Perilous Question

by Antonia Fraser

  The Prime Minister ended magnificently: ‘If, however, I should unfortunately sink in the struggle, I shall at least have the consolation of feeling that I did, to the best of my judgement, that which I thought right and fitting, regulating my actions according to the sincere dictates of my conscience, with one sole objective of effecting that which should be best calculated to promote the interests of my country.’

  The ensuing debate lasted for four nights. Members of the Commons and strangers crowded into the narrow Chamber of the Lords. During the second night two MPs, members of the Government, Stanley and Sir James Graham, lay sprawling on the floor opposite the throne. All the time the people outside – the unenfranchised – thronged the streets, anxious to hear the latest news of the discussions while the Council of the National Union of the Working Classes sat in more or less permanent conclave in its new Committee Rooms in Great Charles Street, Westminster.

  The Duke of Wellington did not emulate the composure of the Prime Minister. Basically he reiterated that prediction of disaster which he had first expressed in 1830, leading to the fall of the Tory Government. Certainly he continued to make the gloomier predictions about the future throughout the spring, as Princess Lieven reported, following one dinner party: ‘he foresees the end of the world after the Bill is passed’ and intended to vote against it ‘in every particular’. The Times had sneered on the eve of the debate: ‘our Conservatives entertain such horror of innovation that they will not even give us a new argument’; despite the newspaper’s Whig bias, there was certainly something in what it said. Compared to Grey’s heroics, Wellington’s speech had something commonplace about it, ‘dull but violent’ in the words of one observer.25

  Once again, as so often, he struck the anti-revolutionary note. Thus he denounced the July Revolution in France as having ‘inflamed’ the people – there had been no feeling for Reform before that took place. He also attacked the idea of the King himself favouring Reform: ‘it was not to be supposed that the King took any interest in the subject’. And he argued that the French Republic, headed by the King of the French, now needed far more soldiers to maintain it than the realm of the previous Bourbon Kings, Louis XVIII and Charles X. He prophesied that a similarly expensive and military government would shortly be needed in this country. In sum, he asserted that the theme of this Bill was not actually Reform: when accomplished it would produce ‘a complete Revolution’.

  It was not to be expected that the diehard Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts – he who had accepted the burning of his Guy Fawkes–style effigy in a practical spirit – would back down on the subject now. Such a change, he declared, amounted to something very like revolution, and it followed therefore that the principle of the Bill was revolutionary, however disagreeable the mention of the word might be to the polite ears of the noble Lords near him.26 ‘I must remind them that some of the chief supporters of the Bill glory in it,’ he said, just because it was a revolutionary measure and advocated it as such. He then quoted Milton on the glories of the British Constitution. And he questioned whether the King’s Coronation Oath did not preclude him from assenting to the Irish Reform Bill.

  This incident had at least the effect of positioning the King temporarily on the side of the Government against his Queen. At breakfast over the newspapers – a favourite time for Adelaide to exercise her influence, as with many wives of busy husbands – she expressed approval for the Bishop’s speech. ‘Madam,’ exclaimed the King, ‘it may be clever or eloquent, of that I am no judge; but though the peers may occasionally be factious, By God, the Bishops are in that house to defend my crown and not to follow vagaries of their own.’27

  On 13 April Lord Durham tore into the Bishop in a passage in which he denounced him for ‘coarse and virulent invective – malignant and false insinuations – the grossest perversion of historical facts – decked out with all the choicest flowers of his well-known pamphleteering slang’.28 This was the House of Lords, not the market place, and ‘Radical Jack’ had gone too far, at least in the opinion of Lord Winchilsea, who interrupted him with protests about his language. (Even Holland admitted that it had ‘rather exceeded the bounds’.) A row followed over the precise phrase ‘pamphleteering slang’ in which other peers, including Grey and Holland, got involved. When Durham was back on his feet his anger was in no way diminished, and a further dispute followed about leaks to the press. The only light note was struck when Grey said that he refrained from employing the phrase – ‘in a jesuitical way’ – since he was aware that ‘the right reverend Prelate [Phillpotts] abhors Jesuits’. That did not stop young Edward Strutt MP from reporting that Grey had given Phillpotts ‘a complete dusting’.

  And yet Durham, for all his notorious splenetics, did manage to include one passage which in its good sense and evident truth did much to explain why ‘Radical Jack’ was an honourable title which he deserved. Lord Ellenborough, a Tory, had complained about the low class – that is, middle class – of the new MPs which would only be increased by the passing of the Reform Bill. Durham hit back. When the gentry are brought together with the middle classes at public meetings and on political occasions, ‘their superiority in learning or intellect is no longer manifest – the reverse is the fact’. If Lord Ellenborough were to attend any of the meetings of the middle classes, and enter into a discussion with them on political or scientific subjects, he would have no reason to plume himself on his fancied superiority. This being the case, demanded Durham, why should such people, possessed of talents, skill and wealth, be excluded merely because they did not happen to be part of a particular class, the aristocracy – endowed with privileges bestowed upon them in different times and different circumstances?

  The debate wound on. Lord Grey was able to refer in his final speech, without fear of contradiction, to ‘the exhausted state in which their Lordships must feel themselves’. Between four and five o’clock, when the daylight began to shed its blue beams across the candlelight, according to Jeffrey, the scene was ‘very picturesque’ from the singular groupings of forty or fifty peers, sprawling on the floor, awake and asleep, in all imaginable attitudes and with all sorts of expressions and wrappings. The candles had been renewed before dawn, and now blazed on after the sun came fairly in at the high windows of St Stephen’s. Grey rose to his feet at 5 a.m. and spoke for one and a half hours, from ‘the kindling dawn into full sunlight’.29

  Although Grey promised to refrain from ‘making any long trespass on their indulgence’ he did in fact rehearse certain vital issues all over again. Most importantly, he utterly refuted the idea that the current agitation on the subject of parliamentary Reform was to be attributed to the misconduct of the present Ministers. On the contrary, by October 1830 the feeling in the country was already so strong that Reform needs must be granted to avert further evils. Lord Grey also condemned Henry Phillpotts, the Bishop of Exeter, denying his claim that the King’s Coronation Oath prevented him from assenting to the Irish Reform Bill.

  On the subject of Phillpotts himself, however, Grey forsook his habitual temperate approach. ‘The right Reverend Prelate threw out insinuations about my ambition. Let me tell him calmly, that the pulses of ambition may beat as strongly under [a Bishop’s] sleeves of lawn as under an ordinary habit.’ But, said the Prime Minister, he did not wish to pursue the subject any further as his feelings were too passionate. He then proceeded to declare that ‘a speech more unbecoming the situation of a Christian Bishop – a speech more inconsistent with the love of peace – a speech more remote from the charity which ought to distinguish a Clergyman of his order – a speech more replete with insinuations and charges, calculated to promote disunion and discord in the community, never was uttered within the walls of this or any other House of Parliament’.

  It was seven o’clock in the morning when the vote on the second reading was taken. The result was a victory for the Government. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. The Contents were in total 184 and the Not Contents 175, giving the Government a m
ajority of 9. A number of proxies were used.* The Bill now passed into Committee, in the formal words of Hansard, ‘to be there improved, if possible’. Nobody was under any illusion that this slender majority should give the Government – or the country – any confidence in the future. ‘The House will adjourn on Wednesday and go into Committee after Easter,’ wrote Greville in his Diary, ‘and in the meantime what negotiations and what difficulties to get over!’ The essential difficulty, he believed, was to bring ‘these extreme and irritated parties’ to any agreement as to terms.30

  Peers who had voted Content would now feel free to haggle and hassle in Committee. They could change their minds – five was the minimum number of derelictions which would secure defeat. Wharncliffe, the well-known Waverer, was currently Content – how long would that last? Nine prelates – not of course including the Bishop of Exeter, but headed by the Archbishop of York – had voted Content but there was no guarantee they would not soon join their ten colleagues, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had voted against. The bouncing Bill of Macaulay’s merry rhyme was more likely than ever to need created peers to carry it through.

  * The tradition spread to North America; for example on 30 March 1863, during the struggle for the emancipation of slaves, Abraham Lincoln introduced a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer.

  * The use of proxy votes in the House of Lords could be dated from 1626 when it was laid down that proxies from Temporal Lords must go to Temporal Lords, and the same principle with the Spiritual Lords. Proxies could not be used in Committee.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SEVENTH OF MAY

  ‘Seventh of May, Crisis Day’ –

  Placards in the London streets, 1832

  In early May 1832, all parties were agreed that there was a crisis. But that was where the agreement ended. It was not as if all the reformers were totally united in themselves: there remained a Radical fringe which continued to criticize the actual clauses of the Bill. On 28 April in his Political Register Cobbett published an account of a conversation with an unknown gentleman in a London bookseller’s.1 The unknown had asked at random in the shop: ‘What do you think now? You see the Second Reading is carried. . . .’ The bookseller declared himself too busy to care, but Cobbett sprang in. He would rather the Bill be lost, he declared, than that the qualification to vote be raised higher, thus excluding poorer voters. At which the unknown was alleged to have replied: ‘We ought to take as much as we can get, for it is impossible to get the whole.’ And when Cobbett denied this, the gentleman replied that he knew the difficulties only too well; ‘for that he had a great deal to do with them’.

  The unknown then revealed himself to hail from Birmingham, and the name of Joseph Parkes was supplied by the bookseller. Parkes himself later publicly denied all knowledge of this conversation; but the fact was that the sentiments were indeed those of the men in the middle, willing to settle for what was available, attacked from left and right in consequence. While The Times called repeatedly for Reform, further down the line politically the Poor Man’s Guardian denounced the Bill as ‘most illiberal’.2

  The Cabinet met on the Sunday night before Lord Grey was due to speak, dining in Holland House in Kensington with its delightful leafy surroundings. It was decided to strike out the simple figure fifty-six for the disenfranchised, and introduce into the Bill the actual names of those who would be thus ejected. It was further agreed that any postponement of the first clause should be resisted to the utmost, since this would be to attack the very principle of disenfranchisement. There was general optimism that the Waverers, such as Wharncliffe, would share this resistance.

  Monday 7 May was the day on which it all happened. On going into Committee in the House of Lords, Grey rose to make this point about the substitution of names for figures in the first clause of the Bill.3 This would have the effect of enabling members of the Committee to raise a question about each separate disenfranchisement. At which point Lord Lyndhurst, the former Lord Chancellor and a famously keen debater, arose on a separate point of order which he said preceded that announced by Lord Grey. Lyndhurst was, wrote Lord Holland, ‘as much agitated and nervous as his nature, destitute of shame . . . could be ’.4 Put crudely, Lyndhurst proposed that both Schedule A, for total disenfranchisement, and Schedule B, for the elimination of one seat, should be postponed. In the course of an elaborate speech, Lyndhurst called the Bill an attack on ‘Monarchy and property itself’. Even more significant than the fundamentalist nature of this language was the fact that Lord Harrowby supported Lyndhurst. This indicated that the Waverers were – contrary to the Cabinet’s hopes – putting their weight on the other side of the scales.

  There had been good news earlier. The royal Duke of Sussex, presenting a petition on the eve of the debate, denied that the proposed Reform militated against the King’s Coronation Oath; the Oath, he said, was irrelevant to the situation, and he supported the Bill not only because it was expedient but because it would be of great advantage to the country as a whole. He also pointed out that the Crown could create peers but not MPs – why then should peers create MPs (by nomination)?

  If the Duke of Sussex represented one force of the establishment, during the debate itself another even greater force intervened: Wellington produced one of his familiar pieces of invective. ‘For his own part he was unquestionably a decided enemy of the Bill. He was an enemy because he was convinced in his conscience that, let their Lordships do what they would with it, it could never be made anything but an evil to the country.’ That was plain enough. The Iron Duke hardly needed to add that he would do everything in his power to avert the evil which was impending since he had been demonstrably doing everything in his power to that effect for the last eighteen months.

  On 7 May, the Opposition carried the day. Despite a further fine speech from Grey, the Government was defeated. The defeat was not a puny one: the majority was 45. This meant that the entire effort of the Government up till now, since the presentation of the First Reform Bill in March 1831, was in effect put on hold. That is to say, the elected Government of a country shouting for Reform – literally so in the case of many demonstrators – was unable to bring it about due to the action of an unelected Chamber. The placards in the streets of London which anticipated this vital debate were proved right: ‘Seventh of May, Crisis Day’.5

  To add to the woes of the Government, there was an element of disagreeable surprise in what had happened (there is an analogy to the surprise felt by the Opposition on 1 March 1831 when Lord John Russell introduced the first Bill). As Le Marchant wrote in his Diary: ‘We went down to the Lords on Monday wholly unconscious of our fate.’6 He had dined with Brougham, and together they agreed that things were going well. Lord Howick, Grey’s eldest son and an MP, reported afterwards that his father too had not expected ‘a serious collision’ that night. A vague rumour that Lyndhurst would propose something to do with Schedule A had been discounted. Le Marchant was ‘quite stupefied’ to find the debate going on after dinner and so were many others, Whigs and Tories, who had come up from the country and stopped off at Parliament in their carriages in a routine sort of way, to see what was going on. As a result ‘the majority was startling,’ wrote Le Marchant. ‘We had not counted on such hostility from Waverers or Bishops.’

  On this very same day, before the news of the defeat of the reformers’ cherished hopes could reach Birmingham, the biggest public meeting yet known took place at that celebrated point of protest, Newhall Hill. The London placards featuring the Seventh of May could equally be applied to the provinces. The inspiration for the meeting was that of the Birmingham Political Union. On the previous Friday the National Political Union had had its own gathering in London, threatening the House of Lords with the non-payment of taxes, leading to the extinction of ‘the privileged classes’ if the Bill was not passed in its entirety. The Birmingham meeting was held under Attwood’s presidency and representatives of thirty other unions from the Midlands were invit
ed to take part. From late April onwards, Joseph Parkes collected money and visited local towns to urge participation – money for the movement was an increasing preoccupation of his, as funds ran low. Francis Place also toiled, as he told Parkes on 28 April: ‘Dear Joe, I am “working like a devil in a mud wall” in all directions and in all ways for you. . . .’7

  Throughout the preceding weekend, people flocked to the city. Harriet Martineau evoked the scene in her history of the period, published at the end of the next decade: ‘From forge and furnace, from mine and factory, from loom and plough, from the cities of Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, they marched with banners.’8 The Times estimated that there were a quarter of a million people at Newhall Hill by noon, with the numbers increasing thereafter. Of course these figures were contested – there was nothing new in that. A week later a clergyman wrote to the Duke of Wellington, telling him that he had been assured by a member of the military that the numbers had never exceeded 30,000. Attwood himself, when asking Brougham to present a petition to the House of Lords on behalf of the meeting, referred to 200,000 people in the course of the day – which was possibly the more accurate estimate.9 *

  £5 and £10 notes were handed about as subscriptions poured in; some of them were from members of the upper classes hoping to avoid molestation. The bonnets, shawls and dresses of female figures, as well as an elegant lady in a riding habit on a horse, can be seen in Haydon’s preliminary depiction of the event. This, with the intention of securing a wide subscription for copies, was done by Haydon very soon afterwards, using the descriptions of actual participants to achieve verisimilitude.

  The Bromsgrove Union arrived late. As they approached in force, the verses of the Hymn of the Union, so familiar to children in the streets, swung out over the waiting crowds: