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‌The Whigs in Power

IN 1815, the territory now known as Belgium, which had been annexed to France under Napoleon, had been added to the kingdom of the Netherlands, the idea being to create a buffer state on France’s northern frontier. By driving out the Dutch garrisons in Brussels and the other Belgian cities in the late summer of 1830, the Belgians had effectively won their independence. But would they be allowed to keep it? The Holy Alliance, in accordance with its so-called obligations under the Treaty of Vienna, was preparing to put down the revolution in its usual way; the French, on the other hand, were determined to support the Belgians. The British meanwhile were adamant that Belgium, with its strategically important ports, should not return to French control.

It was in the midst of this complicated situation that Talleyrand arrived as French ambassador in England at the end of September. He soon established good relations with Wellington’s Foreign Minister Lord Aberdeen, but this did not prevent him from frequenting Whig society or dining several times a week at Holland House.

Holland, who had known Talleyrand in so many roles, was delighted to see him in his new one as the ambassador of one constitutional monarchy to another. There were those who regarded him as a turncoat or worse – for Grey he was one of the three greatest rascals in Europe – but Holland would hear nothing against him. When Talleyrand was attacked in the House of Lords the following year, he sprang to his defence: ‘Forty years acquaintance with the noble individual,’ he declared, ‘enabled him to bear testimony to the fact, that… there had been no man’s character more shamefully traduced, and no man’s public character more mistaken and misrepresented than the public and ‌private character of Prince Talleyrand.’¹

Holland House was Talleyrand’s second home in London, and he made it his headquarters whenever his niece (and mistress) the Duchess of Dino, who acted as his ambassadress, was away. Now 76, with his thickly powdered curls and pallid wrinkled face, he looked, said one observer, like an aged lion. But the charm and fascination of his conversation were as great as ever. His bons mots were endlessly repeated. In his Foreign Reminiscences Holland quotes Talleyrand’s humorous reproof to a young man who been boasting about his mother’s beauty, and by implication that of her descendants. ‘C’était donc,’ said Talleyrand, ‘monsieur votre père ‌qui n’était pas si bien.’²

Lady Holland had mixed feelings about Talleyrand – she had never quite forgiven him for his betrayal of Napoleon – and he in his turn was not always charitable about her. ‘Elle fait semblant de tout sçavoir, car cela lui donne de l’importance, and quand elle ‌ne sçait pas elle invente,’³ he once remarked, and when someone asked why she had changed the time of her dinners to the inconveniently early hour of five, he said frankly, ‘C’est ‌pour gêner tout le monde.’⁴ To Holland, on the other hand, he was devoted. He addressed him in English as ‘my dear friend’, or sometimes ‘dearest’, in his letters, signing himself ‘Talley’, the nickname by which he was known in England. Holland regarded him as an honorary Foxite, a title first bestowed on him by Fox himself, and one he declared himself proud to accept.

Some people thought that Holland was taken in by Talleyrand: ‘[He goes] every evening late to Holland House, when everyone else is gone, and sucks Holland’s brain for an hour or two ‌before he goes to bed,’⁵ reported the Duke of Bedford to his brother Lord William Russell. But Holland shared Talleyrand’s aim of ensuring good relations between England and France, and their confidence was mutual. Neither was much bothered by the niceties of working through official channels, a fact that drove their Foreign Ministers to distraction. Talleyrand showed Holland confidential documents, Holland reported on Cabinet discussions. In their view Anglo-French co-operation was essential if the other great powers were to be kept from intervening over Belgium, and its establishment as a neutral and independent country was the only way to balance French and British interests. The fact that these aims were peacefully achieved, despite belligerent noises from all sides, owed much to the underlying trust between them. It was, as the historian Leslie Mitchell remarks, ‘an extraordinary ‌culmination of a 40-year friendship’.⁶

The problems of Belgium might not have been so easily resolved had the Tory government remained in power. When Parliament reassembled on 2 November 1830 the king’s speech mentioned the revolution in Belgium with ominous disapproval. But the July Revolution in France, with its knock-on effect in Belgium, had speeded up demands for change in Britain too. The movement for electoral reform had been gaining momentum over the last few years, and with Catholic Emancipation out of the way, it had become the most important issue of the day. Wellington had been pragmatic over Catholic Emancipation. When Parliament opened that autumn most people expected that he would also introduce some measure of parliamentary reform, if only to silence more extreme demands. But the duke was not prepared to make concessions. His announcement in the opening debate that the British constitution was the most perfect yet devised by man, and that he would resist all attempts to change it, dismayed even his most loyal followers. The speech dealt a death blow to the ministry. The party was already weakened by the defection of the former Canningites and the Ultras, the latter still bent on revenge after their betrayal, as they saw it, over Catholic Emancipation. On 15 November the two groups combined with the Whigs and independents to defeat the government in the Commons. Wellington resigned and William IV, who unlike his brother had no objection to the Whigs, asked the 66-year-old Lord Grey to form a government.

After 23 years in opposition the Whigs were once more in power. With the prospect of office Grey discovered a new sense of energy and purpose. He had never wavered in his support for electoral reform though his aims were more moderate than they had been in 1792. Holland had done his utmost to keep his place as leader warm during Grey’s years of semi-retirement in Northumberland; without the social and intellectual draw of Holland House, the Foxite Whigs who formed the core of his new Cabinet might have been scattered altogether. Now was the time when Holland could claim his reward. It had always been his dream to become Foreign Secretary, and Grey’s first thought was to offer him the post. But Holland’s health was no longer equal to it, and he was forced to refuse. The gout which had plagued him for years had become increasingly incapacitating, often confining him to bed for weeks on end. During one particularly severe attack that summer, Wellington had ridden out to Holland House on a night of pouring rain to ask after him: old friendship transcending the political differences between them.

Palmerston became Foreign Secretary, Holland taking the less onerous post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. As a member of the Cabinet, he could still keep in touch with foreign affairs, often to the fury of Palmerston, though as we have seen with fruitful consequences for Franco-British understanding. The rest of the Cabinet, which included such Canningites as Melbourne, who became Home Secretary, was almost entirely aristocratic, ‘not that I exclude a man of merit from another class,’ Grey told his friend Princess Lieven, ‘but between men of equal mind ‌I would chose the aristocrat.’⁷

The wild card was Brougham. Not an aristocrat, but too popular with the public to be left out of the government, he had made his name as the defender of Queen Caroline and a vociferous advocate of legal and political reform. Rather than leave him in the Commons where his powerful and combative personality might cause trouble for the Leader of the House, Lord Althorp, Grey offered him the post of Lord Chancellor, with the title of Baron Brougham and Vaux. At first it was doubtful if he would accept – ‘You can do ‌more with him than anybody,’⁸ wrote Grey to Holland anxiously – but it was the king who finally brought him round. ‘You are all under great obligations to me,’ he told Holland. ‘I have settled Brougham. He will ‌not be dangerous any more.’⁹

Grey’s youthful championship of parliamentary reform had gone against the tide of the times; with the Terror raging across the Channel the Friends of the People had been seen as a dangerously subversive group. Now the whole force of public opinion was behind him. A rising middle class, rich and well educated, was demanding its share in government; lower down the scale workers’ associations, suppressed since the Napoleonic wars, had begun to articulate their claims once more. Economic misery added to the sense of urgency; rick-burning under the auspices of the sinister ‘Captain Swing’ was spreading fear in the rural south, desperate workers were arming and training in the industrial north. The fear of revolution, which had once held back political change, had become the chief reason for bringing it about.

Grey set to work at once. No sooner had his Cabinet been approved by the king than he entrusted a committee of four – his son-in-law Lord Durham, Lord John Russell, Lord Duncannon and the Cumberland baronet Sir James Graham – with the task of drawing up a Reform Bill. Their conclusions would be reached in conditions of the utmost secrecy, before being presented to the king at the beginning of the year.

Although the Whigs had always supported parliamentary reform, Holland himself was relatively lukewarm on the subject. ‘For my part,’ he wrote to Henry on the eve of Wellington’s departure, ‘I was never a very keen reformer, but I think reform now absolutely inevitable, and I am sure, if it be so, the sooner ‌it is done the better.’¹⁰ In this spirit he would take part in the parliamentary battles leading up to the passing of the Reform Bill, not so much as a maker of policy – he was far more interested in foreign affairs – but as a respected senior figure, whose tact and experience helped to reconcile differences in the Cabinet, and on whose discretion Grey could rely. Through his relationship by marriage he also had informal access to the king, and his daughter-in-law, now raised to the title of Lady Mary Fox, was a useful source of gossip on court life. The queen, a German princess of decidedly anti-democratic views, was fiercely opposed to reform. Holland’s journal, which he began in July 1831, gives vivid glimpses of the domestic struggles – the queen frequently in tears – taking place behind the scenes.

The old Foxite doctrine of opposition to the Crown, steadfastly maintained through the reigns of George III and George IV, had now lost much of its relevance. Wellington, by overriding George IV’s resistance to Catholic Emancipation, had proved that in the last analysis the will of Parliament must prevail. William IV was a very different character to his brother, sympathetic to the Whigs as we have seen, good-natured and anxious to do right. But he still had considerable power and Grey and Holland needed all their persuasive skills to win him round to the forthcoming bill; the alternative, Holland assured him, would be civil war and revolution.

Despite his wife’s resistance, William IV accepted the proposed bill in its entirety, reassured by Grey’s arguments that its provisions were essentially ‘aristocratic’: the stability of the country’s institutions, including the throne, could only be ensured if the suffrage was extended. ‘Never was there such a king,’ wrote Holland joyfully to Anglesey; ‘he not only acquiesces but espouses the measures deemed necessary by his ministers, ‌however disagreeable to royal palates.’¹¹

From the moment the bill was first in contemplation Grey had been convinced that there was no point nibbling at the question of reform. The only safe measure, he felt, was one that was broadly based and his committee had shared his view. When Lord John Russell introduced it in the House of Commons on 1 March 1831, it was considered so sweeping that not only the Tories but even the more timid Whigs were appalled. Had Peel, the Tory leader in the Commons, proposed to divide the House on its first reading, the bill – and the government – would probably have been defeated. But Peel was a cautious man who preferred to weigh things carefully, and the first reading of the bill, as was usual in the Commons, was allowed to pass without a division.

In fact the bill was far from revolutionary; less a democratic measure than a transfer of power from the upper to the middle classes, and the acceptance of an already existing situation. The working classes were excluded, and even the anomalies by which in a few boroughs they had been able to vote were abolished. Nonetheless it did much to impose some kind of order on a previously chaotic system: rotten boroughs (where the population had declined to below 2,000) and nomination boroughs (where the patron could name his own candidate) were abolished; the big industrial towns, like Manchester and Birmingham, were enfranchised; and a more equal system of representation was established between constituencies. The resounding welcome with which the public greeted the bill did much to persuade the waverers in Parliament. But the outcome of the vote, when it came up for its second reading, was uncertain to the last. The numbers were counted in an atmosphere of mounting excitement. When it finally became clear that the bill had been passed by one vote – 302 to 301 – a shout went up, wrote Macaulay, the new member for Calne, which could have been heard at Charing Cross.

The reformers’ triumph was short-lived. Two weeks later the bill was defeated on an amendment in committee, and on 23 April Parliament was dissolved. In the election campaign that followed Lord John Russell, as the bill’s proposer in the Commons, was the hero of the hour. When he went to Devonshire for re-election, huge crowds flocked to see him. ‘The people along the road were very much disappointed by his smallness [Russell was only five feet tall],’ reported Sydney Smith to Lady Holland. ‘I told them that he was much larger before, but was reduced by excessive anxiety about the people. This ‌brought tears to their eyes.’¹²

The Whigs were returned to office with a hugely increased majority – the Tories retaining little more than their nomination boroughs – and the Reform Bill, basically unchanged, was introduced into the new House of Commons on 24 June. This time it was passed by a majority of 136 votes on its second reading, but the struggle to get it through both houses would continue for another year and in the process bring the country to the brink of revolution. ‘I am full twenty years too old,’ sighed Grey to Holland in a moment of discouragement. ‌‘In short I am miserable.’¹³

In Holland House at least he could be sure of friendship and support.