‘Confound their politics
Frustrate their knavish tricks’ –
Sung at a Whig dinner, 25 September 1831
On 8 September at long last that coronation, so much resented and criticized by the King, took place. Whatever William’s private feelings, the rejoicing in the country was almost universal. For days beforehand newspapers had been advertising apartments with a view of the procession (there were also tickets available to the public for seats inside the Abbey). On the day itself, the cries of ‘God Save the King’ seemed endless, in the words of The Times, ‘As far as the eye could reach, hats, hankies and flags were waving in the air.’1
The report added: ‘It must not pass unnoticed that the word Reform mingled with the loudest shouts that greeted the monarch’s ear.’ The dark, boarded-up windows of Londonderry House, punished for its owner’s hardline opinions, were another reminder that the issue was ever present. But in general the coronation was thought to demonstrate one salient fact about the national character: ‘Of all people on the face of the earth, the people of England are a King-loving generation.’ The vision of well-dressed young women in their best bonnets and frocks, gradually getting swallowed up by the crowd, where only their piercing screams saved them, was thought to add to the gaiety of the occasion; as the poor young things emerged, the sight of their crushed costumes and bonnets ‘twisted into fantastic shapes’ was greeted with good-natured laughter.
There was certainly a huge contrast between this delirious reception and the one which had greeted George IV ten years earlier. This time the hisses and groans which Peel had received at London Bridge were reserved for the Duke of Cumberland – which, given his well-known Ultra Tory views, was a good way of indicating approval for the Whigs. Enthusiasm was not limited to the capital: the Birmingham Political Union, for example, held a so-called monarchical dinner in honour of the occasion at the Globe Inn; under Attwood’s expert management, expressions of opinion were limited to approval of the Sovereign.2 The odd complaint about the cost was not anything that ruling systems must not inevitably endure. The barber who told his client, while cutting his hair, ‘we want a cheap government like America and we will have it’ was in this great tradition of popular grumbling. In the same way, Croker’s suggestion that the young Princess Victoria might one day find herself to be plain Miss Guelph was in the equally great tradition of pessimistic upper-class prophecy. The fact that the Duchess of Kent wilfully kept the heiress presumptive to the throne away from the ceremony did more harm to the thirteen-year-old girl’s image than any lavish stories of splendour.
In any case, when it came to the details William had not budged in his emphasis on economy. Only a few weeks earlier, he had expostulated once more on the subject: ‘the Solemnity’ of a coronation, as he put it, might have been useful in its time but was ‘ill adapted to ours’, and the expense it involved ‘in the present circumstances of the country and those of Europe most idle and unnecessary’. The result was summed up by Greville as designed to ‘cost as little money and as little trouble as possible’. Macaulay made fun of it all: ‘The Archbishop mumbled, the Bishop of London preached well enough but not so effectively as the occasion required . . . and the King behaved very awkwardly, his bearing making the foolish parts of the ritual appear monstrously ridiculous.’ It was the Whig grandee the Duke of Devonshire, commented Macaulay, who looked as if he came to be crowned, instead of his master.3
All the same, the cost was only just over £43,000 (roughly £4,300,000) as compared to that of his predecessor at more than five times that figure.4 Peers wore their parliamentary robes, which undermined the opportunity for conspicuous consumption in ordering new ones. The ushers in Westminster Abbey were volunteers who paid for their own costumes. A single fiddler on a single string was thought the cheapest way of accompanying the anthem. The Tory press was in addition horrified when William insisted on doing away with the procession, which led to the abolition of some hereditary offices.
William IV’s annotated copy of the proposed coronation ritual has been described by an authority as resembling ‘a battlefield’.5 The King felt particularly strongly on the subject of the anointing; he wanted no one to wipe away oil from his head: ‘I will not be smeared,’ he told Lord Holland. There were all sorts of simplifications and cost-cutting changes. George IV had aimed to eclipse Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor in 1804; William IV on the other hand did not even have the crown itself remodelled – it was merely padded. (Queen Adelaide, however, scorned the idea of the crown once used for Mary of Modena, Catholic wife of James II, and announced she would have one made up for herself out of jewels belonging to the late Queen Charlotte.) The ceremony, termed the ‘Penny coronation’ or the ‘half-crownation’ by wags, was in direct contrast to that of George IV in another way: this time the Sovereign did not occupy his time ogling his mistress, Lady Conyngham, both in the Abbey and afterwards. On the other hand, William IV’s lewd toast at the post-coronation dinner was gleefully reported by Greville, one of those less than happy incidents when the spirit of the old sailor took over from that of the new King. William toasted killing eyes and moving thighs, before celebrating another part of the body by rhyming le cul qui danse with honi soit qui mal y pense.6
During the more formal part of the day there was one significant new prayer, in contrast to the many cuts: ‘The Lord give you a faithful Senate, wise Counsellors and magistrates, loyal nobility, dutiful gentry . . .’ it ran. One can easily believe that this prayer found a heartfelt echo in the royal breast. It remained to be seen in the coming weeks whether the Senate was indeed so faithful – especially that part of the Senate known as the House of Lords.
The third reading of the Bill took place on 21 September and the House of Commons finally passed it at five o’clock the next morning. The majority was unequivocal: 345 in favour to 236 against. The Tories were not however showing any signs of conceding the case. Where the House of Lords was concerned, the destination of the Bill in October, this was ominous. Only the day before the vote, Sir Robert Peel had expatiated at length on the characteristics of tyrants through the ages, citing Napoleon under the name of ‘Boney’; Cromwell, that ever popular source of historical parallel at this time, as Peel himself had pointed out earlier; and the French Assembly of 1791: in each case these tyrants had pretended to preserve the outward form of things, in order to transform the substance. And the Tory leader in the Commons proceeded to quote Macbeth:
Upon his head they placed a fruitless crown
And put a barren sceptre in his grip.
The reference was to the witches’ prophecy that Banquo would be father to a line of kings, while Macbeth would have no heirs; Macbeth was mocked with the emblems of power but the reality was transferred away.7
Publicly, the triumphant Whigs and their allies were not disturbed by these fearful predictions. There were Whig dinners. One celebration of over 250 people was given in the Hall of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, to which all the various individuals who had backed Reform were invited. In the Chair was Sir Francis Burdett, in his kaleidoscopic character illustrating the various elements which made up the reforming movement at this time. Burdett, with a magnificent patrician nose to rival that of the Duke of Wellington, looked what he was: ‘a thoroughly high bred gentleman’ in the words of Sir Denis Le Marchant. He was a hereditary baronet, and after a dashing youth as the lover of Lady Oxford, had married Sophia Coutts, a member of the banking family (their daughter Angela Burdett-Coutts would be the celebrated philanthropist). First in a seat paid for by his Coutts father-in-law, and later as MP for Westminster, Burdett had been in Parliament for nearly forty years; but there were interruptions. Burdett was a born subversive, sacked from Westminster School when young, a frequenter of Paris in the early idealistic days of the Revolution, then imprisoned in the Tower of London for breach of parliamentary privilege, finally sent to the Marshalsea Prison after Peterloo for protesting about the massacres and the ‘bloody Neroes’ who were responsible.8
Perhaps Burdett summed up his own character best when he described its finest part as being ‘a strong feeling of indignation at injustice and oppression and a lively sympathy with the sufferings of my fellows’. Naturally Burdett had been an early and passionate advocate of Reform. At the same time that paternalistic side of his nature, which made Whigs call him a Tory and Tories a Whig – as he himself joked – led him to see the Crown as the natural protector of the poor. This certainly made him an appropriate Chairman for this particular occasion. It was notable that ‘God Save the King’ was sung with particular vigour, with special emphasis on the lines concerning the scattering of his (and their) enemies:
Confound their politicks
Frustrate their knavish tricks
On Thee our hopes we fix
God Save the King!
Lord Althorp, he whose easy, unforced manner of management had been responsible for so much of the successful outcome of the ‘dreary warfare’, in Le Marchant’s phrase, made various speeches to his colleagues. His style was to be brief: ‘I have never been ambitious of power, or of high degree,’ declared Althorp, one of the few Ministers who could say such a thing with conviction, ‘but I have been, am still, ambitious of that popularity which is the true result of an honest and consistent discharge of public duty.’ How, he asked, had the recent happy result been obtained? Certainly by the support of the men before him, but also by ‘the support of the people of England’.9 This was the Whig philosophy which needed to be emphasized, in case the cause of Reform, now officially sailing forward, was threatened by shipwreck some time in the future.
As for the people of England themselves at this juncture, much was anticipated with regard to the passing of the Bill – and much was feared by the men who were their rulers. In particular the rising number of trade unions were the subject of apprehension. The idea of workmen combining to secure better working hours and more appropriate wages, together with limiting the right of entry to a profession, went right back to the medieval craft guilds. It was in the eighteenth century that the potentially dangerous – to the employers – idea of combination among workers led to a series of so-called Combination Acts. Repealed in 1824, they were replaced the next year by measures intended to limit at the very least this kind of activity. In the autumn of 1831, therefore, it was not absolutely clear either to the authorities or the uniting workers what might be legal and what was not. Although the Birmingham Political Union, founded late in 1829, led the way and continued to act as a template, there were many others, not all necessarily with that commitment to non-violent protest on which the charismatic Thomas Attwood insisted.
A significant figure in the Radical movement at this stage in his ambivalence towards protest was Joseph Parkes. He had been born in Warwick and moved to Birmingham in 1822, playing a role in the earlier attempts to enfranchise it. On several occasions this ‘shrewd little fellow’, in Carlyle’s description, had acted as an election agent. On the one hand Parkes, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, regarded Francis Place as his ‘political father’ from whom he, as ‘a raw miseducated boy’, learnt much that was ‘sound and honest’. He abandoned hopes of a life at the Chancery Bar in London when his father’s business failed, but his air of erudite intelligence common to that profession remained; that enabled a local paper to sneer at him in 1828 as possessing ‘the light of wisdom ting’d by folly’s shade’, in the words of a satirical poem, Chancery Court, published shortly before.10
On the other hand Parkes had originally deplored the founding of the Birmingham Political Union as ‘ill-contrived and worse timed’. Suspecting that Attwood rated currency reform above that of Parliament, he described the Union as a ‘burning lava of red hot radicalism’ which ‘devastated the fair field of reform’. Then he threw his energies and his dissenting idealism into supporting it (and if necessary modifying it). In May 1831 he wrote that, although he was a Radical and ‘may be a Republican in the year 1900, if by the grace of God I so long live [he would have been 104] I am a great advocate for the respect of caste and order’.
On 30 September Parkes organized a Birmingham meeting with the stirring declaration: ‘if the Lords throw out the Bill, the question of the utility of the hereditary peerage will infallibly arise.’11 The King’s prerogative (to create peers) was not an ornament but something for use. There was a subtle change here – even a hint of a threat – from the loyal declaration of the previous December, when William IV was thanked for getting rid of Wellington, and ‘entire confidence’ was placed in his ‘wisdom, patriotism and firmness’. But Parkes, with his lightly balanced scales dipping between a desire for progress and respect for the status quo, stood for many sincere men, both governors and governed, at this delicate moment.
From the opposite point of view, Lord Melbourne, as Home Secretary, had his own concerns. He was in touch with the King’s secretary, Sir Herbert Taylor, immediately after the Bill passed through the Commons. ‘So far as I can learn,’ wrote Melbourne, ‘the political unions are undoubtedly extending themselves, increasing their numbers and completing their arrangements’ in case the Bill was defeated. He believed that plans to resist taxes while preserving the peace – an interesting challenge in itself – were constantly discussed. Melbourne, by no means an ardent reformer, reported ‘the most serious fears’ of those who knew the people well, of the consequences of rejecting the measure of Reform.12
As a matter of fact, Melbourne was indirectly in touch with Radical opinion: he used his younger brother, the MP George Lamb, to make contact with the agitator-cum-tailor Francis Place. In good Whig fashion, Melbourne had appointed Lamb Under Secretary at the Home Office and his spokesman in the House of Commons. Lamb was a rumbustious fellow – ‘very diverting’ in Macaulay’s estimation – who had defended the use of force by the military at Merthyr in June on the grounds that it was necessary to maintain public order; but he was sound generally on the need for Reform.13 Immediately after the Government was formed in November 1830, Lamb had been used by Melbourne to ask Francis Place to calm down the Swing rioters; that overture had not worked but the connection, via Lamb’s own Private Secretary, Thomas Young, existed.
The great debate starting in the House of Lords on 3 October began inauspiciously with a squabble between two marquesses: Cleveland quarrelled with Londonderry over a petition from Durham for Reform.14 Londonderry was sure the inhabitants of Durham at large ‘by no means partook of these sentiments’, to which Cleveland retorted that there was no counter-petition to be considered. But Londonderry was not done yet. The Duke of Sussex now presented a petition from merchants, bankers, traders and so forth of Bristol: nearly 26,000 names altogether. Care had been taken, the Duke reported, that none of those who had signed were under sixteen. Londonderry jumped up and announced that he had received certain knowledge from a correspondent that 5,000 or 6,000 of the signatures were fake. But the petitions rolled on: there were for example over 33,000 signatures from Manchester, and lesser amounts from towns throughout the country from South Shields in the north-east to Weymouth on the south coast. Finally the bickering ceased.
Lord Grey now rose to his feet and moved the second reading of the Reform Bill in the House of Lords. He was, however, a man only very recently pierced by the personal tragedy so long feared – none the easier to bear for that. On 24 September, Durham’s son Charles Lambton, Grey’s favourite grandchild, gave up his struggle to survive tuberculosis and died. Grey was devastated. To Princess Lieven he uttered the heartbreaking cry of the old who have survived the young: ‘Why did the blow fall on this heavenly boy, while I and so many others who would be no loss to the world are spared?’
The pathetic funeral cortège of the thirteen-year-old boy was actually passing north as the devastated grandfather rose to speak. Perhaps it was appropriate under the circumstances that his ‘grave and beautiful eloquence’ was felt by the young Gladstone, intently listening to every debate for nine or ten hours a day, to be that of ‘an older time’;* there were surviving Members of the House of Lords who were reminded of their own youth as they listened to the rippling, majestic oratory emanating from the sixty-seven-year-old Prime Minister.15
‘In the course of a long political life,’ began Grey, a phrase he was certainly entitled to use, given that he had entered Parliament as MP for Northumberland forty-five years earlier. Then he had to sit down.16 He was evidently labouring to master strong emotion – the consciousness of that sad little coffin travelling north was too much for him. Recovering, Grey described himself as the advocate of principles from which he had never swerved, and declared boldly that if Reform had sometimes appeared to ‘slumber’ – a convenient way of dealing with the twists and turns of its history, including his own participation – it had never slept. There were cheers and counter-cheers. Grey then reminded his audience of that ‘imprudent declaration’, Wellington’s denunciation in principle of ‘all Reform whatever’, before pointing out that he himself had only accepted office from the King on condition that he could bring in ‘a measure of peace, safety and conciliation’ – in short, Reform.
Yet ‘men of learning and character have actually been found elsewhere’, continued Grey, who have ‘gravely’ told their audience that unless Members of the House of Commons were allowed to be ‘the nominees of Peers, of loan contractors, and of speculating attorneys, rather than the Representatives of the people, all security for the happiness, the prosperity, and the liberty we enjoy, will fall from under us’. Was this really to be the case in modern times, ‘in this hour – in the nineteenth century – when the schoolmaster is abroad, and when the growing intelligence of all classes of the community is daily and hourly receiving new lights?’ Grey would have supposed that the mere mention of nomination would have brought about ‘universal derision and contempt’.
In the course of a long speech, the Prime Minister made prolonged excursions into past history: the Spanish Netherlands, the execution of King Charles I, the deposition of James II, the loss of British America, the extinction of the old French monarchy under Louis XVI with ‘the utter sweeping off of the French nobility as a power in the State’ – all found mention, all were cited as examples of the tragedies which occurred when the will of the people was ignored. It was, wrote The Times afterwards, ‘a grave, dignified, earnest and impressive speech’, in other words ‘a model of luminous statement’.17
Grey did not receive universal acclaim from his fellow peers, as he had hardly expected to do. When he touched on the suggestion, made by some Lords, that removing the nominations was ‘an act of spoliation and robbery’, there were loud cries of ‘Hear, hear!’ Grey responded swiftly: the right to nominate MPs was ‘not property but a trust’. As to the argument that the present system worked well enough, there was one vital thing it had not achieved: it had not ‘conciliated the affections and feelings of the people’. Witness the fact that petitions on the subject of Reform had been presented ‘to an extent which, I believe, was never equalled on any other occasion’. If his opponents in the Lords still doubted the sentiments of the people, still imagined that this anxiety for Reform would pass away, he conjured them: ‘do not lay that flattering unction to your souls!’
A particularly serious passage in Grey’s speech – from the point of view of the future – was what he designated an address to ‘the Prelates’. Bishops – the Lords Spiritual as opposed to the Lords Temporal – were by ancient historical tradition Members of the House of Lords, some ex officio such as the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, others by appointment; there was a long-standing connection between the Church of England and the Tory Party, parallel to the Whig connection to dissent. There were of course clerics who were ‘good Whigs’, in the revealing phrase of Lord Holland, drawing up a document for Lord Grey which discussed various clerical claims to preferment. (To be ‘a thorough old Whig’ was the highest praise and there was a conspicuous lack of emphasis on spiritual values.)18 But once again it must be remembered how long the Tories had been more or less exclusively in office. During this period ‘good Whigs’ were not first in line for promotion. Under the circumstances, there had been dire predictions from some Tories that the Church of England as well as the monarchy – all part of the established order – would be threatened by Reform.
Contemporary attacks on the bishops were not infrequent, suggesting that they were a set of worldly men ignoring their pastoral function. From their point of view, the bishops upheld anti-revolutionary values to the general benefit of a hierarchical society. Critics of the Anglican Church took a different line: here was a politicized extension of the State (with the Sovereign as its supreme governor). Attacks ranged from the crude designation of them as ‘black locusts’, to Francis Place’s more florid malediction – ‘luxurious, rich, overbearing, and benumbing’. Then there was Sydney Smith’s characteristic barb that the bishops deserved to be ‘preached to death by wild curates’. The fact was that the need to pay Church tithes – literally a tax for the support of the Church – caused much unpopularity for obvious reasons at times of economic distress. One John Saville, thought by some to be Captain Swing himself, was responsible for such ‘inflammatory’ notices as this: ‘Oh ye Church of England Parsons, who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, woe woe woe be unto you, ye shall one day have your reward.’ Among the lower classes, it was not forgotten that a clergyman had actually read the Riot Act at Peterloo.19 And where the higher echelons of the Church were concerned, so many ‘Prelates’ had of course votes in the House of Lords.
The current Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley, was in his mid-sixties like the King and Grey, and had been appointed in 1828. A strong opponent of Catholic Emancipation, as also of that repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts which allowed offices previously disbarred to dissenters, Howley was a man whose strong religious convictions made him highly conservative in his politics. For the Whigs his was not a reassuring presence on the ecclesiastical benches. No one could accuse Archbishop Howley of being a thorough old Whig, although his spiritual values, in the tradition of High Churchmen since the seventeenth-century Caroline divines, were not in doubt.
Addressing the prelates as he moved towards a conclusion, Lord Grey implored them to consider what would happen to their standing in the country if the Bill was demonstrably rejected by their votes. Were they not ‘the ministers of peace’? So their actions should lead in the direction of peace. He ended not in the pastures of the Church, but where the true rocks of Reform lay. Grey announced fairly and squarely that he was not prepared to compromise, putting an end to the hopes of moderate Tories in that direction. Nor would he submit to them any ‘delusive’ measure of Reform. It was the Bill and the whole Bill. ‘My Lords,’ he said, ‘I have now done.’
In Birmingham on the same day, the Union held a meeting on Newhall Hill. Shops and factories closed early for the event, bells rang and flags were to be seen in every hand with slogans such as ‘William IV – the People’s Hope’ and ‘Earl Grey – the just rights of our order secured, we will then stand by his order’. Newhall Hill, certainly a more salubrious setting than the crammed and claustrophobic Chamber of the House of Lords, was to prove a crucial environment for the all-important protests of the Birmingham Political Union; Joseph Parkes described it as ‘a natural amphitheatre on twelve acres of rising ground’, although a placard of sale three years later showed it to be something less than half of that. Parkes also erred on the side of generosity when he estimated the crowd on this occasion as 100,000; it was probably more like 30,000, although sceptics went even lower.20 *
All the same, whatever the numbers, this was a cheerful crowd, dressed up as though for a gala day, with plenty of women present, some in bonnets, others in practical shawls. There was also loud patriotic music, which must have been easier for the crowds to hear than the actual words of the speeches, despite the favourable slant of the hill. The Times wrote that there never was ‘we may safely assert, any previous occasion upon which such a deep and universal excitement pervaded the public mind of Birmingham and its neighbourhood’; it was the most important public meeting since 1688 (a report later copied in the Birmingham Journal and the Scotsman).22
In his speech, Attwood cited with a flourish the Marquis de Lafayette forty years ago: ‘for a nation to be free, it is sufficient that she wills it.’ He then asked the whole assembly, having bowed their heads, to ‘look up to the Heavens’, where the just God ruled both Heaven and Earth and cry ‘God bless the King’. Everyone present duly uncovered their heads and shouted out in enthusiastic acclamation of their Sovereign. All this was in line with the Radical medals now beginning to be struck: Thomas Attwood’s fine profile might be on one side of the medal, but on the other the words ‘God Save the King’, with protestations of loyalty, would be found. The next day the Birmingham Political Union’s petition to the House of Lords was presented by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham, along with seventy-nine others.
The expressions of loyalty to William IV among the reformers were almost universal; as at the Whig dinner, the confounded politics of opposition were contrasted with loyalty to the Sovereign. Yet in Whig circles an uneasiness was beginning to be felt about the King’s precise stance, as Grey reported privately. It was of course all a question of that cloud on the horizon, creation of peers for a particular political purpose, as opposed to the traditional coronation creations, which had gone off smoothly. The Times for one, with its excellent contacts (preeminent among them the indiscreet maverick Lord Brougham), picked up on this development.
As the debate itself was in progress, it ran a story expressing sympathy for the King as being in a difficult position. The ‘female part of his family’ were said to differ generally from him in opinion on the important question of reform. ‘Heaven bless the amiable babblers!’ exclaimed the patriarchal newspaper, hoping they would all live to see the happy effects of that measure to which they now fancied themselves averse. In general, of course, ‘petticoat politicians’ were not to be heeded and The Times consoled itself with the thought that the King, as a sailor, was used to separating himself ‘by whole seas’ from the persons to whom he was most attached.23 This begged the question as to what would happen when the King was not so much separated by whole seas from his family, as marooned in their midst.
In the meantime the importance of what was happening in the Lords was signified by ‘a somewhat unusual circumstance’, in the discreet terminology of Hansard. It had been usual for one or two, even as many as half a dozen peeresses, escaping the uncomfortable Ventilator above, to attend the actual Chamber, in a small part of the space below the bar, protected and screened by a curtain. But now a considerable number of peeresses, their daughters and relations, attended every evening, occupying a considerable portion of the space below the Bar, where chairs were placed for them. (The young Gladstone, who noted this phenomenon, thought Lady Grey the most beautiful of them all.) So far, so good but, ‘as might perhaps be expected’ went on Hansard, ‘they displayed all the enthusiastic ardour of the sex in sympathy with the sentiments of different speakers’.24
As the atmosphere in the House of Lords came closer to that of Newhall Hill than might have been expected, there was at least one celebrated male visitor who knew how to behave: the ‘Hindoo’ Rammohun Roy occupying the space around the throne with Members of the House of Commons. Lord Ellenborough, who met him at dinner with the Director of the East India Company, noted in his Diary with innate English condescension that Roy spoke English well but slowly: ‘He is great for an Indian, I dare say, but he would be nothing particular as an European.’25 Roy was in fact more accurately a distinguished social and religious reformer who had challenged traditional Hindu culture (calling, for example, for the abolition of suttee); he was thus an appropriate witness to the English attempts to set their own house in order.
He listened to Lord Wharncliffe among others, who in effect led for the Opposition, since the Duke of Wellington’s position was inevitably compromised by that blunt declaration against any Reform in the autumn of 1830. Wharncliffe took his stand on the apparent inflexibility of the Government. Why, he asked, were they to accept this particular measure and no other, and to declare that acceptance of the whole measure on the second reading? There was a slight kerfuffle in the Lords when Wharncliffe’s method of dealing with the Bill was criticized. But in the end Wharncliffe made it quite clear: ‘his great object was to have this Bill rejected’.
The next day the Earl of Harrowby accused Grey of trying to ‘overawe’ the House with threats as to what would happen if they did not pass the Bill. But he did admit to regretting Wellington’s speech ‘because it induced the country to think that no alteration would be paid to his wishes for a rational, moderate and well-tempered Reform’. Like Wharncliffe, Harrowby appeared to be hinting at a possibility of compromise if something ‘rational’ was proposed. This was more than their titular leader did; Wellington was unswerving when he called the Bill ‘the most considerable alteration or change ever proposed’. It was indeed ‘Radical Reform rather than Reform of any other description’.
On 5 October one Tory peer gave vent to a sentiment which under the circumstances was peculiarly optimistic: the Earl of Dudley declared that the Tories were entitled to be recognized as ‘the true friends of order and liberty in future ages, and draw down on their memory the gratitude of the country’. The Marquess of Londonderry on the other hand struck a less elevated party political note. ‘The details of the Bill,’ he declared, ‘were most ingeniously devised for the great object of its framers, that Whig supremacy should be eternal.’ The Earl of Carnarvon chose to let rip with a colourful description of His Majesty’s Ministers putting out to sea, in spite of all the dangers and perils with which their journey had been threatened. Subsequently they would cling to the sinking Ship of State till it went down, ‘not as the Royal Standard which made her the envy and admiration of all beholders’, nor as the rudder which had made her victorious in many battles, but ‘they would cling to her as barnacles, yes, like barnacles to a vessel to impede her navigation . . . until she sank in depths unfathomable never to rise again’.
On Friday 7 October, the last full day of the debate, the veteran High Tory the Earl of Eldon began by referring to his feelings of infirmity – he was eighty and there were courteous requests to him to speak up – but announced that he would not go to his grave without giving his opinion that this ‘most destructive measure’ was calculated to reduce the country, ‘which has hitherto been the most glorious of all nations upon earth, to that of misery which now afflicts all other countries in the world’.26
The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley, rose to his feet very late and cut short his speech for this reason: but its message was nonetheless clear – all the more so because he was the only prelate who spoke and, by virtue of his revered position, was deemed to speak for the clergy as a whole. He described the Bill as ‘mischievous in its tendency’ and extremely dangerous to the fabric of the Constitution. His hope for ‘an union of men of all parties’ in the future which would ‘tranquillize’ fears of agitation, which even he agreed might seem ‘chimerical and futile’, was sufficiently vague to please neither side while doing nothing concrete for the reputation of the Church of England.
Of all the speeches, there was no doubt that Brougham’s extraordinary peroration on the final day eclipsed all others.27 It did so partly due to his amazing eloquence, but partly, it has to be said, because of the eccentricity of his behaviour. His gestures, his craggy figure with the famous, much-caricatured bottle-nose – and perhaps the allusion to a bottle was justified – were in themselves almost as persuasive as his words. From the beginning, Brougham declared the stakes to be high, even the highest. He was, he said, ‘now standing with your Lordships on the brink of the most momentous decision that ever human assembly came to at any period of the world’. There was then a long rhetorical digression as to how he would have prepared himself ‘every day and every hour’ of his life, if he had ever known he would bear such a responsibility as had now fallen to him. It was the next loosing of the riptide which only Brougham could have carried off.
The Lord Chancellor chose to focus on Lord Wharncliffe, a man in vain pursuit of some people, any people who hated Reform: ‘Whither shall he go – what street shall he enter – in what alley shall he take refuge – since the inhabitants of every street, and lane, and alley, feel it necessary in self-defence, to become signers and petitioners as soon as he makes an appearance among them.’ (This was a reference to Lord Wharncliffe’s ill-fated reporting of Bond Street shopkeepers as being anti-Reform, at which point they immediately came up with a petition in favour.) ‘If, harassed by Reformers on land, my noble friend goes down to the water, there one thousand Reformers greet him.’ (Brougham had presented petitions from Lambeth that day.) ‘If he were to take a Hackney-coach, the very coachman and their attendants would feel it their duty to assemble and petition.’ Brougham went on in full flow: ‘Wherever there is a street, an alley, a passage, nay a river, a wherry. . . .’ The unfortunate Lord Wharncliffe could of course try the south side of Berkeley Square, where he will wander ‘remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow’ – the quotation was from Oliver Goldsmith’s poem The Traveller – for there at least there were no inhabitants and thus no friends of the Bill to be found. Elsewhere, wherever he went, he would be pursued by cries of ‘Petition! Petition! The Bill! The Bill!’ In a happy touch, Brougham suggested that even in country inns Wharncliffe would not be safe, since the landlords would take care that the waiters who served him were reformers in disguise.
In conclusion Brougham struck a majestic note of warning: ‘Raise not the spirit of a peace-loving but determined people – alienate not the affections of a great empire from your body. As your friend, as the friend of my country, as the servant of my sovereign, I counsel you . . . For all these reasons, I pray and beseech you not to reject this Bill’ – there were cheers at this point – ‘I call upon you by all that you hold most dear, by all that binds every one of us to our common order and our common country – unless, indeed, you are prepared to say that you will admit of no reform, that you are resolved against all change, for in that case opposition would at least be consistent – I beseech you, I solemnly adjure you, yes, even on bended knees, my lords’ – here, according to The Times, Brougham slightly bent his knee upon the Woolsack – ‘I implore you not to reject this Bill.’ There followed a prolonged and heartfelt bout of Whig cheering.
Afterwards, there was some controversy about that modest genuflection in the direction of the Woolsack as reported by Brougham’s ally The Times. Was it in fact an involuntary fall, not a genuflection at all? There was obviously some need to explain the incident. Lord Lyndhurst, he who had been put aside as a possible Lord Chancellor (although a Tory) in favour of Brougham, had this to say: ‘He continued some time as if in prayer; but his friends, alarmed for him, lest he should be suffering from the effects of the mulled port he had demonstrably been imbibing, picked him up and replaced him safely on the woolsack.’28
There was certainly evidence that Brougham drank. Edward Littleton MP, an eyewitness who described the speech as ‘one of the most splendid conceivable – flaming with wit and irony and eloquence, and served with argument and admonition to a degree that made one tremble’ – did not mention the fall. But he did record that in the course of a speech which was over three hours long, Brougham drank three immense soda water bottles full of hot negus (sweetened wine and water); at one point, getting agitated when he thought his refreshment was in danger from Lord Bathurst sitting next to it, he proceeded to remove the bottle to his own side amid some laughter. Lord Grey and Lord Holland, however, both assured Althorp that as a feat Brougham’s speech was ‘superhuman’, uniting the excellences of the ancient with those of modern oratory.29
Lord Grey himself, speaking again at five o’clock in the morning shortly before the vote, struck rather a different note. ‘I had no desire for place,’ he said, ‘and it was not sought after by me.’ Only his sense of duty made him delve back into a world so inimicable to his whole being: ‘I am fond of retirement and domestic life and I lived happy and content in the bosom of my family . . . What but a sense of duty could have induced me to plunge into all the difficulties, not unforeseen, of my present situation.’ And he quoted from Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, written 150 years earlier at the time of the Exclusion Crisis, with Shaftesbury as Achitophel and Monmouth as Absalom:
What else could tempt me on these stormy seas . . .
Bankrupt of life yet prodigal of ease
So the House proceeded to the division. Lord Campbell recalled afterwards that at this point Grey was ‘tranquil and smiling as if they had been dividing on a road Bill’. Mrs Arbuthnot, on the other hand, heard that he ‘vapoured’ – which was not quite the same thing.30 At six-thirty in the morning the Government was defeated by a majority of 41 against the Bill: it was noteworthy that twenty-one bishops out of twenty-three voted against it. And the list of Not Contents was headed by two royal Dukes, Cumberland and Gloucester.
Perhaps it was the exhaustion of the night, the lateness of the hour. Sir Denis Le Marchant reflected that there was no sense within the House that a measure was being decided which might cause the land to be deluged in blood. Very different was the reaction of those, the thousands, the hundreds of thousands dedicated to the cause, who were outside. ‘What will the Lords do?’ That had been the question on every lip when friend met friend for several months, according to Alexander Somerville, the Scottish working man turned soldier. Now ‘expressions of disappointment and indignation arose loudly, and ran swiftly through every street in London, and with every mail back out of it; along every turnpike road; into every bye-path in the kingdom and almost to every hearth, save in the houses of the fractional minority of the population, the anti-reformers.’31 There was a feeling of thunder in the air.
Lord Althorp wrote to his father, Lord Spencer, in a spirit of despair: ‘I think Reform will never pass the House of Lords, unless it is brought forward by its enemies’, as Catholic Emancipation had been. In Paris, Harriet Granville, wife of the British Ambassador and a key figure in the new generation of the Whig cousinage, was quite clear about what the House of Lords had done. ‘They have made their own 25 July,’ she wrote, referring to the French Revolution – and the news made her shudder.32
* This connection makes for an interesting historical link: the youthful Grey had listened to Pitt the Younger as Prime Minister when he was first in Parliament in 1786; Gladstone’s last premiership ended in 1894.
* Such figures are a perpetual subject of debate between the demonstrators and the demonstrated-against; according to the formula of an experienced magistrate in Manchester, cited by one authority, under these circumstances 6,000–7,000 persons fitted to an acre. The peculiar geography of this historic place, rising ground virtually in the midst of a shopping district, can still be seen today, although unmarked by any memorial.21