Perilous Question

by Antonia Fraser

  It was the loyal if discreditable Dolly who now spent all day on 17 November attempting to persuade Lord Grey, via his son-in-law Lord Durham, to retain Lyndhurst as Lord Chancellor. Yet despite being described as ‘the fool of women’ – which great hostesses like Princess Lieven certainly believed – it was strange how Grey was never actually persuaded to do anything he did not want to do in the first place. The Princess congratulated herself, for example, on securing the position of Foreign Secretary for Lord Palmerston; but Grey, while listening to her blandishments, had every intention of doing this anyway. Once his long-term ally Lord Holland had turned down the Foreign Secretaryship on grounds of health (he suffered from gout) and the Marquess of Lansdowne preferred to be Lord President of the Council, the choice of Palmerston with his many useful Tory contacts was a conciliatory measure to the Reform-minded Tories.

  In the same way Grey recognized that Brougham’s appointment to the post was a convenient solution on two grounds: first it secured Brougham’s loyalty (as well as his finances). Second, it left the battleground which would be the House of Commons to the generalship of Lord Althorp. So Brougham took his seat on the Woolsack as Lord Chancellor under the title of Baron Brougham and Vaux; the latter addition, ascribed to descent from the Vaux family, was considered pretentious, even dubious by some; but then Brougham always attracted a measure of ridicule along with the admiration. More to the point, when he took his seat on 22 November, those present included the royal Dukes of Gloucester and Sussex (the latter a known friend to Reform) and Prince Leopold, widower of Princess Charlotte and a contender for the new Belgian throne. There was now an established feel to the wayward Brougham.

  Grey’s Cabinet, when it was formed, had as its bedrock the Whigs – and the Whig cousinship. He had promoted, it transpired, a formidable number of his close relatives and connections. It was not totally unjust that Lord Lytton, in a colourful passage, contrasted the fuss when King William appointed his illegitimate son as Constable of the Tower with the acceptance of Grey’s nepotism: ‘My lord Grey! What son-what brother-what nephew-what cousin-what remote and unconjectured relative in the Genesis of the Greys has not fastened his limpet to the rock of the national expenditure? Attack the propriety of these appointments, and what haughty rebukes from the Minister will you not receive.’

  The Earl of Ellenborough, a Tory peer, noted drily in his Diary that three of Grey’s sons-in-law were members of the Government: Durham, Charles Wood, who acted as his Private Secretary throughout this vital period, and George Barrington.16 Then there were Grey’s brothers-in-law: Edward Ellice, husband of Lady Hannah Grey, as a Government Whip, and George Ponsonby, Lady Grey’s brother, on the Treasury Board; to say nothing of his son and heir Lord Howick, Under Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. Ellenborough, who began his Diary in 1828 when he joined Wellington’s Ministry, noted that altogether they were costing the State £16,000 a year (roughly £1.5 million in modern money). Understandably, the self-created Brougham repeated the charge in his memoirs.

  One might point out the similar surge forward of Sir Robert Peel’s relatives – William, Jonathan and Edmund Peel all stood in the 1830 Election, as did his brother-in-law George Dawson: in short this was the mentality of the age. Yet even Grey’s supporters, such as The Times, believed there was a case to answer. Harriet Martineau in her history, published only a few years after Grey’s death, thought that this was the only derogatory charge which could be made against him.17 Grey himself would have replied that this was the responsibility of his class; just as he personally drew attention to the acres owned by his Cabinet – in excess of anything previously recorded – as giving them an enormous stake in the country.

  A better defence of this particular Cabinet would be its deliberately conciliatory nature at a time when the national mood was so aggressively against anything in the nature of compromise. This was an attempt at a coalition, in short, with Tories like the Duke of Richmond as Postmaster General alongside impassioned Whigs such as Lord Durham as Lord Privy Seal. Canningite Tories were included, such as Lord Goderich – who had briefly been a Tory Prime Minister – at the Colonial Office. Lord Melbourne was Home Secretary, Lord Althorp Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as Leader of the Commons. But then Charles Grant, a former Canningite, was President of the Board of Control for India. Of the thirteen-strong Cabinet, it was noteworthy that Grant was the only member without a title of any sort (Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty, was a Baronet). There was a Duke, a Marquess, two Earls, four Viscounts and one simple Baron in the shape of Lord Holland.

  Where appointments for Scotland and Ireland were concerned, Scotland drew upon the intelligentsia in the shape of the celebrated Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review as Lord Advocate, with Henry Cockburn as Solicitor-General. Edward Stanley, heir to the Earl of Derby, was Chief Secretary for Ireland with the Marquess of Anglesey, incidentally another Canningite, as Lord Lieutenant.

  The man chosen as Foreign Secretary, the forty-six-year-old Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston was also a Canningite Tory; in some ways he was innately conservative. In Ireland, for example, in 1828 he believed in the ‘sword and musket’ as the best method of preserving tranquillity, and elsewhere the execution or transportation of rioters.18 Palmerston had sat as the Member for Cambridge University – not an especially liberal constituency – roughly for the last twenty years. One of the Russell family who spent his lifetime in the political world recollected Palmerston’s ‘slipshod and untidy style’ of oratory, sentences larded with ‘hums’ and ‘hahs’, sentences eked out with phrases such as ‘You know what I mean’ and ‘all that kind of thing’. In private however the Duchess of Dino, Talleyrand’s niece, found his conversation ‘dry but not wanting in wit’.19

  Palmerston was clever, with a rich, raffish personality, emphasized by his long-time connection to the beautiful Whig hostess Emily Countess Cowper (Melbourne’s sister). Once described as ‘grace put in action, whose softness was as seductive as her joyousness’, Emily Cowper finally married Palmerston some years later, following her widowhood. Above all, Palmerston believed in the need for Reform. In October 1830 the Tory John Wilson Croker visited him with regard to a place in Wellington’s threatened Ministry and asked Palmerston directly:

  ‘Are you resolved, or are you not, to vote for Parliamentary Reform?’

  ‘I am,’ he replied.

  ‘Well then,’ retorted Croker, ‘there is no use talking to you any more on this subject. You and I, I am grieved to see, shall never again sit on the same bench together.’20

  In spite of Croker’s huff, Palmerston remained an important potential link to the Reform-minded Tories.

  Another man conservative by nature yet a part of the Whig world was Palmerston’s future brother-in-law William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, who became Home Secretary. Melbourne’s aristocratic appearance – ‘refined and handsome’ in the words of Haydon – was supported by the careless elegance of his dress. It was said that ‘no one ever happened to have coats that fitted better’.21 Melbourne’s private life was no more straightforward than that of his sister Emily; but his wayward wife Lady Caroline Lamb, erstwhile mistress of Lord Byron, had died in 1828, four years after their official separation. As William Lamb he had been a Member of the House of Commons until 1829 and, as a Canningite, acted as Chief Secretary for Ireland for a year in the Wellington Government until his father died and he joined the Lords. It will be seen that Melbourne, like Palmerston, had the possibility of acting as a bridge with his former colleagues. He was certainly not a passionate reformer – more of an aristocratic pragmatist who thought that Reform was preferable to a collapse of the regime, as had happened recently in France.

  In the climate of expectation – or dread – which followed the formation of the Whig Government in mid-November 1830, disturbances in the country grew rather than diminished. Aggression was expressed in many different ways. For the political unions, in their infancy, it took the form of meetings. There
was nothing straightforward or indeed programmed about their growth – at one point the Duke of Wellington, for example, had to be told that they actually had existed when he was Prime Minister.22 The Birmingham Political Union was obviously a formative influence and there would be many copies. At the same time the early unions – whatever their detractors might say – were essentially non-violent, this being a central tenet of Attwood’s creed. Open-air banquets, open-air meetings, speeches, declamatory speeches – all these were symptoms of popular discontent rather than revolutionary calls to arms. Lord Grey complained about ‘the large assemblages’ near the new ‘great town’ of Manchester, under the direction of the local trade union, to protest against the low rate of wages offered by the master manufacturers; but he did not suggest that their methods were crudely violent.23

  The more ferocious disturbances in the country did not necessarily have a central unifying theme and were dealt with in a variety of different ways. For example on 24 November the Duke of Buckingham felt impelled to organize a ‘feudal levy’ among his tenants, in order to repel rioters at Itchen Abbas in Hampshire, who were surrounding his Avington House estate; forty or fifty prisoners were taken. On the same date, magistrates in Norfolk dealing with rioters of the Swing variety thought fit to comment on the need for landowners to provide employment, with the implication that there was more to rioting than the mere need to show violent resistance to lawful authority.24 This attempt at understanding was in direct contradiction to the resolution of the Cabinet on 4 December that magistrates should be urged to show no weakness. Lord Melbourne sent a circular to his local magistrates dictating that on no account should they pander to the poor. At the end of the year he reiterated this stalwart sentiment: ‘to force nothing but force can be successfully opposed’.25 Meantime machine-breaking was becoming rife on the Norfolk-Suffolk coastline. Nor were the disturbances confined to the south: near Carlisle there was a huge fire caused by some disaffected weavers.

  The Royal Hospital in Chelsea, home to military pensioners, had various ‘out-pensioners’ on whom it could call; these were now supposed to volunteer to supplement the efforts of police, existing military forces and feudal levies. Two warships – sloops – were sent to the Tyne in case the current ‘insurrectionary spirit’ extended there. One solution to this militant spirit, favoured at the time, was the encouragement of emigration: tacitly it was accepted that lack of employment – and thus potential starvation – might not necessarily be cured by force. The revolutionary nature of the times, in which among others Wellington and his former Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen profoundly believed, received graphic illustration when a ‘shabby-looking’ man with a pistol and a knife was found trying to get into the House of Lords with the apparent aim of assassinating Wellington (the Iron Duke maintained his usual cool on hearing this news).26 The crowds in St James’s were believed to be uniformly hostile – or at any rate, only the hostile gave voice.

  Punitive measures of the sort Melbourne approved continued: at a special commission which sat at Winchester, to try charges of Swing-type insurrection, there were 285 people up for trial; of these 101 were capitally convicted, six destined for execution and sixty-nine to be transported for life. On the other hand, on 18 December there was a meeting at Beardsworth’s Repository in Birmingham, at which a petition of rights was to be entrusted to the Earl of Radnor to present to the House of Lords; this was certainly mild enough. By the end of 1830 there were apparently two possible courses that the country could take.

  Everything for the moment hung on the future of Reform. ‘Lambton, I wish you would take our Reform Bill in hand.’ Thus Lord Grey, casually on the steps of the House of Commons, addressed his son-in-law ‘Radical Jack’ Lambton, Lord Durham.27 And so a Committee of Four was formed: Lord Althorp; Lord John Russell, Paymaster General but still just outside the Cabinet; Lord Duncannon, who became First Commissioner of Land Revenue (that is, Woods and Forests) early next year; and Durham himself. In their different ways, these men would all be essential to the committee’s progress.

  John Spencer Viscount Althorp was one of those extraordinary characters who might be described as the quintessential Whig of his time – except that his sheer eccentricity made him quite unlike anyone else. He was now forty-eight and had been a Member of the Commons, sitting first for Okehampton, then established in Northamptonshire, for twenty-six years; although, as the eldest son, the threat of succeeding to his father’s title of Earl Spencer hung over him, so that the health of the frail Lord Spencer was a matter of practical concern throughout this period.

  ‘Honest Jack’ Althorp’s private life had been curiously romantic for such an apparently stolid man. He had made what was in effect an arranged marriage to an heiress named Esther Acklom, endowed not so much with beauty as with a fortune of £10,000 a year; but then her intelligence and wit won him over: the couple had fallen in love with each other. Esther’s early death, leaving no children, meant that Althorp resolved never to marry again; what was more, he gave up his beloved hunting (he had been Master of the Pytchley) as a tribute to her memory and resolved to wear black for the rest of his life. Poignantly, he referred to the alterations to their estate they had planned together: ‘I miss more than I can say her, to whom alone I could tell their success or failure, with a certainty of her feeling as much or more interest in them than myself.’28

  Althorp’s real interests were undoubtedly rooted in the country. He was the founder of the Yorkshire Agricultural Society; at his property at Wiseton he built up a herd of shorthorns, begun by buying a bull called Regent in 1818. Now his prize bulls, with names like Roman and Ivanhoe (Sir Walter Scott’s novel was published in 1819), were the widower’s pride and joy, a substitute for the happy married life he no longer enjoyed; he was painted with one of them, his bluff farmer’s appearance making him appear a suitable member of the herd. For Jack Althorp had nothing visibly of the aristocrat about him. The Morning Post would ridicule him thus:

  Most rustic ALTHORP, honest, stupid, dull

  Blunderer in thoughts, thy ev’ry act a bull.

  But such crude lampoons missed one great quality of this man, clumsy speaker, most rustic by inclination as he might be. ‘Honest Jack’, as the nickname indicated, was seen by one and all as trustworthy and as such could command respect at the very least over the most difficult issues.

  This perceived innate decency explained his mastery of the House of Commons, where he had been chosen as Leader in March 1830, despite his deficiencies as an orator (‘a better speaker in every vestry in England’ was one contemporary comment). Francis Jeffrey commented on this decency in his correspondence with Lord Cockburn: ‘There is something to me quite delightful in his calm, clumsy, courteous, inimitable probity and well-meaning and it seems to have charm for everybody.’ As a more hostile observer – a Tory – ruefully expressed it: ‘Oh, it was his damn good temper did all the mischief.’29 Even the bull he most resembled was John Bull, a cartoon figure beginning to evolve as the type of honest, incorruptible Englishman.

  Yet the trustworthiness was only part of the picture. Jack Althorp, if he did not let it show, was actually a clever man: perhaps this very diffidence qualified him to be the type of John Bull; he had gone from being a popular but undistinguished schoolboy at Harrow (he excelled at boxing, a sport he continued to patronize in later life), to gaining two first-classes in his mathematical exams at Cambridge; Althorp’s capacity for intellectual curiosity took a practical turn when he set about learning chemistry in order to apply it to agriculture. Thus intricate legal clauses in committee presented no difficulties to him, even if he always felt like a man about to be hanged before speaking in the House of Commons.30

  By Althorp’s own account, Cambridge had been important to him in another way since it was here that he began to discover the political philosophy – that of the Whigs – which would be his other passion in life. He told Sir Denis Le Marchant* that it was at Cambridge he found the Whigs so much more to his ta
ste than the Tories. Althorp’s Whig connections helped him fit easily into the House of Commons. A few months in Italy during the brief peace at the beginning of the century made him, in his own words, ‘a determined liberal’. It was a comfort to Althorp that he had never voted against the Whig hero, Charles James Fox.31

  Part of Althorp’s trustworthiness lay in his very lack of ambition – another very English quality. In November 1830 Althorp wrote to his fellow committee member Lord John Russell about his own motives for taking office: ‘I have not been able to escape, and have been obliged to sacrifice myself; for to me it is an entire sacrifice.’32 The man to whom he wrote the words was a politician of a very different ilk. Politics was in the blood of Lord John Russell: in 1819, at the time he was adopting the cause of parliamentary Reform, he published a life of his famous radical ancestor, that Lord Russell who had been executed by Charles II for standing up – as he saw it – for the rights of liberty against the Crown. Ten years younger than Althorp, Russell had not joined in that short-lived Whig administration of 1806, only becoming an MP for Tavistock in 1813.