Abstract
A variety of circumstances brought Lord Grey and the Whigs into office at the end of 1830.1 One was that the death of George IV in the previous spring had removed the royal ban on the Whigs. William IV was happy to work with them (he was, indeed, to be of signal service in getting the great reform bill on to the statute books). Another was that the elections of 1830, which, as the law then stood, were required by the accession of a new monarch, had revealed a strong current of anti-government sentiment in the most open constituencies and had brought gains to the opposition. Party ties were still too indistinct for a general election to determine the fate of a government at once (the first government to resign immediately after a general election rather than test its strength in parliament was Disraeli’s in 1868) and the Duke of Wellington and his ministers remained in office to meet the new parliament. The government ranks were, however, in a sorry state. The Tory Party, held together by Lord Liverpool for fifteen years, had disintegrated into three groups — the Canningites (whom the bulk of the party had refused to act with during Canning’s short-lived government in 1827), the regular supporters of Peel and Wellington, and the ultras (estranged from the party leaders by Wellington’s decision to turn round on his public statements and preside over the passing of the act of Roman Catholic emancipation).
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Grey’s government was far from being entirely Whig. The three great secretaryships of state were filled by ex-Canningites (Palmerston at the Foreign Office, Melbourne at the Home Office and Goderich at the War Office) and the ultra-Tory Duke of Richmond was postmaster general. But the government’s strength rested on the Whig Party and its Radical allies and throughout this chapter the word ‘Whig’ is used, for convenience, to describe the government and its parliamentary supporters.
See E. J. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (London, 1969). the Penguin edition of 1973 has a new introduction with the authors’ comments on remarks made by critics of the book.
The Earl of Northbrook (ed.), Journals and Correspondence of Francis Thornhill Baring, Lord Northbrook (London, 1902), i, p. 66.
Annual Register, 1830, p. 146.
Anon., Parties and Factions in England at the Accession of William IV (London, 1830), 48.
Anon., The Results of the General Election; or, What Has the Duke of Buckingham Gained by the Dissolution? (London, 1830).
Parties and Factions, p. 48.
The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of William IV and Victoria (London, 1861), i, p. 45.
E. J. Stapleton (ed.), Some Official Correspondence of George Canning (London, 1887), ii, p. 321.
Hansard, 3rd Series, i, 37–38.
Ibid., vii, 1187.
It is worth noting that, despite everyone’s knowing that the House of Commons had become the centre of politics, the place both where real business was decided and where ministries were made and unmade — ‘nobody cares a damn for the House of Lords’, Wellington said in 1818; ‘the House of Commons is everything in England and the House of Lords nothing’ — nine of the thirteen members of Grey’s cabinet sat in the upper house. The other four were Viscount Palmerston, a great landowner with an Irish title (compatible with a seat in the House of Commons), Viscount Althorp, heir to the large estates of the Earl of Spencer, Sir James Graham, a modest landowner, and Charles Grant.
N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (London, 1953), p. 11.
Hansard, New Series, vii, 85.
Office of the Times, History of ‘The Times’ (London, 1935–48), i, p. 240.
‘It has sometimes occurred to me that we ought to try once more whether, by placing ourselves on the middle ground, condemning the conduct of Hunt and his associates, but strenuously resisting the attempt to attack through them the safeguards of the constitution, we could not rally to our standard all moderate and reasonable men (and a great portion of the property of the country), to whom the people might again be brought to look as their natural leaders and protectors.’ (Grey to Henry Brougham, 25 August, 1819. H. Brougham, The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham (London, 1871), ii, p. 343.)
O’Gorman, Two-Party System, p. 86.
J. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640–1832 (Cambridge, 1973), p. 210.
Fraser, ‘Party Voting’, p. 766.
The parliamentary battle, which lasted until the early summer of 1832, may be followed in detail in J. R. M. Butler, The Passing of the Great Reform Bill (London, 1914), still the most exciting account,
and in M. Brock, The Great Reform Act (London, 1973).
Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, p. 221.
Henry, Earl Grey (ed.), The Correspondence of the Late Earl Grey with H.M. King William IV (London, 1867), i, pp. 96–97.
See W. B. Gwyn, Democracy and the Cost of Politics in Britain (London, 1962), pp. 39–48.
Professor Gash’s discussion of the reform act in the first chapter of his Politics in the Age of Peel should not be missed. The quotations that follow are all taken from that chapter.
The most important of Moore’s articles are ‘The Other Face of Reform’, Victorian Studies, September 1961, and ‘Concession or Cure: the Sociological Premises of the First Reform Act’, Historical Journal, March 1966.
See Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, pp. 246–50, for a summary of the case against Moore. See also E. P. Hennock, ‘The Sociological Premises of the First Reform Act: a Critical Note’, Victorian Studies, March 1971.
Hansard, 3rd Series, ii, 1190–1205.
T. B. Macaulay, The Works of Lord Macaulay (London, 1911), ix, pp. 308–9.
E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: an Economic History of Britain since 1750 (London, 1968), p. 55.
Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 817.
See J. Hamburger, James Mill and the Art of Revolution (New Haven and London, 1963),
and D. J. Rowe (ed.), London Radicalism, 1830–1843: a Selection from the Papers of Francis Place (London, 1970).
For an excellent discussion of the public context in which the parliamentary battle for the reform bill took place see D. Fraser, ‘The Agitation for Parliamentary Reform’, in J. T. Ward (ed.), Popular Movements c.1830–1850 (London, 1970).
Readers are recommended to turn to Thomis and Holt, Threats of Revolution, pp. 85–99, for a balanced and thorough airing of this question. See also J. Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1870 (London, 1979), pp. 218–28,
and W. H. Maehl, The Reform Bill of 1832: Why Not Revolution? (London, 1967).
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© 1989 Robert Stewart
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Stewart, R. (1989). The Great Reform Act. In: Party and Politics, 1830–1852. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19653-1_2
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