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

by Antonia Fraser

  In the meantime the importance of what was happening in the Lords was signified by ‘a somewhat unusual circumstance’, in the discreet terminology of Hansard. It had been usual for one or two, even as many as half a dozen peeresses, escaping the uncomfortable Ventilator above, to attend the actual Chamber, in a small part of the space below the bar, protected and screened by a curtain. But now a considerable number of peeresses, their daughters and relations, attended every evening, occupying a considerable portion of the space below the Bar, where chairs were placed for them. (The young Gladstone, who noted this phenomenon, thought Lady Grey the most beautiful of them all.) So far, so good but, ‘as might perhaps be expected’ went on Hansard, ‘they displayed all the enthusiastic ardour of the sex in sympathy with the sentiments of different speakers’.24

  As the atmosphere in the House of Lords came closer to that of Newhall Hill than might have been expected, there was at least one celebrated male visitor who knew how to behave: the ‘Hindoo’ Rammohun Roy occupying the space around the throne with Members of the House of Commons. Lord Ellenborough, who met him at dinner with the Director of the East India Company, noted in his Diary with innate English condescension that Roy spoke English well but slowly: ‘He is great for an Indian, I dare say, but he would be nothing particular as an European.’25 Roy was in fact more accurately a distinguished social and religious reformer who had challenged traditional Hindu culture (calling, for example, for the abolition of suttee); he was thus an appropriate witness to the English attempts to set their own house in order.

  He listened to Lord Wharncliffe among others, who in effect led for the Opposition, since the Duke of Wellington’s position was inevitably compromised by that blunt declaration against any Reform in the autumn of 1830. Wharncliffe took his stand on the apparent inflexibility of the Government. Why, he asked, were they to accept this particular measure and no other, and to declare that acceptance of the whole measure on the second reading? There was a slight kerfuffle in the Lords when Wharncliffe’s method of dealing with the Bill was criticized. But in the end Wharncliffe made it quite clear: ‘his great object was to have this Bill rejected’.

  The next day the Earl of Harrowby accused Grey of trying to ‘overawe’ the House with threats as to what would happen if they did not pass the Bill. But he did admit to regretting Wellington’s speech ‘because it induced the country to think that no alteration would be paid to his wishes for a rational, moderate and well-tempered Reform’. Like Wharncliffe, Harrowby appeared to be hinting at a possibility of compromise if something ‘rational’ was proposed. This was more than their titular leader did; Wellington was unswerving when he called the Bill ‘the most considerable alteration or change ever proposed’. It was indeed ‘Radical Reform rather than Reform of any other description’.

  On 5 October one Tory peer gave vent to a sentiment which under the circumstances was peculiarly optimistic: the Earl of Dudley declared that the Tories were entitled to be recognized as ‘the true friends of order and liberty in future ages, and draw down on their memory the gratitude of the country’. The Marquess of Londonderry on the other hand struck a less elevated party political note. ‘The details of the Bill,’ he declared, ‘were most ingeniously devised for the great object of its framers, that Whig supremacy should be eternal.’ The Earl of Carnarvon chose to let rip with a colourful description of His Majesty’s Ministers putting out to sea, in spite of all the dangers and perils with which their journey had been threatened. Subsequently they would cling to the sinking Ship of State till it went down, ‘not as the Royal Standard which made her the envy and admiration of all beholders’, nor as the rudder which had made her victorious in many battles, but ‘they would cling to her as barnacles, yes, like barnacles to a vessel to impede her navigation . . . until she sank in depths unfathomable never to rise again’.

  On Friday 7 October, the last full day of the debate, the veteran High Tory the Earl of Eldon began by referring to his feelings of infirmity – he was eighty and there were courteous requests to him to speak up – but announced that he would not go to his grave without giving his opinion that this ‘most destructive measure’ was calculated to reduce the country, ‘which has hitherto been the most glorious of all nations upon earth, to that of misery which now afflicts all other countries in the world’.26

  The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley, rose to his feet very late and cut short his speech for this reason: but its message was nonetheless clear – all the more so because he was the only prelate who spoke and, by virtue of his revered position, was deemed to speak for the clergy as a whole. He described the Bill as ‘mischievous in its tendency’ and extremely dangerous to the fabric of the Constitution. His hope for ‘an union of men of all parties’ in the future which would ‘tranquillize’ fears of agitation, which even he agreed might seem ‘chimerical and futile’, was sufficiently vague to please neither side while doing nothing concrete for the reputation of the Church of England.

  Of all the speeches, there was no doubt that Brougham’s extraordinary peroration on the final day eclipsed all others.27 It did so partly due to his amazing eloquence, but partly, it has to be said, because of the eccentricity of his behaviour. His gestures, his craggy figure with the famous, much-caricatured bottle-nose – and perhaps the allusion to a bottle was justified – were in themselves almost as persuasive as his words. From the beginning, Brougham declared the stakes to be high, even the highest. He was, he said, ‘now standing with your Lordships on the brink of the most momentous decision that ever human assembly came to at any period of the world’. There was then a long rhetorical digression as to how he would have prepared himself ‘every day and every hour’ of his life, if he had ever known he would bear such a responsibility as had now fallen to him. It was the next loosing of the riptide which only Brougham could have carried off.

  The Lord Chancellor chose to focus on Lord Wharncliffe, a man in vain pursuit of some people, any people who hated Reform: ‘Whither shall he go – what street shall he enter – in what alley shall he take refuge – since the inhabitants of every street, and lane, and alley, feel it necessary in self-defence, to become signers and petitioners as soon as he makes an appearance among them.’ (This was a reference to Lord Wharncliffe’s ill-fated reporting of Bond Street shopkeepers as being anti-Reform, at which point they immediately came up with a petition in favour.) ‘If, harassed by Reformers on land, my noble friend goes down to the water, there one thousand Reformers greet him.’ (Brougham had presented petitions from Lambeth that day.) ‘If he were to take a Hackney-coach, the very coachman and their attendants would feel it their duty to assemble and petition.’ Brougham went on in full flow: ‘Wherever there is a street, an alley, a passage, nay a river, a wherry. . . .’ The unfortunate Lord Wharncliffe could of course try the south side of Berkeley Square, where he will wander ‘remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow’ – the quotation was from Oliver Goldsmith’s poem The Traveller – for there at least there were no inhabitants and thus no friends of the Bill to be found. Elsewhere, wherever he went, he would be pursued by cries of ‘Petition! Petition! The Bill! The Bill!’ In a happy touch, Brougham suggested that even in country inns Wharncliffe would not be safe, since the landlords would take care that the waiters who served him were reformers in disguise.

  In conclusion Brougham struck a majestic note of warning: ‘Raise not the spirit of a peace-loving but determined people – alienate not the affections of a great empire from your body. As your friend, as the friend of my country, as the servant of my sovereign, I counsel you . . . For all these reasons, I pray and beseech you not to reject this Bill’ – there were cheers at this point – ‘I call upon you by all that you hold most dear, by all that binds every one of us to our common order and our common country – unless, indeed, you are prepared to say that you will admit of no reform, that you are resolved against all change, for in that case opposition would at least be consistent – I beseech you, I solemnly adjure you, yes,
even on bended knees, my lords’ – here, according to The Times, Brougham slightly bent his knee upon the Woolsack – ‘I implore you not to reject this Bill.’ There followed a prolonged and heartfelt bout of Whig cheering.

  Afterwards, there was some controversy about that modest genuflection in the direction of the Woolsack as reported by Brougham’s ally The Times. Was it in fact an involuntary fall, not a genuflection at all? There was obviously some need to explain the incident. Lord Lyndhurst, he who had been put aside as a possible Lord Chancellor (although a Tory) in favour of Brougham, had this to say: ‘He continued some time as if in prayer; but his friends, alarmed for him, lest he should be suffering from the effects of the mulled port he had demonstrably been imbibing, picked him up and replaced him safely on the woolsack.’28

  There was certainly evidence that Brougham drank. Edward Littleton MP, an eyewitness who described the speech as ‘one of the most splendid conceivable – flaming with wit and irony and eloquence, and served with argument and admonition to a degree that made one tremble’ – did not mention the fall. But he did record that in the course of a speech which was over three hours long, Brougham drank three immense soda water bottles full of hot negus (sweetened wine and water); at one point, getting agitated when he thought his refreshment was in danger from Lord Bathurst sitting next to it, he proceeded to remove the bottle to his own side amid some laughter. Lord Grey and Lord Holland, however, both assured Althorp that as a feat Brougham’s speech was ‘superhuman’, uniting the excellences of the ancient with those of modern oratory.29

  Lord Grey himself, speaking again at five o’clock in the morning shortly before the vote, struck rather a different note. ‘I had no desire for place,’ he said, ‘and it was not sought after by me.’ Only his sense of duty made him delve back into a world so inimicable to his whole being: ‘I am fond of retirement and domestic life and I lived happy and content in the bosom of my family . . . What but a sense of duty could have induced me to plunge into all the difficulties, not unforeseen, of my present situation.’ And he quoted from Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, written 150 years earlier at the time of the Exclusion Crisis, with Shaftesbury as Achitophel and Monmouth as Absalom:

  What else could tempt me on these stormy seas . . .

  Bankrupt of life yet prodigal of ease

  So the House proceeded to the division. Lord Campbell recalled afterwards that at this point Grey was ‘tranquil and smiling as if they had been dividing on a road Bill’. Mrs Arbuthnot, on the other hand, heard that he ‘vapoured’ – which was not quite the same thing.30 At six-thirty in the morning the Government was defeated by a majority of 41 against the Bill: it was noteworthy that twenty-one bishops out of twenty-three voted against it. And the list of Not Contents was headed by two royal Dukes, Cumberland and Gloucester.

  Perhaps it was the exhaustion of the night, the lateness of the hour. Sir Denis Le Marchant reflected that there was no sense within the House that a measure was being decided which might cause the land to be deluged in blood. Very different was the reaction of those, the thousands, the hundreds of thousands dedicated to the cause, who were outside. ‘What will the Lords do?’ That had been the question on every lip when friend met friend for several months, according to Alexander Somerville, the Scottish working man turned soldier. Now ‘expressions of disappointment and indignation arose loudly, and ran swiftly through every street in London, and with every mail back out of it; along every turnpike road; into every bye-path in the kingdom and almost to every hearth, save in the houses of the fractional minority of the population, the anti-reformers.’31 There was a feeling of thunder in the air.

  Lord Althorp wrote to his father, Lord Spencer, in a spirit of despair: ‘I think Reform will never pass the House of Lords, unless it is brought forward by its enemies’, as Catholic Emancipation had been. In Paris, Harriet Granville, wife of the British Ambassador and a key figure in the new generation of the Whig cousinage, was quite clear about what the House of Lords had done. ‘They have made their own 25 July,’ she wrote, referring to the French Revolution – and the news made her shudder.32

  * This connection makes for an interesting historical link: the youthful Grey had listened to Pitt the Younger as Prime Minister when he was first in Parliament in 1786; Gladstone’s last premiership ended in 1894.

  * Such figures are a perpetual subject of debate between the demonstrators and the demonstrated-against; according to the formula of an experienced magistrate in Manchester, cited by one authority, under these circumstances 6,000–7,000 persons fitted to an acre. The peculiar geography of this historic place, rising ground virtually in the midst of a shopping district, can still be seen today, although unmarked by any memorial.21

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHAT HAVE THE LORDS DONE?

  ‘What have the Lords done? The answer is that they have done what they can never undo. The House of Lords will never again be on the same foundations in the confidence of the people’ –

  The Times leader, 10 October 1831

  On 8 October the ‘frightful majority’ of 41 against Reform in the Lords was published in the Sun newspaper, fringed in black. At the same time it was known that Lord Grey had told the King that he would not resign. A friend of Francis Place named John Powell, an attorney’s clerk who was subsequently sub-editor of the Morning Chronicle, happened to take a steamer to Gravesend and Chatham that morning. He wrote an account of events for Place two years later: ‘Never shall I forget the excitement that prevailed in the breast of everyone’ when the black-fringed newspaper was seen in his hands. The passengers rushed towards him in order to hear an authentic account of what had happened. Powell was instantly mounted on a chair and forced to read aloud the whole debate, while all around him on board ship the bishops were the subject of ‘fearful’ denunciations. When Powell reached Grey’s ‘noble declaration’ that he would not give up so long as he could be of service to his King and his country – in short, the Government was not going to resign – ‘the very shores of old Father Thames reechoed the reiterated shouts of applause’.1

  Unsurprisingly, there were crowds of angry ‘hooters’ outside the House of Lords itself; prominent Ultra Tories like Lord Dudley (who had already boarded up his windows) found members of the mob trying to grab the reins of his horse, until the spirited steed, named Paris, gave a great leap and dispersed them. The remaining windows of that familiar target, Lord Londonderry, were broken, as were those of the Duke of Newcastle. The hated Duke of Cumberland was pelted with mud which totally covered his body.

  In the provinces the bad news spread, and with the news came an ugly reaction, as incredulity and dismay gave way to physical manifestations of disgust. If Lord Holland was right, and the Reform Bill was not the cause of the danger – unemployment, low wages, general economic distress were fundamentals in the country – then certainly the prompt passing of the Bill had been the best hope of allaying it. Late at night on Saturday 8 October, a large mob came from Derby to the home of William Mundy, a local dignitary, and his wife Harriot; the household was in bed. The mob had just heard of the rejection of the Bill by the Lords. Now they surrounded the house, as Harriot Mundy wrote to a friend in a panic at eight o’clock the next morning, ‘shouting and hallooing and smashed all our windows and broke in many doors and frames of windows’. Luckily quite a lot of manservants were in the house, and troops could be dispatched from Nottingham, a mere sixteen miles away. Mrs Mundy reported later: ‘I have been four nights without undressing.’ Nearer Nottingham at Colwick, a Mr Musters was not quite so lucky: known to be very unpopular locally, he found his pictures and furniture being carried out and burnt. Mrs Musters, her daughter and her mother-in-law, who was sick in bed, had to be smuggled out and laid down under the bushes.2

  Significantly, popular acclaim for the monarchy was beginning to fray at the edges, despite the declared loyalty of the middle classes. The Poor Man’s Guardian had been founded in July by Henry Hetherington, the son of a London tail
or, who had become an apprentice printer at the age of thirteen at Hansard’s printing works. Influenced by the reforming ideas of Robert Owen, he was responsible for a series of Radical newspapers including the Penny Papers for the People of 1830. Such a penny newspaper, paying no stamp tax, and selling in tens of thousands, was unabashedly matching popular will against the law.3

  On 15 October the Poor Man’s Guardian issued an article headed WHAT WILL WILLIAM GUELPH DO? – the crude use of the surname was hardly a promising start.4 The paper then proceeded to call for the creation of peers, at least 100 of them, before pointing out that this watered-down peerage would constitute such ‘paltry, common trash’ that the people would no longer be at all afraid of them. As for William Guelph, a man ‘who never did and never could think for himself’, he probably needed his friends to point out that if the peerage went, the King would be next. ‘If our advice is any use to him, we are but a Job’s comforter; he cannot save himself; he must go sooner or later; but he may go with a good grace or a bad one: so let him do more than all his predecessors together, some honest work before he goes.’ The solution of the Poor Man’s Guardian was to dispense with the bishops altogether, and as for the noble Lords, why not enable them to carry the Bill by creating every £10 householder a peer . . .