The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  When emancipation came, however, it was as a result of events in Ireland. Since Union the island had been deceptively peaceful. The Catholic bishops had accepted Union on condition that Catholics should be allowed to become MPs. Pitt’s inability to carry the point rankled with Catholic opinion but for the moment did not embarrass the British government, which was intent on making a reality of Union. The act of 1800 provided for the tightly drawn incorporation of Ireland with England. Where possible, any duplication of institutions was to be eliminated. On this basis the two Exchequers were united in 1816. Moreover, Ireland was drawn more closely under the administrative control of Dublin Castle. In 1814 special police powers for disturbed areas were given to the Lord Lieutenant. In 1822 a Constabulary Act established a chief constable in each locality, supported by local constables appointed by local magistrates. Beneath the surface, however, the grounds for discontent in Ireland had not disappeared. The detested Protestant Ascendancy remained securely in power. Furthermore, serious famine conditions – the result not of shortage but of the export of grain to England and consequent high prices in Ireland – caused immense suffering in 1817 and again in 1821–2. The old problems of agricultural backwardness, short tenures, overpopulation and a land shortage resulted in poverty, insecurity and lawlessness. It seemed that Ireland had gained nothing from Union. Against this background, in 1823 Daniel O’Connell10 launched the Catholic Association, a moderate, middle-class body, dedicated to the repeal of all discriminatory legislation against Catholics and committed to the repeal of the Act of Union. The Catholic Association caught the mood of Catholic Ireland. The combination of religious and nationalist resentment was irresistible. Supported by the Catholic Church and by the people’s 1d. a month (the ‘Catholic rent’), the movement rapidly grew in size and confidence. Its suppression in 1825 only worsened the situation. By 1828 Ireland was lapsing into anarchy. Widespread violence, the destruction of property, the spread of secret societies and the breakdown of law and order suggested that the country was drifting into a state of civil war.

  At this point British domestic politics intersected dramatically with the gathering crisis in Ireland. It is clear that the Act of Union had drawn the affairs of Ireland dangerously close to the centre of British politics. British and Irish politics became fatally intertwined when the resignation of the Canningites from Wellington’s government in May 1828 caused by-elections in the constituencies of their replacements, one of them an Irish county seat at Clare. O’Connell, who had held back from confrontation, hoping for concessions from Canning and his friends, now concluded that he could hope for nothing from Wellington. He contested and won the Clare by-election. As a Catholic he would not be able to take his seat; but if he were not allowed to do so, Ireland might descend into civil disorder. Had Wellington’s government tried to hold Ireland by military force, it is doubtful if a House of Commons which had already consistently revealed a majority, however slight, for emancipation, would have supported it. The only obvious political alternative was to dissolve Parliament. But another general election would simply inflame Catholic and thus Protestant feeling and, almost certainly, lead to the return of more Catholics in Irish seats. Wellington now saw that the national interest demanded the huge concession of Catholic emancipation if civil war were not to consume Ireland.11 Peel’s decision not only to accept emancipation but also to pilot the measure through Parliament was equally decisive. In March–April 1829 he rushed emancipation bills through both Houses. The government’s arguments were irresistible. To try to maintain discrimination against Catholics on the business of 140 years ago would plunge the nation into civil war now. To make timely concessions would pave the way for the peaceful incorporation of the mass of Roman Catholics into the state. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 enabled Catholics to hold offices (with the exception of some minor offices close to the throne) and to take their seats in Parliament. In a desperate attempt to dilute O’Connell’s electoral base, the act altered the county franchise in Ireland from the 40s. freeholder, as in the English counties, to the £10 householder. Nevertheless, the meaning of Catholic emancipation was clear. Catholics were to be full members of the political nation.

  Catholic emancipation was greeted with horror by much of the Protestant population of Britain. Emancipation was presented as a betrayal of the people and as a violation of the proud ancestry of Protestant Britons. It was not just Anglicans but the mass of Protestant Dissenters, including many Methodists, who were appalled. The prejudices of the humble and uneducated were whipped up. Angry Protestants in Ireland as well as England flocked into the Brunswick clubs, which had begun to form in the summer of 1828 and which numbered around 200 at their height, and the Orange lodges, at least 300 of which were organized in England alone. Between 2,000 and 3,000 petitions were presented to Parliament in 1828–9 from such organizations, protesting against a policy of emancipation, some of them signed by over 20,000 people. As in 1828, however, resistance to a religious reform measure was not sufficiently well organized to impose itself upon a course of political events which had their own logic. Furthermore, this outpouring of anti-Catholic opinion remained peaceful. Although hundreds of thousands of people reacted against emancipation with fury, on this occasion there was no violence, no mobbing and no Gordon Riots. The confessional state had been dismantled without a civil war.

  The bitterness within the Tory Party generated by emancipation was extraordinary. Most of the 202 MPs and 118 peers who voted against emancipation were Tories. Having lost the Huskissonites, Wellington now lost the Protestants or ‘Ultras’. The Ultras threatened to transform the broad and inclusive Toryism of Liverpool, Peel and Canning into a narrow, well-financed and well-organized reactionary body. The crises of 1828 and 1829 had given birth to nothing less than a party within a party. It was an extremely powerful force, including most Tory peers, a growing number of Tory MPs, the press, the Brunswick clubs and the Orange lodges, together with powerful support at court. In Parliament, there was a core of about 40 Ultras in the Commons, capable of calling on a further 30–40. They were led publicly by Sir Edward Knatchbull but behind the scenes by Sir Richard Vyvyan. They simmered with resentment that they had been defeated on such a vital issue. They had been betrayed by their own party and by two of its staunchest ‘Protestants’, Wellington and Peel, and in the teeth of public opinion.12 Even worse, many of them found it difficult to stomach the argument repeated during the 1829 debates, that the Anglican church shared many fundamental doctrines with the Roman church and that it stood closer to Rome than it did to the Dissenters. To understand the passions and resentments generated in 1829, we need to remember that emancipation was not merely a matter of religious toleration but a grave political issue involving Ireland and the future of the Union. Some of the ‘Ultras’ even feared that emancipation might be the prelude to attacks upon Protestant property in Ireland.

  The passage of Catholic emancipation had important consequences for the reform of Parliament. Although there was no immediate demand for parliamentary reform in the country, the issue leapt to the top of the political agenda. It could no longer be evaded or postponed on the grounds that emancipation had first to be settled. Within a year political unions were springing up in many parts of the country which emulated many of the organizational features of the Catholic Association. Reformers had noted, too, that the changes to the Irish electorate contained in the Emancipation Act undermined the basis of one of the most compelling arguments against reform: that a traditional propertied electoral system should never be tampered with. Furthermore, the traditional bulwarks against reform, the House of Lords and the monarchy, suddenly looked much less insurmountable. In short, Catholic emancipation was a triumph of organization, a precedent for reformers and a political breakthrough of the first order. Ironically, it also attracted a certain amount of Ultra support. On the argument that a parliamentary system that fairly represented public opinion could not have passed emancipation, some of the Ultras now dropped
their previous hostility and proved to be adamant supporters of parliamentary reform between 1830 and 1832.13

  After the passage of emancipation the government staggered on for a further year. By now it had alienated both the liberal wing of the Tory Party, the Canningites, and the reactionary wing, the Ultras. Indeed, its prosecution of the extreme Protestant newspaper, the Morning Journal, for its libellous attacks on ministers worsened the rift with the Ultras. The government, on the other hand, failed to impress liberals, Whigs and reformers with the East Retford Bill, which transferred the seats of the notoriously corrupt Nottinghamshire borough into the neighbouring hundreds rather than to Birmingham. Peel had to work hard to drive it through the cabinet and through the Lords. To make matters worse, the government’s position was weakened by the economic depression which spread over both rural and urban areas of the country alike from late 1829. Wellington lacked a strategy and seemed to be waiting on events. Sensing the growing paralysis in the Tory Party, the Whigs began to revive their commitment to reform. In February 1830 Lord John Russell moved a motion to enfranchise Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester. He lost, but by the very respectable division figures of 188 to 140. In the dying months of the Wellington administration a number of reform motions were moved by Russell and O’Connell but most of them were voted down by large majorities. As yet the extra-parliamentary agitation was as yet too weak to influence votes in the Commons. Within a year that position no longer applied.

  To complicate a complex political situation even more, in June 1830 George IV died. At once the longstanding royal veto against taking in the Whigs as a party disappeared; in particular, George IV’s detestation of Grey, and his refusal to have any dealings with him since 1827, would no longer be a barrier to the formation of a Whig government. His successor, William IV, was an elderly man without much political passion. If anything, he had Whiggish tendencies, and he had supported Catholic emancipation. At the general election which legally had to follow a monarch’s death, moreover, public opinion – especially among the middling classes – was clearly sympathetic to parliamentary reform. In those constituencies where opinion could make itself felt in the summer of 1830 it was clear that the government was bitterly unpopular. More ominously, reform candidates were speaking a language of bitter class resentment not only against aristocratic influence in elections but against landed power in general. Interestingly, Ultras friendly to parliamentary reform were in evidence, but they were thin on the ground at these elections. It was not sections of the landed interest which were prompting reform; it was dissatisfaction with the landed interest which was proposing it.

  As a result of the election, the Whigs increased their strength by 25 to 30 seats.14 It is notoriously difficult to estimate the extent to which the French Revolution of 1830 affected the outcome. Far more serious was the effect on reforming opinion by Wellington’s extraordinary speech in the Lords on 2 December 1830, which claimed not only that reform was unnecessary but also that it would never be forthcoming while his government remained in power. The speech roused both Whigs and radicals in the Commons and alienated the Ultras as well. Wellington’s motives in delivering such a massive rebuff to reforming hopes at the beginning of a new Parliament have never been satisfactorily explained. Perhaps, with characteristic vigour and frankness, he was simply making a response to Lord Grey’s speech, which had urged the ministers to introduce a moderate measure of parliamentary reform. But it was the consequences rather than the motives of his speech which give it such high historical significance. On 15 November, on a motion for a select committee to investigate the Civil List accounts, the ministry was defeated by 233 to 204. Of the 17 new county members who voted, only two supported Wellington. The English county members as a group voted 47 to 15 against him. The Ultras, indeed, voted 33 to 8 against their own government. For Wellington, who had now lost both wings of his party, there was little alternative to resignation. Several of the outgoing cabinet ministers, but not Wellington, advised William IV that some measures of parliamentary reform were now inevitable. On that basis, William IV invited the Whigs to form a government.

  THE PASSAGE OF REFORM, 1830–1832

  The Whigs had come to power, but rather through the self-destruction of the Wellington ministry than through any exertions of their own. Indeed, their prime asset was the fact that they were the only realistic alternative to Wellington. It was not their parliamentary strength nor their ideological radicalism that commended them to the public in November 1830, but the universal unpopularity of the Tory Party. In this sense the political changes of November 1830 were not a victory for party. Indeed, the government formed by Grey was not exclusively a party ministry, its cabinet containing as it did four Canningites and one Ultra-Tory.

  The Whig Party had been less than zealous in its support of parliamentary reform in recent years. By this time, the Whig opposition consisted largely of its old Foxites and their heirs and some moderate reformers, most of the old Grenvillites having seceded in 1817. In these years Grey had preferred to maintain the unity of the party by avoiding speculative commitments to reform so that it could retain its credibility as a future party of government, leave itself free to keep up its attack on the corrupt court system and, not least, to defend the liberties of the subject whenever threatened. Occasionally there were signs of some enthusiasm for reform. In 1822 Russell moved to disfranchise 100 rotten boroughs and transfer their representation to the counties and unenfranchised towns. Russell lost, but by the respectable margin of 269–164. However, his subsequent motions did not fare so well. In 1824 and 1825 he moved none at all. In 1826 he was defeated by 247 to 124. After that not a single parliamentary reform petition was presented to the House of Commons until 1829. Even now, in late 1830, the impetus to parliamentary reform was coming from out of doors, not from the Whig Party. Furthermore, the Whigs had never systematically enlarged upon the old reform schemes of the 1790s, which included a householder franchise, an attack on the rotten boroughs and triennial Parliaments. Because Grey did not believe that parliamentary reform would come in his lifetime, he had no prepared programme of reform in 1830. Indeed, while Grey was slowly coming round to the view that parliamentary reform would have to be conceded, it is possible that had Wellington brought a plan of reform forward he might have supported it. The idea that the ‘liberal’ Lord Grey overthrew the ‘reactionary’ Duke of Wellington on the issue of parliamentary reform is seriously flawed. Wellington, like Grey, was slowly reaching the conclusion that the problems facing the country after Catholic emancipation demanded solutions that might well include the reform of Parliament.

  The party that Grey took into government was not distinguished by its unity. In 1827, indeed, four of its leaders had served in the Canning and Goderich cabinets. Nevertheless they continued to regard themselves as Whigs. Whilst in office they continued to receive the Whig whip; they were never absorbed into the ranks of the government and they returned to the opposition benches in January 1828. Yet even in late 1830 the party was not united on parliamentary reform. Durham and Brougham stood on the radical wing, Holland and Lansdowne in an older, Foxite tradition.15 Grey and Russell would have an unenviable task in keeping the party united. It says something for the uncertainty of Grey’s position in late 1830 that he felt it necessary to find junior offices for a handful of Tories. Yet this was to be emphatically a Whig administration, with Whig leaders in both Houses and with the vast majority of office-holders toeing the Whig Party line. Whether it would prove to be strong enough to surmount the obstacles standing in the way of the passage of a Reform Act was by no means certain.

  The reform drama of 1830–2 was to be played out against a background of economic depression, grinding economic hardship and widespread popular excitement. Already when Grey came to office a rising tide of reform sentiment was sweeping the country on a scale that had not been experienced for over a decade. Led by Henry Hunt and William Cobbett, a national agitation was already rousing the middling and lower classes.
The harvests of 1829 and 1830 had been poor. The resulting distress led to rural rioting which racked the country from August 1830 to December 1831, starting in Kent and spreading across the south of England as far west as Dorset. In what are usually termed the ‘Swing Riots’, after the mythical Captain Swing, the agricultural labourers were responding to conditions of want and distress which intensified their depressed status and conditions as machine farming and market forces took their toll. The new Whig government showed little mercy to the rioters. The Home Secretary, Melbourne, set up special commissions to try suspects, who were treated to a stern range of punishments including imprisonment (644), transportation (481) and execution (19). The sense of national crisis was, moreover, heightened by a cholera outbreak in October 1831.

  This grim background should be borne in mind when considering the passage of reform in 1830–2. Indeed, the Reform Act would almost certainly not have passed had it not been for the extraordinarily powerful popular demand for reform in general. Those who wished to reform Parliament were part of a broad coalition including currency reformers, like the Birmingham radical Thomas Attwood, who blamed the current economic crisis on financial mismanagement, the Manchester reformers, those who demanded the repeal of the Corn Laws, others who agitated for factory reform, a popular demand in Leeds, and yet others campaigning for the abolition of slavery. Many people anticipated, indeed, demanded, that the reform of Parliament should not be an end in itself but that it should be a preliminary to reform in other areas of national life. The Wigan reformers, for example, celebrated ‘Potter and Purity of Election: Food, Knowledge and Justice Without Taxation’. Universally, it was assumed that reform would attack corruption in central as well as in local government and lead to a more just and humane society.