When the motion for the second reading came to be put to the vote it was found that the Opposition had got together a very full gathering of their numbers, and the second reading was only carried by a majority of one. The hearts of many of the reformers sank within them for the moment, and the hopes of the Tories were revived in an equal degree. Even already it seemed clear to all of Lord Grey's colleagues that a measure carried on its second reading by such a bare majority had not the slightest chance of forcing its way through the House of Lords, even if it should be fortunate enough to pass without serious {150} damage through the House of Commons. Lord Grey and his colleagues were already beginning to think that nothing worth accomplishing was likely to be achieved until a general election should have greatly strengthened the Reform party in Parliament. The movement for reform had of late been growing steadily in most parts of the country. Some of the more recent elections had shown that the reform spirit was obtaining the mastery in constituencies from which nothing of the kind had been expected a short time before, and it seemed to most of the Whig leaders that the existing Parliament was the last bulwark against the progress of reform. When the time came for the motion to enable the Bill to get into committee—that is, to be discussed point by point in all its clauses by the House, with full liberty to every member to speak as many times as he pleased—General Gascoigne, one of the representatives of Liverpool, proposed an amendment to the effect that it was not expedient, at such a time, to reduce the numbers of knights, citizens, and burgesses constituting the House of Commons, and this amendment was carried by a majority of eight. Now the carrying of this amendment could not possibly have been considered as the destruction of any vital part of the Bill.
[Sidenote: 1831—William the Fourth and Reform]
Lord John Russell had argued for the reduction of the numbers in the House as a matter of convenience and expediency; but he had not given it to be understood that the Government felt itself pledged to that particular proposition, and had made up his mind not to accept any modification in that part of the plan. The authors of the Reform Bill, however, read very wisely in the success of General Gascoigne's amendment the lesson that in the existing Parliament the Tories would be able to take the conduct of the measure out of the hands of the Government during its progress through committee, and to mar and mutilate it, so as to render it entirely unsuited to its original purposes. Therefore Lord Grey and the other members of his Cabinet made up their minds that the best course they could take would be to accept the vote of the House of Commons as a distinct defeat, and to make an {151} appeal to the decision of the constituencies by an instant dissolution of Parliament.
One important question had yet to be settled. Would the King give his assent to the dissolution? No one could have supposed that the King was really at heart a reformer, and the general conviction was that if William cared anything at all about the matter his personal inclination would be in favor of good old Toryism, or that, at the very least, his inclination would be for allowing things to go on in the old way. At that time the principle had not yet been set up as a part of our constitutional system that the sovereign was bound to submit his own will and pleasure to the advice of his ministers. It would have been quite in accordance with recognized precedents since the House of Hanover came to the throne if the King were to proclaim his determination to act upon his own judgment and let his ministers either put up with his decision or resign their offices.
For some time, indeed, it appeared as if the King was likely to assert his prerogative, according to the old fashion. The disagreeable and almost hazardous task of endeavoring to persuade the King into compliance with the desire of his Ministry was entrusted to Lord Brougham, who was supposed, as Lord Chancellor, to be keeper of the sovereign's conscience. Brougham was not a man who could be described as gifted with the bland powers of persuasion, but at all events he did not want courage for the task he had to undertake. William appears at first to have refused flatly his consent to the wishes of the Ministry, to have blustered a good deal in his usual unkingly, not to say ungainly, fashion, and to have replied to Brougham's intimation that the ministers might have to resign, with words to the effect that ministers, if they liked, might resign and be—ministers no more. The King, however, was at last prevailed upon to give his assent, but then a fresh trouble arose when he found that Lord Grey and Lord Brougham, presuming on his ultimate compliance, had already taken steps to make preparations for the ceremonials preceding dissolution. As the {152} Ministry thought it necessary that there should be no delay whatever in the steps required to dissolve Parliament, a message had been sent in order that the Life Guards should be ready, according to the usual custom when the King went to Westminster for such a purpose. William found in this act on the part of the Ministry a new reason for an outburst of wrath. He stormed at Brougham; he declared that it was an act of high-treason to call out the Life Guards without the express authority of the King, and he raged in a manner which seemed to imply that only the mercy of the sovereign could save Grey and Brougham from the axe on Tower Hill.
[Sidenote: 1831—The second Reform Bill]
Perhaps it was fortunate on the whole for the peaceful settlement of the controversy that the King should have found this new and unexpected stimulant to his anger; for when his wrath had completely exploded over it, and when Brougham had been able to explain, again and again, that no act of high-treason had been contemplated or committed, the royal fury had spent itself; the King's good-humor had returned; and in the reaction William had forgotten most of his objections to the original proposal. It was arranged, then, that the dissolution should take place at once. As a matter of fact, Sir Robert Peel, in the House of Commons, was actually declaiming, in his finest manner, and with a voice that Disraeli afterwards described as the best ever heard in the House, excepting indeed "the thrilling tones of O'Connell," against the whole scheme of reform, when the Usher of the Black Rod was heard knocking at the doors of the Chamber to summon its members to attend at the bar of the House of Lords, in order to receive the commands of his Majesty the King. The commands of his Majesty the King were in fact the announcement that Parliament was dissolved, and that an appeal to the country for the election of a new Parliament was to take place at once.
The news was received by Reformers all over the country with the most exuberant demonstrations of enthusiasm. In London most of the houses throughout the principal streets were illuminated, and many windows which showed {153} no lights were instantly broken by the exulting crowds that swarmed everywhere. The Duke of Wellington received marked tokens of the unpopularity which his uncompromising declaration against all manner of reform had brought upon him. Some of the windows at Apsley House, his town residence—the windows that looked into the Park—were broken by an impassioned mob, and for years afterwards these windows were always kept shuttered, as a sign—so at least the popular faith assumed it to be—that the Duke could not forgive or forget this evidence of public ingratitude to the conqueror of Waterloo. The King, on the other hand, had grown suddenly into immense popularity. The favorite title given to him at the time of his accession was that of the "Sailor King." Now he was hailed everywhere in the streets as the "Patriot King." Wherever his carriage made its public appearance it was sure to be followed by an admiring and acclaiming crowd. The elections came on at once, and it has to be noted that the amount of money spent on both sides was something astonishing even for those days of reckless expenditure in political contests. Neither side could make any boast of political purity, and indeed neither side seemed to have the slightest inclination to set up such a claim. The only rivalry was in the spending of money in unrestricted and shameless bribery and corruption. The more modern sense of revolt against the whole principle of bribery was little thought of in those days. There were men, indeed, on both sides of the political field who would never have stooped to offer a bribe if left to the impulses of their own honor and their own conscience. But the ordinary man of the world, and more especially of the political world, felt that if he himself did not give the bribe his rival would be certain to give it, and that nobody at his club or in society would think any the worse of him because it was understood that he had bought himself into the House of Commons. When the elections were over the prevalent opinion as to their result was almost everywhere that the numbers of the Reform party in the House of Commons would be much greater than it had been in the {154} House so lately dissolved. When the new Parliament was opened, Lord John Russell and Mr. Stanley appeared as members of the Cabinet. The new Parliament was opened by King William on June 21. If William really enjoyed the consciousness of popularity, as there is every reason to believe he did, he must have felt a very proud and popular sovereign that day. His carriage as he drove to the entrance of the House of Lords was surrounded and followed by an immense crowd, which cheered itself hoarse in its demonstrations of loyalty. On June 24 Lord John Russell introduced his second Reform Bill. It is not necessary to go through the details of the new measure. The second Reform Bill was in substance very much the same as its predecessor had been, but of course its principle was debated on the motion of the second reading with as much heat, although not at such great length, as in the case of the first Reform Bill a few weeks before. Nothing new came out in this second argument, and the debate on the second reading, which began on July 4, occupied only three nights, a fact which made some members of the Opposition think themselves entitled to the compliments of the country. The Parliamentary opponents of the Reform Bill were, however, soon to make it evident that they had more practical and more perplexing ways of delaying its progress through the House of Commons than by the delivery of long orations on the elementary principle of reform. The second reading of the Bill was carried by 367 votes in its favor and 231 votes against it—that is to say, by a majority of 136 for the Bill. Therefore everybody saw that, as far as the House of Commons in the new Parliament was concerned, there was a large majority in support of the measure brought forward by the Government.
[Sidenote: 1831—William Cobbett]
It was morning, and not very early morning, when the House divided, and the Attorney-General had not much time to spare for rest before setting off for one of the law courts to conduct a prosecution which the Government had thought it well to institute against a man who held a most prominent position in England at that time, and whose name, it is safe to say, will be remembered as long as good {155} English prose is studied. This man was William Cobbett, and he had just aroused the anger of the Government by a published article in which he vindicated the conduct of those who had set fire to hayricks and destroyed farm buildings in various parts of the country. William Cobbett had begun life as the son of a small farmer, who was himself the son of a day laborer. He had lived a strange and varied life. In his boyish days he had run away from a little farm in Surrey and had flung himself upon the world of London. He had found employment, for a while, in the humblest kind of drudgery as a junior copying clerk in an attorney's office, and then he had enlisted in a regiment of foot. He was quartered for a year at Chatham, and he devoted all his leisure moments to reading, for which he had a passion which lasted him all his lifetime. He is said to have exhausted the whole contents of a lending library in the neighborhood, for he preferred reading anything to reading nothing. He was especially fond of historical and scientific studies, but he had a love for literature of a less severe kind also, and he studied with intense eagerness the works of Swift, on whose style he seems to have moulded his own with much success and without any servile imitation. Then he was quartered with his regiment for some time in New Brunswick, and after various vicissitudes he made his way to Philadelphia. During his stay in New Brunswick he had studied French, and had many opportunities of conversing in it with French-Canadians, and when settled for a time in Philadelphia he occupied himself by teaching English to some refugees from France. Now and again he went backward and forward between America and England, but it was in Philadelphia that he was first known as a writer. Under the signature of Peter Porcupine he published the "Porcupine Papers," which were chiefly made up of sarcastic and vehement attacks upon public men. Cobbett had begun as a sort of Tory, or, at all events, as a professed enemy of all Radical agitators, but he gradually became a Radical agitator himself, and when he finally settled in England he soon began to be recognized as one of the most powerful {156} advocates of the Radical cause in or out of Parliament. He wrote a strong, simple Anglo-Saxon style, and indeed it is not too much to say that, after Swift himself, no man ever wrote clearer English prose than that of William Cobbett. He had tried to get into Parliament twice without success; but at last he succeeded in obtaining a seat as the representative of the borough of Oldham, a place which he represented until the time of his death, and which was represented by members of his family in the memory of the present generation. He had started a paper called The Weekly Political Register, and in this he championed the Radical cause with an energy and ability which made him one of the most conspicuous men of the time.