[ [!-- Note Anchor 244 --][Footnote 244: As instances of the want of church-room in such towns, Lord John cited the dioceses of London, Chester, York, Lichfield, and Coventry, containing a population of 2,590,000 persons, with church accommodation for only 276,000, or one-ninth of the population; the Commissioners, from whose report he was quoting, reckoning that church-room ought to be provided for one-third.]
CHAPTER XI.
Death of William IV., and Accession of Queen Victoria.—Rise of the Chartists.—Resignation of Lord Melbourne in 1839, and his Resumption of Office.—Marriage of the Queen, and Consequent Arrangements.—The Precedence of the Prince, etc.—Post-office Reform.—War in Afghanistan.—Discontent in Jamaica.—Insurrection in Canada.—New Constitution for Canada and other Colonies.—Case of Stockdale and Hansard.
The reforms mentioned in the preceding chapter were the last measures of the reign of William IV. In the summer of the next year, 1837, he died, and was succeeded in his British, though not in his Hanoverian, dominions by our present gracious sovereign, who had only just arrived at the age which entitled her to exercise the full authority of the crown. The change was calculated to strengthen the crown, by enlisting the chivalrous feelings of all that was best in the nation in the support of a youthful Queen, and in a lesser degree it for a time strengthened the ministry also; but, with respect to the latter, the feeling did not last long. For the next three years the summers were very unfavorable to the farmer; the harvests were bad; the inevitable accompaniment of a rise in prices had caused severe and general distress, and distress had produced clamorous discontent, and in some districts formidable riots. It had been greatly aggravated in the manufacturing counties by the operations of the trades-unions, which had gradually put forth pretensions to regulate the wages and other conditions of work, and had enforced them with such tyrannical violence, not flinching from the foulest crimes, that in many instances they had driven the masters to close their factories rather than submit to their mandates; and in others had compelled the workmen themselves to discontinue their labors, thus spreading destitution among thousands whose earnings, if they had been allowed to consult their own wishes, would have been amply sufficient for the support of their families;[[245]] and the evil had grown to such a height, that in 1838 a committee was appointed by the House of Commons to investigate the whole subject of trade combinations. But the turbulent spirit excited by this distress did not now confine itself to single outbreaks of violence, but, under the guidance of some demagogues of a more methodical turn of mind than usual, developed itself in a systematic organization having for its object what they called "the people's charter," which aimed at a total revolution of the existing parliamentary system, with the avowed design that, when adopted, it should eventually lead to an entire reconstruction of the government. The Chartists, as they called themselves, had advocates even in Parliament, who presented their petitions to the House of Commons, and tried, though unsuccessfully, to give them importance by the appointment of a committee to investigate the character of the reforms which they demanded. They were not, however, contented with peaceful modes of pressing their demands, but, in the course of the summer of 1839, broke out in formidable riots in different parts of the country. At Birmingham they set fire to different parts of the town, carrying on their work of pillage and destruction to such a pitch that the Duke of Wellington compared the condition of the town to one taken by storm in regular warfare; and at Newport, in Monmouthshire, they even planned and carried out an attack on the troops quartered in the district. But this violence led for a time to the suppression of the movement, the leaders in the Newport riots being convicted of high-treason; and, though the government forbore to put the extreme severities of the law in force against them, those who remained unconvicted had been taught by their example the danger which they incurred by such proceedings; and some years elapsed before a series of revolutionary troubles on the Continent again gave a momentary encouragement to those in this country who sympathized with the revolutionists, and prompted them to another attempt to force their views upon the government and the people.
It had nearly, however, been another ministry on whom the task of quelling these riots had fallen. Though, as has been already said, Lord Melbourne's cabinet derived a momentary strength from the accession of a young Queen, the support it thus acquired did not last; and in May, 1839, having been defeated on a measure of colonial policy, which will be mentioned [hereafter], the cabinet resigned. The Queen intrusted the task of forming a new administration to Sir Robert Peel, who undertook it with a reasonable confidence that he should be able to hold his ground better than formerly, now that the retirement of his predecessors was their own act, and admitted by them to have been caused by a consciousness of the divisions among their supporters and their own consequent weakness. He had the greater reason for such confidence, since two of the colleagues of Lord Grey who had refused his offers in 1834, Lord Stanley and Sir James Graham, were now willing to unite with him; and he had almost completed his arrangements, when he was stopped by an unexpected, though not altogether unprecedented, impediment. It will be recollected that, in 1812, some of the arrangements for the formation of a new administration on the death of Mr. Perceval were impeded by a doubt which was felt in some quarters whether the new ministers would be allowed to remove one or two officers of the household, to whom the Regent was generally understood to be greatly attached, but who were hostile to the party which hoped to come into power, though it was afterward known that these officers had felt themselves bound to retire as soon as the arrangements in contemplation should be completed.[[246]] Sir Robert Peel was now met by a difficulty of the same kind, but one which the retiring ministers had the address to convert into a real obstacle. The Queen, who had warm affections, but who could not possibly have yet acquired any great knowledge of business, had become attached to the ladies whom Lord Melbourne had appointed to the chief places in her household. It had never occurred to her to regard their offices in a political light; and, consequently, when she found that Sir Robert considered it indispensable that some changes should be made in those appointments, she at once refused her consent, terming his proposal one "contrary to usage and repugnant to her feelings." Sir Robert, however, felt bound to adhere to his request for the removal of some of the ladies in question; for, in fact, they were the wives and sisters of his predecessors, and a continuance of their daily intercourse with the Queen might reasonably be expected to have some influence over her Majesty's judgment of the measures which he might feel it his duty to propose. Such a difficulty could not have arisen under a male sovereign; but Lord Melbourne himself had departed from the ordinary practice when he surrounded his royal mistress with ladies so closely identified with his cabinet. It is very possible that he had originally made the appointments without any such design, from the careless indifference which was his most marked characteristic; but he cannot be so easily acquitted when, in reply to the Queen's application to him for advice on the subject, he, being joined in his assertion by Lord John Russell, assured her that Sir Robert Peel's demand was unjustifiable and unprecedented. Supported by the positive dictum of the ministers on whose judgment she had hitherto been bound to rely, the Queen naturally adhered to her decision of refusing to permit the removal of the ladies in question, and the result was that Sir Robert Peel declined to take office under circumstances of difficulty beyond those to which every new minister must of necessity be exposed, and Lord Melbourne and his colleagues resumed their posts. The transaction was, of course, canvassed in both Houses of Parliament. Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, who was the spokesman of the party in the House of Lords, defended their refusal to undertake the government on any other condition than that for which they had stipulated, on the ground that the authority to make such changes in the household as they had proposed was indispensable, as a proof of their possession of her Majesty's confidence; while Lord Melbourne, with a strange exaggeration, defended the advice which he had given her Majesty by the assertion that to have complied with Sir Robert Peel's proposal would have been "inconsistent with her personal honor." Other arguments on the same side were based on the alleged cruelty of separating her Majesty "from the society of her earliest friends, her old and constant companions;" an argument which was disposed of by Lord Brougham's remark, that till she had become Queen (not yet two years before) she had had no acquaintance with them whatever.[[247]]
But it is needless to dwell at any length on the case, in which all subsequent historians and political critics, however generally prepossessed in favor of the Liberal ministers, have given up their position as untenable. Her Majesty herself kept strictly on the path of the constitution in guiding herself by the counsels of those who, till their successors were appointed, were still her responsible advisers. But the course which they recommended was absolutely irreconcilable with one fundamental principle of the constitution—the universal responsibility of the ministers. In denying the right of the incoming ministers to remodel the household (or any other body of offices) in whatever degree they might consider requisite, they were clearly limiting the ministerial authority. To limit the ministerial authority is to limit the ministerial responsibility; to limit the ministerial responsibility is to impose some portion of responsibility (that portion from which it relieves the minister) on the sovereign himself, a dangerous consequence from which the constitution most carefully protects him. In fact, that the advice Lord Melbourne gave was indefensible was tacitly confessed by himself, when, on the recurrence of the same emergency two years later, he was compelled to recommend a different course;[[248]] and the ladies whom Sir Robert had considered it necessary to remove anticipated their dismissal by voluntary resignation. It may be added that, at the close of this same year, Lord Melbourne himself insisted on nominating the private secretary to the Prince whom the Queen was about to marry, though no one could pretend that offices in his household were as important as those in that of the sovereign; and though, if there was any post in which the Prince might have been supposed to have a right to an unfettered choice, that might have been supposed to have been the office of his private secretary.[[249]]
Her Majesty's marriage with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, her first cousin—one tending as greatly to the happiness of herself and the advantage of the nation as any royal marriage recorded in history—took place in the beginning of 1840; and in the preparatory arrangements—matters of far greater consequence to the Queen's feelings than any appointments in the household—the ministry, by singular mismanagement, contrived to force the consideration of other constitutional questions on Parliament in such a way that the conclusions which were adopted, however inevitable, could hardly fail to be mortifying and vexatious to her Majesty, in whose cup of happiness at such a moment special care ought rather to have been taken to prevent the admixture of any such alloy. In the matter of the annuity to be settled on the young Prince, the Opposition must, indeed, share the blame with the minister. If it was unpardonable carelessness in the latter to omit the usual practice of previously consulting the leaders of the Opposition on the amount of the grant to be proposed, it was not the less impolitic and unworthy of such men as the Duke and Sir Robert Peel to show their disapproval of the inattention by a curtailment of the grant. The sum proposed, £50,000 a year, was fairly justified by the fact of its being the same which twenty-four years before had been settled on the Prince's uncle, Leopold, on his marriage with the Princess Charlotte. Indeed, if there were to be any difference, the circumstances might have been regarded as warranting an increase rather than a diminution of it. Money was certainly more plentiful in 1840 than in 1816, and the husband of an actual Queen occupied, beyond all question, a higher position than the husband of the heiress-presumptive, who might never become Queen, and who, in fact, never did. We cannot think, therefore, that the reduction of £20,000, which Sir Robert Peel proposed and carried, was reasonable or becoming, but regard it as neither called for by the circumstances of the kingdom, nor as befitting its liberality, nor as in harmony with its practice.
But on the two other questions—one immediately affecting the constitution, and the other not absolutely unconnected with it—no defence of the minister seems available. At the opening of Parliament in 1840, her Majesty commenced her speech by the announcement of her intended marriage, describing the bridegroom simply as "the Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha," the same expression which she had used in addressing the Privy Council a few weeks before. That description of him had at once struck her uncle, Leopold—who, since the death of his English wife, the Princess Charlotte, had become King of Belgium—as so imperfect and insufficient, that, on reading her address to the Privy Council, he at once wrote to her to point out that it would have been desirable to mention the fact of the Prince being a Protestant,[[250]] and that the omission would inevitably cause discontent. But, in spite of this warning, Lord Melbourne refused to advise the Queen to insert a statement of the Prince's religion in her speech, though it was by no means superfluous on such an occasion, since, if he were a Roman Catholic, a marriage with him would have incurred a forfeiture of the crown. The Duke of Wellington, on the other hand, regarded it as a positive duty to require that the fact of the Prince being a Protestant should be mentioned, so as to show the care of Parliament to prevent any constitutional precautions from being overlooked, such statement having, indeed, been usually made on similar occasions. When he, therefore, moved an amendment to insert the word "Protestant" in the description of the Prince, Lord Melbourne did not venture to divide the House against it; but still his management gave an ungracious appearance to the transaction, as if there had been in any quarter an unwillingness to recognize the fact of the Prince's Protestantism till the recognition was forced on the government by the action of the Parliament.