Perilous Question Read online

  The Tory Alexander Baring went in for what one observer described as ‘casuistry’ when he tried to maintain that Wellington had actually come to the rescue of a King abandoned by those who should have been his servants. It was not to be denied, Baring said, that the country stood, at present, ‘on the brink of a great crisis’. But it was all due to the Ministers who were refusing to perform their duties. As it was, the Government had resigned over ‘a most dangerous and atrocious principle’: it was being suggested that every time the Government disagreed with the Lords, the King had to create enough peers to enable them to win after all. And he also denounced Ebrington’s use of language.

  This was too much for Althorp. He insisted on clarifying what Ebrington had actually described as ‘public immorality’: his charges had been aimed at those individuals ‘who, having opposed the Reform Bill in its principle and details, were nevertheless ready to accept office, with the view of carrying out the very measure they had strenuously resisted’. Under the circumstances, Althorp thought the language no stronger than was justified. It was left to Macaulay – the future historian – to provide the kindest gloss on Wellington’s behaviour. He could not contemplate, said Macaulay, without the most acute pain ‘the possible degradation of perhaps the most famous name in British history’.

  This could be described as the exchange of high-level calumnies, when one party apparently loses and another gains, were it not for the behaviour of Sir Robert Inglis. It will be remembered that it was the ebullient Sir Robert who had vividly expressed the sheer amazed disgust of a certain kind of Tory when Lord John Russell first produced his Bill in March 1831. Now he issued an ominous preliminary to his speech: he, Sir Robert Inglis, ‘never rose under a more reluctant and painful sense of public duty’. Then Inglis denounced the adoption of Reform by the incoming Government as ‘one of the most fatal violations of public confidence that could be inflicted’. Sometimes one man who is unafraid can turn the mood of an assembly; the other Tories began to express their uneasiness and even disapproval.

  For influence on the immediate future, however, the most significant speech was undoubtedly that which followed Inglis – by Sir Robert Peel, the Tory leader in the Commons. Peel began by describing the whole debate as ‘injudicious’. He put it to the House whether ‘declarations of determined hostility to a hypothetic Administration’ were not somewhat premature. Then he used the fatal words – as many Tories and not a few Whigs instantly perceived – as follows: ‘I feel unable to enter into the Service of the Crown . . .’ Sir Robert added that he bitterly regretted that he was not able to accept office. Greatest of all was his regret that an opportunity was being given for sarcastic attacks on those who did accept office. And Peel was careful to emphasize that everything done by the Duke of Wellington ‘will be dictated by the highest courage and the purest sense of honour’.

  There can be little question that it was the refusal of Sir Robert Peel not only to head but even to join the new Government which proved in the end fatal to the Tory interest. In short, Peel could not make the about-turn which Wellington was apparently able to manage. At the start of Tuesday 15 May Lord Grey still thought that Wellington would ‘persevere’ and form an administration, as he told Lord Holland.8 But in fact the time for Grey’s task had come.

  Wellington himself had already decided, given the past, that he should not actually head the Government. Peel had refused on principle. There was a third candidate, the verbose Charles Manners-Sutton, Speaker of the House. Along with a tendency to talk at inordinate length, he suffered from indecision: it was fatal to his prospects at a time when rapid action was necessary, and in the end he was understood to have declined.

  It was in fact on 15 May that Wellington decided to abandon his attempt to serve his Sovereign – as he saw it – as impractical, since he could have no hope of controlling the Commons. The news was broken to Lord Althorp by the Duke of Richmond, in terms most likely to bring home the message to the passionate countryman who was also a reformer. ‘Well, I have news for you,’ said Richmond as he entered. ‘No shooting this year. Pack up your guns again. I have the intelligence from the Palace, and knew it to be true. The Duke of Wellington has been with the King this morning, and given up his commission altogether.’9

  Peel might have given the Tories at least a sporting chance of success with their chosen measure of Reform, but Peel, still mortified by his treatment over his final adoption of Catholic Emancipation, was not for turning this time. As Princess Lieven had noted in the spring, Peel did not foresee the end of the world if the Bill was passed, unlike Wellington; although he was strongly opposed to it. ‘There you have the difference between forty and seventy,’ she exclaimed, with a certain colourful exaggeration (Peel was actually forty-four to Wellington’s sixty-three).10 It was however certainly true that, coming from a different generation and being of a very different temperament, Peel could not emulate the Iron Duke’s satisfaction in serving the King in peace as he had in war, with no regard to his very public declarations of conscience.

  The Tory Party point of view was put by Lord Ellenborough in his Diary: ‘I confess I do not think Peel’s part creditable,’ he wrote. ‘He is afraid of being again taunted with inconsistency and so he exposes his country to peril.’11 As against that, Peel could be sure that his ‘pure and cold moral character’, somewhat stained in Ultra Tory eyes in 1829, was once again intact.

  The result was that, later on Tuesday 15 May, Lord Grey received a message from the King. Beginning with the phrase ‘In consequence of what passed last night in the House of Commons’, William IV expressed his hope that the Bill could now receive ‘such modifications’ as might appeal to those who held different opinions. This kind of arrangement would relieve the King from ‘the embarrassment’ which had been caused him by the proposal for large-scale creation.12

  Negotiations had now started again. Given the backbench Tory distress at the idea of a Tory administration bowing to Reform, these negotiations were in fact welcome to many Tory MPs. One of them remarked that the King must either recall Grey, ‘or start for Hanover’. From the Whig point of view, however, the situation was not so simple. This was hardly the moment to cave in to this new demand for ‘modification’, whatever that meant. A Cabinet minute of 16 May outlined the only two possible ‘modes’ which were acceptable to them. One was the ‘cessation’ of opposition to the Bill on the part of its adversaries; the other was ‘such a creation of Peers as should give your Majesty’s servants sufficient power to overcome that opposition’.13

  In theory Grey was requesting no more than the King had already granted in his long – and rambling – letter of 15 January. Here William IV had apparently accepted, in a worst-case scenario, what the Cabinet had demanded in its minute: the power of ‘acting at once up to the full exigency of the case’, that is, creation and unlimited creation at that – for what else could the word ‘full’, which the King or Sir Herbert Taylor inserted into the language of the Cabinet minute, actually mean? Two things had happened since that grudging admission, in the middle of a long letter denouncing the Bill as stifling independent voices. First, the country itself had moved from being restive and disturbed on the subject of Reform to being angry and – in certain cases – violent. Second, and from the point of view of the Whigs vitally in the present instance, the attitude of William himself had substantially soured on the subject of Reform.

  The satiric press was crude and even cruel in its attacks on Queen Adelaide and the other ‘royal tabbies’, but they were not necessarily for that reason wrong in the influence they attributed to her. Some of the tabbies were of course male – William’s newly ennobled son, the Earl of Munster, or the High Tory Duke of Cumberland. A conservative figure by upbringing and by preference, Queen Adelaide showed no signs of understanding the niceties of the Constitution by which a consort did not interfere in politics – if only because such niceties were nowhere laid down, whereas the normal day-to-day intercourse of husband and w
ife was an established, socially approved routine. King William himself was not exactly a weak man: despite his late entry into the royal experience, he was determinedly conscientious, with a notion of his royal duty which he took extremely seriously. The Bristol Mercury, in a charitable assessment, called him ‘not ill-natured but not very wise’; and suspected that sea life had taught him the valuable lesson that ‘the poorer orders could feel’. At the same time, here was a man, old and infirm, with a love of domesticity – ‘and he has a young wife!’14

  What William did lack was the brilliance of a public figure who can assess a new situation adeptly and turn it to advantage; he was fundamentally inexperienced, and lack of experience made him easily frightened. Perhaps the monarchy really was under threat, as his family suggested, with all this talk of Reform: revolutionary events in Europe in recent times had made it all too easy to believe, to say nothing of the ominous presence of Charles X in exile in Holyrood. And it was Queen Adelaide the injudicious who, both in her speech and her writings, spread the news of the King’s reluctance. As she told a friend of the Tory Lord Dover on Thursday 16 May: ‘I don’t despair yet.’15

  In view of this developing obstinacy on the part of the King, it was clear to the Whigs, and to many conscientious Tories, that the first alternative outlined in the Cabinet minute was infinitely preferable. If the peers could be induced to drop their practical opposition to the Bill – while not being asked to express hypocritical approval of Reform – the ‘fearful alternative’ of creation could still be avoided. Obviously the attitude of the Duke of Wellington was of enormous importance, both as a moral and an actual political leader of his party. In this context, two speeches ‘of extreme violence’ on Thursday 17 May, from Lyndhurst and the Duke respectively, bade fair to wreck the whole tenuous process towards accommodation all over again, as Grey hastened to report to the King that very evening. ‘He is sorry to inform Your Majesty, that nothing could be more unsatisfactory or embarrassing.’16

  Wellington included his own apologia which, by implication, blamed the Whigs: he remained of the opinion that Reform would be ‘most injurious’ to the country. Be that as it may, ‘I cannot help feeling, that if I had been capable of refusing my assistance to His Majesty – if I had been capable of saying to His Majesty “I cannot assist you in this affair” – I do not think, my Lords, that I could have shown my face in the streets from shame of having done it – for shame of having abandoned my Sovereign under such circumstances.’ That was personal, and it was aimed at Lord Grey.

  Lyndhurst added his own ‘violent invective’. To this Grey responded with angry pride that he was fully justified in bringing in a measure consistent with the principles he had maintained ‘through life ’. The debate ended without any declaration regarding withdrawal of opposition, of the nature that the King had led Lord Grey to expect.

  Lord Grey then told the King that the Cabinet would meet the next day, Friday the 18th, at twelve, after which he would be in touch with the King again. In a private letter to Sir Herbert Taylor, sent at the same time, Grey told the royal secretary that he had not yet recovered from his astonishment at what had happened in the Lords. To Princess Lieven privately he likened their attacks to something by Robespierre or Cromwell.17 It was true that the recalcitrant peers had left the Chamber after speaking, which might be construed as an intention to pass on voting. Again, it might simply mean that they would reappear at a given moment and wreck the Bill. Later that night, Taylor hastened to reply. Purely in his capacity as a private individual, Wellington had assured the King that he would abstain from further discussion of the Bill; quite separately, many other Peers had made the same assertion.18

  So the arguing went on, while the country appeared to be on the edge of incendiarism, if not actually in flames already. The Morning Chronicle declared that the debate in the House of Lords had been an ‘open declaration of war’ against the people of England. Harriet Grote remembered afterwards that in her political set in London, ‘so intensely interesting was the crisis that we scarce did anything but listen for news and run from one house to another’.19 Now rumours, which proved to be true, of Wellington’s withdrawal spread rapidly.

  Francis Place was up early on 18 May, reading The Times and the Morning Chronicle by seven o’clock. A stream of visitors followed, all of whom had come to the same conclusion: resistance to the Duke at any cost, and in every possible way. At half past eight he received a significant message from Sir John Hobhouse asking him to declare his intentions in a letter. At nine o’clock Francis Place duly replied, pointing out that the demand for gold – backed by Place and his allies – had ceased when news percolated of Grey’s potential return. But Place added, while paying a tribute to the cool courage and admirable discipline of the people: ‘We cannot however go on thus beyond today.’ If the Duke came into power now, laws would have to be broken, barricades put up in towns. In short, ‘Let the Duke take office as premier, and we shall have a commotion in the nature of a civil war.’ The Morning Chronicle also chose to invoke the emotive word ‘barricades’ – shades of the French Revolution – which it feared would soon be erected.20

  All along, the established connection of Place to Hobhouse provided an excellent conduit for discreet threats in the direction of the Cabinet, of the sort that could be employed usefully in campaigns which would one day be termed propaganda and, still later, spin. When Francis Place announced via Hobhouse, ‘If the Duke comes into power now, we shall be unable to “hold to the laws”’, he was well aware that this was a most helpful statement from the Whig point of view. The same applied to the various minatory public meetings of the National Political Union.

  Meanwhile, in the central arena of politics, a riposte came from the King to Lord Grey, following his complaint of the previous evening.21 The King stated that various peers had intended to declare their abstention publicly during that debate so full of invective – but it was Grey’s speech, ‘so peremptory and unconciliatory’, which had led them to abandon their intention.

  Finally the King, very possibly on the gentle nudging of Taylor, gave way. There can be no certainty about Taylor’s intervention at such a vital moment, only supposition based on Taylor’s past record for discreet, tactful negotiation with the best interests of the monarchy at heart. Sir Herbert Taylor, the experienced royal servant of many years’ standing, could see that from the King’s point of view, the challenge of the current constitutional situation was best not confronted, but glided over; this diplomatic conduct of withdrawal from outright challenge would mean that the royal powers were far more likely to survive intact.

  In this way, a further letter came from the King on 18 May, following his riposte.22 William IV agreed that if there were continuing obstacles to the Bill, Lord Grey might submit to him ‘a creation of peers’ sufficient to carry the Bill. He did not fail to make his familiar point about the need to preserve the aristocracy, advocating heirs to peerages all over again; but in suggesting that this list must be exhausted first, the King did imply that the Government could also look elsewhere – Grey’s people of substance and property, doubtless. It appeared that the mini-crisis – caused, one is obliged to conclude, by the outraged and outrageous feelings of the Tory peers on the subject of Reform, including Wellington and Lyndhurst – was over.

  It was scarcely surprising that Grey felt himself unable to attend the Queen’s Ball that night. He told Taylor in a private letter, ‘I am quite knocked up with the fatigue of the last ten days’, and was therefore obliged to send an excuse to Her Majesty. Grey added: ‘Pray do what you can to prevent a wrong construction being put on my absence. I really am very unwell.’23

  The next day, 19 May, in a calmer mood, Lord Grey was discussing with Taylor the technicalities of reinstating Ministers whose resignations had been accepted.24 This applied especially to those, like the Duke of Devonshire, who had positions in the Royal Household. But he could not resist commenting all over again on recent events in the House of Lord
s, which portended ‘a very troublesome opposition’, given the degree of passion which had been exhibited. He urged Taylor to do all he personally could to ‘insure absence’ on the part of the leading peers, even if it was impossible to procure positive support for the Government.

  On the same day Lord Grey took part in his own exercise in the art of diplomacy. In a political situation which remained astonishingly delicate – as he had pointed out to Taylor, the intentions of the Opposition could not be guaranteed – Grey was determined to acknowledge his outside allies and, in so doing, confirm them in their vociferous but non-violent stance. So the Prime Minister, as Grey could be described once more, sent for Thomas Attwood. Already the reformers’ hero of the hour was being fêted. Attwood told his wife in jocular fashion that if they stayed in London much longer, ‘we shall have more to fear from the dinners than from the barricades and cannonballs’.25

  Now he met Grey, together with Lord Holland, at the Treasury. Attwood and his companions wore the full regalia of the Birmingham Political Union, although, ever the aristocrat, Grey subsequently confided that he was irritated by the sight of all these badges and ribbons, ‘knowing the misrepresentation that would be made of his reception of them in that character’. At the time, he displayed none of this irritation. Grey was in fact handsome in his acknowledgement of Attwood’s role: ‘we owe our situation entirely to you,’ he said.26

  This was a statement which could be accepted with equanimity by Attwood; at the same time it could not be contradicted by Attwood’s opponents, since it was impossible to be certain how much the unionist thunder clouds, lowering over the country, had contributed to the restoration of the Whig Government. It had, thankfully from the point of view of most honest citizens, never been put to the test. Wellington had not formed his administration. The Bill remained the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill. The Times was able to salute the imagined sentiments of the King with a merry rhyme which it dedicated to that patriotic figure John Bull: