A history of England

by Charles Oman

Though the most upright and conscientious of men, Wellington proved a very unsatisfactory prime minister. His main fault was precisely the one that would least have been expected from an old soldier—a tendency to flinch from his resolves and engagements when he found that public opinion was set against him. Personally he was a Tory of the old school: for popular cries and magnificent programmes he had a rooted distrust, which he had picked up in the Peninsula, while dealing with the bombastic and incapable statesmen who led the liberal party in the Spanish Cortes. But, on the other hand, he had seen so much of the horrors of civil war, that he had imbibed a great dread of making himself responsible for any measure that might split the nation into hostile camps and cause domestic strife. These two conflicting impulses acted on his mind in strange and often abrupt alternations. He was always making reactionary declarations, and then receding from them when he found they were unpopular.

At first it seemed likely that he was about to make himself the mouthpiece of the stern and unbending Tories of the school of Castlereagh. Before he had been three months in office he had dismissed Huskisson, and the other disciples of Canning followed Huskisson into retirement.

Catholic Emancipation.—Daniel O'Connell.

But very soon he disappointed his more fanatical followers. In the summer of 1828 he was confronted with a great national agitation in Ireland. Since the Union, that country had been in its normal condition of unrest, but the main grievance which Irish agitators mooted was the non-fulfilment of the promise of Catholic Emancipation which Pitt had made in 1800, when he united the two Parliaments. The demand that the majority of the nation should be granted equality of political rights with the minority was obviously just, yet not only Irish Orangemen but English Tories had a violent prejudice against Romanism. It was evident that Emancipation would not be conceded without a struggle. But the Irish at this moment were headed by the adroit and capable Daniel O'Connell, a wealthy squire of old family, a platform orator of great power and pathos, and a skilful party leader, but vain, scurrilous, and noisy. He founded an "Association," the prototype of the Land Leagues and National Leagues of our own day, to forward the Catholic claims. He filled the land with monster public meetings, and frightened the champions of Protestant ascendency by vague threats of civil war. To his great credit he kept his followers from crime, a feat which his successors have not always accomplished. His power was shown by his triumphant return to Parliament, in defiance of the law, for County Clare. Under the influence of their priests, the Irish farmers had broken away from their old subservience to the great landlords, and placed themselves at O'Connell's disposal.

Wellington concedes Emancipation to the Catholics.

Wellington was by birth an Anglo-Irish Protestant, and he detested Romanism, but he detested civil war still more. When O'Connell's agitation grew formidable, and the old Tories urged him to repress it by force, he refused. At last his mind was made up to grant Emancipation. His own words explain his mental attitude, "I have passed a longer period of my life in war than most men, and principally in civil war, and I must say this, that if I could avert by any sacrifice even one month's civil war in the country to which I am attached, I would give my life to do it." In the spring of 1829 Wellington announced his intention of granting complete equality of civil rights to all Romanists. Many of his followers called him a weathercock and a turncoat, while the vicious old king pretended—in imitation of his father's action in 1801—that his conscience forbade him to violate his coronation oath. But Wellington carried his Emancipation bill with the aid of Whig support, and against the votes of all the narrower Tories. The king swallowed his scruples with cowardly haste, and the Act was made law (April 14, 1829). O'Connell and some scores of his followers, his "Tail" as the English called them, entered Parliament and allied themselves to the Whigs.

The Reform agitation renewed.

The Emancipation question being moved out of the way, the topic of Parliamentary Reform came once more to the front as the great difficulty of the day. When the Whigs began to moot it again, they found the time favourable, for the Wellington ministry was grown very weak. The duke had expelled the moderate Tories from his cabinet in 1828, he had angered the old Tories by his concession to the Romanists in 1829, and could no longer command the loyalty of either section of his party.

Europe in 1830.

The agitation for the reform of the Commons began to become formidable in the stormy year 1830. Unrest was in the air, and all over the world popular risings were rife. In July the French rose in arms, dethroned their dull and despotic king, Charles X., and replaced him by his popular cousin Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans. The Poles raised an insurrection against the tyranny of Czar Nicholas. There were troubles in Italy and Germany, and open war in Belgium and Portugal; everywhere the partisans of the Holy Alliance and the old régime were being assailed by riot and insurrection. It was natural that England should feel the influence of this wave of discontent.