the relative importance of various procedures clear. He asked the MPs never to leave the House; they were there to support the Government with votes, not speeches.