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’.8 To others it was proof that constitutions did not have to ‘grow like vegetables’: they could be fashioned outright.9 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 d’Orléans, 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 sausage stuffed into the covering’. On 26 June, as Earl Grey informed Princess Lieven, ‘the poor King sank at last under his accumulated miseries, and died about 3 a.m.’.10
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.11 It was left to the Duke of Wellington to give a more charitable verdict. Here was ‘the most extraordinary compound of talent, wit, buffoonery, obstinacy and good feeling,’ he told Harriet Arbuthnot, ‘ – in short a medley of the most opposite of qualities with a great preponderance of good – that I ever saw in any character in my life’.12
The man who succeeded George IV was in almost every way a complete contrast. This was to be a time of change and the difference in the characters of the two monarchs symbolized it from the start. You could even say that the variation in regal name had something portentous about it. The Royal Chaplain who inadvertently prayed for ‘Our Lord King George’ might surely be pardoned: there had been sovereigns named George for the last 114 years since the death of Queen Anne. It was left to the new King to say emphatically: ‘William, if you please.’13
The Duke of Clarence, now William IV, had been heir presumptive to the throne for the last three years, ever since the death of another, older brother, Frederick Duke of York. He was sixty-four, born in the same year as Lord Grey. As the third son, he was put into the Navy early in life and spent his youthful, formative years in that environment. Admiral Nelson was one of his heroes – William had acted as a witness at his wedding in the West Indies, and a relic of the shirt in which the great man died was preserved at his home at Bushy Park. Perhaps that early naval life was responsible for his bluff good nature; this was accompanied by a certain uninhibited freedom of expression, however, which had clearly survived unimpaired by naval discipline. There was also something of the busybody about him, as had been displayed during his short stint as Lord High Admiral during his brother’s reign: in the end William had resigned rather than submit to ‘the laws enacted by Parliament’ as his brother expected.14
William was friendly, and, in contrast to what a contemporary called the ‘haughty reserve’ of the late King George, friendly to people around him, regardless of degree. His tendency to wave and laugh at the crowds who greeted him, to walk spontaneously among them making light-hearted conversation in a way George IV would never have contemplated, shocked the staider members of society but aroused delight in lowly observers. This informality and love of a risqué joke – especially in after-dinner speeches – aroused similarly mixed reactions. When told that a certain person could not attend Court because he did not have the right breeches, the King quipped happily: ‘Then let him come without his breeches.’15 There was something childlike – bon-enfant – about his enjoyment of his new position.
The seclusion of George IV’s last years had been a marked aspect of his reign: he had not visited London for a year, nor Brighton since 1827. The result had been a Court described as ‘the most sombre and melancholy that ever was known’.16 One of the first actions of William IV was to throw open the previously closed terraces of Windsor Castle to the people; unlawful names might be carved on the walls as a result, but he gained immense affection. Similarly free access to the royal parks was granted and dinner was given for the poor people of Windsor.
It was not quite clear how intelligent the new King was. As Duke of Clarence he had gained a reputation for being ‘foolish and indelicate’ in his utterances, but that might have been the effect of unusual talkativeness in a royal prince. In May 1830 Lord Anglesey predicted gloomily that he would be ‘wild, arbitrary, prejudiced and unmanageable’ but admitted that he might be popular. He had a tendency, as one of his closest aides noted, to cling strongly to opinions which he had imbibed early and ‘long eagerly maintained’, but again that was not so unusual in a gentleman of rank in his mid-sixties.17
There was however one aspect of his character which would prove to be of considerable significance in the years to come. In spite of this obstinacy in public, William had one weakness. He was uxorious, that is to say he was inclined to be influenced by the woman in his life, and expected to live in close proximity to her. None of the royal marital distance for him; he shared the conjugal bedroom, something sufficiently unusual to cause comment. When the messengers came to tell the new King of the old King’s death at Bushy Park in the early hours of the morning, William was said to have retired to bed afterwards with the cheerful words: ‘I’ve never been to bed with a Queen before.’ Perhaps the story was apocryphal, but the sentiment, as in many apocryphal stories, expressed the man.18 The Court created around this happily domestic couple might lack excitement compared to that Whig paradise of hospitality, Holland House. According to the diarist Greville, Queen Adelaide sat around embroidering flowers of an evening while William dozed – something to which he had a general tendency – occasionally waking to say strongly: ‘Exactly so, Ma’am’, before going to sleep again. But fashionable Whig despair – Lady Grey commenting on the ‘unendurable’ boredom of two days at Windsor – did not mean that the strength of the central royal union could be ignored.19
This need for intimacy had been true of his earlier, prolonged relationship outside marriage with the actress Mrs Jordan, who bore him a brood of children. Mrs Jordan was dead, although the FitzClarences, William’s acknowledged bastards, were an important component of the new Court. The death of Princess Charlotte – George IV’s only offspring – in childbirth had, however, led to a desperate search for a new royal heir (or heiress). There was an extraordinary lack of heirs within the prolific family of King George III and somewhere lurking in the order of succession was the grim figure of his fifth son, Ernest Duke of Cumberland, a notoriously reactionary character. The fourth son, the Duke of Kent, duly married in 1818 and his wife produced a daughter, named Victoria, born i
n May the next year. William also married in 1818: his own bride, nearly thirty years younger, was Adelaide, daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. Adelaide had borne William two children, both daughters, but neither had lived longer than a few months. The elder, known as Princess Elizabeth, would of course have succeeded in advance of her cousin Victoria: her mother referred to her as ‘our poor little Queen Bess’ when she died, for she would have come to the throne as the second Elizabeth. It should be noted that at the time of William’s accession, Queen Adelaide was only thirty-eight: an age at which she at least had not despaired of providing an heir, as her Diary reveals.20
Once upon a time there had been glamour about the late King as a young and dashing Prince – Florizel, as he had been nicknamed years ago. No one could pretend that the new royal couple had anything glamorous about them: William had looked engaging enough as a boy; he was now stout, rubicund and not very tall. His Queen gained compliments from the charitable, but mainly for her graciousness: to Maria Edgeworth she was ‘a good natured-looking good sort of body’. More spiteful observers such as Greville noted that her complexion was not very good – ‘this dreadful spotted majesty’ – in an age when even critics of the English aristocracy admitted the peerless quality of the ladies’ creamy skins.21 She also had a strong German accent, scarcely surprising given her background, but offering a potential target for satirists.
It was an important component of the new Queen’s character that, born in 1792 when the Terror was approaching in France, she had been brought up in a war-torn Germany. Meiningen was a tiny state, its capital a little larger than the town of Hertford, as a contemporary biographer of William IV wrote, with a population of about 5,000.22 From this perspective, great events brought nothing but dread. All Adelaide’s childish memories were of the horrors of Revolution – and the hideous consequences for sovereigns such as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette if Revolution was allowed to devour its prey. The fate of Marie Antoinette, born an Archduchess of Austria, was something which haunted princesses in German royal nurseries. In addition to these fears, Adelaide had a dread of encouraging dissipation at Court, in Puritanical reaction to the previous reign. Ladies who had been urged to show their décolletages by George IV in his lubricious prime, were now told sharply to cover up. She did not receive the wife of Earl Ferrers because she was known to have been his mistress before marriage.23 In short, here was a kindly, decent but unsophisticated woman, whose choice would have been a quiet life in their delightful house at Bushy Park, now catapulted into the centre of political events.
Greville did better with William IV. The King looked like a respectable old admiral, he wrote in his Diary. But an observer at the coronation saw on the contrary a wizened little old man with an extremely red face.24 The emphasis on William’s age was not a coincidence. Three Hanoverian princes – George IV, the Duke of York and the Duke of Kent – had died within the last decade, the first two in their sixties and the third in his early fifties. (This was a period when the median age of death for males was somewhere in their forties.) Throughout the early years of the reign of William IV, anxious reports of his health abounded, and as the various crises arose, the anxieties grew greater. Then there was the threat of madness in the son of a father whose reign had been so conspicuously marked by it. Rumours persisted that William too had tendencies that way – and of course his behaviour both eccentric and excitable, his wild bombastic speeches, did nothing to discourage them.
Naturally the constitutional powers of a British Sovereign remained in theory exactly the same in the case of both William and his elder brother. But one obvious consequence of a hereditary system was that character would vary considerably from monarch to monarch; and with that variation – due to the quirk of fate by which George IV died on 26 June 1830 and William IV succeeded – came the prospect of change. Lord Bolingbroke, in his famous study of 1738, The Idea of a Patriot King, suggested that ‘A new people will seem to arise with a new King’: nearly a hundred years later, there was at least that possibility.25 Queen Adelaide might note in her Diary that at Windsor the room of the late George IV remained just as it was: ‘a sad sight’ with even the cushions of the mighty chair in which he died untouched.26 But the sad sight would soon belong to the past.
*
The death of a hereditary monarch had another predictable consequence. This was the need for an immediate General Election according to the legal requirement of the time. The Prime Minister, the so-called Iron Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo, had led the Tory Government since January 1828; previously, a spate of deaths had robbed the Tories of George Canning and Lord Liverpool. In this connection, it was relevant that when various governments had been proposed to George IV of a more co-operative nature politically, Grey’s name had been put forward: but George IV did not fail to manifest his extreme dislike for the Whig leader, his contemporary, once rival in love, and supporter of Queen Caroline, the wife he tried to divorce in 1820; to say nothing of the fact that Grey had opposed a large financial grant to him as Prince of Wales. ‘Anyone but Grey,’ George IV told Wellington in 1828.27 That personal debarment no longer existed with the King’s death. William IV had on the contrary been suspected of Whig sympathies before his accession although he quickly took pains to reassure Wellington of the continuance of his favour, that everything should go on as before.
Nevertheless the Tory Government was no longer the force it had once been, ruling the country one way and another for sixty years, with one short break twenty-five years earlier. The passing of the Act for Catholic Emancipation in 1829 had reft the party despite its admirable intentions – even The Times admitted that George IV had behaved well in giving his assent to the Bill. The quip that Wellington, to cover the total change of policy of his Government (in the interests of pragmatism), simply and successfully ordered the Lords like a lot of soldiers: ‘About turn! March!’ was very far from the truth.28 A powerful group had emerged known as Ultra Tories who despised the Government for their submission, as they saw it, to pressure over principle. The Tory Duchess of Rutland took to her bed ‘with alarm about Bloody Mary, Guy Faux, and the Duke of Norfolk’ – the latter being the premier peer, but a Catholic of ancient lineage who was now able to give a celebratory dinner for his new rights.29 Then there were Tories such as Sir Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, who had in the end supported Catholic Emancipation – once again he was seen by opponents in his party as sacrificing his principles, an accusation against a man conscious of his own rectitude which might well influence his future political behaviour.
The campaign for Catholic Emancipation had been extraordinarily divisive. Put simply, in England, Wales and Scotland, it proposed the right of Catholics to vote in elections and stand for Parliament. Its opponents declared loudly that Protestant England itself was being attacked – the all-important power of the Anglican Church being thus eroded. In Ireland, the situation was more complicated. Here, Catholics within certain property qualifications had been allowed to vote and stand as candidates since 1793; hence Daniel O’Connell had been elected at a by-election in 1828, but as a Catholic had been unable to take his seat at Westminster.
This divisive effect is well illustrated by the seemingly bizarre behaviour of certain Ultra Tories such as the Marquess of Blandford. The young heir to the Duke of Marlborough, Member of Parliament for the family seat of New Woodstock since 1826, had been a vociferous opponent of Catholic Emancipation. Accusing Wellington and Peel of betraying the Protestant Constitution in response to the menaces of ‘Jesuits and Jacobins’, he decided that a House of Commons which could pass such an act must be in need of – what else but Reform? His aim was to reduce the dreaded incoming Roman Catholic influence. Now in his late twenties, Blandford was in private life a handsome scallywag who had begun early by leading riots against the Headmaster of Eton, and gone on to even more disreputable activities where women were concerned. In political terms, Tories found him ‘perfectly headstrong’ and utterly resolved to mak
e Reform ‘a cause of his own’. He introduced a bill to that effect in February 1830.30
The word ‘Reform’ itself did not have a particularly long history in public usage, the word ‘reformation’ being more generally employed. Its origin in regard to parliamentary Reform has been traced into the Association movement of Christopher Wyvill, in the 1780s, attacking the American War.31 There had been a movement towards parliamentary Reform by the Whigs at the end of the eighteenth century, numbering in its advocates that young Charles Grey who was now the venerable Whig politician. But over all these nascent movements had fallen the darkness of the French Revolution in its later horrifically violent stages, so painful to those who had hailed it originally: it is indeed impossible to exaggerate the shadow it cast over subsequent decades. Decent people who had seen its consequences so hideously demonstrated shuddered away from the mere notion of change. Others with equal conviction saw the Revolution quite differently: this was what happened when change was denied for too long.
Now, however, it was surely impossible for Reform not to feature in the coming reign. It was not only a cause for maverick (if well intentioned) young Tories like Blandford. The young Whig Lord John Russell had produced his own bill earlier and there had been other bills in the 1820s. After years of languishing, the topic was once again assuming some kind of national importance. And by a strange coincidence, the second French Revolution, that which had ejected Charles X and crowned Louis-Philippe as King of the French a month after the accession of William IV, was there once again to exercise its cross-Channel influence, for better or for worse.
To some, the baleful consequences of ejecting a monarch would be only too clearly visible in the period ahead: the dispossessed Charles X fled first of all to Lulworth Castle, near the Dorset coast, and then set up his court at Holyrood Palace in Scotland. Here was a king chased out by his people. Sir Robert Peel referred to ‘this wild liberty’ established by France, which he hoped the English would never be tempted to pursue, in contrast to the ‘well-tempered freedom’ they actually enjoyed. Princess Lieven, a professed enemy of revolutions at home and abroad, observed that ‘the democratic turn taken by things in France disturbs me greatly’, although she admitted that everyone in England was showing ‘the keenest interest in the new order of things in France’.32 It was relevant that the Duke of Wellington, the hero of the nation, had defeated the French at Waterloo; as a young man in the Navy the new King had fought bravely on the English side.