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

PERILOUS QUESTION

PERILOUS
QUESTION

Reform or Revolution?
Britain on the Brink, 1832

Antonia Fraser

PUBLICAFFAIRS
New York

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FICTION

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Your Royal Hostage

The Cavalier Case

Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave

Political Death

The perilous question is that of Parliamentary Reform, and as I approach it, the more I feel all its difficulty.
Earl Grey, 13 January 1831

Copyright 2013 by Antonia Fraser.

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Published in the United States by PublicAffairs, a Member of the Perseus Books Group

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The Library of Congress Control Number: 2013933913

ISBN 978-1-61039-332-4 (EB)

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In Memory of

HAROLD PINTER and FRANK LONGFORD
who were not afraid to ask perilous questions

A Patriot King is the most powerful of all reformers ...
A new people will seem to arise with a new King

Lord Bolingbroke, The Idea of a Patriot King, 1738

The struggle for the Great Reform Bill of 1832 took place at the crossroads of English history. One road wound down from the long eighteenth century which, it could be argued, only ended with the victory of Waterloo in 1815. Another road led forward to the reign of Queen Victoria which began in 1837 and a nineteenth century which finally terminated with the beginning of the First World War in 1914. This was the Britain from which the imagination of J.M.W. Turner drew inspiration; in a famous picture of the 1830s, The Fighting Temeraire, a ship distinguished at the Battle of Trafalgar twenty-five years earlier, was shown being tugged away at sea, to be broken up; in another exquisite sunset landscape, a new industrial town existed as a dark, even menacing blur in the corner.

Communications were being transformed. This was the time when the first railways were nosing their way round Britain. Mrs Harriet Arbuthnot, confidante of the Duke of Wellington, waxed lyrical at the opening of the LiverpoolManchester Railway: I dont think I ever saw a more beautiful sight than at the moment when the car attached to the engine shot off on its journey.

During the struggle, the famous names of the coming reign were already present, albeit in very junior capacities. Here was the nineteen-year-old Charles Dickens as a cub reporter in Parliament and a youthful Thomas Babington Macaulay, first elected MP in 1830, making his name. A promising student at Oxford attended the debates in the gallery: his name was William Ewart Gladstone. Victoria herself, who was twelve in 1830, struck an observer as a young, pretty, unaffected child; Sir John Hobhouse added: What will become of her?

Among the politicians at Westminster, Daniel OConnell made his first appearance from Ireland the man who would be known as The Liberator. At the same time the leading Whig politician, Charles 2nd Earl Grey, had worshipped at the liberal shrine of Charles James Fox in the 1780s and as a young man had been the cavalier of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, centre of the glittering Whig world of that time. The Tory Prime Minister, the great soldier the Duke of Wellington, whose mother had taken part in the coronation of George III in 1761, was in his sixties, as indeed was Grey.

During the struggle, there would be frequent references to the troubles of Charles I with his Parliament and the English Civil War which followed. Then there was the last traumatic period in English reforming history, the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Whig oligarchy imposed their choice of the Protestant William III upon the throne and ejected the Catholic James II. The diarist Charles Greville In 1830, when Talleyrand was appointed French Ambassador to London, there were many such treasuries. One prominent young Whig, Lord John Russell, was descended from the ducal Bedford family which had been so active in the oligarchic cause in the late seventeenth century. It was 140-odd years since 1688 not a great length of time in human generations.

More recently the American War of Independence and the founding of the American nation, with its written Constitution, provided other memories to draw upon and another example of change. To some the American struggle was the torch which lighted the world for the last fifty years. But there was also the folk memory of a rebellious people.

The particular drama of the Great Reform Bill began with the death of one king and the fall of another. In June 1830 George IV, King of Great Britain, died at the age of sixty-seven. A month later the Bourbon King of France, in the shape of Charles X, was toppled. An insurrection resulted in the substitution of a cousin, Louis-Philippe, Duc dOrlans, under the more populist title King of the French.

King George, the eldest son of the huge family of George III and Queen Charlotte, had been ailing for some time. By the spring of 1830 it was evident that he could not expect to live much longer. In April he was said to have attacks in which he went black in the face, although he still managed to call for a page to provide him with a huge piece of beef, while drinking ale, claret and brandy in succession. It was hardly surprising that the King had become enormous: like a feather bed, wrote Princess Lieven, the astringent Russian Ambassadress, in May, while his legs, also swollen, are hard as stone; his face is drawn and the features pinched. The Irish writer Maria Edgeworth was told by Sir David Wilkie that painting the King in the last stages of his life was the most difficult and melancholy business; it took three hours to get the old dying dandy into his robes, whereupon he looked like a great

The Times weighed in with an obituary which caused exclamations of disgust in loyal quarters, with its reference to a life, the character of which rose little higher than that of animal indulgence. A fortnight later the newspaper, under its powerful editor Thomas Barnes, returned to the attack: There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased King. What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow? the latter jibe being a reference to his last mistress, Lady Conyngham, physically a match for her royal lover (she too was immensely fat), and with similarly lavish tastes in jewellery.