Metternich had been spending the summer at his country residence of Koenigswart (Kynzvart) in Bohemia when, on 3 August 1830, he heard of the first disturbances in Paris. News of the outcome reached him in the middle of the following night, and he immediately penned a letter to his emperor. ‘The revolution, a revolution of the worst kind, has triumphed,’ he wrote. ‘This proves two things: one that the ministry made a mistake in the choice of its means; the other that I was right when, more than two years ago, I drew the attention of the cabinets to the dangers of the situation. Unfortunately, my voice was lost in the wilderness.’ The next day he left for Vienna.1
On the way, he stopped at Karlsbad to consult with Nesselrode, who was taking the waters there. As was his wont, Metternich quickly saw the opportunities provided by the new state of affairs. Events in Paris were bound to act as an encouragement to revolutionaries in other countries, particularly Italy and Germany, and if they were to rise this might in turn lead to French armed intervention in support. This threat should help unite the powers and recreate the post-1815 concert, and, in his view, justified a new congress. Nesselrode could do nothing without consulting Nicholas, but he agreed that Russia and Austria must stand united in defence of the 1815 settlement. Once back in Vienna, Metternich put in hand the reinforcement of Austrian troops in Lombardy-Venetia, and ordered the call-up of more men. ‘We are arming to the teeth,’ he reassured Apponyi in Paris, but he was far from confident that Austria and its allies could raise enough troops to stand up to the numerically superior French. The Habsburg monarchy was almost bankrupt.2
By 1 September, he was growing despondent. ‘My innermost feeling is that we have reached the beginning of the end of old Europe,’ he wrote to Nesselrode. ‘Being determined to perish along with it, I will continue in my duty, and that goes not just for me, but for the Emperor as well.’ ‘The old Europe has not existed for forty years,’ Nesselrode replied; ‘let us take it as it is today and try to preserve it; if it does not get any worse we will have already achieved a great good, for to wish to make it better would be to attempt the impossible. Charles X undid himself because he did not recognise this truth.’3
Metternich wanted the German states to come together in the Bundestag at Frankfurt in order to jointly confront ‘the spectre of revolution’. But Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg, which felt exposed to possible attack by France, were inclined to remain neutral, arguing that it was all very well for Metternich to goad them into an anti-French and anti-revolutionary stance, but that having despatched the bulk of its troops to guard against trouble in Italy, Austria was in no position to come to their assistance if they were attacked. And there was no lack of evidence to suggest that, if provoked, France would attack. On 30 November, Armand Carrel, editor of the paper Le National, wrote: ‘The revolution can only defend itself by attacking: that was the instinctive cry of the French in 1792 and once again there is no salvation for us unless we strike the first blows.’4
Prussia, which had been given territory on the Rhine at the Congress of Vienna for the very purpose of creating a buffer against possible French aggression, was the most exposed, particularly when revolution broke out in nearby Belgium. Metternich insisted that Frederick William stand firm and act jointly with Austria and Russia, but the Prussian king did not have the stomach and could only see that he was the most at risk from the revolutionary plague. In order to avoid provoking the French, he cancelled the manoeuvres of the Prussian army scheduled at Koblenz that autumn. Nor would Prussia be pushed into acting as policeman in Germany, as Metternich suggested. The Prussian foreign minister Bernstorff took the view that the troubles in Brunswick, Hanover and elsewhere in Germany had less to do with France or the revolutionary spirit than with poverty, hunger and ‘the blundering and injudicious administrative practices of individual officials and leaders’. He refused to contemplate military intervention, if only because troops sent out to quell justifiable riots by poor people at the end of their tether might well become demoralised and, if there really were a revolutionary spirit abroad, contaminated. For this reason too, he opposed Metternich’s attempts to put together a pan-German military force to ward off a possible French invasion and intervene in France should circumstances require it. The Prussian ambassador in Paris, Heinrich Wilhelm von Werther, advised recognising Louis-Philippe and supporting the new government in Paris in order to avoid worse developments.5
Metternich was against accepting the new status quo by recognising Louis-Philippe, in part because he did not believe he would maintain himself on the throne for more than a couple of months. The idea of a citizen-king caught between hostile legitimists on one side and republicans on the other struck him as absurd. But there was also a matter of principle involved. The regime the allies had put in place in France in 1814 was the bedrock of the settlement reached at the Congress of Vienna. If that could be overturned by three days of popular disorder, so, theoretically, could the constitutions of other states and all the territorial arrangements reached then. Nicholas agreed. Although he had repeatedly warned Charles X through his ambassador in St Petersburg to abide by the Charte and not to provoke the liberals, he saw Louis-Philippe as a living insult to the principle of legitimacy. ‘That Orléans will never be anything but an infamous usurper,’ he wrote to his brother Constantine. He insisted that the powers should make a moral stand against him, and even thought of launching military operations to dethrone him. In the interim, he ordered his ambassador in Paris to withdraw with his entire staff, and all Russians in France to leave the country immediately. Frenchmen were to be denied entry to Russian dominions, and ships flying the tricolour were to be turned away from Russian ports. He gave instructions to the censors to look sharp and not allow ‘anything impious or Jacobin’ to be printed.6
According to Benckendorff’s reports, the majority of Russian society greeted the fall of Charles X with joy, if only because people viewed his regime as ‘jesuitical’. Liberals hailed the accession of Louis-Philippe, the young toasted him, and his assumption of the title of ‘King of the French’ provoked discussion on possible changes to the nature of the Russian monarchy. The reports stressed that this was all only ‘chatter’, but that could change if France began supporting revolutionary movements in other parts of Europe. Field Marshal Diebitsch suggested massing Russia’s army in Poland to counter a possible French invasion.7
Poland itself presented a major problem. The Congress of Vienna had set up a small kingdom of Poland attached to Russia by personal union, the tsar being also King of Poland. The Congress Kingdom, as it was called, had its own 40,000-strong army, under the command of the tsar’s elder brother Grand Duke Constantine. The kingdom’s administration was controlled by the Russian plenipotentiary Count Novosiltsev, whose attitude to due process did not accord with either the spirit or the letter of the constitution. The opposition in the Sejm grew in number and truculence, and by 1825 Alexander had become so exasperated that he dismissed it.
Young Poles were no less inclined than their Russian and German brothers to associate in pursuit of self-improvement and the regeneration of society. The Philomaths of Vilna University and the Panta Koyna of Warsaw had much in common with the German Burschenschaften. The Union of Free Poles and the Patriotic Society, on the other hand, set national independence as their goal. In 1822 a law was passed banning all such societies, and arrests were made. This had the effect, as it had in Russia, of encouraging conspiratorial activity. As the Patriotic Society and the Union of Free Poles both had members in the western provinces of Russia and in the Polish army, which was involved in manoeuvres with Russian forces, the plotters of both nations were in touch. The chaotic nature of the Decembrist revolt did not allow the Poles time to join in, but their contacts were revealed. Constantine erupted. ‘Enraged at having been deceived, humiliated at not having uncovered plots which were hatching under his very eyes, he abandoned himself to the full fury of his nature,’ in the words of his son’s tutor, an old French émigré. ‘Swarms of spies’ were brought into play, ‘their denunciations were granted the weight of truth’ and the prisons filled up.8
Nicholas had put off for as long as he could his coronation as King of Poland, and when he came to Warsaw in April 1829, his visit was not a success. His coming had been anticipated with some optimism, as people hoped he would take matters in hand and sack the hated Novosiltsev, and on 28 May Benckendorff reported back to St Petersburg that the Poles loved their new king. But Nicholas feared and hated Poles, and could not hide it.9
He found the attitude of the Sejm insolent. Every speech he or his Polish subjects made seemed to raise uncomfortable questions from the bloody past dividing the two nations. There was also tension between Nicholas and Constantine, who felt that having left the imperial crown to his younger brother he should at least be allowed to rule Poland as he liked. He also felt that it was time that Alexander’s wish to join the former Polish western provinces of the Russian empire to the Congress Kingdom was put into effect. The units of the Russian army raised in those provinces were already under his command, bore Polish names and wore uniforms with Polish crimson in place of Russian red on their collars and cuffs, an anomaly Nicholas wished to reverse. In the light of the Spanish and Neapolitan revolutions, the Semeonovsky mutiny and the Decembrist revolt, one might have expected them to have taken note of what was going on inside those uniforms.10
Like his brothers, Constantine had been brought up in what was effectively a military camp, and he lived for the army, which he treated as a voluptuary might his mistress. Military expenditure engulfed more than half of the budget of the kingdom, and a high proportion of it went on uniforms, which he never ceased redesigning. He held almost daily parades, regardless of the weather, which suited neither uniforms nor men. Sadistic punishment for any minor infraction, such as a missing or less than brightly polished button, was an integral part of his philosophy, and corporal punishment was inflicted even on officers, leading some to commit suicide rather than submit to the ignominy.11
Constantine was horrified when he heard of the July revolution in Paris. ‘The comité directeur, whose existence has been so strenuously denied, has at last dropped its mask, as we can see from the fact that the insurgents had been given and from the very beginning knew their posts and the roles they were to play,’ he wrote to Nicholas, at the same time assuring him that there was no threat of trouble in Poland. ‘I guarantee that you can count on the army and the majority of the population,’ he wrote. Nicholas had already begun to mass troops so as to be in a position to march against France, and with the outbreak of revolution in Belgium he considered taking them to the aid of his brother-in-law King William of Holland.12
With the arrest of senior members of the Patriotic Society, the leadership was left in the hands of a small group of subalterns. They decided to rise and set a date in December, but with the police closing in, brought it forward to the night of 29 November. Like the Decembrists, they were under the illusion that once they rose up and waved the flag the nation would rally to their cause, and their enterprise was just as shambolic. The signal to begin was bungled, some of the conspirators lost their way, the group that was supposed to assassinate Constantine let him get away, some of the most capable Polish generals were murdered because they would not join the rebels, and the only outcome was that, with the raiding of the arsenal, an armed mob took over the streets.
‘All my measures of surveillance proved useless,’ a distraught Constantine wrote to his brother on 13 December. His trusted police network had showered him with information, most of it inaccurate, and while he had been aware that a conspiracy was afoot, he had been taken entirely by surprise. He complained that he was ‘barefoot’ and without clothes or cash, having had to flee his bedroom at night. Most of all, he was in despair at the fact that sixteen years of untiring work on his beloved army had gone to waste. He suggested withdrawing all Russian units from the kingdom and waiting for the Poles to sort things out, as he believed they would once they had let off some steam. As he predicted, senior figures in Poland quickly took control and reined in the revolutionaries, then sent an emissary to St Petersburg to negotiate an accommodation. But Nicholas demanded total submission before he would agree to speak to anyone. The issue divided Russian society into those, mainly young aristocrats, who supported the Poles, and those who thought it provided an excellent opportunity to crush them and stage a ‘massacre’ that would finally shut them up.13
The Russian empire was all but bankrupt, and to make matters worse, a virulent cholera epidemic had broken out. Dark rumours circulated as to its causes, and there were riots and attacks on hospitals. Nicholas had shown courage during one of these, driving into the crowd without an escort and telling the enraged populace to get to their knees and pray to God, which they did. Less easily put down was a mutiny in Novgorod, in which three generals and 160 officers and officials were massacred. In this instance Nicholas sent in troops to overpower the mutineers, 129 of whom died from the floggings he ordered. It was not a time to show hesitancy, and he ordered his troops into Poland.14
This came as a relief to his neighbours. With unrest in many parts of Germany, the last thing Prussia needed was revolution on its eastern frontier as well as on its western one. Frederick William also ruled over large Polish provinces, which might, if the Poles in the Congress Kingdom did manage to win their independence, wish to emulate them. The spirit of revolt appeared as contagious as the cholera relentlessly advancing towards Europe from the south and the east. ‘The striking resemblance of this evil and its operations to an epidemic is visible both in the infection by which it is propagated, as well as in the feverish nature of its movements,’ Bernstorff wrote to his king on 29 January 1831. Another Prussian official felt they were fighting ‘an outright cholera of the spirit’.15
Metternich welcomed the Polish rising; he had no doubt that it would be put down by Russia, and it would distract Nicholas and keep him from interfering elsewhere in Europe. He needed a free hand in Italy, where news of the July revolution had caused panic in ruling circles and unwelcome enthusiasm elsewhere. There were attempted risings in Piedmont and Modena, and more were expected by the doom-sayers. The sense of uncertainty only grew worse when, on 30 November, Pope Pius VIII died. The conclave to choose his successor opened on 14 December, and Metternich went into action, pressuring all the cardinals he knew in order to obtain the election of a pope who shared his views. The conservative Cardinal Cappellari was elected on 2 February 1831, taking the name of Gregory XVI, but before the news had even travelled through the peninsula, on 3 February, risings took place in Parma, Modena and in the Papal States themselves, at Bologna and in the Legations. After inept attempts to reassert its authority, Rome called on Austria for help, and Metternich sent in troops.16
While his police minister Sedlnitzky had gone grey in the course of a month, Metternich managed to keep his composure, and even his sense of humour, such as it was. After a day of browbeating ministers and ambassadors, like Jupiter Tonans (as one lady put it) he would be charming the ladies in some salon and making jokes. But he was disappointed in his hopes of recreating the concert of the great powers: Russia was bogged down in Poland, Prussia wavered, and Britain remained aloof.17
Wellington did not wish to be associated with the forces of reaction on the Continent, and rejected Metternich’s proposal for a conference, as he feared it would be seen as another Pillnitz (where the original coalition of Austria and Prussia issued their declaration against revolutionary France in 1791). Yet that summer and early autumn he, and many like him in Britain, felt that if the Belgian rising were not put down by the King of the Netherlands, subversive elements everywhere would be encouraged to ‘set Europe in a blaze’, and as Princess Lieven noted in a letter to her brother Aleksandr Benckendorff, ‘this rich, free, happy, and prosperous England is not by any means free from the dangerous contagion which disturbs Europe’.18
Although Wellington’s Tories had won the election in the summer of 1830, reform was in the air. Wellington had lost much of his erstwhile popularity as the hero of Waterloo, and his ministry was beleaguered by Radicals and Whigs who exploited the ill-feeling against the metropolitan police, established the previous summer. On 26 October they organised demonstrations at Covent Garden and Piccadilly under the slogan ‘No New Police!’, and two days later staged a confrontation at Hyde Park Corner. The Peelers, armed only with batons, managed to contain the mob.
At the opening of Parliament on 2 November, Wellington made it clear that there would be no parliamentary reform on his watch. Whigs and reformers expressed various degrees of shock and anger, while those lower down the social scale released all manner of grievance and pent-up rage. The Swing rioters were matched by urban mobs breaking windows, setting fires and breaking into houses in a week of sporadic violence. Wellington’s confidante Mrs Harriet Arbuthnot noted that the king was ‘very much frightened, the queen cries half the day with fright’, Radicals such as Francis Place rubbed their hands in the belief that such a demonstration of popular feeling would force the government’s hand, and Princess Lieven reported to her brother in St Petersburg that Britain was ‘on the brink of revolution’. Wellington deployed 7,000 troops around London, and drew up detailed instructions for the military defence of his residence Apsley House, specifying how many armed men should be posted at the windows of the Piccadilly drawing room, Lord Douro’s drawing room, the duchess’s bathroom and so on, and at what point they should open fire.19
Matters reached a climax on 9 November, when the king was due to attend a banquet given by the lord mayor at the Guildhall. The extreme Radicals had organised a demonstration. One poster read:
Liberty or Death! Britons!! And Honest Men!!!
The time has at last arrived. All London meets on Tuesday. We assure you from ocular demonstration that 6,000 cutlasses have been removed from the Tower for the use of Peel’s Bloody Gang. Remember the cursed speech from the Throne!! These damned Police are now to be armed.
Englishmen, will you put up with this?
Another called on people to look to France, and argued that ‘If a New Police be requisite, let it emanate from the People, and be under their entire controul [sic]’, like the French National Guard.20
The king was persuaded not to attend the banquet, and the demonstrators, robbed of their prey, moved off in the direction of the West End, bent on causing trouble. The Peelers met them in the Strand and dispersed them without bloodshed by the use of a newly devised tactic, the baton charge. But the troubles did not cease. The opposition made hay, and the government was defeated in Parliament on 15 November, leading to the formation of a Whig ministry under Earl Grey.21
Among those in favour of reform expectations reached a new pitch. Henry Hunt, who had been elected to Parliament, caused a stir by tabling a motion in favour of female suffrage. The number of disturbances as well as meetings of one kind or another rose dramatically. ‘The state of the country is dreadful,’ noted the diarist Charles Greville on 21 November; ‘every post brings fresh accounts of conflagrations, destruction of machinery, association of labourers, and compulsory rise of wages.’ He was convinced that the disturbances had nothing to do with poverty, but were inspired by the inflammatory speeches of Cobbett and his like, and particularly by news from abroad. The new home secretary, Lord Melbourne, took a more vigorous line than Peel with the Swing rioters, sending out senior military officers to the disturbed areas to take the situation in hand, but many still felt the country was sliding towards revolution.22
News of the revolution in Warsaw on 29 November, and of troubles in Piedmont, only darkened the picture. ‘I never remember times like these, nor read of such – the terror and lively expectation which prevail, and the way in which people’s minds are turned backwards and forwards from France to Ireland, then range excursively to Poland or Piedmont, and fix again on the burnings, riots, and executions here,’ Greville noted on 30 December. Colonel Sir William Napier thought a revolution ‘inevitable’, while the poet Robert Southey told Greville that if he could find the money he would take himself and his family off to America.23
‘I entertain no doubt that there exists a formidable conspiracy,’ Wellington wrote to the Earl of Malmesbury on 6 December. ‘But as yet I don’t believe that we have got a trace of it.’ He had been receiving reports of Irishmen in Paris preparing to raise the standard of revolt in the island. ‘I am inclined to think that the operations of the conspirators in this country are conducted by Englishmen,’ he wrote, but he felt that ‘the original focus is at Paris … I know that the Société Propagande at Paris had at its command very large means from subscriptions all over Europe, but particularly from the revolutionary bankers in France. A part of these means is, I think, now applied to the purpose of corrupting and disturbing this country.’ He even considered the possibility of a French invasion. The term ‘bankers’ had now joined ‘liberals’ in the canon reaching back to the Templars.24
Metternich felt that his theory of universal conspiracy was being fully vindicated. ‘There is not one event taking place these days whose origin and provenance cannot be easily identified, and the centre of the action can everywhere be traced,’ he almost crowed in October. ‘The revolution in Modena is no isolated event,’ he wrote in February 1831, ‘it is an episode of the vast conspiracy which embraces the whole of Italy; it is the signal for a conflagration which its authors would like to be universal. One could furnish a mass of proofs, but the simultaneous nature of the revolts which have just broken out in the Papal States renders all proofs unnecessary.’ He claimed that French agents were roaming Italy dispensing large sums of money. He was not seriously worried by the Italians themselves. ‘Italy is full of idlers and proletarians who make great expenditure of speech in cafés and other public places which are their habitual haunts,’ he explained to Esterházy in April. But, as he assured Apponyi, ‘there is nothing Italian about the measures which accompany the revolts: the form is entirely French; it is that prescribed by the comité directeur of Paris; it is that which was followed by the recent minor disturbances in Germany.’ All the reports he was receiving from those places in Italy where there had been disturbances were ‘unanimous in expressing the conviction that the whole revolution in Italy is nothing but the outcome of the work of the committees of Paris … agents of the comité directeur gave the signal for the rising’. ‘In every village which has risen, one or several Frenchmen are at the head of the movement,’ he affirmed, without a shred of supporting evidence. ‘The intensity of the workings of the sects in Europe is beyond belief,’ he wrote to Apponyi on 3 June, ‘but its effect would be negligible if the comité directeur of Paris were not there to activate and regulate the Revolution.’25
‘The most recent French revolution and the outbreaks bursting forth shortly thereafter at so many points make indubitable the truth previously simply suspected, which for years was evident to any thinking person, that the revolutionary movements of all lands arise from one focus and that this centre is in Paris,’ he affirmed. ‘The committee which directs those evidently strongly organised sects which seek to overthrow all legitimate monarchical constitutions scarcely bothers to hide its existence and its designs. Only its means and the agents which it uses are still a secret.’26
The only rising Metternich did not link to Paris was the Polish one, which he recognised as a specific case, essentially an inter-state war. The Polish Sejm had voted for the dethronement of Nicholas as King of Poland on the grounds that he had violated the constitution, and this dissolved Poland’s union with Russia. The Poles had won a succession of battles with the invading Russian army, and Diebitsch and other senior Russian commanders were growing discouraged; cholera was devastating his forces. But Nicholas was determined to punish what he saw only as ‘rebels’. The Polish leadership, headed by the eminently un-revolutionary Prince Czartoryski, knew they could not sustain the war indefinitely, and were desperate to negotiate a settlement. They attempted to engage the good offices of Austria and Britain, suggesting the creation of a neutral Polish state with an Austrian archduke or one of the late King George IV’s brothers on the throne. But neither Britain nor Austria wished to get involved. Prussia was vehemently opposed to the emergence of an independent Poland, which, it feared, would ultimately result in the loss of its own Polish provinces, but had to step cautiously as public opinion throughout Germany was enthusiastically pro-Polish.27
This posed problems for Metternich, who was continuing his preparations for war on France. He had reinforced the Austrian army with the aim of creating a combined force including Prussian and Russian contingents, to be commanded by the Austrian Archduke Charles, victor of Aspern in 1809. But the archduke refused. On 7 March 1831 he produced a memorandum arguing that Austria’s military and financial resources were inadequate for such a conflict, and that it would be a war against ideas, which, by definition, could not be won. He pointed out that left to its own devices, the French revolutionary spirit would burn itself out. Challenged, it would become dangerous. A victory over France would only plunge that country deeper into chaos, which would affect the allied armies operating against it, and inflame revolutionary tendencies in Germany, Poland and Italy. Metternich responded with the argument that they were engaged in a ‘life and death struggle’ against the forces of anarchy, and it was not admissible to stand idly by.28
Those forces of anarchy could in reality only be contained by Louis-Philippe, yet he was under siege from all sides. The republicans may have been slow to act in July 1830, but they were making up for lost time, meaning to take the revolution to what they saw as its logical conclusion. The same was true of others whose expectations had been raised, including many, both in the army and among the working classes, who felt the shame of 1815 should be wiped out by war against those who had inflicted it. Louis-Philippe had to repress the first and humour the second, and to reassure the great powers of his peaceful intentions, which they doubted. The revolution in Belgium only added to his troubles; it cried out for French military assistance. Every rising in Germany and Italy produced waves of sympathy in France and demands for armed intervention on its behalf. The rising in Poland, which had come to be seen in France as a sister victim of 1815, brought people out into the streets demanding immediate armed action on its behalf. Louis-Philippe had to navigate a tortuous course between loud statements of sympathy for Poland and quiet assurances to the powers.
In December 1830 he was nearly toppled by an attempted revolution concerted by the Société des Amis du Peuple, but while he managed to weather this crisis, there was continuing instability. ‘Still the same madness,’ Count Rodolphe Apponyi, cousin of the Austrian ambassador in Paris, noted in his diary in February 1831. ‘There’s dancing in the drawing rooms, fighting in the streets, the revolution is in full swing; everything seems to be falling apart, we are on a volcano, which rumbles and threatens, the new monarchy is shaken, as is the government, down to its very foundations.’29
The Emperor Francis would later admit that the only reason he had not gone to war with France in 1830 was that Austria could not afford to. There was a good deal of truth in this, and it permitted the much-maligned bankers to take a salutary hand in the proceedings. The five Rothschild brothers, and particularly James in Paris and Salomon in Vienna, had lent most of the governments of Europe, and particularly those of Austria and France, large sums of money in return for government bonds. James Rothschild let it be known that were war to be declared against France, the French bonds would go down from their current low of 73 per cent to under 45 per cent. Austrian and Prussian bonds would also fall in value, with attendant loss to all those who had invested in them. Louis-Philippe, who was a heavily invested businessman, did not need to be reminded of this, and nor did his ministers Lafitte and Casimir Perrier, both of them bankers. Metternich had close links with the Rothschilds, who had resolved many difficulties for him in the past and who now arranged for his mother-in-law’s 400,000-franc debt to be written off. Gentz had an even closer connection to the banking brothers, and had received substantial rewards from them. He tried to persuade Metternich to go along with a planned conference on mutual disarmament suggested by Louis-Philippe and supported by the Rothschilds.30
The other place where the foundations of government were being shaken was Britain, where the prominent Whig Lord John Russell had introduced his Reform Bill on 1 March. This was anything but revolutionary: it would abolish a number of rotten boroughs and the more shocking electoral anomalies (one Member of Parliament represented Old Sarum, a field with a ring in it, while two were returned for Dunwich in Suffolk, most of which had long ago fallen into the North Sea) and enlarge the electorate by just over half. The Bill passed its second reading, by one vote, but a month later it was defeated by a spoiling motion. There was rioting in London and other cities. The Whig prime minister Earl Grey persuaded the king to grant a dissolution of Parliament at the end of April. The subsequent elections gave the Whigs an overwhelming majority, and the Bill was introduced once more. Grey warned that unless the enemies of reform did not back down, ‘there will ensue troubles such as the world has never yet seen, and will in the end submerge everything’. By the end of May, Wellington believed that ‘we are on the eve of a great revolution, or rather that we are already in a state of revolution’. He had convinced himself that the changes proposed by the Bill would fundamentally undermine the whole fabric of British society. ‘I don’t in general take a gloomy view of things,’ he wrote to Lord Melville a few days later, ‘but I confess that, knowing all that I do, I cannot see what is to save Church, or property or colonies, or union with Ireland, or eventually monarchy, if the Reform Bill passes.’31
His fears were echoed by, amongst others, Nesselrode, who admitted in a letter to Princess Lieven that the Bill, a copy of which she had sent him, had ‘inspired a real terror’ in him. ‘To entirely suppress the rotten boroughs would be to overthrow the government, and if the project were to pass, I will take my leave of England,’ he wrote. The princess herself was appalled by the way the issue of Belgium was addressed in the King’s Speech at the opening of Parliament in June 1831, which referred to ‘the right of the people of Belgium to regulate their own internal affairs, and to establish their Government according to their own view of what may be most conducive to their future welfare and independence’. A conference had been convened in London to resolve the Belgian crisis and, reluctantly in the case of Austria and Russia, the powers had agreed that the country should become a neutral, independent kingdom, with Leopold of Saxe-Coburg as, significantly, King of the Belgians. The notion that a people should be allowed to secede and choose their own king was ‘most unseemly’ to someone who believed in the Russian empire, and it was fraught with danger, since it posed the question: if Belgium, why not Poland? It also spelled the end of any possible concert between the autocratic powers and the liberal ones. Princess Lieven warned Nesselrode that if the tsar were to support the King of Holland against the Belgians, it would drive the two liberal powers Britain and France into each other’s arms, with the result that the whole of Europe would be revolutionised.32
Revolution did not break out in Britain, and for all its reformist zeal the government applied the necessary measures to suppress the disturbances. In June, militant miners at Merthyr Tydfil in Wales were dispersed by troops. The courts imposed savage sentences against the Swing rioters who had been apprehended: of 1,976 tried in thirty-four counties, 252 were sentenced to death (in the end only nineteen were executed), and the others were transported, sent to prison, fined or bound over. The superintendent of convicts who visited those about to be transported before they sailed said that he ‘never saw a finer set of men’, and noted that they had been motivated by outrage at injustice rather than by any revolutionary instincts.33
On the night of 6–7 July 1831 Russell’s second Bill passed in the Commons by 136 votes, but this only served to stiffen the resolve of diehard Tories, who raised the spectre of a grand conspiracy embracing France, Belgium, Poland, Italy and Germany as well as Britain. Wellington did not make much of the reports received by the Home Office that there were ‘2000 French soldiers with officers about the town, that certain of them were seen standing at the corners of streets with maps in their hands, as if they were getting a knowledge of the town’, and thought that perhaps the presence of a few tourists had given rise to them. He was putting on a brave face, boasting that he could put down a revolution with a single regiment, but in the event the Metropolitan Police had contained and dispersed many meetings without provoking the sort of rage that the appearance of troops was wont to do. On 15 October the home secretary, Lord Melbourne, introduced the Special Constables Act, which permitted the rapid enlistment of large numbers of these officers, and the very knowledge that ‘specials’ were being enlisted made the organisers cancel more than one meeting.34
When the Reform Bill came before the Lords on 7 October, it was thrown out by a majority of forty-one. This prompted a rash of rioting in London, Manchester, Derby, Nottingham – where the Duke of Newcastle’s castle was burned – and other cities. Magistrates and Tories were insulted and assaulted in the street, and churchmen, particularly bishops, pelted with mud and stones – twenty-one of the twenty-three bishops in the Lords had voted against the Bill. Houses of known opponents of reform were sacked, and factories torched. In Bristol the rioting lasted three days, in the course of which the Mansion House, the Bishop’s Palace, the Custom House, three prisons and countless other buildings were burned to the ground. Possibly as many as four hundred people lost their lives. Lord Melbourne was, in his own words, ‘frightened to death’. The rejection of the Bill had altered the mood of large sections of the population, and the hitherto stalwart support for the monarchy as the basis of British national life was beginning to fray. King William IV’s popularity waned, and republicans felt emboldened enough to question the point of keeping ‘Fat Billy’ at all, while there were plenty of voices raised in favour of doing away with the aristocracy.35
Wellington was by now convinced, as he put it in a letter to the Bishop of Exeter on 5 November, that there were ‘strong indications of an expectation, if not of an actual plan, of insurrection against property among the lowest orders’. That Guy Fawkes Night, the effigies burned were not those of the Catholic plotter, but of the hero of Waterloo and assorted bishops. Tory landowners began to fortify their houses and arm their retainers, and the Duke of Rutland installed cannon at Belvoir Castle to repel the putative revolutionary mob. A casualty of all this alarm was John Henry North MP, whose epitaph in a Harrow church informs that he died, aged forty-four, as a result of ‘a mind too great for his earthly frame in opposing the Revolutionary Invasion of the Religion and Constitution of England’.36