‘Upon the gentlemen of England, then, I call . . .’ –
Lord John Russell, House of Commons, 1 March 1831
‘A happy new year to you,’ wrote Lord Grey to his wife Mary on 1 January 1831. ‘I am afraid I must look neither for happiness nor peace during its continuance, if my possession of office should continue so long.’ This doleful prediction on the part of the Prime Minister was not shared by the energetic Committee of Four now struggling with the details of Reform; they acted in a state of rising excitement. But they decided on conducting all their cogitations in great secrecy. One clever ruse was to ignore the customary professional help of clerks and use instead the skills of the Prime Minister’s wife and well-educated eldest daughter Georgiana – ‘the Grey ladies’ – to copy out documents.1 Loyalty and discretion were thus ensured; the great work went forward while the female secretarial help remained, as so often, unknown to history.
A draft of their proposals was shown to the Prime Minister on 14 January. A scribbled paper with many crossings-out was read by Lord John Russell and Lord Grey at Panshanger, near Hertford. A convenient Whig retreat, this was the newly created Regency Gothic country house of Earl Cowper, husband of Emily, Palmerston’s mistress. It shows the complexity and uncertainties of the developing project, ending with a series of rough calculations. Thus ‘fifty boroughs no longer to send Members to parliament’ becomes ‘fifty-two’ then ‘fifty-three’. ‘Fifty-one’ to send only one Member becomes ‘fifty-five’ and so forth and so on.2
The real role of Grey at this point was, however, to cement his relationship with his new Sovereign; William IV’s hopefully benign agreement to his Government’s proposals for Reform would shortly be of the greatest importance. Their correspondence throughout January, while the committee toiled away in secret, shows considerable wariness on the part of the King. On 12 January for example he pointedly congratulated Grey on ‘strenuously’ supporting him against all attempts to undermine ‘the established rights of the Crown’; similarly Grey had, he believed, resisted the efforts to destroy ‘those institutions under which this society has so long prospered’. The King went on to contrast this happy domestic state with that of foreign countries who were suffering so severely from the effects of ‘revolutionary projects’ and ‘what are called Radical remedies’ – he meant of course France and the Low Countries.3
By way of reply, Grey wrote to Sir Herbert Taylor, the King’s private secretary, expressing his own credo on the subject (a point of view from which he would never seriously deviate in the coming long months). ‘The perilous question is that of Parliamentary Reform, and as I approach it, the more I feel all its difficulty. With the universal feeling that prevails on this subject, it is impossible to avoid doing something; and not to do enough to satisfy public expectation (I mean the satisfaction of the rational public) would be worse than to do nothing.’4
The next day Taylor wrote back to Grey on the King’s behalf in what was another clear statement of position: deliberately citing Grey’s own use of the word ‘perilous’, he said that the King was not surprised his Prime Minister should approach parliamentary Reform with dread; ‘nor is His Majesty blind or indifferent to public feeling, or to public expectation’. Conceding that some ‘reasonable reforms’ might be necessary to check ‘the restless spirit of innovation’ which was abroad, nevertheless the King believed these elements were being exaggerated in their importance.5
Meanwhile there was an ever-present danger of a clash between the House of Commons and the House of Lords which should be viewed ‘as a great national and political calamity’; in this case Reform might notably increase the influence of the House of Commons at the expense of the Lords, a most disagreeable possibility. As to the evils of the present system, these were more theoretical than practical; after all, it seemed to work perfectly well. Most emphatically of all: ‘His Majesty cannot consider public meetings as a just criterion of the sentiments of the people.’ Establishing his personal objections to election by Secret Ballot (inconsistent with the ‘manly spirit and the free avowal of opinion’ which distinguish the English people) and to Universal Suffrage (‘one of those wild projects which have sprung from revolutionary speculation’), the King even wondered whether the whole movement for Reform was not ‘a specious cloak for the introduction of Republicanism’.
This was certainly not a Sovereign who was going to make it easy for anyone to solve the perilous question. Another reference to it by the King, a few weeks later, showed that Grey’s phrase had caught his fancy, even if the monarch and his Prime Minister did not as yet agree on the correct answer.6 By 24 January Grey was warning Durham (who was ill) that ‘there is likely to be more difficulty than I thought’.7 The Court, when not at Windsor or St James’s Palace, was established at Brighton, in the fantastic seaside pavilion in which George IV had taken such pleasure. It was to Brighton that Grey came on Sunday 30 January to show the King the Bill. It was, as Grey’s first biographer wrote, ‘a day of potential crisis’, since William could in theory refuse his agreement. The King passed the test, however, from the Whig point of view, and accepted the totality of the Bill as it was (without the Secret Ballot or Universal Suffrage). As Grey wrote to his wife the next day: ‘He has approved everything.’ Grey was equally succinct to his confidante Princess Lieven: ‘The King had our plan of Reform fully explained to him, and he understood it perfectly.’8
One preoccupation which further linked Grey to his Sovereign was the planning of King William’s coronation. The King was actually reluctant to have a ceremony at all; but, in the event of being unable to avoid it, he was absolutely determined on economy. Here he was in deliberate contrast to his elder brother, whose coronation ten years previously had cost a total of £238,000 (£23-odd million in today’s money); the sum spent by all three earlier Georges put together had only come to a total of £25,000 (£2.5 million).9 A coronation, however, featured a Queen as well as a King – if there was one available. Everyone shuddered at the thought of the hideous incident in which Queen Caroline had attempted to gatecrash the coronation of George IV; there had not been a Sovereign’s wife more conventionally involved for seventy years, since Queen Charlotte in 1761. In other ways Parliament were having to get used to the presence – and expense – of a Queen again.
What were her legitimate claims on the State? A matter of principle to MPs, such a topic was of more vital concern to Queen Adelaide herself, liable to bedevil her relationship with any administration, especially a Whig one. She was after all surrounded by Tories at Court; foremost was her favourite, Earl Howe, her handsome, urbane Lord Chamberlain, described by another ecstatic lady as ‘so gentlemanlike and unpretending’. Sneers about the precise relationship of Lord Howe and the young(ish) Queen were not wanting; when there was a rumour of her pregnancy, wicked Greville made a bad-taste joke: ‘Howe miraculous!’10 Howe was thirty-four, the same generation as his mistress (unlike the King). He had been a Tory Lord of the Bedchamber in the previous administration. However it was not at all clear at this point what significance should be put upon the public allegiance of an explicitly Tory royal official: a Whig Government with a Tory Opposition, like a happily wedded Queen, was a novelty.
It was to her private Diary that Adelaide confided the distressing details of the royal couple’s farewell to Wellington when he resigned as Prime Minister: ‘How grieved we were at what had happened.’ His own visible emotion touched the Queen: ‘I saw tears in the hero’s eyes, a rare sight which rejoiced me.’11 Publicly the Queen positively paraded her deeply Tory sympathies. When she agreed to be the godmother to the grandchild of the Marquess of Londonderry, the most outspoken, even rancorous, Tory denouncer of all manner of Reform, Adelaide drove in state to the christening, donating a mother-of-pearl bowl and a comb to the infant and £45 (£4,500) to the nursery.12 Previously she had been the witness at the marriage of Londonderry’s sister Lady Caroline to the MP Thomas Wood.
Londonderry was a great magnate in the north, where his coal mines rivalled those of the Lambton family. A former Army officer and then an ambassador, he was the half-brother of the Tory Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, who had committed suicide. Londonderry, now in his fifties, was famously rash and uncontrolled in his behaviour despite his former diplomatic career. His nickname was ‘Fighting Charlie’: the kind of man who fought duels and would not hesitate to settle a coal strike by a face-to-face confrontation with the miners’ leader. Some of his contemporaries thought he was actually deranged. These qualities had not prevented him from making a most advantageous second marriage to the heiress Frances Vane-Tempest, inspiring the poet Thomas Moore to reflect that the stars must be at fault when ‘a wealthy young lady so mad is/As to marry old dandies that might be their daddies’.13 From the Queen’s point of view, Londonderry was a personal attachment which she had every right to maintain – but such connections would not necessarily be seen as such in the rising climate of political change and clash.
Then there were the King’s illegitimate children by the late Mrs Jordan, to whom the Queen was notably charming. They were headed by George FitzClarence, already clamouring for some proper recognition of his status as a king’s son (even one born on the wrong side of the blanket); Greville was no doubt right when he suggested that the bastards longed to bring back the good old days of Charles II with his dozen illegitimate children, on whose infant heads dukedoms were regularly scattered.14 There were the new King’s younger brothers and sisters, most of whom, with the notable exception of the Duke of Sussex, had by nature deeply Tory sympathies. All of these were liable to inflame the Queen’s feelings if she felt herself wrongly used – and she would then do her best, not surprisingly, to inflame the King.
Various questions arose. Conventionally, a Queen of child-bearing age – and Adelaide was only thirty-eight at her husband’s accession – had provisions made for her regency, if the King died leaving her either the mother of the heir or potentially so because she was pregnant. There were also provisions to be made for her welfare as a widow. In fact the first clash came over Adelaide’s welfare as a Queen. There was opposition to her outfit allowance from Charles Grant, the Canningite MP for Inverness-shire who had joined the Government as part of its coalition element and was currently President of the Board of Control. Previously regarded as congenitally lazy, on this occasion Grant showed a stubborn energy, threatening to resign if the Queen’s outfit allowance continued to be mooted. It was Palmerston, the new Foreign Secretary and a man of the world where ladies were concerned, who observed: ‘This might be, I will say it, Disastrous.’15
In the end the crisis was solved when the King and Queen gave way. Adelaide showed ‘good sense and good humour’, as tactfully reported by Sir Herbert Taylor; but suspicions about the intentions of the Government towards matters royal were not allayed. Where the coronation was concerned, it was decided that Parliament would not grant the Consort a new crown, as had happened with previous queens: there had to be some more economical solution.16 All this inevitably deepened the tension between Court and Government. There was not yet a vicious spiral whereby the press attacked the Queen for her Tory political influence over the King, while the King was moved by chivalry to show her public sympathy in the face of such attacks. But the possibility was there.
The press in the early nineteenth century was certainly no respecter of royal persons. The attacks and satires of the previous reign might pale compared to those to which Marie Antoinette had been subjected in France in the pre-Revolutionary days; but they were still vicious. As 1831 dawned, the press in general was entering a new period of popular influence, much as the unions were exploring the possibilities of popular opinion as a force. In consequence, a clever Tory like John Wilson Croker, who referred to journalists as ‘needy adventurers’, foresaw a time when a member of the Cabinet would be trusted with that important duty of state, ‘the regulation of public opinion’. Every large provincial town had its newspaper despite the fourpenny stamp tax, which meant selling it at seven pence a copy when an agricultural wage averaged at something like nine shillings a week.17 Illicit lending meant that readers avidly interested in Reform extended far beyond the number of papers actually sold.
One of the most respected provincial papers at this stage was the Leeds Mercury, which had been bought from its printer-proprietors in 1801 by Edward Baines; by now Baines had so built up its fortunes that it was regarded as a responsible advocate of moderate Reform, with sales in excess of 5,000 (and a readership of course far in excess of that). His son Edward Baines junior, who would take over the proprietorship, first emerged as a journalist defending the cause of peaceful protest at Peterloo. The Nottingham Journal, for example, was characterized as a Tory newspaper yet it too proved a strong proponent of Reform; whereas the Manchester Guardian, founded in 1821 following Peterloo, had shown liberal sympathies from the first.18
The press was not allowed to exist unrestrained. William Blackstone, in his celebrated Commentaries on the Laws of England in the later eighteenth century, had called the free press essential to the nature of a free state, but this freedom did not count when there were ‘previous restraints upon publication’. It has been calculated, for example, that there were eighteen convictions for seditious libel and seventy-five for blasphemous libel between 1821 and 1834.19 In contrast to the respectable provincial papers and the established London papers such as The Times or the Morning Chronicle, which all had to pay a stamp tax, there were a host of unstamped extreme Radical sheets and newspapers written by John Wilson Croker’s ‘needy adventurers’. But they were adventurers in the cause of Reform who, in papers like the Gorgon and the Poor Man’s Guardian, founded by Henry Hetherington, reached the ear of the public. The Radical philosopher James Mill summed up the situation: the press, he said, could be a grand instrument for the diffusion of knowledge – or error: a judgement which, it might be argued, has stood the test of time.20
Thomas Barnes, editor of The Times since 1817 (early journalistic efforts had included the exciting life of a theatre critic), would have definitely ranged himself and his paper among the former instruments.21 An extraordinarily handsome man in youth – he was described as having ‘a profile of Grecian regularity’ by Leigh Hunt, which may have helped him in his early life as ‘a complete voluptuary’ – Barnes was now in his mid-forties. He had put on weight since that Grecian youth, the curls were iron grey; but he still cut an impressive, broad-shouldered figure, with an agility maintained by frequent swimming in the Thames between Chelsea and Parliament. Barnes also made it his business to have strong links to politicians: for example, he saw a lot of Brougham, The Times having backed Queen Caroline when Brougham defended her. They frequently took informal breakfasts together for the exchanging of information. This was in contrast to another organ of opinion favouring the Whigs, the Morning Chronicle, which, under its editor John Black, had deplored the Peterloo Massacre, but attacked the conduct of the then Queen.
On 26 January 1831 Barnes in The Times made it quite clear where his newspaper stood. ‘We repeat our earnest counsel to the people to be strenuous, indefatigable and uncompromising in their demands for Reform.’ Three days later he repeated this encouragement of popular intervention in even stronger terms: ‘Unless the people – the people everywhere – come forward and petition, ay, thunder for reform, it is they who betray an honest Minister – it is not the Minister who betrays the people.’ For the time being, however, The Times remained supportive of the new monarch; in mid-February it announced that ‘no credence should be put in the rumours that an illustrious personage [that is to say the King] was insincere in his attachment to the popular cause’.22
Lord Grey, in his letter to the King, had promoted the idea of ‘the rational public’, in contrast presumably to the irrational mob. Certainly the cogitations of the Committee of Four, however removed from the public gaze, were held against a background of virtually countrywide violence, rational or otherwise being a matter of opinion. Parliament was due to sit again at the beginning of February. There was an inauspicious beginning in which Lord Althorp presented to the Commons a Budget which, with its proposed transfer tax on exchange of funded property, aroused cries of furious protest from the City; after a notably fine speech from Sir Robert Peel the offending clause had to be withdrawn (perhaps there was a lesson here on the interrelationship of finance and government).23 More optimistically, on 3 February Grey announced in the House of Lords that ‘ministers had at last succeeded in framing a measure’; Lord John Russell would present the Reform Bill in the Commons on 1 March.24
In the meantime, the great estates (whose masters were very often away in Parliament but kept in touch with the message from the countryside) had to cope with the problems of seemingly random attack. At Eaton Hall in Cheshire, the estate of Earl Grosvenor (created Marquess of Westminster later this year), a gamekeeper spoke out stoutly: ‘he only wished the rioters would come here; we would defend the house against 3,000 people’. Lord Grosvenor had his pistols loaded and his grooms were ready to gallop prisoners off to Flint Castle, as he told his daughter-in-law Elizabeth. In mid-February she watched fifty-one yeomen being drilled in the ‘driving snow and sleet’ for two and a half hours in front of the house, by her husband. Sir Stephen Glynne at nearby Hawarden was a great deal more timid; said to be ‘in the greatest fright’ and wondering if he could trust his 200 constables, he sent to Manchester for troops.25 At Belvoir Castle, home of the Duke of Rutland, a leading Tory, 100 staves were acquired for the use of Special Constables in January 1831.26
In London the Tories, feeling their way in the unaccustomed role of the Opposition, held a series of meetings before the terms of the Reform Bill were announced. At a meeting at Peel’s house in Whitehall Gardens on 20 February – amid the exquisite pictures which were part of his rich collection – it was decided not to offer initial resistance to this unknown Bill (whose proposals still remained secret). If, as has been suggested, Peel was uneasy with this decision, he was certainly right to be concerned at such tactics, as future events would demonstrate. Nevertheless at a further meeting at Apsley House on Sunday 27 February, under the aegis of the Duke of Wellington, there was general agreement not to make a concerted attack from the start which might lead to a dissolution of Parliament, with a consequent General Election – all at a time of violent uncertainty regarding the future of parliamentary Reform. So the two sides mustered with their parliamentary staves at the ready, but on the Tory side there was no precise sense of when they might most efficiently wield them.
Lord John Russell rose to move the first reading of the Bill for Parliamentary Reform in England and Ireland (Scotland would be the subject of a separate bill) on Tuesday 1 March 1831.27 The House of Commons, which of course at its utmost could only accommodate two-thirds of its Members, was packed. Before Russell spoke, one Member showed the eagerness with which seats had been sought by asking the Speaker, Charles Manners-Sutton, whether it was in order for MPs to put their names on the back of a seat. The Speaker merely observed that the House was ‘remarkably full’ when he came into it, but after prayers and before voting there appeared to be more papers marking seats than Members. Members of the House of Lords crowded into their gallery, including the royal Duke of Sussex, who was known to favour Reform.
From the first moment of his long speech, Russell paid due respect to the general concern felt about the present situation. ‘I rise, Sir, with feelings of deep anxiety and interest, to bring forward a question, which, unparalleled as it is in importance, is likewise unparalleled in difficulty’ – an echo of Grey with his employment of that word ‘perilous’ which the King had picked up. Russell reminded his hearers that he had raised the question of parliamentary Reform previously as an individual; now the measure was not so much his but that of the Government: ‘the deliberate measure of a whole Cabinet’. There might be ‘a crowded audience’ here but he wanted to refer them to the millions outside the House of Commons ‘who look with anxiety – who look with hope – who look with expectation, to the result of this day’s deliberations’.
Russell then went on to stress the essentially conciliatory position of the present Government. Standing in the middle between ‘the Bigotry’ of the one who thought no reformation necessary, and the ‘fanaticism’ of the other who thought that only one particular kind of Reform could be satisfactory, ‘we fix ourselves on what is, I hope, firm and steadfast ground, between the abuses we wish to amend and the convulsions we hope to avert’. It was all good stirring stuff. Russell’s next point invoked history: there had been a time when the House of Commons had represented the people of England – the 1628 Petition of Right had alluded to the ancient statutes of Edward I – and that happy state of affairs must be restored.
It was his appeal to reason which most clearly represented Russell’s own point of view. A stranger from some distant country would be told that England’s proudest boast was its political freedom. What would be his surprise, then, to be taken to ‘a green mound’ and told that this green mound actually sent two Members to Parliament. Or he might be shown an equally green park with many signs of luxurious vegetation but none of human habitation, which was entitled to the same privilege. Then this innocent stranger would be shown large, flourishing towns in the north of England, ‘full of trade and activity’ – this time he would be told that these towns were entitled to send no MPs at all to London. Furthermore, at an election in Liverpool he might be shocked by the ‘gross venality and corruption’. No wonder the whole people were calling loudly for Reform. It would be easier, reflected Lord John, to move the ‘flourishing manufactories’ [sic] of Leeds and Manchester to Gatton and Old Sarum, the green park and the green mound.
Lord John Russell then proceeded to outline in great detail the plan on which the Committee of Four had agreed, and the Cabinet as a whole had endorsed. For a while his audience could hardly believe what they were hearing as his small, high, old-fashioned voice proceeded relentlessly onwards (The Times frequently complained about its inaudibility). Then, as the extraordinarily radical – one has to use the word – nature of what he was proposing began to sink in, his speech was punctuated with cheers: some of these were cheers of enthusiasm, others of disbelieving derision. After a while there were bouts of what Sir John Hobhouse called ‘wild, ironical laughter’. The colour came and went in Sir Robert Peel’s face. Towards the end of Lord John’s speech, Peel actually put his head in his hands. Whatever he had anticipated, it was not this.28
There were two main propositions: redistribution, and clarification of the right to vote.29 As a result of the first, all boroughs with less than 2,000 inhabitants were to be disenfranchised (Schedule A), a total of sixty boroughs; those with less than 4,000 were to be robbed of one of their two MPs (Schedule B), a total of forty-seven. The second proposition limited the right to vote in the boroughs to those £10 householders, and in the counties to 40s freeholders. This would have the effect of simplifying a byzantine system of qualifications for the vote.
There were to be twenty-seven new boroughs and 168 MPs would lose their seats; half a million (adult males) would be added to the electorate. The most violent reaction of the House came when Russell started to read out the names of the boroughs which would thus be disenfranchised, while others would be reduced. By their very nature, these were likely to have historic resonances: the past was one thing, and good for oratory, but of course actual live Members of Parliament listening to Russell found their seats blandly eliminated.
In his final peroration, Russell took on his opponents squarely. The argument to history – our ancestors granted Old Sarum representatives, so we should do the same – he firmly demolished. He even invoked the name of Edmund Burke, the great man who had once been the inspiration of Whig freedom, finally the enemy of the French Revolution. First, our ancestors granted these representatives simply because Old Sarum was a large town; which is just why they proposed to give representatives to Manchester. To quote Burke, you might just as well say that the principles of the Roman Empire under Augustus had to be the same as those of the Roman Republic under the first Brutus. The Bill, he believed, would not destroy the power of the aristocracy by removing their nominated boroughs. They would continue to enjoy large incomes and property, by which they could relieve the poor by charity, and thus evince ‘private worth and public virtue’.
This kind of influence would remain; what would be removed was the influence of the idle aristocrat, cut off from the people. He appealed to them: ‘the gentlemen of England have never been found wanting in any great crisis . . . I ask them now when a great sacrifice is to be made, to show their generosity – to convince the people of their public spirit – and to identify themselves for the future with the people. Upon the gentlemen of England, then, I call . . .’
When Lord John finally sat down there was disbelief, astonishment and finally a tempestuous reaction. In the general hubbub, it was some time before Sir Robert Inglis, for the Tories, could make himself heard. Unfortunately this gentleman of England was verging on the apoplectic in his response to Lord John’s call. Inglis’s father was a self-made man who had three times been Chairman of the East India Company and been made a baronet. Sir Robert, the same generation as Althorp, was a dedicated believer in the Tory Protestant interest as guarding the proper order of the State. Although he was against the slave trade, and had liberal views on India, he had spoken out frequently against Catholic Relief and Catholic Emancipation. As a result he had defeated Sir Robert Peel (who finally supported it) in the fight for the Oxford University parliamentary seat, which he would occupy for twenty-five years.
Sir Robert had been involved in public affairs for many years. An intelligent, cultured man, he was a Fellow of the Royal Society, acted as a Commissioner of Public Records and as a Trustee of the British Museum. Normally his ‘rosy, corpulent, beaming appearance’, graced with one of his splendid trademark floral buttonholes, was a harbinger of goodwill.30 On this occasion Sir Robert was not beaming.
He felt, he said, ‘a sensation of awe at the contemplation of the abyss, on the brink of which we stand’. It was the first time for nearly fifty years that someone had come to the House from the Government declaring their own incompetence at carrying out legislative functions. As for the demands of ‘the people’, he reacted with horror at the very idea. Had they not survived other periods of crisis, such as 1793, or the year of Peterloo? The danger had been ‘met, averted and beaten down’. Therefore although he did not deny ‘that there does exist at this time . . . a state of diseased and feverish excitement’, it was purely temporary, due to the three days of ‘Paris’ (the July Revolution). In short, whatever Lord John Russell’s intentions might be, the object of his Bill ‘cannot be Restoration, cannot then be Reform, but, in a single word, is and must be Revolution’.
By invoking from the first the dreaded word ‘revolution’, Sir Robert instinctively conveyed the sheer shock and horror of what had been outlined. This shock, on which everyone agreed whatever their opinions, took many different forms. Part of it was certainly due to the closeness with which the secret had been kept. ‘I hope God will forgive you on account of this Bill,’ said Lord Sidmouth to Lord Grey on the day of Russell’s speech. ‘I don’t think I can.’ Sir John Hobhouse wrote: ‘Never shall I forget the astonishment of my neighbours as he [Russell] developed his plan. Indeed, all the House seemed perfectly astounded.’ An MP called Baring Wall, who sat for Guildford, kept exclaiming: ‘They are mad! They are mad!’ Princess Lieven – surely she was the favoured confidante of Lord Grey? – confessed herself ‘absolutely stupefied’ at the extent of the Bill, and confirmed that ‘the most absolute secrecy’ had been maintained until the last moment.31
The young MP for Derby, Edward Strutt, a Unitarian from a wealthy and high-minded manufacturing family, a convinced Whig reformer, told his wife with some satisfaction that the Bill had ‘horrified’ – his italics – ‘the great proportion of the House’. The Duke of Wellington was giving a dinner party, and when the first reports reached him of what was being proposed, simply declined to believe them: there must be some mistake.32 In short, in the exultant language of The Times, ‘the secret was kept till the blow was struck’.
The next day in the Commons Lord Stormont, heir to the Earl of Mansfield, quoted a passage from Coriolanus on the grounds that ‘the great Poet’ Shakespeare had surely anticipated this situation:
Thus we debase
The nature of our seats, and make the rabble
Call our cares, fears; which will in time break ope
The locks o’the Senate, and bring in the crows
To peck the eagles.
The most notable feature of the debate on 2 March was, however, the rise of a new star on the Whig horizon.33
Thomas Babington Macaulay was just thirty when he became an MP for Calne in Wiltshire – incidentally a so-called rotten borough in the gift of the Whig grandee Lord Lansdowne, a fact which allowed his opponents to make merry; they also used it as an argument for the nomination system by which bright young outsiders were brought into Parliament. With his high forehead, hair already receding, and his heavy brows above piercing eyes, Macaulay dominated by sheer brilliance rather than physique. As Greville put it, ‘a lump of more ordinary clay never enclosed a powerful mind and lively imagination’. Sydney Smith had a wittier word for him: he was, he said, ‘a book in breeches’. There was something odd about Macaulay’s diction: Lytton captured it when he referred to his ‘strong utterance’ which occasionally split ‘into a strange, wild key, like hissing words that struggle to be free’. It was the content of the hissing words which mesmerized hearers in this vital session of Parliament; Edward Littleton MP once commented that his speeches carried away the House, as he seemed to be carried away himself ‘in a whirlwind of mixed passions’.34
Macaulay began by describing the Bill as ‘a wise, noble and comprehensive measure’. He dismissed Sir Robert Inglis’s challenge to show that the Constitution had ever been better with the contemptuous phrase: ‘Sir, we are legislators, not antiquaries.’ Then he got into his stride: ‘Our ancestors would have been amazed indeed if they had foreseen that a city of more than 100,000 inhabitants would be left without Representation in the nineteenth century, merely because it stood on ground which in the thirteenth century, had been occupied by a few huts.’ As to the idea of there being an evil in change just because it was change, there was also an evil in discontent as discontent. This Bill was ‘a great measure of reconciliation’ after recent horrors. Furthermore Macaulay expressed his conviction that the middle class wanted to uphold both the royal prerogatives and the constitutional role of the Peers. Rotten boroughs he dismissed – ‘Despotism has its happy accidents’ – of which of course he was one. The real point was this: ‘Turn where we may – within, around – the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve.’
Macaulay was at his finest and most characteristic in the passage which followed, ‘thumping out the word “Now” nine times’: ‘Now, while the roof of a British palace’ – he meant Holyrood, residence of Charles X – ‘affords an ignominious shelter to the exiled heir of forty Kings . . . Now, while the heart of England is still sound – now, in this your accepted time, now in this day of your salvation – take counsels not of prejudice . . . but of history – of reason of the ages which are past – of the signs of this most portentous time. Renew the youth of the State,’ he went on. There he concentrated on the word ‘save’, as in: ‘Save property divided against itself. Save the multitude endangered by their own ungovernable passions. Save the aristocracy, endangered by its own unpopular power. Save the greatest, and fairest, and most civilized community that ever existed, from calamities which may in a few days sweep away all the rich heritage of so many ages of wisdom and glory. The danger is terrible. The time is short.’
The immediate response to this came from the young Viscount Mahon, heir to Earl Stanhope, MP for Wootton Bassett, and at the age of twenty-five already a published author. A violent Tory but a most agreeable and cultivated man, according to Macaulay himself – later as Lord Stanhope he produced a highly illuminating account of his conversations with the Duke of Wellington – Mahon came from an eccentric family (he was the nephew of the traveller Lady Hester Stanhope). Mahon would shortly be inspired to produce a savage dystopian piece on post-Reform England. In the meantime he merely commented rather feebly that Macaulay had considered so many branches of the subject that he hardly knew which to reply to first.
It was true. In this crucial week in early March the Opposition, under Sir Robert Peel in the Commons, was reeling from the extraordinary shock of the Whig ambush. Tactics of demolition had to be applied to the perilous question. One expedient had been ruled out in advance – had it not? – and that was calling for a vote on the Bill at once, which was likely to produce a dissolution and an immediate General Election, which was not thought to be in the Tories’ interest, given the state of the country.
So the two forces, pro- and anti-Reform, prepared to square up for the seven days at the first reading which would follow. There was tremendous optimism among the Whigs. Thomas Creevey reported in his Diary that his ‘raptures’ with the Bill increased daily, as also his astonishment at its boldness. Here was ‘a little fellow not weighing above eight stone’ – he meant Lord John Russell – creating an entirely new House of Commons. ‘What a coup it is! It is its boldness that makes its success so certain . . .’35 Another Whig, John Campbell, MP for Stafford, was not quite so confident. ‘This really is a REVOLUTION ipso facto,’ he wrote. ‘It is unquestionably a new Constitution.’36 (Despite the fact that Grey in the House of Lords argued firmly that it was in no way a new Constitution.) The sensation produced in the House of Commons convinced Campbell that there was not the remotest chance of this Bill being carried.
The attack did not only come from the right. The Radical MP Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, who had got into the House of Commons at a by-election in December, also attacked the Bill. He justified his sobriquet by denouncing Macaulay for his derisory reference to the lower classes and Peterloo. This was the occasion, alluded to earlier, on which Hunt described his own experience of that fearful occasion: ‘there was a real massacre. A drunken and infuriated yeomanry,’ he went on, only to be interrupted by cries of ‘No! No!’ and ‘Question’. Hunt battled forward: ‘a drunken and infuriated yeomanry with swords newly sharpened’ – there were renewed angry cries of ‘No!’ and ‘Question’. ‘Where is the man who will step forward and say “No!”’ Hunt’s voice grew louder and louder; all the same he was almost drowned by the furious cries of the interrupters.37 All this meant that the Whigs, who had aimed at bringing about Reform by coalition, looked fair to be harried by those who felt they had not gone far enough, as well as those who felt they had gone too far.
On 3 March, Sir Robert Peel rose in the House of Commons to mount the official attack for the Tories.