Accession of William IV.
In the midst of the year King George died, worn out by his evil living (June 26, 1830). He was succeeded by his third brother, William Duke of Clarence, for Frederick of York, the second son of George III., had died in 1827. The new king was an eccentric but good-natured old sailor. He was simple, patriotic, and kindly, and carried into all his doings something of the breezy geniality of his old profession. But his elevation almost turned his brain, and in the first months of his reign he was guilty of a dozen absurd actions and speeches which made men fear for his sanity. "It is a good sovereign," punned a contemporary wit, "but it is a little cracked." The best feature in William was that he was not a party man; he acted all through his reign as a constitutional monarch should, and his personal popularity did much to make the crisis of the reform agitation of 1830-1832 pass off without harm.
Fall of Wellington's ministry.
The fall of Wellington's ministry followed very closely on the accession of the new king. A general election in the autumn of 1830 was fatal to the duke's majority in the Commons. The old Tories refused to interest themselves in his fate, and would not work for him, while the Whigs made a great effort and swept off almost all the seats in which election was really free and open. No less than sixty out of eighty-two county seats in England were captured by them. Parliament reassembled on November 2, and on November 15 Wellington was beaten by a majority of twenty-nine in the Lower House and promptly resigned.
The Whigs return to office.
William IV. immediately took the proper constitutional step of sending for the leader of the opposition, Lord Grey. After an absence of twenty-three years from power the Whigs once more crossed to the treasury bench and took over the management of the realm. Their long exile from office had made them better at criticism than administration, and they found it hard to settle down into harness—more especially as some of the new ministry were wanting in restraint and gravity, notably the Lord Chancellor Brougham, one of the most versatile and able, but also one of the most eccentric and volatile men who has ever sat on the woolsack. But the cabinet was much strengthened by the adhesion of two of the Canningite Tories, Lord Melbourne and Lord Palmerston, who became respectively Secretary for Ireland and Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
The Whigs at once took in hand the chief item of their programme, Parliamentary Reform, though O'Connell was doing his best to bring another topic to the front by agitating for Home Rule, or "Repeal" as it was then called, and was enlisting all Catholic Ireland in a league for that end.
The Peers throw out the Reform Bill.
In March, 1831, Lord John Russell, a young member of one of the greatest Whig houses, and the great-grandson of the Bedford who was minister in 1763, brought forward his famous Reform Bill, which disfranchised most of the rotten boroughs, and distributed their seats among the large towns and the more populous counties. Owing to differences of opinion among the Whigs themselves as to the exact shape it should assume, the bill never reached its third reading in the Commons. The ministry then dissolved Parliament, in order to get a clear verdict from the constituencies on the Reform question. They came back to Westminster with a magnificent majority of 136. Lord John Russell again introduced his bill, which passed all its readings with ease, but was rejected by the Tory majority in the House of Lords on October 8, 1831.