‘What have the Lords done? The answer is that they have done what they can never undo. The House of Lords will never again be on the same foundations in the confidence of the people’ –
The Times leader, 10 October 1831
On 8 October the ‘frightful majority’ of 41 against Reform in the Lords was published in the Sun newspaper, fringed in black. At the same time it was known that Lord Grey had told the King that he would not resign. A friend of Francis Place named John Powell, an attorney’s clerk who was subsequently sub-editor of the Morning Chronicle, happened to take a steamer to Gravesend and Chatham that morning. He wrote an account of events for Place two years later: ‘Never shall I forget the excitement that prevailed in the breast of everyone’ when the black-fringed newspaper was seen in his hands. The passengers rushed towards him in order to hear an authentic account of what had happened. Powell was instantly mounted on a chair and forced to read aloud the whole debate, while all around him on board ship the bishops were the subject of ‘fearful’ denunciations. When Powell reached Grey’s ‘noble declaration’ that he would not give up so long as he could be of service to his King and his country – in short, the Government was not going to resign – ‘the very shores of old Father Thames reechoed the reiterated shouts of applause’.1
Unsurprisingly, there were crowds of angry ‘hooters’ outside the House of Lords itself; prominent Ultra Tories like Lord Dudley (who had already boarded up his windows) found members of the mob trying to grab the reins of his horse, until the spirited steed, named Paris, gave a great leap and dispersed them. The remaining windows of that familiar target, Lord Londonderry, were broken, as were those of the Duke of Newcastle. The hated Duke of Cumberland was pelted with mud which totally covered his body.
In the provinces the bad news spread, and with the news came an ugly reaction, as incredulity and dismay gave way to physical manifestations of disgust. If Lord Holland was right, and the Reform Bill was not the cause of the danger – unemployment, low wages, general economic distress were fundamentals in the country – then certainly the prompt passing of the Bill had been the best hope of allaying it. Late at night on Saturday 8 October, a large mob came from Derby to the home of William Mundy, a local dignitary, and his wife Harriot; the household was in bed. The mob had just heard of the rejection of the Bill by the Lords. Now they surrounded the house, as Harriot Mundy wrote to a friend in a panic at eight o’clock the next morning, ‘shouting and hallooing and smashed all our windows and broke in many doors and frames of windows’. Luckily quite a lot of manservants were in the house, and troops could be dispatched from Nottingham, a mere sixteen miles away. Mrs Mundy reported later: ‘I have been four nights without undressing.’ Nearer Nottingham at Colwick, a Mr Musters was not quite so lucky: known to be very unpopular locally, he found his pictures and furniture being carried out and burnt. Mrs Musters, her daughter and her mother-in-law, who was sick in bed, had to be smuggled out and laid down under the bushes.2
Significantly, popular acclaim for the monarchy was beginning to fray at the edges, despite the declared loyalty of the middle classes. The Poor Man’s Guardian had been founded in July by Henry Hetherington, the son of a London tailor, who had become an apprentice printer at the age of thirteen at Hansard’s printing works. Influenced by the reforming ideas of Robert Owen, he was responsible for a series of Radical newspapers including the Penny Papers for the People of 1830. Such a penny newspaper, paying no stamp tax, and selling in tens of thousands, was unabashedly matching popular will against the law.3
On 15 October the Poor Man’s Guardian issued an article headed WHAT WILL WILLIAM GUELPH DO? – the crude use of the surname was hardly a promising start.4 The paper then proceeded to call for the creation of peers, at least 100 of them, before pointing out that this watered-down peerage would constitute such ‘paltry, common trash’ that the people would no longer be at all afraid of them. As for William Guelph, a man ‘who never did and never could think for himself’, he probably needed his friends to point out that if the peerage went, the King would be next. ‘If our advice is any use to him, we are but a Job’s comforter; he cannot save himself; he must go sooner or later; but he may go with a good grace or a bad one: so let him do more than all his predecessors together, some honest work before he goes.’ The solution of the Poor Man’s Guardian was to dispense with the bishops altogether, and as for the noble Lords, why not enable them to carry the Bill by creating every £10 householder a peer . . .
In contrast to such fulminations, the Birmingham Political Union, according to its long-held policy, remained temperate. And the Government acknowledged the importance of this restraint when on 8 October a communication was sent from Lord John Russell – he who had been dubbed ‘Lord John Reformer’ by Sydney Smith – Lord Althorp and Sir George Skipworth, thanking Attwood for his public support. In Russell’s words regarding the House of Lords: ‘It is impossible that the whisper of faction should prevail against the voice of the nation.’ Undoubtedly this straightforward declaration helped Attwood to preserve some kind of peace, and the Union continued to counsel, in the words of their address, ‘Patience! Patience! Patience!’ There were references to ‘our beloved King’ standing firm. Once again, the people were told that they had nothing to fear – nothing unless their own violence should rashly lead to anarchy. The motto was: be patient, be peaceful. But streets and pubs with signs not only of Wellington but of Queen Adelaide were pulled down. Alexander Somerville, then stationed in Birmingham, recorded later that the Queen’s influence was thought to be behind the rejection.5
The mob had so far no overt reason to criticize the King. The Queen was another matter. In a disagreeable incident at Court, King William had felt compelled to side with his Government against his wife. One of the notable Lords who voted against the Bill was Earl Howe, the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain – suspected of being unduly close to her. (Kindly observers like Lady Bedingfield thought the devotion was actually all on his side; the Queen ‘was so truly good and virtuous that she has no idea that people would fancy she likes him too well’.)6 Howe’s prominence was due to his particular public role rather than the Queen’s favour, but the latter was undoubtedly a complication. Nor, for all her virtue, was Queen Adelaide particularly tactful where her husband’s Government was concerned: she had chosen all her coronation attendants from among ‘our enemies’, as one Whig put it. On 10 October Lord Grey urged that Lord Howe be dismissed from the Royal Household, on the grounds that an official had no right openly to disagree with the declared policy of the Government. Grey wanted to carry out the dismissal himself; the only concession William made to his wife’s feelings was to insist that Howe resign instead.
The deed was done while Queen Adelaide was out riding. By her own account, she had no conception of what lay in store, and was therefore ‘very much surprised’ when, shortly after her return, Lord Howe brought her back his keys, declaring to her at any rate that he had been dismissed. The Queen wrote in her Diary: ‘I would not believe it, for I had trusted in, and built firmly on the King’s love for me.’ She added: ‘I fear it will be the beginning of much evil’ before confessing that she had had a hard struggle to appear at table after such a blow, ‘which I felt deeply as an insult, which filled me with “Indignation” [in English in the original]’. In short, ‘I felt myself deeply wounded both as wife and queen, and I cannot conquer the feeling.’7 Thereafter the Queen certainly made no secret of her hostility to Lord Grey, ostentatiously refusing to speak to him. When Princess Lieven commented to her in German that the Prime Minister was very much mortified at her behaviour, Adelaide replied stubbornly, also in her native language: ‘Is he? I am glad of it; he shall continue to be mortified for he shan’t be spoken to.’8 *
‘What have the Lords done?’ asked The Times in a leader on 10 October, before answering its own question: ‘They have done what they can never undo. The House of Lords will never again be on the same foundations in the confidence of the people.’ It was a question of 400 people versus twenty-two million, the population of the country. ‘The nation willed it. The Lords forbade it. Will the nation give way or will the Lords?’ And The Times mounted yet another attack on the errant bishops who had helped to bring about this miserable state of affairs.9
Indeed, the prominence of the bishops’ vote in the tally of the majority was something not missed in the country as a whole. One prelate had the words ‘Bishop of Worcester Judas Iscariot’ scrawled on his cathedral walls; other bishops were said to be confined to their episcopal palaces for fear of outrages. Prominent anti-reforming clerics like Henry Phillpotts, recently made Bishop of Exeter, a high-flown and colourful debater on conservative issues of social order, were beginning to attract public attention. Like the Bishop of Durham, the Bishop of Exeter could no longer proceed freely round his diocese.10
Of course there were other clerics, good Whig men in Lord Holland’s phrase, of a very different turn of mind – Sydney Smith, for example. Lord Holland’s verdict on him to Grey was eloquent: what could be and was said against Smith was ‘all hypocrisy or at best trifling – founded on his own maxim that “no man can be pious who is not dull”’. It was in the spirit of enjoyment in a highly tense situation that, in a speech at Taunton on 11 October, Sydney Smith now evoked the character of Dame Partington. He compared Wellington to this sturdy lady who had attempted to repel the Atlantic Ocean with her housewife’s mop: ‘The Atlantic was roused,’ he declared. ‘I need not tell you that the contest was unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs Partington. She was excellent at a slop or a puddle, but she should not have meddled with a tempest. Gentlemen, be at your ease – be quiet and steady – you will beat Mrs Partington.’ And the elderly clergyman began ‘trundling’ an imaginary mop about the platform, to the great delight of his audience.11
Joyfully the cartoonists seized on the comparison. Wellington as Dame Partington, wearing a bonnet and a woman’s dress but his hawk-like features and black eyebrows clearly recognizable, armed with his/her mop, became a favourite subject of caricature. The enormous waves certainly looked as if they were about to engulf not only the Dame but also her modest dwelling.
So far were the bishops in general identified with the Tories that The Times actually questioned whether they should have seats in the House of Lords in the first place.12 Alas, Smith, recently made a Canon of St Paul’s by Lord Grey, was not considered episcopal material; do anything else for Smith, Lord Milton told Grey, ‘but it will not do to give him a mitre’.
In the Commons it was only a short while before the displeasure of the Whig majority was made known on the floor of the House. Macaulay’s trenchant speech on 10 October was thought by some to sail somewhat close to the wind on the delicate subject of intimidation since he made references to Ireland: ‘England may exhibit the same spectacle which Ireland exhibited three years ago – agitators stronger than the Magistrate. . . .’13 The keynote was as follows: ‘I know only two ways in which society can permanently be governed – by public opinion and the sword.’ And he referred feelingly to the relative keeping of the peace in the two cities of New York and Milan: in the one by the assent and support of the people, and in the other by the bayonets of Austrian soldiers. Therefore he did not understand how peace was to be kept in England, ‘acting on the principles of the present Opposition’. There was danger that fearful things like Democracy and Revolution would be unleashed. This allowed the Tory Sir Charles Wetherell to suggest that Macaulay was actually advocating a breach of the peace – otherwise why cite Ireland?
Viscount Ebrington, heir to Earl Fortescue, who had been a Whig MP off and on for nearly thirty years, did better. With a fine upstanding appearance, looking ‘quite the model of an English nobleman’, he had, according to his friend Le Marchant, ‘one of the purest minds I have ever known’ with advanced views on the subject of liberty, even if he had a tendency to carry conscientiousness to extremes.14 A meeting of about 200 Whig MPs was held, and it was agreed to back Ebrington’s resolution which called on the House to redeem its pledge to the country concerning Reform. Ebrington’s subsequent speech did make the point that the country should remain ‘orderly’ – a subject on which he also felt strongly – but he declared his complete confidence that the Reform Bill would ‘consolidate all the blessings which the British constitution can bestow upon a happy and united people’. The result was ‘a most opportune triumph’ – 329 in support and 198 against.
Such brave declarations left unsolved the question of Radicalism in the country and how – if it all – it could be harnessed to help the Government. Bodies like the National Union of the Working Classes, set up with elaborate rules in July 1831, were beginning to be more overtly revolutionary; it called, for example, for total equality before the law, which meant Universal Suffrage, although even here mention was made of the need ‘to wait with patience, and cheerfully pay the public taxes’.15 The middle classes were, however, still practising patience.
On Wednesday 12 October a huge march took place in London.16 What was significant, in the opinion of Francis Place’s friend John Powell at least, was the competent organization throughout: ‘for young soldiers, we were not bad generals’. The files were six, eight or ten abreast and at each flank a man was stationed responsible for managing his own line. In order to avoid accusations of drunkenness, there were orders against alcohol. The consequence, wrote Powell, which was ‘universally admitted’, was that there was absolutely no disorder, unless you counted the groans which greeted the houses of known enemies of the Bill. Here were respectable people. Here were housekeepers, shopkeepers and superior artisans. The numbers were estimated from 70,000 to 300,000 – probably nearer the former – and the spectators included ‘elegantly draped ladies’. There were cheers and the waving of handkerchiefs. Not only petitions, but flowers and cockades were ‘fragrantly’ showered on the marchers as they passed. The music varied from the ‘Dead March’ and church bells tolling to ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’.
The declared intention was to present a petition to William IV at St James’s Palace, an intention which was not viewed at the palace itself ‘without alarm’. In the end the various deputies were persuaded to abandon their plan of seeking admission to the King himself, but to wait prudently in nearby St James’s Square while Joseph Hume and another MP presented their petitions. Equally prudent was the conduct of the Government, which, being apprised of the march, promised to keep the police – a potentially inflammatory symbol of authority – out of sight. Powell reflected subsequently that the whole episode taught him that ‘to the energetic, determined and persevering nothing is impossible . . . few things more repugnant to the general habits, customs and prejudices of the middle classes of London than walking through the streets in a procession can scarcely be conceived’. Yet it had been a triumph.
At six o’clock that evening, a meeting of about 100 people was held at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand with the declared agenda of discovering the ‘best means of giving effectual support to the King and Government and on the measures necessary to secure the peace and safety of the metropolis’. Two long tables down the centre of the large room, and chairs at the sides, were all full, and many other people were standing. Unlike the march, the mood of the meeting was not encouraging, as Francis Place made despondent predictions about the Government’s intentions to modify the Bill.17
Later, ‘past ten o’clock’ at night, Place led a self-styled delegation of members of London parishes to Number 10 Downing Street. There was no appointment but Grey agreed to see them. The demand of the delegates was simple: Grey should pass the Bill in seven days by the expedient of peer creation. The meeting did not, on the face of it, go particularly well. Sir John Hobhouse for example thought the whole thing was a mistake; he implied that ‘such ill-looking fellows’ had no place in the Prime Ministerial dwelling. Nor was Grey himself at his best in this kind of situation with his lofty manner: his idealistic purpose evidently did not help him to communicate with clever, determined men from a different class (who were not his tenants in the north) such as Place. This was not the House of Lords, ready to hear a rolling peroration in which past and future were seamlessly evoked. Francis Place, who was absolutely determined that the Bill should not be watered down, went away with the impression that Grey intended to do exactly that.18
He described the occasion to Joseph Parkes in a letter written at seven the next morning.19 Francis Place made it clear that Grey’s florid Whig style was not his own; he told Parkes that he would not bother him with the various ‘tedious and silly repetitions’ which the ‘polite and courtier-like conduct of the Noble Lord occasioned’. What Place did tell him was that the delegation had clearly put Grey on the defensive from the first. Grey uttered various hardline sentiments about popular uprisings: if the people rioted, they would be bayoneted, shot and hanged. Apparently Grey did not intend to propose the creation of peers. ‘What say you now to your motto – Peers or Revolution?’ enquired Place of Parkes. Place thought the clear implication of the meeting was that Parliament would be prorogued and ‘a more conciliatory Bill’ would be introduced. All this was fairly disastrous.
But there was another, more favourable side to the encounter. Despite the misunderstanding, Francis Place was deeply impressed by one thing and that was Grey’s integrity; he was ‘the most open and manly’ of Prime Ministers, and thus Place had at the very least confidence in Grey’s intention to do good, even if he questioned his judgement. A link had been forged which other, younger men – the genial Lord Althorp for example – might be able to exploit: this was a link between those in theory capable of provoking (or controlling) revolution and those in charge of the policies against which they reacted.
After this meeting Francis Place went on to enjoy the hospitality of the Philosopher Radical George Grote and his famously intellectual wife Harriet at their salon in Threadneedle Street, close by the Bank of England in the City.20 Both were or would be writers – Grote was at work on an authoritative History of Greece; they were in their late thirties and childless. Grote was an independently wealthy banker whose inclination was to be a scholar; influenced by both James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, he was ‘a zealous friend of liberty’ and had given £500 to the Committee of the July Revolution in Paris ‘for the beautiful cause’.
Harriet Grote’s nineteenth-century biographer Lady Eastlake compared her to an English Madame de Staël; she was certainly a passionate reformer who in conversation at least did not shrink from advocating principles which might lead to civil war.21 As for George Grote, in Essentials of Parliamentary Reform, published in 1831, he boldly compared public feeling to that in France before the Revolution of 1789, and called firmly for the Secret Ballot, although as a banker he was both more reticent about personal involvement and a great deal more wary about the merits of public disorder. Mischievous Sydney Smith summed up the Grotes thus: ‘I like him, he is so ladylike and I like her, she’s such a perfect gentleman.’ Less delightfully he pretended the tall, striking, unconventionally dressed Harriet Grote was the origin of the word Grotesque; her family nickname of ‘The Empress’ gave a kinder impression of her general character.22
On this occasion, as Francis Place fulminated in Threadneedle Street about Grey’s vacillation – as he saw it – the Grotes and their circle of intellectual reformers rejoiced in the developments which they saw in a far more favourable light. But the growing force was undoubtedly with the unions. This period marked the foundation of the National Political Union, under the inspiration of Place, in direct imitation, it was hoped, of the success of the Birmingham Political Union – and also with the indirect intention of securing the national leadership. While proposing to construct this Union as much as possible on the Birmingham plan, it was specified ‘that such matters as related to the particular views of Mr Attwood respecting the currency’ should be omitted.23
Meanwhile the West Country of England seethed. Mary Frampton, sister of James Frampton, Justice of the Peace and Colonel of the Dorset Yeomanry, wrote a vivid account of it all in her Journal.24 The carriage of a sheriff and his assessor – Mr Davies of Milton Abbas and Mr Philip Williams – was attacked. Yeomanry did eventually rescue them but the town of Blandford and its neighbours still continued its ‘lawless proceedings’; the High Sheriff stayed the next day at Dorchester, fearing to pass through Milborne. A young couple, the Tory MP Lord Ashley and his wife, the captivating Minnie Cowper, reputedly the illegitimate daughter of Lord Palmerston by his mistress Lady Cowper, had to choose ‘an unlikely route’ to their house at St Giles, Wimborne, and a secret one to get away; Lord Ashley kept a pair of loaded pistols handy (although this fact was kept from the newly married Lady Ashley).
Ashley, heir to the local grandee the Earl of Shaftesbury, had recently been elected MP for Dorset at a by-election, switching from Dorchester, which was left to his younger brother. Although he would be better known to history as the great philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury, after he inherited his father’s title in 1851, it was more relevant to the would-be attackers that Ashley was at this point a persistent anti-reformer; he had voted against the measure in March, and again in September. His evangelical principles, the compassion which had its origin in the sight of a pauper’s funeral when he was a schoolboy at Harrow, and caused him already to be described as ‘a Saint’, did not find expression in this particular cause; like the young Gladstone’s denunciation of Reform (he thought the Lords’ rejection highly satisfactory), it was an interesting reminder of the complex mosaic of society at this time where social issues were concerned.
At the town of Sherborne, matters began on 19 October with cries of ‘Reform’ from the rough types gathered for the traditional October Pack Monday Fair; the windows of those who had supported Ashley in the recent by-election for the Dorset seat were the main target. Then a considerable mob broke every pane of glass they could find at Sherborne Castle, home of Lord Digby, and even tried to force the great gates. Mary Frampton recorded in her Journal that there was a large house party within the castle itself, playing at some round game, when the first yell was heard and a volley of stones broke the windows. Troops of yeomanry were summoned but for a while could do little in view of the general disaffection of the place; several of the yeomen were seriously injured by stones and knocked off their horses.
James Frampton was in fact at the Quarter Sessions at Dorchester when the news came to him, but set off immediately back to Sherborne ‘in full costume’. Tranquillity was eventually restored, although the vicarage of the Revd Mr Parsons was much damaged. Here, according to the Sherborne Journal, ‘the doors were forced, the window-frames torn out, the furniture broken up, hogsheads of beer staved, spirits consumed and wasted, and in fact the most wanton acts of spoliation resorted to’.25 The Revd Parsons, who was an acting magistrate, fared even worse than his house: he was knocked down by the mob, ‘shamefully ill treated’ and only saved by being taken to a neighbour’s, where he lay senseless for some hours. One imagines that it was his attempt to read the Riot Act which provoked this brutality, rather than his role as a member of the Church of England – although the combination of a clergyman and the hated Act was always liable to inflame the populace.
Things were no better in the Midlands. There were riots in Derby on Sunday 9 October and an assault on the gaol to rescue prisoners taken the night before, which failed; one bystander was killed. The next day the Mayor refused permission for a public meeting but set up stalls so the public might organize their petitions to Parliament. Unfortunately matters had gone too far for such peaceful methods: the mob destroyed the stalls and the Riot Act was read. In the ensuing fracas, three more innocent men were killed.26
In Nottingham on 10 October a mob assaulted another castle – this time they were successful in getting inside and burning it down. This was a gleeful development, given that the proprietor was the Ultra Tory and enemy of Reform, the Duke of Newcastle. Several factories were also burnt. On 11 October the magistrates declared the town in a state of insurrections and the Riot Act was read. The Duke himself was not actually there; he admitted that he had to give the manufacturing districts a wide berth: ‘I should either be murdered or raise a riot by appearing.’27 He also accused some of the local magistrates of haranguing the crowds about the Lords and the Bill – in short, of being on the side of the mob rather than of law and order, as they should have been; they had ‘indifferently’ suffered all these things to take place.
In London, where accounts of countrywide violence were not slow in coming in, just as press reports of Parliament were rushed into the provinces, tension in the Government was still further racked up. No one could predict how and when the present effective deadlock would be resolved. On 15 October Sarah, Lady Lyttelton (née Spencer), went to see her brother Althorp: she told their father that he looked ‘fagged and ill’, adding ‘I could fancy myself admitted to the Captain’s cabin on the eve of a hurricane.’ As for her children –‘les petits’ – ironically enough, they had been terrified by crowds shouting and banging on the door of the house; although these were in fact amiable if boisterous salutations from those who admired Lyttelton’s reforming stand.28
Relations between the King and his Prime Minister were clearly entering a delicate stage. The question of creation of peers was so far the unspoken issue between them, although, as the obvious solution to what the Lords had done, it was being widely discussed in both political and Radical circles. John Doyle was not slow to seize upon the subject. In a cartoon issued on 12 October entitled ‘An After Dinner Scene (at Windsor)’ he showed a sinister-looking Brougham, whispering in the King’s ear as he sits with him on a sofa, while the Queen and other ladies and gentlemen are nattering in the background. The bubble of words coming out of Brougham’s mouth tails off with the unfinished phrase: ‘whether in the undoubted exercise of your R–y–l prerogative, you should not. . . .’ William however is stretched out on the sofa fast asleep.29
In real life the King was not able to practise avoidance so easily and was in fact concentrating on establishing his constitutional position (and rights). In correspondence on 17 October – handled as before by Sir Herbert Taylor – William IV chose to quote from Bolingbroke’s The Idea of a Patriot King.30 * This work, originally published in 1738, which had not featured strongly in the concept of kingship in the late eighteenth century, was enjoying a new vogue; it was republished in 1831 after a gap of fifty years (quite apart from being used as the subtitle of that play at the time of the March division on the Reform Bill). It was felt that there was something peculiarly appropriate, even exhilarating in its message with regard to the reign which began in 1830 – or, as Bolingbroke had written, a new King meant a new people.
A royal biography by John Watkins, published in 1831, emphasized the point: ‘What the masterly hand of BOLINGBROKE sketched as an ideal character and a vision of virtuous excellence, this nation happily enjoys in the reign of William IV,’ he wrote.32 It was a flattering picture of a paternalistic monarch, standing above his Ministers in order to put the interests of his people first, and as such calculated to appeal to William’s image of himself, in contrast to that of his late brother.
Now Bolingbroke was brought to the aid of the current crisis: ‘Every new modification in a scheme of government and of national policy was of great importance,’ he had written. Such modifications required more and deeper consideration than ‘the warmth, and hurry, and rashness of party conduct admit’. So the duty of a prince required that he should use his influence to render the proceedings more orderly and more deliberate, even when he actually approved of the objective at which they were aimed. It was an argument for a king as a well-intentioned arbiter rather than the pawn of his Ministers. As Bolingbroke had put it: ‘To espouse no party, but to govern like the common father of his people, is so essential to the character of a Patriot King.’33
Grey replied the same day: ‘In the quotation from Lord Bolingbroke,’ he wrote, ‘with which Your Majesty concludes your gracious letter, Edward Grey readily acknowledges that there is much wisdom,’ but he hoped that the measures he was putting forward, with the approval of his colleagues, were not actually open to the censure of having been urged with the warmth, hurry and rashness of party conduct, in the King’s words. Of course all proceedings should be orderly and deliberate but public opinion should also be taken into account.34 In short, a policy for the restoration of public confidence should be pursued with consistency and firmness.
Back came the King on 18 October.35 While not intending to apply the words of Bolingbroke to Grey himself, he disapproved strongly of a clash between the two Houses of Parliament. And he drew attention to that particular letter from Lord John Russell with its reference to ‘the whisper of faction’ in the Lords, which was causing scandal. That is, if it had been received with delight by Attwood and the Birmingham Political Union to which it was sent, it was condemned angrily by the Tories. Lord Wharncliffe denounced the letter as being ‘subservient’ to the Birmingham Political Union; to which Lord John Russell replied smoothly that he was merely thanking the Chairman of a meeting, said to be of 150,000 people, for his support. It was true that Russell apologized to the King, describing his letter as having been written ‘in the first moments of disappointment’.36 But the phrase summed up the popular revulsion against the Lords’ behaviour, its numerical weakness versus the national will.
The game continued: the Whigs put forward the popular demonstrations, hopefully non-violent, as evidence of the need for Reform, while the Tories exclaimed furiously that such hooligans were not to be trusted with representation in Parliament. The fundamental question was whether a Whig Government could possibly carry any bill in the existing state of the House of Lords, numerically so weighted in favour of the Tories, against its will. Obviously such a situation might have the effect of arousing scepticism about the whole system. The intelligent reforming journalist Albany Fonblanque had written on the day of the Lords’ rejection: ‘A reverence for a hereditary legislature seems properly contemporary with witches and wizards.’37
On 20 October William IV formally prorogued Parliament; in other words he brought the current session to an end, as opposed to dissolving Parliament, which necessitated a General Election, as had happened in March.38 It was, in a sense, a cooling-off period, or what the King called ‘an interval of repose’, since MPs were able to return to their constituencies (and peers to their country estates). William, surrounded by the Sovereign’s usual entourage on such occasions, came in person to the House of Lords, the Speaker, Lord Althorp and other MPs being present at the bar.
In his speech, the King referred to ‘a session of unexampled duration and labour’ and went on to say that he was sure it was unnecessary for him to recommend to them the ‘most careful attention to the preservation of tranquillity in your respective counties’. He also referred, beyond touching on the various achievements of the session, to ‘the anxiety which has generally been manifested by my people for the accomplishment of a Constitutional Reform’ in the Commons. He trusted that in the future proceedings would be regulated by a due sense of the necessity of order and moderation. Parliament must of course return again to a consideration of this important question at the next session. The King declared that he himself had an ‘unalterable desire to promote its settlement’.
Ten days later the worst and most influential riots so far broke out in the West Country. Whatever the Lords had intended to do, their massive rejection of the Bill had brought about a crisis which not only scaremongers and the professionally pessimistic saw as leading rapidly towards revolution.
William IV by Sir Martin Archer Shee, who came to the throne in July 1830, aged 65.
Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, wife of William IV, who was twenty-seven years his junior.
Sir Robert Peel: the Tory Leader of the House of Commons during the period of the Reform Bill.
William Cobbett, the Radical; etching by Daniel Maclise, 1835, when he was in his seventies.
A view of the interior of the House of Commons, 1821.
Bristol was the scene of riots over three days in October 1831, in which the centre of the city was set on fire. A number of people, including rioters, perished; subsequently many rioters were hung or transported abroad.
Villagers rejoice at the passing of the Reform Bill, Scorton Green, North Yorkshire.
* This was an early version of the so-called Bedchamber Crisis which would plague the young Queen Victoria; once again the personal predilection of a royal personage clashed with the notion of official responsibility. But Victoria was of course a Queen Regnant, whereas Adelaide was only a Queen Consort.
* The point has been made that of the Hanoverian monarchs William IV was probably the only one who actually read The Idea of a Patriot King.31
