Perilous Question Read online

  The debate which now took place, with protests about the large sums involved in further works and the methods used to raise the money, was therefore an additional irritant to the King where his faithful Commons were concerned. Lord Duncannon for the Government, a good man but a bad speaker because of his stammer, tried to hold the fort against the denunciation of John Cresset Pelham, the eccentric MP for Shropshire, and the attack of Henry Hunt. Joseph Hume’s intervention was especially waspish: he would like to know on what authority the pledge concerning expenditure was given. They had had a pledge from the Chancellor of the Exchequer on a former occasion ‘which turned out to be worth nothing’.17 All laboured the question – the familiar question where public works are concerned – was this really enough or were there further demands to come?

  The main work of the Commons, the wrangling over the Reform Bill, was scarcely more to the King’s liking, as he received his reports from his Prime Minister, daily when necessary. In William IV’s comments, as relayed by Sir Herbert Taylor, the tone of despondency, that considerable anxiety noted by Grey, grows markedly with the passing of the weeks. Even the tactful Taylor admitted to Grey that the King was often low, not bothering to conceal it; after all ‘in his own family (I mean among his children) there is much difference of opinion’. Others did not scruple to report the King’s low spirits; they then went further, suggesting that some expression of his had ‘betrayed his apprehension’ about the political future. But Taylor himself was sure that his master had in fact never shown any want of confidence in his Ministers. It is true that William IV by his own account stood firm when Lord Londonderry paid a visit to Brighton on 27 January. The King told Taylor that the notorious Ultra Tory was very quiet at first, but grew warm and eager by degrees, ‘and finally wound himself into a state of great excitement on the question of Reform, and addition to the Peerage’. William IV listened but said nothing.18 The trouble was that in the present situation, silence was more likely to be construed as assent than dissent by a man of such passionate feelings as Londonderry.

  The state of the country was, from a very different angle, quite as warm and eager as Lord Londonderry and there was no evidence to support the occasional statements of Tory optimists that interest in Reform was dying down. William IV attributed this to the newspapers; he could not lose sight, he wrote, of the growing influence of the press, nor of the extraordinary power which it unfortunately possessed of exciting popular feeling and producing prejudice and misconstruction.

  Of course the press performed a useful – or dangerous, depending on the point of view – function of facilitating communications around the country, and spreading the news of demonstrations after they had happened. On the other hand, to suggest that it was the press which was actually responsible for the countrywide cries for Reform was to mistake effect for cause – as Stanley had memorably castigated John Wilson Croker for doing in terms of English Civil War history. According to the Tory St James’s Chronicle, the Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, had voted unanimously to eject the pro-Reform Times from their Combination (Common) Room, disgusted by its ‘violent and unprincipled language and doctrines’; it was the last straw when The Times ascribed the recent riots in Derby, Nottingham and Bristol to the Tories. The Morning Herald was substituted.19 But the Fellows were in the position of Dame Partington and her fabled mop, attempting to sweep away the Atlantic. Reform at this point could be watered down and it could be defeated. But it could not be swept away.

  Memories of the recent riots remained vivid, if only because a special commission was set up by the Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, to hand out exemplary punishments. The consequent executions and transportations overseas caused unease in Whig quarters – not with Melbourne himself however, nor with Grey. Yet in general there was an acceptance of the status quo where punishment was concerned; Reform was not considered to apply to judicial penalties. Sir John Hobhouse for example reflected on the fate of the Bristol rioters: ‘if our criminal code awards death as a punishment for any crime, I could not see how these men could be saved’. Many of the people involved in unions thought differently. On Sunday 19 January there was a big meeting in protest in St George’s Square in Manchester, which caused local fright; it also shocked respectable citizens because of the use of the Sabbath, despite the obvious fact that this was the only free day for most working people. Amid stories that the unions had been seen drilling by moonlight, magistrates ordered the meeting to be adjourned for ten days; it was subsequently broken up by soldiers and some of the organizers put in prison.20

  On 2 February the National Political Union met under the presidency of Sir Francis Burdett, that outspoken veteran of protest. But the ensuing meeting did not run smoothly. Burdett and Hume both objected to the idea of a petition which would urge the Ministers to press on with Reform, in view of the tumultuous state of the country. On the contrary, the pair of them felt that the Government was actually doing all it could. So the meeting ended in uproar. Curiously enough, as the see-saw of stability on one end and riot on the other swung up and down, one of the strongest advantages of the pro-Reformers was the adamantine stance of the Duke of Wellington on the subject. Here was no Londonderry, an eccentric considered by some of the charitable to be half mad (even if Queen Adelaide did not agree). This was on the contrary the hero of the nation, as the Queen had noted sadly in her Diary when he departed from office in November 1830, a former Prime Minister as well as war leader; whatever faults Wellington had, no one doubted seriously that he had the best interests of the country at heart.

  But Wellington did not even indulge in the kind of weasel words of his Tory leader in the Commons, Sir Robert Peel. Where Peel might concede the need for some Reform some day, while rigorously denouncing this one, Wellington was obdurate. He had nothing but contempt for the King’s honest attempts at constitutional government. On 2 January he wrote that ‘the great mischief of all is the weakness of our poor King, who cannot or will not see his danger, or the road out of it when it is pointed out to him’. Ten days later he was prophesying the destruction of the monarchy: ‘we are governed by the mob,’ wrote Wellington to Lord Strangford, ‘and its organ – a licentious Press.’ Wellington was convinced that if the Bill was carried, ‘there was an end to the constitution and government of this country’.21

  The hero of Waterloo was not about to give up. He told Lord Howe that he went down to the House of Lords every day, in order to prove to the world ‘that I am not dead or dying’. He informed Lord Harrowby, the prominent Waverer seeking to tone down the Bill, that he disdained all compromise. And his mournful predictions of the destruction of the Constitution continued to rain down on his correspondents. Just as Wellington’s original speech in the House of Lords had led to the fall of the Tory Government, so his hardline utterances – his ‘high tone and impracticable spirit’, in Lord Holland’s words – continued to provide convenient ammunition for his opponents.22

  The Committee stage of the Bill might have provided another episode of ‘dreary warfare’, in the phrase Sir Denis Le Marchant had used for the events of the late summer of 1831. But in fact the stakes were much higher now. Most sensible Members of either House realized that matters would soon come to a final crunch with a vote in the Lords; defeat would surely mean the resignation of the present Government – and what would that mean to the state of the country as a whole, since the popular will was so evidently in favour of Reform? The first twelve clauses were carried in three nights. On 26 January there was a bizarre scene in the Commons by any standards when Spencer Perceval, son of the assassinated Prime Minister of the same name, took the floor. Perceval had once been ‘a sweet young boy’ spotted at Harrow by William Wilberforce; then the protected orphan, made financially secure by award of Parliament; now he was a frenzied advocate of the particular evangelical religious sect associated with Edward Irving and Henry Drummond, sometimes known as Irvingite.23

  Perceval, who had regarded the Reform Bill in March 1831 as
the greatest act of folly committed by any Minister, had a particular preoccupation. This was the current epidemic of cholera and its causes. Increasingly dreaded since it arrived in England, the disease had now reached London and, as John Wilson Croker wrote: it was ‘in full speed along the banks of the river’ with alarming consequences such as the stagnation of trade. John Campbell remarked on the decline in the sale of fruit and vegetables so that thousands of little shopkeepers were ruined, together with the boycotting of hackney coaches where infection might be spread by strangers. (Great hostesses like Lady Holland refused to eat ices; only the stubbornly Tory Mrs Arbuthnot continued to think the Reform Bill the greater evil.) But of course not just London but all the new densely peopled industrial cities suffered fearfully from ‘this messenger of death’, as James Phillips Kay put it: ‘the abodes of poverty . . . the close alleys, the crowded courts, the overpopulated habitations of wretches, where pauperism and disease congregate round the source of social discontent and political disorder in the centre of our large towns’.24

  For Perceval the remedy was quite clear, and it was not so much medical as spiritual: a day of national fasting and humiliation. This must take place as a result of a motion of the House of Commons. He began by using a traditional phrase (which had not been heard for the last eighteen years): ‘I perceive that strangers are in the House.’ According to practice, observers, including reporters, were duly cleared out. He had done this, Perceval explained at once, to remove the temptation to blasphemy from his opponents. In the absence of reporters, Hansard was compelled to rely on the memories of those present for the speech which followed. That version was certainly long and astonishing enough, leaving the experience of the full text to the imagination.

  For one thing, Perceval spoke holding a copy of the Holy Bible in his hand which he frequently flourished. He intended to speak freely, he said, in the presence of baptized men. (There had been recent efforts to admit unbaptized Jews to Parliament.) Then he proceeded to address the Members ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world, who was exalted King of kings, and Lord of lords . . . in the name of God, the Highest, he appealed to the House’. Since it was given that anyone who despised the messenger was despising Him who had sent him, he that rejected him (Perceval) rejected his God.

  Perceval’s main message from God was a fearful one: the nation trembled on the verge of destruction. In every district there were disorders, respect within the ranks of society no longer existed, and there was also ‘the frightful collision of the two Houses of Parliament’. Furthermore the houses of the nobility and gentry were entered and pillaged and one of the great cities of the nation (Bristol) had been plundered and devastated by the mob. What was to be done? He would read from the Holy Book, declared Perceval, about God’s mercy and his judgements. And so he proceeded to do, long, long passages about Israel, its transgressions, its atonements, Ninevah, further transgressions, further atonements, summed up in Hansard by the cool phrase: ‘The hon. Member read a number of extracts from the Bible to the same effect.’

  By concentrating on the various biblical pestilences sent by God, Perceval pointed out the way ahead for the present nation. Just as it had been in the time of the Old Testament, when ‘the curse of God was on the land, and it had overtaken the people’, so now the pestilence was once again countrywide. Members ought to hasten to address the throne to proclaim a fast and day of humiliation in the land, ‘that we might avert this dreadful wrath’. This was the truth: they had departed from God, and God had departed from them. When it came to detail, and it did, Perceval gave the destruction of Bristol as a sample of God’s wrath. And he spent some time denouncing ‘the liberal mind that is marching through Europe’, adding that it was blasphemy to attribute power to the people, since all power came from God. Perceval finally drew to a close asking the Members to ‘Beware of the wrath that went forth on the plain against Sodom and Gomorrah’.

  It was left to Lord Althorp, at his best in defusing a situation like this, to declare calmly that discussion on such a topic was ‘highly inexpedient’. It was in any case the intention of the Government to appoint a day of fasting. And that was that. Except that ‘Orator’ Hunt seized the opportunity to quote from the Bible himself. Had Perceval forgotten Isaiah? He proceeded to jog his memory with the words from Isaiah 58:6. ‘Is not this the fast that I have chosen . . . Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out, to thy house?’ What Perceval wanted, he said, was not a proper biblical fast; a real fast was one that would feed the hungry and clothe the naked.

  It was left to Perceval to withdraw his motion, lest his opponents would be encouraged to further blasphemies, while observing that ‘a fast of hypocrisy’ (such as he maintained the Government would instigate to ‘get rid of the question’) was in no way acceptable to God. Acceptable or not, on 6 February the Government duly announced a day of fasting and humiliation to be held on 21 March.

  Perceval was not alone in his manic invocations, if his expression of them was extreme. His views were merely one outstanding example of passionately held convictions against ‘liberalism’ and the power of the people, just as there were equally passionately held convictions on the Radical and reforming side. It would be a mistake therefore to suppose that all the idealism was on the side of Reform, as the dealings of the Committee in the House of Commons continued, and Lord Grey pursued his elaborate negotiations with the King about the ‘fearful alternative’ of creation.

  The Tories were animated by patriotism even as the Whigs were (and of course both sides were also inspired by that healthy spirit of self-interest which may be regarded as part of politics, if by no means the only part). The Tories, however, paid fervent attention to the evil consequences of Revolution on the one hand, the merits of stability on the other. For those of a conservative turn of mind, these evil consequences had been fully demonstrated by the developing events of the French Revolution, as a result of which so many innocent people suffered. As for the merits of stability, these were obvious to numerous well-intentioned people who, with some justification, believed that society at every level was the better for it. This was not a philosophy to be treated with intellectual contempt even if supporters like Perceval, with his crazy denunciations of the liberal mind, made it easy to do so. William IV’s apocalyptic passage in his letter to Lord Grey in January with its reference to ‘a revolutionary and demoralizing spirit . . . making frightful strides’ did in fact express the legitimate terrors of many decent people, including politicians.

  * As a result of which the present barracks in Birdcage Walk were built.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BOUNCING BILL

  ‘What though now opposed I be?

  Twenty peers shall carry me

  If twenty won’t, thirty will

  For I’m His Majesty’s bouncing Bill’ –

  Macaulay’s parody of a nursery rhyme, March 1832

  On 18 February 1832 a banquet at the Mansion House gave Lord Grey an important opportunity to declare his unalterable commitment to the cause of Reform.1 He thus publicly contradicted rumours that he was weakening on the subject of the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill: in short, that he would make concessions rather than face up to creation. At present there had been remarkably few modifications agreed in Committee, mostly matters of detail. The vital clause enfranchising the metropolitan boroughs, although much debated, actually passed with a majority of 80. But the strain of these weeks was beginning to tell on all the Whigs in Government.

  Despite his staunch public espousal of Reform, Grey certainly felt an ‘extreme repugnance’ for creation, and was consequently in a permanent state of anxiety; although his actual parliamentary ordeal – in the House of Lords – lay ahead. Then there was the question of the King holding fast. At the moment, as Creevey cheerfully put it in his Diary, ‘King Billy hates peer-making, but as a point of honour to his ministers, he gives them unlimited power.’2 Meanwhile Wi
lliam IV’s health began to give cause for concern – never a good sign with any member of the House of Hanover. Worse, much worse, were the reliable signals of Queen Adelaide’s ever-strengthening disapproval. Her freezing attitude to Lord Grey in the autumn, after the fiasco of Lord Howe’s so-called resignation, was indicative of her general approach to matters of Court and politics. Her Diary contained frequent pious invocations to Providence in view of the difficulties of her high position; but in fact by upbringing and experience Queen Adelaide, Princess of a minor German duchy, was ill equipped to deal with a highly complex period when the lightest of royal female touches – or possibly restraint altogether – was what was needed. With revolutions all round Europe, with royalties ousted from thrones and even countries, surrounded by Tories prophesying woe, it was scarcely surprising that poor Queen Adelaide feared for her husband’s crown. And yet to her it seemed that the Whigs were doing nothing to shore up the situation. On the contrary, they were siding with the forces of revolution . . .

  The trouble was that these fears quickly made their way into the avid press. One of their contacts was Brougham; he did not help with his hostile references to the royal ladies as ‘the Begums’. The mudslinging of the press duly incensed the Queen – and inevitably as time went on, her loyal husband the King – still further against the forces of Reform. It was, literally, a vicious circle. By January 1832, cartoons of the Queen as patroness of the Opposition were beginning to appear. On 1 March one called Un Tableau Vivant adapted a picture by the distinguished Scottish RA Sir David Wilkie, Calabrian Minstrels playing to the Madonna. It showed well-known members of the Opposition, including the Duke of Wellington in the guise of an old peasant, gathered round their own Madonna, the Queen. Robert Seymour was the principal artist of the satirical magazine Figaro in London; on 1 February he delivered his cast of the people engaged to bring out the so-called New Opera of Reform. They included Signor Giovanni Bulli, a bull with papers Schedule A and B stuck on his horns and M. de Guelpho as the lessee of the theatre; but also Madam Queeno in the lead.3