The government was again defeated by seven on an amendment to the address, notwithstanding the loyal aid of Graham and Stanley, whose attitude during the general election had excited Peel's mistrust. In the course of this debate, the prime minister, abandoning his usual reserve, definitely pledged himself not only "to advance, soberly and cautiously, in the path of progressive improvement," but to bring forward specific measures. "I offer you," he said, "reduced estimates, improvements in civil jurisprudence, reform of ecclesiastical law, the settlement of the tithe question in Ireland, the commutation of tithe in England, the removal of any real abuse in the Church, the redress of those grievances of which the dissenters have any just ground to complain." Nor were these offers illusory or barren. On March 17, he brought in a bill to relieve dissenters from disabilities in respect of marriage, which met with general approval. It was founded on the simple principle, since adopted, of giving legal validity to civil marriages duly solemnised before a registrar, and leaving each communion to superadd a religious sanction in its own way. The marriages of Churchmen in a church were to be left on their old footing, but Churchmen were of course to be granted the same liberty as other citizens of contracting a purely civil marriage.
Still more important, as examples of conservative reform, were Peel's efforts to purge the established Church of abuses, and to introduce a voluntary commutation of tithes. His correspondence amply shows how large a space these remedial measures occupied in his mind, and one of his first acts was to appoint an ecclesiastical commission, with instructions to institute a most comprehensive inquiry into every subject affecting the distribution of church revenues. Compared with the petty squabbles over the appropriation of an imaginary surplus to be derived from Irish tithes which it was impossible to collect, the schemes of Peel for purifying and strengthening the Church of England assume heroic proportions. The report of the ecclesiastical commission originated by him, with its startling disclosures of pluralism and non-residence, became the basis of legislation which has wrought a veritable revolution in the financial and disciplinary administration of the church. His tithe bill, abortive as it was in 1835, was reproduced, with little alteration, in the tithe commutation act of 1836.
But the whig-radical allies of 1835 had not the smallest intention of giving Peel a fair trial; nor indeed had they any other object beyond the recovery of power. His appeals to his opponents, though by no means without effect in the country, fell upon deaf ears in the house of commons, and further humiliations followed rapidly. One of these was the successful outcry against the appointment of Londonderry, who had excited much hostility as an uncompromising enemy to reform, to the embassy at St. Petersburg, in consequence of which he, very honourably, relieved the government from obloquy by declining the post. A motion to repeal the malt tax was decisively defeated, and soon afterwards a motion in favour of granting a charter to the University of London was carried against the government by a large majority. Then came a defeat on a motion for adjournment, and the arts of obstruction were obstinately practised in debates on the estimates. At last the inevitable crisis arrived, and, as might be expected, the final issue was taken upon an Irish question.
The influence of O'Connell and his "tail," as his followers were called, had been neutralised, since the reform act, by the overwhelming strength of the whigs, and the public-spirited action of Peel, who, as leader of the conservative opposition, actually supported the whig government in sixteen out of twenty most important contests on domestic policy. A very different spirit was now shown by the whig opposition, and an evil precedent, pregnant with disastrous consequences, was set by the famous "Lichfield House compact". This was a close alliance between O'Connell and those whom he had so fiercely denounced as "the base, brutal, and bloody whigs". It bore immediate fruit in a motion of Russell for a committee of the whole house to consider the temporalities of the Irish Church. After a debate of four nights, the resolution was carried, on March 30, by a majority of thirty-three. On April 5, a further resolution was carried by a majority of twenty-five for applying any surplus-funds "to the general education of all classes of the people without religious distinction," and was more emphatically affirmed two days later by a majority of twenty-seven.
Peel had long been conscious of the hopelessness of his position and impatient of maintaining the struggle. He felt the constitutional danger of allowing the executive government to become a helpless instrument in the hands of a hostile majority in the house of commons. Nothing but the earnest remonstrances of the king and his tory friends, including Wellington, had induced him to retain office so long, and, after the division of the 7th, he firmly resolved to resign. On doing so, he received from the whole conservative party, of which he was the creator, a most cordial address of thanks and confidence. Though his short administration had consolidated the whig forces for the moment, and given them a new lease of power, it showed him to be the foremost statesman in the country, and paved the way for his triumphant return to office. As Guizot said, he had proved himself "the most liberal of conservatives, the most conservative of liberals, and the most capable man of all in both parties".
MELBOURNE'S SECOND MINISTRY.
The king now discovered the fatal mistake which he had made in "dismissing" his whig cabinet, as he boasted, instead of waiting for it to break down under the stress of internal dissensions. His first idea was to fall back on Grey, who had already betrayed his growing mistrust of radicalism, but Grey declined to enter the lists again. There was no resource but to recall Melbourne, whom the king personally liked, and to put up with the elevation of Russell to a position which all admitted him to have fairly earned. He became home secretary, as well as leader of the house of commons, and the new whig cabinet differed little from the old. Palmerston, Lansdowne, Auckland, Thompson, and Holland returned to their former offices. Grant was made secretary for war and the colonies, Duncannon became lord privy seal, Spring Rice chancellor of the exchequer, Hobhouse president of the board of control, and Viscount Howick, son of Earl Grey, was appointed secretary at war. Outside the cabinet, Viscount Morpeth, son of the Earl of Carlisle, became Irish secretary. The most significant difference between the two cabinets lay in the omission of Brougham, which was effected by the expedient of placing the great seal in commission. This negative act was, in reality, the boldest and most perilous in Melbourne's political life. A correspondence between Brougham and Melbourne in February must have made clear to the ex-chancellor that he would be excluded from office, and he reluctantly acquiesced in Melbourne's decision, hoping that it would be merely temporary, and that he would soon resume his place on the woolsack as the dominant member of the cabinet, but his exclusion was destined to be final, and the close of a career to which English history in the nineteenth century presents no parallel.[131]
BROUGHAM.
Brougham was called to the Scottish bar at the age of twenty-one, having already given proof of brilliant ability and rare versatility at the University of Edinburgh. He was the youngest and most prolific of the original writers in the Edinburgh Review, then a very powerful organ of whig opinion, and his contributions to it ranged over some thirty years after its first appearance in 1802. He was already twenty-nine when he joined the English bar in 1808, and though he never rivalled Eldon as a lawyer or Scarlett as a persuasive advocate, he soon became an acknowledged master of the highest forensic eloquence. His fame was already established by his argument before parliament against the orders in council when he entered the house of commons in 1810. There his passionate oratory and power of invective made him the most formidable of party speakers, and it was said that Canning alone could face him on equal terms in debate. Except during four years, 1812-16, when he was out of parliament, his prodigious energy and versatility were the greatest intellectual force on the liberal side throughout all the political conflicts under the regency and the reign of George IV. His speeches embraced every question of foreign, colonial, or domestic policy, and it may truly be said that no salutary reform was carried during that period of which he was not either the author or the active promoter. The suppression of the slave-trade which had revived after the great war, the liberty of the press, the cause of popular education—these were among the almost innumerable objects, outside the common run of politics, and largely philanthropic, to which he devoted his restless mind, before it was engrossed for a while by parliamentary reform. There, as we have seen, he showed a moderation which had not been expected of him, nor is it too much to say that, both as a leader of the bar and as chancellor, he made good his claim to be the greatest of law reformers.
His famous speech of February 7, 1828, had quickened the germs of many legal improvements carried out in a later age, and the four years of his chancellorship actually produced great constructive amendments of the law, such as the institution of the central criminal court and the judicial committee of the privy council. Other reforms, in bankruptcy, criminal law, and equity, were mainly due to his initiative, and it was he who originated the county courts, though his bill was recklessly thrown out by the house of lords on party grounds. His public life, up to the year 1835, was perhaps the most brilliant and the most useful of the century, yet it was hopelessly marred in the end by a certain eccentric vanity, and want of loyalty to colleagues, not inconsistent with the higher ambition of leaving the world better than he found it. For some years after his fall he retained his astounding energy, and even his ascendency in the house of lords, where Lyndhurst, his only possible rival, was astute enough to court his co-operation. Never was his fertility in debate more conspicuously shown than in the session of 1835, while he was still nominally a supporter of the whig government. The last stage of his life, extending over more than thirty years, belongs to another chapter of English history; it is enough here to notice that, whatever his political aberrations, he continued in his isolation and old age to work zealously for those social reforms which he sincerely had at heart. The popularity which had been to him as the breath of life never, indeed, returned to him, and his figure no longer occupies a foremost place in the gallery of our statesmen, but the results of his noble services to humanity remain, and the memory of them ought not to be obscured by the sad record of his failings.