‘Then away to Bristol he quickly walked
T’indulge in meditation
And he gaily laughed as he slowly stalked
O’er a scene of desolation’ –
Charles Dickens, ‘The Devil’s Walk’, November 1831
On Saturday 29 October, nine days after the prorogation of Parliament, the lawyer Sir Charles Wetherell, in his judicial capacity as Recorder of Bristol, set out for the West Country to perform his official functions. Later there were many found to assert that the presence of such a notorious Ultra Tory – remembering his fulmination about ‘a dose of Russell’s Purge’ in the House of Commons in March – was provocative. Bristol was not a naturally pliant city: there had been riots in 1793 over the removal of houses for an access road to a new bridge in which eleven people were killed. In fairness to Wetherell, one of the MPs for Bristol, the young Whig Edward Protheroe, held a different view. Descended from a prominent Bristol family of merchants and bankers, he believed that his own solid support for the subject of Reform had not so much allayed the local fever as calmed the inhabitants.1
Wetherell was speedily undeceived about the state of Bristol. Even before he reached the city itself, he was greeted by hostile demonstrators among whom, it was remarked, ‘not a few were women of abandoned character, whose violent language seemed well fitted to urge on the desperate population’. He entered Bristol at eleven o’clock in the morning escorted by a large force of special constables and police. He found himself immediately ‘amid the groans, hisses and execrations of thousands’. At Temple Street, his carriage was showered with stones and rotten eggs; the unfortunate Wetherell was ‘screwed up in one corner’ with an air of complete terror on his face. At the Bristol Bridge, large stones were flung; one policeman was struck and fell to the ground, apparently dead. All the time, the loud and continuous groaning of the crowd was ‘enough to shake the stoutest heart’. When Wetherell’s presence was made known, a huge and menacing group gathered round his lodging at the Mansion House. Then they proceeded to attack, not with guns but with bars, stones and sheer physical force – and, of course, fire, the undiscriminating weapon of the mob down the ages. Gradually, a change occurred in the personnel of the attack: what had been a body of working men and artisans turned into something manned by what a contemporary called ‘the lower grades of society’, some dressed in smocks, others in ‘generally mean attire’.2
There was another interesting social contrast when some of the shopkeepers who went to chase their stolen goods penetrated the quarters inhabited by the Irish labourers: hitherto a world away from their comfortable lives – if not literally so. An accumulation of dirt a foot deep was reported, including dead cats, dogs and rabbits, pig dung and pools of stagnant water containing rotting vegetables. At least 100 houses were burnt including the Bishop’s Palace, the toll house, the excise house, the customs house and three prisons. (Charles Kingsley, the celebrated Victorian novelist, then a schoolboy in Clifton, remembered for the rest of his life the devastation, including charred corpses, in Queen Square.)3 The Mansion House itself was sacked before being burnt and Wetherell himself only escaped, like some Mozartian character, by dressing as a postilion and fleeing over the roof. When the cooks were driven out of the kitchen the feast they had prepared was left behind; so the rioters were able to enjoy turtle soup, turkeys and joints of venison, an interesting variation on their usual meagre diet. Other rioters, enjoying the involuntary hospitality of the Mansion House and elsewhere, were not so lucky: many fell to the ground blind drunk and were consumed by the fire they had created.
Grey would refer to what happened in Bristol as ‘the melancholy events’, but in fact they were a great deal rougher than this graceful phrase suggested. Matters were compounded by the reluctance of Colonel Brereton, at the head of the Dragoons, to fire on the crowd because he had spent three years there as a recruiting officer and felt attached to the place. Brereton was even observed shaking hands with the rioters, many of whom he knew personally. Ever since the disaster of Peterloo, there had been some confusion about the relative roles of military and civilians in maintaining order. Brereton made the mistake of withdrawing the 14th Dragoons because they were in his opinion inflaming the populace. There were undoubtedly inflammatory incidents with terrible consequences: Elizabeth Grosvenor heard from her neighbour of a Captain Beckwith of the 14th Dragoons who had been hurt by ‘a great stone thrown in his face’. In a passion, Beckwith gave an immense sweep of his sword and lopped the offending man’s head clean off his shoulders.4
The official estimate was of twelve killed and just under 100 wounded in the course of a battle which started from the moment of Wetherell’s appearance, when he was greeted by cries of ‘The King and Reform’ and ‘We’ll give them reaction’. In fact, the number of rioters who died was probably more like 400, including those burnt to death drunk, even if it could not be accurately estimated. One hundred and two prisoners were taken, eighty-one convicted, thirty-one of them of capital crimes; four were executed and seven men transported overseas. Colonel Brereton was another casualty: he was subsequently tried for his well-intentioned humane behaviour, but shot himself before the trial was concluded.
Most of the destruction took place on the Sunday and Monday, 30 and 31 October. On 1 November The Times, with the aid of a local correspondent on the Globe, revealed that the work of devastation was still going on at a most fearful rate. It was not until 2 November that Lord Althorp was able to comment: ‘Bristol is at last got under.’ He was also able to report a great escape at the Post Office where £300,000 (about £30 million in today’s money) happened to be lodged on the Sunday night, but was rescued by an enterprising man who hired an inoffensive-looking ‘hack chaise’ and took the money away to Bath.5
These were by far the most aggressive riots so far; the question on everyone’s lips, whatever their political persuasion, was: where would it all end? Charles Dickens expressed the countrywide horror in a poem written in November, ‘The Devil’s Walk’, in which the Devil determined to make a few calls ‘to see if his Friends were well’. His first call was the House of Lords where, ‘with mixed feelings of pleasure and hate’, he found a few rich and proud nobles declaring war against ‘the People and Prince’, which reminded him of the Wars in Heaven long ago.
Then away to Bristol he quickly walked
T’indulge in meditation
And he gaily laughed as he slowly stalked
O’er a scene of desolation
The Devil honoured the hand that had done the deed before deciding to return to London at speed to see his old friend Sir Charles . . .6 It was all very well for the Whig Government to take the position stoutly that the violence would end when Reform was carried; for all anyone knew at the beginning of November, the revolution regularly predicted by both sides, most notably by the Duke of Wellington, was on its way. Whatever their point of view, most serious people feared that the Devil would continue to find scenes of desolation for a long time to come as he walked about Britain.
The fact was that law and order was a serious problem for the authorities at this point. There were historic bodies such as the civil magistrates; but the police force was in its infancy and the country was by no means overrun with troops. The effective strength of the Army in Great Britain, including Ireland, at the end of 1831 has been estimated at just over 25,000, with about 3,500 officers in addition; the cavalry were something under 5,000, the footguards under 4,000, and the rest made up of infantry.7 The result was that unusual activity in one district was liable to cause a famine of protection in another. As Sir Willoughby Gordon, the Quartermaster General, drily observed about the lack of disposable forces in and around London: ‘We need not fear a Military Despotism at least.’ This had been seen clearly during the October riots when General Bouverie in Manchester declined to dispatch troops for Nottingham and Derby, urgent as the need was, because he did not feel he could safely detach anything from his own district. Meanwhile Colonel Thackwell in Nottingham sent a detachment to Derby, only to find himself in need of troops as the rioters tore apart Nottingham (including the Castle).
There was a further complication: were the existing troops loyal? Loyal to the Government that is; Brereton’s reluctance to fire, animated by feelings for the neighbourhood he knew, has been noted. A speaker at a meeting of the National Union of the Working Classes in Manchester in late November declared that the soldiers, ‘though they did happen to have scarlet coats’, had feelings in common with the people, as well as having fathers, brothers and friends among those standing before them. There were all kinds of rumours of muskets ordered by the rioters – one in particular concerning a gunmaker called Riviere convinced the Duke of Wellington, even if it proved to have no foundation when it was checked. Similarly stories of disaffection among the troops themselves were rife. The soldier Alexander Somerville reported these widespread rumours in his memoir, adding that there was no proof of their reliability.8 But of course in a volatile situation it was what was generally believed that was important in guiding popular reaction, rather than the actual truth.
The great estates took precautions. The incendiarism of the previous year had been a frightening experience; now there was a new element in the destruction among the rioters, the feeling of political justification. Sir Robert Peel had expressed the best-case scenario from the Tory point of view: there was yet a hope that the propertied class, ‘by diligently reading the lessons which have been written in blood at Bristol’, might learn the risk – or rather ‘the certain price’ – of revolutions. He referred to the disgust which must be felt at the ‘whole reptile tribe of spouters at public meetings’ led of course by Thomas Attwood and his like. As it happened, Drayton Manor, the country seat of Sir Robert Peel, was in a peculiarly exposed position, centrally placed in the Midlands industrial district, with Derby to the north, Nottingham north-east and Birmingham only ten miles south-west. In a less optimistic mood, Peel imported carbines and announced that he intended to defend his home as long as he could. Sir John Hobhouse wrote to the Tory leader of the House of Commons, pointing to the domestic style of the country houses built within the last 300 years: none of the owners had ever dreamt of being obliged to provide against ‘the attack of the mob’.9
At Belvoir Castle, home of the Tory Duke of Rutland, cannons and one ‘long gun’ were set up on the North East Terrace, which was specially paved for their reception, under the instruction of a Sergeant John Kirkby.10 * A room in the Round Tower was fitted up as ‘an Arsenal’. The team of estate carpenters were trained to operate the guns. These were not the first precautions on the Rutland estates in the Midlands: there were those staves bought for Special Constables in January and recently, in October, the watchmen had been provided with flints and gunpowder. But cannons set to dominate the surrounding countryside sent the clearest message yet: no one could attack this fortress with impunity even though some were expected to try.
There was another aspect to it all. Richard Norman, manager of the estates, made a report to the Duke on 6 November in which he stressed the connection of poverty to rioting.11 Described as ‘of tall and noble presence, elegant and dignified in manner’, the 5th Duke of Rutland was ‘singularly courteous to everyone he met’; this paragon of an aristocrat was also ‘a philanthropist in his neighbourhood’. Thus the Duke had contributed generously to the treatment of the poor by the parishes, yet the allowances being made to them were dismally small – six shillings a week for a man and his wife, one shilling and sixpence per child per week. This meant that the administrators of the parish of Waltham, for example, were actually pocketing money.
As a magistrate Norman intended to allow twelve shillings per week, and he hoped the farmers would respond with similar generosity, whether they employed the men on the farm or the road, lowering their rents. ‘And as you have nobly done Your Part,’ Norman told the Duke, ‘I trust You will stand by me in doing but Justice to the Poor.’
Nevertheless, for all this high-minded local charity Norman was clearly in a state of apprehension about ‘the greatest Excitement prevailing in the Minds of the People’. Only ‘a Spark’ was wanting to cause a general combustion. He did however question whether the political unions might not actually be a force for good in suppressing tumult – given that the people enrolled as unionists had ‘the security of Property at heart’. This was the Attwood message of peaceful protest making itself felt. All the same, Norman ended on a note which summed up clearly what the majority of the property-owners and their households were thinking: ‘We cannot in this Moment, look forward a Week without Alarm.’
Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated with bonfires and the burning of effigies ever since the uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, fell conveniently – from the point of view of the rioters – a few days later. Originally Parliament had focused on the Catholic elements in the conspiracy and its official Anglican prayers on the day were redolent of anti-popery, with references to ‘Popish treachery’ and the Royal Family (in 1605) being led ‘as sheep to the slaughter’. In the 200-odd years which had passed since the death of Guy Fawkes and his Catholic co-conspirators, things had moved on; it had gradually become customary to burn effigies of current hate-figures rather than the original villains.12 There was indeed some dramatic irony in the fact that it was now the Anglican bishops being execrated on 5 November, a day originally planned specifically to denounce the Pope of Rome and his accomplices.
As the freethinker Richard Carlile had pointed out concerning the twenty-one prelates who had voted to reject the Bill, that number voting the other way would have been enough to pass it, given the 41 majority for defeat. ‘The Bishops have done it,’ he declared sardonically. ‘It is the work of the Holy Ghost.’ Thus on 5 November 1831 bishops’ mitres took the place of Guy Fawkes’s traditional black hat crowning the stuffed figures on the bonfires. In Huddersfield, according to the Poor Man’s Guardian, there was a ceremony of ‘rather novel description’ when around 15,000 or 20,000 people paraded with an effigy of a bishop ‘as natural as life’, and it was said that no funeral was ever conducted with greater awe and solemnity. One man dressed up as a priest himself and declaimed: ‘Ho! All ye people of Huddersfield . . . For lo! and behold! Here is a great, fat, bloated, blundering bishop whom we have bartered for the poor, deluded, murdered Guy Faux [sic].’ The only light note was struck by the ‘rueful expression’ on the face of the burning bishop. A subversive rhyme was chanted:
Good Lord! put down aristocrats
Let Boroughmongers be abhorred
And from all tithes and shovel hats
Forthwith deliver us, good Lord!
Yet it was noted that the streets cleared quietly after ten o’clock when the flames had died down.13
Taking advantage of the traditional date, there were many more such demonstrations countrywide where it was sometimes difficult to draw a line between a bout of popular disaffection, often for local causes, and some more violent intention connected to Reform. In Dorset Mary Frampton had noticed that during their demonstrations, ‘the minds of the common people’ were ‘wickedly excited’ by suggestions that Reform would give them meat as well as bread in abundance, all at a much cheaper price than normal.14
In Exeter, Bishop Henry Phillpotts was already a target by reason of his notoriously anti-Reform stance; now his effigy was ostentatiously burnt. A ‘tall, finely formed’ figure of a man, with an imposing, lofty forehead and ‘dark hair like the quills of the fretful porcupine’ in the words of the parliamentary journalist James Grant, this was one ‘Guy’ which was unmistakable to the people of Exeter. It has to be said for the Bishop’s sangfroid under the circumstances that he explained his toleration of the burning to the Duke of Wellington as follows: far from being a sign of weakness, it was simply the most convenient way of getting rid of the effigy, which would otherwise have hung about awkwardly. Nearer home, the Duke himself, together with the Duke of Cumberland, was burnt in effigy at Tyburn, near Marble Arch. Phillpotts’s efficiency was, however, matched by Wellington’s composure. On 8 November he told the Deputy Governor of Dover Castle loftily: ‘In respect to insults to me, those who wish to insult me are perfectly welcome.’ He added: ‘I defend myself if they attempt injury. . . .’15
Back in London the Cabinet were far from united on what should be done. It was the question, posed crucially by Lord Lyndhurst in the House of Lords, to which some answer had to be found. Could the Bill really not be moderated – that was the right soothing word – in some way so as to bring in enough peers to pass it in its (comparatively) new form? A little group of Tory peers was beginning to take shape who would be known as ‘the Waverers’; prominent among them were Lord Wharncliffe and Lyndhurst himself. Given that you only had to ‘turn’ twenty-one votes (and of course they did not necessarily have to be bishops), there was a body of opinion in the Cabinet, including Lord John Russell himself, Melbourne and Palmerston, who believed this must be the reasonable way to go.
The first debate concerned the date of the next meeting of Parliament. Grey, the Duke of Richmond and Lord Palmerston thought 6 December – the date generally proposed – was too soon. They were defeated; Lord Althorp was impressed by Grey’s dignified bearing in the face of his failure. In any case the state of the country meant that the arguments for urgent action had been mightily reinforced. The Prime Minister was frank about it in his communication with the King: the recall was against his own wishes or, as the Cabinet minute put it which was sent to William IV, the three dissenters, ‘though they were of the opinion that it would have been better to continue the prorogation till the beginning of January’, acquiesced in the advice ‘which is thus humbly submitted to your Majesty’.16
There was also an appalling scene at the Cabinet dinner on the eve of Parliament when Lord Durham started to insult his father-in-law Grey in a way that bordered on the mad. Grief had not improved Durham’s excitable, even morbid temperament. Only a week earlier he had written to Grey, thanking him for all his kindness to him over the death of his son. Now he issued the most brutal attack on him, wrote Althorp to his father, that he had ever heard in his life. Lord Melbourne, more crudely, said that if he had been Lord Grey, he would have knocked Durham down.17
Durham accused Grey of keeping him in London while his son was dying, saying that he, Durham, would be disgraced if there was any alteration in the move towards Reform. (This was quite unfair, commented Althorp, because the Bill was essentially the same.) The deeply mortified Grey responded that he would rather work in the coal mines than be subject to such attacks. ‘And you could do worse,’ responded the noble colliery owner. Then Durham left the room. If there were two Durhams, quite unalike, as Lord Holland once suggested, this was certainly Durham in his most terrible mood – however understandable. It was the measure of his instability at this time that, although Althorp believed he would instantly resign, Durham proceeded later as if nothing had happened.
Meanwhile the stately dance with and round the King – with sidesteps in the direction of the Radicals – continued. In the general state of perturbation throughout the country, not everyone took the enlightened attitude of the Duke of Rutland’s estate agent, Richard Norman, that the unions might be a force for pacification. There were rumours – more rumours – about the existence of armed bodies and menacing military organization. Guns, it was said, were being concealed in walking-sticks. The Tory-inclined newspaper the Standard suggested that the Birmingham Political Union had actually played some part in the recent ‘melancholy events’, in Grey’s phrase, at Bristol. This was certainly not true; in fact it was the Bristol riots that prompted Thomas Attwood to suggest that military organization of some sort might be a sound plan for the Union, in the face of such hostility. In Birmingham, 10,000 or 15,000 men would be able ‘to vindicate the law, and restore the peace and security of the town’.18 No mention was made of arms – although of course they were not officially forbidden either.
Under the circumstances the Government decided to issue a Royal Proclamation on the subject. This was something that William IV was easily persuaded to do. On 22 November it was officially announced that all political unions were illegal which assumed power independent of the civil magistrates. On the face of it this was a direct rebuff to the unions, a challenge to their growing numbers which could cost the Government dear, given the existing attacks on their policies from the opposite side of the political spectrum. But several days previously Lord Althorp, having persuaded Grey of the need for secret intervention, had written privately to Joseph Parkes asking him to intercede in Birmingham: Attwood should be dissuaded from incorporating any such military organization into his flagship Birmingham Political Union, otherwise it would inevitably be brought into conflict with the Government.19 This important undercover initiative was successful, and any such militarization of the Union was now explicitly rejected.
In a leader on the day of the Opening of Parliament, The Times expressed the pious hope that His Majesty would mention ‘the dreadful occurrences at Bristol’. They were satisfied: putting on his spectacles to read his speech from the throne, William IV sounded duly shocked by recent events: ‘My Lords and Gentlemen, the scenes of violence and outrage which have occurred in the city of Bristol and some other places, have caused me the deepest affliction’; therefore, foremost in the coming session the King wanted ‘a speedy consideration of the measures of Reform in the House of Commons’.20
Fortunately, the King was in one of his ebullient moods, according to Sir Denis Le Marchant who, as the Lord Chancellor’s Private Secretary, happened to be near him in the robing room when he was putting on his crown. When Grey remarked that this would be one of the longest speeches ever delivered from the throne, the King boasted that his boyhood tutor had believed that ‘no lesson could be too long for him to learn’. He confided to Brougham that since he usually learnt his speeches by heart, he was not afraid of being put out by any accidental interruption.21
Lord John Russell presented the new Bill on 12 December.22 Perhaps his manner could never be heroic, given the limitations of his old-fashioned ‘Whig’ voice and his slight figure. Sydney Smith once wickedly suggested that when the electors were worried by Russell’s small size, they should simply be assured that he began by being much larger, but had been worn away by the anxieties and struggles of the Reform Bill.23 Nevertheless Russell’s words were stirring and his message forthright: there was no one who had attended to ‘this great question’ and noticed the manner in which it has agitated the country, ‘the agitation increasing with every returning period of distress’, without being convinced that the time had now arrived when speedy and satisfactory settlement was of an importance ‘very nearly equal to the Bill itself’.
It was not the identical Bill that was now presented. There had been small but distinct alterations, as for example a reworking of Schedule B, whereby the number of towns to lose one Member was reduced, including Bodmin, Guildford and Huntingdon, and ten of the newly enfranchised towns got an extra seat. These alterations were at the suggestion of the so-called Waverers; but it could be argued that the Tory restitutions were neatly balanced by the increased influence of the more Radical towns.24
Besides Lords Wharncliffe and Lyndhurst, the Waverers now included the veteran Earl of Harrowby. Just on seventy, Harrowby had originally been the Tory MP for Tiverton, and a personal friend of Pitt; later, as a peer, he had occupied various prestigious posts and acted as Lord President of the Council for fifteen years until 1827. Greville paid tribute to him in his Memoirs: Harrowby, he wrote, if he lacked imagination and eloquence, had ‘a noble, straightforward, independent character’ who in the course of a long political life never incurred any blemish or suspicion.25
Obviously it was in the best interests of the Government for the hostile majority to be gradually eroded by changes of mind before the next vote. Harrowby was just the kind of man whose presence in the voting lobby of the Lords would be most valuable to them. Although meetings with the Waverers were liable to be described as treacherous by both sides, Radicals and Ultra Tories, they were an obvious pacific route towards the progress of the Bill. The Whigs had an excellent natural conduit to them in the shape of Edward Stanley, the Chief Secretary for Ireland. In the way such things worked, he had been at Oxford with Lord Wharncliffe’s son and visited North America with him. Then Stanley called at the Harrowby home at Sandon Hall in Staffordshire on his way to Ireland, allowing Harrowby to establish a discreet relationship with the Cabinet.
So the new Bill included various modifications. For one thing the Census of 1831 (as opposed to 1821) was used, the absence of which had always been a legitimate grievance on the part of its critics. The number of houses and the number of assessed taxes were employed to calculate Schedules A and B, rather than the population; also the number of MPs was not to be reduced – as General Gascoyne had demanded in his amendment back in April, leading to the famous dissolution. In this way, dozens of boroughs could be taken out of Schedule B, and other well-populated towns such as Rochdale could be enfranchised.
The changes enabled Sir Robert Peel in reply to refer to ‘the great escape from the previous Bill’ and to express his gratitude to those – the Lords and the objectors in general – who had brought it about. At this point, therefore, the result could well be described as a triumph for compromise; in other words there was more than one way of putting down the aristocrats in the House of Lords, other than violence and burning effigies. Cobbett and Hunt both approved the Bill, The Times thought it very little changed and Ultra Tories like Croker considered the details a great triumph for the fuss made by his own party. Baring Wall, the MP for Guildford who had cried out ‘They are mad!’ when he first heard the provisions of the Bill in March, took the line that the concessions were due not so much to the Opposition as to ‘reason and justice’.26
However, Croker went on to point out more gloomily that the Bill left ‘the great objection’ – to Reform in the first place – just where it was: ‘Nay, by removing anomalies and injustices, it makes the Bill more palatable and therefore more dangerous.’ Sir Charles Wetherell, admirably undaunted by recent experiences in Bristol, gave one of his history lessons. He recalled the attack on the Anglican Church in 1641; once again bishops were being treated as ‘malignants’. And he quoted the lines from Hudibras, the popular poem by the seventeenth-century Samuel Butler, which referred to the sectarian female dissidents of the time:
When oyster women locked their fish up
And trudged away to cry ‘No Bishop!’
Wetherell was also keen to pour scorn on Russell’s notorious reference to ‘the whisper of faction’, that is the House of Lords. Like Croker, he believed that the Bill had been defeated not by a whisper but by ‘the well-grounded conviction of reasoning men’.27
Not all the five days of debate were on the highest level. Hunt and Lord Morpeth got into a squabble over an entry in the Leeds Mercury following Hunt’s visit to the city. Lord Morpeth took the line that the Mercury had never advocated physical assault against Hunt’s person, to which Hunt (not unreasonably) replied that the words ‘cracking open his skull’ were difficult to interpret otherwise; in an argument reminiscent of that of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Hunt queried how this could take place without loss of blood.28
The speech of Lord William Lennox, MP for King’s Lynn since 1831, was on a more elevated level. Brother of the Duke of Richmond, Lord William took a similar interest in colonial matters. The Duke had advocated giving votes to the colonies (the right types, as ‘a sure counteraction to the force of popular clamour’, were expected to emerge in the House of Commons as a result). It was a measure which, despite being argued ‘very ingeniously’, was rejected by his colleagues as too large and late. Lennox was a spirited fellow who really preferred the theatre and sport to politics – he had made an unwise marriage to a singer which ended in disaster – but during his short-lived occupation of a parliamentary seat, he spoke out boldly and critically on the subject of nominated Members. He saw no difference, he said, between ‘the vested right of a West Indian planter over the body of his slave’ and the vested rights of nomination; ‘for I see no distinction between mental and corporeal enthralment’.29
There were two fine speeches which impressed all who heard them, both by men who were young in parliamentary terms – Thomas Babington Macaulay and Edward Stanley were thirty-one and thirty-two respectively.30 Macaulay’s speech, an extraordinary compound of ‘deep philosophy, exalted sentiments and party bitterness’, was said to have had ‘a prodigious effect’. Physically unimpressive, Macaulay created a greater impression with his oratory every time he spoke. Now he waxed both eloquent and furious on the subject of the new Bill and refused to give an inch on the subject of the Lords’ rejection: ‘. . . in truth, we recant nothing – we have nothing to recant – we support this Bill – we may possibly think it is a better Bill than that which preceded it. But are we therefore bound to admit that we were in the wrong – that the opposition was in the right – that the House of Lords has conferred a great benefit on the nation? . . . Is delay no evil? Is prolonged excitement’ – the word generally used for crowds out of control – ‘no evil? Is it no evil that the heart of a great people should be made sick by deferred hope?’
Macaulay then went on to dispose of the idea that the great Parliamentarians of the past had arrived via nominations; in fact the five largest represented urban districts – Westminster, Southwark, Liverpool, Bristol and Norwich – had produced among others Burke, Fox, Sheridan, Canning and Huskisson. There would, of course, always be some ‘extravagances’ at a time of change: the Anabaptists had flourished at the time of the Reformation. But the history of England was one of government ‘sometimes peaceably, sometimes after a violent struggle, but constantly giving way before a nation that has been constantly advancing’.
Examples Macaulay produced were the forest laws, the law of villainage, the oppressive power of the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestant establishment subsequently, the prerogatives of the Crown and the censorship of the press. The Stuarts could not govern as the Tudors had, nor the Hanoverians as their predecessors the Stuarts had done; the age of the last four Hanoverian monarchs was also over. As so often at this period, the French Revolution was brought into play; the government of Louis XVI had been ‘much better and milder’ than that of his ancestor Louis XIV, but the latter had been admired and loved, while Louis XVI died on the scaffold. Why? Simply because the French government had not advanced as rapidly as the French nation.
Stanley, the future ‘Rupert of Debate’, began with a well-argued defence of the new Bill in detail, allaying the fears of his friends who knew he could do the stirring stuff, but worried that this political firebrand might be ‘stranded in a studied speech’. The concessions, he said, were responsible and in answer to genuine grievances; and in order to avoid a crisis it was essential the Bill should be passed as soon as possible. But his speech was also remarkable for his intervention in the long-running intellectual battle between John Wilson Croker and Macaulay. This was a matter which had involved not only the staple of such conflicts, bad-tempered reviews, but also acid references in Parliament. (Croker never willingly let Macaulay forget that he entered the House of Commons, sitting for Calne, at the whim as it were of Lord Lansdowne.)
Now Stanley lashed into Croker, who had made what was, as it turned out, an unfortunate reference to Charles I and his Parliaments – another historical period constantly invoked at this time. ‘In the course of his extraordinary misrepresentation of the history of the country,’ declared Stanley, ‘he has given us events for causes and causes for events. What he describes as a consequence had actually preceded it. What he represents as a cause . . .’ and so forth and so on. The trouble was that Stanley was right. Having demonstrated the complete falsity of Croker’s contention, Stanley memorably observed: ‘Inaccurate reading is as dangerous as a little reading.’ This public putting-down of Croker was not totally unwelcome to his own side. Edward Littleton was told afterwards that Peel had remarked: ‘I wonder how our biographer, Croker, likes the dressing [down] he got from Stanley.’ Croker for his part went very pale, and pulled his hat down over his eyes. An Irishman in the gallery, listening to Croker’s violent declamations, had once described him as being ‘like a hen on a hot griddle’. For now the ‘hen’ was quiet.31
On 17 December, the last day of the debate, Peel spoke again and made an important statement of his position for the future.32 There was a conventional tribute to the Constitution ‘under which I have lived hitherto, which I believe is adapted to the wants and habits of the people’ followed by a declaration: ‘I will continue my opposition to the last, believing as I do, that it is the first step, not directly to Revolution, but to a series of changes which will affect the property, and totally change the character of the mixed constitution of this country.’ But at the end Peel added an important caveat: ‘On this ground I take my stand, not opposed to a well considered Reform of any of our institutions which need reform, but opposed to this Reform.’ There was a hint of flexibility here – very different from the inflexibility of his leader, the Duke of Wellington, in the Lords in November 1830 and ever since.
On the same day, voting took place: 324 MPs voted for the Bill and half that number against; the 162 majority made it clear that there were Tory abstentions. Parliament was adjourned. The landowners now went to their country houses, the Duke of Richmond to his Sussex palace whose name was beginning to be used for ‘the Goodwood Set’. This comprised those, such as the Duke himself, Palmerston and Melbourne, who were uneasy about the direction that Reform was taking, and the whole subject of creation of peers in particular.
There was no escaping the decision which had to be taken in some form or other early in the New Year. Given that the House of Commons had once again passed the Bill, and given that it seemed inevitable that the Lords would reject it – in clear defiance of the popular will – the creation of new peers had to be considered. The aristocrats were not so much to be watered down as swamped with new Members. Otherwise, wrote The Times in its report of the passing of the Bill, Great Britain would be ‘one scene of blood and terror’. Joseph Parkes put it succinctly in a letter to Harriet Grote: ‘All say New Peers or d–m–n to Lord Grey and co.’33
* The big gun is still to be seen today at Belvoir Castle.