Perilous Question
Page 3
The Whig grandees on the other hand were by inclination and heredity pro-French; many of them had spent long periods in Europe, including France, Louis-Philippe being known to them personally. Lord Holland was the nephew of the Whigs’ hero, Charles James Fox, who had died in 1806, and guardian of his still vivid flame. He hailed ‘the glorious changes’ in France: ‘who could have imagined that all would have been effected, and so heroically and happily effected, in three short days and that the forbearance, magnanimity and wisdom of the people after victory should have been as great, glorious and perfect as it was during the contest.’ Alluding to his Whig past, when he admired the early stages of the French Revolution, Lord Holland added in this letter to his son-in-law the significant comment: ‘It makes one young again.’ The Whig-inclined Times made a donation to ‘necessitous Parisians’.33
Perhaps the most ominous reaction was that of a Radical tailor called Francis Place and his associates.* In a committee room, considering the new General Election, they were confronted by a gentleman holding a French publication printed in Paris ‘announcing the people’s victory after three days’ fighting’. Sir John Hobhouse, a Radical MP since 1820, was heard first: raising his hat above his head, he cheered loudly. The whole room was electrified, whereupon a host of loud voices joined him in cheers ‘as heartily as ever they were given aboard a man-of-war at the moment of victory’.34
This was not in fact a moment of victory – rather the beginning of a fight, the outcome of which was extremely uncertain. More generally, it was felt to be a time of danger, if excitement. It was not only the fear of revolution – the re-emergence of the tricolor in France was followed by a revolution in nearby Belgium – it was the uncertainty which the prospect of change always brings, and the inevitable human reaction against it. Throughout this period the word ‘perilous’ was in frequent use, whether by King, politicians – or those who struggled for change.
* Radicals were generally understood to be to the left of the Whigs, using the modern phrase; that is, more revolutionary in both the political and social sense. But they were not a formal political party in the same way.
CHAPTER ONE
THE CLAMOUR
‘I dread trade, I hate its clamour’ –
Captain the Hon. John Byng, riding through England in the 1790s
‘I defy you to agitate a fellow with a full stomache,’ wrote William Cobbett, the Radical politician, who had visited both France and America and spent time in the Army (not to forget two years in Newgate Prison for denouncing the flogging of militia men).1 In the Britain of the General Election of 1830, held following the death of the Sovereign, there were a great many fellows whom, according to this dictum, it would be easy to agitate. From another social sphere, the estate manager at Belvoir Castle in the Midlands reported to the Duke of Rutland on the subject of local incendiarism that, although these fires might very often be the work of rascals and vagabonds, ‘still they are more likely to take place among a starving Population’. The relationship of hunger and poverty to riot in Britain was after all nothing new: twenty years earlier Lord Byron in his maiden speech in the House of Lords had commented on the revolt of the unemployed weavers in Nottinghamshire in similar terms: ‘nothing but absolute want’ could have driven a once honest and industrious body to such excesses.2
A series of appalling harvests followed by severe winter weather had bedevilled the country. In 1830, according to Greville, the thermometer at Greenwich was lower than it had been for the last ninety years.3 Britain was already in the throes of economic distress following the end of the Napoleonic Wars when the returning soldiers sought employment, all too often in vain. Most notoriously in the past, such dire conditions had led to the so-called Peterloo Massacre near Manchester in 1819 when a group led by the Radical orator Henry Hunt had demanded political Reform as a solution to the problem; there were an estimated eleven deaths at the time at the hands of the military, and over 400 injured; subsequently there were executions and transportations overseas for life.
Henry Hunt, born in Wiltshire, from a well-off farming family, was arrested and sentenced to two and a half years in prison in a gaol which he nicknamed ‘the Ilchester Bastille’. Much later he would describe the scene to Parliament: how the Yeomanry pressed down on ‘the unresisting people, hundreds of whom were wounded, thrown down, trampled upon, or otherwise injured. The groans of the wounded, the horrid shrieks of the women, and the despair of the maddened wretches thus ferociously assaulted formed the most dreadful scene that could be imagined.’4 Despite the outraged protests of those of a dissident turn of mind – notably the poet Shelley – contemporary thinking in general had not moved on where the treatment of popular protest was concerned. ‘Advice how to attack a Mob’ by a General Trevor of 30 November 1830 was full of military good, if aggressive, sense for armed men against the unarmed, such as ‘attack those in the flank and break their line’.5
Agricultural distress arrived in a new form, as machines came to supplant men; and the men sought revenge (or relief) by breaking up the new machines. The campaign took its name from its leader, Captain Swing – was he a man or a myth? It began in East Kent, where landowners might expect to find the following menacing message left overnight:
Revenge for thee is on the Wing
From thy determined Captain Swing.
Writing in 1831 with the title Swing Unmasked; or the Causes of Rural Incendiarism, E.G. Wakefield suggested that Swing might be ‘one of our natural enemies, the French Jacobins, who has invented a wonderful fireball for the ruin of Old England’. Wakefield wrote from his personal observation of the enthusiasm of ‘poor [English] creatures’ for news of the ‘glorious French Revolution’ in the press; and these poor creatures were after all not so very distant from the coastal regions of France. Alternatively Captain Swing might be a rascally farmer wanting the abatement of his rent. Or again perhaps he was a disguised papist or Methodist bent on the destruction of the Church (Catholic Emancipation was still sufficiently novel to arouse these kinds of fears) or even a well-dressed agent hoping to raise the price of corn. Whatever the identity of Swing, Wakefield’s conclusion was not so very far from Cobbett’s aphorism quoted above: he believed that the only thing to do was to ‘remove the misery’.6
Outbreaks of this type of unrest, dreaded by the inhabitants of great – or greater – houses, spread through southern England, areas of the Midlands and East Anglia. These ‘poor creatures’ taking refuge in violence which seemed mindless to outsiders but curiously logical to themselves – they would replace the machines as the machines had replaced them – had no part in the parliamentary election. Their cries, and with rising frequency their deeds of protest, were not originally rooted in a desire for parliamentary Reform, but for relief from the fearful economic realities of their situation. Where elections were concerned, just over 3 per cent of the population voted in 1830, some 400,000-odd people out of a population of approximately sixteen million: all were, of course, male.7 *
There were 658 seats allotted to the United Kingdom altogether, Ireland being given seats in the Westminster Parliament (to which Catholics would now be admitted for the first time) by the Act of Union in 1801. The great majority of these seats were in England; Ireland had 100, Scotland 45 and Wales 24. The constituencies were of various types including county, borough or burgh and university constituencies, and generally had more than one Member: thus the total number of constituencies for the 658 seats was 379. Within the simplicity of these figures, however, is concealed a system of fiendish variety and intricacy, just because it had originated so many centuries ago and evolved according to perceptions of another time. Walter Bagehot, writing in the 1870s, summed it up: ‘A system of representation made without design, was fixed as eternal, and upon a changing nation.’ Naturally such a system laid itself open to abuses. As one modern authority has pointed out, ‘generations of attorneys grew fat on the niceties of electoral law’, and certainly there were many disputed returns a
fter any General Election.8
In the other Chamber, the House of Lords, the seats were strictly hereditary. Although new peerages could be created: that was theoretically the prerogative of the Sovereign. Not all Irish peers sat in the House of Lords after the Union of 1801; twenty-eight peers were elected among their number. This meant that others could stand as MPs (Viscount Palmerston, possessor of an Irish peerage, was an example of this). The Scottish peers had a similar system after the Union of 1707, electing sixteen to sit in the Lords. The eldest sons of English and Scottish peers, enjoying so-called courtesy titles like Viscount Althorp, heir to Earl Spencer, could also be elected as MPs, although of course the death of the father would automatically hoist the son, happily or unhappily, into the Lords.
When Oliver Cromwell had supported the abolition of the House of Lords in the middle of the seventeenth century – only temporarily, as it turned out – he had referred to its Members as ‘lumps of gilded earth’. The vivid if contemptuous phrase expressed the fact that the Lords derived their existence from being landowners, and very often great landowners at that. The current parliamentary system, by which patrons of ‘pocket boroughs’ nominated individuals to enjoy the seats which were considered in effect to belong to them, meant that Members of the Lords were an important force in any election. ‘May not I do what I like with my own?’ exclaimed the Duke of Newcastle in a notorious bout of indignation when the abolition of certain seats of which he had the patronage was proposed.9 Perhaps this simple ducal identification of a parliamentary seat with any other piece of property was an extreme point of view; nevertheless the connection of property and representation was fundamental. It did, of course, definitively exclude the propertyless, the poor creatures, whether compliant with their fate or rebellious.
So-called ‘rotten boroughs’ – an eighteenth-century usage – were those where, due to the decline in local population over the years, a minuscule number of voters elected two Members of Parliament; Newtown on the Isle of Wight was one glaring example, with fourteen houses and twenty-three voters. Under the circumstances, nomination for seats by a powerful local patron was a strong possibility. Money often changed hands and, given the open ballot, patrons could check whether their interests had been properly served. One argument in favour of the ‘rotten boroughs’, however, was that they enabled bright young men of no particular fortune to rise through the system and dazzle in Parliament.
A witty cleric called Sydney Smith understood how to deal with that argument – as with so many issues of this time. He made fun of it. Sydney Smith was now sixty; having edited the first issue of the Edinburgh Review, he left for London where he enjoyed exceptional popularity as an Anglican preacher and became the darling of Holland House. After that, Smith expounded his progressive views from a Yorkshire parish: he was, for example, a staunch advocate of Catholic Emancipation. From there, through patronage, he transferred to Combe Florey in Somerset. On this issue, he compared rotten boroughs to the pains in the stomach of a rich man risen from poverty, who exclaims: ‘I am not rich in consequence of the pains in my stomache but in spite of them: I would have been ten times richer and fifty times happier if I had no pains in my stomache at all.’ Smith added: ‘Gentlemen, those rotten boroughs are your pains in the stomache – and you would have been a much richer and greater people if you had never had them at all.’10
As for the money, Edward Stanley would state in Parliament later, without fear of contradiction, that ‘it was as notorious as the sun at noon-day, that boroughs were bought and sold in the market by their proprietors’.11 The system also lent itself to corruption and bribery (which led to drunkenness) and the sums of money could be astronomical. There was a notorious Northumberland county election in 1826 in which four candidates battled for two seats. Young John George Lambton (created Lord Durham in 1828) managed the election campaign of his brother-in-law Lord Howick, eldest son of Lord Grey, and tempers grew so hot that he fought a duel with one candidate, Thomas Wentworth Beaumont, on the sands beneath Bamburgh Castle. The election cost Beaumont £80,000 in vain, Howick £20,000 and the Tories £30,000 each (roughly £8 million, £2 million and £3 million in today’s money).12
It was however the geographical distribution of the seats in 1830 which would present the most incongruous sight to a modern eye. Despite an extraordinary rise in the population, there had been virtually no alteration in the original medieval scheme since 1760 and before that the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707. Furthermore, one vital feature of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England had been totally ignored, and that was the phenomenon now termed the Industrial Revolution. Macaulay, then a young MP, managed to have semi-religious feelings on the subject as he expatiated on the wonders of industry by quoting the Bible: ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ So manufacturers must be judged by cotton goods and cutlery, engineers by suspension bridges and steam tunnels. Indeed, he contrasted ‘the speed, the precision with which every process is performed in our factories’ with the ‘awkwardness, the rudeness, the slowness, the uncertainty’ of the judicial system. Finding in industry what others of the time found in Nature, he struck a contemporary as being like a traveller who ventured through ‘rich and picturesque scenery’ by railroad. Others were more conventional in their reaction. ‘Every rural sound is sunk in the clamour of cotton works; and the simple peasant . . . is transformed into the impudent mechanic,’ wrote the Captain the Hon. John Byng, later Viscount Torrington, riding through the Midlands in the 1790s; and again, ‘I dread trade, I hate its clamour.’13
But the clamour was there. It was heard, for example, in cities like Birmingham. In her novel Emma, published in 1816, Jane Austen had Mrs Elton exclaim with regard to Birmingham: ‘I always say there is something direful in the sound.’ Genteel distaste was one thing; the rush towards employment, often in small industries, where employers and men were closely connected, meant that the population there had virtually doubled in the twenty years between 1811 and 1831 when it was over 145,000; a new fast stagecoach service meant that news of the clamour from other places could easily reach the rising population of Birmingham. Sheffield had multiplied nearly threefold to 110,000; Manchester from 95,000 to 310,000, Bradford and Leeds had both soared. As for Scotland, Glasgow was a phenomenon in itself, with the greatest surge of all.14 It should be emphasized that with the exception of the under-represented Glasgow, there were no parliamentary seats attached to these teeming, choking, productive industrial cities, or what Lord Melbourne would later describe in Parliament as these ‘great emporiums of commerce’, full of men of ‘opulence, of spirit, of intelligence’ who had arrived at an almost imperial grandeur and ‘metropolitan magnificence’.15
In the meantime there were the infamous ‘rotten boroughs’ such as Old Sarum, where two MPs represented – quite literally – a lump of stone and a green field. No wonder visitors flocked to see this miraculous site! John Constable was sufficiently fascinated by this wild landscape which had once been a medieval city to commemorate it – Sir Thomas Lawrence admired the result and told him he should dedicate it to the House of Commons. Gatton in Surrey was only slightly less miraculous: here there were six houses in the borough, and 135 inhabitants in the parish – ‘those celebrated and opulent and populous Towns’, as the painter Haydon sarcastically called them. This particular borough of Gatton was sold several times, the price in the summer of 1830 said to be £180,000 (approximately £18 million in today’s money).16 There was no miracle where Dunwich in Suffolk was concerned: it had in effect fallen into the sea, but still it returned two Members of Parliament. Places with a long and ancient history frequently had a disproportionate amount of seats to their inhabitants, witness Cornwall, where there was a total of forty-four Members for a thinly scattered population. In general, there was a pronounced bias towards the south over the north of England.
It was not that efforts had not been made to remedy at least the most egregious of these perceived abuses. East Retford was a so-
called freeman borough, and where bribery was concerned, local freemen were said to have established a tariff of twenty guineas a vote – roughly the agricultural wage for the year in certain parts of England. Candidates duly paying up in 1818 and 1820, there had been no contest; but the emergence of two candidates in 1824 had led to extraordinary expenditure. Efforts had been made, notably by the Reform-minded Lord John Russell, to award its seats to Birmingham, bereft of representation. But this East Retford initiative had not succeeded.
All in all, a system had grown up like a monstrous warped tree on the landscape, the sight of which could no longer be ignored in an age of change in so many other areas. The General Election of 1830 was, however, still conducted in the shadow of this monstrous growth. One aspect of the system was the proliferation of election days: no particular date was designated, the returning officers for the various constituencies suiting the local needs. Furthermore, where there was a contest, polling could go on for days. In 1830 polling – all of which was done, and had to be done, openly – began on 29 July and ended on 1 September (there were contests in about a third of the constituencies). The new Parliament was summoned for 14 September, for a maximum seven-year term under the terms of the Septennial Act of 1716.
In an age before the full intricacies of party organization as it is now experienced, the designation of Tories and Whigs was not always clear-cut, as has been stressed with regard to the Ultra Tories. These, however, were the party designations – Tory and Whig – which were familiar. The word ‘Conservative’ was only just beginning to be mentioned: in 1832 Daniel O’Connell would call it ‘the new fangled phrase now used in polite society’; ‘Liberal’ was not yet in use for a political party. In a shifting situation, one analysis of the results of the 1830 Election uses the term ‘friends’ and ‘foes’ of the Wellington Ministry instead: as a result of this calculation, the Government could count on a majority of about 42, with 333 potential ‘friends’ to 291 ‘foes’.17