Perilous Question Read online

  An important fact about the Whigs was that very few survived who had experienced office during that brief spell of government a quarter of a century back. There were of course surprises, and the emergence of one name: the election of a vigorous, brilliant, eccentric, striking-looking lawyer called Henry Brougham. A Whig, he defeated the Tory interest for a Yorkshire seat (previously he had sat for smaller constituencies). He would surely – with all his manifest virtues, all his possible vices – be prominent in the coming session of Parliament. Nevertheless it would seem to the superficial observer in the autumn of 1830 that the Whigs constituted a hereditary party of opposition, the Tories one of government.

  There certainly seemed no particular reason to suppose that this Parliament would not continue like a docile carthorse to plod on under the direction of the Duke of Wellington – although the victory of a very different type of animal might have been construed as an omen: this was a racehorse named Birmingham who won the St Leger at odds of forty to one. This race meeting at Doncaster was a traditional holiday for Yorkshire workers.

  In early October – ‘for good or for bad’, as he put it – Earl Grey and his wife left their beloved northern estate of Howick in Northumberland for Westminster. Throughout the period which lay ahead, Grey’s yearning for his country home, his country life and the exceptionally happy domestic environment which he had been granted despite the amatory adventures of his youth, was to be a feature of his conduct. ‘A small comfortable house, a little land to afford me occupation out of doors, my Mary, and my children are all that are necessary,’ he had written as early as 1801.18 Born in 1764, Grey had married Mary Ponsonby at the age of thirty. Here was a strong character of the new Whig mould: Mary Grey had great charm but was certainly not wildly, romantically rakish as the previous generation, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire and her sister Harriet Countess of Bessborough, had been. Yet in reflecting to the diarist Thomas Creevey on her successful marriage, Lady Grey showed her characteristic tolerance, reflecting that ‘mine is a very lucky case’: had she, ‘in the accident of marriage’, been married to a man for whom she felt no respect, ‘I might have done like them, for all what I know.’ A devoted mother to her large family, Lady Grey was also capable of expressing her own opinions. Although she yawned at the Court of William IV, Lady Grey had also been critical of George IV: he seemed ‘to hate all public men’, she reflected.19

  Grey the contented family man was indeed a sight that moved visitors; perhaps he was unconsciously atoning for that time when, among other adventures, the reckless young aristocrat whose patrician, thoroughbred look was ‘doted upon’ by Lord Byron, had begotten an illegitimate child by Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire.20 In October 1830, for example, there would be a gathering of sons, sons-in-law, daughters, daughters-in-law – and twenty-three grandchildren. This was where he wished to be.

  He particularly enjoyed suggesting reading matter to his children; and Grey the patriarch did not draw the usual distinction of that time, that class, between the education of his sons and his daughters; significantly, the latter were intelligent, well-instructed young women whose gifts he would come to employ in his own political cause. And one should note that his appreciation for female company had not diminished with the years if the satisfaction these days, one supposes, was a purely emotional one. An attractive if reputedly saucy woman such as Lady Lyndhurst could rely on the favour of Grey in society, while his visits and correspondence to the Russian Ambassadress Princess Lieven were an important part of his private life. Indeed, even his ally Lord Holland admitted that Grey was susceptible to the flattery of fair ladies.21

  Nowadays Grey’s noble appearance was generally felt to be an important part of his image. Somehow it was easy to believe that here was a matching nobility of temperament between the outer and the inner man. Certainly contemporaries could never resist alluding to it, whether as a measure of admiration for the superiority of the man, as condemnation for his haughtiness: the critical Greville suggested that his reputation actually owed much to this ‘tall, commanding and dignified’ spectacle which he presented. Thomas Attwood, the important middle-class reformer from Birmingham, revealed afterwards: ‘I looked at his unsullied character’ – as reflected in his appearance – ‘with something approaching reverence.’ Grey was regularly accused of vanity, which may have been a way of alleviating the jealousy of the less noble-looking observer. The Tory Lord Ellenborough, in his Diary, called attention to Grey’s fits of petulance, while admitting that in the main he was ‘grand and statesmanlike’.22

  Where Grey’s looks were concerned, the romantic black curls had long ago receded but they had left a splendid dome of a head on which every painter – and every caricaturist – seized with enthusiasm. But his figure was still slender, that figure which had caused him to be nicknamed ‘Lanky’ at Eton; and the depiction of Grey in his tight-fitting white pantaloons was another feature of the art, formal or informal, of the time. Pessimistic by nature – as early as November 1820 he was wishing for ‘nothing so much as a peaceable retirement for my declining years’ – Grey was nevertheless strongly idealistic where parliamentary Reform was concerned, the dominating passion of his public career. When he declared at the Opening of Parliament in 1830 that ‘through my whole life, I have advocated Reform’, it was fundamentally true even if Wellington had put it rather more crudely that summer: Grey, he told Harriet Arbuthnot, was both arrogant and very obstinate, with ‘all kinds of fantastic notions about Reform in Parliament’.23

  A man of ancient birth and great wealth based largely on land, Grey subscribed strongly to the view that these privileges – as one might call them in modern terms – also carried duties. He had, for example, an idealistic view of the aristocracy as a class which predisposed him in its favour, while the harsh realism of public life had taught him where to pick and choose among their number. On that subject, it is however fair to say that Grey, when in doubt, picked a member of his own family. His nepotism became notorious – although it is also fair to add that Grey was not the only statesman surrounded by his close relations, and in the interlocked relationships of the Whigs, and indeed the Tories, a relation might perfectly reasonably be considered the best man for the job.

  Grey had proposed Reform as early as 1792, when the Society of the Friends of the People was formed, although that had divided the Whigs at the time. In the autumn of 1830, he believed that it was a cause whose time had come. While still at Howick, he had heard that the Duke of Wellington was not unlikely to appear in the new character of a parliamentary reformer in the next session. Grey reflected that this really would make the session, as his friend the high-spirited bon viveur Lord Sefton would say, ‘Good fun!’ For a convinced pessimist, this was an extraordinarily optimistic statement; nevertheless it represented his state of mind as the great Grey caravan bowled down from the north to London.

  The Duke of Wellington, leader of the Tories, was at sixty-one five years younger than Grey. Fifteen years after Waterloo, it would be impossible to exaggerate the nationwide esteem in which he was held. His great eminence – an eminence which he had earned – made Greville believe that he could speak to the Sovereign as an equal. As Alexis de Tocqueville, an intelligent French observer touring Britain, wrote: ‘glory clothes a man in such magic that seeing him in the flesh and hearing him speak I felt as if a shudder ran through my veins.’ And of course physically he was unmistakable – another gift to artists – with what the painter Haydon called his greyhound eyes and his eagle nose.24 But there was another aspect to Wellington’s character, other than the leadership qualities of the great soldier and the realistic statesman (who had carried through Catholic Emancipation against his own convictions). This was a certain detachment from ordinary concerns, a social reliance on ‘none but military dandies and fine ladies’, as the critical Times put it.25 If Wellington’s personal eminence meant that he could talk to the Sovereign as an equal, it also led to that type of isolation which haunts the very grand. />
  Where politics were concerned, it was relevant that Wellington had only been a Member of the House of Commons for a short period, fragmented by military campaigns; and that brief span had ended over twenty years ago with his elevation to the peerage. Perhaps lack of knowledge of the day-to-day grind of Parliament was responsible for the fact that he was a curiously uneasy public speaker. ‘As embarrassed as a child reciting its lesson,’ said the otherwise awestruck de Tocqueville. He was also – fine, upstanding, unmistakable figure as the Iron Duke undoubtedly was – becoming rather deaf. Used to making decisions – and very successful decisions – on the battlefield, Wellington was not naturally inclined towards intellectual debate with persons he considered to have inferior judgement and character.

  The Birmingham-born George Holyoake, looking back on his long ‘Agitator’s life’, noted that Wellington treated his men as he did his muskets: ‘he kept them dry and clean and ready for action’. But since men were a great deal more complex than muskets, Lord Grey had a point when he declared that Wellington did not understand ‘the character of the times’.26 Where dealing with the riotous was concerned, he was a strong, unabashed believer in force and had the self-confidence to express it. In 1830 he observed to Greville with grim pride that his own regiment alone could take on all the population of London, and he told a deputation from Manchester with similar menace that ‘the people of England are very quiet if they are left alone, but if they won’t be quiet, there is a way to make them’.27 When Wellington was told that there might nonetheless be conflict with the people, he reportedly exclaimed: ‘Ah, bah!’ It remained to be seen how this robust philosophy would fare if the people positively declined either to remain quiet or to be silenced with a dismissive word.

  Petitions to Parliament – formal written requests of a specific nature from the public – were an important feature of early-nineteenth-century politics and a weathervane where public preoccupations were concerned. Petitions to change an existing law or introduce a new one had an ancient history and were generally addressed to a particular Member (including a peer) to be drawn to the attention of the House. It was significant that there had been no petitions exclusively on the subject of Reform for the five years from 1824 to 1829 when Catholic rights, the slave trade and the Corn Laws were popular subjects; but in 1830 this subject began to feature again. The number of petitions from the public rose dramatically: there were 645 in 1830.28

  As he set about to address the House of Lords on the subject of the King’s Speech after the Opening of Parliament on 2 November, Wellington certainly did not rate this modest manifestation of popular enthusiasm as worthy of note. Nor for that matter did the turbulent Swing-type protests – traumatic or thrilling, depending on your point of view – appear to have influenced him.

  *

  In Birmingham, on 11 October 1830, a dinner was held to celebrate the recent French Revolution at a place soon to be celebrated for its intimate connection to Reform. This was Beardsworth’s Repository, the chief centre for the sale of horses in the Midlands; John Beardsworth allowed political friends to make use of it free of charge; it was capable of holding, as on this occasion, nearly 4,000 people.29 The food was lavish: 3,500 lbs of beef, veal, ham, legs of pork and mutton, and the whole feast was under the auspices of the Birmingham Political Union, founded with Thomas Attwood as its first President in December 1829. Associated with him was his close friend Joshua Scholefield, an iron manufacturer and banker, ‘a small rotund man with fire and purpose’, who became Deputy Chairman.

  Undoubtedly, the foundation of the Union owed something to the peculiar circumstances of Birmingham, where the prevalence of small industries and workshops led to ‘a freer intercourse between all classes’, as Richard Cobden would later describe it to John Bright; he compared Birmingham favourably in this respect to Manchester, where the great capitalists formed an aristocracy and ‘an impassable gulf’ separated workmen from employers.30

  Attwood was at this point in his late forties, a county banker, with a house at Harborne in the pastoral country just outside Birmingham; a man of great solidity of character who was at the same time an inspiring leader and orator. He held the passionate conviction that the interests of masters and men were in fact one: ‘if the masters flourish, the men are certain to flourish with them’. Attwood’s devotion to his beliefs may be judged by the fact that he had pondered the foundation of the Birmingham Political Union all one night in his library at Harborne and, in the grey light of the early morning, went down on his knees and prayed that the Birmingham Political Union should only prosper if the ‘liberty and happiness of the people were enhanced’.31

  With a broad Brummagem accent, dropping his aitches, he could hardly have presented a greater contrast to the languid patrician tones of Whigs such as Lord John Russell, with his archaic pronunciation – cucumber as cowcumber, for example. Attwood nevertheless spoke in a notably clear voice, and had the ability to sink to a theatrical whisper if the drama of the occasion demanded it. When Attwood sat for Haydon, the painter noted that his whole appearance spoke of vigour, his carriage being upright, his forehead high, white and shining, his very hair seeming to grow upwards, and the blood rushing into his face when he talked on his favourite subject. George Holyoake wrote of the characteristic strength of the Midland mind, despite being provincial, ‘whereas the London mind has brightness’: Attwood was a supreme example of that Midland strength.32

  Attwood was not only vigorous, he was also opinionated, his particular hobby horse being the reform of English finance by enlarging the money supply (county banks had been forbidden to enlarge their note issue in 1826). It was a strange paradox that this man, the epitome of the new, intelligent, vocal middle class (many of them without votes), had begun life as a Tory. It was his hobby horse which had led him to the conviction that parliamentary Reform was necessary to achieve his primary aim. Attwood’s character was, however, to be of vital importance in one aspect of the campaign for Reform. This was his absolute determination not be defined as advocating popular violence, even if the cause was good. That is to say, he was prepared to tolerate defensive action on the part of people if attacked, but not overt aggression. It was a point jovially expressed in a verse sung by the Union which referred to the trade in guns and swords for which Birmingham had been famous; now new weapons were being forged:

  We now make arms against foes at home

  But these are intellectual.33

  On this particular occasion, for example, Attwood made the point that while the French had recently been justified in using force, the English would not be. The motto of the Union was ‘The Constitution, nothing less, nothing more’. It was the measure of Attwood that at the end of an emotional speech he appealed to his hearers in unequivocal terms. He had been accused, he said, of setting in motion ‘a tremendous principle which no human power could control; that I should like a Frankenstein* create a monster of gigantic strength, endowed with life but not with reason, that would hunt me to destruction. Is that so?’ But Attwood derided the concept of peril. ‘Where is the man among you who would not follow me to death in a righteous cause?’ He received the rapturous answer: ‘All, all.’34

  This public-spirited fellow was in fact perfectly capable of wooing the multitude: on one campaign he was reputed to have kissed 8,000 women, which, if true, left the exploits of the shining Whig Duchess Georgiana, kissing a mere butcher, in the shade. By January 1831 the Birmingham Political Union would have 8,000 members. And it was a remarkable indication of the current disarray of the Tory Party that the maverick Lord Blandford, that Ultra Tory who wanted Reform for his own anti-papist purposes, had, shortly after its foundation, been made an honorary member of the Union. ‘A strange bedfellow,’ commented Attwood drily, this Ultra Tory Marquess, whom his fellow Tory John Wilson Croker would jovially hail as ‘Citizen Churchill’.35

  Attwood’s demand for peaceful change was in contrast to events taking place elsewhere in the country. The first thresh
ing machine was destroyed at a village near Canterbury on 28 August 1830. By 14 October The Times was referring to an ‘organisational system of stack-burning’. When William Cobbett visited Battle in East Sussex two days later he was accused of having ‘much excited the feelings of the paupers’. The rector of nearby Hurst Green found his house surrounded by a ring of rioters.36 On 22 October the first trial of the machine-breakers was held at Canterbury. The judge, however, showed the changing measure of the times by imposing unexpectedly light sentences – a caution and a mere three days’ prison; he did so, he said piously, in the hopes that ‘the kindness and moderation evinced this day . . . would be met by a corresponding feeling among the people’. Another straw in the wind was the reaction of William Henry Gambier, tackled at six in the evening by a mob from Maidstone. (Unlike some of the mobs, they did not have blackened faces.) ‘We are starving,’ declared their leader John Adams, a journeyman shoemaker. Gambier, son of the local rector at Langley, replied that ‘the present King was desirous of doing all that could be done and I had no doubt that Parliament had the same disposition, and that they should wait until Parliament met’.37

  Of course the riots were not confined to east Kent and Sussex, but spread as riots do, word of mouth acting as the clarion along with posters intentionally framed to cause alarm. Nor were the great estates immune from such threats. The Goodwood estate of the Duke of Richmond, a Tory politician of liberal turn of mind, experienced the visit of Captain Swing, as did estates spreading into the west. Agricultural machinery acted as a magnet; hence there were riots too in East Anglia. It remained to be seen whether Gambier had been correct in his prophecy about Parliament and, for that matter, about the intentions of the new King.