The Political History of England – Vol XI

BROUGHAM BECOMES CHANCELLOR.

But the most formidable of all the "radical reformers" still remained to be conciliated, and provided with a post which might satisfy his restless ambition. At the end of 1830 Brougham was in the plenitude of his marvellous powers, and in the zenith of his unique popularity. As member for the great county of York, returned free of expense on the shoulders of the people, he already occupied the foremost position among British commoners, and it was feared that he might use it for his own purposes in a dictatorial spirit. He had recently declared in Yorkshire that "nothing on earth should ever tempt him to accept place," and that he was conscious of the power to compel the execution of measures which, before that democratic election, he could only "ventilate". So late as November 16, he assured the house of commons that "no change in the administration could by any possibility affect him," adding that he would bring forward his motion for parliamentary reform on the 25th, whatever might then be the state of affairs, and whatever ministers should then be in office. The great whig peers were most anxious to keep him out of the cabinet without losing his support, or, still worse, provoking his active hostility. With this view, Grey indiscreetly offered him the attorney-generalship, and we cannot be surprised that Brougham rejected the offer with some indignation and disdain. It was no secret that his supreme desire was to become master of the rolls – an office compatible with a seat in the house of commons – but his future colleagues well knew that, in that case, they would be at his mercy in the house. Thereupon it was suggested, probably by the king himself, that it might be the less of two dangers to entrust him with the great seal, which Lord Lyndhurst was quite prepared to resume under a fourth premier. Accordingly, it was known on November 20 that Brougham was to be the whig lord chancellor, and on the 22nd he actually took his place on the woolsack. His title was Baron Brougham and Vaux, but, though he lived to retain it for nearly forty years, he always preferred, with pardonable vanity, to sign his name as "Henry Brougham".

Before the close of 1830 the new ministers found time to carry a regency bill, whereby the Duchess of Kent (unless she married a foreigner) was to be regent in the event of the Princess Victoria succeeding to the crown during her minority. Having adopted the watchword of "Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform," they gave an earnest of their zeal for retrenchment by instituting a parliamentary inquiry into the possible reduction of official salaries, including their own. The defeat of Stanley by "Orator" Hunt at Preston was a warning against undue reliance on popular confidence, for Preston was already a highly democratic constituency, largely composed of ignorant "potwallopers". A similar but more emphatic warning came from Ireland, where O'Connell did his utmost to insult and defy Anglesey, the new lord-lieutenant, in spite of his sacrifices for catholic emancipation, and his well-known sympathy with the cause of reform. In the southern counties of England, too, violent disturbances had broken out, and were marked by all the ferocity and terrorism characteristic of luddism in the manufacturing districts. They spread from Kent, Sussex, and Surrey into Hampshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire. In these four counties there was a wanton and wholesale destruction of agricultural machinery, of farm-buildings, and especially of ricks, as if the misery of labourers could possibly be cured by impoverishing their only employers. The rioters moved about in large organised bodies, and their anarchical passions were deliberately inflamed by the writings of unscrupulous men like Cobbett and Carlile.

Happily, the ministers showed no sign of the weakness upon which the ringleaders had probably calculated. They promptly issued a proclamation declaring their resolution to put down lawless outrage, and promised effective support to the lords-lieutenant of the disturbed counties. Acting upon this assurance, Wellington himself went down to Hampshire, and took a leading part in quelling disorder. The government next appointed a special commission, which tried many hundreds of prisoners and sentenced the worst to death, though few were executed. This vigour soon overawed the organised gangs which, in one or two instances, had only been dispersed by military force. Finally, they prosecuted Carlile and Cobbett for instigating the poor labourers to crime. The former was convicted at the Old Bailey, and condemned to a long term of imprisonment, with a heavy fine. The trial of Cobbett was postponed until the following July, when the frenzy of reform was at its height. He defended himself with great audacity in a speech of six hours, calling the lord chancellor with other leading reformers as witnesses, and succeeded in escaping conviction by the disagreement and discharge of the jury.

ALTHORP'S FIRST BUDGET.

Two other questions engaged the attention of parliament on the eve of the great struggle over the reform bill. One of these was the settlement of the civil list, which the Duke of Wellington's ministry had failed to effect. William IV. was not an avaricious sovereign, nor did he share the spendthrift inclination of his brother. But he was disposed to stickle for the hereditary rights of the crown, both public and private, and he greatly disliked the details of his expenditure being scrutinised by a parliamentary committee. Now, Grey and his colleagues stood pledged to such a committee, and could not avoid promoting its appointment. They propitiated the king, however, by excluding the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster from the inquiry, and ultimately succeeded in persuading the house of commons to grant a civil list of £510,000 a year. But the publication of a return containing a complete list of sinecure offices and pensions was turned to good account by the economists, and produced an outburst of public indignation, which was by no means unreasonable. Great results were expected from the report of the select committee on the civil list, which revised the salaries of officials in the royal household, as well as the emoluments of pensioners. It was even demanded that no regard should be paid to vested interests, but Grey firmly supported the private remonstrances of the king against such an act of confiscation. In fact, the savings recommended by the committee were so trifling that it was thought better to waive the question for the time, and the first economical essay of the new régime ended in failure.

The budget introduced by Althorp soon after the meeting of parliament on February 3, 1831, and in anticipation of the reform bill, was equally unsuccessful as a specimen of whig finance. Finding that, after all, he could not effect a saving of more than one million on the national expenditure, as reduced by his capable predecessor, Goulburn, he nevertheless proposed to repeal the duties on coals, tallow candles, printed cottons, and glass, as well as to diminish by one half the duties on newspapers and tobacco. To meet the deficit thus created, he designed an increase of the wine and timber duties, new taxation of raw cotton, and, above all, a tax of ten shillings per cent. on all transfers of real or funded property. This last proposal was at once denounced by Goulburn, Peel, and Sugden, the late solicitor-general, as a breach of public faith between the state and its creditors. Their protests were loudly echoed by the city, and the obnoxious transfer duty was abandoned. The same fate befell the proposed increase of the timber duties, and Althorp only carried his budget after submitting to further modifications. Those who had relied on his promises of economical reform were signally disappointed, and, had not parliamentary reform overshadowed all other issues, the credit of the government would have been rudely shaken in the first session after its formation. But this great struggle, now to be described, so engrossed the attention of the country, that little room was left for the consideration of other interests, until it should be decided.

It is probable that no great measure was ever preceded by so thorough a preparation of the public mind as the reform bills of 1831-32. Ever since the early part of the eighteenth century the abuses of the representative system had been freely acknowledged, and no one attempted to defend them in principle. The multitude of close boroughs, the smallness of the electoral body, the sale of seats in parliament, the wide prevalence of gross bribery, and the enormous expense of elections – these were notorious evils which no one denied, though some palliated them, and few ventured to assail them in earnest by drastic proposals, lest they should undermine the constitution. So far back as 177 °Chatham had denounced them, and predicted that unless parliament reformed itself from within before the end of the century, it would be reformed "with a vengeance" from without. In 1780 the Duke of Richmond had introduced a bill in favour of universal suffrage, and Pitt had brought forward bills or motions in favour of parliamentary reform as a private member in 1782 and 1783, and as prime minister in 1785. But the French revolution persuaded him that the time was not favourable to reform, and he successfully opposed Grey's motion for referring a number of petitions in favour of reform to a committee in 1793.

After this, a strong reaction set in, and the reform question had little interest for the governing classes during the continuance of the great war. It was never allowed to sleep, however, and in 1809, a bill introduced by Curwen to pave the way for reform by preventing the return of members upon corrupt agreements, actually passed both houses, though in so mutilated a form that it was practically a dead letter. Still, the cause was indefatigably pleaded by Brand, and Burdett, who in 1819 made himself the spokesman of the violent reform agitation then spreading over the country. Unfortunately, this violence, and the extravagance of the demands put forward by the democratic leaders, were themselves fatal obstacles to a temperate consideration of the question, and threw back the reform movement for several years. In 1821, when Grampound was disfranchised, it assumed, as we have seen, a more constitutional form, and motions in favour of reform were proposed by Russell in 1822, 1823, and 1826, and by Blandford in 1829. Had Canning placed himself at the head of the movement the course of domestic history during the reign of George IV. might have been very different. As it was, the number of petitions in favour of reform sensibly fell off in the last half of the reign, and its tory opponents vainly imagined that the movement had spent itself. We now know that, in the absence of noisy demonstrations, it was really and constantly gaining strength in the minds of thoughtful men until it reached its climax at the end of 1830.

PUBLIC OPINION AND REFORM.

The first act of the great political drama which occupied the next eighteen months may be said to have opened with the fall of Wellington, and the formation of the whig ministry. These events, together with the success of the Paris revolution, supplied the motive power needed to combine the great body of the middle classes with the proletariat in a national crusade against the political privileges long exercised by a powerful landed aristocracy. It is true that reform, unlike catholic emancipation, had always appealed to broad popular sympathies, and had been advocated by men like Grey and Burdett as carrying with it the redress of all other grievances. But Canning was by no means the only liberal statesman who heartily dreaded it, and even the advanced reformers had not fully grasped the comprehensive meaning of the idea which they embraced, or the far-reaching consequences involved in it. The palpable anomaly of Old Sarum returning members to parliament, while Birmingham was unrepresented, was shocking to common sense, and so was the monopoly of the franchise by a handful of electors in some of the larger boroughs, especially in Scotland. But few appreciated how seriously constitutional liberty had been curtailed by the growth of these abuses (unchecked by the Commonwealth) since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, how effectually home and foreign policy was controlled by a small circle of noble families dominant in the lower as well as in the upper chamber, how vast a transfer of sovereignty from class to class would inevitably be wrought by a thorough reform bill, and how certainly men newly entrusted with power would use it for their own advantage, whether or not that should coincide with the advantage of the nation. Such general aspects of the question are seldom noticed in the earlier debates upon it, and economical reform sometimes appears to occupy a larger space than parliamentary reform in the liberal statesmanship of the Georgian age.

With Wellington's declaration against any parliamentary reform, this apathy vanished, and the movement, gathering up into itself all other popular aspirations thenceforward filled the whole political horizon. Reform unions sprang up everywhere, and instituted a most active propaganda. So rapid was its spread and so wild the promises lavished by radical demagogues, that Grey and his wiser colleagues soon felt themselves further removed from their own extreme left wing than from the moderate section of the conservatives. It is abundantly clear that Grey himself, faithful as he was to reform, never dreamed of inaugurating a reign of democracy. He often declared in private that such a bill as he contemplated would prove, in its effect, an aristocratic measure, and he doubtless believed that it would be possible to bring the new constituencies and the new electoral bodies under the same conservative influences which had been dominant for so many generations. He did not foresee, as Palmerston did thirty years later, that, even if the political actors remained the same, they "would play to the gallery" instead of to the pit or boxes. He would, indeed, have repudiated the maxim: "Everything for the people, and nothing by the people"; he was fully prepared to place the house of commons in the hands of the people, or at least of the great middle class, but he regarded the crown and the house of lords as almost equal powers, and he never doubted that property and education would practically continue to rule the government of the country.

DRAFT OF THE FIRST BILL.

When the whigs came into office they were singularly fortunate in the high character and consistency of their chief, no less than in the divisions of their opponents, whose right wing showed almost as mutinous a spirit as their own left wing. Even between Wellington and Peel there was a want of cordial harmony and confidence, yet Peel was the only tory statesman of eminent capacity in the house of commons. The attitude of the king, too, was not only strictly constitutional but friendly, though it afterwards appeared that he relied too implicitly on Grey and Althorp to protect him against the machinations of the radicals. The letters written by his orders, though mostly composed by his private secretary, Sir Herbert Taylor, display marked ability together with a very shrewd and just conception of the situation. His loyal adoption of a moderate reform policy was a most important element of strength to his ministers at the outset of their great enterprise, and, if he afterwards held back, it was in deference to scruples which several of them shared in their hearts. Nor was the violence of the ultra-radicals, or the scurrilous language of O'Connell by any means an unmixed source of weakness to men engaged in framing and carrying a temperate reform bill. Their firm resistance to extravagant demands reassured many a waverer and showed how carefully their comprehensive plan had been matured. On the other hand, they had to contend against difficulties not yet fully revealed. One of these was their own want of administrative experience, contrasting unfavourably with the statesmanlike capacity of Peel. Another was the intractable character of two at least within their own innermost councils – Durham and Brougham. A third was the inflexible conservatism of a great majority in the house of lords, who, unlike the people at large, clearly understood that the impending conflict was a life-and-death struggle for political supremacy between themselves and the commons – the greatest that had been waged since the revolutions of the seventeenth century.

It was privately known that a committee had been empowered to draft the bill awaited with so much impatience. This committee consisted of two members of the cabinet, Durham and Graham, together with two members of the administration not of cabinet rank, the Earl of Bessborough's eldest son, Lord Duncannon, then chief whip of the whig party, and Russell, who was second to none as a staunch and judicious promoter of parliamentary reform. In spite of his vanity and petulance, Durham deserves the credit of having drawn up the report, highly appreciated by the king, upon which the projected measure was founded. It originally included vote by ballot, and it is rather strange that on this point Durham was powerfully supported by Graham, but opposed by Russell. It is still more strange that Brougham, whose scheme of reform was locked up in his own breast, was honestly disturbed by the radicalism of his colleagues and specially objected to so large a disfranchisement of boroughs as they contemplated. Upon the whole, however, the bill was the product of an united cabinet, and received the express approval of the king in all its essential features. The elaborate letter which he addressed to Grey on February 4, 1831, betrays a sense of relief on finding that universal suffrage and the ballot were not to be pressed upon him In declaring that he never could have given his consent to such revolutionary innovations, he insists strongly on the necessity of maintaining an "equilibrium" between the crown, the lords, and the commons, as well as between the "representation of property" and that of numbers.

The reform bill of 1831, which differed only in detail from the act passed in 1832, cannot be understood without some knowledge of the system which that act transformed. This system has been well described as "combining survivals from the middle ages with abuses of the prerogative in later times". The counties remained as they had remained for centuries; Rutland, for instance, returned as many representatives as Yorkshire, until in 1821 the two seats taken from Grampound were added to those already possessed by Yorkshire. On the other hand, the old franchise of the 40s. freeholders was more widely diffused since the value of money had been greatly depreciated. Still, the influence of the great county families was almost supreme, and they were firmly entrenched in the nomination boroughs, where there was scarcely a pretence of free election. The crown had originally a discretion in summoning members from boroughs, and used it by issuing writs to all the wealthiest as better able to bear taxation and more competent to sanction it. The poorer boroughs, too, were also glad to escape representation in order to save the expense of their members' wages. The discretionary power of the crown was afterwards used in creating petty boroughs such as "the Cornish group," for the purpose of packing the house of commons with crown nominees. This practice, however, ceased in the reign of Charles II., and these petty boroughs fell by degrees into the hands of great landowners, who dictated the choice of representatives.

The result has been concisely stated as follows: "The majority of the house of commons was elected by less than fifteen thousand persons. Seventy members were returned by thirty-five places with scarcely any voters at all; ninety members were returned by forty-six places with no more than fifty voters; thirty-seven members by nineteen places with no more than one hundred voters; fifty-two members by twenty-six places with no more than two hundred voters. The local distribution of the representation was flagrantly unfair… Cornwall was a corrupt nest of little boroughs whose vote outweighed that of great and populous districts. At Old Sarum a deserted site, at Gatton an ancient wall sent two representatives to the house of commons. Eighty-four men actually nominated one hundred and fifty-seven members for parliament. In addition to these, one hundred and fifty members were returned on the recommendation of seventy patrons, and thus one hundred and fifty-four patrons returned three hundred and seven members."103 Household suffrage prevailed in a few boroughs, and here barefaced corruption was common. Seats for boroughs, appropriately called "rotten," were frequently put up to sale; otherwise, they were reserved for young favourites of the proprietor. Neither yearly tenants, nor leaseholders, nor even copyholders, had votes for counties. Of Scotland it is enough to say that free voting had practically ceased to exist both in counties and in boroughs, as the borough franchise was the monopoly of self-elected town councils, and the county franchise of persons, often non-resident, who happened to own "superiorities".

PROVISIONS OF THE FIRST BILL.

The reform bill of the whig ministry, drawn on broad and simple lines, struck at the root of this system. Its twofold basis was a liberal extension of the suffrage with a very large redistribution of seats. The elective franchise in counties, hitherto confined to freeholders, was to be conferred on £10 copyholders and £50 leaseholders; the borough franchise was to exclude "scot and lot" voters, "potwallopers" and most other survivals of antiquated electorates, but to include ratepaying £10 householders. The qualification for this franchise had originally been fixed at £20, and the king deprecated any reduction, but the omission of the ballot reconciled him and other timid reformers to an immense increase in the lower class of borough voters. Sixty boroughs of less than 2,000 inhabitants, returning 119 members, were to be disfranchised altogether; forty-seven others, with less than 4,000 inhabitants, were to be deprived of one member, and Weymouth was to lose two out of the four members which it returned in combination with the borough of Melcombe Regis. Fifty-five new seats were allotted to the English counties, forty-two to the great unrepresented towns, five to Scotland, three to Ireland, and one to Wales. Altogether the numerical strength of the house of commons was to be reduced by sixty-two, and this entirely at the expense of England. Both the county and borough franchises in Scotland were to be assimilated generally to those established for England, and the £10 borough franchise was extended to Ireland. The bill contained many other provisions designed to amend the practice of registration, the voting power of non-resident electors, and the cumbrously expensive machinery of elections. It is important to notice that it also limited the duration of each parliament to five years – a concession to radicalism afterwards abandoned and never since adopted.

On February 3 parliament met after the adjournment, and Grey stated that a measure of reform had been framed, but the nature of it was not disclosed to the house of commons until March 1, and during the interval the secret was kept with great fidelity. The task of explaining it was entrusted to Russell, whose thorough mastery of its letter and spirit fully justified the choice, partly suggested by his aristocratic connexions and historical name. His speech was remarkable for clearness and cogency rather than for rhetorical brilliancy, and he was careful to rest his case on constitutional equity and political expediency of the highest order rather than on vague and abstract principles of popular rights. The debate on the motion for leave to bring in the bill lasted seven nights, and was vigorously sustained on both sides. The drastic and sweeping character of the measure took the whole house by surprise, while its authors justly claimed some credit for moderation in rejecting the radical demands of universal suffrage, vote by ballot, and triennial, if not annual, parliaments. Not only inside but outside the walls of St. Stephen's the statement of the government had been awaited with the utmost impatience, and it was universally felt that an issue had now been raised which hardly admitted of compromise. The king himself, though much engrossed by minor questions affecting the civil list and the pension list, heartily congratulated Grey on the favourable reception and prospects of the measure, which he regarded as a safeguard against more democratic schemes. His great fear was of a collision between the two houses, and the sequel proved that it was not unfounded. For the present, however, all promised well. Peel denounced the bill with less than his usual caution, but declined to give battle upon it, and it passed the first reading on March 9 without a division. Indeed, the chief danger to the stability of the government arose from its defeat on the timber duties. This and other vexatious rebuffs so irritated Grey that he actually contemplated a dissolution, lest the reform bill itself should meet with a like fate. But the king would not hear of it, and the cabinet wisely decided to follow the example of Pitt and ignore an adverse division on a merely financial proposal, however significant of parliamentary feeling.