When William IV. Was King

by John Ashton

Anent the creation of new peers, there is an amusing skit in verse.

"From the Hon. Henry —— to Lady Emma ——.

"Paris, March 30.

"You bid me explain, my dear angry Ma'amselle,
How I came thus to bolt, without saying farewell;
And the truth is,—as truth you will have, my sweet railer,—
There are two worthy persons I always feel loth
To take leave of at starting, my mistress and tailor,—
As, somehow, one always has scenes with them both:
The Snip in ill-humour, the Syren in tears,
She calling on Heaven, and he on th' attorney,—
Till, sometimes, in short, 'twixt his duns and his dears,
A young gentleman risks being stopp'd on his journey.

"But to come to the point:—though you think, I dare say
That 'tis debtor or Cholera drives me away,
'Pon honour you're wrong; such a mere bagatelle
As a pestilence, nobody, nowadays, fears;
The fact is, my love, I'm thus bolting, pell-mell,
To get out of the way of these horrid new Peers;
This deluge of coronets, frightful to think of,
Which England is now, for her sins, on the brink of;—
This coinage of nobles, coined, all of them, badly,
And sure to bring counts to a discount most sadly.

"Only think, to have Lords overrunning the nation,
As plenty as frogs in a Dutch inundation;
No shelter from Barons, from Earls no protection,
And tadpole young Lords, too, in every direction,—
Things created in haste, just to make a Court list of,
Two legs and a coronet, all they consist of!
The prospect's quite frightful, and what Sir George R—e
(My particular friend) says, is perfectly true,
That so dire the alternative, nobody knows,
'Twixt the Peers and the Pestilence, what he's to do;
And Sir George even doubts,—could he choose his disorder,—
'Twixt coffin and coronet, which he would order."

In the House of Lords, on May 7th, Lord Lyndhurst moved the postponement of the disenfranchising clause, which was carried, against the Government by a majority of thirty-five. Next day, Earl Grey and the Ministry resigned. The mob were enraged, and spoke evilly of the King and Queen. The former applied in vain to the Tory party to make a Government, but finding that useless, he was reduced to the humiliating necessity of renewing his intercourse with his former ministers (who returned to power), and had to swallow the leek as to the creation of new peers. He had no objection to raising to the peerage eldest sons of peers, or of rehabilitating dormant peerages, but he had a wholesome horror of creating an enormous quantity of peers simply to coerce the House of Lords and pass a measure to which they were opposed. Good sense, however, prevailed: the peers did what they always have done, bowed to overwhelming popular opinion—amended the Bill somewhat—and on the 4th of June the Bill was read a third time in the House of Lords, and passed, one hundred and six peers voting for it, and twenty-two against it. The amendments introduced by the peers were agreed to on the following day by the House of Commons, without any discussion regarding their merits, though not without much angry remark in attack and defence of the conduct of ministers in the late events. On the 7th of June, the Royal Assent was given by commission, and the great bugbear of King William's reign was laid at rest.

Such a consummation was undoubtedly due to the conduct of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel at this crisis; and, indeed, that this was the general feeling, is shown by the accompanying satirical print by H. B., in which we see these two statesmen using their best endeavours to keep Sir George Grey firm in his very insecure position. (See next page.)

The party passions of the mob ran very high both before and after the passing of the Bill, and led to some excesses, two or three examples of which are worth recording. The Times, May 16th—

"The Marylebone, or Tory Hunt.