LORD JOHN RUSSELL, AFTERWARDS EARL RUSSELL (1792–1878).
Sat in the House of Commons for forty-seven years. He introduced the great Reform Bill in 1831 and was twice Prime Minister (1846–52, and 1865–6). He was raised to the Peerage in 1861.
Two personages in the procession, who had met under far different circumstances in earlier years, met with a tremendous ovation wherever they moved. One of these was the Duke of Wellington—our Great Duke—and the other was the veteran Duke of Dalmatia—the puissant Maréchal Soult of the Peninsula and Waterloo—once the redoubtable foe of England. Mr. Justin McCarthy has suggested that “the cheers of a London crowd on the day of the Queen’s coronation did something genuine and substantial to restore the good feeling between this country and France, and efface the bitter memories of Waterloo.” On the other hand, the anti-monarchical party in France attributed the popular reception of Soult in London to the prevalence of sympathy with Republican views. |Popular Reception of Wellington and Soult.| Certain it is that when, in later years, Soult championed the English alliance in the French Assembly he referred with feeling to his reception at Queen Victoria’s coronation: “I fought the English,” he said, “down to Toulouse, when I fired the last shot in defence of national independence; in the meantime I have been in London, and France knows how I was received. The English themselves cried ‘Vive Soult!’ They cried ‘Soult for ever!’” One may formulate rules of diplomacy and international courtesy, but who shall weigh the effect of sympathy between a generous people and a former gallant foe?
Parliament had voted £243,000 for the expenses of George IV.’s coronation—perhaps the effect of a newly-extended franchise may be traced in the more economical figure of £70,000, which sufficed for that of our present Queen.
M. Noble.] [National Portrait Gallery.
SIR ROBERT PEEL
(1788–1850).
Was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1812, Home Secretary in 1822, and again in 1828–30 under the Duke of Wellington. In 1830 he reconstructed the Metropolitan Police. He was Prime Minister in 1834–5, and again from 1841 to 1846. His second Administration was distinguished by the total abolition of the Duty on Corn.
The battle of Reform had been fought out in the country and in Parliament five years before the accession, and there were, as yet, no signs—to quote Sir Robert Peel’s famous expression at Tamworth—of the Constitution being “trampled under the hoof of a ruthless democracy.” On the whole, life—its business and pleasures—seemed to be going forward on much the same lines as before the great Act, dreaded, as it had been, as intensely by one party, as it had been pressed forward and welcomed by the other. Lord Melbourne was the head of a Whig Administration, of which, as everybody knows, the late King had waited impatiently for the first decent opportunity to get rid. But Melbourne and Lord John Russell (who, with the office of Home Secretary, was leader of the House of Commons) had to reckon with an advance wing of their own party, already known as Radicals, and were at least as profoundly averse from their projects as they were from the Tory policy. |State of Parties.| Melbourne and Russell desired to put down Radicalism and proceed with moderate and safe reforms, above all in Ireland, where the chronic discontent was being fanned to eruption by the exertions of Daniel O’Connell. The King’s death had relieved the Whig Cabinet from the adverse influence of the Court; moreover, the reliance placed from the first by the young Queen upon Lord Melbourne, and the intimate relations between them, brought about by the circumstances of the case, enabled the Whigs to assume the peculiar rôle of their opponents—that of the special supporters of the throne.
The Tories,[B] on the other hand, approached with much misgiving the General Election, which, according to the law as it then stood, followed of necessity on the demise of the monarch. They knew that the Duchess of Kent had favoured Whig principles in the education of the Queen; they saw that Melbourne’s personal charm had secured for him complete ascendancy in the councils of the new Sovereign, and they had nothing to expect in the country but reverse.