Perilous Question: Reform or Revolution? Britain on the Brink, 1832

by Antonia Fraser

  His other marked characteristic was his avidity for learning, extraordinary by the standards of his time and class. Place established a vast political library – ‘the headquarters of English Radicalism’ – in his house. It was described at the beginning of the twentieth century by an old man who still remembered being shown it, as ‘a sort of gossiping shop for such persons as were in any way engaged in public matters, having the benefit of people for their object’. Another contemporary wondered at the sheer organization of the library: ‘books, pamphlets, journals, memoranda of every kind – political, philosophical, physiological, and every other “cal” which can be imagined, all arranged in such perfect order that he can put his hand on any book or paper he may want in a moment’.20 Where Brougham’s skull showed combativeness, with Francis Place, in phrenological terms, ‘the bump of order’ was very strong indeed.

  He certainly did not find the coming Parliament orderly enough, having referred in May to the ‘rascally’ House of Commons, which excited him to ‘indignation, hatred and abhorrence’ whenever he thought of it. His Westminster dwelling nevertheless made him an important man in the political sphere, since Westminster was one of the few electoral seats with something approaching manhood suffrage, based on freehold. Just as Attwood was originally interested in currency reform, Place had an attachment to Malthusian doctrines of population control, with a particular prejudice in favour of contraception to enable the people to reduce their own numbers. Hence Reform for him had become a primary element of justice for the working classes and his prodigious organizational talents were now to be dedicated to it, despite his theoretical dislike of the Whigs.

  Francis Place was at this point not in an optimistic mood. On 1 November he wrote to Henry Hunt, the Radical known for good reason as ‘Orator’ Hunt, on the subject of the Duke of Wellington: ‘The Duke thinks this is not the time to meet the wishes of the people. He does not understand things and has therefore decided to make no concessions.’ Personally Place hoped that Wellington would stick to this disastrous course (thus provoking confrontation). Whatever happened, according to Place, it was merely ‘a question of longer or shorter – change will come’. And he issued a prophecy: ‘No corrupt system ever yet reformed itself.’ It was now time to see whether Place was right.21 Was there really no possibility of orderly change?

  William IV, always assiduous in carrying out his constitutional role (unlike his elder brother), arrived at Parliament with a clear-cut duty to perform. It was customary for the King’s Speech, which declared the Government’s policy for the coming session, to be pronounced by the Sovereign himself in the House of Lords. Once on the throne, he was watched by Queen Adelaide and her ladies. The sight was impressive in itself – the scarlet cloth, the beautiful chandeliers and above all the ‘general air of good manners, an easy good taste and, so to say, an aroma of aristocracy’, as Alexis de Tocqueville would describe it.22 On this occasion the aroma of aristocracy was not enough to atone for the fact that the King’s Speech made no reference at all to any kind of plans for parliamentary Reform, such as had been vaguely expected – witness Lord Grey’s playful notion earlier of the ‘good fun’ to be had. Indeed, on the day itself, according to Lady Grey, there was still a story being spread that the Duke ‘would yield to the wish of the nation’ despite his dislike of Reform; in short he would do anything rather than resign.23

  William did emphasize his continued good connections – ‘diplomatic relations and friendly intercourse’ – with the French court, to which he had sent cordial messages.24 Louis-Philippe, the new King of the French, had been anxious for recognition and the aged Prince Talleyrand had recently been sent to London as his Ambassador. Nevertheless many of the hereditary Lords he addressed were well aware that the Bourbon ex-King was in exile in Britain, and in such an atmosphere there was a possibility that Louis-Philippe would abandon his own hereditary Chamber of Peers much as Oliver Cromwell had done two centuries earlier (although, as it turned out, with less permanent effect). Less happily from the point of view of the Whigs, King William talked of the recent revolt in Belgium, whereby the Belgians threw off Dutch rule and seemed to suggest the possibility of English intervention. ‘I am endeavouring in concert with my allies to devise means of restoring tranquillity,’ he said; these words had a sinister sound to the Whigs as the traditional party of peace – and also, incidentally, to Radicals such as Thomas Attwood and Francis Place who were inexorably opposed to any such war.

  The real drama of the occasion began with Lord Grey’s speech. His hearers now listened to him with profound attention as, whatever their views, they respected his style of oratory, which recalled to hearers the ‘stately splendours’ of the eighteenth century, and admired the characteristic upright pose of the tall, elegant figure as he walked up and down the centre of the Chamber, his hands folded in front of him ‘on his person’, for eight or ten minutes. As Creevey had observed a decade earlier: ‘There is nothing approaching this damned fellow in the kingdom, when he mounts his best horse.’25

  Grey began by complaining about what had been said: where the Low Countries were concerned, in this ‘direct course’ against the behaviour of the people there was ‘language directly opposed to the principle of non-interference’. Grey then passed more solemnly to what had been left unsaid: there had been no discussion of the violence which now dominated the domestic scene. His pronouncement was unequivocal: ‘If danger is all around us . . . the way to go is by securing the affections of your fellow subjects, and by redeeming their grievances. And, my Lords, I will pronounce the word – by reforming Parliament.’26

  ‘Through my whole life,’ he continued, ‘I have advocated Reform, and I have thought that, if it were not attended to in time, the people would lose all confidence in Parliament, and we must make up our minds to witness the destruction of the Constitution.’ It was noteworthy that Grey, the wealthy aristocrat who believed in the hereditary principle including the duties it imposed, was here invoking quite a different force: ‘the people’. And by implication these people were supposed to have wishes which had to be respected. If Francis Place was right, and Wellington really thought this was not the time to meet ‘the wishes of the people’ – could this blanket dismissal really be in prospect? – then Grey placed the Whigs by implication in direct opposition. Yet it should be stressed that the idea of the rule of the people as such – what is now known as democracy – was anathema in the early nineteenth century.

  Indeed, the very word ‘democracy’ caused a shudder at this juncture while the phrase ‘the people’ implied, generally speaking, a mob and not a very friendly mob at that. After all, the original democrats had been the republicans of the French Revolution who had emerged in opposition to the aristocrats, and the connection was held to contaminate it.* Sir Herbert Taylor, King William’s influential private secretary, would confide to Grey that his master ‘dreaded the Democracy [his capital letter] towards which he conceived the institutions of the country to be gradually approaching’.27

  What Lord Grey was proposing was however a strictly limited measure of Reform. He was on more stable ground – if conservatism means stability – when he announced that he was against Universal Suffrage: ‘Perhaps in the early part of my life,’ he admitted, ‘I have urged this question with the rashness of youth.’ So the Reform that the Whigs were asking for at this juncture referred to an electorate whose claims were based on property. But he continued with another reference to the people – how the recent July French Revolution had been brought about by an attack on ‘the people’s liberties’. The inference was clear: the people’s liberties must be respected ere worse befell the country.

  The Duke of Wellington rose to his feet shortly after. His crucial words came towards the end of a long speech.28 He agreed, he said, with Lord Grey that his Government and he himself as Prime Minister were not prepared for any measure of Reform. ‘Nay, he on his own part, would go further, and say, that he had never read or heard of any measure up
to the present moment which could in any degree satisfy his mind that the state of representation could be improved or be rendered more satisfactory to the country at large at the present.’ He would not even enter into a discussion, but did not hesitate ‘to declare unequivocally’ what were his sentiments upon the matter. The Duke was fully convinced, he said, that the country possessed at this time a legislature which answered all the good purposes of legislation, and this by a ‘greater degree’ than any legislature ever had answered in any country whatever.

  The Duke evidently felt that even now he had not gone far enough, so he went on to say that the legislature and the system of representation ‘possessed the full and entire confidence of the country – deservedly possessed that confidence’. In fact if he had the duty of forming a legislature, he would try to form one to produce the same results. The reason? The electorate consisted of ‘a large body of the property of the country in which landed interests had the preponderating influence’. Under the circumstances the Duke was not prepared to bring forward any measure of the description alluded to by Lord Grey – he did not mention the fearful word Reform.

  As if this was not sufficiently clear, Wellington proceeded to speak even more emphatically: ‘He was not only not prepared to bring forward any measure of this nature, but he would at once declare that as far as he was concerned, as long as he held any station in the government of the country, he would always feel it his duty to resist such measures when proposed by others.’ At first the Lords sat in silence: a stunned silence. Then the murmuring began as the implications of the Prime Minister’s message began to sink in.

  Did the Iron Duke himself have some inkling of the stark – and starkly confrontational – nature of what he had just said? There is some evidence that he did. ‘I have not said too much, have I?’ he asked the Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, at his side. ‘You’ll hear of it,’ replied Aberdeen. But to someone else on his way out who asked what the Duke had said, Aberdeen was more explicit. ‘He said that we were going out,’ the Foreign Secretary observed.30

  *

  Almost immediately the first part of Lord Aberdeen’s prophecy came into effect. Everyone could soon hear the noise of outraged reaction to the Duke’s speech. The fires, the hooliganism, the sheer unpredictable behaviour of mobs, especially in London, alarmed not only the Government but also the royal establishment. This constituted a particular problem at this juncture since the King and Queen were destined by immemorial custom to attend the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in the City on 9 November.* Under the circumstances – the glass windows of the great houses being a particular hazard – the Government advised the King not to attend.

  This direct obeisance to popular violence was hailed for what it was by Francis Place: ‘This is the first time, observe, that apprehension of violence by the people against all administration has induced them openly to change their plan of proceeding.’ And Place went further – just as Wellington had done. ‘This is the first step of the BRITISH REVOLUTION,’ he wrote.31 By 7 November the theatres were closed for ‘very fear’; in the commercial world, the jewellers and silversmiths shut up shop and sent their goods to the banks while the merchants barricaded their warehouses. Consols (consolidated annuities) were a redeemable government stock set up in 1751 whose price was an important indication of how the stability of the State was regarded. After Wellington’s speech they fell sharply. In Europe – to the annoyance of the English – there was publicly expressed wonder (which was certainly imbued with Schadenfreude, given the recent revolutions there) that the King of England could not venture out in his own capital to dine with the Lord Mayor. In the meantime the Birmingham Political Union under Attwood’s leadership petitioned the King to dismiss his Ministers.

  As Wellington’s totally unexpected, rigorous speech crystallized certain wavering attitudes concerning Reform – the Huskissonite Tories found themselves in alliance with the Whigs – so the unlooked-for cancellation of a very public occasion confronted the ruling classes with the possibility, however remote, of losing control. Nowhere was this felt more strongly than in St James’s Palace, where the King and Queen resided – the frugal William IV regarding Buckingham Palace as too expensive. Mrs Arbuthnot reported that the King was ‘very much frightened, the Queen cries half the day with fright’. This robustly Tory lady added in her passionate style: ‘And all about nothing.’ These violent people did not want Reform; ‘what they want is plunder’ or, to put it bluntly, ‘those who have nothing want the property of those who have something’. The faithful acolyte then summed up the great Duke’s point of view succinctly: Wellington felt that the beginning of Reform was the beginning of Revolution.32

  Wellington himself remained characteristically calm, telling the Knight of Kerry crisply on 6 November that he did not have the leisure to discuss parliamentary Reform; at the same time strict precautions were taken at his splendid London residence, Apsley House, with its many windows facing Hyde Park. Armed men were stationed at the more vulnerable windows such as the Duchess’s bathroom and the Duke’s bedroom. Instructions were clear: no one was to fire unless the gates were actually broken open and an intruder entered the garden over the railings. Wellington also bore with his usual contemptuous equanimity the jeers of the crowd, and shouts of ‘No Polignac’ – a reference to the French Prime Minister of the recently departed government. He told Princess Lieven ‘that Reform could no more be carried without him than the Catholic Question; that he would have nothing to do with it, and consequently that nothing would be done’. Grey in turn commented to the Princess on the ‘blind presumption of the man’.33

  Obviously such a situation could not long obtain, with Hunt and Cobbett addressing the crowds at the Rotunda at Blackfriars Bridge – a famous Radical meeting place – ‘in the most seditious manner’. On 9 November a large mob paraded in the City, went on to Temple Bar and, armed with wood taken from a convenient fence in Chancery Lane, proceeded to beat the police with gusto. The police regrouped and, collecting more men, beat them back. This particular episode of rioting ended without fatal injuries – but with many broken heads. Around the House of Lords itself there were cries of ‘No Tyrants!’ Of course on paper all the strength was with the military: Harriet Granville, the Whig hostess, heard that when a member of the crowd shouted ‘Liberty or Death!’ at a soldier, he replied with menace: ‘I am very sorry I cannot give you Liberty, but I can give you Death if you like it at this very moment.’34 And that was certainly true enough. But the balance was shifting.

  There was an increasing number of liberal-minded Tories.* A significant intervention in the House of Lords came from the Duke of Richmond on 8 November. This Tory grandee had a rich country life on his Goodwood Estates, where he dispensed princely hospitality and was celebrated for the breed of sheep which he had made the pride of the Sussex downs; his racing interests were crowned by his Stewardship of the Jockey Club. Richmond, a man of fine appearance, was ‘personally liked’ according to Greville (even if his intelligence was not rated very highly). Regardless of this possible defect, he struck another contemporary as the finest specimen of the purely English nobleman that he had ever met.35

  Descended from Charles II via a royal mistress, Richmond had been a brave soldier, ADC to Wellington in the Peninsular War and present at Waterloo; he had also been MP for Chichester for seven years before succeeding to his father’s dukedom. He was professedly anti-Catholic (he was Provincial Grand Master of the Freemasons from 1819 onwards) and had left the Tory Party in protest against Catholic Emancipation. To him, however, Reform was a very different issue.

  Now Richmond responded robustly to the Ultra Tory Marquess of Londonderry (a famously splenetic orator in his party’s cause): ‘he believed, when the hour of danger came, that the people would rally round the Throne’, but the only way to bring about that surge of support was to form a government which really possessed their confidence. If that were achieved ‘he would stake his character and his very existence – that t
he Sovereign might go as he pleased into the heart of his City of London without the assistance of police or the protection of guards, and be borne along amid the joyous cheers of a loving and delighted people’. As to Reform: he was no friend to it and would be last to yield to the clamours of the mob; but he agreed with those who thought that some Reform was necessary, and he was prepared to concede the demands of the people.36 Richmond, by implication, was already drawing an important distinction between the ‘mob’, a hateful revolutionary lot, probably drunk, certainly violent, and ‘the people’ who had certain not unreasonable needs.

  On this same day there was a markedly intemperate debate in the House of Commons. Lord Althorp, who had recently been chosen as the leader of the Whigs there, described the cancellation of the royal visit as ‘one of the most extraordinary and alarming events he had known’. Brougham spoke, probably with more truth, of ‘the most awful mercantile inconvenience’. For the Government, Peel aimed to chill the blood as he described the thousands of handbills which had been circulated with inflammatory messages. One, calling for ‘Liberty or Death!’, was signed by ‘An Englishman calling for an armed response’. Another reported that a thousand cutlasses had been removed from the Tower for the use of PEEL’S BLOODY GANG and urged all London to come armed for a meeting on Tuesday.37

  Then Peel moved from the general to the particular. He read aloud an anonymous letter to Wellington foretelling attacks on ‘your Grace’s person’; at which there was cheering and laughter from the Opposition benches. ‘Good God! a sarcastic cheer!’ said Peel, ‘and from an officer in the army too’ – the reference was to a Colonel Davies, whose cheering had been particularly loud. Davies later leapt to his feet to explain the cheer. Impudently, he suggested that he had cheered out of sheer relief at finding that it was the unpopularity of Wellington, not that of the King, which had caused the cancellation. Was it really the Prime Minister’s intention, he asked, to bring down the King’s popularity to the same level as his own? Sir James Graham hammered in the Whig message when he pointed out that only a week previously the King had gone to the theatre without any problem; it was Wellington’s declaration against Reform which had started it all. In short, this declaration had made him ‘the most unpopular Minister that was ever known in England’.