Perilous Question

by Antonia Fraser

  People could not help commenting on Russell’s appearance: with his large head and broad shoulders and notably small body, he caused astonishment when he stood up. His high, stammering voice with its drawling Whig accent added to the picture he presented, which was the reverse of impressive. Russell also lacked the easy warmth of many of the Whigs; as Lytton analysed it:

  He wants your vote but your affections not

  Yet human hearts need sun as well as oats

  So cold a climate plays the deuce with votes.33

  Yet as a character Russell had not only intellectual brilliance but extraordinary determination: perhaps that determination he showed in pursuing those causes in which he believed, such as parliamentary Reform, was inspired not only by the Whig principles of the great Russell family, but by his need to overcome physical weakness.

  There were other obstacles. As a younger son, Russell was not independently wealthy, unlike many of his colleagues. The new salary, as Paymaster General, of £2,000 a year, with a house, was important to him in a way that simply did not apply to most of the others who, whatever their debts and financial encumbrances, started from a solid base of huge estates. Educated at Westminster and the University of Edinburgh – at a time when Whig aristocrats generally trod the path which led from Eton or Harrow to Oxford or Cambridge – the passion which would lead Sydney Smith to dub him Lord John Reformer was there early; a European tour with Lord and Lady Holland when he was sixteen brought him further into the heart of Whig circles, with their agreeable mix of hedonism and idealism. Russell had a fiery intelligence which he had already used to attack the Test and Corporation Acts.

  The third member of the committee, John William Ponsonby, Viscount Duncannon was heir to the Earl of Bessborough, hence able to sit in the House of Commons. Like his exact contemporary and first cousin ‘Honest Jack’ Althorp, he had been a Member since his early twenties, for the last four years representing County Kilkenny. (Duncannon’s mother was Harriet, known as Hary-O, sister of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, who once summed up her tumultuous private life involving long absences from her family and the birth of illegitimate children with the words: ‘You know I can never love anything a little.’)34 Duncannon’s Anglo-Irish property and connections meant that he would be able to maintain good relations with the Irish MPs, since he had notably liberal views on Ireland; as a block vote these would be of growing importance in the London Parliament under their leader Daniel O’Connell. He was not a good speaker, as everyone agreed, an appalling stammer handicapping him in public from the start, so that he was cruelly nicknamed Dumbcannon; but in contrast, behind the scenes, with his calm temperament and unruffled manner he was an excellent manager of men – in short, perfect material for a Chief Whip.

  And then there was Durham himself, to whom Grey had confided the Bill in that casually patrician manner. There was nothing calm about Durham’s temperament; if Russell would prove to be the crucial intelligence of the quartet, then Durham was its passionate heart. His temper, which he was apparently unable – or unwilling – to check, made him a difficult adversary and an even trickier colleague. As the parliamentary journalist James Grant discreetly commented in his memoirs, ‘he was well known to be of irritable temperament’.35 It was relevant that Lord Durham had been fatherless since the age of five; he would come to regard his father-in-law Lord Grey as a father figure, but of course that relationship implied bad as well as good on the ‘son’s’ side, rebellion as well as respect. Conversely on Grey’s side – and this would prove to be crucial in his attitude to Durham – there was considerable tenderness for the wild, Byronically romantic boy, and keen sympathy for any personal sufferings he might have.

  Undeniably Durham was an attractive figure, ‘handsomely formed’, with his jet black eyes and eyelashes so long that there was something slightly feminine about him. Heir to the prominent mining family in northern England – which made him Grey’s neighbour – Durham was now thirty-eight, a decade younger than Althorp and Duncannon; he had been a Member of the House of Commons for the Durham seat since the age of twenty-one, before his elevation to the peerage.

  For all Grey’s paternal feelings, it cannot be said that Durham won many golden opinions from outsiders. Princess Lieven described him as ‘the haughtiest aristocrat’ in England, surely a considerable achievement. He could be petty, even vindictive when crossed; one charge against him was that he was an autocrat in the home, who cuffed his servants and spoilt his children, and a democrat abroad: a version of the German saying Hausteufel, Strassenengel: devil in the house, angel in the street.36 Yet he was not known as ‘Radical Jack’ (in contrast to ‘Honest Jack’ Althorp) for nothing. His feelings for Reform were passionately expressed but they were sincere. They were also unchangeable.

  Perhaps the fairest verdict was that of the equable Lord Holland in his Diary: ‘No two men are more unalike than Durham when in a good humour and Durham in his angry, tetchy and I am afraid one must add usual mood.’ One historian of this period felicitously compared Durham – ‘in temper and impetuous heart’ – to Achilles:37 this latter-day flawed hero had greeted the recent French Revolution as ‘glorious’ because the liberties of the people had prevailed; now was the time for this formidable but temperamental campaigner to hurl himself on the topic of Reform in his own country.

  While the Whig lords gathered to plan and plot, elsewhere the friends of Reform were also beginning to hope. The Unitarian attorney Joseph Parkes wrote to Francis Place on 5 December: ‘I think the Whigs must and therefore will do something real; and when the wand of Reform once touches the body of Corruption she [sic] will soon vanish.’38 Nevertheless Parkes argued for continued demonstrations – just in case the Whigs were tempted to forget their obligations.

  As for Albany Fonblanque, he was a brilliant political journalist of French Huguenot descent, a keen student of political philosophy as well as current events. He had been employed on the staff of The Times and the Morning Chronicle, where his superior writing was contrasted by Macaulay with the ‘rant and twaddle’ of other journalists. Now he took over control of the Examiner, which he would edit for the next seventeen years; this was a weekly literary paper which under Leigh Hunt and his brother John had acquired an additional reputation for political independence. A keen reformer, Fonblanque bade farewell to 1830 explicitly in these terms: ‘We have closed the year ONE of the People’s cause.’39

  This was a bold claim. The new King William IV might have made one of his outspoken and explosive comments if he read Fonblanque’s description of the early months of his reign. But in a certain manner it was true: the events of the autumn of 1830, the clamour for Reform coming in very different ways from both people and Parliament would have been unthinkable twelve months earlier. A great deal now depended on the committee which began to meet at Lord Durham’s London house in Cleveland Row, Mayfair.

  In the meantime there was an attitude of joyful expectancy: it pervaded all classes. The Birmingham Political Union expressed gratitude to the King for dismissing Wellington, and placed entire confidence for the future ‘in the wisdom and patriotic firmness of His Majesty’. ‘It is quite extraordinary how this question [of Reform] is gaining every day,’ wrote Georgiana Ellis, daughter of the Whig aristocrats the Earl of Carlisle and Georgiana Cavendish, to her sister on 1 December 1830: ‘It is scarcely any longer a question of whether you are for, or against, Reform, but what sort of Reform you prefer.’ With that enthusiasm, Georgiana Ellis contrasted the low spirits of Sir Thomas Baring, who for twenty years had devoted his time and fortune to the good of the poor in his neighbourhood, and now found them ‘all going against him’.40

  * Karl Marx would refer scornfully to the Whigs as ‘Tartuffes of politics’, their ‘family-nepotism’ opening them to the charge of hypocrisy.

  * The Reform Club, whose name speaks for itself, was founded in the aftermath of the struggle in 1834.

  * An important eyewitness to these events, as Private Secretary to Lord
Brougham, since he kept a Diary.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE GENTLEMEN OF ENGLAND

  ‘Upon the gentlemen of England, then, I call . . .’ –

  Lord John Russell, House of Commons, 1 March 1831

  ‘A happy new year to you,’ wrote Lord Grey to his wife Mary on 1 January 1831. ‘I am afraid I must look neither for happiness nor peace during its continuance, if my possession of office should continue so long.’ This doleful prediction on the part of the Prime Minister was not shared by the energetic Committee of Four now struggling with the details of Reform; they acted in a state of rising excitement. But they decided on conducting all their cogitations in great secrecy. One clever ruse was to ignore the customary professional help of clerks and use instead the skills of the Prime Minister’s wife and well-educated eldest daughter Georgiana – ‘the Grey ladies’ – to copy out documents.1 Loyalty and discretion were thus ensured; the great work went forward while the female secretarial help remained, as so often, unknown to history.

  A draft of their proposals was shown to the Prime Minister on 14 January. A scribbled paper with many crossings-out was read by Lord John Russell and Lord Grey at Panshanger, near Hertford. A convenient Whig retreat, this was the newly created Regency Gothic country house of Earl Cowper, husband of Emily, Palmerston’s mistress. It shows the complexity and uncertainties of the developing project, ending with a series of rough calculations. Thus ‘fifty boroughs no longer to send Members to parliament’ becomes ‘fifty-two’ then ‘fifty-three’. ‘Fifty-one’ to send only one Member becomes ‘fifty-five’ and so forth and so on.2

  The real role of Grey at this point was, however, to cement his relationship with his new Sovereign; William IV’s hopefully benign agreement to his Government’s proposals for Reform would shortly be of the greatest importance. Their correspondence throughout January, while the committee toiled away in secret, shows considerable wariness on the part of the King. On 12 January for example he pointedly congratulated Grey on ‘strenuously’ supporting him against all attempts to undermine ‘the established rights of the Crown’; similarly Grey had, he believed, resisted the efforts to destroy ‘those institutions under which this society has so long prospered’. The King went on to contrast this happy domestic state with that of foreign countries who were suffering so severely from the effects of ‘revolutionary projects’ and ‘what are called Radical remedies’ – he meant of course France and the Low Countries.3

  By way of reply, Grey wrote to Sir Herbert Taylor, the King’s private secretary, expressing his own credo on the subject (a point of view from which he would never seriously deviate in the coming long months). ‘The perilous question is that of Parliamentary Reform, and as I approach it, the more I feel all its difficulty. With the universal feeling that prevails on this subject, it is impossible to avoid doing something; and not to do enough to satisfy public expectation (I mean the satisfaction of the rational public) would be worse than to do nothing.’4

  The next day Taylor wrote back to Grey on the King’s behalf in what was another clear statement of position: deliberately citing Grey’s own use of the word ‘perilous’, he said that the King was not surprised his Prime Minister should approach parliamentary Reform with dread; ‘nor is His Majesty blind or indifferent to public feeling, or to public expectation’. Conceding that some ‘reasonable reforms’ might be necessary to check ‘the restless spirit of innovation’ which was abroad, nevertheless the King believed these elements were being exaggerated in their importance.5

  Meanwhile there was an ever-present danger of a clash between the House of Commons and the House of Lords which should be viewed ‘as a great national and political calamity’; in this case Reform might notably increase the influence of the House of Commons at the expense of the Lords, a most disagreeable possibility. As to the evils of the present system, these were more theoretical than practical; after all, it seemed to work perfectly well. Most emphatically of all: ‘His Majesty cannot consider public meetings as a just criterion of the sentiments of the people.’ Establishing his personal objections to election by Secret Ballot (inconsistent with the ‘manly spirit and the free avowal of opinion’ which distinguish the English people) and to Universal Suffrage (‘one of those wild projects which have sprung from revolutionary speculation’), the King even wondered whether the whole movement for Reform was not ‘a specious cloak for the introduction of Republicanism’.

  This was certainly not a Sovereign who was going to make it easy for anyone to solve the perilous question. Another reference to it by the King, a few weeks later, showed that Grey’s phrase had caught his fancy, even if the monarch and his Prime Minister did not as yet agree on the correct answer.6 By 24 January Grey was warning Durham (who was ill) that ‘there is likely to be more difficulty than I thought’.7 The Court, when not at Windsor or St James’s Palace, was established at Brighton, in the fantastic seaside pavilion in which George IV had taken such pleasure. It was to Brighton that Grey came on Sunday 30 January to show the King the Bill. It was, as Grey’s first biographer wrote, ‘a day of potential crisis’, since William could in theory refuse his agreement. The King passed the test, however, from the Whig point of view, and accepted the totality of the Bill as it was (without the Secret Ballot or Universal Suffrage). As Grey wrote to his wife the next day: ‘He has approved everything.’ Grey was equally succinct to his confidante Princess Lieven: ‘The King had our plan of Reform fully explained to him, and he understood it perfectly.’8

  One preoccupation which further linked Grey to his Sovereign was the planning of King William’s coronation. The King was actually reluctant to have a ceremony at all; but, in the event of being unable to avoid it, he was absolutely determined on economy. Here he was in deliberate contrast to his elder brother, whose coronation ten years previously had cost a total of £238,000 (£23-odd million in today’s money); the sum spent by all three earlier Georges put together had only come to a total of £25,000 (£2.5 million).9 A coronation, however, featured a Queen as well as a King – if there was one available. Everyone shuddered at the thought of the hideous incident in which Queen Caroline had attempted to gatecrash the coronation of George IV; there had not been a Sovereign’s wife more conventionally involved for seventy years, since Queen Charlotte in 1761. In other ways Parliament were having to get used to the presence – and expense – of a Queen again.

  What were her legitimate claims on the State? A matter of principle to MPs, such a topic was of more vital concern to Queen Adelaide herself, liable to bedevil her relationship with any administration, especially a Whig one. She was after all surrounded by Tories at Court; foremost was her favourite, Earl Howe, her handsome, urbane Lord Chamberlain, described by another ecstatic lady as ‘so gentlemanlike and unpretending’. Sneers about the precise relationship of Lord Howe and the young(ish) Queen were not wanting; when there was a rumour of her pregnancy, wicked Greville made a bad-taste joke: ‘Howe miraculous!’10 Howe was thirty-four, the same generation as his mistress (unlike the King). He had been a Tory Lord of the Bedchamber in the previous administration. However it was not at all clear at this point what significance should be put upon the public allegiance of an explicitly Tory royal official: a Whig Government with a Tory Opposition, like a happily wedded Queen, was a novelty.

  It was to her private Diary that Adelaide confided the distressing details of the royal couple’s farewell to Wellington when he resigned as Prime Minister: ‘How grieved we were at what had happened.’ His own visible emotion touched the Queen: ‘I saw tears in the hero’s eyes, a rare sight which rejoiced me.’11 Publicly the Queen positively paraded her deeply Tory sympathies. When she agreed to be the godmother to the grandchild of the Marquess of Londonderry, the most outspoken, even rancorous, Tory denouncer of all manner of Reform, Adelaide drove in state to the christening, donating a mother-of-pearl bowl and a comb to the infant and £45 (£4,500) to the nursery.12 Previously she had been the witness at the marriage of Londonderry’s
sister Lady Caroline to the MP Thomas Wood.

  Londonderry was a great magnate in the north, where his coal mines rivalled those of the Lambton family. A former Army officer and then an ambassador, he was the half-brother of the Tory Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, who had committed suicide. Londonderry, now in his fifties, was famously rash and uncontrolled in his behaviour despite his former diplomatic career. His nickname was ‘Fighting Charlie’: the kind of man who fought duels and would not hesitate to settle a coal strike by a face-to-face confrontation with the miners’ leader. Some of his contemporaries thought he was actually deranged. These qualities had not prevented him from making a most advantageous second marriage to the heiress Frances Vane-Tempest, inspiring the poet Thomas Moore to reflect that the stars must be at fault when ‘a wealthy young lady so mad is/As to marry old dandies that might be their daddies’.13 From the Queen’s point of view, Londonderry was a personal attachment which she had every right to maintain – but such connections would not necessarily be seen as such in the rising climate of political change and clash.

  Then there were the King’s illegitimate children by the late Mrs Jordan, to whom the Queen was notably charming. They were headed by George FitzClarence, already clamouring for some proper recognition of his status as a king’s son (even one born on the wrong side of the blanket); Greville was no doubt right when he suggested that the bastards longed to bring back the good old days of Charles II with his dozen illegitimate children, on whose infant heads dukedoms were regularly scattered.14 There were the new King’s younger brothers and sisters, most of whom, with the notable exception of the Duke of Sussex, had by nature deeply Tory sympathies. All of these were liable to inflame the Queen’s feelings if she felt herself wrongly used – and she would then do her best, not surprisingly, to inflame the King.