“They behaved splendidly whoever spoke; and finally Mr. Salt stood forward, and, uncovering his head, bid them all uncover, and raise their right hands to heaven while they repeated, after him, the comprehensive obligation which had been given in printed form to all of them:
“‘With unbroken faith, through every peril, through every privation, we here devote ourselves, and our children, to our country’s cause!’
And while those two hundred thousand men were taking that oath together, I find the House of Lords was going into Committee on the Reform Bill. This time it must pass.”
“It will not pass,” said Piers, “without the most extreme measures are resorted to.”
“You mean that the King will be compelled to create as many new peers as will carry it through the House of Lords.”
“Yes; but can the King be ‘compelled’?”
“He will find that out.”
“Now, Edgar, that is as far as I am going to listen.”
Then Piers put down his paper, and said, “The House was in session, and would the Squire go down to it?” And the Squire said, “No. If there is to be any ‘compelling’ of His Majesty, I will keep out of it.”
The stress of this compulsion came the very next day. Lord Lyndhurst began the usual policy by proposing important clauses of the Bill should be postponed; and the Cabinet at once decided to ask the King to create more peers. Sydney Smith had written to Lady Grey that he was, “For forty, in order to make sure;” but the number was not stipulated. The King promptly refused. The Reform Ministry tendered their resignation, and it was accepted. For a whole week the nation was left to its fears, its anger, and its despair. It was, however, almost insanely active. In Manchester twenty-five thousand people, in the space of three hours, signed a petition to the King, telling him in it that “the whole North of England was in a state of indignation impossible to be described.” Meanwhile, the Duke of Wellington had failed to form a Cabinet, and Peel had refused; and the King was compelled to recall Lord Grey to power, and to consent to any measures necessary to pass the Reform Bill. It was evident, even to royalty, that it had at length become–The Bill or The Crown. For His Majesty was now aware that he was denounced from one end of England to the other; and several painful experiences convinced him that his carriage could not appear in London without being surrounded by an indignant, hooting, shrieking crowd.