[3] [If Lord Grey said this it was a mistake. The younger sons and daughters of marquises take rank after earls.]
May 22nd, 1831
At Epsom all last week for the races at a house which Lord Chesterfield took; nobody there but the three sisters[4] and their two husbands. Rode out on the downs every morning, and enjoyed the fine country, as beautiful as any I have seen of the kind. After the races on Friday I went to Richmond to dine with Lord and Lady Lyndhurst, and was refreshed by his vigorous mind after the three or four days I had passed. He thinks the state of things very bad, has a great contempt for this Government, is very doubtful what will happen, thinks Lord Grey will not stand, and that Brougham will be Chancellor and Prime Minister, like Clarendon; he talked of the late Government, the Duke of Wellington and Peel; he said that the former meddled with no department but that of Foreign Affairs, which he conducted entirely; that he understood them better than anything else, and if he came into office again would be Foreign Secretary; that in the Cabinet he was always candid, reasonable, and ready to discuss fairly every subject, but not so Peel. He, if his opinion was not adopted, would take up a newspaper and sulk. Lyndhurst agreed with me about his manners, his coldness, and how he disgusted instead of conciliating people; he said that when any of his friends in Parliament proposed to speak in any debate, he never encouraged or assisted them, but answered with a dry ‘Do you?’ to their notification of a wish or intention. He said that this Bill was drawn up by Lambton himself, but so ill done, so ignorantly and inefficiently, that they were obliged to send for Harrison, who, in conjunction with the Attorney-General, drew it up afresh; that when John Russell brought it forward the Bill was still undrawn.[5] He says that there is not the least doubt they never had an idea of bringing forward any such measure as this till they found themselves so weak in the House of Commons that nothing but a popular cry and Radical support could possibly save them. It is very remarkable when we look back to the moment of the dissolution of the late Government, when Brougham was in the House of Commons armed with his Bill, which, though unknown, was so dreaded, and which turns out to have been mere milk and water compared with this. He said Brougham was offered the Attorney-Generalship by a note, which he tore in pieces and stamped upon, and sent word that there was no answer; that he has long aspired to be Chancellor, and wished to get into the House of Lords. He ridicules his pretensions to LORD BROUGHAM AS A JUDGE. such wonderful doings in his Court and in the Bills he has announced; says that he has decided no bankruptcy cases, and, except some Scotch appeals in the House of Lords, has got rid of hardly any arrears; and as to his Bills, the Bankruptcy Bill was objectionable and the Chancery Bill he has never brought on at all; that he knows he affects a short cut to judicial eminence, but that without labour and reading he cannot administer justice in that Court, although no doubt his great acuteness and rapid perception may often enable him at once to see the merits of a case and hit upon the important points. This he said in reply to what I told him of Brougham’s trumpeter Sefton, who echoes from his own lips that ‘the Court of Chancery is such a sinecure and mere child’s play.’
[4] [Lady Chesterfield, Mrs. Anson, and Miss Forester.]
[5] [Compare the details of the preparation of the Reform Bill published by Lord Russell in the last edition of his ‘Essay on the British Constitution.’ Much of this conversation of Lord Lyndhurst’s is extremely wide of the truth, but it is retained to show what was said and believed by competent persons at the time.]
In the meantime the elections have been going languidly on, and are now nearly over; contrary to the prognostications of the Tories, they have gone off very quietly, even in Ireland not many contests, the anti-Reformers being unable to make any fight at all; except in Shropshire they are dead-beat everywhere. Northamptonshire the sharpest contest, and the one which has made the most ill blood; this particular election has produced a good deal of violence; elsewhere the Reformers have it hollow, no matter what the characters of the candidates, if they are only for the Bill. Calcraft and Wellesley, the former not respected, the latter covered with disgrace, have beat Bankes and Tyrrell. Lowther had not a chance in Cumberland, where Sir James Graham got into another scrape, for in an impertinent speech he made an attack upon Scarlett, which drew upon him a message and from him an apology. Formerly, when a man made use of offensive expressions and was called to account, he thought it right to go out and stand a shot before he ate his words, but now-a-days that piece of chivalry is dispensed with, and politicians make nothing of being scurrilous one day and humble the next. Hyde Villiers has been appointed to succeed Sandon at the Board of Control as a Whig and a Reformer. He was in a hundred minds what line he should take, and had written a pamphlet to prove the necessity of giving Ministers seats in both Houses (as in France), which he has probably put in the fire. I am very glad he has got the place, and though his opinions were not very decided before, he has always been anti-Tory, and has done nothing discreditable to get it, and it was offered to him in a very flattering manner.
May 28th, 1831
Yesterday Lord Grey was invested with the blue ribband, though there is no vacancy; the only precedent is that of Lords Liverpool and Castlereagh (which was thought wrong), but it was on the occasion of the peace after Bonaparte’s overthrow and when Castlereagh returned with such éclat from Paris that the whole House of Commons rose and cheered him as he entered it.
I met Alexander Baring the other night, who said it was certain that the King was full of regrets at the extent of the measures into which he had been hurried, when I told him of Lord Grey’s Garter, and asked him what he said to that, and how that bore out the assertion of the King’s regrets. The fact is that although on one side a most indecent though effectual use of the King’s name has been made, on the other there is nothing that is not asserted with equal confidence about ‘his difficulties and his scruples.’ Sefton told me that it was the sort of things that were said that made the King write to Lord Grey (he saw the letter) and tell him that he thought it of the greatest importance at the present moment to confer upon him a signal mark of his regard and of his satisfaction with the whole of his conduct. It is, I believe, true that the King felt some alarm and some doubt about the dissolution, but I do not believe that he has any doubts or fears at present. Indeed, how should he not have suffered himself to be led away by these people and to become identified with their measure? They have given him an ample share of the praise of it; they assure him it will be eminently successful; he sees himself popular and applauded to the skies, and as far as things have gone it has been successful, for the elections have gone on and gone off very peaceably, and the country in expectation of the passing of the Bill is in a state of profound tranquillity.