‘I will call this Bill, Russell’s Purge of Parliament’ –
Sir Charles Wetherell, House of Commons
The attack of Sir Robert Peel upon the Reform Bill concentrated on the importance of the stability of the State – that traditional and respectable Tory cry. Given that his opponents like Lord Grey were arguing that Reform would actually in some mysterious, gratifying way preserve the status quo, and given the tumultuous state of the country, this was indeed the case Peel had to answer. He might have covered his face with his hands towards the end of Lord John Russell’s speech, but it was not in Peel’s highly rational nature to give way to despair. On the night of 3 March Peel spoke for two hours, eloquently as was his wont.1
It has been suggested by one of Peel’s biographers that this policy of restraint – no instant calling for a vote on the first reading – remained a sensible calculation despite the surprise of the proposals: in the case of such a vote, the Government would have fought back boldly, just as their Bill was in itself a bold move.2 Nevertheless this prolonged disquisition was an enormous relief to the Whigs at the time. They feared for a snap vote, by which their campaign should be cut off in its infancy. Brougham, whose dramatic sense of self-worth meant that the story never got lost in the telling, related how the welcome news had reached him. His Secretary Sir Denis Le Marchant, who was in the House, dispatched a note which actually read: ‘Peel has been up twenty minutes’ – this meant that they were safe from a snap vote. But instead of opening the note, Brougham suggested they all had a drink first. Drink duly taken, and the message finally read, Brougham whirled the note round his head, shouting ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Victory! Victory!’ Then he told his friends that Peel was remaining on his legs.3 More drinks were had all round to celebrate. In fact it had been Sir Robert Inglis, not Peel, as discussed in the last chapter: Le Marchant had made a mistake in his report, as he later admitted. But the point remained: the Tories had definitely lost the initiative. With the co-operation of the newspapers, the country would be able to follow with zest the debate which followed.
Unlike ‘Orator’ Hunt, Peel received cheers at various points, and not only from his fellow Tories. It was clever to begin by suggesting that the Whigs, in the light of their recent electoral victory, were still animated by party faction. Yet he doubted whether ‘the old system of party tactics’ was applicable to the present state of things – should they not be looking rather to ‘the maintenance of order, of law, and of property?’ Lamentably, Peel saw principles in operation which he believed would be fatal to ‘the well-being of society’. Whenever the Government showed signs of resisting those principles, he would give them his support; conversely, when the Government encouraged them, he would offer ‘his decided opposition’. Unlike the Duke of Wellington, Peel was careful not to set his face publicly against all change: he was in favour of reforming every institution that really required it, but he preferred to do so ‘gradually, dispassionately, and deliberately’ in order that Reform might be long-lasting. Peel was setting the tone for an Opposition which took its stand on integrity and tradition, not on a mulish determination to cause havoc.
In the meantime the Whigs remained extremely confident. Grey wrote a few days later that opposition to the Bill was ‘little short of insanity in view of the strength of feeling in the country’. He told another friend: ‘the public is now decidedly with us.’4 Furthermore the Whigs were bolstered by the support of the Radicals. Francis Place, who had once dismissed ‘gabbling Whigs’, now felt considerable enthusiasm for what was happening. William Cobbett became ‘a Bill-man heart and soul’. Of course there remained the problem of the Radicals’ demands, as expressed in Parliament by Hunt – the question of the Secret Ballot and Universal Suffrage.
On 4 March there was a public meeting at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, a well-known Radical venue (where Charles James Fox had been celebrated in the old days); it was blessed with a huge room over eighty feet long. A series of resolutions were passed calling for Triennial Parliaments, three-year terms as opposed to the current seven, and ‘the [Secret] Ballot’. But Sir John Hobhouse jumped on the table and cried out that nothing should be passed but votes of confidence in the Ministers.5
This was in effect the position of The Times when it reported Russell’s speech under four headings.6 These were as follows: changes brought about by the total or partial disenfranchisement of certain boroughs, with rights transferred elsewhere, to larger towns and counties; the change in the qualification of the votes in boroughs and counties; the changes in the mode of securing the ‘purity’ of electoral lists, and of taking the poll; lastly the changes of representation in Scotland and Ireland. ‘Speaking in general terms,’ commented The Times, ‘we approve of the present plan most sincerely . . . The crew of a stranded ship do not examine too minutely the merits of the vessel which is to take them off the wretched island on which they are cast, to a place of plenty and safety.’ Thus the paper thundered: ‘To the House we should say “Pass it, pass it.” To the people, “Urge in every way the passing of the bill: call for it, press it forward.”’
The process of debate which followed was long and exhausting, much of it taking place at night. The young Charles Dickens was one of those in attendance as a reporter and wrote on 7 March that he was so ‘exceedingly tired’ from his week’s exertions that he had slept on the sofa the whole day.7 Many of the most vehement speeches were made by MPs whose seats were threatened; although Charles Baring Wall was thought in poor taste when he observed that the partial disenfranchisement of Guildford ‘would leave him but half a man’.
Hudson Gurney, from the Norfolk banking family, was MP for Newtown, Isle of Wight; despite having predominantly Whig sympathies, he was unhappy at the reduction of the number of MPs for the island. He grumbled that the Bill would give additional Members to Ireland and the metropolitan districts: ‘the worst of representatives . . . radicals, knowing nothing and representing no interests whatsoever’. Gurney told Sir Denis Le Marchant that there was no chance of the House passing the Bill: ‘No one but Oliver Cromwell could ever have done that.’8 As against these predictable cavils, Edward Stanley made a powerful speech for Reform which found an echo in many hearts: even the Tory Lord Ellenborough reckoned that he had spoken ‘very much like a gentleman’. Political concessions, Stanley said, which came too late, were like the Sybilline Books of antiquity: ‘the longer you delayed the purchase, the higher the price you must pay, and the less advantage you receive’.9
There were also undoubted anomalies to be condemned, arising from the use of population figures for the distribution of seats. The Census of 1821 was used (the Census of 1831 was not yet available); the distinction between boroughs and parishes was mistakenly interpreted in different ways, in different areas, which meant that a skilful member of the Opposition could point to these obvious disparities. John Wilson Croker, in a speech generally regarded as ‘clever but extremely violent’, accused Lord John Russell of trying to remodel ‘all the institutions of the empire by the rules of arithmetic’. (Croker could not pronounce the letter ‘R’ so that the hated word came out as ‘Weform’ – but this only added to the venom of his delivery.) Croker referred to Russell sardonically as ‘our new Justinian’ with his ‘pandects and codex’, whose Government had nevertheless made considerable errors in interpreting the 1821 Census.10
Croker also made play with the Whig bias shown in the obliteration or limitation of seats. For example, there were still to be two MPs for Downton, the living of the keen reformer Lord Radnor. He picked on the situation at Macaulay’s constituency at Calne, which he had obtained through the patronage of Lord Lansdowne; apparently Calne, with less than 5,000 inhabitants, was to be awarded two Members, whereas Bolton, with 22,000, was only awarded one. And how strange that Tavistock, in the gift of another Whig grandee, the Duke of Bedford, Russell’s very own father, had survived the cull! Croker undoubtedly enjoyed himself as he expostulated with mock sympathy: ‘God forbid that we should ever see the time when the natural influence of a munificent and benevolent landlord like the Duke of Bedford is to be annihilated.’
On 7 March, a satirical sketch by John Doyle appeared entitled ‘The Last of the Boroughbridges’. Doyle was a Dublin-born painter who since 1827 had become increasingly famous for his political prints, issued during parliamentary sessions, under the initials of H.B. (This career lasted a span of twenty-two years.)11 Thackeray would praise them for their ‘polite points of wit’ which raised ‘quiet, gentlemanlike smiles’, but Doyle was in fact remarkably acute at seizing the right image and reference. He would delineate John Bull as trying on his new ‘Grey’ breeches, with Russell as the tailor, standing by with shears; meanwhile Wellington denounced the material, purported to be ‘Cord du Roy’, as fustian and Peel lamented that he never thought to see his poor old friend John Bull sans culotte.
In this case Doyle’s subject was Sir Charles Wetherell, MP for Boroughbridge and the Recorder of Bristol. Wetherell’s taste for invective – often garnished with ‘rich humour’ and ‘happy sarcasms’ along the way – tended to distract from his excellent legal brain and genuine antiquarian interests. In the same way, his eccentric appearance, likened by a contemporary to that of some untidy friar with threadbare clothing looking as if ‘made by accident’, masked an incisive intelligence.12 To Wetherell, Toryism had a superior excellence quite unconnected to the need for office: he had in fact been sacked by Wellington from his post as Attorney-General for the ferocity of his speeches against Catholic Emancipation.
Here this passionately Tory character was seen by Doyle as a dying man in robe and nightcap. The Duke of Cumberland and the Earl of Eldon, both deeply right-wing figures, were weeping at his bedside, with the Marquess of Chandos, Tory heir to the Duke of Buckingham, as his nurse. Wetherell bemoaned the fact that he was being dispatched out of this world with ‘a dose of Russell’s purge’. These had been his own dramatic words in Parliament with their appeal to seventeenth-century history. ‘I will call this Bill, Russell’s Purge of Parliament . . . the nauseous experiment of a repetition of Pride’s Purge, republican in its basis . . . destructive of all property, of all right, of all privilege.’13 The same arbitrary violence which expelled a majority of Members in the time of the Commonwealth was now proceeding to expose the House of Commons again to such odious tyranny. Wetherell had been greeted with tumultuous cheering. It was hardly surprising that Wetherell was a favourite of Doyle’s; another sketch showed ‘John Bull between Tragedy and Comedy’, with Tragedy represented by John Henry North, MP (he who would die of heartbreak over Reform), dragging poor John Bull to ‘the first abyss in the revolutionary Hell which is yawning for us’, while Wetherell as Comedy reflects: ‘Oh, I shall die of laughing.’
The question remained: was the robed and nightcapped man really dying? Perhaps Russell’s purge was not so easily administered, especially to the unelected Members of the House of Lords.
Meanwhile Reform continued to be the talk of fashionable London. Lord Grey called across to Creevey at dinner at his own house: ‘Do you think, Creevey, we shall carry our Reform Bill in the Lords?’ The diarist remarked on the Prime Minister’s renewed vitality: ‘all alive – o! quite overflowing’.14 Although in his private correspondence Grey, like many a politician before and after him, continued to bemoan his exhaustion and advancing years, where politics was concerned he was the warhorse who responded to the sound of trumpets ‘and smelleth the battle afar off’. The celebrated Tory hostess Lady Jersey had a very different slant on it all. ‘She is mad in her rage against our Reform,’ wrote Creevey, ‘and moves heaven and earth against it, wherever she goes, according to her powers; but these powers are by no means what they used to be. In short she is like the rotten boroughs – going to the devil as far as she can.’15
In this fervid atmosphere, political theatre flourished. By an eighteenth-century Act of Parliament, spoken drama was supposed to be limited to the so-called patent theatres: the two Theatre Royals in the Hay-market and Covent Garden. The Royal Coburg Theatre,* founded in 1818, took advantage of its position on the south bank of the river to go in a more adventurous direction. Reform, or John Bull Triumphant was subtitled A Patriotic Drama: a play in one act by W.T. Moncrieffe, it was first performed on 14 March 1831.16
John Bull, the essential, decent Englishman, in a ‘farmer’s drab great coat’, shows tolerance towards his incendiarist tenants, in contrast to his steward, named Premium: ‘why they set one of my barns on fire the other night, poor deluded creatures’. Other characters include a stereotype Irishman, Patrick Murphy, in a round hat with a shamrock in it, and a Scot named Sandy Glaskey in plaid, with a thistle in his bonnet. The callous Premium threatens the tenants with transportation to the Swan River if they do not pay their rents and upbraids one in particular for indulging in the luxury of a wife and family: ‘You should leave these enjoyments to your betters, sirrah.’ Unfortunately for Premium, this indulgent fellow is actually John Bull in disguise: he proceeds to belabour Premium with a stick and then assures his tenants: ‘Everything shall be reformed – you shall all henceforth have proper persons to represent your grievances.’
Throughout, the play was notable for its favourable references to ‘that patriotic and good monarch’ William IV, indicative of the current climate of opinion about his reforming sympathies. It ended with an invocation by John Bull himself:
Pshaw! Let’s from sorrow sever
And shout reform forever.
We’ll dance and sing
God Save the King
A better there was never.
In its review of 19 March, the Spectator described the play as ‘completely successful – and so will Reform be’.
On 7 March, the day that Doyle’s witty sketch appeared, The Times reported that many of its correspondents were calling for illuminations, possibly that very night when the King was due to go to the opera at Covent Garden: this would be ‘a public expression of rational joy’.17 The provincial reaction was equally warm; also on 7 March the Birmingham Political Union held a meeting. Thanks to Attwood’s energetic concerns on the subject, the Union had remained in principle law-abiding, an example to other unions. Now a concourse of about 15,000 people expressed its gratitude for the proposed measure – to the King and his Ministers. Henceforth the Union considered that there had been a ‘compact’ with Grey: he had their backing, so long as the Bill he produced remained intact. It was a version of what the Spectator had eloquently called for: ‘The Bill, the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill’.18 This kind of fruitful provincial reaction was of course counterpoised by the more mindless violence of the Swing-type rioters; together the two forces allowed the Government to feel that the country as a whole was resolutely on the side of Reform.
Within Parliament itself, those Irish Members under the charismatic leader Daniel O’Connell also perceived that support for the Whig proposals was in their own best interests. The situation of the Whigs regarding O’Connell was complicated. Edward Stanley, the Chief Secretary for Ireland (one of the necessary coalition Members), was totally opposed to what he saw as the Irishman’s seditious influence. A trumped-up charge of conspiracy was brought against him in January 1831:19 Stanley believed that if O’Connell was dealt with, even transported overseas, Ireland might be tranquil. The true Whigs in England, headed by Althorp, felt very differently. O’Connell’s support was vital. In the end a deal was done by which a guilty plea was entered, but by the time the case would have come to court, the law officers decided that the particular statute had expired.
Now the Irish leader announced that, despite some objections, he would give the Bill ‘his most decided support’. O’Connell might be seen as Dr Frankenstein by Doyle – he who had created a monster. But if he was creating a monster, O’Connell had a definite, constructive agenda, the repeal of the Act of Union, however unpopular he might be in England. Furthermore he had a thrilling voice in which to expound it. Lytton wrote of its ‘sonorous swell’, paying tribute to the variety of its tones:
It play’d with each wild passion as it went
Now stirr’d the uproar, now the murmur still’d
And sobs and laughter answered as it willed.20
Numerically, there were 100 Irish MPs altogether, including one for Dublin University and comparatively few in O’Connell’s thrall. But then in the coming debate the numbers might be so tight that even the slightest support would prove significant. Certainly no political measure had ever before gained such countrywide, almost breathless attention; this was a time when labourers near Edinburgh, anxious for a full report, clubbed together for copies of the Caledonian Mercury and men in the Midlands eagerly awaited the arrival of the fast coaches from London bearing the latest news from Parliament.21
While the interval between the two readings of the Bill gave time for public support to resonate throughout the country, it also enabled the Tories, so disunited since 1829, to rally. The Duke of Wellington remained obdurate on the question of Reform: suggestions that certain clauses could be opposed, others tolerated – what Croker called ‘moderate gunpowder’ – were dismissed. It was in the best interests of the country, Wellington believed, that the Tories should be in a belligerent mood; they should be unaffected by popular outcries for Reform from people of little sense and even less education. Thus on 18 March the Tories actually brought about a defeat of the Government – of all things the issue was a proposed alteration of the Timber Duties – but they secured a majority of 46 votes. Described by Grey as ‘an untoward event’, it was a warning that all the eager labourers in Scotland reading the Caledonian Mercury still were no closer to representation: in electoral terms nothing had changed.22
Grey duly informed the King in a letter to Sir Herbert Taylor of ‘the determination taken by the Cabinet last night, to proceed with the Reform Bill as if the division on the Timber Duties had not taken place’, giving his technical reasons.23 At the same time defeat on such a trivial issue did raise the spectre of defeat on a larger scale – and on the great issue of the moment. The Whigs had been warned. If they were defeated, and then asked the King to dissolve Parliament – thus provoking a countrywide General Election – would he agree? The subject had to be raised and it had to be raised delicately. When Grey felt his way via Sir Herbert Taylor, he received a highly discouraging reply. The King, reported Taylor, was deeply against dissolution due to ‘apprehensions of a convulsion in this country, and chiefly in Ireland, which have taken such a hold on his mind, that I am persuaded no argument will shake them’. In response to ‘the perilous question’, dissolution had become ‘the obnoxious proposal’.24
Then William spoke for himself. In an extremely long letter dated 20 March he rehearsed all his previous support for Grey and the Bill.25 But he declared himself resolutely opposed to ‘an alternative . . . namely a dissolution of Parliament, to which it is his bounden duty most strenuously to object at this critical period’. It was the royal prerogative to dissolve Parliament. This meant presumably that it was also the royal prerogative not to do so. Was the docile William of January beginning to stir in his palace?
The debate on the second reading of the Reform Bill was summed up by Lord John Russell on 22 March.26 He addressed himself firmly to the question of civic unrest, its cause, its cure, and gave his own take on history. Sir Richard Vyvyan, the MP for Cornwall, had referred to revolutions in 1789 and the time of Charles I; but Russell wanted to refer listeners not only to the revolutions of ‘our ancestors’ but also to that which occurred in France in July last. He posed a rhetorical question: ‘How was it caused? Were Charles X and his Ministers too ready to come forward with plans for Reform?’ Russell answered his own question. He himself firmly believed ‘that if the people were popularly represented, they would not make that Revolution which Sir Richard Vyvyan dreaded. It gave him great satisfaction to think . . . that they had not hesitated to risk that power, to risk their fame, to risk their places, and all that was dear to them as men and Ministers, to improve, largely, liberally and generously, and he hoped successfully, the Constitution of Great Britain.’ The vote was now put, actually on the motion of Sir Richard Vyvyan for delay: that the second reading of the Bill for Representation of Parliament should be held in six months’ time. Thus, paradoxically, ‘No’ became the positive vote in favour of Reform.
The voting took place ‘at exactly three minutes to three’, as Hobhouse meticulously noted, early in the morning of 23 March. ‘The excitement was beyond anything,’ with each side confident of winning. As a result, in Greville’s account, there were ‘great sums’ betted on the outcome.27 When the Speaker, according to custom, put the question that Sir Richard Vyvyan’s motion should be passed, the Whigs bellowed out ‘No’ and with equal ferocity the Tories responded with ‘Aye’; there was a roar, in Macaulay’s vivid phrase, like two volleys of cannon from opposite sides of a battlefield. The Speaker admitted that he did not know which side had it and put the question again. This time he declared: ‘I am not sure but I think the Ayes have it.’
It was at this point, by tradition, that the Ayes left the Chamber to register their votes, which meant that those still in their seats could also be counted. The Ayes seemed to take for ever filing out; to the nervously watching Whigs, the Commons appeared horribly empty after their departure. There was extreme despondency, which gradually faded as the tellers began their work of counting the heads that remained. The tellers spoke loudly so that all could hear . . . Thus there was a shout as they acclaimed 290, a further cry of joy at 300. The ultimate figure of 302 was received with further enthusiasm. At the same time the tension was only building because, clearly, in a house of over 650 Members the possibility of defeat still loomed over them. Rumours came in from outside where the Tory Ayes were gathered: 307, 310, 305 – all disastrous.
It was only when the voice of Charles Wood, Grey’s young son-in-law and Private Secretary, was heard calling out that the truth was known. Wood had jumped onto a bench by the entrance. ‘They are only three hundred and one,’ he shouted. Macaulay said that the shout that the Whigs sent up in reply could have been heard at Charing Cross.28
One vote: but it was enough. Hepburne Scott, an MP who was against Reform, captured something of the astonishing surprise. When the last man walked in and the numbers were declared, ‘I felt as if my nearest relative was dead, a sort of shock I could hardly have conceived it possible on a division in the House.’ Nor was he the only one: Hepburne Scott saw many others who were so overcome that they were unable to speak.29
The Chamber of the House of Commons rapidly emptied as MPs rushed to spread the news. In the small hours crowds were still thronging all through the corridors of Parliament waiting to hear the result. Reporters ran to file their copy and coaches set out through the growing daylight for the provinces. Macaulay had a particularly satisfying encounter with his cab driver as he left the precincts of Westminster at four o’clock in the morning. The first thing the driver asked was: ‘Is the Bill carried?’ ‘Yes, by one.’ ‘Thank God for it, Sir,’ replied this stout reformer. Macaulay reflected that the scene would probably never be equalled in Westminster until the reformed Parliament itself needed reforming; in an optimistic prediction he added, ‘not till the days of our grandchildren’. It was like seeing Caesar stabbed in the Senate house or Oliver Cromwell taking the mace from the table, ‘a sight to be seen only once and never to be forgotten’.30 Of the two alternatives he was convinced faced the country, Reform or Revolution, it seemed for the time being that Reform had been chosen.
The reaction to the news in the rest of the country was predictably ecstatic. Alexander Somerville was a witness to the scene in Edinburgh. At this point he was nineteen or twenty, the youngest of eleven children of an East Lothian farm worker, who had supported himself by manual labour since the age of eight; later in the year Somerville enlisted in the Scots Greys, and later still published his memoirs under the title The Autobiography of a Working Man, an important testimony since he had lived through many of the events of the Reform era in the ranks of the Army.
Now he described how the Edinburgh crowd roared like a wild beast roaming the streets.31 ‘It proclaimed itself the enemy of anti-reformers – and of glass.’ Somerville also sounded a cautious note. This was a parliament of popular commotion and at first even the sound of breaking glass was ‘not unmusical’; but as ‘dash, smash, crash’ went on towards midnight, there were those who began to reflect seriously and severely whether this was truly about Reform ‘or was it popular liberty?’ It was a pertinent enquiry which would grow in strength as time passed. But in the first happy reaction to the majority – however minuscule – this question was less important than the general rejoicing.
There was ‘a sort of repose from the cursed Bill for a moment’, wrote Greville in London.32 It was not however a repose which the two groups ranged on either side of the issue of Reform expected to enjoy as they entered the Committee stage of the Bill. Lord Grey in the House of Lords announced that he stood by the Bill and would not amend it. Reforming groups such as the Birmingham Political Union declared that their support was for the compact, which supposed the whole compact – in short the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill, as the Spectator had it. The support of the Irish Members led by O’Connell for Reform, at 56 votes, had been decisive – English Members voted narrowly by 3 votes against it. They were not in a mood to accept a watering-down of the Bill. Yet some kind of amelioration, as the Tories saw it, was what they were determined to secure. After all, many of them, including Peel himself, had talked of moderate Reform.
* Now the Old Vic.