It was six years before another opportunity occurred of meeting a popular constituency, with any prospect of success. But the question was kept alive, of a seat in Parliament. Reformers were sanguine that the franchise was on the eve of being broadened; and the yeomanry were beginning to join them,—a circumstance which brought into being a more influential class of adherents to Mr. Cobbett and his views. One of the more zealous and active of these new friends was Sir Thomas Beevor, a young baronet of Norfolk. He had read the Register for the first time, during the American exile; and his admiration for the courageous writer so grew upon him, that he at last publicly declared himself a Cobbettite and raised a reform camp in his own county. A proposal was at length made,[2] to hold a meeting in London in support of Cobbett’s claims to a seat in Parliament; but it was relinquished, for the present, upon Cobbett’s suggestion that they might properly wait until there was a certain prospect of a dissolution.
Meanwhile, all the matters upon which the moderate reformers had set their hearts were canvassed in the Political Register from time to time: the Game laws and iniquities, Catholic emancipation, the freedom of public speech, the continued distress of the Agricultural interest; along with minor topics, from the hypocrisies in Parliament, to the extortions of the toll-farmers. Much of Mr. Cobbett’s influence had been imperilled by his last American trip, and some of its consequences. But his espousal of the cause of Queen Caroline appears to have completely restored him to his place in the popular mind; and, from that period onward, not all the base slanders which were still showered upon him, nor even his own extravagant vehemence, could rob him of his power.
In the beginning of the year 1826, a renewed effort was made, led by Sir Thomas Beevor, to bring Mr. Cobbett before some constituency. A meeting was held in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, of a very enthusiastic character; and, in a few weeks, several hundred pounds were subscribed. Cobbett, on his part, was determined to make a good fight this time; and he announced that, if elected at all, he must be chosen by persons who chose him for the good of the country, and not for their own profit: that if returned at all, it must be by no corrupt or infamous means; and must be for a place “where some considerable number of the people have something to say in the matter.”
Westminster was thought of, and so was Middlesex; both constituencies in the hands of a narrow clique. It was, however, decided to fix upon Preston, as a town affording the desirable element of a very wide suffrage.[3] Accordingly, the prorogation of Parliament, on the 31st of May, found Mr. Cobbett canvassing the electors. A famous contest ensued: the other candidates being the Hon. E. G. Stanley (afterwards 14th Earl Derby), John Wood, merchant, and Captain Barrie, R.N.; the two first being elected. The numbers were, Stanley 3041, Wood 1982, Barrie 1657, Cobbett 995. There was comparatively little ruffianism, but sufficient impediment to fair voting.[4] Mr. Cobbett talked, for some time afterward, of a petition against the return, but the idea was relinquished. Indeed, he took this defeat in remarkably good humour; and proceeded to console himself and his friends, by recounting those triumphs which he could boast of.
Those were not mean triumphs, although principally at the hands of the “lower orders.” Flags and music: shouting, exulting, and shaking of hands, attended his progress through Blackburn, Bolton, and Manchester, on his way homeward.[5]
It was now quite obvious that popular candidates stood little or no chance, even in the most popular boroughs, in the existing state of the representation. But the prospect of any reform seemed more distant than ever. In Parliament, the question was practically shelved. Lord John Russell seemed, for the time, to have a persuasion that there was little encouragement to press the matter; and Mr. Canning, soon after becoming premier in 1827, declared that he would oppose parliamentary reform to the end of his life, under whatever shape it might appear. Burdett said that “putting aside all the great questions, including among the rest that of Parliamentary Reform,”[6] he saw sufficient reason to support Canning’s administration. And Brougham did not consider that “the late opposition” stood pledged in favour of the question!
Is it any wonder that Whiggism is dead and buried? Call not the Russells and the Greys Whigs: they had deserted the practices (considered apart from the professions) of their party before becoming reformers. If Whiggism had been anything besides profession, parliamentary reform would have been undertaken twenty years before; and the Whigs, as a party, had nothing more to do with it, when it was at last undertaken, than to be the vehicle of the country’s earnest demand.
This is how it came to pass. The French and Belgian revolutions, in the year 1830, powerfully moved all the populations of Europe; and the news of that double convulsion reached the people of England at one of the saddest periods of their history. To quote Mr. Molesworth,[7] “they were going mad with misery.” Machine-breaking and rick-burning kept the country alive with alarm, and sent some poor wretches to banishment or to death. People in the towns began to growl again, as they had growled ten or twelve years before. And the leaders of reform took fresh heart; for they saw that the question could no longer be stifled, with the country in a greater state of degradation than under the Tories of 1817.
So, in the midst of all this trouble, a Reform Bill was introduced. And, looking at the subsequent history of the struggle, and its consequences, it is impossible to avoid this conclusion: that the same prosperity and public confidence, which ensued upon the Act of 1832, might have been the guerdon of the Tories, at the beginning of the century.