‘The Tories believe in the divine right of Kings and the Whigs believe in the divine right of noblemen and gentlemen’ –
Thomas Dolby, The Cyclopedia of Laconics, c. 1832
The Whig world from which the new Government sprang was one of wealth and privilege. The Duke of Devonshire was perhaps the wealthiest of all, with an income of over £400,000 a year (roughly £40 million); but in acreage owned many of the individual Whigs were fabulously well endowed. This was an age when the average man left nothing, or at least nothing probate statistics considered property.1 Compared to this, the wealth of the Whigs set them apart even if there were exceptions like Lord John Russell, a younger son, who was dependent on salaries and legacies. But Lord Grey was a substantial landowner, for all that the demands of a large family produced financial difficulties from time to time. Lord Althorp would inherit £160,000 (£16 million) from his father at the end of this period, together with enormous land interests spread across various counties, producing a vast income. Lord Holland’s immense London properties added value to his fortune.
The Whig world was also one where a concept of public duty coexisted with a healthy sense that the Whigs need not abandon all thoughts of self-advantage in order to fulfil their noble ideals. No more than any other political party – or politician – were the Whigs free from ambition. Since worlds of wealth and privilege inevitably incur the opprobrium of those who dwell outside them, there were many sneers on this subject. The Tories, ran one contemporary saying, believed in the divine right of Kings; the Whigs believed in the divine right of noblemen and gentlemen – that is to say, the Whigs. Like many sneers, this contained a particle of the truth but not the whole truth. Another tale summed up that complacency which Whigs did tend to feel: a little girl asked her mother, ‘Mamma, are Tories born wicked, or do they grow wicked afterwards?’ To which the mother replied, ‘They are born wicked and grow worse.’2
It would however be fairer to say, as the convinced Tory Croker observed to Brougham long after the struggle was over, that there were two antagonistic principles at the root of all government – stability and experiment. The former was Tory and the latter Whig. A Whig like the Anglo-Irish Lord Duncannon, for example, grew up with a philosophy of a duty to govern, along with the feeling of a right to do so. Perhaps Charles James Fox, the Whig hero who had died in 1806, put it best when he talked of ‘something being due to one’s station in life, something to friendship, something to the country’.3
That was the good side of the Whig philosophy; of course it had another side, as when the grandee Lord Holland, who had been at Harrow, criticized the self-educated – among whom so many of the Radicals including Francis Place would have to be included. They were, he thought, ‘peculiarly conceited and arrogant and apt to look down on the generality of mankind from their being ignorant of how much other people knew, not having been at public schools’. There were satires aplenty on the subject of the Whigs; a verse about the ‘Young Whig’ declared:
He talks quite grand of Grant and Grey;
He jests at Holland House;
He dines extremely every day
On ortolans and grouse.4
Returning to their good qualities, the Whigs were loyal to each other, never leaving a friend in the lurch according to Emily Cowper, mistress and later wife of Lord Palmerston. The celebrated Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review drew attention to their ‘frankness, cheerfulness, and sweet-blooded courage’. The painter Haydon summed up the general feeling of reluctant admiration: there was ‘nothing like ’em when they add intelligence to breeding’.5
Obviously men who shared these ideals formed a powerful network. It was all the more powerful for the intricate connections of blood which bound them together and led, inevitably, to that charge of nepotism already mentioned in connection with Grey.* It was perfectly accurate to describe them as ‘the Great Grandmotherhood’, given the fact that the (Althorp) Spencers, Russells, (Duncannon) Bessboroughs and Devonshires all had descent from Lavinia Countess Spencer in common. As Lord Melbourne admitted, the Whigs really did all seem to be cousins.6
Such connections were continued into the younger generations: Duncannon’s son married Lord Durham’s daughter (who was herself a granddaughter of Lord Grey, since Durham had married Lady Louisa Grey in 1816), Duncannon and Althorp were first cousins, as were Althorp and the Duke of Devonshire. An addiction to family connections was as much part of the Whig philosophy as sport – racing and cricket – agriculture on their great estates or indeed that enlightened Francophilia. It was the latter which had years ago made them among those gravely disappointed in the outcome of the French Revolution. Sydney Smith chose to refer to the absolute monarch Louis XIV as ‘that old Beast’, which was amusing, but left the problem of Robespierre’s terror-enforced rule unsolved.7
Whigs were characterized not only by their wealth but also their great houses; some of these, such as Devonshire House and Lansdowne House, were in London. Most famously Holland House lay in Kensington, just outside the official boundaries of London. Lady Holland herself waxed eloquent on the subject of the ‘fresh air, verdure and singing birds’ to be found surrounding the Jacobean dwelling after ‘the dense vapours, gas lights and din of London’; the ‘evil-smelling and dismal’ atmosphere of the capital, due to the effects of coal and steam, being a favourite source of complaint at the time among great ladies.8 In this semi-rural – but highly political – paradise, guests often found it convenient to spend the night after dining, with the increased intimacy that involved. Furthermore King William, whose visits to London houses were subject to etiquette, could dine freely at Holland House as being technically in the country.
In another way there was an outsider quality to Holland House. Years ago the beautiful, bold Elizabeth Vassall, already the wife of another man, had captured the heart of the young Lord Holland. His lines ‘All eyes are Vassals: Thou alone a Queen’ summed up his lifelong devotion to this mesmerizing and capricious woman, then the wife of Sir Godfrey Webster.9 Divorce and remarriage followed but not before an illegitimate son, named for his celebrated Fox great-uncle, had been born to the couple.
To her husband, Elizabeth Holland remained Cleopatra: (‘I loved you much at forty four/I love you better at three score,’ he wrote). To others she was genuinely terrifying: Sydney Smith suggested that London apothecaries should prepare a special draught of medicine for those frightened by Lady Holland. Nevertheless, many young men of promise such as Macaulay benefited from her patronage and she was adept at picking such for her salon. Macaulay described her to his sister as ‘a great lady, fanciful, hysterical and hypochondriacal’, at once ‘ill-natured and good-natured, afraid of ghosts and not of God’; he compared her to Queen Elizabeth when old. The word ‘womanly’, she once told the young MP, was one she hated since it was always used as a term of reproach. Macaulay commented that it was hardly likely to apply to her . . . All the same Lady Holland had an acute political eye and also, one might say, an eye for the main chance: her immediate reaction to the accession of Louis-Philippe was to enlist Talleyrand, the new French Ambassador, to supervise the sending of the chic muslin caps she required from France.
At Holland House there was a subliminal feeling that the usual rules did not apply; perhaps it originated with Lady Holland’s dubious position as a divorced woman (not being received at Court, for example). This might apply to the hospitality itself: the hostess, treating her homme d’affaires the librarian Dr John Allen as ‘a negro slave’, made and unmade seating arrangements according to whim; fifteen people regularly sat at a table intended for nine – although it was probably more important to the guests that the cheeses at Holland House were proverbially excellent. As for Holland himself, contemporaries agreed that he was a man of rare charm; even if his Foxite physical appearance, with his heavy brows and equally weighty figure, made him resemble ‘a turbot on its tail’ when he wore a white tie. Devoted as he might be to the memory of Fox, he was an equally loyal supporter of Lord Grey. Indeed, he penned his own self-effacing epitaph, found after his death:
Nephew of Fox, and friend of Grey,
Enough my mead of fame . . .
In sum, the sheer exciting enterprise of society at Holland House, as well as the host and hostess, made it a vital element in the Whig world.10
Other Whig houses were in the country proper, ready for the round of sporting visits at the appropriate seasons which could also be the occasion of political planning. There was for example Bowood, the house of the Marquess of Lansdowne in Wiltshire; Woburn, the seat of the Duke of Bedford; the great houses of Lord Fitzwilliam at Wentworth Woodhouse and Lord Spencer at Althorp in Northamptonshire; and there was Holkham, lived in by the intelligent, liberal-minded agriculturalist Thomas Coke of Norfolk. These houses were of course centres of political influence in another sense, in that the owners would through their position be nominating MPs to seats.
The Whigs also benefited from the development of the Club system in London following the Napoleonic Wars.11 The busy, enjoyably exclusive gatherings which took place at Brooks’s Club, originally a gambling club, could not fail to be extremely influential given the long years of Whig Opposition. Of course the clique within it incurred hostility, as cliques do: Francis Place, for example, referred with scorn to the ‘half dandy, half idiot fashionable people’ who sometimes condescended to notice their so-called inferiors.12 It was significant in this context that the Carlton Club (originally the Tory Club) was only founded in the atmosphere of potential Tory defeat of March 1832; it had the laudable ambition ‘to be the best in London’, an implied answer to the success of the Whig powerhouse Brooks’s or White’s Club nearby whose membership was frequently said to be politically ‘indiscriminate’.*
Not every Club was avowedly political; the Athenaeum, for example, the inspiration of John Wilson Croker, had a different aim: Croker considered that ‘literary men and artists’ required ‘a place of rendez-vous also’, so that, with the exception of bishops and judges, there had to be a publication of sorts to qualify for membership. In principle this was the beginning of what has been described as ‘the Golden Age of the Clubs’ fanning out from the intense interest of the Whigs in such associations.13 It was the principle of association which was being underlined, just as the working classes and even middle classes – notably Thomas Attwood – were beginning to discover the same principle in the formation of unions.
As Grey came to form his Government, the first real drama which occurred centred on Henry Brougham. There were two complications. The first concerned the high income which Brougham earned, not supplemented by landed wealth. Offered the post of Attorney-General in the House of Commons, he declared himself unable to accept on the grounds that he might one day lose his seat, and thus be condemned to penury. Then there was the question of the leadership of the House of Commons: the Whigs were adopting one of their new heroes in Lord Althorp at their head – as with many English heroes, an unlikely one – and it was not felt helpful to have Brougham diminishing his authority. This put the emphasis on the post of Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords: highly paid and with a lifetime pension at the end of it, this position of immense distinction would surely suit Brougham. But would it suit the Whigs to have the dazzling but unstable Brougham thus elevated – would it suit the King and country? It could be argued that this was not necessarily a political role and there is evidence that some efforts were made towards retaining the Tory Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst.14
This remarkable self-made man, born in America but brought up in England, the son of the painter John Singleton Copley, added to a handsome appearance a speaking voice whose ‘rich, melodious tone’ reminded some hearers of Mephistopheles in Faust. Lyndhurst was famous for the cunning of his persuasive arguments coupled with a fabled air of sincerity; he was certainly a brilliant lawyer, even if the sincerity was sometimes in doubt. Lyndhurst was also one of those who had spoken up against Catholic Emancipation, describing the Roman Catholic religion in 1827 as ‘one of encroachment’. Yet for a moment in mid-November it seemed that Lyndhurst might be retained especially as he, like Brougham without inherited wealth to back him, feared to lose his £10,000 a year salary as Lord Chancellor.
There was furthermore a private complication in the shape of Lady Lyndhurst. There were two aspects to Dolly Lyndhurst’s public reputation. On the one hand her striking looks were generally admired: extremely handsome and so dark, according to Creevey, that she was ‘very near a woman of colour’, Dolly was compared to portraits by Leonardo da Vinci. On the other hand her character was rather less favourably judged: ‘an underbred creature,’ thought Maria Edge-worth; all the better-bred ladies hated her. There were rumours of affairs, including a scandalous one with the royal Duke of Cumberland, and a current one with Lord Dudley, and even an unpleasant implication that Lyndhurst was not totally put out by such a situation. Among her admirers was said to be Lord Grey who, despite his domestic bliss, was never one to cut and run where a predatory pretty face was concerned and frequently sat, apparently enchanted, by her side at receptions. Lord Ellenborough recorded in his Diary that it was a misfortune for Lyndhurst to have such a wife ‘and be led by her . . . to acts which discredit him’. As to Dolly’s feelings for Lyndhurst, Greville reported that she detested him as a husband while desiring him as a partner.15
It was the loyal if discreditable Dolly who now spent all day on 17 November attempting to persuade Lord Grey, via his son-in-law Lord Durham, to retain Lyndhurst as Lord Chancellor. Yet despite being described as ‘the fool of women’ – which great hostesses like Princess Lieven certainly believed – it was strange how Grey was never actually persuaded to do anything he did not want to do in the first place. The Princess congratulated herself, for example, on securing the position of Foreign Secretary for Lord Palmerston; but Grey, while listening to her blandishments, had every intention of doing this anyway. Once his long-term ally Lord Holland had turned down the Foreign Secretaryship on grounds of health (he suffered from gout) and the Marquess of Lansdowne preferred to be Lord President of the Council, the choice of Palmerston with his many useful Tory contacts was a conciliatory measure to the Reform-minded Tories.
In the same way Grey recognized that Brougham’s appointment to the post was a convenient solution on two grounds: first it secured Brougham’s loyalty (as well as his finances). Second, it left the battleground which would be the House of Commons to the generalship of Lord Althorp. So Brougham took his seat on the Woolsack as Lord Chancellor under the title of Baron Brougham and Vaux; the latter addition, ascribed to descent from the Vaux family, was considered pretentious, even dubious by some; but then Brougham always attracted a measure of ridicule along with the admiration. More to the point, when he took his seat on 22 November, those present included the royal Dukes of Gloucester and Sussex (the latter a known friend to Reform) and Prince Leopold, widower of Princess Charlotte and a contender for the new Belgian throne. There was now an established feel to the wayward Brougham.
Grey’s Cabinet, when it was formed, had as its bedrock the Whigs – and the Whig cousinship. He had promoted, it transpired, a formidable number of his close relatives and connections. It was not totally unjust that Lord Lytton, in a colourful passage, contrasted the fuss when King William appointed his illegitimate son as Constable of the Tower with the acceptance of Grey’s nepotism: ‘My lord Grey! What son-what brother-what nephew-what cousin-what remote and unconjectured relative in the Genesis of the Greys has not fastened his limpet to the rock of the national expenditure? Attack the propriety of these appointments, and what haughty rebukes from the Minister will you not receive.’
The Earl of Ellenborough, a Tory peer, noted drily in his Diary that three of Grey’s sons-in-law were members of the Government: Durham, Charles Wood, who acted as his Private Secretary throughout this vital period, and George Barrington.16 Then there were Grey’s brothers-in-law: Edward Ellice, husband of Lady Hannah Grey, as a Government Whip, and George Ponsonby, Lady Grey’s brother, on the Treasury Board; to say nothing of his son and heir Lord Howick, Under Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. Ellenborough, who began his Diary in 1828 when he joined Wellington’s Ministry, noted that altogether they were costing the State £16,000 a year (roughly £1.5 million in modern money). Understandably, the self-created Brougham repeated the charge in his memoirs.
One might point out the similar surge forward of Sir Robert Peel’s relatives – William, Jonathan and Edmund Peel all stood in the 1830 Election, as did his brother-in-law George Dawson: in short this was the mentality of the age. Yet even Grey’s supporters, such as The Times, believed there was a case to answer. Harriet Martineau in her history, published only a few years after Grey’s death, thought that this was the only derogatory charge which could be made against him.17 Grey himself would have replied that this was the responsibility of his class; just as he personally drew attention to the acres owned by his Cabinet – in excess of anything previously recorded – as giving them an enormous stake in the country.
A better defence of this particular Cabinet would be its deliberately conciliatory nature at a time when the national mood was so aggressively against anything in the nature of compromise. This was an attempt at a coalition, in short, with Tories like the Duke of Richmond as Postmaster General alongside impassioned Whigs such as Lord Durham as Lord Privy Seal. Canningite Tories were included, such as Lord Goderich – who had briefly been a Tory Prime Minister – at the Colonial Office. Lord Melbourne was Home Secretary, Lord Althorp Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as Leader of the Commons. But then Charles Grant, a former Canningite, was President of the Board of Control for India. Of the thirteen-strong Cabinet, it was noteworthy that Grant was the only member without a title of any sort (Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty, was a Baronet). There was a Duke, a Marquess, two Earls, four Viscounts and one simple Baron in the shape of Lord Holland.
Where appointments for Scotland and Ireland were concerned, Scotland drew upon the intelligentsia in the shape of the celebrated Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review as Lord Advocate, with Henry Cockburn as Solicitor-General. Edward Stanley, heir to the Earl of Derby, was Chief Secretary for Ireland with the Marquess of Anglesey, incidentally another Canningite, as Lord Lieutenant.
The man chosen as Foreign Secretary, the forty-six-year-old Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston was also a Canningite Tory; in some ways he was innately conservative. In Ireland, for example, in 1828 he believed in the ‘sword and musket’ as the best method of preserving tranquillity, and elsewhere the execution or transportation of rioters.18 Palmerston had sat as the Member for Cambridge University – not an especially liberal constituency – roughly for the last twenty years. One of the Russell family who spent his lifetime in the political world recollected Palmerston’s ‘slipshod and untidy style’ of oratory, sentences larded with ‘hums’ and ‘hahs’, sentences eked out with phrases such as ‘You know what I mean’ and ‘all that kind of thing’. In private however the Duchess of Dino, Talleyrand’s niece, found his conversation ‘dry but not wanting in wit’.19
Palmerston was clever, with a rich, raffish personality, emphasized by his long-time connection to the beautiful Whig hostess Emily Countess Cowper (Melbourne’s sister). Once described as ‘grace put in action, whose softness was as seductive as her joyousness’, Emily Cowper finally married Palmerston some years later, following her widowhood. Above all, Palmerston believed in the need for Reform. In October 1830 the Tory John Wilson Croker visited him with regard to a place in Wellington’s threatened Ministry and asked Palmerston directly:
‘Are you resolved, or are you not, to vote for Parliamentary Reform?’
‘I am,’ he replied.
‘Well then,’ retorted Croker, ‘there is no use talking to you any more on this subject. You and I, I am grieved to see, shall never again sit on the same bench together.’20
In spite of Croker’s huff, Palmerston remained an important potential link to the Reform-minded Tories.
Another man conservative by nature yet a part of the Whig world was Palmerston’s future brother-in-law William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, who became Home Secretary. Melbourne’s aristocratic appearance – ‘refined and handsome’ in the words of Haydon – was supported by the careless elegance of his dress. It was said that ‘no one ever happened to have coats that fitted better’.21 Melbourne’s private life was no more straightforward than that of his sister Emily; but his wayward wife Lady Caroline Lamb, erstwhile mistress of Lord Byron, had died in 1828, four years after their official separation. As William Lamb he had been a Member of the House of Commons until 1829 and, as a Canningite, acted as Chief Secretary for Ireland for a year in the Wellington Government until his father died and he joined the Lords. It will be seen that Melbourne, like Palmerston, had the possibility of acting as a bridge with his former colleagues. He was certainly not a passionate reformer – more of an aristocratic pragmatist who thought that Reform was preferable to a collapse of the regime, as had happened recently in France.
In the climate of expectation – or dread – which followed the formation of the Whig Government in mid-November 1830, disturbances in the country grew rather than diminished. Aggression was expressed in many different ways. For the political unions, in their infancy, it took the form of meetings. There was nothing straightforward or indeed programmed about their growth – at one point the Duke of Wellington, for example, had to be told that they actually had existed when he was Prime Minister.22 The Birmingham Political Union was obviously a formative influence and there would be many copies. At the same time the early unions – whatever their detractors might say – were essentially non-violent, this being a central tenet of Attwood’s creed. Open-air banquets, open-air meetings, speeches, declamatory speeches – all these were symptoms of popular discontent rather than revolutionary calls to arms. Lord Grey complained about ‘the large assemblages’ near the new ‘great town’ of Manchester, under the direction of the local trade union, to protest against the low rate of wages offered by the master manufacturers; but he did not suggest that their methods were crudely violent.23
The more ferocious disturbances in the country did not necessarily have a central unifying theme and were dealt with in a variety of different ways. For example on 24 November the Duke of Buckingham felt impelled to organize a ‘feudal levy’ among his tenants, in order to repel rioters at Itchen Abbas in Hampshire, who were surrounding his Avington House estate; forty or fifty prisoners were taken. On the same date, magistrates in Norfolk dealing with rioters of the Swing variety thought fit to comment on the need for landowners to provide employment, with the implication that there was more to rioting than the mere need to show violent resistance to lawful authority.24 This attempt at understanding was in direct contradiction to the resolution of the Cabinet on 4 December that magistrates should be urged to show no weakness. Lord Melbourne sent a circular to his local magistrates dictating that on no account should they pander to the poor. At the end of the year he reiterated this stalwart sentiment: ‘to force nothing but force can be successfully opposed’.25 Meantime machine-breaking was becoming rife on the Norfolk-Suffolk coastline. Nor were the disturbances confined to the south: near Carlisle there was a huge fire caused by some disaffected weavers.
The Royal Hospital in Chelsea, home to military pensioners, had various ‘out-pensioners’ on whom it could call; these were now supposed to volunteer to supplement the efforts of police, existing military forces and feudal levies. Two warships – sloops – were sent to the Tyne in case the current ‘insurrectionary spirit’ extended there. One solution to this militant spirit, favoured at the time, was the encouragement of emigration: tacitly it was accepted that lack of employment – and thus potential starvation – might not necessarily be cured by force. The revolutionary nature of the times, in which among others Wellington and his former Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen profoundly believed, received graphic illustration when a ‘shabby-looking’ man with a pistol and a knife was found trying to get into the House of Lords with the apparent aim of assassinating Wellington (the Iron Duke maintained his usual cool on hearing this news).26 The crowds in St James’s were believed to be uniformly hostile – or at any rate, only the hostile gave voice.
Punitive measures of the sort Melbourne approved continued: at a special commission which sat at Winchester, to try charges of Swing-type insurrection, there were 285 people up for trial; of these 101 were capitally convicted, six destined for execution and sixty-nine to be transported for life. On the other hand, on 18 December there was a meeting at Beardsworth’s Repository in Birmingham, at which a petition of rights was to be entrusted to the Earl of Radnor to present to the House of Lords; this was certainly mild enough. By the end of 1830 there were apparently two possible courses that the country could take.
Everything for the moment hung on the future of Reform. ‘Lambton, I wish you would take our Reform Bill in hand.’ Thus Lord Grey, casually on the steps of the House of Commons, addressed his son-in-law ‘Radical Jack’ Lambton, Lord Durham.27 And so a Committee of Four was formed: Lord Althorp; Lord John Russell, Paymaster General but still just outside the Cabinet; Lord Duncannon, who became First Commissioner of Land Revenue (that is, Woods and Forests) early next year; and Durham himself. In their different ways, these men would all be essential to the committee’s progress.
John Spencer Viscount Althorp was one of those extraordinary characters who might be described as the quintessential Whig of his time – except that his sheer eccentricity made him quite unlike anyone else. He was now forty-eight and had been a Member of the Commons, sitting first for Okehampton, then established in Northamptonshire, for twenty-six years; although, as the eldest son, the threat of succeeding to his father’s title of Earl Spencer hung over him, so that the health of the frail Lord Spencer was a matter of practical concern throughout this period.
‘Honest Jack’ Althorp’s private life had been curiously romantic for such an apparently stolid man. He had made what was in effect an arranged marriage to an heiress named Esther Acklom, endowed not so much with beauty as with a fortune of £10,000 a year; but then her intelligence and wit won him over: the couple had fallen in love with each other. Esther’s early death, leaving no children, meant that Althorp resolved never to marry again; what was more, he gave up his beloved hunting (he had been Master of the Pytchley) as a tribute to her memory and resolved to wear black for the rest of his life. Poignantly, he referred to the alterations to their estate they had planned together: ‘I miss more than I can say her, to whom alone I could tell their success or failure, with a certainty of her feeling as much or more interest in them than myself.’28
Althorp’s real interests were undoubtedly rooted in the country. He was the founder of the Yorkshire Agricultural Society; at his property at Wiseton he built up a herd of shorthorns, begun by buying a bull called Regent in 1818. Now his prize bulls, with names like Roman and Ivanhoe (Sir Walter Scott’s novel was published in 1819), were the widower’s pride and joy, a substitute for the happy married life he no longer enjoyed; he was painted with one of them, his bluff farmer’s appearance making him appear a suitable member of the herd. For Jack Althorp had nothing visibly of the aristocrat about him. The Morning Post would ridicule him thus:
Most rustic ALTHORP, honest, stupid, dull
Blunderer in thoughts, thy ev’ry act a bull.
But such crude lampoons missed one great quality of this man, clumsy speaker, most rustic by inclination as he might be. ‘Honest Jack’, as the nickname indicated, was seen by one and all as trustworthy and as such could command respect at the very least over the most difficult issues.
This perceived innate decency explained his mastery of the House of Commons, where he had been chosen as Leader in March 1830, despite his deficiencies as an orator (‘a better speaker in every vestry in England’ was one contemporary comment). Francis Jeffrey commented on this decency in his correspondence with Lord Cockburn: ‘There is something to me quite delightful in his calm, clumsy, courteous, inimitable probity and well-meaning and it seems to have charm for everybody.’ As a more hostile observer – a Tory – ruefully expressed it: ‘Oh, it was his damn good temper did all the mischief.’29 Even the bull he most resembled was John Bull, a cartoon figure beginning to evolve as the type of honest, incorruptible Englishman.
Yet the trustworthiness was only part of the picture. Jack Althorp, if he did not let it show, was actually a clever man: perhaps this very diffidence qualified him to be the type of John Bull; he had gone from being a popular but undistinguished schoolboy at Harrow (he excelled at boxing, a sport he continued to patronize in later life), to gaining two first-classes in his mathematical exams at Cambridge; Althorp’s capacity for intellectual curiosity took a practical turn when he set about learning chemistry in order to apply it to agriculture. Thus intricate legal clauses in committee presented no difficulties to him, even if he always felt like a man about to be hanged before speaking in the House of Commons.30
By Althorp’s own account, Cambridge had been important to him in another way since it was here that he began to discover the political philosophy – that of the Whigs – which would be his other passion in life. He told Sir Denis Le Marchant* that it was at Cambridge he found the Whigs so much more to his taste than the Tories. Althorp’s Whig connections helped him fit easily into the House of Commons. A few months in Italy during the brief peace at the beginning of the century made him, in his own words, ‘a determined liberal’. It was a comfort to Althorp that he had never voted against the Whig hero, Charles James Fox.31
Part of Althorp’s trustworthiness lay in his very lack of ambition – another very English quality. In November 1830 Althorp wrote to his fellow committee member Lord John Russell about his own motives for taking office: ‘I have not been able to escape, and have been obliged to sacrifice myself; for to me it is an entire sacrifice.’32 The man to whom he wrote the words was a politician of a very different ilk. Politics was in the blood of Lord John Russell: in 1819, at the time he was adopting the cause of parliamentary Reform, he published a life of his famous radical ancestor, that Lord Russell who had been executed by Charles II for standing up – as he saw it – for the rights of liberty against the Crown. Ten years younger than Althorp, Russell had not joined in that short-lived Whig administration of 1806, only becoming an MP for Tavistock in 1813.
People could not help commenting on Russell’s appearance: with his large head and broad shoulders and notably small body, he caused astonishment when he stood up. His high, stammering voice with its drawling Whig accent added to the picture he presented, which was the reverse of impressive. Russell also lacked the easy warmth of many of the Whigs; as Lytton analysed it:
He wants your vote but your affections not
Yet human hearts need sun as well as oats
So cold a climate plays the deuce with votes.33
Yet as a character Russell had not only intellectual brilliance but extraordinary determination: perhaps that determination he showed in pursuing those causes in which he believed, such as parliamentary Reform, was inspired not only by the Whig principles of the great Russell family, but by his need to overcome physical weakness.
There were other obstacles. As a younger son, Russell was not independently wealthy, unlike many of his colleagues. The new salary, as Paymaster General, of £2,000 a year, with a house, was important to him in a way that simply did not apply to most of the others who, whatever their debts and financial encumbrances, started from a solid base of huge estates. Educated at Westminster and the University of Edinburgh – at a time when Whig aristocrats generally trod the path which led from Eton or Harrow to Oxford or Cambridge – the passion which would lead Sydney Smith to dub him Lord John Reformer was there early; a European tour with Lord and Lady Holland when he was sixteen brought him further into the heart of Whig circles, with their agreeable mix of hedonism and idealism. Russell had a fiery intelligence which he had already used to attack the Test and Corporation Acts.
The third member of the committee, John William Ponsonby, Viscount Duncannon was heir to the Earl of Bessborough, hence able to sit in the House of Commons. Like his exact contemporary and first cousin ‘Honest Jack’ Althorp, he had been a Member since his early twenties, for the last four years representing County Kilkenny. (Duncannon’s mother was Harriet, known as Hary-O, sister of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, who once summed up her tumultuous private life involving long absences from her family and the birth of illegitimate children with the words: ‘You know I can never love anything a little.’)34 Duncannon’s Anglo-Irish property and connections meant that he would be able to maintain good relations with the Irish MPs, since he had notably liberal views on Ireland; as a block vote these would be of growing importance in the London Parliament under their leader Daniel O’Connell. He was not a good speaker, as everyone agreed, an appalling stammer handicapping him in public from the start, so that he was cruelly nicknamed Dumbcannon; but in contrast, behind the scenes, with his calm temperament and unruffled manner he was an excellent manager of men – in short, perfect material for a Chief Whip.
And then there was Durham himself, to whom Grey had confided the Bill in that casually patrician manner. There was nothing calm about Durham’s temperament; if Russell would prove to be the crucial intelligence of the quartet, then Durham was its passionate heart. His temper, which he was apparently unable – or unwilling – to check, made him a difficult adversary and an even trickier colleague. As the parliamentary journalist James Grant discreetly commented in his memoirs, ‘he was well known to be of irritable temperament’.35 It was relevant that Lord Durham had been fatherless since the age of five; he would come to regard his father-in-law Lord Grey as a father figure, but of course that relationship implied bad as well as good on the ‘son’s’ side, rebellion as well as respect. Conversely on Grey’s side – and this would prove to be crucial in his attitude to Durham – there was considerable tenderness for the wild, Byronically romantic boy, and keen sympathy for any personal sufferings he might have.
Undeniably Durham was an attractive figure, ‘handsomely formed’, with his jet black eyes and eyelashes so long that there was something slightly feminine about him. Heir to the prominent mining family in northern England – which made him Grey’s neighbour – Durham was now thirty-eight, a decade younger than Althorp and Duncannon; he had been a Member of the House of Commons for the Durham seat since the age of twenty-one, before his elevation to the peerage.
For all Grey’s paternal feelings, it cannot be said that Durham won many golden opinions from outsiders. Princess Lieven described him as ‘the haughtiest aristocrat’ in England, surely a considerable achievement. He could be petty, even vindictive when crossed; one charge against him was that he was an autocrat in the home, who cuffed his servants and spoilt his children, and a democrat abroad: a version of the German saying Hausteufel, Strassenengel: devil in the house, angel in the street.36 Yet he was not known as ‘Radical Jack’ (in contrast to ‘Honest Jack’ Althorp) for nothing. His feelings for Reform were passionately expressed but they were sincere. They were also unchangeable.
Perhaps the fairest verdict was that of the equable Lord Holland in his Diary: ‘No two men are more unalike than Durham when in a good humour and Durham in his angry, tetchy and I am afraid one must add usual mood.’ One historian of this period felicitously compared Durham – ‘in temper and impetuous heart’ – to Achilles:37 this latter-day flawed hero had greeted the recent French Revolution as ‘glorious’ because the liberties of the people had prevailed; now was the time for this formidable but temperamental campaigner to hurl himself on the topic of Reform in his own country.
While the Whig lords gathered to plan and plot, elsewhere the friends of Reform were also beginning to hope. The Unitarian attorney Joseph Parkes wrote to Francis Place on 5 December: ‘I think the Whigs must and therefore will do something real; and when the wand of Reform once touches the body of Corruption she [sic] will soon vanish.’38 Nevertheless Parkes argued for continued demonstrations – just in case the Whigs were tempted to forget their obligations.
As for Albany Fonblanque, he was a brilliant political journalist of French Huguenot descent, a keen student of political philosophy as well as current events. He had been employed on the staff of The Times and the Morning Chronicle, where his superior writing was contrasted by Macaulay with the ‘rant and twaddle’ of other journalists. Now he took over control of the Examiner, which he would edit for the next seventeen years; this was a weekly literary paper which under Leigh Hunt and his brother John had acquired an additional reputation for political independence. A keen reformer, Fonblanque bade farewell to 1830 explicitly in these terms: ‘We have closed the year ONE of the People’s cause.’39
This was a bold claim. The new King William IV might have made one of his outspoken and explosive comments if he read Fonblanque’s description of the early months of his reign. But in a certain manner it was true: the events of the autumn of 1830, the clamour for Reform coming in very different ways from both people and Parliament would have been unthinkable twelve months earlier. A great deal now depended on the committee which began to meet at Lord Durham’s London house in Cleveland Row, Mayfair.
In the meantime there was an attitude of joyful expectancy: it pervaded all classes. The Birmingham Political Union expressed gratitude to the King for dismissing Wellington, and placed entire confidence for the future ‘in the wisdom and patriotic firmness of His Majesty’. ‘It is quite extraordinary how this question [of Reform] is gaining every day,’ wrote Georgiana Ellis, daughter of the Whig aristocrats the Earl of Carlisle and Georgiana Cavendish, to her sister on 1 December 1830: ‘It is scarcely any longer a question of whether you are for, or against, Reform, but what sort of Reform you prefer.’ With that enthusiasm, Georgiana Ellis contrasted the low spirits of Sir Thomas Baring, who for twenty years had devoted his time and fortune to the good of the poor in his neighbourhood, and now found them ‘all going against him’.40
* Karl Marx would refer scornfully to the Whigs as ‘Tartuffes of politics’, their ‘family-nepotism’ opening them to the charge of hypocrisy.
* The Reform Club, whose name speaks for itself, was founded in the aftermath of the struggle in 1834.
* An important eyewitness to these events, as Private Secretary to Lord Brougham, since he kept a Diary.