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

  Let us not forget that Althorp’s sport of choice was prizefighting; in short he was an excellent example of that apparently reluctant English pugnacity captured in the music hall song written half a century later by G.W. Hunt: ‘We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do. . . .’ In this way, he would sometimes find himself speaking twenty times in one night at the Committee stage; at which point physical resilience – which he certainly had – became at least one important quality for a politician. Althorp also cheered himself up with the optimistic thought that the Commons was slightly more bearable in the summer, because the windows were kept open for relief. Others simply shuddered at the hot, dirty, dusty air which wafted through them.

  In the royal rituals of the summer, there was an outward semblance at least of that political neutrality which the Crown was supposed to maintain. On 25 July William IV visited Eton College to attend ‘Election speeches’ (the reference was to the school, not the national arena). One of those in attendance was the Whig Cabinet Minister Lord Holland, who had been at Eton for nine years. In his Diary he showed himself in the characteristic nostalgic mood of any visitor to his old school: ‘the weather was fine, the scene was gay, and to us all [the many Old Etonians present including Lord Durham, Lord Melbourne and Lord Grey himself] the recollections a mixed emotion of pleasure and melancholy.’ He was especially moved by the numerous portraits of himself and friends in early youth, ‘some no more and some so altered’.30

  Nostalgia apart, it could certainly be argued that at Eton the homogeneity of English society at the top was demonstrated. It was true that the Provost, Joseph Goodall, incumbent for the last twenty years and showing ‘excessive and foolish delight’ at the royal presence, was a pronounced Tory. But Lord Holland noted that ‘the most remarkable feature was the dexterity and impartiality with which praise was distributed to Etonians, Whig or Tory, statesmen or warriors, and the ingenious choice of avoiding the appearance of party by clapping the names of Wellington and Grey, as the two living Premiers in one line.’* It was whispered to Holland that the head boy who achieved this feat was a Tory; the Whig names had been inserted against his inclination at the request of the Masters. ‘But a boy of Tory principles,’ reflected Holland the lofty Whig, ‘should learn, no doubt, to submit to authority.’

  A week later there was a more public demonstration of that same ‘excessive and foolish delight’ evinced by the Provost of Eton at the royal presence. William IV, accompanied by Queen Adelaide, travelled by barge to declare the new London Bridge officially open. The fact that the royal couple scattered silver medals among the people certainly did not detract from the popular joy. However, on this occasion political prejudices did play their part. Wellington – ‘somewhat uncourteously’, as Lord Holland thought – refused to attend. The Whig story was that he did so, pretending the people might salute him in preference to the Sovereign; Lord Ellenborough was probably closer to the truth when he wrote that the Duke declined because ‘he had been in November informed that his going into the City would endanger the peace’.31 As it was, Sir Robert Peel, who was made of sterner stuff, did attend and in consequence was hooted at by the people. In general, ‘the contrast of the poor old bridge with the magnificent new structure’, according to Sir John Hobhouse, was very striking. William IV himself said he had never seen anything like it, as he looked down the long vista. John Doyle commemorated what was said to be an actual incident in one of his drawings ten days later.32 The Duke of Cumberland, standing with a group of eminent right-wing Tories including Lord Londonderry and Lord Eldon, told the Duke of Devonshire that he had come to the wrong barge: ‘All here are against you.’ To which Devonshire was said to have replied: ‘Well, if you all here are against me, all there are against you.’ And he pointed to the huge multitude of spectators thronging the banks of the river, stretching as far as the eye could see.

  The next day, 2 August, William came in person to the House of Lords to give his assent to the Queen’s dower-bill. This made financial provision for the royal widow in the event of the King’s death. (Constitutionally, it was not essential for the Sovereign to be present in the House of Lords in order to give his assent; as time would show, this mark of favour could not be taken for granted but on this occasion the King was determined to make a show of his approval.) Adelaide herself was conducted into the House of Lords, preceded by her Lord Chamberlain, Earl Howe. She sat on a chair of state covered in red velvet, to the right of the King’s throne but level with it, and at the end made obeisance three times.33 On this occasion the King was as usual much pleased by the degree of applause; it was little Prince George of Cambridge, he who had already questioned the Queen about the oddity of what his uncle had done, who cowered behind Lord Albemarle for protection, not realizing that he was hearing the sounds of acclaim.

  There had been no need for any equivalent ceremony for seventy years since the days of Queen Charlotte, and Lord Holland at any rate found the whole occasion ‘indelicate if not distressing’, despite the popular enthusiasm for the monarch. It was a reaction which reminds one of the continuous concern about the King’s health – based on his family record of survival as well as his father’s long madness – for just as William had, for liberals, turned out to be a vast improvement on George IV, so it was feared that little Victoria, in the power of her baleful mother the Duchess of Kent, might blight their hopes of Reform. It was the same threat of the personal to the political as was experienced in a lesser way by the Whigs over the health of Earl Spencer; there were sinister reports of his deterioration in late July; his death would automatically elevate Lord Althorp in his father’s title to the House of Lords, leaving the House of Commons without a popular figure of management at this vital moment.34

  There were private stresses too: Durham’s relationship with his father-in-law Grey was beginning to be profoundly affected by the piteous condition of Durham’s elder son, Master Charles Lambton. The thirteen-year-old boy, immortalized in Lawrence’s famous portrait ‘The Red Boy’, showing him in all his romantic innocence, was wasting away from tuberculosis; he spent the summer at Marine Square, Brighton, in a vain attempt to restore his unrestorable health. Grey alternated between presiding over the political ferment centred on Downing Street and visiting him at Brighton; the devoted grandfather was struck by the almost unbearable stoicism of the boy. Durham, a dedicated reformer, was also a frenzied and in many ways unbalanced character; already, as has been seen, he enjoyed the kind of troubled relationship with his father-in-law common to those who first designate an older man a father figure, and then proceed to resent his paternal authority. An element of emotional blackmail was creeping in as the poor boy grew ever sicker, yet the beneficiary, if any, was the cause of Reform about which Durham felt so passionately.

  As the date of the coronation approached at the end of the first week of September, MPs were ragged with their debating in Committee, while the country simmered with enthusiasm for Reform. For all the forty separate sittings, the only major modification concerned the so-called Chandos clause. Lord Chandos, heir to the Duke of Buckingham, sat for a seat in Buckinghamshire. On 18 August he carried an amendment which enfranchised £50 tenant farmers in the county constituencies, thus enhancing the prospect of the landlords maintaining that influence which they had long considered their right.

  Outside the narrow enclave of Westminster there was – not for the first or last time in history – the sound of apprehensive wailings in the financial sector; at the end of August one banker informed Ellenborough of the lack of confidence in the City, and the Tory peer had already heard that James Rothschild had withdrawn from English funds.35 Nevertheless true reformers felt that conditions could and surely would be alleviated by the passing of the Reform Bill – that is, if the House of Lords permitted it.

  On 26 August Althorp wrote gloomily to his father in the country that the Government had ‘little chance’ in the House of Lords, even allowing for those extra peers created, not for political reas
ons but according to custom, to mark the formal ceremony of crowning.36 At a Cabinet meeting on 5 September, there was no unanimity on the subject: the Duke of Richmond argued forcefully against such a creation, backed by the ‘timid counsel’ of Stanley, also by Lansdowne, Goderich and Palmerston – in short, exactly that coalition element coming mainly from Canningite Tories which had been so valuable to the Whig Government. In this atmosphere of tension, even within the Cabinet, the Bill finally passed its prolonged Committee stage at seven p.m. on 7 September and the country gave itself up to the glories – economical glories – of the coronation. John Gilpin paused in his flight long enough to take the sacred oath, which even the reluctant William IV admitted was of vital importance in the contract between a sovereign and his people.

  * One is reminded of the sums of money dispensed in the American Presidential Elections in the twenty-first century; but these take place in a country with a huge population and covering a vast area.

  * Floreat Etona – let Eton flourish, as the school’s motto had it, whatever the administration.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CONFOUND THEIR POLITICS

  ‘Confound their politics

  Frustrate their knavish tricks’ –

  Sung at a Whig dinner, 25 September 1831

  On 8 September at long last that coronation, so much resented and criticized by the King, took place. Whatever William’s private feelings, the rejoicing in the country was almost universal. For days beforehand newspapers had been advertising apartments with a view of the procession (there were also tickets available to the public for seats inside the Abbey). On the day itself, the cries of ‘God Save the King’ seemed endless, in the words of The Times, ‘As far as the eye could reach, hats, hankies and flags were waving in the air.’1

  The report added: ‘It must not pass unnoticed that the word Reform mingled with the loudest shouts that greeted the monarch’s ear.’ The dark, boarded-up windows of Londonderry House, punished for its owner’s hardline opinions, were another reminder that the issue was ever present. But in general the coronation was thought to demonstrate one salient fact about the national character: ‘Of all people on the face of the earth, the people of England are a King-loving generation.’ The vision of well-dressed young women in their best bonnets and frocks, gradually getting swallowed up by the crowd, where only their piercing screams saved them, was thought to add to the gaiety of the occasion; as the poor young things emerged, the sight of their crushed costumes and bonnets ‘twisted into fantastic shapes’ was greeted with good-natured laughter.

  There was certainly a huge contrast between this delirious reception and the one which had greeted George IV ten years earlier. This time the hisses and groans which Peel had received at London Bridge were reserved for the Duke of Cumberland – which, given his well-known Ultra Tory views, was a good way of indicating approval for the Whigs. Enthusiasm was not limited to the capital: the Birmingham Political Union, for example, held a so-called monarchical dinner in honour of the occasion at the Globe Inn; under Attwood’s expert management, expressions of opinion were limited to approval of the Sovereign.2 The odd complaint about the cost was not anything that ruling systems must not inevitably endure. The barber who told his client, while cutting his hair, ‘we want a cheap government like America and we will have it’ was in this great tradition of popular grumbling. In the same way, Croker’s suggestion that the young Princess Victoria might one day find herself to be plain Miss Guelph was in the equally great tradition of pessimistic upper-class prophecy. The fact that the Duchess of Kent wilfully kept the heiress presumptive to the throne away from the ceremony did more harm to the thirteen-year-old girl’s image than any lavish stories of splendour.

  In any case, when it came to the details William had not budged in his emphasis on economy. Only a few weeks earlier, he had expostulated once more on the subject: ‘the Solemnity’ of a coronation, as he put it, might have been useful in its time but was ‘ill adapted to ours’, and the expense it involved ‘in the present circumstances of the country and those of Europe most idle and unnecessary’. The result was summed up by Greville as designed to ‘cost as little money and as little trouble as possible’. Macaulay made fun of it all: ‘The Archbishop mumbled, the Bishop of London preached well enough but not so effectively as the occasion required . . . and the King behaved very awkwardly, his bearing making the foolish parts of the ritual appear monstrously ridiculous.’ It was the Whig grandee the Duke of Devonshire, commented Macaulay, who looked as if he came to be crowned, instead of his master.3

  All the same, the cost was only just over £43,000 (roughly £4,300,000) as compared to that of his predecessor at more than five times that figure.4 Peers wore their parliamentary robes, which undermined the opportunity for conspicuous consumption in ordering new ones. The ushers in Westminster Abbey were volunteers who paid for their own costumes. A single fiddler on a single string was thought the cheapest way of accompanying the anthem. The Tory press was in addition horrified when William insisted on doing away with the procession, which led to the abolition of some hereditary offices.

  William IV’s annotated copy of the proposed coronation ritual has been described by an authority as resembling ‘a battlefield’.5 The King felt particularly strongly on the subject of the anointing; he wanted no one to wipe away oil from his head: ‘I will not be smeared,’ he told Lord Holland. There were all sorts of simplifications and cost-cutting changes. George IV had aimed to eclipse Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor in 1804; William IV on the other hand did not even have the crown itself remodelled – it was merely padded. (Queen Adelaide, however, scorned the idea of the crown once used for Mary of Modena, Catholic wife of James II, and announced she would have one made up for herself out of jewels belonging to the late Queen Charlotte.) The ceremony, termed the ‘Penny coronation’ or the ‘half-crownation’ by wags, was in direct contrast to that of George IV in another way: this time the Sovereign did not occupy his time ogling his mistress, Lady Conyngham, both in the Abbey and afterwards. On the other hand, William IV’s lewd toast at the post-coronation dinner was gleefully reported by Greville, one of those less than happy incidents when the spirit of the old sailor took over from that of the new King. William toasted killing eyes and moving thighs, before celebrating another part of the body by rhyming le cul qui danse with honi soit qui mal y pense.6

  During the more formal part of the day there was one significant new prayer, in contrast to the many cuts: ‘The Lord give you a faithful Senate, wise Counsellors and magistrates, loyal nobility, dutiful gentry . . .’ it ran. One can easily believe that this prayer found a heartfelt echo in the royal breast. It remained to be seen in the coming weeks whether the Senate was indeed so faithful – especially that part of the Senate known as the House of Lords.

  The third reading of the Bill took place on 21 September and the House of Commons finally passed it at five o’clock the next morning. The majority was unequivocal: 345 in favour to 236 against. The Tories were not however showing any signs of conceding the case. Where the House of Lords was concerned, the destination of the Bill in October, this was ominous. Only the day before the vote, Sir Robert Peel had expatiated at length on the characteristics of tyrants through the ages, citing Napoleon under the name of ‘Boney’; Cromwell, that ever popular source of historical parallel at this time, as Peel himself had pointed out earlier; and the French Assembly of 1791: in each case these tyrants had pretended to preserve the outward form of things, in order to transform the substance. And the Tory leader in the Commons proceeded to quote Macbeth:

  Upon his head they placed a fruitless crown

  And put a barren sceptre in his grip.

  The reference was to the witches’ prophecy that Banquo would be father to a line of kings, while Macbeth would have no heirs; Macbeth was mocked with the emblems of power but the reality was transferred away.7

  Publicly, the triumphant Whigs and their allies were not disturbed by these fearful predict
ions. There were Whig dinners. One celebration of over 250 people was given in the Hall of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, to which all the various individuals who had backed Reform were invited. In the Chair was Sir Francis Burdett, in his kaleidoscopic character illustrating the various elements which made up the reforming movement at this time. Burdett, with a magnificent patrician nose to rival that of the Duke of Wellington, looked what he was: ‘a thoroughly high bred gentleman’ in the words of Sir Denis Le Marchant. He was a hereditary baronet, and after a dashing youth as the lover of Lady Oxford, had married Sophia Coutts, a member of the banking family (their daughter Angela Burdett-Coutts would be the celebrated philanthropist). First in a seat paid for by his Coutts father-in-law, and later as MP for Westminster, Burdett had been in Parliament for nearly forty years; but there were interruptions. Burdett was a born subversive, sacked from Westminster School when young, a frequenter of Paris in the early idealistic days of the Revolution, then imprisoned in the Tower of London for breach of parliamentary privilege, finally sent to the Marshalsea Prison after Peterloo for protesting about the massacres and the ‘bloody Neroes’ who were responsible.8