‘It was impossible, therefore, to delay looking to the fearful alternative which was thus forced upon our consideration . . .’ –
Lord Grey to William IV, 4 January 1832
On 1 January 1832, Lord Holland wished his close friend the Prime Minister a happy New Year. 1831 had been, he noted in his Diary, the first full year of Whig rule for seventy years. To Grey he gave his New Year wish regarding the recalcitrant House of Lords: ‘I hope you will prove yourself (pardon the blasphemy) a famous Creator.’ And on the subject of numbers to be created, Holland proceeded to make merry with the rules of tennis, of which he was a veteran player; he said that he liked that way of counting – fifteen, thirty, forty, Game.1 Unfortunately the subject was by no means so light-hearted as Lord Holland’s sprightly comments suggested. Nor was creation – the question of enlarging the House of Lords in order to nullify the large natural Tory majority – quite as simple as the Radical Joseph Parkes had indicated in his letter to Harriet Grote on the universal demand for ‘New Peers’.
At a Cabinet meeting on 18 December, Grey raised the matter in a voice which was rather faint: what would happen if the second reading of the Bill was defeated once more in the Lords?2 In November he had quoted to Sir Francis Burdett a Latin tag on the subject: quieta prius tentanda – first of all, a peaceable approach must be tried. There was nothing however to suggest that a peaceable approach, when it came to the vote, would prove effective. Nevertheless, Grey’s evident diffidence masked a real difficulty which was felt by aristocrats themselves where the enlargement of their class was concerned. It is too simple to describe this as being purely a jealous sense of superiority. No doubt that came into it in some cases, as such emotions generally do where exclusivity is apparently being threatened from outside. But the whole matter was more complicated than that.
There was also a sincere feeling for the aristocracy as a special caste which was certainly not dishonourable; this caste was part of the natural order of society, along with Crown and People, which, by its establishment and maintenance, prevented any kind of unnatural upheaval. Like any other class, they were expected to show a sense of responsibility commensurate with their privilege: in this case, a sense of responsibility towards the government of the country and the people in it, as Grey in particular had felt so strongly all his life. But then so had the traditional Tory aristocrats. This patrician feeling was an essential strand woven into the fabric of the time, as much part of it as the Radical feelings of a Parkes or an Attwood.
Of course it was understood that this caste would be enlarged from time to time, most recently by the traditional coronation creations. Grey’s own earldom, for example, was only second-generation, although he came from a long line of landed gentry. The new entrants were expected to be worthy of their new estate, which at least partially meant in a material sense. These kinds of creations, however, were individual honours, and while political allegiances obviously came into it – after all, the famous Tory majority had come about during the stretched-out years of Tory government – that was a different matter from a large block of creations at one particular time for the sake of one political measure.
This had occurred 120 years earlier in the reign of Queen Anne in order to bring about the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession. But this was not necessarily regarded as a good precedent. In 1711 twelve peers were hastily created by a reluctant Queen in order to assist the new Tory Government at the expense of the Whigs; among them were Samuel Masham, the husband of her favourite Abigail Masham. When she was warned by Lord Dartmouth that this measure would have ‘a very ill effect in the House of Lords and no good one in the kingdom’, the Stuart Queen replied that she liked it as little as he did, but no one had proposed ‘a better expedient’.3 It remained to be seen whether her Hanoverian cousin William IV, faced with the same choice, would with similar reluctance make the same decision.
In short, the Constitution held that the creation of peers was a royal prerogative; less clear was the part that ministerial advice should play, and whether this advice was in itself mandatory for the monarch to take. The relatively small number of twelve was also significant and presumably influenced Grey when he had made a reference to it in July. Although in theory a vastly bigger number must also be covered by the royal prerogative, in practice an influx of, say, forty or fifty peers at one go, as the Radicals cheerfully demanded, would have the effect of transforming the House of Lords. And, incidentally, who were these new peers to be?
There was an obvious difference between the eldest sons of existing peers – many of whom, sitting in the House of Commons under their courtesy titles, were destined to inherit peerages sooner or later – and actual commoners. The first category was infinitely preferable to those who felt strongly on the subject of the caste: it enlarged the Government majority but did not in effect enlarge the aristocracy. One obvious example whose name was mentioned in this connection was the Marquess of Blandford, heir to the Dukedom of Marlborough, who had favoured Reform as a way to combat the evil effects of Catholic Emancipation, voting with the Government on 22 March 1831. (He said later that he had rejected the possibility.)4
Similarly, giving certain Irish or Scottish peers – such as Lord Palmerston – the right to sit in the British House of Lords, hitherto denied them, did not actually enlarge the aristocracy. There was a further possibility: the granting of peerages to older men without children (who could be trusted not to beget them in the future) would also leave the aristocracy untouched in the future. This enabled Lord Holland to make one of his jokes: ‘I shall tell the candidates for peerages to imitate the housemaid who enhanced her qualifications for the job: “My Lord, besides all this I’m a barrener” – since many [new barons] are to be barren with an “e” as well as an “o”.’5
Of course it was not to be expected that, in an age when satire was a popular recreation, witticisms on the subject of the new peers should be excepted. There was for example a story that one lord had simply nominated a waiter at White’s Club – the only problem being that he didn’t know the waiter’s name. The seventy-five-year-old Lord Essex had been one of the ‘beaux of that day’ – the day being pre-revolutionary France, where he had known Marie Antoinette; he was famous for having his hair magnificently coiffed in Paris for a party, travelling all the way back to London with his head ‘in a forced position’, and then dazzling the English capital once again with the same coiffure. Now he suggested that the King ought to stop at the first stand of hackney coaches in Piccadilly and make all the coachmen in succession peers until the number was filled up.6
In answer to Grey’s question on 18 December, important differences of opinion on this potentially vital subject began to emerge in the Cabinet.7 Lord Brougham was in fine bombastic form as he summed up both sides of the question. Although, after a long speech, he finally came down on the side of ‘a very large increase in the Lords’ as opposed to the loss of the Bill, he was felt by some to have spent too much time on the objections to an increase, even exaggerating them; so Brougham, as ever, managed to be both helpful and unhelpful in the same swoop of eloquence. What did emerge was the fact that a very large creation would have the counter-effect of alienating some peers who had hitherto been friendly to the Bill.
Both the Marquess of Lansdowne and the Duke of Richmond deprecated ‘most earnestly’ what they termed the ‘destruction’ of the House of Lords. It was an unpleasant fact that King Louis-Philippe had abolished the hereditary upper house in France late in 1831. Such an event across the Channel could not help evoking a kind of general dread of change regarding hereditary legislature in England, in case here also it all went too far, too fast. Lord Palmerston took a different line. Rather than endorse creation, he favoured indirect concessions over parts of the Bill: the Government would accept having ‘obnoxious’ changes forced upon them in Committee if in return the vote in favour on the second reading would be guaranteed.
Lord Holland, as ever of a pragmatic turn of mind, suggested that the right course was to demand the creation of a few peers, in order to demonstrate their power with the King; it might also persuade those who were totally averse to any large increase on constitutional grounds that acceptance of the Bill was the least bad alternative. The Duke of Richmond then admitted that the Archbishop of Canterbury – ‘if convinced we would make peers’ – might prefer to lead his fellow prelates into voting for the Bill, rather than accept a large increase.
Vacillation was one characteristic of the Prime Minister that Lord Grey’s critics often commented upon when his behaviour did not suit their own purposes (of course, apparent indecision was also a useful weapon of statesmanship). On this occasion Grey could certainly be forgiven, in view of the divided views of the Cabinet, in saying that he referred the question to them for their further consideration. It was left to Lord Durham, mercifully in a less combative mood – although he did still manage to show ‘asperity’ towards Palmerston – to sum up the three possibilities: whether to make peers sufficient to carry the Bill; whether to create a small batch with a view to avoiding the first option; or whether to trust to ‘modifications, arrangements and understandings’ in order to secure a majority in the Lords. Durham seemed to grow in belligerence once more as he contemplated this third option, which he described as ‘neither reconcileable to honour or prudence, an evasion of Lord Grey’s pledge’ and furthermore an incitement to defeat. He declared that he himself (and surely others) would actually vote against this Bill, ‘so mutilated and the offspring of such compromise and contrivances’.
Later Holland visited Grey in the bosom of his beloved family at his southern retreat of East Sheen; here Grey was always at his most ‘natural and amiable’. The Prime Minister confided to him that Durham’s temper was often more of a trial to him than any public or private grievances whatsoever; all the same Holland found Grey’s desire to gratify his daughter Louisa Durham, the bereaved mother, very touching. Nevertheless, with whatever reluctance, Grey still believed that the creation of peers was a necessity. And Holland was relieved to find that Lady Grey, who in her quiet way had great influence with her husband, was manifestly for a vigorous measure rather than a second defeat.8
It was a reminder of the troubles of the wider world that, at that late December meeting, the Cabinet had passed from Reform to discussing events in Ireland. Only the day before Lord Grey had had to inform the King of ‘an affray’ in Kilkenny on account of tithes: the chief constable and sixteen police were killed ‘and only three or four of the mob’.9 The police were said to have been attacked in a road with high banks by about 2,000 people armed with pitchforks and stones, who rushed them before they could fire more than a few shots; this incident demonstrated that the apparent unassailable advantage of firepower did not always prevail where the other side had numbers, surprise and ferocity on their side. Now Stanley, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, confirmed the increasing violence to the Cabinet. There were calls, he said, not so much for reform of Parliament as for repeal of the Union which had subsumed the Irish Parliament into the English one thirty years earlier. As ever, agitation was met by counter-agitation. So Stanley also commented on the ‘no less violent and factious’ combinations of the Orangemen and Brunswickers ‘on the pretence of protecting the Protestant Church’.
Throughout the following months, as the future of the English – or one should say British – Parliament was being decided in a series of intricate conspiracies, the spectre of insurrection in Ireland stalked the Government’s imagination, with the King at least believing that O’Connell was ‘stirring the fire’. William IV feared that more troops would be needed in Ireland since the example of violence, especially if it has been successful, was always contagious in that ‘inflammable population’. Meanwhile the riots in England and Scotland continued; here was no nationalist agenda but demands for bread and jobs – and Reform. In the eloquent words of Macaulay: ‘the far-spreading light of midnight fires, and the outrages of incendiaries have all but too often indicated wretchedness and despair, starvation and daring recklessness’.10 It was the potential recklessness of those who had nothing to lose which perturbed both sides in the debate on Reform.
*
On 2 January 1832 a long Cabinet meeting took place at which Grey set forth what he called ‘the great question of the day’ by reading three letters.11 Two, from Lord Brougham, painted ‘in strong language’ the need for creation, ten or twelve peers acting as ‘a demonstration of our power and the King’s determination to support us’. The third letter was from Thomas Coke, MP for Norfolk since 1807, who described himself with some justice as ‘a very old reformer’; he was now seventy-eight and in the old days had been a strong supporter of Charles James Fox; he continued to correspond with Lafayette as a fellow ‘Patriot’. Coke was a fervent Whig and an equally zealous improver of his agricultural estates centred on Holkham. As the Duke of Bedford once said to him, at Woburn and Holkham they were not plagued by demands for lower rentals: ‘The reason is simple; neither you nor I screw our tenants up to high rents which they are unable to bear.’12 Grey acknowledged Coke’s distinguished philanthropic history when he read his letter aloud to the Cabinet; the veteran reformer called strongly for creation in accordance with the ‘earnest expectations and wishes’ of the people of Norfolk.
Yet Grey himself continued to express openly his reluctance for such an extreme measure. It was only the conviction that ‘yet greater calamities’ would follow that persuaded him. And it was the obvious sincerity of this position that would help Grey in his relations with William IV, when he went down to Brighton the next day for the crucial meeting. Grey had the backing of the Cabinet to tell the King that they wanted a ‘demonstration’ of his confidence – demonstration was thought to be a ‘very serviceable’ phrase. But by no means could the Prime Minister be held to represent any kind of ardent anti-monarchical force. There were those who argued for Reform just because it was ‘subversive of aristocracy, favourable to democracy [fearsome word] and partaking of a revolutionary character’ – as the Marquess of Lansdowne had put it in Cabinet. Grey was evidently not one of them. He brought to his beleaguered Sovereign something more convincing: the belief of an honest man that worse, much worse, would follow if the King did not pledge creation.
The meeting on the morning of 4 January was extremely long; the King had been prepared for it not only by previous correspondence but by a preliminary talk the evening before. According to Grey’s minute of the conversation, written afterwards and passed to the King, he began by outlining how little security the Government had for believing they would carry the Bill, despite the increased majority in the House of Commons and the general expectation.13 It was impossible therefore to delay looking to ‘the fearful alternative’ which was thus forced upon their consideration. Either they would face all the danger attendant upon the loss of the Bill or they must prevent such a defeat ‘by use of the means which the prerogative of the Crown afforded’ for just such an emergency: Grey meant, of course, the creation of peers.
William IV listened to it all ‘with the greatest attention and with evident anxiety’. Naturally he was surrounded at Brighton by his large, loving and vociferous family headed by Queen Adelaide, and the Tory lords who were their friends; but he, like his Prime Minister, was an honest man struggling to do his best in the situation in which he found himself, even if he was not absolutely sure what that situation was. In reply William stressed his ‘undiminished’ concern about creation and then concentrated on the vexed question of who these putative new peers might be. Above all, the King wanted to change the permanent character of the House of Lords as little as possible – which meant in effect heirs to peerages, Irish peers and those ‘barreners’, as Lord Holland put it, who could be relied on not to enlarge the ranks of the Lords for more than one generation. Grey, by his own account, conceded all this but did add that ‘some creations of Commoners of high character and great property’ might be desirable, but once again limited so as not to pillage the House of Commons unduly.
Grey ended by expressing the hope that ‘a first partial creation’ might produce the effect which would obviate a subsequent addition. Once again William IV listened ‘most graciously’; then reiterated his point about the need to avoid augmenting the peerage. Suddenly he became more animated: ‘His Majesty added that he trusted it would not be proposed to raise to the Peerage any of those who had been forward in agitating the country, as nothing could induce him to consent to the advancement of persons of that description.’ He went on to express the greatest anxiety about the state of the country, trusting there would be no further encroachments tending to diminish ‘the necessary power of the Government’. And he asked to see an account of their conversation in writing.
When he did so, the King acknowledged its ‘perfect accuracy’.14 But he made it clear that he did not consider himself pledged at this point to the adoption of any proposal or suggestion; for that he would need a more formal minute of the Cabinet. And he proceeded to declare it as a condition inseparable – his italics – to any proposal of creation, that the peers chosen should be exclusively – his italics again – eldest sons or collateral heirs to peerages where there was no direct heir. (There were two or possibly three exceptions of named men who had earlier been considered for coronation peerages.) He did not believe that even Irish or Scotch peers were necessary, looking at the lists submitted, although he would not actually have objected to them.
At the same time the King was positively against any policy of a partial creation, leading to a further measure: if twenty-one was the desired number, it must be twenty-one now ‘instead of feeling the pulse and beating about the bush’. Having made it clear that his acquiescence was subject to the exclusion of all creations except those specified, William signed off with a renewed admonition about not rewarding the agitators.
His last paragraph was positively apocalyptic about the state of the country. This was a time of great peril, ‘when the overthrow of all legitimate authority, the destruction of the ancient institutions, of social order, and of every gradation and link of society are threatened, when a revolutionary and demoralizing spirit is making frightful strides, when a poisonous press, almost unchecked, guides, excites and at the same time controls public opinion’. So the King hoped that, once Reform was happily settled, his Government would see to it that there was no further encroachment from the House of Commons, and above all no further diminution of the authority, influence and dignity of the Crown. He was not conscious of having shown any tendency towards an extravagant display of dignity and splendour – in contrast to the previous reign, was implied – or the exercise of despotic and arbitrary power. Therefore the various encroachments must be ascribed to something the King once again italicized: that growing fancy for liberalism. However fair its appearance, in itself it threatened the Constitution and form of government ‘under which this country has so long prospered’.
On paper Lord Grey now had some kind of grudging royal assurance concerning creation, although it was so hedged around with conditions about the people suitable to be ennobled that it was doubtful if any large-scale creation would be possible. There were also disquieting clues to certain growing preoccupations of the Sovereign: that reference to a poisonous press, for example. Like many other royalties before him – notably Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette – the King was beginning to be stung by the gadflies.
In due course the official minute from the Cabinet was submitted.15 With ‘deep pain’ the Cabinet confessed that it could have no confidence in securing a majority in the House of Lords. In such an extreme case, therefore, they believed that the exercise of the King’s prerogative of creation could be justified. While paying lip-service to the King’s known disinclination to augment the peerage in the long term, the Cabinet minute did not commit to any particular number until the Government should have received more accurate information about the state of opinion, as the Bill continued to go through the Commons.
The King replied at length on 15 January.16 Many old arguments were rehearsed. He also allowed himself to compare the creation of peers at the Government’s instigation for the avowed purpose of obtaining a majority in the House of Lords to the use of nomination, ‘vulgarly called rotten boroughs’. Yet Reform was against this in principle. In both cases ‘the independent voice’ was being overpowered. Nevertheless there was a crucial passage buried in the extensive text, the kernel of the nut which the Cabinet sought. If necessary, the King would not deny to his Ministers the power of ‘acting at once up to the full exigency of the case’ – here he was ostensibly quoting from the Cabinet minute, but by inserting the word ‘full’, absent in the original, had inadvertently strengthened it.
*
Parliament reconvened on 17 January and then went into Committee. Before it did so, in view of the King’s recent explosion on the subject of dignity and splendour, it was ironic that a lively debate took place over public expenditure on Buckingham Palace – ironic because King William, in his genuinely frugal way, had strongly objected to the proposal to move the royal residence there, and preferred to stay in St James’s Palace.
The history of Buckingham Palace hitherto was not an encouraging one to a lover of economical living. Buckingham House had originally been built for the Duke of that name at the beginning of the eighteenth century; it was then altered into a private residence for Queen Charlotte, where most of her fifteen children were born, and known as the Queen’s House. The transformation to a palace was, characteristically, the inspiration of George IV, with John Nash as his architect; Nash, however, was actually sacked for extravagance in 1829 and Edward Blore was substituted. Gamely, William IV continued to resist the move; in 1831 he hopefully suggested that 1,500 Foot Guards in need of a new home should have Buckingham Palace adapted to a barracks, only to have Lord Grey condemn that as too expensive.*
The debate which now took place, with protests about the large sums involved in further works and the methods used to raise the money, was therefore an additional irritant to the King where his faithful Commons were concerned. Lord Duncannon for the Government, a good man but a bad speaker because of his stammer, tried to hold the fort against the denunciation of John Cresset Pelham, the eccentric MP for Shropshire, and the attack of Henry Hunt. Joseph Hume’s intervention was especially waspish: he would like to know on what authority the pledge concerning expenditure was given. They had had a pledge from the Chancellor of the Exchequer on a former occasion ‘which turned out to be worth nothing’.17 All laboured the question – the familiar question where public works are concerned – was this really enough or were there further demands to come?
The main work of the Commons, the wrangling over the Reform Bill, was scarcely more to the King’s liking, as he received his reports from his Prime Minister, daily when necessary. In William IV’s comments, as relayed by Sir Herbert Taylor, the tone of despondency, that considerable anxiety noted by Grey, grows markedly with the passing of the weeks. Even the tactful Taylor admitted to Grey that the King was often low, not bothering to conceal it; after all ‘in his own family (I mean among his children) there is much difference of opinion’. Others did not scruple to report the King’s low spirits; they then went further, suggesting that some expression of his had ‘betrayed his apprehension’ about the political future. But Taylor himself was sure that his master had in fact never shown any want of confidence in his Ministers. It is true that William IV by his own account stood firm when Lord Londonderry paid a visit to Brighton on 27 January. The King told Taylor that the notorious Ultra Tory was very quiet at first, but grew warm and eager by degrees, ‘and finally wound himself into a state of great excitement on the question of Reform, and addition to the Peerage’. William IV listened but said nothing.18 The trouble was that in the present situation, silence was more likely to be construed as assent than dissent by a man of such passionate feelings as Londonderry.
The state of the country was, from a very different angle, quite as warm and eager as Lord Londonderry and there was no evidence to support the occasional statements of Tory optimists that interest in Reform was dying down. William IV attributed this to the newspapers; he could not lose sight, he wrote, of the growing influence of the press, nor of the extraordinary power which it unfortunately possessed of exciting popular feeling and producing prejudice and misconstruction.
Of course the press performed a useful – or dangerous, depending on the point of view – function of facilitating communications around the country, and spreading the news of demonstrations after they had happened. On the other hand, to suggest that it was the press which was actually responsible for the countrywide cries for Reform was to mistake effect for cause – as Stanley had memorably castigated John Wilson Croker for doing in terms of English Civil War history. According to the Tory St James’s Chronicle, the Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, had voted unanimously to eject the pro-Reform Times from their Combination (Common) Room, disgusted by its ‘violent and unprincipled language and doctrines’; it was the last straw when The Times ascribed the recent riots in Derby, Nottingham and Bristol to the Tories. The Morning Herald was substituted.19 But the Fellows were in the position of Dame Partington and her fabled mop, attempting to sweep away the Atlantic. Reform at this point could be watered down and it could be defeated. But it could not be swept away.
Memories of the recent riots remained vivid, if only because a special commission was set up by the Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, to hand out exemplary punishments. The consequent executions and transportations overseas caused unease in Whig quarters – not with Melbourne himself however, nor with Grey. Yet in general there was an acceptance of the status quo where punishment was concerned; Reform was not considered to apply to judicial penalties. Sir John Hobhouse for example reflected on the fate of the Bristol rioters: ‘if our criminal code awards death as a punishment for any crime, I could not see how these men could be saved’. Many of the people involved in unions thought differently. On Sunday 19 January there was a big meeting in protest in St George’s Square in Manchester, which caused local fright; it also shocked respectable citizens because of the use of the Sabbath, despite the obvious fact that this was the only free day for most working people. Amid stories that the unions had been seen drilling by moonlight, magistrates ordered the meeting to be adjourned for ten days; it was subsequently broken up by soldiers and some of the organizers put in prison.20
On 2 February the National Political Union met under the presidency of Sir Francis Burdett, that outspoken veteran of protest. But the ensuing meeting did not run smoothly. Burdett and Hume both objected to the idea of a petition which would urge the Ministers to press on with Reform, in view of the tumultuous state of the country. On the contrary, the pair of them felt that the Government was actually doing all it could. So the meeting ended in uproar. Curiously enough, as the see-saw of stability on one end and riot on the other swung up and down, one of the strongest advantages of the pro-Reformers was the adamantine stance of the Duke of Wellington on the subject. Here was no Londonderry, an eccentric considered by some of the charitable to be half mad (even if Queen Adelaide did not agree). This was on the contrary the hero of the nation, as the Queen had noted sadly in her Diary when he departed from office in November 1830, a former Prime Minister as well as war leader; whatever faults Wellington had, no one doubted seriously that he had the best interests of the country at heart.
But Wellington did not even indulge in the kind of weasel words of his Tory leader in the Commons, Sir Robert Peel. Where Peel might concede the need for some Reform some day, while rigorously denouncing this one, Wellington was obdurate. He had nothing but contempt for the King’s honest attempts at constitutional government. On 2 January he wrote that ‘the great mischief of all is the weakness of our poor King, who cannot or will not see his danger, or the road out of it when it is pointed out to him’. Ten days later he was prophesying the destruction of the monarchy: ‘we are governed by the mob,’ wrote Wellington to Lord Strangford, ‘and its organ – a licentious Press.’ Wellington was convinced that if the Bill was carried, ‘there was an end to the constitution and government of this country’.21
The hero of Waterloo was not about to give up. He told Lord Howe that he went down to the House of Lords every day, in order to prove to the world ‘that I am not dead or dying’. He informed Lord Harrowby, the prominent Waverer seeking to tone down the Bill, that he disdained all compromise. And his mournful predictions of the destruction of the Constitution continued to rain down on his correspondents. Just as Wellington’s original speech in the House of Lords had led to the fall of the Tory Government, so his hardline utterances – his ‘high tone and impracticable spirit’, in Lord Holland’s words – continued to provide convenient ammunition for his opponents.22
The Committee stage of the Bill might have provided another episode of ‘dreary warfare’, in the phrase Sir Denis Le Marchant had used for the events of the late summer of 1831. But in fact the stakes were much higher now. Most sensible Members of either House realized that matters would soon come to a final crunch with a vote in the Lords; defeat would surely mean the resignation of the present Government – and what would that mean to the state of the country as a whole, since the popular will was so evidently in favour of Reform? The first twelve clauses were carried in three nights. On 26 January there was a bizarre scene in the Commons by any standards when Spencer Perceval, son of the assassinated Prime Minister of the same name, took the floor. Perceval had once been ‘a sweet young boy’ spotted at Harrow by William Wilberforce; then the protected orphan, made financially secure by award of Parliament; now he was a frenzied advocate of the particular evangelical religious sect associated with Edward Irving and Henry Drummond, sometimes known as Irvingite.23
Perceval, who had regarded the Reform Bill in March 1831 as the greatest act of folly committed by any Minister, had a particular preoccupation. This was the current epidemic of cholera and its causes. Increasingly dreaded since it arrived in England, the disease had now reached London and, as John Wilson Croker wrote: it was ‘in full speed along the banks of the river’ with alarming consequences such as the stagnation of trade. John Campbell remarked on the decline in the sale of fruit and vegetables so that thousands of little shopkeepers were ruined, together with the boycotting of hackney coaches where infection might be spread by strangers. (Great hostesses like Lady Holland refused to eat ices; only the stubbornly Tory Mrs Arbuthnot continued to think the Reform Bill the greater evil.) But of course not just London but all the new densely peopled industrial cities suffered fearfully from ‘this messenger of death’, as James Phillips Kay put it: ‘the abodes of poverty . . . the close alleys, the crowded courts, the overpopulated habitations of wretches, where pauperism and disease congregate round the source of social discontent and political disorder in the centre of our large towns’.24
For Perceval the remedy was quite clear, and it was not so much medical as spiritual: a day of national fasting and humiliation. This must take place as a result of a motion of the House of Commons. He began by using a traditional phrase (which had not been heard for the last eighteen years): ‘I perceive that strangers are in the House.’ According to practice, observers, including reporters, were duly cleared out. He had done this, Perceval explained at once, to remove the temptation to blasphemy from his opponents. In the absence of reporters, Hansard was compelled to rely on the memories of those present for the speech which followed. That version was certainly long and astonishing enough, leaving the experience of the full text to the imagination.
For one thing, Perceval spoke holding a copy of the Holy Bible in his hand which he frequently flourished. He intended to speak freely, he said, in the presence of baptized men. (There had been recent efforts to admit unbaptized Jews to Parliament.) Then he proceeded to address the Members ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world, who was exalted King of kings, and Lord of lords . . . in the name of God, the Highest, he appealed to the House’. Since it was given that anyone who despised the messenger was despising Him who had sent him, he that rejected him (Perceval) rejected his God.
Perceval’s main message from God was a fearful one: the nation trembled on the verge of destruction. In every district there were disorders, respect within the ranks of society no longer existed, and there was also ‘the frightful collision of the two Houses of Parliament’. Furthermore the houses of the nobility and gentry were entered and pillaged and one of the great cities of the nation (Bristol) had been plundered and devastated by the mob. What was to be done? He would read from the Holy Book, declared Perceval, about God’s mercy and his judgements. And so he proceeded to do, long, long passages about Israel, its transgressions, its atonements, Ninevah, further transgressions, further atonements, summed up in Hansard by the cool phrase: ‘The hon. Member read a number of extracts from the Bible to the same effect.’
By concentrating on the various biblical pestilences sent by God, Perceval pointed out the way ahead for the present nation. Just as it had been in the time of the Old Testament, when ‘the curse of God was on the land, and it had overtaken the people’, so now the pestilence was once again countrywide. Members ought to hasten to address the throne to proclaim a fast and day of humiliation in the land, ‘that we might avert this dreadful wrath’. This was the truth: they had departed from God, and God had departed from them. When it came to detail, and it did, Perceval gave the destruction of Bristol as a sample of God’s wrath. And he spent some time denouncing ‘the liberal mind that is marching through Europe’, adding that it was blasphemy to attribute power to the people, since all power came from God. Perceval finally drew to a close asking the Members to ‘Beware of the wrath that went forth on the plain against Sodom and Gomorrah’.
It was left to Lord Althorp, at his best in defusing a situation like this, to declare calmly that discussion on such a topic was ‘highly inexpedient’. It was in any case the intention of the Government to appoint a day of fasting. And that was that. Except that ‘Orator’ Hunt seized the opportunity to quote from the Bible himself. Had Perceval forgotten Isaiah? He proceeded to jog his memory with the words from Isaiah 58:6. ‘Is not this the fast that I have chosen . . . Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out, to thy house?’ What Perceval wanted, he said, was not a proper biblical fast; a real fast was one that would feed the hungry and clothe the naked.
It was left to Perceval to withdraw his motion, lest his opponents would be encouraged to further blasphemies, while observing that ‘a fast of hypocrisy’ (such as he maintained the Government would instigate to ‘get rid of the question’) was in no way acceptable to God. Acceptable or not, on 6 February the Government duly announced a day of fasting and humiliation to be held on 21 March.
Perceval was not alone in his manic invocations, if his expression of them was extreme. His views were merely one outstanding example of passionately held convictions against ‘liberalism’ and the power of the people, just as there were equally passionately held convictions on the Radical and reforming side. It would be a mistake therefore to suppose that all the idealism was on the side of Reform, as the dealings of the Committee in the House of Commons continued, and Lord Grey pursued his elaborate negotiations with the King about the ‘fearful alternative’ of creation.
The Tories were animated by patriotism even as the Whigs were (and of course both sides were also inspired by that healthy spirit of self-interest which may be regarded as part of politics, if by no means the only part). The Tories, however, paid fervent attention to the evil consequences of Revolution on the one hand, the merits of stability on the other. For those of a conservative turn of mind, these evil consequences had been fully demonstrated by the developing events of the French Revolution, as a result of which so many innocent people suffered. As for the merits of stability, these were obvious to numerous well-intentioned people who, with some justification, believed that society at every level was the better for it. This was not a philosophy to be treated with intellectual contempt even if supporters like Perceval, with his crazy denunciations of the liberal mind, made it easy to do so. William IV’s apocalyptic passage in his letter to Lord Grey in January with its reference to ‘a revolutionary and demoralizing spirit . . . making frightful strides’ did in fact express the legitimate terrors of many decent people, including politicians.
* As a result of which the present barracks in Birdcage Walk were built.