The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  Such an approach offers a comprehensive interpretation, even if it totters on the verge of a Whiggish type of social inevitability. Nevertheless, it does not explain the occurrence of reform, merely the background to it. Reform could only come when those excluded from the regime joined together to achieve it, as they did between 1830 and 1832. Correspondingly, reform could only come when one at least of the two great parties in the state was convinced both of its necessity and of its urgency. Reform could also only come when the obstacles to its passing had weakened to such an extent that they could be removed, but the story of their removal is significant indeed.

  Common to both these interpretations is the assumption that the old order was destroyed in 1832 – something which would have astonished those who framed the Reform Act, who were determined to save as much as they could of the old electoral (to say nothing of the political) structure more generally. Indeed, almost all historians who have investigated these issues have reported that continuity rather than change was the intention of the men who had to wrestle with the Reform Crisis. To what extent this was indeed the case will be considered later in this chapter.

  For the moment, however, it is enough to notice that during the 1820s the old order seemed alive and well. The later years of Lord Liverpool’s administration represented an Indian summer of the old regime, a continuation of an aristocratic, propertied style of government and one based upon political consensus around which patriotic men could rally. This was a Tory government dedicated to the preservation of the constitution, the maintenance of the Union, the defence of the social hierarchy and the protection of property. It exploited and defended the existing political structure but it was also committed to its administrative reform.

  There is no clear dividing line in the history of Lord Liverpool’s administration, no general dawning of a policy of ‘Liberal-Toryism’, as historians once believed. Canning resigned in December 1820 at the start of the reign of George IV, a deed which left Castlereagh secure in the posts of Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons. His suicide in August 1822 enabled Liverpool to appoint Canning to both posts and made possible an extensive ministerial reshuffle. By early 1823 Huskisson had become president of the Board of Trade and Robinson had replaced Vansittart as Chancellor of the Exchequer.4 These changes, however, did not mark a new ‘Liberal-Tory’ economic policy. The new ministers had already been developing their own ‘liberal’ ideas of reform and efficiency outside the cabinet and the prosperity of the early 1820s was a suitable time in which to implement them. Most recent writers, notably J. E. Cookson and Boyd Hilton have emphasized the essential continuity, not change, in the economic policies of the Liverpool government, suggesting that the idea of ‘Liberal-Toryism’ was imposed retrospectively by historians, and, it should not be forgotten, by Liverpool, Huskisson and Robinson themselves when defending their policies.5 It was the economic prosperity of the 1820s which marked the difference from the earlier decade, not any serious shift in policy. By the mid-1820, free trade was regarded not merely as an economic strategy but as a force for moral advantage. Huskisson, in particular, caught the mood of optimism in stripping away many obstacles to internal trade within the British Empire. He removed countless duties, relaxed the Navigation Laws and reduced taxes. Increases in trade generated more income and enabled budgetary and banking reforms to proceed. Ever since the Corn Law of 1815 the government had remained wedded to a policy of agricultural protection but it was difficult to justify giving preference to any one sector. Ministers argued that agriculture would benefit from general prosperity and a rapid expansion in trade. Following the Corn Law of 1815, therefore, the protection of agriculture remained a high government priority. Prices and production settled down, but a further collapse in prices during a renewed agricultural depression triggered further government action. In 1822, when the price had slipped to as little as 40s. a quarter, the government imposed a sliding scale starting at 80s.

  The government pursued a policy of prudent finance, but in economic terms it was far from reactionary. It had already committed itself to a policy of free trade and commercial expansion in 1819, based upon tariff reductions and sound money. This it proceeded to implement pragmatically and cautiously. In 1820 Liverpool celebrated the policy as an attempt to unite the agricultural, manufacturing and commercial interests. While it stood for the protection of agriculture, the government was also determined to permit industry to prosper and expand by lowering taxes and customs duties and by ending the Navigation Laws. Liverpool thus saw government as an honest broker, aloof from contending interests but acting as an impartial, conciliating agency between them. In the general prosperity of the mid-1820s, the government agreed to repeal the Combination Laws, arguing that trades unions, trade associations and reform societies had created the dangerous domestic agitations of the 1790s and that in the present more benign economic climate not only was government repression unnecessary but also that strikes and sedition were irrelevant. However, the repeal of the acts in 1824–5 was followed by a wave of strikes and the government had to enact a further bill in 1825 imposing penalties for intimidation. The Whigs, by comparison, were lagging behind public opinion. While the government was attempting to impress influential groups with its free trade economic policies, Whigs could scarcely see beyond cooperation with the agricultural lobby.

  Even if there was no new ‘Liberal-Tory’ policy in the 1820s, ominous divisions existed within the government of Lord Liverpool. Men like the Duke of Wellington, who had been a cabinet minister since 1818, deplored Canning’s liberal foreign policy, especially his refusal to send troops to defend the king of Portugal from his subjects in the summer of 1823. More serious were the tensions produced by the growing support of Lord Grenville and his friends, Huskisson and, not least, Canning, for Catholic claims in Ireland. Wellington and Peel were horrified. The last four years of the Liverpool government thus witnessed a cabinet divided between the Tory Ultras, Wellington, Bathurst, Eldon and Westmorland, on the one hand, and those adopting more progressive diplomatic and religious policies, Liverpool, Canning, Robinson and Huskisson on the other. These were not merely theoretical differences; on some occasions they could be extremely damaging. The government’s response to the distress in the manufacturing districts which followed the financial crisis of 1825 was to claim the right to admit foreign corn as it thought necessary during the parliamentary recess. Moreover, it allowed corn stored in bonded warehouses on to the market at the extremely low price of 10s. a quarter. These decisions diverted the demand for the repeal of the Corn Laws, but the agricultural lobby was horrified. As a consequence, the government had to rely upon opposition votes to get its way.

  The fragile unity of the Tory Party could not survive the paralytic stroke which caused Lord Liverpool’s retirement in February 1827. The departure of a long-serving prime minister frequently ushered in a period of political confusion. On this occasion, the confusion was to be particularly intense. Liverpool’s reputation in recent years had improved, and deservedly so. His tactical skills and personal arts had done much to maintain confidence in moderate government, pledged to defend traditional institutions while facilitating economic development. Nevertheless, his undoubted political skills had simply postponed, not settled, a number of vital issues, including Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform and the question of a Corn Bill. These in the end were to destroy his Tory successors.

  Canning, the clear choice of the cabinet (except Peel), became prime minister. Canning enjoyed the backing of the majority of his party in the Commons, but Wellington, Peel, Eldon and four other members of the old cabinet resigned. Furthermore, no fewer than thirty-five resignations occurred among the minor office-holders, many of them Ultras. They were afraid that Canning would bring in Catholic emancipation even though he denied that he had any intention of doing so. Furthermore, four Whigs, including Tierney and Lansdowne, who had accepted places in the government, promised not to raise the issue. The formation of
Canning’s ministry advertised the serious divisions within the Tory Party. In particular it demonstrated the numerical strength and the passionate sincerity of the Ultras in the Tory Party, those who stood out against concessions either to Protestant Dissenters, Catholics, parliamentary reformers or free traders. Their resignations somewhat ominously implied that their fears for the Protestant constitution were stronger than their loyalty to the monarch and the minister of the monarch’s choice.

  The unexpected death of Canning in August 1827 threw everything into confusion. His successor, Lord Goderich, was too weak either to deal with the king – he accepted George IV’s nomination of Herries as Chancellor of the Exchequer – or to settle divisions within his cabinet. An issue of confidence soon arose when Herries quarrelled with Huskisson over the appointment of the Whig, Lord Althorp, to the chairmanship of a parliamentary finance committee. Huskisson refused to give up Althorp but Goderich was determined to stand by Huskisson. Certain to be weakened by the loss either of Herries or of Huskisson, Goderich chose to resign in January 1828.

  In this situation the king, who still refused to forgive Wellington and Peel for what he considered their desertion in 1827 and which had paved the way for Canning’s government, now was forced to turn to Wellington, who proceeded to attempt to reunite the fractured elements of the Tory Party. He was actually Commander-in-Chief of the forces during the early days of his government and it took the united decision of his cabinet colleagues to make him relinquish the post. Nevertheless, Wellington had a number of advantages. The victor of Waterloo was still a national hero and a symbol of unity. Not least, he could be relied upon to hold the Protestant line against Catholic emancipation. In early 1827, on the death of the heir to the throne, the Duke of York, Wellington, assumed the mantle of the champion of the ‘Protestants’. The Duke of York had been a fervent anti-Catholic and his successor, William, Duke of Clarence, was more moderate in his opinions. Those fearful of Catholic emancipation now looked to Wellington to protect them from ‘Catholics’. Furthermore, Wellington had considerable political and diplomatic experience, having been a member of Liverpool’s cabinet between 1818 and 1827. In constructing his cabinet he retained Huskisson and some of the Canningites, while Peel trooped back into office. Although Wellington was desperately trying to balance his cabinet, his political instincts were the very opposite of Lord Liverpool’s. He was not by nature a conciliator. He had a ‘social contempt for his intellectual equals, and an intellectual contempt for his social equals’.6 Indifferent to the feelings of his political subordinates and ignorant of the sensitivities of public opinion, he was not the man to heal the wounds in the Tory Party.

  It did not take long for the divisions in the government to show themselves. Although the government had a two to one majority in the Commons, it enjoyed only a limited political base. Wellington angrily reported after the first cabinet meeting of his government: ‘I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.’7 With such an attitude, he was unlikely to reconcile the different groups within his own party. The Huskissonites wanted to demonstrate their liberal credentials by disfranchising the two constituencies most evidently guilty of electoral corruption at the general election of 1826, the boroughs of East Retford and Penryn, and transfer their seats to Birmingham and Manchester. In May 1828, however, Peel proposed to transfer the representation of East Retford to the neighbouring hundred of Bassetlaw, where the Ultra–Tory Duke of Newcastle would be able to dominate it. Huskisson voted against Peel and thereupon resigned from the government, taking his followers with him.

  Yet the history of the Wellington government deserves a better reputation than its divisions, and its later collapse, have normally earned. It weathered yet another Corn Law crisis and effected some useful home office reforms. In 1828 a new Corn Bill excluded foreign wheat until the domestic price was 73s. For a time this settled the bitter dispute both inside and outside the ranks of the Tory Party between the free traders and the agricultural protectionists. Whilst maintaining protection, it was a modest retreat from the high protective tariff of 1815. At the same time, Wellington’s government enacted a steady stream of home office reforms which went back to the early 1820s. Peel had himself got rid of dozens of trivial offences which had carried the death penalty while he was home secretary under Liverpool (1822–7). Back in office as Home Secretary under Wellington, his Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 established a police force for the capital. Although similar forces were not established for provincial towns until after the Reform Act of 1832, the model was now in place and the precedent had been created.

  But well-meaning and well-prepared home office reforms, while adding to the reputation of Peel and that of Wellington’s government, were not likely to relieve it of its most acute embarrassments, arising from religion and reform. In February 1828 Lord John Russell8 introduced a bill for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. He was supported by a powerful Nonconformist pressure group, the United Committee (of Baptists, Congregationalists and Unitarians) and by the militant Protestant Society. The Protestant Dissenters, fully conscious of their wealth, influence and rising social prestige, were no longer prepared to tolerate the insulting symbols of Anglican supremacy. It was not enough for Anglicans to argue that the Indemnity Acts protected them from the full force of the legislation. The Dissenters were prominent citizens, loyal, successful and in some cases, eminent. (In the previous decade three lord mayors of London had been Dissenters.) At first, Peel and Wellington resisted the bill, but it clearly had the support of the Commons, where it passed its crucial division on 26 February by 237 to 193. They tried to compromise but in the end were compelled to give way.

  Russell was overjoyed that the Tories, the great defenders of the confessional state, had surrendered so meekly the first of their two great principles, ‘that none but Churchmen are worthy to serve the State’, and he looked forward to the surrender of the second, ‘that none but Protestants are’. He added, significantly in famous words, ‘Peel is a very pretty hand at hauling down his colours.’ So, of course, was Wellington who had found himself in a minority in his own cabinet. As the Annual Register put it, repeal was ‘the first successful blow that had aimed at the supremacy of the Established Church since the Revolution’. It is significant that even the government of the Duke of Wellington put up so little resistance. Ministers realized that it would not have been in their interests to have totally alienated one of the richest, most numerous and most influential groups in British society. Parliament was ready to pass repeal and public opinion was decisively in favour. Even more surprising, and of much more significance, was the supine acceptance of repeal by the leaders of the Anglican church. Not a single bishop voted against repeal. Now that the church had become partially complicit in the dismantling of the confessional state – according to Wellington the repeal legislation could have been stopped in the House of Lords but the bishops were against doing so – it would be very much more difficult in the future to resist the claims of the Catholics. The reluctance of the church to defend itself seriously drained the enthusiasm of the laity to leap to its defence. What sort of confessional state was it whose clergy, at the crucial moment, surrendered without a fight on a cardinal point of both principle and practice? True, repeal had passed on the understanding that it did not imply an open door to Catholic emancipation but much would depend on events.9 Ominously, indeed, there was a majority of six on an emancipation vote in the Commons in May 1828. Repeal did not lead directly to emancipation, but politically it made it much more likely.

  Emancipation was a much more complex and, in many ways a more difficult issue than repeal. Privately, Liverpool believed that emancipation would come in time but he treated it as an ‘open’ question in his cabinet. After all, two governments had fallen – in 1801 and 1807 – on the issue. George Ill’s veto on emancipation was continued by his successor, and royal intransigence on the issue was strongly supported by public opinion in England and Scotland. In fa
ct, fear of Catholicism was not as virulent in many quarters as it had been in earlier decades. Catholics and Protestants had formed a common front during the war against France after 1793. Thereafter, Catholics could not by any stretch of the imagination be treated as a subversive force. After the Relief Act of 1791 there was no demand on their part for further concessions until 1808. They accepted quite placidly their status as one of a number of churches peacefully coexisting outside the framework of the Anglican establishment. Popular prejudices could be whipped up against them, but the old antagonisms were in general cooling. Natural prejudice against Irish immigrants into some of the manufacturing towns of the north-west could not be ignored, but they remained as yet only a small proportion of a Catholic community which numbered no more than 250,000 in the early nineteenth century.

  It was to be one of the most important developments in the unfolding of Catholic emancipation that in the years after 1807 parliamentary opinion began to change, and change decisively. On the occasional motions moved by Irish members or radicals the majority against emancipation steadily diminished. An emancipation motion had passed the Commons as early as 1813, failing to clear the Lords by only one vote; another motion in 1819 failed there by only two votes. In 1821 there was a majority, albeit only of six, in the Commons for emancipation. This bill had to be defeated in the Lords. A similar fate met a motion moved by Burdett in 1825 though this time by a majority of 17. A permanent, if tiny, majority for emancipation now existed in the Commons. After 1812 emancipation motions were usually opposed by under 250 MPs, less than 40 per cent of the House, and of those only 170 MPs were determinedly and persistently opposed to it. Although there was a small majority against emancipation in the upper house, the Lords could not for ever defy the will of the elected lower house. Even Wellington had been prepared to consider relief for Catholics in 1825.