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

by Antonia Fraser

  In short, the Constitution held that the creation of peers was a royal prerogative; less clear was the part that ministerial advice should play, and whether this advice was in itself mandatory for the monarch to take. The relatively small number of twelve was also significant and presumably influenced Grey when he had made a reference to it in July. Although in theory a vastly bigger number must also be covered by the royal prerogative, in practice an influx of, say, forty or fifty peers at one go, as the Radicals cheerfully demanded, would have the effect of transforming the House of Lords. And, incidentally, who were these new peers to be?

  There was an obvious difference between the eldest sons of existing peers – many of whom, sitting in the House of Commons under their courtesy titles, were destined to inherit peerages sooner or later – and actual commoners. The first category was infinitely preferable to those who felt strongly on the subject of the caste: it enlarged the Government majority but did not in effect enlarge the aristocracy. One obvious example whose name was mentioned in this connection was the Marquess of Blandford, heir to the Dukedom of Marlborough, who had favoured Reform as a way to combat the evil effects of Catholic Emancipation, voting with the Government on 22 March 1831. (He said later that he had rejected the possibility.)4

  Similarly, giving certain Irish or Scottish peers – such as Lord Palmerston – the right to sit in the British House of Lords, hitherto denied them, did not actually enlarge the aristocracy. There was a further possibility: the granting of peerages to older men without children (who could be trusted not to beget them in the future) would also leave the aristocracy untouched in the future. This enabled Lord Holland to make one of his jokes: ‘I shall tell the candidates for peerages to imitate the housemaid who enhanced her qualifications for the job: “My Lord, besides all this I’m a barrener” – since many [new barons] are to be barren with an “e” as well as an “o”.’5

  Of course it was not to be expected that, in an age when satire was a popular recreation, witticisms on the subject of the new peers should be excepted. There was for example a story that one lord had simply nominated a waiter at White’s Club – the only problem being that he didn’t know the waiter’s name. The seventy-five-year-old Lord Essex had been one of the ‘beaux of that day’ – the day being pre-revolutionary France, where he had known Marie Antoinette; he was famous for having his hair magnificently coiffed in Paris for a party, travelling all the way back to London with his head ‘in a forced position’, and then dazzling the English capital once again with the same coiffure. Now he suggested that the King ought to stop at the first stand of hackney coaches in Piccadilly and make all the coachmen in succession peers until the number was filled up.6

  In answer to Grey’s question on 18 December, important differences of opinion on this potentially vital subject began to emerge in the Cabinet.7 Lord Brougham was in fine bombastic form as he summed up both sides of the question. Although, after a long speech, he finally came down on the side of ‘a very large increase in the Lords’ as opposed to the loss of the Bill, he was felt by some to have spent too much time on the objections to an increase, even exaggerating them; so Brougham, as ever, managed to be both helpful and unhelpful in the same swoop of eloquence. What did emerge was the fact that a very large creation would have the counter-effect of alienating some peers who had hitherto been friendly to the Bill.

  Both the Marquess of Lansdowne and the Duke of Richmond deprecated ‘most earnestly’ what they termed the ‘destruction’ of the House of Lords. It was an unpleasant fact that King Louis-Philippe had abolished the hereditary upper house in France late in 1831. Such an event across the Channel could not help evoking a kind of general dread of change regarding hereditary legislature in England, in case here also it all went too far, too fast. Lord Palmerston took a different line. Rather than endorse creation, he favoured indirect concessions over parts of the Bill: the Government would accept having ‘obnoxious’ changes forced upon them in Committee if in return the vote in favour on the second reading would be guaranteed.

  Lord Holland, as ever of a pragmatic turn of mind, suggested that the right course was to demand the creation of a few peers, in order to demonstrate their power with the King; it might also persuade those who were totally averse to any large increase on constitutional grounds that acceptance of the Bill was the least bad alternative. The Duke of Richmond then admitted that the Archbishop of Canterbury – ‘if convinced we would make peers’ – might prefer to lead his fellow prelates into voting for the Bill, rather than accept a large increase.

  Vacillation was one characteristic of the Prime Minister that Lord Grey’s critics often commented upon when his behaviour did not suit their own purposes (of course, apparent indecision was also a useful weapon of statesmanship). On this occasion Grey could certainly be forgiven, in view of the divided views of the Cabinet, in saying that he referred the question to them for their further consideration. It was left to Lord Durham, mercifully in a less combative mood – although he did still manage to show ‘asperity’ towards Palmerston – to sum up the three possibilities: whether to make peers sufficient to carry the Bill; whether to create a small batch with a view to avoiding the first option; or whether to trust to ‘modifications, arrangements and understandings’ in order to secure a majority in the Lords. Durham seemed to grow in belligerence once more as he contemplated this third option, which he described as ‘neither reconcileable to honour or prudence, an evasion of Lord Grey’s pledge’ and furthermore an incitement to defeat. He declared that he himself (and surely others) would actually vote against this Bill, ‘so mutilated and the offspring of such compromise and contrivances’.

  Later Holland visited Grey in the bosom of his beloved family at his southern retreat of East Sheen; here Grey was always at his most ‘natural and amiable’. The Prime Minister confided to him that Durham’s temper was often more of a trial to him than any public or private grievances whatsoever; all the same Holland found Grey’s desire to gratify his daughter Louisa Durham, the bereaved mother, very touching. Nevertheless, with whatever reluctance, Grey still believed that the creation of peers was a necessity. And Holland was relieved to find that Lady Grey, who in her quiet way had great influence with her husband, was manifestly for a vigorous measure rather than a second defeat.8

  It was a reminder of the troubles of the wider world that, at that late December meeting, the Cabinet had passed from Reform to discussing events in Ireland. Only the day before Lord Grey had had to inform the King of ‘an affray’ in Kilkenny on account of tithes: the chief constable and sixteen police were killed ‘and only three or four of the mob’.9 The police were said to have been attacked in a road with high banks by about 2,000 people armed with pitchforks and stones, who rushed them before they could fire more than a few shots; this incident demonstrated that the apparent unassailable advantage of firepower did not always prevail where the other side had numbers, surprise and ferocity on their side. Now Stanley, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, confirmed the increasing violence to the Cabinet. There were calls, he said, not so much for reform of Parliament as for repeal of the Union which had subsumed the Irish Parliament into the English one thirty years earlier. As ever, agitation was met by counter-agitation. So Stanley also commented on the ‘no less violent and factious’ combinations of the Orangemen and Brunswickers ‘on the pretence of protecting the Protestant Church’.

  Throughout the following months, as the future of the English – or one should say British – Parliament was being decided in a series of intricate conspiracies, the spectre of insurrection in Ireland stalked the Government’s imagination, with the King at least believing that O’Connell was ‘stirring the fire’. William IV feared that more troops would be needed in Ireland since the example of violence, especially if it has been successful, was always contagious in that ‘inflammable population’. Meanwhile the riots in England and Scotland continued; here was no nationalist agenda but demands for bread and jobs – and Reform. In the el
oquent words of Macaulay: ‘the far-spreading light of midnight fires, and the outrages of incendiaries have all but too often indicated wretchedness and despair, starvation and daring recklessness’.10 It was the potential recklessness of those who had nothing to lose which perturbed both sides in the debate on Reform.

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  On 2 January 1832 a long Cabinet meeting took place at which Grey set forth what he called ‘the great question of the day’ by reading three letters.11 Two, from Lord Brougham, painted ‘in strong language’ the need for creation, ten or twelve peers acting as ‘a demonstration of our power and the King’s determination to support us’. The third letter was from Thomas Coke, MP for Norfolk since 1807, who described himself with some justice as ‘a very old reformer’; he was now seventy-eight and in the old days had been a strong supporter of Charles James Fox; he continued to correspond with Lafayette as a fellow ‘Patriot’. Coke was a fervent Whig and an equally zealous improver of his agricultural estates centred on Holkham. As the Duke of Bedford once said to him, at Woburn and Holkham they were not plagued by demands for lower rentals: ‘The reason is simple; neither you nor I screw our tenants up to high rents which they are unable to bear.’12 Grey acknowledged Coke’s distinguished philanthropic history when he read his letter aloud to the Cabinet; the veteran reformer called strongly for creation in accordance with the ‘earnest expectations and wishes’ of the people of Norfolk.

  Yet Grey himself continued to express openly his reluctance for such an extreme measure. It was only the conviction that ‘yet greater calamities’ would follow that persuaded him. And it was the obvious sincerity of this position that would help Grey in his relations with William IV, when he went down to Brighton the next day for the crucial meeting. Grey had the backing of the Cabinet to tell the King that they wanted a ‘demonstration’ of his confidence – demonstration was thought to be a ‘very serviceable’ phrase. But by no means could the Prime Minister be held to represent any kind of ardent anti-monarchical force. There were those who argued for Reform just because it was ‘subversive of aristocracy, favourable to democracy [fearsome word] and partaking of a revolutionary character’ – as the Marquess of Lansdowne had put it in Cabinet. Grey was evidently not one of them. He brought to his beleaguered Sovereign something more convincing: the belief of an honest man that worse, much worse, would follow if the King did not pledge creation.

  The meeting on the morning of 4 January was extremely long; the King had been prepared for it not only by previous correspondence but by a preliminary talk the evening before. According to Grey’s minute of the conversation, written afterwards and passed to the King, he began by outlining how little security the Government had for believing they would carry the Bill, despite the increased majority in the House of Commons and the general expectation.13 It was impossible therefore to delay looking to ‘the fearful alternative’ which was thus forced upon their consideration. Either they would face all the danger attendant upon the loss of the Bill or they must prevent such a defeat ‘by use of the means which the prerogative of the Crown afforded’ for just such an emergency: Grey meant, of course, the creation of peers.

  William IV listened to it all ‘with the greatest attention and with evident anxiety’. Naturally he was surrounded at Brighton by his large, loving and vociferous family headed by Queen Adelaide, and the Tory lords who were their friends; but he, like his Prime Minister, was an honest man struggling to do his best in the situation in which he found himself, even if he was not absolutely sure what that situation was. In reply William stressed his ‘undiminished’ concern about creation and then concentrated on the vexed question of who these putative new peers might be. Above all, the King wanted to change the permanent character of the House of Lords as little as possible – which meant in effect heirs to peerages, Irish peers and those ‘barreners’, as Lord Holland put it, who could be relied on not to enlarge the ranks of the Lords for more than one generation. Grey, by his own account, conceded to all this but did add that ‘some creations of Commoners of high character and great property’ might be desirable, but once again limited so as not to pillage the House of Commons unduly.

  Grey ended by expressing the hope that ‘a first partial creation’ might produce the effect which would obviate a subsequent addition. Once again William IV listened ‘most graciously’; then reiterated his point about the need to avoid augmenting the peerage. Suddenly he became more animated: ‘His Majesty added that he trusted it would not be proposed to raise to the Peerage any of those who had been forward in agitating the country, as nothing could induce him to consent to the advancement of persons of that description.’ He went on to express the greatest anxiety about the state of the country, trusting there would be no further encroachments tending to diminish ‘the necessary power of the Government’. And he asked to see an account of their conversation in writing.

  When he did so, the King acknowledged its ‘perfect accuracy’.14 But he made it clear that he did not consider himself pledged at this point to the adoption of any proposal or suggestion; for that he would need a more formal minute of the Cabinet. And he proceeded to declare it as a condition inseparable – his italics – to any proposal of creation, that the peers chosen should be exclusively – his italics again – eldest sons or collateral heirs to peerages where there was no direct heir. (There were two or possibly three exceptions of named men who had earlier been considered for coronation peerages.) He did not believe that even Irish or Scotch peers were necessary, looking at the lists submitted, although he would not actually have objected to them.

  At the same time the King was positively against any policy of a partial creation, leading to a further measure: if twenty-one was the desired number, it must be twenty-one now ‘instead of feeling the pulse and beating about the bush’. Having made it clear that his acquiescence was subject to the exclusion of all creations except those specified, William signed off with a renewed admonition about not rewarding the agitators.

  His last paragraph was positively apocalyptic about the state of the country. This was a time of great peril, ‘when the overthrow of all legitimate authority, the destruction of the ancient institutions, of social order, and of every gradation and link of society are threatened, when a revolutionary and demoralizing spirit is making frightful strides, when a poisonous press, almost unchecked, guides, excites and at the same time controls public opinion’. So the King hoped that, once Reform was happily settled, his Government would see to it that there was no further encroachment from the House of Commons, and above all no further diminution of the authority, influence and dignity of the Crown. He was not conscious of having shown any tendency towards an extravagant display of dignity and splendour – in contrast to the previous reign, was implied – or the exercise of despotic and arbitrary power. Therefore the various encroachments must be ascribed to something the King once again italicized: that growing fancy for liberalism. However fair its appearance, in itself it threatened the Constitution and form of government ‘under which this country has so long prospered’.

  On paper Lord Grey now had some kind of grudging royal assurance concerning creation, although it was so hedged around with conditions about the people suitable to be ennobled that it was doubtful if any large-scale creation would be possible. There were also disquieting clues to certain growing preoccupations of the Sovereign: that reference to a poisonous press, for example. Like many other royalties before him – notably Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette – the King was beginning to be stung by the gadflies.

  In due course the official minute from the Cabinet was submitted.15 With ‘deep pain’ the Cabinet confessed that it could have no confidence in securing a majority in the House of Lords. In such an extreme case, therefore, they believed that the exercise of the King’s prerogative of creation could be justified. While paying lip-service to the King’s known disinclination to augment the peerage in the long term, the Cabinet minute did not commit to any particular number until the Government s
hould have received more accurate information about the state of opinion, as the Bill continued to go through the Commons.

  The King replied at length on 15 January.16 Many old arguments were rehearsed. He also allowed himself to compare the creation of peers at the Government’s instigation for the avowed purpose of obtaining a majority in the House of Lords to the use of nomination, ‘vulgarly called rotten boroughs’. Yet Reform was against this in principle. In both cases ‘the independent voice’ was being overpowered. Nevertheless there was a crucial passage buried in the extensive text, the kernel of the nut which the Cabinet sought. If necessary, the King would not deny to his Ministers the power of ‘acting at once up to the full exigency of the case’ – here he was ostensibly quoting from the Cabinet minute, but by inserting the word ‘full’, absent in the original, had inadvertently strengthened it.

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  Parliament reconvened on 17 January and then went into Committee. Before it did so, in view of the King’s recent explosion on the subject of dignity and splendour, it was ironic that a lively debate took place over public expenditure on Buckingham Palace – ironic because King William, in his genuinely frugal way, had strongly objected to the proposal to move the royal residence there, and preferred to stay in St James’s Palace.

  The history of Buckingham Palace hitherto was not an encouraging one to a lover of economical living. Buckingham House had originally been built for the Duke of that name at the beginning of the eighteenth century; it was then altered into a private residence for Queen Charlotte, where most of her fifteen children were born, and known as the Queen’s House. The transformation to a palace was, characteristically, the inspiration of George IV, with John Nash as his architect; Nash, however, was actually sacked for extravagance in 1829 and Edward Blore was substituted. Gamely, William IV continued to resist the move; in 1831 he hopefully suggested that 1,500 Foot Guards in need of a new home should have Buckingham Palace adapted to a barracks, only to have Lord Grey condemn that as too expensive.*