On the eighth of May, Parliament asked the King to sanction a large creation of new peers. The king angrily refused his assent. The ministers then tendered their resignation. It was accepted. On the evening of the ninth, their resignation was announced to the Lords and Commons. On the eleventh Lord Ebrington moved that “the House should express to the King their deep distress at a change of ministers, and entreat him only to call to his councils such persons as would carry through The Bill with all its demands unchanged and unimpaired.”
This motion was carried, and then for one week the nation was left to its conjectures, to its fears, and to its anger at the attitude of the government. Indeed for this period England was without a government. The Cabinet had resigned, leaving not a single officer who would join the cabinet which the king had asked the Duke of Wellington to form. In every city and town there were great meetings that sent petitions to the House of Commons, praying that it would grant no supplies of any kind to the government until the Bill was passed without change or mutilation. A petition was signed in Manchester by twenty-three thousand persons in three hours, and the deputy who brought it informed the Commons that the whole north of England was in a state of indignation impossible to describe. Asked if the people would fight, he answered, “They will first of all demand that Parliament stop all government supplies—the tax gatherer will not be able to collect a penny. All civil tribunals will be defied, public credit shaken, property insecure, the whole frame of society will hasten to dissolution, and great numbers of our wealthiest families will transfer their homes to America.”
Lord Wellington utterly failed in all his attempts to form a ministry, Sir Robert Peel refused to make an effort to do so, and on the fifteenth of May it was announced in both Houses, that “the ministers had resumed their communication with his majesty.” On the eighteenth Lord Grey said in the House of Lords that “he expected to carry the Reform Bill unimpaired and immediately.” Yet on the day before this statement, Brougham and Grey had an interview with the King, in which his majesty exhibited both rudeness and ill-temper. He kept the two peers standing during the whole interview, a discourtesy contrary to usage. Both Grey and Brougham told the King that they would not return to office unless he promised to create the necessary number of peers to insure the passage of the Reform Bill just as it stood; and the King consented so reluctantly that Brougham asked for his permission in writing.
The discussion of these facts occupied the whole morning and after an early lunch the squire prepared to go to The House; then Dick noticed that even after he was hatted and coated for his visit, he kept delaying about very trivial things. So he resolved to carry out his part of their secret arrangement, and remove himself from all temptation to tell his mother he was going to marry Faith Foster. His father understood the lad so like himself, and Dick knew what his father feared. So he bid his mother good-by, and accompanied his father to the street. There the latter said plainly, “Thou did wisely, Dick. If I hed left thee alone with thy mother, thou would hev told her all that thou knew, and thought, and believed, and hoped, and expected from Faith. Thou couldn’t hev helped it—and I wouldn’t hev blamed thee.”
CHAPTER X—THE GREAT BILL PASSES
“In relation to what is to be, all Work is sacred because it is the work given us to do.”
“Their cause had been won, but the victory brought with it a new situation and a new struggle.”
“Take heed to your work, your name is graven on it.”