CHAPTER ONE

THE CLAMOUR

‘I dread trade, I hate its clamour’ –

Captain the Hon. John Byng, riding through England in the 1790s

‘I defy you to agitate a fellow with a full stomache,’ wrote William Cobbett, the Radical politician, who had visited both France and America and spent time in the Army (not to forget two years in Newgate Prison for denouncing the flogging of militia men).¹ In the Britain of the General Election of 1830, held following the death of the Sovereign, there were a great many fellows whom, according to this dictum, it would be easy to agitate. From another social sphere, the estate manager at Belvoir Castle in the Midlands reported to the Duke of Rutland on the subject of local incendiarism that, although these fires might very often be the work of rascals and vagabonds, ‘still they are more likely to take place among a starving Population’. The relationship of hunger and poverty to riot in Britain was after all nothing new: twenty years earlier Lord Byron in his maiden speech in the House of Lords had commented on the revolt of the unemployed weavers in Nottinghamshire in similar terms: ‘nothing but absolute want’ could have driven a once honest and industrious body to such excesses.²

A series of appalling harvests followed by severe winter weather had bedevilled the country. In 1830, according to Greville, the thermometer at Greenwich was lower than it had been for the last ninety years.³ Britain was already in the throes of economic distress following the end of the Napoleonic Wars when the returning soldiers sought employment, all too often in vain. Most notoriously in the past, such dire conditions had led to the so-called Peterloo Massacre near Manchester in 1819 when a group led by the Radical orator Henry Hunt had demanded political Reform as a solution to the problem; there were an estimated eleven deaths at the time at the hands of the military, and over 400 injured; subsequently there were executions and transportations overseas for life.

Henry Hunt, born in Wiltshire, from a well-off farming family, was arrested and sentenced to two and a half years in prison in a gaol which he nicknamed ‘the Ilchester Bastille’. Much later he would describe the scene to Parliament: how the Yeomanry pressed down on ‘the unresisting people, hundreds of whom were wounded, thrown down, trampled upon, or otherwise injured. The groans of the wounded, the horrid shrieks of the women, and the despair of the maddened wretches thus ferociously assaulted formed the most dreadful scene that could be imagined.’4 Despite the outraged protests of those of a dissident turn of mind – notably the poet Shelley – contemporary thinking in general had not moved on where the treatment of popular protest was concerned. ‘Advice how to attack a Mob’ by a General Trevor of 30 November 1830 was full of military good, if aggressive, sense for armed men against the unarmed, such as ‘attack those in the flank and break their line’.⁵

Agricultural distress arrived in a new form, as machines came to supplant men; and the men sought revenge (or relief) by breaking up the new machines. The campaign took its name from its leader, Captain Swing – was he a man or a myth? It began in East Kent, where landowners might expect to find the following menacing message left overnight:

Revenge for thee is on the Wing

From thy determined Captain Swing.

Writing in 1831 with the title Swing Unmasked; or the Causes of Rural Incendiarism, E.G. Wakefield suggested that Swing might be ‘one of our natural enemies, the French Jacobins, who has invented a wonderful fireball for the ruin of Old England’. Wakefield wrote from his personal observation of the enthusiasm of ‘poor [English] creatures’ for news of the ‘glorious French Revolution’ in the press; and these poor creatures were after all not so very distant from the coastal regions of France. Alternatively Captain Swing might be a rascally farmer wanting the abatement of his rent. Or again perhaps he was a disguised papist or Methodist bent on the destruction of the Church (Catholic Emancipation was still sufficiently novel to arouse these kinds of fears) or even a well-dressed agent hoping to raise the price of corn. Whatever the identity of Swing, Wakefield’s conclusion was not so very far from Cobbett’s aphorism quoted above: he believed that the only thing to do was to ‘remove the misery’.6

Outbreaks of this type of unrest, dreaded by the inhabitants of great – or greater – houses, spread through southern England, areas of the Midlands and East Anglia. These ‘poor creatures’ taking refuge in violence which seemed mindless to outsiders but curiously logical to themselves – they would replace the machines as the machines had replaced them – had no part in the parliamentary election. Their cries, and with rising frequency their deeds of protest, were not originally rooted in a desire for parliamentary Reform, but for relief from the fearful economic realities of their situation. Where elections were concerned, just over 3 per cent of the population voted in 1830, some 400,000-odd people out of a population of approximately sixteen million: all were, of course, male.⁷ *

There were 658 seats allotted to the United Kingdom altogether, Ireland being given seats in the Westminster Parliament (to which Catholics would now be admitted for the first time) by the Act of Union in 1801. The great majority of these seats were in England; Ireland had 100, Scotland 45 and Wales 24. The constituencies were of various types including county, borough or burgh and university constituencies, and generally had more than one Member: thus the total number of constituencies for the 658 seats was 379. Within the simplicity of these figures, however, is concealed a system of fiendish variety and intricacy, just because it had originated so many centuries ago and evolved according to perceptions of another time. Walter Bagehot, writing in the 1870s, summed it up: ‘A system of representation made without design, was fixed as eternal, and upon a changing nation.’ Naturally such a system laid itself open to abuses. As one modern authority has pointed out, ‘generations of attorneys grew fat on the niceties of electoral law’, and certainly there were many disputed returns after any General Election.8

In the other Chamber, the House of Lords, the seats were strictly hereditary. Although new peerages could be created: that was theoretically the prerogative of the Sovereign. Not all Irish peers sat in the House of Lords after the Union of 1801; twenty-eight peers were elected among their number. This meant that others could stand as MPs (Viscount Palmerston, possessor of an Irish peerage, was an example of this). The Scottish peers had a similar system after the Union of 1707, electing sixteen to sit in the Lords. The eldest sons of English and Scottish peers, enjoying so-called courtesy titles like Viscount Althorp, heir to Earl Spencer, could also be elected as MPs, although of course the death of the father would automatically hoist the son, happily or unhappily, into the Lords.

When Oliver Cromwell had supported the abolition of the House of Lords in the middle of the seventeenth century – only temporarily, as it turned out – he had referred to its Members as ‘lumps of gilded earth’. The vivid if contemptuous phrase expressed the fact that the Lords derived their existence from being landowners, and very often great landowners at that. The current parliamentary system, by which patrons of ‘pocket boroughs’ nominated individuals to enjoy the seats which were considered in effect to belong to them, meant that Members of the Lords were an important force in any election. ‘May not I do what I like with my own?’ exclaimed the Duke of Newcastle in a notorious bout of indignation when the abolition of certain seats of which he had the patronage was proposed.⁹ Perhaps this simple ducal identification of a parliamentary seat with any other piece of property was an extreme point of view; nevertheless the connection of property and representation was fundamental. It did, of course, definitively exclude the propertyless, the poor creatures, whether compliant with their fate or rebellious.

So-called ‘rotten boroughs’ – an eighteenth-century usage – were those where, due to the decline in local population over the years, a minuscule number of voters elected two Members of Parliament; Newtown on the Isle of Wight was one glaring example, with fourteen houses and twenty-three voters. Under the circumstances, nomination for seats by a powerful local patron was a strong possibility. Money often changed hands and, given the open ballot, patrons could check whether their interests had been properly served. One argument in favour of the ‘rotten boroughs’, however, was that they enabled bright young men of no particular fortune to rise through the system and dazzle in Parliament.

A witty cleric called Sydney Smith understood how to deal with that argument – as with so many issues of this time. He made fun of it. Sydney Smith was now sixty; having edited the first issue of the Edinburgh Review, he left for London where he enjoyed exceptional popularity as an Anglican preacher and became the darling of Holland House. After that, Smith expounded his progressive views from a Yorkshire parish: he was, for example, a staunch advocate of Catholic Emancipation. From there, through patronage, he transferred to Combe Florey in Somerset. On this issue, he compared rotten boroughs to the pains in the stomach of a rich man risen from poverty, who exclaims: ‘I am not rich in consequence of the pains in my stomache but in spite of them: I would have been ten times richer and fifty times happier if I had no pains in my stomache at all.’ Smith added: ‘Gentlemen, those rotten boroughs are your pains in the stomache – and you would have been a much richer and greater people if you had never had them at all.’10

As for the money, Edward Stanley would state in Parliament later, without fear of contradiction, that ‘it was as notorious as the sun at noon-day, that boroughs were bought and sold in the market by their proprietors’.¹¹ The system also lent itself to corruption and bribery (which led to drunkenness) and the sums of money could be astronomical. There was a notorious Northumberland county election in 1826 in which four candidates battled for two seats. Young John George Lambton (created Lord Durham in 1828) managed the election campaign of his brother-in-law Lord Howick, eldest son of Lord Grey, and tempers grew so hot that he fought a duel with one candidate, Thomas Wentworth Beaumont, on the sands beneath Bamburgh Castle. The election cost Beaumont £80,000 in vain, Howick £20,000 and the Tories £30,000 each (roughly £8 million, £2 million and £3 million in today’s money).12

It was however the geographical distribution of the seats in 1830 which would present the most incongruous sight to a modern eye. Despite an extraordinary rise in the population, there had been virtually no alteration in the original medieval scheme since 1760 and before that the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707. Furthermore, one vital feature of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England had been totally ignored, and that was the phenomenon now termed the Industrial Revolution. Macaulay, then a young MP, managed to have semi-religious feelings on the subject as he expatiated on the wonders of industry by quoting the Bible: ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ So manufacturers must be judged by cotton goods and cutlery, engineers by suspension bridges and steam tunnels. Indeed, he contrasted ‘the speed, the precision with which every process is performed in our factories’ with the ‘awkwardness, the rudeness, the slowness, the uncertainty’ of the judicial system. Finding in industry what others of the time found in Nature, he struck a contemporary as being like a traveller who ventured through ‘rich and picturesque scenery’ by railroad. Others were more conventional in their reaction. ‘Every rural sound is sunk in the clamour of cotton works; and the simple peasant . . . is transformed into the impudent mechanic,’ wrote the Captain the Hon. John Byng, later Viscount Torrington, riding through the Midlands in the 1790s; and again, ‘I dread trade, I hate its clamour.’¹³

But the clamour was there. It was heard, for example, in cities like Birmingham. In her novel Emma, published in 1816, Jane Austen had Mrs Elton exclaim with regard to Birmingham: ‘I always say there is something direful in the sound.’ Genteel distaste was one thing; the rush towards employment, often in small industries, where employers and men were closely connected, meant that the population there had virtually doubled in the twenty years between 1811 and 1831 when it was over 145,000; a new fast stagecoach service meant that news of the clamour from other places could easily reach the rising population of Birmingham. Sheffield had multiplied nearly threefold to 110,000; Manchester from 95,000 to 310,000, Bradford and Leeds had both soared. As for Scotland, Glasgow was a phenomenon in itself, with the greatest surge of all.14 It should be emphasized that with the exception of the under-represented Glasgow, there were no parliamentary seats attached to these teeming, choking, productive industrial cities, or what Lord Melbourne would later describe in Parliament as these ‘great emporiums of commerce’, full of men of ‘opulence, of spirit, of intelligence’ who had arrived at an almost imperial grandeur and ‘metropolitan magnificence’.¹⁵

In the meantime there were the infamous ‘rotten boroughs’ such as Old Sarum, where two MPs represented – quite literally – a lump of stone and a green field. No wonder visitors flocked to see this miraculous site! John Constable was sufficiently fascinated by this wild landscape which had once been a medieval city to commemorate it – Sir Thomas Lawrence admired the result and told him he should dedicate it to the House of Commons. Gatton in Surrey was only slightly less miraculous: here there were six houses in the borough, and 135 inhabitants in the parish – ‘those celebrated and opulent and populous Towns’, as the painter Haydon sarcastically called them. This particular borough of Gatton was sold several times, the price in the summer of 1830 said to be £180,000 (approximately £18 million in today’s money).¹⁶ There was no miracle where Dunwich in Suffolk was concerned: it had in effect fallen into the sea, but still it returned two Members of Parliament. Places with a long and ancient history frequently had a disproportionate amount of seats to their inhabitants, witness Cornwall, where there was a total of forty-four Members for a thinly scattered population. In general, there was a pronounced bias towards the south over the north of England.

It was not that efforts had not been made to remedy at least the most egregious of these perceived abuses. East Retford was a so-called freeman borough, and where bribery was concerned, local freemen were said to have established a tariff of twenty guineas a vote – roughly the agricultural wage for the year in certain parts of England. Candidates duly paying up in 1818 and 1820, there had been no contest; but the emergence of two candidates in 1824 had led to extraordinary expenditure. Efforts had been made, notably by the Reform-minded Lord John Russell, to award its seats to Birmingham, bereft of representation. But this East Retford initiative had not succeeded.

All in all, a system had grown up like a monstrous warped tree on the landscape, the sight of which could no longer be ignored in an age of change in so many other areas. The General Election of 1830 was, however, still conducted in the shadow of this monstrous growth. One aspect of the system was the proliferation of election days: no particular date was designated, the returning officers for the various constituencies suiting the local needs. Furthermore, where there was a contest, polling could go on for days. In 1830 polling – all of which was done, and had to be done, openly – began on 29 July and ended on 1 September (there were contests in about a third of the constituencies). The new Parliament was summoned for 14 September, for a maximum seven-year term under the terms of the Septennial Act of 1716.

In an age before the full intricacies of party organization as it is now experienced, the designation of Tories and Whigs was not always clear-cut, as has been stressed with regard to the Ultra Tories. These, however, were the party designations – Tory and Whig – which were familiar. The word ‘Conservative’ was only just beginning to be mentioned: in 1832 Daniel O’Connell would call it ‘the new fangled phrase now used in polite society’; ‘Liberal’ was not yet in use for a political party. In a shifting situation, one analysis of the results of the 1830 Election uses the term ‘friends’ and ‘foes’ of the Wellington Ministry instead: as a result of this calculation, the Government could count on a majority of about 42, with 333 potential ‘friends’ to 291 ‘foes’.17

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 to and correspondence with 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 threshing 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.

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.