‘The King has behaved like an angel.’ –
Lord Grey to the Marquess of Anglesey
‘The best dressed, the handsomest, and apparently the happiest man in all his royal master’s dominions’ – thus Creevey described Lord Grey standing in his own drawing room, alone with his back to the fire, on 25 March 1831, two days after the vote in favour of the second reading of the Bill: a considerable change from the doleful Grey of January. Lady Grey also looked as handsome and happy as ever she could be.1 This was an exciting time for the Whigs as a whole and the Cabinet in particular. Of course, these were disparate men, ranging from the fanatical reformer ‘Radical Jack’ Durham and the sincere advocate of change ‘Honest Jack’ Althorp, to Stanley and Richmond, Tories who had entered the Cabinet to form a kind of coalition in favour of moderate Reform.
Brougham in particular could never have been expected to act Patient Griselda, Chaucer’s long-suffering bride; his close relationship with the charismatic editor of The Times, Thomas Barnes, led to leaks which reflected whatever Brougham’s current conspiratorial strategy was at the moment. That gossipy Tory, Mrs Arbuthnot, eagerly reported Brougham’s indiscreet disparagements of his fellow Cabinet members: Grey was in his dotage, led by the nose by Durham, Althorp was a blockhead, Sir James Graham (at the age of twenty-six) a puppy and, in a flourish of malice, the Duke of Richmond had not enough brains to fill the smallest thimble that ever fitted the smallest lady’s finger.2 For all these internal difficulties – against the attacks from the Tories pledged at the very least to diminish the Bill, and the Radicals calling for something far more extreme – the Cabinet remained remarkably united.
Henry Hunt, MP for Preston, was a key figure in the protests of the Radicals. Now nearly seventy, he had aimed to restore his fortune by commerce after his release from prison following Peterloo. Hunt offered a series of products including tax-free Breakfast Powder and shoe-blacking, whose bottles were embossed appropriately enough with the slogan: Equal Laws, Equal Rights, Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage and the Ballot. Caricaturists were naturally happy with Hunt and his wildly bombastic manner of speaking: he was depicted as bursting a symbolic bottle of blacking in the Chamber of the House of Commons. Hunt had originally been supportive of Russell’s unofficial earlier Bill, but increasingly felt that it had not gone far enough; now the Reform Bill proffered by the Whig Government lacked any proposals for what may be termed the shoe-blacking ideals.
Hunt turned against the Bill on 7 April in a crucial speech in Manchester.3 He accused the Government of deliberately framing a measure to bind together ‘the middle classes, the little shopkeepers and those people, to join the higher classes’ who would raise yeomanry and support a standing army; in this way they intended to ‘keep power out of the hands of the rabble’. It was the contemporary distinction between the people as rabble and the people as respectable individuals of the middling sort – except that Hunt, unusually, appeared to believe in the sacred rights of the rabble. Hunt suggested that the Government was bowing down before the illiberal determination of the Tories to avoid a ‘democratical House of Commons’.
A week later Hunt made a speech on the floor of the House.4 He did so in response to Sir Charles Forbes. The latter had been one of those who threatened never to sit in the House of Commons again if it became constituted according to the new Bill; now Forbes prophesied the decline of prosperity and destruction of property as a result of it: for why else was the country from one end to another ‘in a flame’? Joseph Hume, the familiar burly Radical figure who specialized in interjections – he had made 4,000 of these, together with short speeches, since 1820 – now pointedly answered Forbes: yes, the country was in a flame, but it was the fire of ‘illuminations’ (indicating the country’s joy at what was happening). Hunt’s denunciation of the Bill which followed, as something that did not go far enough, was pouring cold water on these flames. Hunt, unlike Forbes, reported disillusionment throughout the country; the people thought they were deluded by the Bill and would not actually be any better off. Yet even Cobbett, declaring his support for the Ballot in the Political Register in February, thought that Hunt was wrong to oppose the Bill.
The fact was that the Whig Government combined genuine enthusiasm on the subject of Reform with attitudes to matters like Universal Suffrage and the Secret Ballot which were very far from the ‘shoe-blacking’ ideals of Hunt. This distinction between the rabble and the people was at the heart of it. Where Universal Suffrage was concerned, the brilliant Macaulay, for example, argued that the poor, in a state of distress, lost their judgement, and in consequence would fall prey to evil flatterers; a monetary qualification for voting was therefore fully justified. It was an attitude of mind well expressed by The Times in the preceding December, when it denounced Universal Suffrage in these terms: ‘we are against all monopolies’. Universal Suffrage would introduce ‘the mass, and with the mass, the dregs of the existing population’. Parliament would be monopolized by ‘the numerical majority of the people’ – in other words, by the mob. Furthermore it would result in the virtual exclusion of all influence derived from property.5
The Secret Ballot was another subject on which contemporary attitudes fought with what would be seen later as enlightenment. There had been calls for it as early as the seventeenth century. Jeremy Bentham had mooted it in the late eighteenth century, and it had been the subject of a long article by James Mill in the Westminster Review in 1830.6 The genuine argument for a Secret Ballot was the need to terminate the fearful atmosphere of bribery and corruption which surrounded the polls. If the vote were to be secret, men could vote according to their convictions, not according to the orders of their masters – in other words their landlords or employers.
Edward Stanley had frankly criticized the idea of the Secret Ballot earlier in 1830 as depriving the higher orders of their legitimate influence. A further argument suggested that it was in fact more corrupt than open voting because the electors could happily take bribes from both sides.7 Sydney Smith as usual had an original take on the subject: he was against secrecy because people would want to know ‘who brought that mischievous profligate villain into Parliament. Let us see the names of his real supporters.’ At the discussions before Russell’s presentation of the Bill, Durham had, perhaps predictably, been in favour of the secret Ballot and Althorp also, although doubtful that it would actually take place. In contrast, the Whig grandees Lords Holland and Lansdowne had shown themselves remarkably indifferent to the subject. It had finally been struck out in view of the King’s professed dislike: ‘nothing should ever induce him to yield to it’.8 The need for William’s overall approbation was paramount.
The duration of Parliament was another question where Hunt’s proposal of Annual Parliaments was avowedly hostile to Whig thinking. Since the Septennial Act of 1716 this duration had been fixed at seven years. In his previous incarnation as a young reformer, Grey had been in favour of Triennial Parliaments, just as Durham was now; but since Russell was against this, there was a compromise of five years.
The future might be with the Radicals – as true reformers must always believe – but for the moment the power of opposition was undoubtedly with the Tories; the question was just how much of it would be mounted in assault upon the Bill in the Commons and Lords. There was very little resignation to the inevitable in the Tory ranks and a great many predictions of fearful woe. It was at this point that the clever, eccentric Tory MP, Viscount Mahon produced his satirical piece A Leaf from the Future History of England.9
A Leaf had a melodramatic beginning as it purported to look back at 1831 in despair from the vantage point of history. At that point had begun ‘that famous English revolution, so fatal a disaster to that country, so useful a warning to others’.* A Leaf continued: ‘This unhappy restlessness was fanned by artful and designing men, and kindled into open flame by the second revolution in Paris.’ There was mockery of the date of Russell’s Bill, the first of March (‘not of April’), before Mahon settled into a series of ghoulish descriptions. He placed the new House of Commons, for example, in February 1832: ‘Instead of independent country gentlemen’, sometimes prejudiced, perhaps, or sometimes stubborn, but always upright and high-minded – there came in ‘a set of needy adventurers, cajolers and pot-companions of the multitude and still reeking with the fumes of their tavern popularity’. In this new Government, where Hunt would be Chief Secretary for Ireland, the post of Foreign Secretary had to be left vacant because no one understood French.
Where real-life politics were concerned, the atmosphere at Westminster grew increasingly tense, with the plottings at the London Clubs by both Whigs and Tories, the gossiping of the hostesses contributing the soprano voices to the choir of rumbling political basses. The Houses of Parliament went into recess for Easter shortly after the victory of 23 March and resumed sitting on 12 April. The Tory strategy was a matter of acute debate within their own circle: obviously one way to go was to propose amendments which would by degrees rob the Bill of any Radical character. Early on, an aged Ultra Tory MP, General Isaac Gascoyne, who had sat for thirty-five years through nine Parliaments, gave notice of one such amendment.10 Gascoyne had been a Coldstream battalion commander in Ireland in 1798, and fought with the Guards in Flanders; he had opposed such causes as the abolition of slavery and Catholic Emancipation. Now he gave notice of a specific amendment which would prevent any reduction in the present number of MPs in England and Wales (although Gascoyne, MP for Liverpool, did support the enfranchisement of Leeds and Manchester, which was a different matter).
Lord Wharncliffe, a Tory peer, suggested a different course of action: the Tories should demonstrate themselves as capable of taking the tiller again, and guiding the national ship to a safe harbour of moderate, necessary Reform. As James Stuart Wortley, Wharncliffe had been an MP until 1826, when he lost his Yorkshire seat and was created a peer. Intelligent and thoughtful, with independent views on matters like education and the controversial Game Laws, it was Wharncliffe in the House of Lords who had pressed forward the debate on the Reform Bill in terms of the figures and the Census. In their need to preserve the Bill itself, the Whigs proved accommodating to some changes: the number of MPs to be abolished, for example, was reduced by half, so that the new House would now contain 627 MPs; there were also minor changes consonant with the Bill remaining the whole Bill. But in the end, the crisis by which the Tories hoped to defeat the Government was manufactured. A version of Gascoyne’s amendment was used, with Gascoyne himself as proposer and another Ultra Tory as seconder.
On 20 April the Government was indeed defeated – there was a majority of 8 for Gascoyne’s amendment, in other words against the Bill. The critical vote was taken even later on this occasion, approaching five o’clock in the morning. The lawyer Francis Jeffrey, who had recently entered Parliament for the first time in his late fifties after a distinguished career as Lord Advocate for Scotland, gave a vivid description of the scene thereafter: ‘It was a beautiful, rosy dead calm morning when we broke up a little before five’... and I took three pensive turns along the solitude of Westminster Bridge, admiring the sharp clearness of St Paul’s and all the city spires soaring up in a cloudless sky, the orange and red light that was beginning to play on the trees of the Abbey, and the old windows of the Speaker’s house, and the flat green mist of the river floating upon a few lazy hulks on the tide, and moving low under the arches. It was a curious contrast with the long previous imprisonment in the stifling roaring House, amidst dying candles and every sort of exhalation.’11
Nobody could be absolutely certain at this point what would happen next. The Government had indicated in advance that they might seek a dissolution if defeated – but that could be interpreted as a mere threat. William IV had expressed himself so firmly only a few weeks ago that from outside there could be no assurance on the subject. The royal Court, as ever, with its fundamental Tory bias, was the source of disquieting stories from the Whig point of view. John Wilson Croker heard on 29 March that the Duke of Gloucester, a profoundly right-wing figure, had told his cousin the King that the effect of Reform would be to deprive him of his crown. ‘Very well, very well,’ replied William ‘pettishly’. At which Gloucester added with relish: ‘But, Sir, Your Majesty’s head may be in it.’ The House of Commons was also a rumour factory. Typically, Le Marchant overheard someone else saying that William had promised his rabidly Tory brother the Duke of Cumberland on no account to dissolve; and that Sir Charles Wetherell had been authorized to say so in the House of Commons.12 There was nothing to substantiate this; but people who wanted to believe it were glad to do so.
The next day, Althorp as Whig leader was defeated in the House of Commons on a bill for supplies, and as a result supplies were refused. This upset the Government plans: it had been hoped to get this bill through before going for a dissolution and the vital election which would follow it. The Opposition, on the contrary, were now keen for the Government to admit that they were seeking dissolution. Then they could promptly defeat them on a motion against it; thus there would be no dissolution and no General Election. It was, in short, a war of nerves.
In the meantime, extensive backstairs lobbying had continued. It is possible, as has been suggested, that the Whig Lord Chamberlain, the Duke of Devonshire, was the key voice in the King’s ear at this point. ‘Hart’, as he was known after his original courtesy title of Hartington, son of Georgiana, was an important member of the Whig cousinhood. He had recently come out strongly for Reform in a striking speech at a city meeting in Derby, adjacent to his enormous, widespread estates.13 How bad the present system had been for the image of the aristocracy! He reflected on the irony of a situation where the Duke’s connection with his fellow countrymen was stronger through his Knaresborough burgage tenures – a form of enfranchisement based on rented land which meant that seats could be bought and sold like the land itself – than through ‘the cordial and independent body . . . I now see before me, the yeomen of the county of Derby’. Devonshire’s influence was obviously important. But there was also a general Whig campaign to inform the King of the Tory sneers on the subject of his prerogative. It was being questioned by some Tories whether the King really did have the right to dissolve Parliament against the wishes of the majority.
Another crucial character in this crisis – and in various crises which lay ahead – was Sir Herbert Taylor, the King’s private secretary, and thus the conduit for his correspondence with the Prime Minister. In an age when royal servants occupied an important but largely unsung position, hung as it were between the heaven of the monarchy and the earth of its subjects, Taylor was supremely well qualified to fill the position. He was devoted to the interests of his royal masters but quietly interpreted these interests as encompassing those of the country as a whole, which would benefit from a popular, respected monarchy.
The son of a Kentish clergyman, Taylor had been educated abroad for ten years. He emerged as an excellent linguist, which enabled him to work for the Foreign Office for a period before joining the Army; there he encountered George III’s second son, Frederick Duke of York. In 1795, at the age of twenty, Taylor became his ADC, and later his private secretary; Taylor rose by degrees to the rank of lieutenant-general in the Coldstream Guards, of which the Duke of York was Colonel. All these were excellent preparatory diplomatic and military experiences for the next vital appointment: as private secretary to George III in 1805.14
In this delicate position, Taylor won golden opinions for his tact and discretion, also his wisdom; later he became private secretary to Queen Charlotte. After her death in 1818, other positions of trust of a mainly military nature followed, including that of military secretary to the Duke of Wellington. Not all his missions were straightforward. It fell to Taylor, for example, to negotiate financially between the Duke of York and his mistress Mary Anne Clarke and it was Taylor too who helped suppress scandalous allegations about the parentage of Thomas Garth, illegitimate son of Princess Sophia. At the death of George IV, Sir Herbert was actually Surveyor-General of the Ordnance of the United Kingdom and Adjutant-General of the Forces when he was seconded to be private secretary to the new (and inexperienced) King.
Taylor’s private correspondence with Grey during this period shows that he managed to bring royal diplomacy to a fine art. He was well aware of the need for secrecy over any possible dissolution, equally frank about his master’s distaste for the ‘obnoxious proposal’, yet somehow managed to maintain a private sense of the true interests of the monarchy. Nevertheless the most tactful secretary in the world might bring the royal horse to the water but still would not necessarily be able to make him drink.
The crisis deepened as the state of the country indicated very clearly to the Tories that they might fare badly at any General Election held in the current climate. Fortunately there was a convenient theory that the dissolution of Parliament could not take place in the middle of unfinished business: this made the need for Tory action in the House of Lords all the more acute. A plan was evolved by which Lord Wharncliffe would propose a vote against dissolution in advance. According to this theory, such a vote would take precedence over the admission of the Commissioners of the Crown (to secure the dissolution).
At a Whig Cabinet meeting on 21 April, the resolution was taken to ask the King for a dissolution despite the King’s adverse letter on the subject: ‘Nothing but an imperative sense of duty’ could have led them to propose a measure to which they were aware the King felt ‘strong objections’, ran the minutes of the meeting.15 * Yet public expectation had been raised high; as a result, the effect of a disappointment was ‘greatly to be feared, as likely to disturb the peace of the country’. In short, it was to prevent an agitation of ‘so formidable a nature’ that they had asked the King to dissolve Parliament. The King’s reply was indicative of the lifestyle of a Hanoverian monarch: he had to receive the Prince of Coburg, he replied, at eleven o’clock in the morning, but he would see his Prime Minister at eleven-thirty and hold a Council at twelve noon. ‘Everybody being in their morning dress’, this Council would concern the dissolution.
When they reached St James’s Palace the Ministers found a King hating dissolution as much as ever, in Brougham’s words, but hating even more the Tory interference with, or attempt to delay, the exercise of the royal prerogative. This is where the Duke of Devonshire and, one may suppose, privately, Sir Herbert Taylor had done their work. Caught on the raw, King William fired up: ‘What! Did they dare meddle with the prerogative! He would presently show them what he could and would do.’ In his impulsive, even rash way, William agreed at once to go down to the House of Lords (where the actual dissolution of Parliament had to take place). The old sailor declared: ‘I am always at single anchor’ – that is, ready to sail.17
The royal cortège, however, was not always at single anchor. It was a question of the necessary traditional pomp for such an occasion, august yet daring. By his own account, Brougham now informed the King that he had taken the liberty – which he hoped the King would forgive – of summoning any Horse Guards that happened to be stationed close by, since the Life Guards, who were generally in attendance, were in a distant barracks. ‘Well, that was a strong measure,’ commented the King. (In the future, William would make Brougham’s action the subject of one of his repetitive jokes, which he at any rate found funnier each time he made them: with great good humour he would remind Brougham of his ‘high treason’ in ordering up the troops.)18 Now Brougham had to dash home to put on the ‘gold gown’ of the Lord Chancellor.
Durham had a slightly different version in his report to his wife Louisa. ‘All is right,’ he wrote in ecstasy. ‘The King has consented to a dissolution. Hurrah!’ It was Durham who, having jumped into Brougham’s coach, went to see the Master of the Horse, the Earl of Albemarle, who was having his breakfast.
‘You must have the King’s carriages ready instantly.’
‘The King’s carriages!’ exclaimed Albemarle. ‘Very well. I will just finish my breakfast.’
Durham told him that, on the contrary, he must not lose a moment.
‘Lord bless me! Is there a Revolution?’ asked the alarmed Master of the Horse.
The answer symbolized the urgency felt by the Whigs about Reform.
‘Not at the moment,’ replied Durham. ‘But there will be if you stay to finish your breakfast.’
According to this story, Albemarle hastened to the Palace in alarm, with the news that the horses’ manes needed time to be appropriately plaited. ‘Then I will go in a Hackney carriage,’ King William replied cheerfully.19
There was then enacted a scene which was ‘never exceeded in violence and uproar by any bear-garden exhibition’. The House of Lords was crammed, including a multitude of peeresses as spectators. As Lord Wharncliffe was actually on his feet in the House of Lords speaking, with a view to moving to dismiss the idea of dissolution, the sound of cannon was heard. In the Commons it was Sir Robert Peel who was in mid-oration when the thunderous noise interrupted him, together with ‘loud and vehement cries’ (in Hansard’s phrase) of ‘To the Bar! To the Bar!’ – the signal to go to the House of Lords.20 Peel struggled to keep on speaking until the Usher of the Black Rod appeared at the bar of the House and said: ‘I am commanded by His Majesty, to command the immediate attendance of the honourable House in the House of Lords.’
So the MPs flocked down the narrow passage between the two Houses, where glass from a broken watch led to at least one moment of jocularity. The MP John Campbell, crunching it underfoot between Peel and Russell, said that he hoped that there would be a clause in the Bill for better communication between the two Houses; to which Peel bantered back that there was surely a case for a compensation clause. The Tory MP Sir Henry Hardinge, a gallant soldier who had been Wellington’s political and military ADC and lost his left hand at Quatre Bras, had a grimmer take on the proceedings: he told Sir John Hobhouse that the next time he heard those guns, they would be ‘shotted’, that is loaded, ‘and take off some heads’.21
The MPs, some shocked, some excited, all surprised, were headed by the Speaker, Charles Manners-Sutton, who was said to be red-faced and quivering with rage at the King’s unexpected and imminent arrival to dissolve Parliament. Lord Lyndhurst, recently the Tory Lord Chancellor, shook his fist at the Duke of Richmond, the Tory who had joined the coalition for Reform. The violent Ultra Tory the Marquess of Londonderry did not so much speak as scream abuse. As Jeffrey put it, it was a scene of ‘bellowing and roaring and gnashing of teeth’.22 Inevitably such extraordinary noise reached the ears of the King when the doors of the Chamber were thrown open. In bewilderment, he asked his Lord Chancellor what the noise was. This gave Brougham his chance. ‘If it please Your Majesty,’ he replied smoothly, ‘it is the Lords debating.’
William IV himself was resolute in the face of the confusion; perhaps the sound of battle was rather more to his taste than the manipulative chicanery of party politics. There was some doubt as to whether a (so far) uncrowned king could properly wear the crown. William would have none of this. He turned to the courtier beside him and said: ‘Lord Hastings, I wear the crown, where is it?’ The crown was brought and Hastings was about to put it on his master’s head when the King intervened. ‘Nobody shall put the crown on my head but myself,’ he declared, suiting the action to the word. In view of his innate reluctance to have a coronation in the first place on grounds of expense, William then allowed himself the barbed comment to Grey: ‘Now, my Lord, the coronation is over.’ 23
This display of royal spirit behind the scenes was one thing. From the opposite point of view, the twenty-three-year-old Viscount Villiers, MP, heir to the Tory Earl of Jersey, shuddered at the sight of the King on the throne with his self-imposed crown loosely on his head and Lord Grey’s tall, gaunt figure towering over him: ‘It was as if the King had got his Executioner by his side’; the whole image was ‘strikingly typical of his and our future destinies’.24 In short, forty years of politics had turned the beautiful patrician youth admired by Byron that Grey had once been into a sombre figure of Fate.
King William’s declaration was all that the Whigs (and the reformers in the country generally) could have wanted. He explained the coming dissolution: ‘I have been induced to resort to this measure for the purpose of ascertaining the sense of my people, in the way in which it can be most constitutionally expressed, on the expediency of making such changes in the representation as circumstances may appear to require’ – in other words, dissolution was intended to bring about a General Election on the subject of Reform. It was no wonder that Grey wrote to Lord Anglesey, following the period of doubt about the royal intentions: ‘The King has behaved like an angel. There is no extent of gratitude that we do not owe him for the confidence and kindness with which we have been treated.’25
The City was similarly enthusiastic. When the news reached it, a Court of Lieutenancy was sitting at the Guildhall; those present included the Lord Mayor and directors of the Bank of England. Members of the Court of Common Council called for a general meeting at the Royal Exchange ‘to express our sentiments on the occasion of His Majesty having so promptly and patriotically determined to exercise his Royal Prerogative’ by dissolving Parliament. Subsequently the Lord Mayor ordered a general celebration by means of illuminations on 27 April.
Queen Adelaide’s attitude to it all in her Diary was naturally rather different; it constituted an interesting indication of the way the Tory element at the Court was thinking. ‘The Ministers prevailed on the King to prorogue the Parliament and dissolve it in his own person,’ she wrote, adding, ‘May God will that the step be not dangerous for the welfare of the Country.’ As for her own reaction: ‘I was very much moved and upset.’26 At least she kept up her poise when questioned anxiously by William’s twelve-year-old nephew, Prince George of Cambridge, who had gleaned that something exceptional had happened. ‘What has the King done?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Has he not done something odd?’ Queen Adelaide responded with dignity: ‘The King can do odd things.’
The whole episode aroused the most passionate feelings in which families were divided and friends abused each other; there was ‘heat, fury, discussion and battling’, in Haydon’s phrase. The Hon. Robert Smith, heir to the first Lord Carrington, a wealthy banker, had been Member for Buckinghamshire for the last ten years; he had presented petitions for the Bill from his constituents (as well as anti-slavery petitions) and voted against Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment on 23 April. Lord Carrington was described by Maria Edgeworth as ‘most amiable and benevolent’ and he was certainly extremely philanthropic. On this occasion, his amiability was apparently stretched too far. He wrote to his son: ‘My dear Bob . . . It would be as well for you not to come to this house for sometime as I would be tempted to use language which you would never forget, and [for] which I myself might never forgive myself.’27
The disgust of Lord Carrington was at least expressed in a letter. Among the Tories, General Gascoyne himself, whose amendment had wreaked this havoc, was hooted, hissed and pelted in his own constituency of Liverpool. An eyewitness recorded: ‘When I saw him his face, his hair and his clothes were covered with filth and spittle . . . not from a mob of the lowest sort, but from men his own equals.’ Gascoyne would in fact be defeated in the coming election.28
Certainly the incident added to the enormous popularity of William IV. The very different stages in his feelings were hidden from his grateful subjects as they hallooed their joy. Much was made of the happy coincidence of the King’s nickname – ‘Vote for the Two Bills’ was a favoured cry. John Doyle produced an amusing drawing of the King, unmistakable with his stout figure and turnip-like face, gazing at a wall on which were the words: ‘The Bill and nothing but the Bill.’ William asked: ‘Is that me?’ At the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the actor-manager William Charles Macready scored great success with Alfred the Great or the Patriot King by James Sheridan Knowles. The play was announced within days of the dissolution and ‘God Save the King’ was incorporated into the text. Lines appropriate to recent events included the following:
Thus to a people faithful to their King
A faithful King an institution gives
That makes the lowly cottage lofty as
The regal dome . . .29
Unfortunately William’s admirers celebrated not only with further illuminations ‘sagaciously’ ordered by the Lord Mayor – the phrase was Elizabeth Grosvenor’s as she and her husband wandered down Regent Street ‘dressed in plain clothes’ – but by breaking windows. This left Princess Lieven to record picturesquely that the Tories who refused to illuminate in honour of the dissolution were obliged to sleep ‘in fresh air’.30 The Lord Mayor’s order found the crowds in no mood to tolerate dissent, which was freely interpreted as meaning any unlit window in a great house. For all that, Elizabeth and her husband, home at midnight, found it ‘a very pleasant and entertaining walk’ in their plain clothes, others were not so lucky. The Duke of Wellington at Apsley House was one of the victims. The Duke was not there; his house was in darkness and there was certainly no sign of the candles with which other grandees had lit up their windows (either with joy or in a bid to preserve them). As the mob swept up Piccadilly, Apsley House seemed to present an inviting target.
There was in fact a far more solemn reason for the darkness which mantled the great house than mere political disappointment. Kitty, Duchess of Wellington, the neglected wife, had died on 24 April and her body lay there in its coffin while the Duke made preparations for her funeral in the country. The Duke reported afterwards that his servant John had saved the house, or the lives of the mob – ‘possibly both’ – by firing gunpowder over their heads: ‘They certainly intended to destroy the House,’ he wrote, ‘and did not care one Pin for the poor Duchess being dead in the house.’31
On the subject of Reform itself the Duke felt an equivalent gloom. He followed the current trend for looking for a disastrous precedent in the events leading up to the English Civil War: ‘I don’t believe that the King of England has taken a step so fatal to his monarchy,’ he wrote of the dissolution, ‘since the day that Charles I passed the Act to deprive himself of the power of proroguing or dissolving the long Parliament.’32
The representative of the banking house of Rothschild in London, Nathan Rothschild, also found his windows suffering from association: he was known to be a friend of the Duke. But it was his brother James in Paris who was almost as gloomy as the Duke, due to his recent experiences there of revolution in which stocks had fallen sharply. He compared events in the two countries. To start with, in France no one viewed the matter as giving cause for concern, ‘but then we fell some 30 per cent and I hope To God this will not be repeated this time in England . . . Let us get down to the nitty gritty, I am not pleased with the situation in England.’ It was high time for England to put a stop to the progress of ‘the infamous liberal spirit’.33
Meanwhile that country itself, watched by the wary financiers, settled down to the joys – or dangers – of a General Election. It was less than six months since the Whigs had come to power but already the whole political climate had changed. Public opinion on the subject of Reform – ‘the expectations of the people’ – had just been quoted by that ‘angel’, the monarch himself, in justifying his dissolution of Parliament.
* Since the text purported to be written about a revolution 'now above a century ago', in theory this imaginary historian could have been looking back from 1945, a time when the actual coming of the Labour Government produced similar predictions of disaster.
* An important surviving witness to all this was Grey’s son, then Lord Howick, who subsequently edited his father’s correspondence with William IV: he reported the dismay when Wharncliffe’s cunning plan of attack was discovered.16