When the disturbances began, the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Sir Robert Peel Home Secretary. But in November 1830 Wellington, who had made a last effort to rally the old Tories, sulking over his surrender on Catholic Emancipation, by some sudden thunder against Reform, had been beaten on the Civil List and resigned. Reform was inevitable, and with Reform the Whigs. Thus, towards the close of the year of the Revolution that drove Charles X. from France, Lord Grey became Prime Minister, to carry the measure which as Charles Grey, lieutenant of Charles Fox, he had proposed in the House of Commons in 1793, a few months after Louis XVI. had lost his head in the Revolution which had maddened and terrified the English aristocracy. Fortune had been sparing in her favours to this cold, proud, honourable and courageous man. She had shut him out from power for twenty-three years, waiting to make him Prime Minister until he was verging on seventy, and all the dash and ardour of youth had been chilled by disappointment and delay. But she had reserved her extreme of malice to the end, for it was her chief unkindness that having waited so long she did not wait a little longer. Grey, who had been forty-four years in public life, and forty-three in opposition, took office at the moment that the rising passed into Hampshire and Wiltshire, and thus his first act as Prime Minister was to summon his colleagues to a Cabinet meeting to discuss, not their plans for Parliamentary Reform, but the measures to be taken in this alarming emergency. After a lifetime of noble protest against war, intolerance, and repression, he found himself in the toils and snares of the consequences of a policy in which war, intolerance, and repression had been constant and conspicuous features. And those consequences were especially to be dreaded by such a man at such a time.
Grey became Prime Minister to carry Reform, and Reform was still enveloped to many minds in the wild fancies and terrors of a Jacobin past. To those who knew, conscious as they were of their own modest purposes and limited aim, that their accession to power boded to many violence, confusion, and the breaking up of the old ways and life of the State, it was maddening that these undiscerning peasants should choose this moment of all others for noise and riot. The struggle for Reform was certain to lead to strife, and it was hard that before they entered upon it England should already be in tumult from other causes. Moreover, Grey had to reckon with William IV. So long as he could remember, the Court had been the refuge of all that was base in English politics, and it was a question whether Liberal ideas had suffered more from the narrow and darkened mind of George III. or the mean and incorrigible perfidy of George IV. In comparison with his father, the new king had the wisdom of a Bentham or an Adam Smith; in comparison with his brother, he had the generous and loyal heart of a Philip Sidney or a Falkland. But seen in any less flattering mirror, he was a very ordinary mortal, and Grey had known this jolly, drinking, sailor prince too long and too well to trust either his intellect or his character, under too fierce or too continuous a strain. These riots tried him severely. No sooner was William on his throne than the labourers came out of their dens, looking like those sansculottes whose shadows were never far from the imagination of the English upper classes. The king’s support of Reform was no violent enthusiasm, and the slightest threat of disorder might disturb the uneasy equilibrium of his likes and fears. In the long run it depended on the will of this genial mediocrity—so strangely had Providence mixed caprice and design in this world of politics—whether or not Reform should be carried, and carried without bloodshed. Throughout these months then, the king, always at Melbourne’s elbow, trying to tempt and push the Government into more drastic measures, was a very formidable enemy to the cause of moderation and of justice.
These influences were strong, and there was little to counteract them. For there was nobody in the world which Grey and Melbourne alike inhabited who could enter into the minds of the labourers. This is readily seen, if we glance at two men who were regarded as extreme Radicals in the House of Commons, Hobhouse and Burdett. Each of these men had served the cause of Reform in prison as well as in Parliament, and each with rather ridiculous associations; Hobhouse’s imprisonment being connected with the ballad inspired by the malicious and disloyal wit of his friend and hero, Byron, and Burdett’s with the ludicrous scene of his arrest, with his boy spelling out Magna Charta on his knee. It is difficult for those who have read Hobhouse’s Diaries to divine what play of reason and feeling ever made him a Radical, but a Radical he was, an indefatigable critic of the old régime, and in particular of such abuses as flogging in the army. Burdett was a leader in the same causes. To these men, if to any, the conduct of the labourers might have seemed to call for sympathy rather than for violence. But if we turn to Hobhouse’s Diary we see that he was never betrayed into a solitary expression of pity or concern for the scenes we have described, and as for Burdett, he was all for dragooning the discontented counties and placing them under martial law. And even Radnor, who as a friend of Cobbett was much less academic in his Radicalism, sat on the Wiltshire Commission without making any protest that has reached posterity.
All the circumstances then made it easy for Grey and his colleagues to slip into a policy of violence and repression. They breathed an atmosphere of panic, and they dreaded the recoil of that panic on their own schemes. Yet when all allowance is made for this insidious climate, when we remember that no man is so dangerous as the kind man haunted by the fear of seeming weak, at a moment when he thinks his power of doing good depends on his character for strength; when we remember, too, the tone of Society caught between scare and excitement, the bad inspiration of the Court, the malevolent influence of an alarmed Opposition, the absorbing interest of making a ministry, the game apart from the business of politics, it is still difficult to understand how men like Grey and Holland and Durham could ever have lent themselves to the cruelties of this savage retribution. When first there were rumours of the intention of the Government to put down the riots with severe measures, Cobbett wrote a passage in which he reviewed the characters of the chief ministers, Grey with his ‘humane disposition,’ Holland ‘who never gave his consent to an act of cruelty,’ Althorp ‘who has never dipped his hand in blood,’ Brougham ‘who with all his half Scotch crotchets has at any rate no blood about him,’ to show that the new ministers, unlike many of their Tory predecessors, might be trusted to be lenient and merciful. Two of these men, Grey and Holland, had made a noble stand against all the persecutions of which Tory Governments had been guilty, defending with passion men whose opinions they regarded with horror; if any record could justify confidence it was theirs. Unfortunately the politician who was made Home Secretary did not share in this past. The common talk at the time of Melbourne’s appointment was that he was too lazy for his office; the real criticism should have been that he had taken the side of Castlereagh and Sidmouth in 1817. As Home Secretary he stopped short of the infamous measures he had then approved; he refused to employ spies, and the Habeas Corpus was not suspended. But nobody can follow the history of this rising, and the history of the class that made it, without recognising that the punishment which exiled these four hundred and fifty labourers is a stain, and an indelible stain, on the reputation of the Government that lives in history on the fame of the Reform Bill. It is difficult to believe that either Fox or Sheridan could have been parties to it. The chief shame attaches to Melbourne, who let the judges do their worst, and to Lansdowne, who sat beside the judges on the Salisbury bench, but the fact that the Prime Minister was immersed in the preparation of a reform, believed by his contemporaries to be a revolution, does not relieve him of his share of the odium, which is the due of Governments that are cruel to the weak, and careless of justice to the poor.
One effort was made, apart from the intercession of public opinion, to induce the Government to relax its rigours. When the panic had abated and the last echo of the riots had been stilled by this summary retribution, a motion was proposed in the House of Commons for a general amnesty. Unhappily the cause of the labourers was in the hands of Henry Hunt, a man whose wisdom was not equal to his courage, and whose egregious vanity demoralised and spoilt his natural eloquence. If those who were in close sympathy with his general aims could not tolerate his manners, it is not surprising that his advocacy was a doubtful recommendation in the unsympathetic atmosphere of the House of Commons. He was a man of passionate sincerity, and had already been twice in prison for his opinions, but the ruling class thinking itself on the brink of a social catastrophe, while very conscious of Hunt’s defects, was in no mood to take a detached view of this virtue. The debate, which took place on the 8th of February 1831, reflects little credit on the House of Commons, and the division still less, for Hume was Hunt’s only supporter. The chief speakers against the motion were Benett of Wiltshire, George Lamb, brother of Melbourne and Under-Secretary at the Home Office, and Denman, the Attorney-General. Lamb amused himself and the House with jests on the illiterate letter for writing which the boy Looker was then on the high seas, and Denman threw out a suggestion that Looker’s father had had a share in the boy’s guilt. Denman closed his speech by pouring scorn on those who talked sentimentality, and declaring that he would ever look back with pride on his part in the scenes of this memorable winter.
So far the Government had had it all their own way. But in their anxiety to show a resolute front and to reassure those who had suspected that a reform Government would encourage social disorder by weakness, Lord Grey and his colleagues were drawn into a scrape in which they burnt their fingers rather badly. They decided to prosecute two writers for inciting the labourers to rebel. The two writers were Richard Carlile and William Cobbett. Carlile was the natural prey for a Government in search of a victim. He had already spent six or seven years of his lion-hearted life in prison for publishing the writings of Paine and Hone: his wife, his sister, and his shopman had all paid a similar penalty for their association, voluntary or involuntary, with his public-spirited adventures. The document for which he stood in the dock at the Old Bailey early in January 1831 was an address to the agricultural labourers, praising them for what they had done, and reviewing their misfortunes in this sentence: ‘The more tame you have grown, the more you have been oppressed and despised, the more you have been trampled on.’ Carlile defended himself in a speech that lasted four hours and a half. The jury disagreed, but after several hours they united on a verdict of acquittal on the charge of bringing the Crown into contempt, and of guilty on the charge of addressing inflammatory language to the labouring classes. He was sentenced to imprisonment for two years, to pay a fine, and to find sureties.
Cobbett’s trial was a more important event, for whereas Carlile was the Don Quixote of liberty of mind, Cobbett was a great political force, and his acquittal would give a very serious shock to the prestige of the Government that attacked him. The attention of the authorities had been called to Cobbett’s speeches very early in the history of the riots, and the Home Office Papers show that appeals to the Government to prosecute Cobbett were the most common of all the recommendations and requests that poured into Whitehall from the country. Some of these letters were addressed to Sir Robert Peel, and one of them is endorsed with the draft of a reply: ‘My dear Sir,—If you can give me the name of the person who heard Cobbett make use of the expression to which you refer you would probably enable me to render no small public service by the prosecution of Cobbett for sedition.—Very faithfully Yours, Robert Peel.’
In an evil moment for themselves, Peel’s successors decided to take action, not indeed on his speeches, but on his articles in the Political Register. The character of those articles might perhaps be described as militant and uncompromising truth. They were inflammatory, because the truth was inflammatory. Nobody who knew the condition of the labourers could have found in them a single misstatement or exaggeration. The only question was whether it was in the public interest to publish them in a time of disturbance. From this point of view the position of the Government was seriously weakened by the fact that the Times had used language on this very subject which was not one whit less calculated to excite indignation against the rich, and the Times, though it was the organ of wealthy men, was in point of fact considerably cheaper to buy than the Register, the price of which Cobbett had raised to a shilling in the autumn of 1830. But this was not the only reason why the Government was in danger of exposing itself to a charge of malice in choosing Cobbett for a prosecution. The unrest in the southern counties had been due to a special set of economic causes, but there was unrest due to other causes in other parts of England. It was not the misery of ploughboys and labourers in Hampshire and Kent that had made Wellington and Peel decide that it was unsafe for the King to dine at the Guildhall in the winter of 1830: the Political Unions, which struck such terror into the Court and the politicians, were not bred in the villages. There was a general and acute discontent with extravagant government, with swollen lists and the burden of sinecures, with the whole system of the control of the boroughs and its mockery of representation. Now in such a state of opinion every paper on the side of reform might be charged with spreading unrest. Statistics of sinecures, and pensions, and the fat revenues of bishopricks, were scattered all over England, and the facts published in every such sheet were like sparks thrown about near a powder magazine. The private citizens who wrote to the Home Office in the winter of 1830 mentioned these papers almost as often as they mentioned Cobbett’s lectures. Many of these papers were based on a pamphlet written by Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty in the very Government that prosecuted Cobbett. One of the Barings complained in the House of Commons in December 1830, that the official papers on offices and sinecures which the Reform Government had itself presented to Parliament to satisfy public opinion of its sincerity in the cause of retrenchment were the cause of mischief and danger. At such a time no writer, who wished to help the cause of reform, could measure the effects of every sentence so nicely as to escape the charge of exciting passion, and the Government was guilty of an extraordinary piece of folly in attacking Cobbett for conduct of which their own chief supporters were guilty every time they put a pen to paper.
The trial took place in July 1831 at the Guildhall. It was the great triumph of Cobbett’s life, as his earlier trial had been his great humiliation. There was very little of the lion in the Cobbett who faltered before Vicary Gibbs in 1810; there was very little of the lamb in the Cobbett who towered before Denman in 1831. And the court that witnessed his triumph presented a strange scene. The trial had excited intense interest, and Cobbett said that every county in England was represented in the company that broke, from time to time, into storms of cheering. The judge was Tenterden, the Chief Justice, who, as a bitter enemy of reform, hated alike accusers and accused. Six members of the Cabinet, the Prime Minister himself and the Lord Chancellor, Melbourne and Durham, Palmerston and Goderich listened, from no choice of their own, to the scathing speech in which Cobbett reviewed their conduct. Benett of Pyt House was there, a spectre of vengeance from one Commission, and the father of the boy Cook of Micheldever, a shadow of death from another. All the memories of those terrible weeks seemed to gather together in the suspense of that eager crowd watching this momentous encounter.