The Once and Future King. F. H. Buckley

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