Perilous Question Read online

  It was therefore in an atmosphere of menace but also anticipation that William IV set forth in his state coach, accompanied by all the panoply of a royal procession, from St James’s Palace to Westminster on 2 November.

  * No women had the vote; hence the contemporary phrase ‘Universal Suffrage’, for which some were beginning to clamour, actually meant ‘Universal Male Suffrage’. Here the phrase ‘Universal Suffrage’ will be generally used in this early-nineteenth-century sense.

  * He referred to the best-selling novel of Mary Shelley published twelve years earlier.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I WILL PRONOUNCE THE WORD

  ‘If danger is all around us . . . the way to go is by securing the affections of your fellow subjects, and by redeeming their grievances and my Lords, I will pronounce the word: by reforming Parliament.’ –

  Earl Grey, House of Lords, 2 November 1830

  The Parliament to which King William IV travelled was, like the electoral system which provided half of its occupants, astonishingly old-fashioned and not intended by its architects for its present purpose. The House of Commons had in fact begun life as the medieval St Stephen’s Chapel and was certainly much better arranged for a chapel than a parliamentary Chamber. First, its size was inadequate: under sixty feet long, approximately thirty-three feet wide, only 400 out of the 658 MPs could be accommodated at any one time. Of course the addition of the Irish MPs at the Act of Union had only added to the problems. It was famously dark and, one might add, infamously ventilated.

  A gallery reporter (later a newspaper editor and historian), James Grant, who published his recollections of Parliament in 1836, wrote: ‘I shall not soon forget the disappointment which I experienced on the first sight of the interior of the House of Commons.’ He had been told already that the place ill accorded with the dignity of what had been termed ‘the first assembly of gentlemen in the world’. All the same he was not prepared for what he called a second edition of the Black Hole of Calcutta (the notoriously tiny dungeon where British prisoners had been held seventy-odd years earlier).1

  Desperately hot in summer, the Chamber was airless in winter. Not surprisingly, the unhealthy atmosphere led to coughing, spluttering and other developments likely to interrupt the speakers on the floor. The historical novelist Lord Lytton, who began life as an MP known as Edward Bulwer, let his pen loose on the subject: ‘wheezing and sneezing, and puffing and grunting, till at last the ripening symphony swells into one mighty diapason of simultaneous groans! . . . Sounds so mournful, so agonising, so inhuman and so ghastly were never heard before!’ There was only a momentary silence when the solemn voice of the Speaker called for ‘Order’; immediately the hideous chorus of noise resumed.2

  Apart from the Lords and Commons, who had a right to be there, if no right to comfort, there was public access – as indeed there always had been to the Palace of Westminster. It might be compared to a modern shopping mall, a place where Pepys, for example, went to buy favours for his lady friends and which also contained an excellent wine shop. As for the Chamber, a hearty financial trade was run by which the principal doorkeeper was able to retire with a fortune after thirty years, through charging half a crown a visit. And with public access came the occasional surly encounter when Ministers found themselves insulted on what they might have legitimately regarded as their own ground. Sometimes this public intrusion was unintentional: so muddling was the layout that people could genuinely stray, as with a Scottish Highlander, in full tartan rig, who advanced on the front benches ‘as if to rest himself on the brow of the heath-clad mountains of Caledonia’. He was only surprised that others were so crowded in the South Gallery, when he himself had plenty of room. Tipped off in the end by a friendly MP, ‘Donald’ was said to have run away at full tilt without looking back.3

  As for the ladies – many of whom, as important hostesses, a role in its own right, were keenly interested in politics – they were not officially admitted to the floor. Grant does tell of an incident when a member of ‘The Sex’, as females were then generally designated, got into a side gallery. The Speaker was said to be delighted at ‘a politician in petticoats’ and referred with similar gallantry to ‘the fair intruder’. This was an unexpected vision. There was, however, a curious arrangement, tacitly accepted, by which ‘The Sex’ could peer down the hole around the lantern which lit the House, otherwise known as the Ventilator; this meant adopting a particularly uncomfortable position and also enduring clouds of candle smoke; furthermore, the watchers could never see the Speaker’s face, only hear his booming roar of ‘Order’. In Grant’s opinion, the only women who stuck it out did so for the sake of husbands, brothers – or lovers; although at least one lady, Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, from a great Whig family and married into the magnificently plutocratic Grosvenors, who later wrote travel books, made it clear that she did so out of a social conscience, despite ‘acute discomfort’ (she was particularly interested in the contrast of wealth and poverty in Ireland).4

  The condition of the gallery reporters, whose work would be vital to any debate which involved the country as a whole, was only one degree better. The secrecy which Parliament had attempted to impose on its proceedings had become eroded towards the end of the eighteenth century, partly due to the efforts of the libertarian John Wilkes. Journalists had been admitted freely since 1778, and the taking of notes had been tolerated five years later. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, giving a full account of speeches, procedure and voting in both Houses, were printed as such from 1829 onwards, the result of a co-operation between the reports of the Radical William Cobbett and the printer Thomas Hansard; the former selling out to Hansard when he faced bankruptcy.

  But total accuracy was hardly achievable. Squashed-together reporters were frequently unable to hear properly. The Times, already known as ‘The Thunderer’, was vociferous in complaint on this issue. Reporters were nevertheless expected to endure long hours in order that their reports should be printed, and the newspapers carried out to the provinces in the new fast coaches. They were also obliged to clear out during voting (a practice only abolished in 1853).5 Limiting each paper to one reporter might help with the crowded gallery, but of course made the responsibility of recording events still more onerous.

  In spite of the privations of reporters and ladies and Highland intruders, there is no doubt that the main sufferers were the wheezing, snuffling MPs themselves. The fact that the public gallery was only fifteen feet above the floor, supported by pillars reaching down to the benches below, made for additional claustrophobia.6 All this meant that Members of both Houses, when preparing for any kind of struggle, were lucky if they were endowed with real physical stamina, as was the Leader of the House of Commons, the John Bull–like figure of Lord Althorp (like other viscounts, he was commonly addressed as Lord). Lord John Russell, on the other hand, undersized and with an undersized voice about which reporters complained, needed great rations of emotional courage. In these testing conditions, long speeches late at night and forward into the dawn – four hours was not unusual – called forth admiration. As William Cobbett would say later, you needed perfect health and also great bodily strength.7 He might have added that the old – or older – would be additionally tested.

  The official Opening of Parliament was preceded by various secret and not-so-secret meetings, as the politicians jockeyed for position. In general, there was an extraordinary lack of cohesion inside the parties and ill-defined boundaries between them on the subject of Reform, due to the constantly changing nature of political loyalties during the previous decade. Where the Tories were concerned, there were Canningites, named for their dead leader, prepared to listen to reason on the subject of Reform, followed by the similarly inclined Huskissonites, named for yet another dead leader who died in a rail accident in September. There were Tories like the eccentric Blandford, with his own reasons for backing Reform, and other so-called Ultra Tories, deeply offended by the Catholic debacle, as they saw it, of the previous
year in which both Wellington and Peel had participated.

  Where the Whigs were concerned, this lack of differentiation brought with it the possibility of fruitful overtures to the other side. One young MP who believed in this was Edward Stanley, just thirty, later styled Lord Stanley as heir to the Earl of Derby, and an MP for the last eight years. Academically brilliant – he had won the Syracuse Latin Prize at Oxford – Stanley would later be known as ‘the Rupert of Debate’: his oratorical style, both dashing and ferocious, to say nothing of his hot temper, reminded hearers of the great seventeenth-century cavalry leader Rupert of the Rhine. Stanley’s (Derby’s) future career was another indication of the fact that party politics were not set in stone at this point. This fair-skinned, red-headed Prince Rupert would in fact change sides later, become a Tory and enjoy a long and distinguished political career. At this point, however, he was described as ‘foremost among the youngsters’, along with Sir James Graham, and counted among the Whigs. Like another aristocrat, Lord Lansdowne, he took to wearing the old Whig uniform of a blue coat with brass buttons and a buff waistcoat.8

  Graham himself was a few years older, and had been a Whig MP since 1826; a man of considerable organizational abilities, he was described by a more erratic contemporary, Lord Durham, perhaps for this reason, as ‘an official drudge, a gentleman and a saint’.9 Certainly, as a wealthy landowner he had become celebrated for the management of his large Cumberland estate and his prosperous tenantry. Economic reform was something that concerned him deeply.

  These two Whig ‘youngsters’ now engineered a secret approach to the Tory Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, via Charles Arbuthnot, the husband of Wellington’s confidante Harriet and a useful intermediary. Peel was surely a key figure in what the younger Whigs hoped to achieve. Unlike Stanley, he was proudly middle-class, the son of a rich manufacturer from whom he had recently inherited the baronetcy, along with an estimated fortune of £1.5 million (£150 million in today’s money).10 Peel was born in 1788, that is to say twenty years after Wellington and Grey. Now in his early forties, he had been at Harrow as a schoolboy and watched his older contemporaries going off to the Napoleonic Wars. He was also, incidentally, a man of strong cultural interests whose collection of pictures meant perhaps as much to him as anything inanimate (he was an original Trustee of the National Gallery). His love for his beautiful wife Julia meant that he too, like the Whig lords, was inclined to pine for the country when she was absent. But Lord Lytton would also refer to Peel’s ‘pure and cold moral character’: this meant that Peel, intelligent and well educated as he was, was not a man to mount a charm offensive, if such were needed.11 When Wellington talked to Lord Stanhope of Peel’s ‘scrupulous veracity of all men he had ever known’ he was not necessarily depicting the ideal convivial politician.12

  Even Peel’s appearance was somewhat offputting; despite his florid good looks and dignified posture there was something uncomfortably stagey about the way he banged the box in front of him when speaking and then turned round for the applause of his supporters, which was seized upon by satirists. Was it perhaps an air of complacency which perturbed his listeners? G.W.E. Russell, reporting the Whig tradition, wrote that he ‘utterly lacked – perhaps he would have despised – that almost prophetic rapture which we recognize in Burke and Chatham’.13 Peel’s rallying dinners were actually said to do more harm than good. Where Reform was concerned, Peel was certainly not a bigot either by experience or inclination. But he was not of course the leader of the Tory Party – that was the role of the Duke of Wellington.

  There were other eve-of-Parliament discussions which centred on the reforming proposals of the new MP for Yorkshire, Henry Brougham. In his fifties, he was thus of a different generation from the rising Whigs such as Stanley and Lord John Russell. His rise to prominence had been as a result of his own irrepressible efforts: thirty years earlier the young lawyer had been among those who founded the seminal journal of enquiry, the Edinburgh Review. Irascible, multi-faceted, Brougham was both intellectual and dazzling in his oratory – as a result of which he had earned an enormous living at the Bar, strictly necessary to his lavish way of life. Lord Holland paid an extraordinary tribute to him: his style of oratory, he wrote in his Diary, was ‘almost preternatural and miraculous’, based on ‘the variety and versatility of his genius . . . his roundness of retort and reply’. Such a character inevitably lent itself to caricature, and his amazing bottle-nose helped matters singularly, as did the piercing eyes under projecting brows and the ‘uproarious condition’ of his dark grey hair, which aroused the admiration of Haydon (it also, incidentally, made his head popular as a tavern sign).14

  But even without such an eccentric appearance, Brougham would have made his mark. For one thing his self-confidence was boundless; one exchange with Grey seemed to sum him up. The two great men were crossing a ford at Howick which turned out to be flooded. Under the circumstances, Grey asked Brougham: ‘Can you swim?’ To which Brougham replied magnificently in the strong northern accent which characterized his speech: ‘I have neverrre swum but I have no doubt I could if I trrried.’ Brougham’s enormous knowledge was also legendary and he had no objections to sharing it. After one such breakfast meeting broke up, Samuel Rogers remarked: ‘This morning Solon, Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Archimedes, Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Chesterfield and a good many others went away in one postchaise.’ A more sardonic observer quipped: ‘if only he knew a little about the law, he would know everything.’15

  Brougham’s wife completed the unconventionality of the picture. A widow with a pleasing income and an equally pleasing house in Hill Street, she was not up to the high standards for conversation and intelligence that the Whigs expected from the ladies in their circle: the diarist Creevey described her as being ‘like an overgrown doll at the top of the table in a bandeau of roses, her face in a perpetual simper without utterance’.16 Brougham’s confidence was undimmed by this tacit disapproval; for it was the confidence of a man who had won his place on merit amid others who had benefited by inheritance. This was a time obsessed by the study of phrenology, the science by which the shape and markings of the skull denoted character; it was generally agreed that the organ of combativeness on Brougham’s skull was mightily developed.

  It was hardly to be expected that such a man would prove an easy colleague, let alone a pack animal. In their rising anxieties for Reform in principle, the Whig notables were not necessarily inclined to favour Brougham’s particular reforms. At the end of September he had spoken out boldly on the subject at a public dinner in Leeds: ‘I will leave in no man’s hand, now that I am Member for Yorkshire, the great cause of Parliamentary Reform.’ In sum this proved to be his threefold plan: to enfranchise those that were known as the ‘great towns’, to extend the vote to various householders and limit the small boroughs to one Member.17

  Hardly revolutionary, with no mention of such vexed topics discussed in Radical circles as Universal Franchise or the Secret Ballot (all voting would still be done in public), it was nevertheless more advanced than anything the Whigs had explored previously and it made them nervous. The Whigs were like a body of men with an enormous dog of famous attacking power at their side; admire the dog as they might, they were never absolutely sure where he would place his huge jaws next. And did the dog perhaps have an agenda all his own, including leadership of the pack itself?

  The Opening of the new Parliament therefore found all those concerned in it apprehensive, and not a great deal of cohesion in either party. If many of the Tories were surly, the Whigs, like all people who have been out of office for a long time, did not necessarily believe their moment had come; Grey’s actual political leadership, such an important element in any Whig Renaissance, was in any case untried. As Byron had written with the pen he wielded from time to time as a knife:

  Nought’s permanent among the human race

  Except the Whigs not getting into place.18

  Meanwhile ferment in the country was spreading, not diminishi
ng. On the eve of Parliament The Times reported that Canterbury had been ‘the scene of the utmost confusion’. Labourers were seen throwing stones at troops and ‘the cry for bread and labour is loud, machines are daily destroyed and no man can say what the end will be’. The Duke of Rutland wrote to Frances Lady Shelley: ‘It is my firm belief that we are nearer to a tremendous explosion than we ever have been.’ He referred to the poison ‘so deeply and widely circulated in the minds of people’, adding: ‘Some friends of mine ascribe it to the schoolmasters!’ There had been a recent meeting at Leicester in which a speaker who predicted the sweeping-away of even ‘a vestige of Nobility’ from the country was greeted with the enthusiastic response: ‘the sooner it is done the better’.19

  One of those following this turbulent scene with acute interest was the Radical tailor Francis Place. Here was a man who thoroughly understood the life of the poor; his father being bailiff at the Marshalsea court, he was actually raised in a debtors’ prison. Earning his living from a young age as a journeyman tailor, Place became Secretary to the Leather-Breeches Makers’ Trade in 1792 at the age of twenty-two. Strongly built, Place maintained his physical fitness on the verge of sixty by walking twenty or thirty miles a day.

  His other marked characteristic was his avidity for learning, extraordinary by the standards of his time and class. Place established a vast political library – ‘the headquarters of English Radicalism’ – in his house. It was described at the beginning of the twentieth century by an old man who still remembered being shown it, as ‘a sort of gossiping shop for such persons as were in any way engaged in public matters, having the benefit of people for their object’. Another contemporary wondered at the sheer organization of the library: ‘books, pamphlets, journals, memoranda of every kind – political, philosophical, physiological, and every other “cal” which can be imagined, all arranged in such perfect order that he can put his hand on any book or paper he may want in a moment’.20 Where Brougham’s skull showed combativeness, with Francis Place, in phrenological terms, ‘the bump of order’ was very strong indeed.