The Scum of the Earth

by Colin Brown

  Wellington’s former army officers in Parliament undoubtedly helped Wellington and the Tory government to maintain a substantial blocking majority against constitutional reform.

  One of the rare exceptions was Sir John Byng, commander of the 2nd Brigade of Guards, who stood as a Whig MP in Poole and supported reform in 1832; he was rewarded by Lord Melbourne – husband of Lady Caroline Lamb – with an hereditary peerage as Lord Strafford, giving him a seat in the Lords. More typical was Sir Hussey Vivian, who commanded the Sixth Brigade of Cavalry at Waterloo and became the MP for Truro – a seat also held by Lord FitzRoy Somerset, Wellington’s military secretary at Waterloo. On the annual renewal of the Mutiny Bill in 1820, establishing the army strength at 92,000 men, Sir Hussey told the Commons that a large standing army was necessary to put down insurrection, such as they had seen at Manchester (Peterloo). Hobhouse, a reforming MP, chided him: ‘At Manchester, 100,000 men were put to the rout by 40 flushed, not to say drunken, yeomen. What then do we want 35,000 soldiers for?’ Hobhouse said the move towards martial law was against Magna Carta. It is a debate that is still going on today. The summer riots of 2011 that left city centres burning ruins raised again the question that faced Wellington and his government – how does the civil power maintain order on the streets if the mobs resort to such violence? At least today, the mobs have the vote. In 1820, the vast majority of Wellington’s ‘scum of the earth’ were disenfranchised.

  The case for reform would not go away and public support for change grew as a result of an extraordinary event – the trial of Queen Caroline. Caroline of Brunswick had married George, Prince of Wales, on 8 April 1795 but it was a disaster. He had secretly married the widow, Mrs Maria Fitzherbert in 1785 but as she was a Catholic it was illegal. He openly had a string of mistresses, including Lady Melbourne and Countess Conyngham. When he succeeded his father as king in 1820 as George IV, he sought a divorce from Caroline, and publicly accused her of adultery. A Bill of Pains and Penalties was introduced in the Lords to divorce her on the grounds of her ‘licentious, disgraceful and adulterous intercourse’ with an Italian servant, Bartolomeo Pergami ‘a foreigner of low station’. It began in the House of Lords in August 1820 and turned into a show trial of Caroline’s sexual behaviour. Newspapers had a field day, reporting the salacious allegations against the queen while the trial ploughed on, day after scandalous day. There had never been such a public washing of the queen’s dirty laundry. The House of Lords had never heard anything like it.

  On 25 August, the Attorney General, Robert Gifford, questioned Barbara Kress from the Post-Inn Karlsruhe, where Caroline had stayed with Pergami, in the most intimate, salacious detail: ‘Did you at any time see anything on the sheets?’ asked the Attorney General. Frau Kress politely replied the sheets were ‘wuste’. There was some dispute about the interpretation, but it was agreed she meant ‘stained’. The Attorney General would not be deflected from the truth. What sort of stains were they? he demanded. ‘White,’ said Frau Kress, who broke down in tears at the intimate nature of the questioning. Were they wet or dry? asked the Attorney General. ‘Wet,’ said the tearful Frau.

  The nation was gripped by the trial and Caroline won massive public support as ‘the wronged wife’. Thomas Creevey, the Radical MP, compared the great demonstrations in support of the queen to the crowds at ‘Peterloo’:

  Every Wednesday the scene which caused such alarm at Manchester is repeated under the very nose of Parliament and in a tenfold degree more alarming. A certain number of regiments of the efficient population of the town march on each of those days in a regular lock step, four or five abreast – banners flying – music playing … I should like anyone to tell me what is to come next if this organised army loses its temper.

  Wellington drew hisses from the crowds on 17 August as he rode to the opening of the trial on Copenhagen. Creevey noted:

  Near the House of Lords there is a fence of railing put across the street from the Exchequer coffee-house to the enclosed garden ground joining to St Margaret’s churchyard, through which members of both Houses were alone permitted to pass. A minute after I passed, I heard an uproar, with hissing and shouting. On turning round, I saw it was Wellington on horseback. His horse made a little start, and he looked round with some surprise. He caught my eye as he passed, and nodded, but was evidently annoyed.9

  The queen arrived in an episcopal black-and-white dress with a white veil so thick it was difficult to see her face, but Creevey compared her manner to a toy doll with jerky movements. It was the main subject of conversation at Brooks’s club in St James’s Street that was founded by Whigs, and renowned for gambling. Lord Grey offered odds of 10 to 1 that the bill would be withdrawn in a fortnight. It is not clear if anyone took him up, but Grey would have lost his bet. The government persisted with it until 10 November when on the third reading it could only muster a majority of nine with ninety-nine peers voting against it, including the Archbishop of York, the Right Reverend Edward Venables Vernon.

  Wellington voted for it, but the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, adjourned further progress and the government abandoned the measure. Grey said by introducing the bill, the government ‘had betrayed their King, insulted their Queen, and had given a shock to the morals of society by the promulgation of the detestable and disgusting evidence’. The Radical writer William Cobbett used the queen’s trial to attack the House of Lords in a pamphlet called A Peep At The Peers.

  But the government’s embarrassment was not over. King George barred the queen from his side at his Coronation at Westminster Abbey on 19 July 1821. There is a myth that she went to the doors of the Abbey, banged on the doors and screamed: ‘Let me in – I am your Queen.’ It is true she was denied her place by the king’s side, but the government was not so stupid as to shut her out altogether. The authorities had allocated Caroline a place in the Abbey among the peeresses with instructions for the door-keepers to let her in and lead her to her place, but she insisted on a place next to the king as her right as the queen. Wellington said: ‘She went to two or three doors (of the Abbey) and received the same answer at each. This quite disconcerted her, and she retired. The mob too, as soon as they found she came to spoil the ceremony, began hissing and hooting.’ She already had one of the twenty-six tickets issued to the Duke of Wellington as High Constable. He denied he gave it to the queen and told a dinner party at Walmer Castle in 1836 that he suspected it was given to Caroline by Lady Jersey, one of her intimate friends.

  Caroline – conveniently for the government and the king – died mysteriously less than a year later on 7 August 1821, aged 53. There were suspicions that she had been poisoned but the symptoms suggested she died from cancer of the stomach. Even in death she proved troublesome. Like the public mood after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, the dead queen became a lightning conductor for public anger at the Establishment. Mobs protested that her body was being ‘smuggled’ out of London via Harwich for burial in her native Brunswick. They wanted to show their support for her – and opposition to George IV – by insisting that her coffin should be put on board a ship in the port of London. There were such violent demonstrations in London when Caroline’s body was being carried for embarkation at Harwich that there were scenes reminiscent of the Peterloo Massacre: the Life Guards, who formed an honour guard, fired some rounds, drew sabres, and two members of the public were killed.

  Seven years later, the civil unrest was as great as ever when Wellington was called on by George IV to take over as prime minister. The Duke rode Copenhagen to 10 Downing Street to show the smack of firm government. They became a familiar site around Westminster. He was returned as prime minister at the General Election caused by the death of George IV in 1830 and the accession to the throne of George’s youngest brother, William (Prince Frederick had died in 1827). But the Duke’s popularity had been completely spent, and for Wellington it all went horribly wrong. In the same month he kissed hands with the king, he received a letter posted in Oxford St
reet saying: ‘Parliamentary reform … or death!’ The writer added: ‘Mark this thou despot.’ It was signed ‘Swing’ . The ‘Swing’ riots were a protest at the hardship of farm workers. But they need not have threatened murder by the mob. The Duke committed political suicide at the opening of the new Parliament. Wellington utterly dismayed his own side by declaring, at the end of his remarks on the King’s Speech opening Parliament in the Lords on 2 November 1830, he would never surrender the vote to the common man. He said Britain had the best Parliamentary system in the world and then in the closing words of speech, he said he would go further:

  Under these circumstances, I am not prepared to bring forward any measure [of Parliamentary reform] … I am not only not prepared to bring forward any measure of this nature but I will at once declare that as long as I hold any station in the government of the country, I shall always feel it my duty to resist such measures when proposed by others.

  It was a suicidal comment to make for a prime minister reliant on shifting alliances. Diarist and senior civil servant Charles Greville noted: ‘The Duke of Wellington made a violent and uncalled-for declaration against Reform, which has without doubt sealed his fate. Never was there an act of more egregious folly, or one so universally condemned by friends and foes.’ A fortnight later, on 16 November, the Duke announced in the Lords he had gone to the king and resigned after losing a vote of no confidence in the Commons.

  There are arguments over why he said it. Elizabeth Longford persuasively argues Wellington – though he showed acute imagination on the battlefield – lacked political nous. Others say he was trying to use his authority – enhanced by the memory of his stunning victory at Waterloo – to kill reform stone dead.

  In one respect, it was surprising that Wellington stoically refused to budge on the issue of reform. Wellington was not an idealist – he was an arch-pragmatist. He had conceded Irish emancipation when the Catholic Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell won a Parliamentary by-election for County Clare; an Irish rebellion was threatened if O’Connell was barred from taking his seat in Parliament by the Oath of Supremacy, which was incompatible with his Catholicism. Backed by Robert Peel and reinforced by threats to bring down the government, Wellington persuaded George IV to drop his own personal deep opposition to Catholic Emancipation and allow Irish Catholics to sit in Parliament for the first time (and it led to his duel with Lord Winchelsea). Wellington also showed his pragmatism when he was later used by Peel to persuade the House of Lords to allow the bill to repeal the hated Corn Laws to go through, even though the Duke was against repeal. Croker claims Wellington privately did propose adopting a ‘large measure of reform’ as a compromise when he tried to form a Cabinet in 1831 and Croker walked out in protest. ‘The Duke afterwards sent for me alone and was seriously angry that I was still obstinate,’ said Croker.10

  Having failed to form a Cabinet to offer a compromise, Wellington gave up the effort. From then on, he was vehemently opposed to reform. Elizabeth Longford conceded that his belief that ‘the scum of the earth’ had to be controlled ultimately by iron discipline, including flogging, was a ‘pitifully static view of human nature’. But, she added, that for the Duke, it had a ‘superficial realism’ which influenced Wellington for many a long year to come. In other words, Wellington believed that ‘the scum of the earth’ had to be kept in their place or there would be chaos.

  Some of the Duke’s arguments sound ludicrous today. Wellington argued that if there were elections in Manchester, the mobs would riot and bring pressure to bear on the candidates, whereas under the present system, a Manchester merchant sitting for a county seat would be free to vote as his conscience and judgment dictated because he had so few voters. Charles Lennox, the uncle of Wellington’s friend, the 4th Duke of Richmond, put the alternative case perfectly when he introduced a reform bill for universal men’s suffrage in 1780: ‘The poor man has equal right but more need to have representation than the rich one …’ Richmond’s reform bill was reprinted as a pamphlet in 1817 by campaigners for reform. However, Wellington appeared as implacable and immovable as if he was being attacked by the Imperial Guard; he went from national hero to hate figure.

  Three attempts to pass the Reform Bill were made before it finally went through. The pro-reform Whigs under Earl Grey were returned with a majority in the Commons and a clear mandate to pass the Reform Bill in April 1831, but Wellington led peers in blocking it in the House of Lords. Wellington told the Lords: ‘From the period of the adoption of that measure will date the downfall of the Constitution.’

  Wellington’s refusal to bow to public opinion triggered Reform Riots across England and caused a constitutional crisis. Bristol was occupied by the rioters for three days. Wellington’s London home, Apsley House, was attacked by the mob while the body of his wife Kitty lay on her death bed. On 28 April 1831 Wellington wrote to Harriet Arbuthnot: ‘I learn from John [his housekeeper] that the mob attacked my house and broke about thirty windows. He fired two blunderbusses in the air from the top of the house, and they went off.’ Wellington regarded the London mob as more dangerous than the Paris mob because it was indisciplined: ‘Our mob is not trained nor accustomed to regular direction as the French was; once let it loose, and you will see what it will do!’ He resorted to putting iron shutters across the windows, and he was ridiculed for it as ‘The Iron Duke’ – the name by which his troops had proudly known him.

  In desperation Prime Minister Grey asked the king, William IV, to create more peers to allow the measure through; when the king refused, Grey resigned as prime minister and the king asked Wellington to form a government. It was then, according to Croker, that the Duke was tempted to dabble in a compromise but with loyal allies like Croker walking out on him, Wellington could never find sufficient support and the king had no option but to summon Grey again. Britain tottered on the brink of anarchy and revolution, the protestors called for a run on the Bank of England and the overthrow of the monarchy. In the midst of a constitutional crisis, William IV secretly wrote to peers without the knowledge of the Cabinet, pleading with them to back down. Erskine May, the constitutional expert, said it was constitutionally highly improper for the king to interfere in this way, but Wellington conceded defeat and the Tory peers relented.

  It was not as if the lower classes – the ‘scum of the earth’ – were being offered the vote as they had in Richmond’s bill. The vote was extended merely from 478,000 men to 813,000 men in a population of 24 million, about 4 men in every 100. The vote was limited in the 1832 Reform Act to the new middle classes – the businessmen, professional classes and journalists agitating for change – who were £10 householders in the boroughs and £10 leaseholders in the shires. Even so, when the Bill was presented by Lord John Russell, the Postmaster General, it surprised even its supporters by the sweeping nature of its reform of the rotten boroughs. The 1832 Reform bill marked a watershed that turned Britain from a fundamentally medieval system of privilege for a few aristocrats towards a modern democracy. It abolished 143 smaller borough seats, and replaced them with 130 seats, including two for each of the industrial towns that had led the fight for reform – Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Halifax and Bradford and Oldham.

  The first MP for Oldham was the veteran campaigner for humble folk in the countryside, William Cobbett, though by then he had returned from America decidedly odd, attacking Jews, rather than the outrage of Peterloo. Hunt became the MP for Preston in 1831 and opposed the Reform Act because it did not go far enough; he lost his seat in 1833 and having turned his back on public life, died in 1835 in Hampshire.

  The aristocratic elite held on to most of their ‘pocket boroughs’. The Duke of Norfolk still controlled eleven seats – including Creevey’s – and the Earl of Lonsdale had nine in his pocket, while the Duke of Devonshire and Lord Darlington each had seven Parliamentary seats in their gift. This not only gave a few aristocratic landowners great influence over the government, but it also gave unelected peers control over the elected C
ommons until they were swept away in the Reform Act of 1867.

  The crisis ended but the campaign for more reform went on. All men over 21 were given a vote in 1918 but it was not until 1928 that women were finally granted equal voting rights with men. The Whig historian Thomas Macaulay was jubilant after the vote on 7 June 1832:

  It was like seeing Caesar stabbed in the Senate House, or seeing Oliver [Cromwell] taking the mace from the table … We set up a shout that you might have heard in Charing Cross - waving our hats – stamping against the floor and clapping our hands. The tellers scarcely got through the crowd. But you might have heard a pin drop as Duncannon read the numbers. Then again the shouts broke out – and many of us shed tears – I could scarcely refrain. And the jaw of Peel fell; and the face of Twiss was as the face of a damned soul. We shook hands and clapped each other on the back, and went out laughing, crying, and huzzaing into the lobby.

  A painting of the Commons to celebrate the passage of the Act was started in 1833 by Sir George Hayter (a year before the old chamber in St Stephens Chapel was destroyed by fire). It shows Wellington standing by the opposition benches (as a peer, he could not sit in the Commons) – he is silver-haired and handsome, turning and smiling to his friends as if saying ‘they are fools’; and some of the protagonists for reform including Grey, Cobbett, William Lamb the 2nd Viscount Melbourne (who became Queen Victoria’s first prime minister) and the Irish nationalist O’Connell. Thomas Creevey saw the Great Reform Act of 1832 as the salvation of the nation: