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

by Antonia Fraser

  The focus of political attention now passed, naturally enough, to the Tories. Was it actually possible that the Duke of Wellington would consent to form a government which would bring about limited Reform? Considering he had spoken publicly of Reform as an evil as recently as 7 May, there must be considerable doubt about the matter. Months before, Lord Althorp had suggested to his father that Reform would only be brought about by their enemies. And there was of course the vital, never-to-be-forgotten precedent of Catholic Emancipation. The Duke had chosen to carry through that measure, as part of his duty to his King and his country: was history about to repeat itself? And yet, if he did not, if Reform was abandoned at this stage, could the country be saved from violent disturbance, not to say uprising?

  Not all the negotiations were with the Tories. Brougham was privately asked by King William to continue as Lord Chancellor; he declined. The King wept but Brougham refused to give way. Then Lord Lyndhurst, the obvious choice to return to the position he had once occupied, suggested on 11 May that there was a condition for his return: Lady Lyndhurst should be received at Court. On the surface an innocuous request, it referred to the fact that the skittish Dolly Lyndhurst was now openly the mistress of Lord Dudley, who presented her with some fine diamonds (which she presumably wished to flaunt at Court). Given Queen Adelaide’s principles, this was a sacrifice on her part, in a cause that she at least felt to be a good one. There was a further mark against Dolly, in the opinion of the Tory ladies at least. She had in the past (to the general fury) exhibited Whig sympathies – if only to include Lord Grey among her admirers. Observers got used to a double act whereby Dolly praised Reform and her husband castigated it, ‘like the old divisions of families in the Civil Wars’, as Greville put it. But perhaps this was all part of the Lyndhurst plan for self-advancement.32

  The key figure after the Iron Duke was, however, not Lyndhurst but Sir Robert Peel; he after all led the Tories in the Commons and would therefore have to guide any limited measure of Reform through that House. This supposed that such a thing was acceptable in any form at all to the Tories and, contrariwise, that the country would accept Reform in a strictly limited version. Yet Peel had told the Tory John Wilson Croker as early as 10 May that he would be reluctant to head any new government because he had sacrificed his own judgement over Catholic Emancipation; he would not now perform ‘the same painful abandonment of opinion’ on the question of Reform. And he talked to Croker of the advantage to the country ‘that public men should maintain a character for consistency and disinterestedness’.33 These were fine words. As opposed to them, it could be argued that what Peel – and Wellington for that matter – had done once, abandon principles, could be done again. But if Peel really did refuse to make a second ‘painful abandonment’ of his convictions, some extraordinary fate might threaten a country already thought by many to be on the verge of revolution.

  Croker, the obdurate Tory, was outspoken in his response to Peel: how Peel’s ‘feeling’ was obscuring his ‘judgement’. He was even more outspoken in his predictions for the future, should the Tories fail to take their current opportunity so that Grey was allowed to return. Croker foresaw ‘the King enslaved, the House of Lords degraded, the Bill passed, the Revolution, I may say, consummated’. Were Peel to allow the King and Constitution to sink under his eyes, without jumping in and trying to save them, his ‘prudence and consistency’ would be called less flattering titles in that ‘black-edged page of history which will record the extinction of the monarchy of England’.

  The Iron Duke himself took a different line. Not for him the heroics – sincere heroics – of Sir Robert Peel. On 10 May he listened to Lyndhurst’s plea: ‘It is our duty to try.’ There was no inconsistency here, by his own standards of behaviour. Wellington announced himself ready to do whatever the King might command him to do. ‘I am as much averse to the Reform as ever I was,’ he declared. But no embarrassment of that kind, no private consideration would prevent him from making every effort ‘to serve the King’.34 It was, in its own way, an honourable position, because it was one that the grand old man had long maintained: his duty to the State, once achieved so triumphantly by force of arms, was now to be rendered by direct service to his Sovereign, and that included forming a government if he was asked to do so.

  Other Tories were less happy at the prospect of bringing about limited measures of Reform, sharing the conscientious objections of Peel rather than the Wellingtonian concept of duty. There was the possibility that the Speaker of the House, a Tory, Charles Manners-Sutton, might prove an acceptable anodyne leader because, by the nature of his office, he was not tarred by the brush of his own anti-Reform declarations. Manners-Sutton was in his early fifties, and since his election in 1817 had proved popular enough as Speaker – a fine, friendly, genial figure, if inclined to pomposity (but that was a forgivable offence in a Speaker). The trouble was that at a crucial meeting of the Tories at Apsley House, Manners-Sutton spent three hours outlining his views on the whole matter at exhaustive and exhausting length. At the end of it, Lyndhurst, never one to flinch from excoriating a rival, flung back his chair and exclaimed that he refused to listen any longer to such ‘a damned tiresome old bitch’.35

  In the meantime the Whigs congregated at their beloved Brooks’s Club in St James’s. Due to the deft handling of Althorp and Stanley, the Whig MPs came to agree that they would permit the incoming – Tory – Ministry to pass the Bill themselves in the Lords, possibly with some additions of their own, and then proceed to defeat the Tories in the House of Commons, which their numbers permitted them to do. In private, Lord Grey was even beginning to believe, wearily, that the passing of the Bill by the Tories was the best thing that could happen to the country. At the same time he doubted whether the Tories could bring it off, and in a depressed communication to Holland on the same Sunday 13 May wrote: ‘Can a new administration be formed? I begin to be afraid that the attempt will fail.’ This want of spirit – after the long fight – was too much for Holland, and with his usual independence of mind he said so. Grey responded by comparing himself to a captive anxious to escape from prison before adding (ironically, in much the same language as Wellington): ‘But I will do my duty.’36

  While the politicians of both parties cogitated, argued, spoke much of duty but gave no appearance of reaching a conclusion, the country at large demonstrated a far more robust attitude. It was on Saturday 12 May that the decision was made in London among the Radicals, led by Francis Place, to attack the soft belly of any government – the finances of the country. Already the crisis was beginning to have the inevitable consequence of a loss of confidence in financial circles. As early as February, powerful financiers had been seeing their own particular kind of sense on the vexed topic of Reform. Charles Arbuthnot reported to the Duke of Wellington that Nathan Rothschild had visited him: ‘He says that among the monied men, there is an alarm lest there should be such opposition to all Reform as would cause commotions. . . .’ These worries among ‘monied men’ took a material form when, between 9 May and 12 May, consols fell from 85 per cent to 83.5 per cent. But in any case, the official historian of the Rothschild family has detected a change in the attitudes of some family members, including Nathan, despite his friendship with Wellington, veering from the Tories towards the Whigs; the Duke’s opposition to Jewish Emancipation may have played some part in this.37

  The meeting held at Francis Place’s house, on Saturday 12 May, included deputies from Birmingham, among them Joseph Parkes.38 This was in theory far from the privileged society of the Rothschilds. Nevertheless, those present were certainly not without connections. There had already been conversations, according to Place, ‘in various parts of the metropolis . . . with merchants, bankers, traders, and Members of Parliament’. There was general perturbation among all of them at ‘the no longer doubted intelligence’ that the King had ordered Wellington to form an administration. Such was the alarm at this prospect that Wellington’s vehement discourse in the Lords
, made only five days previously, had already been reprinted, placarded and distributed – with a caution to the people against letting such a man and his party govern them in the future.

  Now serious consideration was given to what should be done when – for it no longer seemed appropriate to say if – such an administration should be formed. Once again, any kind of violent demonstration was condemned: demonstrations yes, but of the orderly sort which would merely require the presence, not the intervention, of soldiers. (Nevertheless the need to be present would prevent the soldiers from moving about the country to obstruct other demonstrations.) The suggested financial manoeuvre was in a new and different category. In Francis Place’s own words, ‘it was very clearly seen that if a much more open and general run for gold upon the banks, the bankers and the Bank of England could be produced, the embarrassment of the Court and the Duke would be increased.’ In short, if a general panic could be produced, the Duke would inevitably be defeated.

  An agitated and prolonged debate followed with many different suggestions as to how this general panic could be produced – the company included two bankers who, although likely to be ‘inconvenienced greatly’, entered heartily into the spirit of the thing. There were two possibilities. In the first place, such a general panic might prevent the formation of the administration in the first place; secondly, it might speedily bring about the defeat of the new government, if it did come to be formed.

  It was during these discussions that someone had the wit to suggest: ‘we ought to have a placard’. This placard would set forth all the consequences of permitting the Duke to govern the country, and call on the people to take care of themselves by collecting all the ‘hard money’ they could, withdrawing it from savings banks, bankers and from the Bank of England, and then hoarding it. So Joseph Parkes got to work drawing up a placard. Francis Place inspected his labours as he worked. Immediately the strong words ‘WE MUST STOP THE DUKE’ struck Place as containing, dramatically, the whole message they wanted to convey. Place therefore took a large piece of paper and wrote:

  TO STOP THE

  DUKE

  GO FOR

  GOLD

  He then held up the paper and everyone acclaimed it; no more words were necessary. Money was quickly put on the table. The printer offered to work all night, and by Sunday morning six bill-stickers, each with a trusty aide at his side, saw to it that bills were posted all over London. Further parcels of posters were sent off that evening and the next day by coach to every quarter of England and Scotland. It was in this fashion that the poster – celebrated or infamous according to the point of view – came out of a Saturday night meeting in the Radical tailor’s library.

  * The population of England, roughly estimated, was sixteen million at this point.10 The figure of 200,000 adults would therefore be a substantial percentage of this, in excess of the total population of many of England’s rapidly expanding industrial cities. What was unquestionable was that this great sea of people, washing over the sands of Birmingham, was the largest, most impressive demonstration in living memory. The crowd included members of ‘The Sex’, as the female population was termed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PRITHEE RETURN TO ME

  ‘Return, Lord Grey, I prithee return to me;

  Return, Lord Grey, and bring the people with thee!’ –

  ‘Song of The King to Lord Grey’, The Times, May 1832

  Thus Monday 14 May, a week after the double Crisis Day, dawned with revolution in the air, calls for political action, posters everywhere, a run on the bank commencing – and no government as yet in place. The crescendo of attacks on the Queen did not help for stability, either in the minds of the people or, for that matter, in that of her husband. Typically, a bugbear of a paper aptly titled The Satirist; or, the Censor of the Times, issued a long, unpleasant poem on Sunday 13 May entitled ‘The Royal Tabbies’.1 The former Prime Minister was characterized as Grey Tom, ‘a stern and stately cat’ who cleared out every rat from the palace; whereupon the tabbies formed a base intrigue, led by their queen, ‘a German tabby she (as Sour-krout better known)’. In the end the night-time squalling of the tabbies turned the poor King’s brain until he dismissed Grey Tom. ‘O woeful change! . . . This King undid all he had done / And was not worth a Crown.’

  The Satirist in its prose articles on 13 May also questioned the very right of the ‘House of Brunswick’ to occupy the throne, describing their authority as nothing more than that of ‘the poorest sausage-spinner in Germany’. And it went on to point out that a royal house which had been invited onto the throne could also be ‘justifiably and patriotically’ removed from it. Even if it meant that William IV had to ‘take his chop’ with Charles Dix at Holyrood – that is, in exile – ‘we say, let England be free’. And this, the paper indicated, was likely to happen ‘unless he can manfully surmount petticoat influence’. This was strong, unsubtle stuff, and the Tory Lord Stormont duly complained about it all as seditious in the House of Lords – a row which rumbled on, and of course enabled The Satirist enthusiastically to reprint all the material, together with Lord Stormont’s complaints.

  In the meantime the Times leader on 14 May, in a more elegantly literary fashion, made the same point.2 The ‘most regretted change’ which had come about in the King’s mind on the subject of Reform and creation had various causes, but ‘it is asserted on all sides that domestic importunity has been one’. With the help of a ten-line Latin quotation from the Aeneid, citing the woes flowing from an ancient queen’s behaviour, The Times reached the solemn conclusion: ‘A foreigner is no very competent judge of English liberties, and politics are not the proper field for female enterprise and exertion.’

  The reformers outside Parliament were less interested in Court intrigues than in the stark reality of the situation. Attwood had stated it clearly enough: if indeed the House of Lords could make and break governments at will, ‘there was an end of popular power in England, and the spirit of the people would be utterly broken’. How was this so-called popular power to be expressed? Dr James Kay quoted Shelley at a meeting in Rochdale. He was a man who had personal experience of conditions in cotton manufacture and went on to write a book about them which would be quoted by Engels. Here he made a poetic suggestion, less crude than The Satirist’s verses, more contemporary than the classical allusions of The Times.

  Rise like lions after slumber

  In unvanquishable number

  Shake your chains to earth, like dew . . .

  Ye are many – they are few.

  These lines were in fact taken from The Masque of Anarchy which Shelley had written thirteen years earlier following the massacre at Peterloo; the poem had not been published at the time as being too provocative, with its call for a great assembly ‘of the fearless, of the free’, and was only now being printed posthumously under the editorship of Leigh Hunt.3

  The sentiments of the poem were all very well: it was factually true that the people outnumbered their rulers. What was much less clear was how they were to proceed once the chains had been shaken off, like the proverbial dew. Shelley’s poem was in effect advocating passive resistance to violence. In 1832 was it to be revolution indeed? The word, so much dreaded, was used by the opponents of Reform as a nightmare threat of what might happen, but was not yet current among its advocates. Nevertheless, towards the end of his life Earl Russell looked back across a long career to the days when he had been ‘Lord John Reformer’; the only moment of real peril that he could recall was the so-called ‘Days of May’.4

  In the meantime the Duke of Wellington was known to be struggling to carry out the commission given to him by the King when he accepted the resignation of Grey’s Government: Wellington was to try to form an administration which would then provide some measure of Reform. The real problem for Wellington lay not so much in the personnel at his disposal but in the extraordinary nature of the about-turn he was expected to make, at the request of the King. As Holland wrote to Grey on the Su
nday 13 May, if Wellington did move a bill, ‘what is to be our tone? Silence, forbearance? Acquiescence and good wishes mixed with apprehension? Invective? Or ridicule?’ Frankly, Holland felt that ridicule was the most appropriate emotion: ‘for I can scarcely refrain from laughing when I think of a change’ – of policy – ‘beyond any farce, except perhaps a harlequin farce, exhibited in the grave assembly . . . and played by the great hero of the age’.5

  The House of Commons filled up early on Monday 14 May. For all Holland’s notional ridicule, it was assumed by many that the Tories were about to form an administration and that the cheerful ‘new Ministers (expectant)’ would soon be in place. Sir Henry Hardinge, Wellington’s chief supporter there – he who had prophesied the loaded guns next time at the dissolution of Parliament in 1831, and was now a candidate to be Chief Secretary for Ireland – accosted Lord Althorp. He said he hoped that Althorp did not disapprove of Wellington forming an administration to pass a bill (which would not of course be that Bill put forward by the Whigs). Hardinge was too elated at the turn of events to notice Althorp’s ‘cold and unsatisfactory’ answer.6 He was also apparently too dedicated to the cause of Wellington to understand that the mood of the House in general – with its Whig majority – was not one of elation but of disgust.

  The presentation of a petition from the City of London, praying that the House would not vote supplies until the Reform Bill was passed, provided the impetus for a debate of unparalleled rancour. Lord Ebrington rose to describe what was projected by a Tory administration as an ‘act of gross public immorality’ – given Wellington’s unvarnished denunciations of the Bill.7 It was a departure from every principle which had been expressed by the Tories throughout the discussions on the question. There could be no pro-Reform pledge given by Wellington which was stronger than ‘repeated votes . . . speeches . . . solemn protests of an uncompromising hostility’. Wellington was the man who had called down ‘the vengeance of Heaven on the principle of this Bill’. This, from Ebrington, was strong language indeed.