‘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 diminishing. 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.
He certainly did not find the coming Parliament orderly enough, having referred in May to the ‘rascally’ House of Commons, which excited him to ‘indignation, hatred and abhorrence’ whenever he thought of it. His Westminster dwelling nevertheless made him an important man in the political sphere, since Westminster was one of the few electoral seats with something approaching manhood suffrage, based on freehold. Just as Attwood was originally interested in currency reform, Place had an attachment to Malthusian doctrines of population control, with a particular prejudice in favour of contraception to enable the people to reduce their own numbers. Hence Reform for him had become a primary element of justice for the working classes and his prodigious organizational talents were now to be dedicated to it, despite his theoretical dislike of the Whigs.
Francis Place was at this point not in an optimistic mood. On 1 November he wrote to Henry Hunt, the Radical known for good reason as ‘Orator’ Hunt, on the subject of the Duke of Wellington: ‘The Duke thinks this is not the time to meet the wishes of the people. He does not understand things and has therefore decided to make no concessions.’ Personally Place hoped that Wellington would stick to this disastrous course (thus provoking confrontation). Whatever happened, according to Place, it was merely ‘a question of longer or shorter – change will come’. And he issued a prophecy: ‘No corrupt system ever yet reformed itself.’ It was now time to see whether Place was right.21 Was there really no possibility of orderly change?
William IV, always assiduous in carrying out his constitutional role (unlike his elder brother), arrived at Parliament with a clear-cut duty to perform. It was customary for the King’s Speech, which declared the Government’s policy for the coming session, to be pronounced by the Sovereign himself in the House of Lords. Once on the throne, he was watched by Queen Adelaide and her ladies. The sight was impressive in itself – the scarlet cloth, the beautiful chandeliers and above all the ‘general air of good manners, an easy good taste and, so to say, an aroma of aristocracy’, as Alexis de Tocqueville would describe it.22 On this occasion the aroma of aristocracy was not enough to atone for the fact that the King’s Speech made no reference at all to any kind of plans for parliamentary Reform, such as had been vaguely expected – witness Lord Grey’s playful notion earlier of the ‘good fun’ to be had. Indeed, on the day itself, according to Lady Grey, there was still a story being spread that the Duke ‘would yield to the wish of the nation’ despite his dislike of Reform; in short he would do anything rather than resign.23
William did emphasize his continued good connections – ‘diplomatic relations and friendly intercourse’ – with the French court, to which he had sent cordial messages.24 Louis-Philippe, the new King of the French, had been anxious for recognition and the aged Prince Talleyrand had recently been sent to London as his Ambassador. Nevertheless many of the hereditary Lords he addressed were well aware that the Bourbon ex-King was in exile in Britain, and in such an atmosphere there was a possibility that Louis-Philippe would abandon his own hereditary Chamber of Peers much as Oliver Cromwell had done two centuries earlier (although, as it turned out, with less permanent effect). Less happily from the point of view of the Whigs, King William talked of the recent revolt in Belgium, whereby the Belgians threw off Dutch rule and seemed to suggest the possibility of English intervention. ‘I am endeavouring in concert with my allies to devise means of restoring tranquillity,’ he said; these words had a sinister sound to the Whigs as the traditional party of peace – and also, incidentally, to Radicals such as Thomas Attwood and Francis Place who were inexorably opposed to any such war.
The real drama of the occasion began with Lord Grey’s speech. His hearers now listened to him with profound attention as, whatever their views, they respected his style of oratory, which recalled to hearers the ‘stately splendours’ of the eighteenth century, and admired the characteristic upright pose of the tall, elegant figure as he walked up and down the centre of the Chamber, his hands folded in front of him ‘on his person’, for eight or ten minutes. As Creevey had observed a decade earlier: ‘There is nothing approaching this damned fellow in the kingdom, when he mounts his best horse.’25
Grey began by complaining about what had been said: where the Low Countries were concerned, in this ‘direct course’ against the behaviour of the people there was ‘language directly opposed to the principle of non-interference’. Grey then passed more solemnly to what had been left unsaid: there had been no discussion of the violence which now dominated the domestic scene. His pronouncement was unequivocal: ‘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.’26
‘Through my whole life,’ he continued, ‘I have advocated Reform, and I have thought that, if it were not attended to in time, the people would lose all confidence in Parliament, and we must make up our minds to witness the destruction of the Constitution.’ It was noteworthy that Grey, the wealthy aristocrat who believed in the hereditary principle including the duties it imposed, was here invoking quite a different force: ‘the people’. And by implication these people were supposed to have wishes which had to be respected. If Francis Place was right, and Wellington really thought this was not the time to meet ‘the wishes of the people’ – could this blanket dismissal really be in prospect? – then Grey placed the Whigs by implication in direct opposition. Yet it should be stressed that the idea of the rule of the people as such – what is now known as democracy – was anathema in the early nineteenth century.
Indeed, the very word ‘democracy’ caused a shudder at this juncture while the phrase ‘the people’ implied, generally speaking, a mob and not a very friendly mob at that. After all, the original democrats had been the republicans of the French Revolution who had emerged in opposition to the aristocrats, and the connection was held to contaminate it.* Sir Herbert Taylor, King William’s influential private secretary, would confide to Grey that his master ‘dreaded the Democracy [his capital letter] towards which he conceived the institutions of the country to be gradually approaching’.27
What Lord Grey was proposing was however a strictly limited measure of Reform. He was on more stable ground – if conservatism means stability – when he announced that he was against Universal Suffrage: ‘Perhaps in the early part of my life,’ he admitted, ‘I have urged this question with the rashness of youth.’ So the Reform that the Whigs were asking for at this juncture referred to an electorate whose claims were based on property. But he continued with another reference to the people – how the recent July French Revolution had been brought about by an attack on ‘the people’s liberties’. The inference was clear: the people’s liberties must be respected ere worse befell the country.
The Duke of Wellington rose to his feet shortly after. His crucial words came towards the end of a long speech.28 He agreed, he said, with Lord Grey that his Government and he himself as Prime Minister were not prepared for any measure of Reform. ‘Nay, he on his own part, would go further, and say, that he had never read or heard of any measure up to the present moment which could in any degree satisfy his mind that the state of representation could be improved or be rendered more satisfactory to the country at large at the present.’ He would not even enter into a discussion, but did not hesitate ‘to declare unequivocally’ what were his sentiments upon the matter. The Duke was fully convinced, he said, that the country possessed at this time a legislature which answered all the good purposes of legislation, and this by a ‘greater degree’ than any legislature ever had answered in any country whatever.
The Duke evidently felt that even now he had not gone far enough, so he went on to say that the legislature and the system of representation ‘possessed the full and entire confidence of the country – deservedly possessed that confidence’. In fact if he had the duty of forming a legislature, he would try to form one to produce the same results. The reason? The electorate consisted of ‘a large body of the property of the country in which landed interests had the preponderating influence’. Under the circumstances the Duke was not prepared to bring forward any measure of the description alluded to by Lord Grey – he did not mention the fearful word Reform.
As if this was not sufficiently clear, Wellington proceeded to speak even more emphatically: ‘He was not only not prepared to bring forward any measure of this nature, but he would at once declare that as far as he was concerned, as long as he held any station in the government of the country, he would always feel it his duty to resist such measures when proposed by others.’ At first the Lords sat in silence: a stunned silence. Then the murmuring began as the implications of the Prime Minister’s message began to sink in.
Did the Iron Duke himself have some inkling of the stark – and starkly confrontational – nature of what he had just said? There is some evidence that he did. ‘I have not said too much, have I?’ he asked the Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, at his side. ‘You’ll hear of it,’ replied Aberdeen. But to someone else on his way out who asked what the Duke had said, Aberdeen was more explicit. ‘He said that we were going out,’ the Foreign Secretary observed.30
*
Almost immediately the first part of Lord Aberdeen’s prophecy came into effect. Everyone could soon hear the noise of outraged reaction to the Duke’s speech. The fires, the hooliganism, the sheer unpredictable behaviour of mobs, especially in London, alarmed not only the Government but also the royal establishment. This constituted a particular problem at this juncture since the King and Queen were destined by immemorial custom to attend the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in the City on 9 November.* Under the circumstances – the glass windows of the great houses being a particular hazard – the Government advised the King not to attend.
This direct obeisance to popular violence was hailed for what it was by Francis Place: ‘This is the first time, observe, that apprehension of violence by the people against all administration has induced them openly to change their plan of proceeding.’ And Place went further – just as Wellington had done. ‘This is the first step of the BRITISH REVOLUTION,’ he wrote.31 By 7 November the theatres were closed for ‘very fear’; in the commercial world, the jewellers and silversmiths shut up shop and sent their goods to the banks while the merchants barricaded their warehouses. Consols (consolidated annuities) were a redeemable government stock set up in 1751 whose price was an important indication of how the stability of the State was regarded. After Wellington’s speech they fell sharply. In Europe – to the annoyance of the English – there was publicly expressed wonder (which was certainly imbued with Schadenfreude, given the recent revolutions there) that the King of England could not venture out in his own capital to dine with the Lord Mayor. In the meantime the Birmingham Political Union under Attwood’s leadership petitioned the King to dismiss his Ministers.
As Wellington’s totally unexpected, rigorous speech crystallized certain wavering attitudes concerning Reform – the Huskissonite Tories found themselves in alliance with the Whigs – so the unlooked-for cancellation of a very public occasion confronted the ruling classes with the possibility, however remote, of losing control. Nowhere was this felt more strongly than in St James’s Palace, where the King and Queen resided – the frugal William IV regarding Buckingham Palace as too expensive. Mrs Arbuthnot reported that the King was ‘very much frightened, the Queen cries half the day with fright’. This robustly Tory lady added in her passionate style: ‘And all about nothing.’ These violent people did not want Reform; ‘what they want is plunder’ or, to put it bluntly, ‘those who have nothing want the property of those who have something’. The faithful acolyte then summed up the great Duke’s point of view succinctly: Wellington felt that the beginning of Reform was the beginning of Revolution.32
Wellington himself remained characteristically calm, telling the Knight of Kerry crisply on 6 November that he did not have the leisure to discuss parliamentary Reform; at the same time strict precautions were taken at his splendid London residence, Apsley House, with its many windows facing Hyde Park. Armed men were stationed at the more vulnerable windows such as the Duchess’s bathroom and the Duke’s bedroom. Instructions were clear: no one was to fire unless the gates were actually broken open and an intruder entered the garden over the railings. Wellington also bore with his usual contemptuous equanimity the jeers of the crowd, and shouts of ‘No Polignac’ – a reference to the French Prime Minister of the recently departed government. He told Princess Lieven ‘that Reform could no more be carried without him than the Catholic Question; that he would have nothing to do with it, and consequently that nothing would be done’. Grey in turn commented to the Princess on the ‘blind presumption of the man’.33
Obviously such a situation could not long obtain, with Hunt and Cobbett addressing the crowds at the Rotunda at Blackfriars Bridge – a famous Radical meeting place – ‘in the most seditious manner’. On 9 November a large mob paraded in the City, went on to Temple Bar and, armed with wood taken from a convenient fence in Chancery Lane, proceeded to beat the police with gusto. The police regrouped and, collecting more men, beat them back. This particular episode of rioting ended without fatal injuries – but with many broken heads. Around the House of Lords itself there were cries of ‘No Tyrants!’ Of course on paper all the strength was with the military: Harriet Granville, the Whig hostess, heard that when a member of the crowd shouted ‘Liberty or Death!’ at a soldier, he replied with menace: ‘I am very sorry I cannot give you Liberty, but I can give you Death if you like it at this very moment.’34 And that was certainly true enough. But the balance was shifting.
There was an increasing number of liberal-minded Tories.* A significant intervention in the House of Lords came from the Duke of Richmond on 8 November. This Tory grandee had a rich country life on his Goodwood Estates, where he dispensed princely hospitality and was celebrated for the breed of sheep which he had made the pride of the Sussex downs; his racing interests were crowned by his Stewardship of the Jockey Club. Richmond, a man of fine appearance, was ‘personally liked’ according to Greville (even if his intelligence was not rated very highly). Regardless of this possible defect, he struck another contemporary as the finest specimen of the purely English nobleman that he had ever met.35
Descended from Charles II via a royal mistress, Richmond had been a brave soldier, ADC to Wellington in the Peninsular War and present at Waterloo; he had also been MP for Chichester for seven years before succeeding to his father’s dukedom. He was professedly anti-Catholic (he was Provincial Grand Master of the Freemasons from 1819 onwards) and had left the Tory Party in protest against Catholic Emancipation. To him, however, Reform was a very different issue.
Now Richmond responded robustly to the Ultra Tory Marquess of Londonderry (a famously splenetic orator in his party’s cause): ‘he believed, when the hour of danger came, that the people would rally round the Throne’, but the only way to bring about that surge of support was to form a government which really possessed their confidence. If that were achieved ‘he would stake his character and his very existence – that the Sovereign might go as he pleased into the heart of his City of London without the assistance of police or the protection of guards, and be borne along amid the joyous cheers of a loving and delighted people’. As to Reform: he was no friend to it and would be last to yield to the clamours of the mob; but he agreed with those who thought that some Reform was necessary, and he was prepared to concede the demands of the people.36 Richmond, by implication, was already drawing an important distinction between the ‘mob’, a hateful revolutionary lot, probably drunk, certainly violent, and ‘the people’ who had certain not unreasonable needs.
On this same day there was a markedly intemperate debate in the House of Commons. Lord Althorp, who had recently been chosen as the leader of the Whigs there, described the cancellation of the royal visit as ‘one of the most extraordinary and alarming events he had known’. Brougham spoke, probably with more truth, of ‘the most awful mercantile inconvenience’. For the Government, Peel aimed to chill the blood as he described the thousands of handbills which had been circulated with inflammatory messages. One, calling for ‘Liberty or Death!’, was signed by ‘An Englishman calling for an armed response’. Another reported that a thousand cutlasses had been removed from the Tower for the use of PEEL’S BLOODY GANG and urged all London to come armed for a meeting on Tuesday.37
Then Peel moved from the general to the particular. He read aloud an anonymous letter to Wellington foretelling attacks on ‘your Grace’s person’; at which there was cheering and laughter from the Opposition benches. ‘Good God! a sarcastic cheer!’ said Peel, ‘and from an officer in the army too’ – the reference was to a Colonel Davies, whose cheering had been particularly loud. Davies later leapt to his feet to explain the cheer. Impudently, he suggested that he had cheered out of sheer relief at finding that it was the unpopularity of Wellington, not that of the King, which had caused the cancellation. Was it really the Prime Minister’s intention, he asked, to bring down the King’s popularity to the same level as his own? Sir James Graham hammered in the Whig message when he pointed out that only a week previously the King had gone to the theatre without any problem; it was Wellington’s declaration against Reform which had started it all. In short, this declaration had made him ‘the most unpopular Minister that was ever known in England’.
The King remained extremely supportive of Wellington, and even bravely offered to take him back from the Guildhall in his own carriage, which would have exposed the royal person to abuse intended for the politician; yet one thing had to be faced. The obstacle of Wellington’s unflinching denunciation remained. As even the loyal Mrs Arbuthnot admitted: ‘The grand difficulty is the question of reform.’38
It was hardly to be expected that the Whigs outside Parliament would remain quiescent during these tempestuous times. Whether it was a dinner given by Brougham or a providential meeting between leading Whigs when riding in the park (the contemporary equivalent of jogging) or the biggest Opposition meeting yet held at the house of Lord Althorp on 13 November, there was a universal feeling that the chase was on. For one thing the Huskissonite Tories had been obliged at last to recognize that their views were closer to the Whigs than those of their parliamentary leader and gave an official welcome to Reform, so long as the terms were kept general. The Whig motion agreed on 13 November was certainly general enough, as it took into consideration ‘the state of representation of the people in Parliament’ with a view to unspecified action ‘to remedy such defects as may appear therein’.39
Two days later, in a vote in the House of Commons on this mild motion, the Government was defeated – coincidentally there was a fire at Wellington’s country palace of Stratfield Saye in Hampshire, among other ramping depredations of a Swing type. Immediately Lord Grey, with his penchant for addressing a female audience in private, wrote to Princess Lieven about the vote: ‘You desired me to send you anything piquant. What do you think of this?’ The vote actually went against the Government by 233 to 204 votes; the county Members voting 47 to 15 against. As for the Ultra Tories, in the key defection three-quarters of them voted against their own Government. The MP John Wilson Croker, trenchant and brilliant in equal measure, wrote succinctly in his Diary: ‘We are out.’ Young Lord Durham, Grey’s handsome, impetuous son-in-law, put it even more crudely: ‘We gave them a good licking.’40
Wellington maintained to the end that aloofness from popular reality which, it might be argued, had been responsible for the crisis in the first place. On the night of the vote he was at Apsley House giving a dinner. At 10 p.m. he asked the Marquess of Worcester, heir to the Duke of Beaufort, to go down to the House and find out the majority – the majority for the Government, that is. Worcester was bowling down St James’s in a cabriolet when a friend called out to him:
‘You are too late, the division has taken place.’
‘Well, what are the numbers?’
‘233 to 204,’ was the simple reply.
Worcester, satisfied, duly turned back to Apsley House. He related the exact totals to the Duke, still imagining the vote had gone in the Government’s favour. Wellington in turn jumped to the same erroneous conclusion and exclaimed: ‘What! No more? I don’t understand it.’41
The delusion persisted. The Countess of Jersey was a powerful Tory hostess whose hauteur frightened all but the bravest hearts – Disraeli would introduce her as ‘Queen Sarah’ in his novel Endymion. She went on to a reception at Princess Lieven’s and denounced a guest there for suggesting that the Government had been defeated. When she finally learnt the truth, Lady Jersey burst into tears. There is evidence that Wellington himself was taken aback. Princess Lieven boldly asked him:
‘Why did you let it come about unless you meant it to end like this?’
‘Devil take me, no!’ Wellington replied.
He was ‘absolutely surprised’ when told they were beaten. When the Princess questioned Peel about it at dinner, the consummate politician indicated that Wellington had been far too explicit: ‘one may do everything, but one should not say everything’.42
The next morning, early, Wellington resigned. In the afternoon the King sent for Lord Grey to form a government. As The Times put it: ‘There has not been, within our memory, a resignation of an entire Cabinet, upon which public opinion may be said to have borne so directly and so powerfully.’ What a change in that opinion His Grace the Duke had experienced within a single fortnight, ‘which he had the misfortune to produce by his own words’.43
* J.R.M. Butler, in his seminal study The Passing of the Great Reform Bill, first published in 1914, largely written in 1912, wrote of this period that the word democracy occupied the position which ‘Socialism holds today’.29 It was understood to mean ‘something vaguely terrible which might “come” and would “come”’. A more recent comparison might be to the word Communism in the USA in the McCarthyite era.
* It was a custom abandoned by King Edward VII at the beginning of the twentieth century.
* Although the word ‘liberal’ was not quite so pejorative as ‘democratic’ in the early nineteenth century, it did not always have the modern connotation. It will however be used from time to time as an adjective.