Читать книгу The Once and Future King - F. H. Buckley - Страница 11

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THE BRITISH PRIME MINISTER

No great historic problem has ever been settled by means of a brilliant idea.

—SIR LEWIS NAMIER

In their debates, the Framers of the American Constitution looked to other models they might follow. A few spoke self-consciously of ancient Greece’s Amphictyonic Council, the Hellenistic Achaean League, Charlemagne’s Empire. That was largely window dressing, though, an ostentatious display of scholarship. Only one model seriously commanded their attention: that of Britain. Their debates were an extended commentary on the British constitution—which they admired, but which they rejected as unsuited for America.

To what did they object, when they looked to the government of Westminster? We wouldn’t think it a democracy. The franchise was severely limited, large cities went unrepresented in Parliament, many members of Parliament were appointed by a local aristocrat, and George III exercised a very strong influence over the government. But the absence of democracy wouldn’t have bothered very many of the delegates, and Britain wasn’t entirely undemocratic either. From the fourteenth century onward, a Dick (“Turn again”) Whittington could travel to London to seek his fortune, and there was a remarkable degree of mobility between the social classes.¹ A Norfolk parson’s son might rise to command the Royal Navy and ascend to the peerage as Lord Nelson; a coal merchant’s son might become the arch-Tory Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon. Through trade, a person might climb the social ladder with a freedom unknown in most of the rest of Europe. “England knows not democracy as a doctrine,” observed Lewis Namier, “but has always practiced it as a fine art.”²

Britain was the freest country in the world at the time of the American Revolution. Though he might dominate the government, George III ruled as a constitutional monarch, and knew that he governed through Parliament, even if the colonists might have forgotten it. Before the Revolution some Americans had argued that, in their quest for self-government, they might bypass Parliament entirely. “The British Empire is not a single state,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. “It comprehends many . . . We have the same King but not the same legislatures.”³ The government of an American province, thought Franklin, was constituted by George III and the local House of Assembly, and only it—not Parliament at Westminster—had the power to levy taxes.

What Franklin objected to was the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, under which the “King-in-Parliament”—King, House of Lords, and House of Commons—has supreme legal authority. Statutes passed by both houses of Parliament and to which the King assents are “absolute and without control,” as William Blackstone wrote in 1765, the same year in which the Stamp Act was passed.⁴ There was nothing new in this. Parliamentary sovereignty had been a well-established constitutional principle at least as far back as the Glorious Revolution of 1688; and earlier constitutional doctrines, in which a Charles I might rule without relying on Parliament, or in which the common law as interpreted by the courts trumped Parliament, were left behind by the 1689 Revolution Settlement. Nor was there anything novel in Parliament’s assertion of authority over America. As far back as 1696, Parliament had declared that colonial laws were invalid if inconsistent with Acts of Parliament.⁵ Britons had come to see Parliament as the safeguard of their liberties, and found the American appeal to royal government a puzzling throwback to the earlier, illiberal regime of Charles I. Before long, Americans, too, abandoned the idea of a direct connection to the King with a Declaration of Independence that labeled George III a tyrant.

George III exercised a powerful influence over the government’s policies. He had a broad right to select whomever he wanted to serve as prime minister, and through a system of patronage controlled the votes of many members of Parliament. He was not, however, the tyrant the Patriots took him to be. Ironically, he might have been one had he tried to rule over America directly, as Franklin proposed. The prime minister, Lord North, recognized this in answering charges by the Whig leader, Charles James Fox, that North’s ministry was Tory. “The aim of toryism was to increase the [King’s] prerogative,” said North. “That in the present case, the administration contended for the right of Parliament, while the Americans talked of their belonging to the Crown.”⁶ But while George III adhered to the 1689 settlement, he also dominated the government, and was the most steadfast opponent of American independence. He remained so even after his ministers recognized that the cause was lost, and this precipitated a British constitutional crisis that put an end to the personal control he had exercised over Parliament. Both in America and in Britain, the American Revolution hastened the growth of democratic government.

THE ORDEAL OF LORD NORTH

Lord North was the prime minister of England from 1770 to 1782, with a period of continued leadership unmatched by all save two prime ministers since then. There was a reason for this. He was an amiable and effective leader who disarmed his opponents with his wit and good humor. No man was less given to enmity, or better able to bury a quarrel with a jest. Years later he told an old antagonist that, notwithstanding their differences in Parliament, “there are not two men in the kingdom who would now be more happy to see each other.” Both were blind at the time, and led about by attendants.⁷

If we remember North today, however, it is as the blunderer who lost America during the Revolution. “Lord Chatham, the king of Prussia, nay, Alexander the Great, never gained more in one campaign than the noble Lord has lost,” thundered Whig statesman Fox. “He has lost a whole continent.”⁸ That was a judgment North sought desperately to avoid; he knew early on that the Revolution was not going Britain’s way, and frequently asked George III to let him resign. In 1779 he described his agony to the King:

I have been miserable for ten years in obedience to Your Majesty’s commands . . . I must look upon it as a degree of guilt to continue in office, while the Publick suffers.” ⁹

The King refused North’s pleas and North remained in office, faithful to the constitutional principle that a King was entitled to choose his ministers. The seals of office may have been in North’s hands, but it was the King who supervised the conduct of the war, and North reported to him as an employee to his superior. However, North’s government could not carry on unless it enjoyed the support of Parliament, and this grew thin as the war continued. Fox argued that there were now two parties in the country, “His Majesty’s ministers, supported by the influence of the crown, against all Britain.”¹⁰

No one desired victory over the colonists more than the King, but after the 1777 British defeat in the Battles of Saratoga, it had become clear that the war would be a protracted and costly affair. The government was forced to increase taxation to meet the expenses of the campaign, and the House was bombarded with petitions to cut government spending. More than eight thousand freeholders in Yorkshire signed a petition demanding government reform, annual elections for Parliament, and an increase in the number of parliamentary county seats. Matters came to a head in 1780, when John Dunning’s motion that “the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished” was carried by 233 votes to 215.¹¹

Thereafter the North ministry stumbled on, with the news from America becoming progressively worse. Word of Lord Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in October 1781 came to Lord North on November 25. “Oh God,” he repeated aloud, “it is all over!”¹² He realized that he must make peace or his government would fall, but George III disagreed. On November 28 he wrote North, “I have no doubt when Men are a little recovered of the shock felt by the bad news . . . that they will then find the necessity of carrying on the war, though the mode of it may require alterations.”¹³ This meant keeping North in office, as the Whig leader, Lord Rockingham, had refused to serve as prime minister unless the King agreed to American independence, and to the dismissal of his current ministers.

North’s government struggled on for the next few months, temporizing about its plans and losing supporters. On February 22, 1782, a motion to end the American war was defeated by a single vote.¹⁴ A month later, on March 17, a motion of nonconfidence in the government was defeated by only nine votes. Everyone knew that North’s opponents were days away from defeating the government. Yet still the King resisted turning over power to the Rockingham Whigs, implying that he would abdicate before doing so. “I am resolved not to throw myself into the hands of Opposition at all events,” he told North, “and shall certainly, if things go as they seem to lead, know what my conscience as well as my honour dictates as the only way left to me.”¹⁵ The idea of a “Loyal Opposition,” of a party loyal to the King but opposed to the government, would be a nineteenth-century innovation. With George III as the de facto head of government, opposition to the government was opposition to the King.

The next day North finally persuaded the King to let him resign. At 4:30 on the afternoon of March 18, a packed House of Commons met to debate the fate of the government. As the session opened, the Earl of Surrey rose to move nonconfidence in the North ministry; at the same moment, North stood up to announce his resignation. “Each noble lord seemed determined not to give way to the other,” wrote the reporter. “This created a great deal of confusion, one side of the house crying out loudly for earl Surrey to speak first; the other side as loudly calling out lord North.”¹⁶ At last North was heard to say that he wished only to save Surrey from making a wholly unnecessary motion. Surrey had wanted to dismiss the ministry—but the ministry was no more.

Fox tried to pursue the matter, to establish the principle that a government might fall through a motion of nonconfidence. However, North conceded the point, and in a gracious and emotional speech thanked the House for its many years of support. He moved for an adjournment, to which the House consented, and walked out, much relieved that his ordeal was over. It was snowing, and the other members stood at the door waiting for their carriages. North had known that, with his resignation, it would be a short session, and unlike his enemies had his carriage at the ready. He saw a few friends gathered at the exit and said, “Come home and dine, and have the credit of having dined with a fallen minister on the day of his dismissal.” With them he stepped aboard his carriage; and to his opponents, huddled in the snow and awaiting their own carriages, he bowed and said, “Good night, gentlemen, you see what it is to be in [on] the secret!”¹⁷

Lord North had not lost a motion of nonconfidence, but he had lost the support of the House, and his government would certainly have fallen had he not resigned. This was the first example of a change of ministry as the immediate result of a vote in the House of Commons. It was also the first recognition of the vital principle of collective responsibility, in which all members of the inner cabinet would fall with the prime minister. “In the disasters of the American revolution,” concluded constitutional historian Sir David Keir, “the eighteenth-century constitution sustained its death-blow.”¹⁸

WILLIAM PITT’S CONSTITUTION

Constitutional changes in Britain are incremental, for the most part. While most historians believe, with John Dunning, that the influence of the Crown had increased on the accession of George III, a school of historians led by Sir Lewis Namier argued that the King had not departed from the generally accepted constitutional principles of the reigns of the first two Georges.¹⁹ North’s fall was not the first time that a government had left office because it had lost the support of the House of Commons; in 1741 a motion of nonconfidence had been made against the government of Sir Robert Walpole, in the form of an address to the King to remove Walpole. Walpole declared this to be “one of the greatest encroachments that was ever made upon the prerogative of the Crown,” and the motion was defeated by a large majority.²⁰ However, in the general election that followed, many of Walpole’s supporters were defeated and he voluntarily resigned his office.

Even after North’s fall in 1782, George III continued to take an active part in British election campaigns and in the choice of who was to lead his government. The King was the “font of honour,” and could award peerages and knighthoods to his supporters. He also controlled the Civil List, a fund of moneys he could spend freely to secure the loyalty of the “King’s Friends” in Parliament.²¹

In succeeding North, Lord Rockingham had imposed his own policies and ministers upon a resentful King. When Rockingham died in July 1782, the King happily chose the more amenable Earl of Shelburne as prime minister. But when Shelburne was faulted for conceding overgenerous terms to the Americans in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, his ministry was replaced in April of that year by an improbable Fox-North coalition. Lord North had been George III’s principal supporter in Parliament; Charles James Fox was the principal opponent of the King’s power. This seemed a union of both ends against the middle, but now North recognized that he had had quite enough of overbearing monarchs, and told Fox that “the King ought to be treated with every sort of respect and attention, but the appearance of power is all that a king of this country can have.”²² The much-abused North had come around to Fox’s constitutional theories of a purely ceremonial royal power.

George III detested Fox, whom he blamed for corrupting his son, the Prince of Wales, and sought out anyone who might keep Fox from office. A son of the Earl of Chatham (Pitt the Elder), the 23-year-old William Pitt, was the chancellor of the exchequer, and the King asked him to form a government. The time was not right, and Pitt refused, as did his uncle, Thomas. Get me “Mr. Thomas Pitt or Mr. Thomas Anybody,” cried the desperate King.²³ He once again considered abdication, but at last concluded that it was easier to swallow Fox as secretary of state than the dissolute Prince of Wales as his successor.

One of the new government’s first acts was a motion to create a government-appointed board to oversee the oppressive East India Company, then ruled by the first governor general of Bengal, Warren Hastings. While this passed the House of Commons by a large majority, there were those who thought a board appointed by the wildly profligate Fox might not be a great improvement over Hastings. Fox possessed what Irish MP Henry Grattan called a “negligent grandeur,”²⁴ an ability to inspire the deepest affection of his followers, while giving the impression he longed to be at the gaming table. He was without guile and artifice. The historian Edward Gibbon thought that “perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity or falsehood.”²⁵ Nonetheless, few people were less suited to administer the fabulously wealthy East India Company than Fox, of whom Horace Walpole left a memorable picture:

As soon as he rose, which was very late, [Fox] had a levée of his followers, and of the members of the Gaming Club, at Brooks’, all his disciples. His bristly black person, and shagged breast quite open, and rarely purified by any ablutions, was wrapped in a foul linen nightgown, and his bushy hair disheveled. ²⁶

His friend Sir Brooke Boothby said that Fox loved three things: women, gambling, and politics,²⁷ and it seemed in that order. He had gambled away his father’s inheritance, and in an age of rakes and spendthrifts, set the tone for a high society of men of pleasure.

For the King, Fox and the India bill were targets too tempting to resist. George first persuaded Pitt to serve as prime minister were the government to fall. The King then contrived to kill the India bill, and thus defeat the Fox-North ministry. He gave Pitt’s cousin, Lord Temple, a letter to circulate to his fellow peers in the House of Lords, in which the King called the India bill unconstitutional and subversive of the rights of the Crown, and said he would consider all who voted for it as his enemies.²⁸ The bill was accordingly defeated in the House of Lords on the evening of December 18, 1783, and George III immediately required Fox and North to deliver up the Seal of State, without even deigning to meet them. “I choose this method,” he wrote North, “as Audiences on such occasions must be unpleasant.”²⁹

The next morning, December 19, a delighted George III invited Pitt to kiss hands and become prime minister. Pitt accepted, and that morning faced the most hostile of Parliaments. When his appointment was announced to the House of Commons, the members of the Fox-North coalition burst into laughter at the idea of a 24-year-old prime minister. They called Pitt’s new government the mince-pie administration, so certain were they that it could not last beyond Christmas. Behind the laughter was anger that the Fox-North government had fallen through an extraordinary assertion of royal power, with a new government, installed solely through the King’s influence, that thumbed its nose at the House of Commons.

What followed was gridlock. The House of Commons immediately defeated the government in two votes, with majorities of 39 and 54 against. Pitt had the support of the King and the House of Lords, but had few allies in the House of Commons, and no bills could be passed. The King offered to dissolve Parliament and hold a new election, which might have given Pitt more support in the House of Commons, but Pitt refused to go to the people until he had a chance to stare down Fox and North. On January 13, 1784, after a debate that lasted until seven in the morning, the House of Commons resolved by a vote of 296 to 54 that the King’s efforts to defeat the Fox-North government had been unconstitutional. There followed a series of nonconfidence motions, but with the King’s encouragement, the preternaturally calm and self-assured Pitt hung on. If not made to be loved, noted his fellow MP Nathaniel Wraxall, he had a remarkable ability to guide and command.

In his manners, Pitt, if not repulsive, was cold, stiff and without Suavity or Amenity. He seemed never to invite Approach or to encourage Acquaintance . . . Smiles were not natural to him, even when seated on the Treasury Bench . . . From the Instant that Pitt entered the Door-way of the House of Commons, he advanced up the Floor with a quick and firm step, his Head erect and thrown back, looking neither to the right nor to the left, nor favoring with a Nod or a Glance any of the Individuals seated on either side. ³⁰

Faced with Pitt’s unblinking gaze, Fox’s majority continually shrank. Nor was Pitt unwilling to influence MPs with the tools now at his command. The floodgates of patronage were opened, and the Pittites suddenly found themselves endowed with titles and royal pensions. They sensed the country behind them, ready for a fresh start after the disastrous American war conducted by Lord North, Fox’s ally. On March 8, 1784, Pitt lost a vote in the House by only one vote. Fox had staked all on ultimate victory, but victory had eluded him; and now, finally, Pitt called for an election. The polls remained open for forty days, during which drink and cash, promises and threats were liberally applied to sway the voters. In Westminster the lovely Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was said to have kissed voters who pledged to vote for her lover, Fox.³¹ He won his seat, but Pitt won the House, with the largest majority any government had received in that century. With an eye to the Protestant martyrology, the government’s supporters went down to defeat as “Fox’s Martyrs.”

What Fox had sought was a revolution in constitutional governance, in which all power would devolve on Parliament and with the prime minister assuming the role of executive. “Had not a majority of the House of Commons almost from time immemorial governed this country?” he asked.³² But that was not the constitution of George III and William Pitt. What Fox wanted was Roger Sherman’s constitution, in which the legislature was supreme. By contrast, the Pittite constitution featured a form of the separation of powers that James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris would urge upon Americans. Pitt and the King had the better understanding of the British constitution, but Fox had a more accurate sense of the direction of constitutional reform. In one of the ironies of history, however, the Framers proposed a constitution that came to resemble the Pittite constitution more than that of the forward-looking Fox.

Americans regarded the political turmoil with great interest. Some ministers were better disposed toward Americans than others, and it mattered who would negotiate the peace treaty between America and Britain, and carry out its terms. No one was more sympathetic to the Americans than Fox, who wore their blue-and-buff uniform to Parliament to show his support for their Revolution. Gouverneur Morris was especially interested in English politics. His stepbrother had fought for the British, and had become a member of the House of Commons. At the Philadelphia Convention, Morris recognized how the prime minister had nearly assumed the executive power in Britain. “If [Fox] had carried his India bill, which he was very near doing, he would have [been] made the Minister, the King in form almost as well as in substance.”³³

In time prime ministers became the ruler that Morris had foreseen, but this was far in the future. For the fifty-year period between the fall of Lord North and the British Reform Act of 1832, the Pittite constitution represented an intermediate stage, in which the prime minister had more power than he did in the early part of George III’s reign, but less still than a modern prime minister. The King would give full support to Pitt as an administrator, and would agree to major reforms, including economic measures that curbed the King’s spending power. Gradually, responsibility for public money was taken from the King and placed in the hands of the prime minister. The modern cabinet also began to develop, as a body that owed its appointment and continuance in office to the prime minister, and not the King. But Pitt did not advance a legislative agenda the way modern prime ministers do, demanding loyalty from their cabinets. Instead, matters were decided by free votes; cabinet ministers might disagree with Pitt over major issues such as parliamentary reform, abolition of the slave trade, and repeal of religious tests without losing their jobs. The doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility, under which members of the cabinet must publicly support all governmental decisions, even if they do not privately agree with them, was a thing of the future.

The King was more than a figurehead, however, and remained a real factor in government. The royal veto, which had last been used to torpedo a public bill in 1708,³⁴ was not a dead letter, and George III threatened to employ it against Catholic emancipation in 1799, a measure Pitt had proposed. He went further, and publicly declared that he would consider as his personal enemy anyone who proposed the measure. In 1801 an exasperated Pitt suggested that he might resign if he were not permitted to introduce Catholic emancipation, and five days later George accepted his resignation.³⁵

Prime ministers continued to depend on the support of the House, but political parties were in their infancy. In rare cases, such as 1784, the nation might divide into two camps upon a constitutional crisis, but for the most part Parliament was composed of shifting political coalitions, and not stable parties. There was still a core of King’s Friends, but Pitt’s economic reforms had reduced George’s influence, and over time the center of political gravity shifted from the King in Windsor to the politicians in Westminster.

REFORM

The Parliament of the eighteenth century was based upon the electoral system of 1660 (with the addition of Scottish seats after the 1707 Act of Union), and reflected where people had lived at that earlier time. During the reign of George III the growing cities of the midlands were greatly underrepresented, while “rotten boroughs” with few inhabitants continued to send disproportionately more members to Parliament. The great County of York, with sixteen thousand voters, was represented by two members—the same number of seats accorded the fifty electors of Thirsk. Similarly, Old Sarum, which had flourished in Norman times, was an uninhabited mound of earth in the nineteenth century; while Dunwich, a thriving capital in the Kingdom of East Anglia, was now almost washed away into the sea. Many of the ridings (or electoral districts) were “pocket boroughs,” smaller districts dominated by one major landowner who effectively controlled its members of Parliament. Seats were bought and sold, noted journalist William Cobbett, and Parliament refused to do anything about it.³⁶

We might wonder how such a seemingly irrational system survived. The greater wonder was the reform movement that swept it away, for the prereform system had an entrenched core of supporters who were its beneficiaries. Privileged bodies have never been in the habit of reforming themselves; in our own times, political incumbents devise powerful obstacles to any threat to dislodge them. Moreover, many of the House’s most distinguished members first came to Parliament from a pocket borough: Fox (while still a minor), Pitt the Younger, Charles Grey, Henry Brougham, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and even the young William Gladstone (on the strength of an antireform speech in the Oxford Union).³⁷ Pitt the Elder served as the member for Old Sarum, as did John Horne Tooke, the parliamentary reformer. For many bright young men, fresh from the Grand Tour (or, in Grey’s case, still on it), the unreformed Parliament provided an entry to politics that a more democratic electorate might well have denied.

Many eighteenth-century Britons thought that their system of “virtual” representation, with its unrepresentative Parliament, served them well—that apart from moments of crisis they were prosperous and well-governed, and the incentives of the great landed families that controlled parliamentary seats were aligned with those of a primarily agricultural country. Given this, they would have agreed with Samuel Johnson that American colonists had no reason to object to taxes imposed by Westminster. The Americans were not directly represented in Parliament, but then neither were most Britons. If virtual representation worked for Birmingham, why not for Boston?

The first proposal for general reform of the electoral system came from John Wilkes in 1776.³⁸ A more democratic system would not, he said, have permitted the ministry to carry on its campaign to subjugate America. “We ought in every thing, as far as we can, to make the theory and the practice of the constitution coincide.”³⁹ A sensible proposal, one might have thought; and yet it was laughed away. “Lord North was very jocular,” according to the reporter (who sadly omitted the jokes),⁴⁰ and no one else spoke on the subject, which was voted down without a division.

Having once been raised, however, the cause of reform refused to go away. After his landslide victory in the election of 1784, Pitt felt the country at his back, and proposed to buy up the small boroughs from their electors and redistribute the seats to the new, unrepresented cities. Fox objected to compensating the electors, an expense the celebrated wit Sydney Smith later compared to reimbursing highwaymen when their poaching grounds in Finchley Common were enclosed.⁴¹ Fox nevertheless voted for the motion, as did reformers such as William Wilberforce; but most Foxites opposed it, as did North’s supporters, and it was defeated 248 to 174.⁴²

There were two more parliamentary attempts at electoral reform before the great reform movement of 1832. In the first, an Irish member introduced a bill for reform in 1790, but by then the French Revolution had made the idea of reform odious to many members. The then secretary of war, William Windham, spoke against the motion, which never came to a vote. “What!” he said, “would he recommend you to repair your house in a hurricane?”⁴³ Two years later, Charles Grey emerged from his devouring affair with the Duchess of Devonshire to take up the cause, replying to Windham in a notice of motion for electoral reform.⁴⁴ It was precisely when radicals, inspired by the French Revolution, threatened the British constitution that every reasonable cause of complaint should be addressed, he said. Now, however, Pitt spoke out against reform, and Edmund Burke warned of radical Jacobins in their midst. Reform had few friends in the House of Commons, and the matter died on the order table.

The cause of reform thereafter languished for forty years. Grey took his seat in the House of Lords on his father’s death in 1807, and the House of Commons lost its strongest advocate for reform. Ten years later Wellington recalled how Grey’s voice was missed. “Nobody cares a damn for the House of Lords,” he told the diarist Thomas Creevey. “The House of Commons is everything in England, and the House of Lords nothing.”⁴⁵ Deprived of a sympathetic and energetic audience, Grey became despondent, and in 1810 suggested that parliamentary reform be deferred while the Napoleonic Wars continued.⁴⁶

With Parliament a dead end, radicals such as William Cobbett agitated for reform through pamphlets and mass meetings. Corresponding societies were formed to promote reform, and were duly suppressed by the government. Horne Tooke was put on trial, and Cobbett himself was imprisoned for two years. Even after Napoleon’s defeat, the example of the French Revolution made reform appear threatening. In The Masque of Anarchy, Percy Bysshe Shelley imagined that conservatives would be shamed by the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, in which Yeomen cavalry, supported by the 15th Hussars (fresh from Waterloo), charged a peaceful assembly of reformers in St. Peter’s Field in Manchester and left a dozen men and women dead. Instead, the principal speaker at the assembly was sentenced to thirty months in prison for sedition, and Parliament made it illegal for more than fifty people to attend a political meeting without the approval of authorities.⁴⁷

Because Peterloo was a working-class protest, it had failed to excite the sympathy of reformers in Parliament. By 1830, however, the cause of reform had begun to revive. The landed aristocracy who controlled the pocket boroughs no longer seemed to provide a rising middle class with effective virtual representation, particularly when it came to the objections free traders had to the protectionist Corn Laws. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 had brought a new kind of Irish MP to Westminster, one whose support would make a crucial difference in the struggle for reform. The excesses of the French Revolution were now forty years in the past, and the 1830 July Revolution that made Louis-Philippe King of the French proved that the middle class might safely make a revolution. To English Whigs, France’s July Revolution recalled England’s 1688 Glorious Revolution, and the diarist Charles Greville reported that people felt an “electrical reciprocity” between the two countries.⁴⁸ Finally, King George IV had died in June, and his brother, the new King William IV, was regarded as much more open to reform.

At that time, parliamentary elections were called on the death of a king. While the Tories under the Duke of Wellington were returned to power in the general election of 1830, the party lost fifty seats. It had opposed reform, and continued to think it had no lessons to take from the French. When Gladstone, then a moderate Tory, cited the example of the July Revolution to an English workingman, he was told, “Damn all foreign countries. What has old England to do with foreign countries!” A chastened Gladstone later recalled that “this is not the only time that I have received an important message from a humble source.”⁴⁹ The Duke of Wellington himself declared his unwavering opposition to reform in an unnecessarily candid speech before the House of Lords. He did not think that the unreformed Parliament could be improved upon, he said, and therefore would always oppose any attempt at reform.⁵⁰ Sitting down, he asked his neighbor, “I have not said too much, have I?” “You’ve announced the fall of your government, that’s all,” was the reply.⁵¹

His ministry fell at once, and in December 1830 Grey was asked to form a government. He announced that his government would bring in a reform bill, and gave the task of drafting it to his impossibly peevish, self-righteous, and impetuous son-in-law, John “Radical Jack” Lambton, Lord Durham. What emerged from Durham’s pen was far more sweeping than anyone had imagined, for he proposed to eliminate 168 seats in a House of 638 members. The bill was tabled in a two-hour speech by the diminutive Lord John Russell on March 1, 1831. When Russell proposed that sixty English rotten boroughs would be disenfranchised under the measure, a member called out “name them!,” and as Russell did so, the magnitude of the change sank in. The parliamentary reporter described how Russell “was frequently interrupted by shouts of laughter, cries of ‘hear, hear,!’ from Members for these boroughs, and various interlocutions across the Table.”⁵² There was a desire for reform, but had Durham gone too far? Many thought that, had the Tories had the presence of mind to demand a vote at that point, the Grey ministry would have fallen.⁵³

On March 21 a packed House of Commons took up the bill on second reading. “Such a scene as the division of last Tuesday I never saw, and never expect to see again,” wrote Macaulay.

The crowd overflowed the House in every part. When the strangers were cleared out, and the doors locked, we had six hundred and eight members present,—more by fifty-five than ever were in a division before. The Ayes and Noes were like two volleys of cannon from opposite sides of a field of battle. When the opposition went out into the lobby, an operation which took up twenty minutes or more, we spread ourselves over the benches on both sides of the House: for there were many of us who had not been able to find a seat during the evening. When the doors were shut we began to speculate on our numbers.

They had, as it turned out, 302 votes on their side. But how many would the Tories muster?

Everybody was desponding. . . . First we heard that they were three hundred and three; then that number rose to three hundred and ten; then went down to three hundred and seven. . . . We were all breathless with anxiety, when Charles Wood, who stood near the door, jumped up on a bench and cried out, “They are only three hundred and one.” We set up a shout that you might have heard to Charing Cross, waving our hats, stamping against the floor, and clapping our hands. The tellers scarcely got through the crowd; for the House was thronged up to the table, and all the floor was fluctuating with heads like the pit of a theatre.⁵⁴

The reform bill had passed, by a majority of one vote: 302 to 301. Thirty members from rotten boroughs had voted to abolish their ridings, and a further thirty-two members had voted to have their representation reduced by half.⁵⁵ Had one of them switched their vote the Grey ministry would have fallen, and the cause of reform would have been deferred once again.

Second reading of a bill amounts to assent in principle. But the details were yet to be worked out, and on April 19, 1831, the government was defeated on an amendment to the bill. Grey despaired of victory, and decided to take his case to the voters. That required the consent of the King to dissolve Parliament, and William IV seemed at first unable to make up his mind. However, the Tories, who wanted neither an election nor passage of the Reform Act, overplayed their hand. In the House of Lords, the Tory Lord Wharncliffe announced that he would move an address to the King against dissolution.⁵⁶ More than anything, William IV did not like to be pressured, and this infuriated him. He decided to dissolve Parliament, and to ensure that Wharncliffe would not have time to make his motion first, declared that he would go to Westminster immediately. Told that the Horse Guards were not ready, that the horses’ manes were not plaited, he said, “I’ll go, if I go in a hackney coach!”⁵⁷

As the King arrived, the Tory leader in the House of Commons, Sir Robert Peel, was furiously declaiming against the “very worst and vilest species of despotism—the despotism of demagogues,” and against something worse still, the despotism of journalism.⁵⁸ In the middle of his harangue he was interrupted by the parliamentary Usher of the Black Rod, who appeared at the Bar of the House and announced, “I am commanded by his Majesty to command the immediate attendance of this hon. House in the House of Lords, to hear . . . his Majesty’s Speech for the Prorogation of Parliament.”⁵⁹ When they arrived there, a loud voice was heard to say “God save the King.” At that moment the large doors to the right of the throne were thrown open, and William entered the House, his crown awry. Grey followed, bearing the great two-handed sword of state, as if defying the Tories to object.⁶⁰ In a short speech the King declared Parliament dissolved, and the contest was removed from Parliament and handed to the people. In the ensuing election the proreform Whigs won a majority of 130 to 140 seats.

A second reform bill, little changed from the first, received second reading in July 1831 and third reading on September 22, when it passed by 346 to 237 votes. However, the bill still required the assent of the House of Lords, and there the 67-year-old Grey introduced it on October 3, reminding the peers that he had advocated reform for nearly fifty years in Parliament. The bill was enthusiastically supported by most Britons, who had given the Whigs their large majority in the House of Commons; but the Tories commanded a majority in the House of Lords, and passage was anything but assured. Such was the excitement over the debate that the reporter noted the unwonted presence of “a considerable number of Peeresses, and their daughters, and relations . . . [who] displayed all the enthusiastic ardour of the sex in their sympathy with the sentiments of the different speakers.”⁶¹

What the Tories objected to were the democratic principles they detected in the bill, and which the Duke of Wellington decried in almost the same words that Madison had used in 1787.

A democracy has never been established in any part of the world, that it has not immediately declared war against property—against the payment of the public debt—and against all the principles of conservation, which are secured by, and are, in fact, the principal objects of the British Constitution, as it now exists. Property, and its possessors, will become the common enemy. ⁶²

Wellington appealed to the principle of the separation of powers, to government by “King, Lords and Commons.” The House of Commons was not entitled to get its own way should the other branches of government disagree with it, he said. The House of Commons had voted for reform; the House of Lords demurred. The situation, said Wellington, was no different from 1783, when Pitt, with the support of George III and the House of Lords, had resisted the majority of Fox and North supporters in the House of Commons. The reform bill could not proceed, and Grey should have accepted this; instead, he had persuaded the King to dissolve Parliament, and in so doing had denied the principle, at the heart of the Pittite constitution, that the King was entitled to choose his own ministers. Grey had proposed a revolution in constitutional theory by appealing to the democratic principle that the ministry should be chosen by voters who elect the House of Commons. He had adopted the idea that James Wilson had enunciated at the Philadelphia Convention, that the legitimacy of the government depended on the consent of the voters. Wellington’s arguments carried the day, and the House of Lords voted 199 to 158 against the bill.⁶³

The two houses of Parliament were now in deadlock, but Grey had a stratagem to break the gridlock which Americans lack when the House of Representatives and the Senate disagree. On the advice of his ministers the King could appoint new peers who would vote with the government, and this had been done in 1711, when the Tory ministry needed to overcome the opposition of Whig peers to the Treaty of Utrecht. With this precedent in mind, Grey had Parliament prorogued (or suspended), and a third reform bill was introduced on December 12, 1831. This included several amendments that had been proposed by the Tories, and was carried on second reading by 324 to 162 votes, exactly two to one. For the bill to pass, however, Grey needed the support of a nervous William IV, and the riots that had broken out across England on the defeat of the second reform bill had done little to calm the King, who personally did not much care for parliamentary reform.

As the King shilly-shallied, Grey’s cabinet let William know that they would resign if new peers were not created. To their surprise, William took them at their word, and approached Wellington to see whether the Tories might form a government. They lacked the support to do so, however, and the Whigs remained in office. At this point, the gridlock embraced all three branches of the British government. Now, however, the King gave in, and signed an agreement with the Whigs that he would create as many peers as they wished. Faced with the degradation of their institution, the House of Lords blinked. In the midst of debate fifty to sixty Tory peers walked out, Wellington in their lead, giving the Whigs their majority; and so the Great Reform Act at last was passed.⁶⁴

The Reform Act extended the franchise, but stopped well short of giving everyone the vote. Only male householders living in properties worth at least £10 a year were enfranchised; even so, this increased the British electorate threefold. The new voters were the members of the middle class whom Lord Brougham memorably described as:

the genuine depositaries of sober, rational, intelligent, and honest English feeling. . . . If they have a fault, it is that error on the right side, a suspicion of State quacks—a dogged love of existing institutions—a perfect contempt of all political nostrums. . . . . Grave—intelligent—rational—fond of thinking for themselves—they consider a subject long before they make up their minds on it; and the opinions they are thus slow to form, they are not swift to abandon. ⁶⁵