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

by Antonia Fraser

  Return, Lord Grey, I prithee return to me;

  Return, Lord Grey, and bring the people with thee! . . .

  Too much Duke, I find, won’t do, Lord Grey!

  Too much Duke has turned my people away!

  My spouse shall dance, and I will sing

  Since Dukey is driven away:

  For I’m sure I’ve done the wisest thing

  I’ve done for many a day.27

  At the same time Francis Place reported that the streets were full of placards ‘of a most indecent description’ featuring the King and Queen, designed in general to bring the Royal Family into contempt. Prints were selling publicly in the streets which showed the Queen in her room, having put the King in a corner with a fool’s cap on his head. Another print showed the Queen wearing a crown, leading the King along by a halter round his neck. All through the country, there were ‘terrifying’ accounts of the lower classes with a strong desire to come to blows. Place told Sir John Hobhouse when he paid him a visit that ‘there would, positively, have been a rising if Wellington had recovered power, yesterday. Everything was arranged for it.’ To avoid apprehension, Place himself would not have slept at home.28

  The people had indeed been turned away; it remained to be seen if the return of Lord Grey was sufficient to bring about tranquillity. And of course the Reform Bill had still not passed through the House of Lords.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  BRIGHT DAY OF LIBERTY

  ‘The bright day of our liberty and our happiness is beginning to dawn’ –

  Thomas Attwood, en route for Birmingham, late May 1832

  During the tense period which followed the famous Days of May, the good news of Grey’s return gradually spread throughout the country. At Liverpool, in consequence, ‘all was joy and congratulation’. Three times three hearty cheers were given in the Liverpool Exchange, and from there the cheering spread, gaining still more strength, to the people outside. Early the following week, The Times chose to run a waggish advertisement headed ‘DEATH EXTRAORDINARY’. What was said to have died on Friday 18 May 1832 ‘at an advanced age’ was ‘the Rt. Hon., the Rt. Rev., and Right Worshipful Tory Power’. This ancient gentleman had been born in the reign of Charles I, given over for dead in 1688, but would at last lie quietly in his unknown grave.1

  Meanwhile the widespread feeling – which Grey had taken care to endorse – that Thomas Attwood and his associates had contributed a great deal with their mixture of strength and circumspection, led to positive reactions wherever their path took them. On 23 May Attwood was made a Freeman of the City of London; he pointed out that he was the first private individual to receive the Freedom. (There were a few objections to giving the honour to a member of an illegal society, but these were overruled.) A magnificent dinner in the Egyptian room in the Mansion House celebrated the accolade. George Grote declared that Attwood had ‘divested the physical force of this country of its terrors and its lawlessness, and has made it conducive to the ends of the highest public benefit’.2

  Attwood’s return journey to Birmingham took on the character of a royal procession – except that royal processions were hardly the flavour of the day in a nation where William IV and Adelaide were being openly compared to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. A speaker in Newcastle upon Tyne had added insult to injury in a speech on 19 May by saying that Marie Antoinette had a fairer head than ever graced the shoulders of Adelaide, but that had not saved her from the scaffold, at the wishes of the people of France. In contrast to this were the lines of a broadsheet published in Coventry as the leading unionist passed through it on his way back to Birmingham: ‘Hail PATRIOTIC ATTWOOD, hail! . . . Thou foe to the British slavish yoke . . . Thrice welcome Thou, REFORMING CHIEF.’

  The crowds were so demanding that Attwood had to stop and make grateful speeches. Labourers and ladies wore blue ribbons; these were merely the forerunners of the plethora of Attwood souvenirs, including blue garters with the encouraging words ‘Attwood forever’ on them. Mugs and pipes displayed the image of ‘King Tom’, as once there had been ‘allegorical’ handkerchiefs of the friends and enemies of Reform, ‘intended for the humbler classes’, with the face of William IV depicted. The new King Tom – saluted just as the old King Billy was being insulted – certainly had a happy theme for his speeches: ‘The final knell of despotism has tolled,’ he declaimed on his route; ‘the bright day of our liberty and our happiness is beginning to dawn.’3

  There was still some time, it seemed, before full daylight. Grey’s prophecy to the King of ‘passionate opposition’ in the House of Lords showed every sign of being fulfilled in the first week of the returned Whig Government – at least in words. On 25 May Lord Ellenborough recorded in his Diary that he was practically the only Tory who hadn’t taken part in a ‘violent tirade’.4 For the Whigs, Lord Durham, fully capable of aggression himself in what he believed was a good cause, came up with an intelligent analysis of ‘public excitement’ in terms of the existing electorate. He pointed out that violence was in inverse ratio to parliamentary representation. That is to say, Marylebone was excitable but Westminster, with its freemen voters, was calm. The Tory Lord Kenyon on the other hand flew at Lord Grey in a verbal assault in which he described Grey’s advice to the King on the subject of creation as ‘atrocious’. Grey reiterated the word and rejected it with ‘contempt and scorn’. There was then a ding-dong between these two eminent gentlemen in which repeated words like ‘atrocious’, ‘contempt’ and ‘scorn’ were hurled to and fro. Lord Winchilsea chose to describe Lord Grey as being ‘excessively sensitive’, but it is hard not to sympathize with him under the circumstances.5

  However, these public battles and tirades, by mainly insignificant Tories in an agony of disappointment, were one thing. The behaviour of the big beasts of the Tory Party was outwardly quiescent; Greville commented acidly that they saw out these events ‘skulking in their clubs and country houses’.6 Wellington had delivered his last public salvo on this issue in the House of Lords on 17 May. The battle over creation had been won by the Whigs; it was now up to the Tories to challenge this in public if they cared so to do.

  But what would happen then? A massive enlargement of the House of Lords, by those who favoured the Whig interest, would follow. This was the last thing the Opposition wanted. In this war of nerves, the Tories had been outplayed. Wellington’s attempt to form a government following the Whig defeat had been a ‘false move’ which endangered his own party, as Creevey put it. Creevey further recorded a conversation with Lord Grey on 2 June: the Opposition, said Grey, had made a blunder in not believing that the Whig Ministry would resign over their defeat. ‘Thank God!’ commented Creevey, ‘they did not know their man.’7

  It was indeed the key point. If Grey had not resigned, but lumbered on, facing further defeat after further defeat in the Lords, in contradiction of the will of the Commons, the country would surely have been in flames – both literally and metaphorically. Over thirty years later, Lord Brougham would give his own version of events and suggest that Grey would never have actually carried through with creation.8 But this is directly against the evidence of Grey’s correspondence with the King, to say nothing of his own character; reluctantly but inexorably, Grey would have put the interests of the country above his own personal feelings and called for the King to fulfil his promise. In the background, but highly articulate, there was always ‘Radical Jack’, the ardent reformer and thus creationist; in the family circle a further tragedy, the death of Durham’s young daughter Harriet, also of tuberculosis, had not diminished his emotional hold on the Prime Minister.

  As it was, quiet messages were passed: there was going to be no more official confrontation when it came to voting on the Reform Bill for the third time. One may suppose that some of Sir Herbert Taylor’s discreet missives on the subject were not strictly authorized, and thus remain unrecorded – nevertheless they met their mark. This was particularly necessary in the case of outspoken peers who were seen, with justice, t
o be close to the King. William IV for his part remained sensitive to the principles of ‘those who have dropped their reactions to the Bill, from a feeling of deference to him’, in order to spare him from the cruel necessity of creation. The current ‘disunion’ in the House of Lords remained a sore point at such a crucial moment in the nation’s history and he did not try to pretend otherwise.9

  The event, so long desired, so long dreaded, finally took place on 4 June 1832. The House of Lords was thinly attended, a fact that The Times (in its report the next day) believed would be read by the public with disgust. It was Lord Grey himself who moved that the Reform Bill be read for the third time.10 In view of his poor state of health – the Days of May had indeed taken its toll physically – Grey hoped not to have to make a speech. He had, after all, made so many in the fifteen months since Lord John Russell had first proposed the Bill in the House of Commons. What happened next left him no option. Even at this late hour, dramatically speaking, there was a tremendous rant – no other word will do – on the part of the Ultra Tory Marquess of Winchilsea, followed by another from the former Waverer, the Earl of Harrowby.

  He suffered a pain greater than he could express, began Lord Winchilsea, in thinking that he had lived to that hour to witness the downfall of his country. He then proceeded to try to express the pain. ‘This night would be the first act of the fatal and bloody tragedy . . . those who might live to witness the last act of the tragedy, would have to tell of the downfall of the Monarchy. In which case he trusted that the daring and wicked spirits with whom the Revolution commenced, might awaken to a sense of the ruin they had brought . . .’ and so forth and so on. Winchilsea was also explicit on the subject of the existing Constitution which, until recent times, had enabled the country to survive that ‘spirit of revolution and infidelity’ which had been cherished in France. What else had enabled ‘an illustrious Duke not then present’ – for Wellington, along with the other Tory grandees, was conspicuously absent – to rescue France from ‘the tyrant grasp’ of Napoleon.

  But it was Winchilsea’s personal attack on Grey which was the most marked feature of his speech. He described himself as having been ‘deceived’ in Grey, whose career he had long followed. His friends had told him a different story but he had not listened to them – would to God that he had! It was Grey himself who had ‘indirectly’ encouraged the spread of ‘seditious and revolutionary doctrines’ – a remarkable charge, given the turbulent state of the country – and Winchilsea went further in quoting the late Prime Minister Canning: Reform, said Canning, was just a mask for the purpose of establishing a democracy. Coming from a Tory peer, this was a chilling if impotent accusation.

  Lord Harrowby, venerable as he might be, honourable and straightforward as described by Greville, believer in compromise at the time of the negotiations with the Waverers, now launched his own attack in which he announced that he too had been ‘grievously disappointed by the conduct of the noble Earl’. Grey and his Ministers had ‘trampled’ on the Crown and the House of Lords, but as a result they had now aroused a force which would trample on them. When Grey came to damn the torrent, he would find no workmen ready to help him. The disappointment of the former Waverer was underlined by the pronouncement of their erstwhile leader Lord Wharncliffe: he accused Lord Grey of ‘wantonly’ placing the country in its present dangerous state, in order that he might carry ‘a favourite measure’. This equation of Grey personally with the revolutionary forces disturbing the country was manifestly unfair since he had so persistently advocated Reform as a means of bringing about peace. Nevertheless Grey felt he must reply.

  In doing so, the Prime Minister mentioned his reluctance to speak in view of his state of health, adding that ‘he was afraid his indisposition would be apparent to their Lordships’ before he was through. Proudly (if not necessarily with total truth), Grey denied that he was speaking to rebut the personal attacks on himself: it was the general attack on his Government that he was there to answer. At the end of a long, justificatory speech, he stopped abruptly and had to sit down, as he had foreseen. But then his reward came.

  The voting gave the third reading of the Reform Bill a majority of 84. Roughly 120 peers took part, in contrast to the far bigger figures of previous debates. Thirty or forty MPs came from the Lower House to witness the occasion. None of the great men of the Tory Party cast their vote among the 22 Not Contents; here was no Wellington and no Lyndhurst. The Duke wrote quite explicitly on the subject to the Earl of Scarborough: ‘It is not my intention to go to the House of Lords for the Third Reading.’ His explanation was made with characteristic brevity. ‘This perilous measure, as all admit it to be’ – here he echoed Lord Grey and the King – ‘will pass this day.’11

  No bishop was listed among the Not Contents – the Archbishop of York had even spoken out recently against the viciousness of the debates. In fact the list of their names included no one of particular distinction – unless you called the Ultra Tory Duke of Newcastle distinguished, for emphasizing his right to ‘do what he liked with his own’, his term for a rotten borough. The courtier Lord Londonderry did not vote. Nor did the favourite, Lord Howe. But at the end of the voting, a great number of peers immediately crowded round Lord Grey ‘apparently to congratulate his Lordship upon the final success of the Bill’, as Hansard put it.12 A number of protests now issued under various peers’ names over matters of electoral detail could not obscure the central fact: on its third reading, the Bill had been passed in the House of Lords.

  ‘Thank God!’ wrote Creevey, who was present. ‘I was at the death of this Conservative plot, and the triumph of our Bill.’13 It was the third great battle of his lifetime in which he had been involved, the first being Waterloo, the second the struggle over Queen Caroline’s divorce, and now ‘the battle of Edward Grey and the English nation for the Reform Bill’. And Creevey took sly satisfaction in the fact that the Master in Chancery, who carried the Bill from the Lords to the Commons, was ‘our own Harry Martin’, lineal descendant of Henry Martin the regicide. How shocked the Tory press would be to learn that!

  A few days passed and the Reform Bill needed the Royal Assent. As has been noted, it was customary for William IV to signify his assent in person, although it was not strictly speaking essential. In this case there were to be no cannons, no processional military horses, as had been needed for that celebrated dissolution of April 1831. In what Sir John Hobhouse described as ‘a fit of foolish spite’, the King declined to honour the House of Lords with his presence. He wrote to the Lord Chancellor, Brougham, to this effect: ‘he will not go down [to the House of Lords] to pass the Reform, for that after the Manner he and his Queen have been treated by the people he should feel himself disgusted and degraded by their applause.’14 Lord Grey was annoyed to discover later that Brougham made another attempt to persuade the King, once again without success. But in this case, Brougham was acting in the King’s best interests.

  Given the fact that the venom of the press still spewed forth, William IV’s reluctance is of course understandable on a human level. As Creevey noted: ‘the King, the Queen, and the Royal Family are libelled, caricatured, lampooned and balladed by itinerant singers hired for the purpose to a degree not credible.’ One typical flysheet ran: ‘I’m a German stormer, I hate a reformer’, suggesting that the Queen might return to her native land in a rage. In addition, Creevey emphasized the ceaseless, menacing allusions to the fates of ‘Charles and Henrietta, Louis and Antoinette’. It was also perfectly true, as The Times put it on the day, that whether the King himself signalled his assent to the Clerk of the House of Lords or whether the Lord Chancellor did so on behalf of the designated Commissioners, ‘matters to the validity of that law not a single farthing’.15

  Nevertheless, in terms of William IV’s royal reputation, to which his affable behaviour had contributed much in the early months of his reign, this sulky abstinence was a mistake. The King had managed to take the big decision – not without evident dismay, but i
n the end he had taken it; he had sent for Lord Grey to return to office, on the understanding that he would create a large number of peers if it proved necessary. But he could not manage to take the small one. Macaulay summed it all up in a letter to his sisters: ‘I fear – I fear – that he has entered on the path of Charles and Louis. He makes great concessions: but he makes them reluctantly and ungraciously. The people receive them without gratitude or affection. What madness! – to give more to his subjects than any King ever gave, and yet to give in such a manner as to get no thanks.’16

  William IV continued to rage impotently, as it proved, against the press. Prompted by the Queen, Royal Family and courtiers, William demanded prosecution. Given the level of vitriol, much of it very crude, some of it funny, most of it relentlessly anti-German – or anti-foreign – this was not surprising. Nor did the King’s recent behaviour escape censure. One popular theme, because it lent itself to illustration, was that of King Canute. Figaro in London showed a bewildered, foolish man, vacant plump face beneath a crown, waving hopelessly at the sea. Wellington and Lyndhurst crouch malevolently behind him. The text described the so-called Modern Canute at the mercy of designing courtiers: ‘Unfortunately, he was one day persuaded that the waves of Reform might be stilled, if he would only command them to become tranquil.’ So the Modern Canute ventured down off his rock and tried his luck, only to find that the tempest of Reform raged more strongly than ever.17