In this strain ran many protests, which a little later, when the Government had done some work, took a new form. There were whispers, and then assertions made, that the Queen had converted all her Ministers to Conservatism, and in January, 1838, the Morning Post had a leader upon the subject:—
“Her Majesty ... has effected an almost instantaneous conversion of Lord Melbourne, Lord John Russell, and all the other members of the Administration into Conservatives, the most ostentatious, not the most sincere, of whom England can boast. Yes, the same statesmen who vexed and harassed the declining years of their late aged Monarch by their alliance with the men of the movement, ... finding themselves at the commencement of a Conservative reign which the most juvenile of their number cannot expect to survive, and having discovered, moreover, that the hints breathed at them from Kensington during the latter part of their Royal Mistress’s minority were of no true or holy inspiration, but such spurious and illicit intimations as seldom fail to deceive alike the givers and the receivers, have thought fit to make for themselves a movement, and a very decided one, in a direction diametrically opposed to that in which for several years past they have been labouring to advance. The obsequious Ministers of a Conservative Sovereign, they are as decidedly Conservative as their existing alliances and their actual position will allow. Hence their hoary chief is in constant personal attendance upon our youthful Conservative SOVEREIGN, not to impart political instruction, but to imbibe it.”
A week or so later the same paper followed this up with another leader, in which it said:—
“The Whigs—the Melbourne or bastard Whigs we mean—have, with a most accommodating and meretricious facility, prostituted their hereditary and their personal pretexts—for principles we cannot call them—to captivate the ‘sweet voices’ of the swinish constituency (? electorate), which, for purposes more swinish than the constituency created, they have forced into existence.”
We scarcely aim at outdoing this sort of thing to-day; no paper would dare to label the electorate “swinish,” for the extension of the franchise would at least have had the effect of making all England feel itself insulted through every constituency.
That there had been no conversion of the Government it is unnecessary to say, but there may have been something to warrant the hope—or otherwise—that such a change had taken place, for Melbourne was distinctly a moderate Whig, disapproving of really Radical measures, just as Wellington disapproved of following blindly the desires of his party when he regarded their methods as impolitic. There was, however, a generally expressed hope that the Whigs would not long be retained in power, and articles upon this point filled the Tory papers, while songs were sung in the streets on the same theme. In Huddersfield upon a window-pane is said to have been written:—
“The Queen is with us, Whigs insulting say,
For when she found us in she let us stay;
It may be so, but give me leave to doubt
How long she’ll keep you when she finds you out.”