Abstract
Death mattered to the Victorians, peculiarly so. It was in part a consequence of doubt. But it mattered in a different rather more prosaic sense too. Particular deaths of particular people could herald revolutions. It was the death of Swellfoot, the Tyrant that opened up the possibility of parliamentary reform in the 1830s. And it was another death, just as momentous in its own way, which opened up the possibility of another Reform Act thirty-three years later. It was entirely appropriate that Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, suffered a heart attack whilst trying to grope a maid over the billiard table at Brocket Hall in October 1865.
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Notes
- 1.
The journalist was Timothy Joseph O’Kane , a well-known Radical. He alleged that his wife had, rather improbably, visited Palmerston to discuss politics, but had then, rather less improbably, been seduced. He claimed £20,000 damages. Clarendon blamed his ‘unscrupulous attorney’ and shared the common opinion that it was little more than a crude attempt at extortion. Needless to say, the action did nothing to dent Palmerston’s popularity in the country; quite the contrary. Disraeli wondered if the entire affair had not been concocted for precisely this reason.
- 2.
The Commission heard evidence that the Tory agent had withdrawn £800 from the bank on the morning of the election, stationed under-agents around the town to direct voters and then settled comfortably into a corner of the Golden Ball Tavern placing a bag of coins ostentatiously on a table in front of him. Voters were asked to line up and wait to be ushered into his presence, to be given their reward and have their names recorded in a notebook.
- 3.
The immediate context here being the publication of W.T. Stead’s incendiary articles on child prostitution in London, the ‘Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon’, in the Pall Mall Gazette in the summer of 1885. The veracity of the articles would be later questioned, but their immediate impact was nothing short of sensational.
- 4.
The robes were draped across the back of the throne. She refused to read the address, instead just staring blankly ahead. Victoria was bribed by the offer of £30,000 from Parliament to help cover the expense of Princess Helena’s wedding to Prince Christian of Sonderburg-Augustenburg. Subsequent invitations were generally rebuffed for reasons of health and climate; sometimes too cold, sometimes too hot, occasionally too windy. The idea that she should open Parliament ‘as a matter of course, year after year’, Lord Derby was informed, was entirely mistaken, only if the weather was right.
- 5.
A vision which horrified Victoria as much as anyone, ‘If only our dear Bertie was fit to replace me’, she moaned on one occasion as she contemplated retiring, apparently, to a ‘cottage in the hills’ (Arnstein 2003, 135). But he was not.
- 6.
The Disraelis lived at nearby Grosvenor Gate. On hearing of the disturbance Disraeli, who was at Westminster, asked his secretary Montagu Corry to report. Corry was reassuring. The crowd had made no especial effort to vandalise his house. Mrs Disraeli was meanwhile quite safe and ‘wishes me to add that the people in general seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves’ and Corry added ‘I really believe she sympathises with them’ (Hibbert 2004, 253).
- 7.
In his A History of the Reform Bills of 1866 and 1867, published in 1868, Cox suggested that reform was necessary if Parliament was to avoid being branded as an ‘utterly incapable and incompetent assembly’ (Briggs 1959, 508).
- 8.
The nomenclature Adullamite was taken from the Old Testament story of David. It was deployed in Parliamentary debate by John Bright, who suggested that Lowe and his supporters had retreated to the ‘political cave of Adullam’, the last refuge for ‘everyone that was in distress and everyone that was discontented’ (Aldous 2007, 158).
- 9.
On the night of the crucial second Reading division, Disraeli looked in on the Carlton Club . Sir Matthew Ridley proposed a toast on the same theme: ‘Here’s the man who rode the race, who took the time, who kept the time, and who did the trick!’ (Weintraub 1993, 448–9).
- 10.
Overend and Gurney enjoyed a solid reputation, and was popular amongst investors when it became a limited company in 1865. It had, however, been making increasingly speculative investments for much of the previous decade, and finally collapse in spring 1866. Banking legislation passed in 1844 was supposed to have prevented collapses of such magnitude.
- 11.
Bagehot advanced the merits of ‘polished liberalism’ in his 1855 essay The First Edinburgh Reviewers (Bagehot 1965, 1.332). In the words of Brian Hanley , Bagehot wrote for an audience of ‘successful bankers, lawyers, shopkeepers, and the like – highly finished instruments of the economy’ (Hanley 2004, 172–3).
- 12.
Wordsworth dominates what is perhaps Bagehot’s most famous literary essay, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning or Pure, Ornate and Grotesque Art in English Poetry , published in 1864. Wordsworth and Milton are identified as the greatest of the ‘pure’ poets, with Tennyson and Browning respectively taking the honours for the ‘ornate’ and the ‘grotesque’ (Bagehot 1965, 2.333–66).
- 13.
Bertie was not directly cited in the case of Mordaunt v Mordaunt, Cole and Johnstone and he vigorously denied any ‘improper familiarity’ when the insinuation arose during cross-examination. But the mere fact that he was called to give evidence was enough for the press. In the end the petition was denied for reason of Lady Mordaunt’s ‘puerperal mania’; an ending which would have resembled so many of the sensation novels of the time. Bertie, a devotee of the genre, might have appreciated the irony.
- 14.
Bagehot quotes extensively from Wellington’s ‘very curious letter’ to Lord Derby on the subject of ‘rejecting things’ written in 1846 in the context of Peel’s Repeal Act. Wellington’s warning touched upon a more particular convention. The 1846 Repeal Act was presented as a money bill, which even then was hedged by a convention which was supposed to prevent its rejection in the Lords (Bagehot 2001, 75–8).
- 15.
Bagehot identified three of these ‘evils’, bringing in ‘untried persons’ all of a ‘sudden’, promoting a sense of transience amongst incumbent ministers, and removing safeguards against any ‘mischievous change of policy’ (Bagehot 2001, 122–3).
- 16.
Thus contemporary France ‘vacillates’ wildly, and violently, between revolutionary and parliamentary government, whilst a century of American history has confirmed the inherent dangers in establishing a constitution wherein there is ‘no ready, deciding power’. ‘The splitting of sovereignty into many parts’ experience confirms, simply ‘amounts to there being no sovereign’ (Bagehot 2001, 139–140, 153).
- 17.
The Westminster Review famously observed that Plantagenet Palliser was now the ‘only duke whom all of us know’; a suggestive observation (Trollope 1995, vii). At the very end of the novel, Trollope leaves Plantagenet considering whether he should agree to return to government as President of the Council. The position is more honorific than real; a dilemma which is every bit as suggestive (Halperin 1977, 268).
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Ward, I. (2018). The Greatest Victorian. In: Writing the Victorian Constitution . Palgrave Modern Legal History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96676-2_4
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