Perilous Question

by Antonia Fraser

  The young MP for Derby, Edward Strutt, a Unitarian from a wealthy and high-minded manufacturing family, a convinced Whig reformer, told his wife with some satisfaction that the Bill had ‘horrified’ – his italics – ‘the great proportion of the House’. The Duke of Wellington was giving a dinner party, and when the first reports reached him of what was being proposed, simply declined to believe them: there must be some mistake.32 In short, in the exultant language of The Times, ‘the secret was kept till the blow was struck’.

  The next day in the Commons Lord Stormont, heir to the Earl of Mansfield, quoted a passage from Coriolanus on the grounds that ‘the great Poet’ Shakespeare had surely anticipated this situation:

  Thus we debase

  The nature of our seats, and make the rabble

  Call our cares, fears; which will in time break ope

  The locks o’the Senate, and bring in the crows

  To peck the eagles.

  The most notable feature of the debate on 2 March was, however, the rise of a new star on the Whig horizon.33

  Thomas Babington Macaulay was just thirty when he became an MP for Calne in Wiltshire – incidentally a so-called rotten borough in the gift of the Whig grandee Lord Lansdowne, a fact which allowed his opponents to make merry; they also used it as an argument for the nomination system by which bright young outsiders were brought into Parliament. With his high forehead, hair already receding, and his heavy brows above piercing eyes, Macaulay dominated by sheer brilliance rather than physique. As Greville put it, ‘a lump of more ordinary clay never enclosed a powerful mind and lively imagination’. Sydney Smith had a wittier word for him: he was, he said, ‘a book in breeches’. There was something odd about Macaulay’s diction: Lytton captured it when he referred to his ‘strong utterance’ which occasionally split ‘into a strange, wild key, like hissing words that struggle to be free’. It was the content of the hissing words which mesmerized hearers in this vital session of Parliament; Edward Littleton MP once commented that his speeches carried away the House, as he seemed to be carried away himself ‘in a whirlwind of mixed passions’.34

  Macaulay began by describing the Bill as ‘a wise, noble and comprehensive measure’. He dismissed Sir Robert Inglis’s challenge to show that the Constitution had ever been better with the contemptuous phrase: ‘Sir, we are legislators, not antiquaries.’ Then he got into his stride: ‘Our ancestors would have been amazed indeed if they had foreseen that a city of more than 100,000 inhabitants would be left without Representation in the nineteenth century, merely because it stood on ground which in the thirteenth century, had been occupied by a few huts.’ As to the idea of there being an evil in change just because it was change, there was also an evil in discontent as discontent. This Bill was ‘a great measure of reconciliation’ after recent horrors. Furthermore Macaulay expressed his conviction that the middle class wanted to uphold both the royal prerogatives and the constitutional role of the Peers. Rotten boroughs he dismissed – ‘Despotism has its happy accidents’ – of which of course he was one. The real point was this: ‘Turn where we may – within, around – the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve.’

  Macaulay was at his finest and most characteristic in the passage which followed, ‘thumping out the word “Now” nine times’: ‘Now, while the roof of a British palace’ – he meant Holyrood, residence of Charles X – ‘affords an ignominious shelter to the exiled heir of forty Kings . . . Now, while the heart of England is still sound – now, in this your accepted time, now in this day of your salvation – take counsels not of prejudice . . . but of history – of reason of the ages which are past – of the signs of this most portentous time. Renew the youth of the State,’ he went on. There he concentrated on the word ‘save’, as in: ‘Save property divided against itself. Save the multitude endangered by their own ungovernable passions. Save the aristocracy, endangered by its own unpopular power. Save the greatest, and fairest, and most civilized community that ever existed, from calamities which may in a few days sweep away all the rich heritage of so many ages of wisdom and glory. The danger is terrible. The time is short.’

  The immediate response to this came from the young Viscount Mahon, heir to Earl Stanhope, MP for Wootton Bassett, and at the age of twenty-five already a published author. A violent Tory but a most agreeable and cultivated man, according to Macaulay himself – later as Lord Stanhope he produced a highly illuminating account of his conversations with the Duke of Wellington – Mahon came from an eccentric family (he was the nephew of the traveller Lady Hester Stanhope). Mahon would shortly be inspired to produce a savage dystopian piece on post-Reform England. In the meantime he merely commented rather feebly that Macaulay had considered so many branches of the subject that he hardly knew which to reply to first.

  It was true. In this crucial week in early March the Opposition, under Sir Robert Peel in the Commons, was reeling from the extraordinary shock of the Whig ambush. Tactics of demolition had to be applied to the perilous question. One expedient had been ruled out in advance – had it not? – and that was calling for a vote on the Bill at once, which was likely to produce a dissolution and an immediate General Election, which was not thought to be in the Tories’ interest, given the state of the country.

  So the two forces, pro- and anti-Reform, prepared to square up for the seven days at the first reading which would follow. There was tremendous optimism among the Whigs. Thomas Creevey reported in his Diary that his ‘raptures’ with the Bill increased daily, as also his astonishment at its boldness. Here was ‘a little fellow not weighing above eight stone’ – he meant Lord John Russell – creating an entirely new House of Commons. ‘What a coup it is! It is its boldness that makes its success so certain . . .’35 Another Whig, John Campbell, MP for Stafford, was not quite so confident. ‘This really is a REVOLUTION ipso facto,’ he wrote. ‘It is unquestionably a new Constitution.’36 (Despite the fact that Grey in the House of Lords argued firmly that it was in no way a new Constitution.) The sensation produced in the House of Commons convinced Campbell that there was not the remotest chance of this Bill being carried.

  The attack did not only come from the right. The Radical MP Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, who had got into the House of Commons at a by-election in December, also attacked the Bill. He justified his sobriquet by denouncing Macaulay for his derisory reference to the lower classes and Peterloo. This was the occasion, alluded to earlier, on which Hunt described his own experience of that fearful occasion: ‘there was a real massacre. A drunken and infuriated yeomanry,’ he went on, only to be interrupted by cries of ‘No! No!’ and ‘Question’. Hunt battled forward: ‘a drunken and infuriated yeomanry with swords newly sharpened’ – there were renewed angry cries of ‘No!’ and ‘Question’. ‘Where is the man who will step forward and say “No!”’ Hunt’s voice grew louder and louder; all the same he was almost drowned by the furious cries of the interrupters.37 All this meant that the Whigs, who had aimed at bringing about Reform by coalition, looked fair to be harried by those who felt they had not gone far enough, as well as those who felt they had gone too far.

  On 3 March, Sir Robert Peel rose in the House of Commons to mount the official attack for the Tories.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  RUSSELL’S PURGE

  ‘I will call this Bill, Russell’s Purge of Parliament’ –

  Sir Charles Wetherell, House of Commons

  The attack of Sir Robert Peel upon the Reform Bill concentrated on the importance of the stability of the State – that traditional and respectable Tory cry. Given that his opponents like Lord Grey were arguing that Reform would actually in some mysterious, gratifying way preserve the status quo, and given the tumultuous state of the country, this was indeed the case Peel had to answer. He might have covered his face with his hands towards the end of Lord John Russell’s speech, but it was not in Peel’s highly rational nature to give way to despair. On the night of 3 March Peel spoke for two hours, eloquently
as was his wont.1

  It has been suggested by one of Peel’s biographers that this policy of restraint – no instant calling for a vote on the first reading – remained a sensible calculation despite the surprise of the proposals: in the case of such a vote, the Government would have fought back boldly, just as their Bill was in itself a bold move.2 Nevertheless this prolonged disquisition was an enormous relief to the Whigs at the time. They feared for a snap vote, by which their campaign should be cut off in its infancy. Brougham, whose dramatic sense of self-worth meant that the story never got lost in the telling, related how the welcome news had reached him. His Secretary Sir Denis Le Marchant, who was in the House, dispatched a note which actually read: ‘Peel has been up twenty minutes’ – this meant that they were safe from a snap vote. But instead of opening the note, Brougham suggested they all had a drink first. Drink duly taken, and the message finally read, Brougham whirled the note round his head, shouting ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Victory! Victory!’ Then he told his friends that Peel was remaining on his legs.3 More drinks were had all round to celebrate. In fact it had been Sir Robert Inglis, not Peel, as discussed in the last chapter: Le Marchant had made a mistake in his report, as he later admitted. But the point remained: the Tories had definitely lost the initiative. With the co-operation of the newspapers, the country would be able to follow with zest the debate which followed.

  Unlike ‘Orator’ Hunt, Peel received cheers at various points, and not only from his fellow Tories. It was clever to begin by suggesting that the Whigs, in the light of their recent electoral victory, were still animated by party faction. Yet he doubted whether ‘the old system of party tactics’ was applicable to the present state of things – should they not be looking rather to ‘the maintenance of order, of law, and of property?’ Lamentably, Peel saw principles in operation which he believed would be fatal to ‘the well-being of society’. Whenever the Government showed signs of resisting those principles, he would give them his support; conversely, when the Government encouraged them, he would offer ‘his decided opposition’. Unlike the Duke of Wellington, Peel was careful not to set his face publicly against all change: he was in favour of reforming every institution that really required it, but he preferred to do so ‘gradually, dispassionately, and deliberately’ in order that Reform might be long-lasting. Peel was setting the tone for an Opposition which took its stand on integrity and tradition, not on a mulish determination to cause havoc.

  In the meantime the Whigs remained extremely confident. Grey wrote a few days later that opposition to the Bill was ‘little short of insanity in view of the strength of feeling in the country’. He told another friend: ‘the public is now decidedly with us.’4 Furthermore the Whigs were bolstered by the support of the Radicals. Francis Place, who had once dismissed ‘gabbling Whigs’, now felt considerable enthusiasm for what was happening. William Cobbett became ‘a Bill-man heart and soul’. Of course there remained the problem of the Radicals’ demands, as expressed in Parliament by Hunt – the question of the Secret Ballot and Universal Suffrage.

  On 4 March there was a public meeting at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, a well-known Radical venue (where Charles James Fox had been celebrated in the old days); it was blessed with a huge room over eighty feet long. A series of resolutions were passed calling for Triennial Parliaments, three-year terms as opposed to the current seven, and ‘the [Secret] Ballot’. But Sir John Hobhouse jumped on the table and cried out that nothing should be passed but votes of confidence in the Ministers.5

  This was in effect the position of The Times when it reported Russell’s speech under four headings.6 These were as follows: changes brought about by the total or partial disenfranchisement of certain boroughs, with rights transferred elsewhere, to larger towns and counties; the change in the qualification of the votes in boroughs and counties; the changes in the mode of securing the ‘purity’ of electoral lists, and of taking the poll; lastly the changes of representation in Scotland and Ireland. ‘Speaking in general terms,’ commented The Times, ‘we approve of the present plan most sincerely . . . The crew of a stranded ship do not examine too minutely the merits of the vessel which is to take them off the wretched island on which they are cast, to a place of plenty and safety.’ Thus the paper thundered: ‘To the House we should say “Pass it, pass it.” To the people, “Urge in every way the passing of the bill: call for it, press it forward.”’

  The process of debate which followed was long and exhausting, much of it taking place at night. The young Charles Dickens was one of those in attendance as a reporter and wrote on 7 March that he was so ‘exceedingly tired’ from his week’s exertions that he had slept on the sofa the whole day.7 Many of the most vehement speeches were made by MPs whose seats were threatened; although Charles Baring Wall was thought in poor taste when he observed that the partial disenfranchisement of Guildford ‘would leave him but half a man’.

  Hudson Gurney, from the Norfolk banking family, was MP for Newtown, Isle of Wight; despite having predominantly Whig sympathies, he was unhappy at the reduction of the number of MPs for the island. He grumbled that the Bill would give additional Members to Ireland and the metropolitan districts: ‘the worst of representatives . . . radicals, knowing nothing and representing no interests whatsoever’. Gurney told Sir Denis Le Marchant that there was no chance of the House passing the Bill: ‘No one but Oliver Cromwell could ever have done that.’8 As against these predictable cavils, Edward Stanley made a powerful speech for Reform which found an echo in many hearts: even the Tory Lord Ellenborough reckoned that he had spoken ‘very much like a gentleman’. Political concessions, Stanley said, which came too late, were like the Sybilline Books of antiquity: ‘the longer you delayed the purchase, the higher the price you must pay, and the less advantage you receive’.9

  There were also undoubted anomalies to be condemned, arising from the use of population figures for the distribution of seats. The Census of 1821 was used (the Census of 1831 was not yet available); the distinction between boroughs and parishes was mistakenly interpreted in different ways, in different areas, which meant that a skilful member of the Opposition could point to these obvious disparities. John Wilson Croker, in a speech generally regarded as ‘clever but extremely violent’, accused Lord John Russell of trying to remodel ‘all the institutions of the empire by the rules of arithmetic’. (Croker could not pronounce the letter ‘R’ so that the hated word came out as ‘Weform’ – but this only added to the venom of his delivery.) Croker referred to Russell sardonically as ‘our new Justinian’ with his ‘pandects and codex’, whose Government had nevertheless made considerable errors in interpreting the 1821 Census.10

  Croker also made play with the Whig bias shown in the obliteration or limitation of seats. For example, there were still to be two MPs for Downton, the living of the keen reformer Lord Radnor. He picked on the situation at Macaulay’s constituency at Calne, which he had obtained through the patronage of Lord Lansdowne; apparently Calne, with less than 5,000 inhabitants, was to be awarded two Members, whereas Bolton, with 22,000, was only awarded one. And how strange that Tavistock, in the gift of another Whig grandee, the Duke of Bedford, Russell’s very own father, had survived the cull! Croker undoubtedly enjoyed himself as he expostulated with mock sympathy: ‘God forbid that we should ever see the time when the natural influence of a munificent and benevolent landlord like the Duke of Bedford is to be annihilated.’

  On 7 March, a satirical sketch by John Doyle appeared entitled ‘The Last of the Boroughbridges’. Doyle was a Dublin-born painter who since 1827 had become increasingly famous for his political prints, issued during parliamentary sessions, under the initials of H.B. (This career lasted a span of twenty-two years.)11 Thackeray would praise them for their ‘polite points of wit’ which raised ‘quiet, gentlemanlike smiles’, but Doyle was in fact remarkably acute at seizing the right image and reference. He would delineate John Bull as trying on his new ‘Grey’ breeches, with Russell as the tailor, st
anding by with shears; meanwhile Wellington denounced the material, purported to be ‘Cord du Roy’, as fustian and Peel lamented that he never thought to see his poor old friend John Bull sans culotte.

  In this case Doyle’s subject was Sir Charles Wetherell, MP for Boroughbridge and the Recorder of Bristol. Wetherell’s taste for invective – often garnished with ‘rich humour’ and ‘happy sarcasms’ along the way – tended to distract from his excellent legal brain and genuine antiquarian interests. In the same way, his eccentric appearance, likened by a contemporary to that of some untidy friar with threadbare clothing looking as if ‘made by accident’, masked an incisive intelligence.12 To Wetherell, Toryism had a superior excellence quite unconnected to the need for office: he had in fact been sacked by Wellington from his post as Attorney-General for the ferocity of his speeches against Catholic Emancipation.

  Here this passionately Tory character was seen by Doyle as a dying man in robe and nightcap. The Duke of Cumberland and the Earl of Eldon, both deeply right-wing figures, were weeping at his bedside, with the Marquess of Chandos, Tory heir to the Duke of Buckingham, as his nurse. Wetherell bemoaned the fact that he was being dispatched out of this world with ‘a dose of Russell’s purge’. These had been his own dramatic words in Parliament with their appeal to seventeenth-century history. ‘I will call this Bill, Russell’s Purge of Parliament . . . the nauseous experiment of a repetition of Pride’s Purge, republican in its basis . . . destructive of all property, of all right, of all privilege.’13 The same arbitrary violence which expelled a majority of Members in the time of the Commonwealth was now proceeding to expose the House of Commons again to such odious tyranny. Wetherell had been greeted with tumultuous cheering. It was hardly surprising that Wetherell was a favourite of Doyle’s; another sketch showed ‘John Bull between Tragedy and Comedy’, with Tragedy represented by John Henry North, MP (he who would die of heartbreak over Reform), dragging poor John Bull to ‘the first abyss in the revolutionary Hell which is yawning for us’, while Wetherell as Comedy reflects: ‘Oh, I shall die of laughing.’